American Patriot's Bible: Sanctified Patriotism, Secularized Faith

I have refrained, up until now, from commenting on the recently published American Patriot's Bible, in part because I have had questions about whether such an exercise in juvenile exegesis even deserves mention. But this review by Richard Gamble at The American Conservative addresses the larger issue which needs to be raised in light of the long-standing American Protestant tendency to sanctify patriotism and secularize the faith.

The logic of The American Patriot’s Bible relies on more than a selective memory. It also depends on a particular kind of exegesis and application of Scripture. To make this story work, somehow we have to get from ancient Israel to modern America. The New Testament writers began the practice of applying biblical Israel’s calling to the church. Peter, for example, in his first epistle calls the church God’s “chosen people” and “holy nation.” It has been common, therefore, for the church throughout its history to read Old Testament passages about God’s “people” in light of its own identity as the realization of God’s true Israel. This appropriation of Old Testament language still offends devout Jews, who object to what they see as the wholesale theft of their identity by Christians. That offense is unavoidable, but the proponents of Christian America take the next step and apply God’s covenant promises to the United States, a leap that offends more Christians than one might expect.

Why this confusion of the church and America matters becomes clear in how The Patriot’s Bible uses promises like the one found in II Chronicles 7:14: “if My people who are called by My name will humble themselves, and pray and seek My face, and turn from their wicked ways, then I will hear from heaven, and will forgive their sin and heal their land.” The Patriot’s Bible reads these words as addressed to America as a once Christian but now backslidden nation. Applying “My people” loosely to America means that God’s people can claim the promises made to Israel just as surely as if they were made to the United States. Repentance will bring healing to the nation. The Patriot’s Bible claims that the book of Second Chronicles offers nothing less than “a model of national spiritual renewal.”

Publication of The American Patriot’s Bible ought to provoke a much needed debate in the United States about the church’s right relationship to civil society. This Bible may become a landmark in that debate, clarifying the issues as never before, forcing people to recognize the degree to which Americanism has penetrated Christianity. An Augustinian perspective may help frame that conversation. In Book XIX of The City of God, the Bishop of Hippo explained in which areas there can be peace and in which there must be conflict between the earthly and the heavenly cities. Christian and non-Christian have a common interest in earthly peace, good order, and the “necessaries of life.” But in matters of worship, Augustine wrote, the Christian was forced to “dissent” from the earthly city. The limits of the common life had been reached. The Christian was forced “to become obnoxious to those who think differently, and to stand the brunt of their anger and hatred and persecutions…” Praising piety and faith in general alongside remnants of the historic Christian faith, The American Patriot’s Bible combines the things of God and the things of Caesar at the very point where they most vigilantly need to be kept apart. When the City of Man sets up Americanism as its faith, the Christian is forced to dissent.

There is another problem here. Why nationalize the Bible? A nationalized Bible would seem in effect to reverse the story of redemption. At the core of Christianity is a message that the gospel of salvation is flung wide open to all peoples regardless of nationality, race, or language. The day of Pentacost made that truth clear. While Christianity has inevitably taken on national accents as it has encountered culture after culture over the past 2,000 years, it is a universal faith. Why, then, take that transnational faith and fuse it with an earthly Caesar and empire by setting it side by side in pages of Holy Writ with a particular nation’s history and identity, as if Christianity belonged to Americans in a special and intimate way not true of other people? This Bible by its very existence distorts the gospel. As Augustine says in The City of God, the “heavenly city, while it sojourns on earth, calls citizens out of all nations, and gathers together a society of pilgrims of all languages…”

Beyond what the editor and the publisher intended, The American Patriot’s Bible is deeply American. It takes to a new level the remaking of Scripture into a marketable consumer good, a trend underway in the United States since at least the invention of the modern steam press in the early 19th century. (See R. Lawrence Moore’s Selling God.) It also exemplifies the irony of American Protestants, who adhere to the sufficiency of Scripture for faith and life yet find the unadorned text of that Word not so sufficient after all. And finally, it provides further evidence of how theologically ill-equipped one dominant strand of American Christianity has been over the past few hundred years to know how to sojourn in America, how to conceive of the United States as part of the City of Man and of the church as a stranger in a strange land.

There is a particular irony in the publication of this Bible. Thomas Jefferson, lauded by the editors for praising the "purity" of Jesus' "moral precepts," was no paragon of Christian orthodoxy. He published his own version of the Gospels, stripping from them all references to Jesus' miracles and, most notably, deleting the resurrection. But, whereas Jefferson subtracted from, The American Patriot's Bible adds to the words of Scripture. After 200 plus years, we should have learned the danger inherent in doing both.