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Romney & America As the New Israel

Via Andrew Sullivan, this short essay by the Reformed theologian James K.A. Smith, about Mitt Romney, Mormonism, and the deification of America. Excerpt: In a way, this is refreshingly honest theology. In fact, if one pays close attention to the actual theology at work here—that is, if one starts asking just which God is being […]

Via Andrew Sullivan, this short essay by the Reformed theologian James K.A. Smith, about Mitt Romney, Mormonism, and the deification of America. Excerpt:

In a way, this is refreshingly honest theology. In fact, if one pays close attention to the actual theology at work here—that is, if one starts asking just which God is being invoked—one finds that it is a particular deity: “the divine ‘author of liberty.’” The god of the culture warriors has always been a generic god of theism (precisely like the god of the Founding Fathers): a “God who gave us liberty” (to do what we want). The “Creator” is a granter of inalienable rights and unregulated freedoms, a god who shares and ordains “American values.” If evangelical culture warriors had worries about Romney’s faith, his jeremiad today should confirm that he pledges allegiance to the same “God of liberty” that they do. We’re all Americanists now.
But I hope Mr. Romney and his culture warrior friends (whether on the Right or Left) won’t be surprised if some of us find it hard to believe in Americanism and its God of liberty. Some of us just can’t muster faith in the generic theism that is preached on the campaign trail, whether from the Right or Left. Some of us Christians have a hard time reconciling the Almighty, all-powerful, law-giving God of liberty with the crucified suffering servant born in a barn and executed at the hands of the elite. Some of us are trying to figure out what it means to be a people who follow one who relinquished his rights rather than asserted them, who considered submission a higher value than freedom. We serve a God-man who wasn’t concerned with “preserving leadership” and the hegemony of the empire’s gospel of freedom, but rather was crushed by its machinations for proclaiming and embodying another gospel.

Though up front about how much he has to learn about Mormonism, Smith claims that Mormonism makes claims for the godliness of America that goes beyond any other religion. He suggests that Mitt Romney is not at all being a phony nationalist on the stump, but that he really believes what he’s saying. Smith’s essay brought to mind the old Cleon Skousen book “The 5,000 Year Leap,” which became briefly a bestseller after Mormon convert Glenn Beck began championing it. A Salon journalist wrote of the book at the time:

“Leap,” first published in 1981, is a heavily illustrated and factually challenged attempt to explain American history through an unspoken lens of Mormon theology. As such, it is an early entry in the ongoing attempt by the religious right to rewrite history. Fundamentalists want to define the United States as a Christian nation rather than a secular republic, and recast the Founding Fathers as devout Christians guided by the Bible rather than deists inspired by French and English philosophers. “Leap” argues that the U.S. Constitution is a godly document above all else, based on natural law, and owes more to the Old and New Testaments than to the secular and radical spirit of the Enlightenment. It lists 28 fundamental beliefs — based on the sayings and writings of Moses, Jesus, Cicero, John Locke, Montesquieu and Adam Smith — that Skousen says have resulted in more God-directed progress than was achieved in the previous 5,000 years of every other civilization combined. The book reads exactly like what it was until Glenn Beck dragged it out of Mormon obscurity: a textbook full of aggressively selective quotations intended for conservative religious schools like Utah’s George Wythe University, where it has been part of the core freshman curriculum for decades (and where Beck spoke at this year’s annual fundraiser).

I hope Mormon believers in this blog’s readership will help us understand the way Mormonism regards America. If Smith is right, and if Skousen’s views more or less reflect what Mormonism teaches about the theological meaning of America, then I suspect that many mainstream Christians, whether they realize it or not, pretty much agree with this “God of Americanism” heresy.  That is, they would be American before they would be Christian. Then again, if Smith is correct about the way Mormon theology regards America, isn’t it the case that America is today what Israel was to the ancient Hebrews: an outward manifestation of a divine covenant? From the point of view of small-o orthodox Christian theology, this is not only wrong, but dangerously wrong. But I think very few mainstream Christians are aware of this fact, or as aware of it as they ought to be.

Patriotism is not the same thing as nationalism, and neither of them have anything to do with holiness. One certainly hopes that one is never forced to choose between being a patriot and being a faithful servant of God. But if I were ever put in that position by historical circumstance, I pray that I, like Dietrich Bonhoeffer, would have the courage to betray my country.

Of course, uncomfortably enough, that’s what Maj. Nidal Hasan, the Fort Hood shooter, would say.

UPDATE: MC, a reader of this blog who is a Mormon, says this is not what Mormons believe. Be sure to read his comments in the thread below.

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