If America wants to position itself as a Christian nation, one that has taken up the spiritual mantle of ancient Israel as the true people of God, then it seems obvious to me that it is also explicitly positioning itself as a nation to be subject to God’s laws about nations. The God I read about in the Bible was very explicit with Israel about God’s expectations on His people, and in particular how they should behave differently than the nations around them.
Throughout the Bible, there are constant correctives from the prophets – from the very earliest all the way through Jesus and the New Testament writers – about setting themselves apart as a people, about being different, about being holy.
And the theme of those corrections in the Hebrew Bible, at least, was singularly consistent: that failure to observe God’s laws would result in losing their promised land. More to the point, specifically in Leviticus 18 and 20, God tells them directly that the land itself will spew them out.
That’s interesting to me – a failure to follow God according to God’s commandments would result in the land itself doing something against the offending people group.
Consider Leviticus 18:24-30: “Then the Lord spoke to Moses, saying (among other things), “Do not defile yourselves in any of these ways, for by all these practices the nations I am casting out before you have defiled themselves. Thus the land became defiled, and I punished it for its iniquity, and the land vomited out its inhabitants. But you shall keep my statutes and my ordinances and commit none of these abominations, either the native-born or the alien who resides among you (for the inhabitants of the land, who were before you, committed all of these abominations, and the land became defiled); otherwise the land will vomit you out for defiling it, as it vomited out the nation that was before you. For whoever commits any of these abominations shall be cut off from their people. So keep my charge not to commit any of these abominations that were done before you and not to defile yourselves by them: I am the Lord your God.”
There is similar language in Leviticus 20:22: “You shall therefore keep all my statutes and all my rules and do them, that the land where I am bringing you to live may not vomit you out.”
Leviticus 25 includes many instructions on how to treat one another – both the Hebrews, but also the aliens and foreigners who live among them.
And in Leviticus 26:33, God warns them that if they fail to observe these commandments, the penalties will ramp up over time as God warns them and then rebukes them and finally ejects them from the land: “…you I will scatter among the nations, and I will unsheathe the sword against you; your land shall be a desolation and your cities a waste.” And then the land will enjoy a Sabbath as it heals, for as many years as it was offended by the sins.
Deuteronomy 28 takes the same approach: “But if you will not obey the Lord your God by diligently observing all his commandments and decrees that I am commanding you today, then all these curses shall come upon you and overtake you.” “The Lord will cause you to be defeated before your enemies; you shall go out against them one way and flee before them seven ways. You shall become an object of horror to all the kingdoms of the earth.” “…you shall be plucked off the land that you are entering to possess. The Lord will scatter you among all peoples, from one end of the earth to the other, and there you shall serve other gods, of wood and stone, which neither you nor your ancestors have known.”
It’s not just the books of Hebrew Law, the Torah, that give these warnings. The prophets also spend quite a few words warning Israel about the consequences of failing to follow God’s law.
Isaiah 5 talks about how injustice causes God to respond: “Woe to those who join house to house, who add field to field, until there is room for no one, and you are left to live alone in the midst of the land! The Lord of hosts has sworn in my hearing: Surely many houses shall be desolate, large and beautiful houses, without inhabitant.” “Woe to those who are heroes in drinking wine and valiant at mixing drink, who acquit the guilty for a bribe and deprive the innocent of their rights!” And in verses 25-30, the response is described: the Lord’s anger is kindled, and He calls nations from far away and their warriors come roaring unstoppable across the land of His people.
Isaiah 24:5–6 says “The earth lies polluted under its inhabitants, for they have transgressed laws, violated the statutes, broken the everlasting covenant. Therefore a curse devours the earth, and its inhabitants suffer for their guilt; therefore the inhabitants of the earth dwindled, and few people are left.”
Jeremiah 7:1-15 is particularly harsh; I’ll read this extended passage:
1 The word that came to Jeremiah from the Lord: 2 Stand in the gate of the Lord’s house, and proclaim there this word, and say, Hear the word of the Lord, all you people of Judah, you who enter these gates to worship the Lord. 3 Thus says the Lord of hosts, the God of Israel: Amend your ways and your doings, and let me dwell with you in this place. 4 Do not trust in these deceptive words: “This is the temple of the Lord, the temple of the Lord, the temple of the Lord.”
5 For if you truly amend your ways and your doings, if you truly act justly one with another, 6 if you do not oppress the alien, the orphan, and the widow or shed innocent blood in this place, and if you do not go after other gods to your own hurt, 7 then I will dwell with you in this place, in the land that I gave to your ancestors forever and ever.
8 Here you are, trusting in deceptive words to no avail. 9 Will you steal, murder, commit adultery, swear falsely, make offerings to Baal, and go after other gods that you have not known 10 and then come and stand before me in this house, which is called by my name, and say, “We are safe!” — only to go on doing all these abominations? 11 Has this house, which is called by my name, become a den of robbers in your sight? I, too, am watching, says the Lord. 12 Go now to my place that was in Shiloh, where I made my name dwell at first, and see what I did to it for the wickedness of my people Israel. 13 And now, because you have done all these things, says the Lord, and when I spoke to you persistently, you did not listen, and when I called you, you did not answer, 14 therefore I will do to the house that is called by my name, in which you trust, and to the place that I gave to you and to your ancestors just what I did to Shiloh. 15 And I will cast you out of my sight, just as I cast out all your kinsfolk, all the offspring of Ephraim.
There are plenty of times where God is described as hearing the outcry from sin and evil, and coming down to see. In Genesis 11, regarding the Tower of Babel, God sees the people becoming arrogant and making a name for themselves, and scatters them into the world.
In Genesis 18, regarding Sodom and Gomorrah, the Lord said, “How great is the outcry against Sodom and Gomorrah and how very grave their sin! I must go down and see whether they have done altogether according to the outcry that has come to me, and if not, I will know.”
Amos 5 is particularly painful to read, noting “Therefore because you trample on the poor and take from them levies of grain, you have built houses of hewn stone, but you shall not live in them; you have planted pleasant vineyards, but you shall not drink their wine. For I know how many are your transgressions and how great are your sins — you who afflict the righteous, who take a bribe and push aside the needy in the gate.”
In many of those prophecies, the prophet specifically says that the people are saying “peace, peace” and exulting over their blessings, even as they are about to be cast out of their land for their evil. Jeremiah 6:13-15 is pretty pointed:
For from the least to the greatest of them,
everyone is greedy for unjust gain;
and from prophet to priest,
everyone deals falsely.They have treated the wound of my people carelessly,
saying, “Peace, peace,”
when there is no peace.They acted shamefully; they committed abomination,
yet they were not ashamed;
they did not know how to blush.
Therefore they shall fall among those who fall;
at the time that I punish them, they shall be overthrown,
says the Lord.
To me, this seems quite different in character from how God describes how other sinful nations will be treated. God is incredibly patient with other nations’ sin for generation after generation; when the outcry from the sin reaches God’s ears, God eventually sends another nation in to apply correction.
But in the case of God’s own people, God describes the land itself as spewing out God’s people, often under the very direction of God themselves. There’s no quarter given for bad behavior by God’s own people; God demands that they accurately represent God’s character in how they behave.
How dangerous a thing, then, to claim a mantle of being God’s chosen people living on God’s promised land, and yet not scrupulously following God’s laws!
Before I go any further, let me be clear: I don’t believe the Bible is univocal – that it speaks with exactly one consistent voice and message – or that the Bible is inerrant – that it cannot contain any mistakes – or that the Bible is inspired, in the sense that everything written in the Bible is exactly and perfectly spoken by God through the authors.
Instead, I believe the Bible is a fairly accurate but complex and challenging historical record of man’s growing awareness of, and understanding of, the divine and how the divine interacts with humanity. It’s a very human set of diverse documents with often conflicting ideas and viewpoints about God. It’s a library of writings that were assembled by people with sometimes imperfect motives. I do believe God inspired humans to do this work, but I don’t believe it is a perfect record, nor do I believe there ever can be such a perfect record, given all the diverse languages and cultures of the world which each interpret language and deity differently. I believe the Bible must needs be as complex and diverse and messy as it is, to interact usefully with a complex and diverse and messy humanity.
However, with that massive caveat, I do believe that the overall sense of the Bible is critically important to understand, as it contains a fairly accurate representation of both the eternal nature of God and the imperfect and transient nature of humanity.
So what do I do with all these verses?
I see there a consistent picture of divinity that is deeply troubled by humanity’s inhumanity, that is focused on how humanity treats its least members. I see a consistent idea that the system of nature that exists is naturally resistant to evil; that over time, nature itself will apply corrective actions in the presence of evil, until the evil is expunged and the land can rest. And the prophets recognized this, as they were inspired by the divine, and they warned the people that failure to be moral and just would result in destruction.
Perhaps, to some believers, it’s an open question whether God as a unique and self-aware entity does the things that we call judgement, or whether it’s natural consequences – the Bible itself goes back and forth between identifying God or the land itself as the proximate cause of correction. But either way, it’s clear that correction will be applied, when the outcry of injustice becomes great enough against any land. And I believe human history supports this idea: eventually evil is destructive to a people, and that culture falls to another.
And beyond this general rule of land that rejects evil, the land occupied by God’s own people seems to get special attention from God. I suppose one might legitimately wonder if this was actually just God’s people being exceptionalists – telling themselves that they were better than the other nations, and thus subject to extra judgement – and whether this was a priestly or kingly attempt to keep the people in line by writing “scripture” to control their behavior by insisting on purity lest they be exiled. Or perhaps, as some progressive theologians believe, this was later writers retrojecting the Levitical purity commands into their history, to explain why they found themselves in exile hundreds of years later.
But whatever the reason, if we take the Bible at face value, it seems clear that God’s own people and God’s land are subject to special attention by the Divine. If God’s people make God’s land impure, the land will deal with the problem directly, and God will ensure judgement follows to cleanse the land.
As such, one might see how dangerous it is to claim this mantle of God’s people living in God’s land.
As James 3:1 observes, not many should claim a privileged place in the kingdom, because those people will be judged more strictly. And yet here we are, with millions of Americans insisting that they have a privileged seat at the Kingdom table.
So with that framework in place, let’s consider how America actually acts, versus the Christian nationalists’ claims.
To me, it’s arguable – easily – that the single most pressing topic that God addressed with God’s people in the Bible was “justice and righteousness.” Those two terms are nearly inseparable in the Bible – we modern folks have very different concepts of them, but Biblically they were tied together, and usually referred to how a people treated each other (justice) reflecting their holiness (righteousness). Sure, there were plenty of ceremonial laws, things like washing of hands and avoiding certain contaminations, and God’s people had to be careful to have those ritual contaminations routinely cleansed lest the impurity build up in the land.
But my sense is that the thing about which God complained most often was injustice.
And when I look at history without the lens of American Exceptionalism, I see a lot of very painful, unjust episodes in our past that have never been fully remedied.
- Genocidal slaughter and wholesale herding and corralling of Native Americans.
- Centuries of chattel slavery, followed by a century of continued gross mistreatment of Blacks.
- During World War II, concentration camps for American citizens of Japanese origin.
- Failure to provide for the poorest among us, with the excuse that it ought not to be the government’s job, even as the church doesn’t do nearly enough to carry that burden that it insists should be its own instead.
- Fiscal policies that keep the poor in their poverty, while enriching the rich even further.
- Immigration policies that reject asylum claims and consistently render the most vulnerable back to their nations where torture and imprisonment away.
And today, we’re watching this become not just tolerated, but actually celebrated by the very people that call themselves “God’s people” in America. This new “Alligator Alcatraz” is a literal concentration camp where the immigrants – including young children – are being caged in chain link fence booths without bathrooms or showers or adequate air conditioning in the oppressive Florida heat and humidity. People with legitimate asylum needs being rounded up and shipped back to be tortured and killed. Families ripped apart by heartless, nameless, masked ICE agents – and it’s all being celebrated and conservatives are even selling “Alligator Alcatraz” merchandise!
If we’re going to claim, as tens of millions do today, that America is God’s chosen nation, the literal fulfillment of Biblical prophecy about Israel, the very inauguration of the Kingdom of God on the earth, I say: woe, woe unto you, those who are about to be judged just as Israel was judged for her unfaithfulness and injustice. The land itself will surely vomit us out, just as God promised in Leviticus and Deuteronomy and the prophets. Our exalted place will not save us for long. The foreign chariots will roll across our land – maybe not literally, but certainly symbolically – leaving death and destruction among those who today are saying “finally, there is peace, peace thanks to this new administration!”
This is perhaps the angriest I have ever been about our nation. Even when I was deeply worried about political matters in years past, convinced that abortion and homosexuality and communism were going to cause God to judge America, I was never even a fraction as angry as this. Because now it’s clear to me: there are tens of times more verses about injustice and God’s resulting wrath against Israel, than there are about those other matters, which barely appear in the Bible.
And I’m watching America’s rulers very pointedly and explicitly cast off any resemblance of care for the poor and the immigrant and the prisoner – all things that lead to one of the most intimidating warnings in the Bible. In a passage that ought to be burned into our consciences and very pointedly inform our thinking about how much God hates injustice, Amos 5:21-24 writes “I hate, I despise your festivals, and I take no delight in your solemn assemblies. Even though you offer me your burnt offerings and grain offerings, I will not accept them, and the offerings of well-being of your fatted animals I will not look upon. Take away from me the noise of your songs; I will not listen to the melody of your harps. But let justice roll down like water and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream.“
It doesn’t matter when Congressmen kneel and pray together on the floor of the US Congress thanking God for enabling them to pass the Big Beautiful Bill. It doesn’t matter when Sean Feucht leads worship in the Oval Office. A crowd of evangelical pastors and influencers laying hands on the President is irrelevant. The establishment of a White House Faith Office means nothing. All those megachurch July 4th ceremonies praising God for America have no value.
If Amos is to be believed, God hates them all because of the gross injustice being done in their name.
We’re on extremely dangerous ground, if we think America is an exceptional Christian Nation.
In fact, we’re on dangerous ground even if not, given the Bible’s consistent testimony that the land itself rises up against injustice. We don’t even need to be right about our exceptionalism.
I would suggest that some humility and repentance are in order today. Perhaps, as the King of Nineveh once decreed, “Humans and animals shall be covered with sackcloth, and they shall cry mightily to God. All shall turn from their evil ways and from the violence that is in their hands. Who knows? God may relent and change his mind; he may turn from his fierce anger, so that we do not perish.”
But sadly, I doubt I will see that happen in America in time to save us.
I hope I’m wrong, because I love America and want to see it live up to its promise on the Statue of Liberty:
Not like the brazen giant of Greek fame,
With conquering limbs astride from land to land;
Here at our sea-washed, sunset gates shall stand
A mighty woman with a torch, whose flame
Is the imprisoned lightning, and her name
Mother of Exiles. From her beacon-hand
Glows world-wide welcome; her mild eyes command
The air-bridged harbor that twin cities frame.
“Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp!” cries she
With silent lips. “Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tossed to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!”
May it be so again.
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