The debate over the proper relationship between religion and politics often focuses on whether religious influence in the public square is a good thing or bad thing for the nation. Evangelical Charles Marsh has written a new book, Wayward Christian Soldiers: Freeing the Gospel From Political Captivity that argues that undue political involvement has been bad for the faith.
Damon Linker reviewed the book in The New Republic:
A professor of religion at the University of Virginia and a devout evangelical, Marsh believes that the politicization of Christianity in recent years–using the good name and moral commandments of the church to “serve national ambitions, strengthen middle-class values, and justify war”–has been spiritually disastrous for evangelicalism in the United States. Conservative American Christians, he claims, have forgotten the difference between “discipleship and partisanship.” They have “seized the language of the faith and made it captive to our partisan agendas–and done so with contempt for Scripture, tradition, and the global, ecumenical church.” The result has been a collapse into spiritual unseriousness, as Christians have “recast” their faith “according to our cultural preferences and baptized our prejudices, along with our will to power, in the shallow waters of civic piety.” Resisting despair, Marsh hopes that his book might inspire some of his fellow believers to repent of their recent ways–to “take stock of the whole colossal wreck of the evangelical witness” and then try to rebuild a more authentic Christianity in its place.
Unlike most books about the religious right, positive or negative, Wayward Christian Soldiers is addressed primarily to the movement’s most devoted members. Accordingly, much of the book is written in a prophetic register, alternating between rebuke and exhortation, as Marsh tries to persuade his readers of the enormity of their transgressions. He employs a rhetoric of outraged denunciation most effectively in his introduction, where he recounts visiting a Christian bookstore near his home in the spring of 2003, shortly before the start of the Iraq war. The store was stocked with “a full assortment of patriotic accessories–red-white-and-blue ties, bandanas, buttons, handkerchiefs, ‘I support our troops’ ribbons, ‘God Bless America’ gear, and an extraordinary cross and flag bangle with the two images welded together and interlocked.” By the cash registers, he found numerous books about the faith of George W. Bush. In Marsh’s words, “It looked like a store getting ready for the Fourth of July, although Easter was just weeks away.”
The problem with such displays is not simply that they blur Christian piety with patriotism, but also that the patriotism is highly partisan. It is not all of America, or even most of America, that these godly patriots love. If Marsh’s neighborhood bookshop was preparing for the Fourth of July, it was the holiday as scripted by the Republican National Committee. And such displays have hardly been limited to selected Christian businesses. As Marsh notes, Christian Coalition activists made a habit of attending rallies for Bush’s 2004 re-election campaign with specially designed crosses emblazoned with Bush-Cheney logos and American-flag emblems. On some of them, “the president’s name appeared in full at the places where Jesus’s hands were nailed” to the cross. At these rallies, which took place all over the country, the blending of politics and religion was complete.
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