This piece was adapted from Russell Moore’s newsletter. Subscribe here.
This past weekend, on the National Mall in Washington, thousands gathered for Rededicate 250, a national prayer service tied to the coming 250th anniversary of the United States. President Donald Trump appeared by video reading 2 Chronicles 7. Political leaders and evangelical figures prayed and spoke. The language was familiar: America, God, repentance, renewal, one nation under God. Lots of “Christian America” nationalistic talking points were repeated—even pleas for a billion-dollar White House ballroom. All I could think about was the way a classmate of mine back in high school defined American religion.
My friend, a nominal Roman Catholic, told me that he saw no point in people arguing about who was right—his tradition or my Southern Baptist one—because, so far as he could see, they worked the same way. “The Catholic kids do whatever they want on Saturday night and go to confession on Sunday and start the whole process over until the next Saturday night,” he said. “The Baptist kids do the same thing, except that on Sunday morning they ‘rededicate their lives to Jesus’ and start the whole process over until the next Saturday night.”
He was, of course, unfair to the Roman Catholic Church’s view of the sacrament of confession and to the evangelical Protestant understanding of repentance, but he was exactly right in the way he saw both distorted. He could see that “rededication” was often about soothing one’s conscience just enough to “rededicate” oneself to doing whatever one wanted.
Nations can do that too.
As I heard the typical talking points for, at its most benign, American civil religion and, at its worst, full-blown Christian nationalism on the Mall, my first thought was America deserves a better gospel than this. But then I repented of my own form of Christian nationalism.
America doesn’t deserve the gospel. Neither do I. Neither do you. “For by grace you have been saved through faith, and that not of yourselves; it is the gift of God,” the apostle Paul told us, “not of works, lest anyone should boast” (Eph. 2:8–9, NKJV). But America does need a better gospel than what we often see in nationalist rallies.
The evocation of 2 Chronicles 7 is predictable at any God-and-country event of the past century, especially the verse that scholar Richard Pierard once identified as “the John 3:16 of American civil religion”—verse 14:
If my people, which are called by my name, shall humble themselves, and pray, and seek my face, and turn from their wicked ways; then will I hear from heaven, and will forgive their sin, and will heal their land. (KJV)
It’s not hard to see why this verse would be chosen, over and over again, for events such as these. It’s comforting. It seems almost transactional. It seems to teach a relatively easy exchange—some acts of public religiosity for God’s blessing on what the country is doing. The problem is that a civil-religion interpretation of 2 Chronicles 7 uses the same grid that a prosperity gospel evangelist uses with the blessings and curses of Deuteronomy.
Second Chronicles 7 is about not religious nationalism but the reverse. The setting is the temple—the place Solomon constructed, where he placed the ark of God’s presence, where he offered up the blood of sacrifices, and where the glory of God filled the house (vv. 1–3). This was all in the context of a covenant—with the people of Israel, to be their God and they his people and with the House of David, to give the kingship permanently to the heirs of that line.
The entire rest of both the Old and New Testaments is how God keeps his word, with Jesus and his apostles teaching that all of it—the glory, the presence, the covenant, the people, the sacrifices, the throne, the blessings, the curses—are fulfilled in him.
And that’s what so dangerous about the way we want to use this text. After all, God warned, in this covenant word, that he would not be used the way the other nations used their tribal deities (2 Chron. 7:19–22). In the pages following the account of Solomon’s dedication of the temple, we see how Solomon proved not to be the faithful king who could keep the covenant. His kingdom divided into two—one nation to the north and one to the south, at odds with one another over, among other things, tax policy.
That created a crisis. After all, the temple, the place of sacrifice, and the manifestation of God’s presence were all in Jerusalem, in the southern kingdom, Judah. The king of the northern kingdom, Jeroboam, had reasonable fears about his geopolitical rivalry with the king of the southern kingdom, Rehoboam. “If this people go up to offer sacrifices in the temple of the Lord at Jerusalem,” he said, “then the heart of this people will turn again to their lord, to Rehoboam, king of Judah, and they will kill me and return to Rehoboam king of Judah” (1 Kings 12:27, ESV).
Jeroboam saw the worship of God as a political problem to be solved. And his answer was religious nationalism. He set up golden calves in Dan and Bethel to tell people that it was “too much” for them to go to Jerusalem—they could worship right there. The obstacle was theological. Among other things, God had appointed only a specific line to offer sacrifices, and to bring the people’s sin before his presence behind the veil. Jeroboam found his own priests, though, who were willing to be ordained to do all of this. He found prophets who would tell him that this was what God wanted.
And so Jeroboam used the totems and symbols of God to build political unity. And in so doing, he empties all these things out.
Bethel was where Jacob—the Israel of the sons of Israel—encountered God, in a dream, as a ladder coming down from heaven. As biblical scholar Richard Bauckham put it,
What he has discovered is not so much that God is in that particular place as that God is where Jacob is. God is with Jacob and will be with him wherever he goes: “Know that I am with you and will keep you wherever you go” (28:15). God’s revelation to Jacob is not for a man who is going to settle down at Bethel with a temple close at hand in which to worship God. Rather it is for a man on a journey. From now on every place where Jacob sleeps will be a Bethel.
To attempt to freeze that revelation into something manipulable and controllable, into a vehicle of state propaganda, is to make it a dead thing. There, at what was once the “house of God,” the king used that holy site to “sacrifice to the calves he had made” (1 Kings 12:32, CSB).
But all of that must have seemed beside the point. After all, who cares about the finer points of theology when an entire nation is at stake? Who wants to end up the way Solomon’s kingdom had—broken apart by foreign alliances and the king’s own sexual immorality? The court prophets must have told themselves, Rehoboam is an awful person who will do horrible things. One can almost imagine revered elders of the community shrugging: Well, say what you will about Jeroboam and his golden calves, at least he knows the difference between a heifer and a bull.
And, for a while, it “worked”—so long that, as always, people mistook the patience of God with his license.
Jeroboam did not say, “Let us worship Baal.” He said, in effect, “Here is the God who brought you out of Egypt, conveniently located closer to home.” Jeroboam did not abolish religion. He made it useful.
And yet, Jesus said of himself, “You will see … the angels of God ascending and descending on the Son of Man,” identifying himself as the Bethel of God (John 1:51). To use that as a means of shoring up a country with blood-and-soil national solidarity is to use Jesus Christ. And Jesus Christ will not be used.
The problem with religious nationalism is not that it asks too much of Christianity for the nation; it asks too little of Christianity and too little of the nation.
Second Chronicles 7 is the Word of God. It is right that we read it. But “My people” does not mean our country; it is the covenant people who come to God under the blood he has provided. “Heal their land” is not a promise that if America performs enough public religiosity, God will restore national greatness. It’s a promise to set all things right in Jesus Christ.
The problem is not worship or repentance. We need all those things. But we need them the way God commands that we come into his presence, through Jesus Christ. A nation can make use of “God.” A nation can make use of “faith.” A nation can make use of “values.” But the crucified and resurrected Jesus is notoriously difficult to make useful, because he keeps interrupting the program by saying, “Follow me.”
We do not come to God by way of a National Mall stage, an Oval Office video, a remembered founding, or a reclaimed country. We come through a torn veil, by blood, to a throne of grace. And we come not through a mascot but through a mediator. We can’t “rededicate” ourselves any other way but that.
That’s not the gospel America deserves. None of us do. But it’s gospel we need. It’s the only gospel there is.
Russell Moore is editor at large and columnist at Christianity Today as well as host of the weekly podcast The Russell Moore Show from CT Media.
The post America Needs a Better Gospel Than Christian Nationalism appeared first on Christianity Today.
