|
This edition is sponsored by Cru |
|
Hello, fellow wayfarers … How two men in black could give life to our 250th Fourth of July … What I told The New York Times about UFOs and alien life … What I learned from conversations this year about what it means to be an American in crazy times … A sequel Desert Island Bookshelf … This is this week’s Moore to the Point. |
How Roger Williams and Johnny Cash Can Show Us How to Celebrate America 250 |
|
Late one night I was walking alone through Statuary Hall in the rotunda of the United States Capitol. Because I was the father of young children at the time, my mind drifted to the movie Night at the Museum, which my sons watched maddeningly often. I couldn’t help but wonder: What if all of these statues came to life? What if this empty, cavernous space buzzed with all these men and women, some famous enough to be on the cash in our pockets but some whose names almost no one would recognize? As people do at parties, I thought about whom I would seek out. |
|
Each state has two statues, so my first inclination was to find "my people"—those from my home state of Mississippi. But one of them is Jefferson Davis, the president of the Confederacy that fought against my country for the awful institution of slavery. The other is James Zachariah George, a Confederate veteran who was later a member of the Mississippi Constitutional Convention of 1890, which was explicitly designed to rob Black Mississippians of the vote and institutionalize the repressive Jim Crow society that dominated most of the century thereafter. I would not want to stand with either of them. |
|
Instead, from today’s delegations, I would probably seek out men from two states to which I have no geographic ties—Rhode Island and Arkansas—to spend my night talking to Roger Williams and Johnny Cash. At first glance, it might seem hard for them to warm to each other, with Williams in his Pilgrim-looking attire and Cash in his trademark black. Cash might try to ask whether Williams was related to a musician by the same surname, only to hear the Baptist dissident disclaim any Hank Williams. |
|
But as the night went on, in my imagination, the two of them would find they had at least one thing in common: Both believed they could best serve God and country by remembering which was which. |
|
In the past 250 years, our country has often returned to the imagery of the "city on a hill," so much so that many modern people associate it with Ronald Reagan rather than with the biblical citation from Jesus (Matt. 5:14). The idea is common to both wings of American politics: For progressives, the city on a hill means social justice and an equitable society are a model to oppressed peoples around the world. For conservatives, the idea is that America can be a model of moral order and patriotic zeal. |
|
The sermon from which this national self-understanding comes was written by John Winthrop, governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony. Just five years later, that same colony banished Roger Williams from that shining city to probable death in the howling winter wilderness. |
|
Williams’s crime was that after fleeing England for the freedom promised in the New World, he refused to outsource his conscience to the government. He concluded that the colony’s leaders were making a catastrophic theological error—not just a political one—by trying to enforce religious conformity through civil law. This is not because he was a relativist or an infidel but because he was neither. |
|
Some historians describe Williams as a founder of the American republic because the essential notion of religious freedom is rooted in his refusal to stand down. He believed that coerced religion is an offense to a holy God who requires people to come before him freely, through the mediation of Jesus Christ (1 Tim. 2:5). |
|
Williams survived his exile only because he was sheltered by the Narragansett people, with whom he had cultivated trust and mutual respect. He founded Providence Plantations on a radical principle implicit in Jesus’ command to give to Caesar what is Caesar’s and to God what is God’s—namely, that the civil government should not use the power of the sword for matters of the soul. Rhode Island became the first place in the New World where Jews, Quakers, Catholics, and Baptists could worship freely. All this was because of Williams’s exclusive Christian claims that everyone must be born again. |
|
Johnny Cash had his trouble with shining cities too. He was a Christian who had been through the ring of fire, including addiction and divorce. Singer Bono writes about sitting at the dining room table with Cash and his wife, June Carter Cash, to hear how he found his way to Jesus. After Cash offered a poetic prayer of grace over the meal, he leaned over to Bono and said, "Sure miss the drugs, though." |
|
In that, Cash was a "walkin’ contradiction," as Kris Kristofferson would put it. Cash recorded a three-disc summation of his greatest hits and called it Love, God, Murder. (His songs about love and murder were more popular than his songs about God.) He performed at Billy Graham crusades but never fit in evangelical celebrity culture—precisely because, as with his comment to Bono, he never pretended it was easy to walk the line. That same tension existed in his love of country. |
|
Cash performed at the White House, in prisons at Folsom and San Quentin, for soldiers in Vietnam, and for members of the Sioux tribe at Wounded Knee. He loved America, but he didn’t idolize it in a way that would whitewash its injustices or its forgotten people: the prisoners, the poor, the conquered. Just as his Christianity held together a strong sense of sin with an even stronger sense of grace, his patriotism knew the country’s shadow side but loved it anyway. |
|
In the East Room at the White House, Richard Nixon asked Cash to perform "Welfare Cadillac" and "Okie from Muskogee," thinking the lyrics would solidify his "Southern strategy." Cash declined. Instead he sang "What Is Truth," which was in part a plea for understanding counterculture youth disillusioned by the war in Vietnam. Cash was willing to sing for the president but not to be owned by him, a fact Nixon himself acknowledged onstage, quipping, "One thing I’ve learned about Johnny Cash … is that you don’t tell him what to sing." |
|
And that’s where Williams and Cash would connect at my fantasy fellowship. Neither would believe he was a statue, certainly not one a state had put up in the most powerful hall of government in the world. |
|
Both Cash and Williams were claimed by their respective establishments and refused to be owned by them. Both understood that their deepest loyalty—to God—was precisely what freed them to love their earthly communities without idolizing them. Both were orthodox Christians who used that orthodoxy as grounds for freedom rather than coercion, persuasion rather than domination. Both knew the gospel would transform, but not if reduced to an almost-gospel for almost-Christians. Both understood that a country that can force people to pretend to be Christians is setting itself up as a god. |
|
Williams refused to let the state capture the mission of the church and speak with the authority of God. And in doing so, he freed both. Cash refused to let the church’s respectability sanitize him. And in doing so, he gave voice to the people whom respectable Christian America wanted to forget. In different ways, both men were exiles who became founders—Williams literally, Cash culturally. |
|
On our country’s 250th anniversary, we need many of the statues in that Capitol hallway. We need the best impulses of those memorialized there and in the surrounding city. We need Washington, Madison, Jefferson, Franklin, and Hamilton. We need to celebrate the loyalty we rightly have for what our fathers and mothers have conserved for us, summed up in these words: "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness." |
|
We should also remember that our patriotism is the kind that needs our country to be our country, not our Messiah. We have another King for that. We love our country best when we don’t expect it to be our final city on a hill. We have another city for that (Heb. 11:16). |
|
It’s 250 years. God bless America. We ought to fly stars and stripes. We ought to have fireworks that light up the sky like bombs bursting in air. Let’s hail Uncle Sam in red, white, and blue. But just so we remember the ones who are held back, up front there should be some men in black. Roger Williams and Johnny Cash taught us that. |
|
Note: This is a copy of my column from the July/August issue of Christianity Today. You can sign up for a subscription here. |
What I Told The New York Times about UFOs and Aliens |
|
Steven Spielberg’s Disclosure Day is in theaters, and I haven’t seen it yet but am committed to remedying that soon. A couple months ago, I wrote here about how an actual disclosure of aliens would affect Christian theology. For those who missed it, I think the possibility of alien life—like the vastness of the cosmos and the billions of years of its existence—is no obstacle at all to a revelation that has already repeatedly told us that the world is far, far stranger than we can imagine. |
|
A couple weeks ago, while I was out, I talked to The New York Times about this. The resulting piece, by Ruth Graham, said, |
|
|
Mr. Moore touched on the topic himself this spring in an adult Sunday school class at his evangelical church in Nashville. Teaching from the New Testament book of Hebrews, he discussed a passage in which the writer ponders humanity’s relationship to angels, and our lack of control over the universe around us. Mr. Moore opened the class by asking what it would mean to have some kind of direct contact with nonhuman creatures like angels—or extraterrestrials, lately in the news.
Afterward, "the conversations were less about aliens than they were about ‘What does it mean to be human?’" he recalled, adding that unidentified anomalous phenomena, colloquially known as unidentified flying objects, "weren’t the point for them, they wanted to talk about A.I."
Mr. Moore said proof of extraterrestrial life should pose no threat to Christianity and need not be received with hostility. "If we assume the possibility that there’s something outside of Earth, our basic default should be the way we treat strangers generally," he said. |
|
|
|
You can read the whole thing here. |
A Bunch of Voices on How to Be American in Crazy Times |
|
This week over at the podcast, we have a "best of" gathering around the mic with some of the conversations I’ve had over the past year about America, its founding, its failures, its promise, and its temptations, asking what faithful citizenship looks like in times as crazy as these. |
|
I talked with Ken Burns about why the birth of this country was more complicated, more contested, and more interesting than our myths usually allow … |
|
With Eddie Glaude Jr. about the way national rituals can summon us to repentance—or shield us from it … |
|
With Michael Luo about a moment on a New York sidewalk after church that led into a much larger story about who gets to be considered American … |
|
With Jon Guerra about what happens when the Beatitudes are allowed to sound strange again in an age that rewards dominance and fear … |
|
With Yuval Levin about how a free people can possibly act together when they don’t think alike … |
|
With Sharon McMahon about refusing the easy dopamine hit of contempt … |
|
And with Jon Meacham about the difference between patriotism and nationalism and how to love a country without making it into an idol. |
| | |
