The Uncomfortable Business of Being the Good Guys

Some Musings on America, Christianity, and the Stories We Tell Ourselves

I’ve been coming to terms with something I don’t particularly enjoy admitting. I’m beginning to wonder whether the United States has been the good guy in quite the way I’ve always believed.

That’s a difficult pill to swallow when you’ve grown up hearing that America is a Christian nation. We’re told endlessly that the country was founded on Christian principles, that our institutions reflect a Christian inheritance, and that our national story is somehow bound up with the defense of Christianity itself.

Wonderful. But Christian according to whom?

The American founding was not a gathering of men who all shared the historic, creedal Christian faith. Some founders were conventionally Trinitarian Christians. Others held heterodox or unorthodox religious views, and Freemasonry and Enlightenment political thought were also part of the founding-era world. Thomas Jefferson famously rejected central doctrines of traditional Christianity, including the Trinity. Yet we have a habit of gathering all these men into one great pantheon of Christian forefathers, as though the question of what they actually believed were an irritating technicality.

I’m not suggesting that every founder was secretly an atheist or that Christianity had no influence upon early America. That would be just another convenient myth. I’m asking why we’re so eager to call the founding Christian without first asking what Christianity means.

And once you start asking that question, some other uncomfortable questions follow.

Consider Nagasaki. Japan’s Christian communities had endured centuries of persecution, including the hidden Christians who preserved elements of their faith across generations. Nagasaki was a historic center of Japanese Catholic Christianity. In August 1945, the United States dropped an atomic bomb on the city, devastating its people and destroying the Urakami Cathedral. Hiroshima also had Christians, but the claim that these were Japan’s only two Christian cities simply isn’t true.

We can argue about the military calculations, the alternatives, and the end of the war. Those are serious historical questions. But surely Christians ought to be able to contemplate the destruction of a historic Christian community without immediately retreating into the comfortable assurance that our side must have been righteous because it was our side.

Then there’s our relationship with Israel. American political leaders regularly visit the Western Wall, sometimes wearing a kippah as a gesture of respect for Jewish religious custom. In much of American evangelicalism, support for the modern State of Israel has acquired an almost theological significance. Yet the modern state is a political entity, not the Church, and Judaism and Christianity disagree profoundly over the identity of Jesus Christ.

That doesn’t make Jewish people enemies or erase their dignity, and it certainly doesn’t mean that Christians must oppose Israel simply because it is not Christian. It means that political alliances and religious truth are different questions. A Christian ought to be able to evaluate a state’s actions without pretending that the state has inherited the promises or moral authority of the Church.

And then consider Russia. Vladimir Putin can be photographed venerating Orthodox icons, attending services, and invoking Christian civilization, while American leaders denounce his government as an adversary. But what are we supposed to conclude from any of these gestures? Does venerating an icon establish the righteousness of a ruler? Of course not. Neither does standing at the Western Wall, quoting Scripture, or invoking God’s blessing upon a flag.

Russia’s actions must be judged on their merits, including its war against Ukraine. So must America’s actions, and Israel’s. The difficulty isn’t that one set of religious symbols automatically vindicates one government while another set condemns its rivals. The difficulty is how readily we allow our existing alliances to decide which displays of piety we find reassuring and which we dismiss as theater.

I’m not interested in trading American exceptionalism for Russian exceptionalism. Nor am I suggesting that every American war has been unjust, or that every opponent of the United States has therefore been righteous. That would merely reverse the old story without examining it.

What troubles me is the possibility that I’ve spent much of my life confusing national allegiance with Christian moral judgment. We call our country Christian, we assume its causes are just, and then we work backward to explain why its conduct must have been necessary. When another nation behaves similarly, we’re suddenly capable of recognizing the danger of nationalism, propaganda, and political religion.

America is not the Church. Israel is not the Church. Russia is not the Church. None of them is the Kingdom of God.

I don’t have to hate my country to question the stories I inherited about it. I can be grateful for what is good in America without baptizing everything it has done. Patriotism need not require the surrender of moral judgment.

For a long time, I thought Christianity explained why America was good. I’m beginning to wonder whether being American simply explained what I was willing to call good.