Since the late 1970s, Christianity's public face in the United States has been prominently defined by movements like the Moral Majority, the Christian Coalition, Eagle Forum, and the Tim Lahaye Ministries. The presidential friendliness of Ronald Reagan and the two Bushes to such fundamentalist, nationalistic Christianities and their conduct of millennially themed rituals for military engagements (treated in chapter 5, “A Fundamentalist Vision for Christian America: From the Scopes Trial to George W. Bush”) stirred several strands of analysis—mostly dissenting. A cluster of activist evangelicals (Jim Wallis, Ron Sider, Gregory Boyd) called for revitalized commitment to peace and social justice. The sentiments of Richard T. Hughes, Professor of Religion at Messiah College, should be seen alongside theirs.
Hughes has earlier written as a historian to clarify American religious themes (primitivism, restorationism) and denominational history (Churches of Christ). In Myths America Lives By (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2003) Hughes assessed self-flattering national narratives of chosenness and innocence. There Hughes created a dialectic in which voices of African-Americans played against the myths. “The Christian Nation” chapter reviewed critical assessments by African-Americans David Walker and Frederick Douglas. Walker had lamented succinctly, “Have not the Americans the Bible in their hands? Do they believe it? Surely they do not?” (79).
Such accusation of biblical hypocrisy becomes the thread for the entire book in Christian America and the Kingdom of God, where it now emerges, not just from minority voices, but from a systematically developed standard of biblical Christianity. Chapters 2, “The Witness of the Hebrew Bible,” and 3, “The Witness of the New Testament,” offer nicely condensed renditions in which social justice and peacefulness emerge as the cardinal virtues. Hughes's journey takes the form of a Protestant sermon directed to Christians sympathetic with the Bible's normative authority. Yet he does not have a simple view of the Bible as a “flat” document lacking in contradictions (25, 35, 83). It too contains prescriptions for dominance and exaltations of imperial values that he rejects on the basis of other sentiments in the Bible. Being biblically faithful for Hughes means to discern and to honor the Bible's coherent tendency. Christianity for Hughes is thus about making choices, not being obedient to a simple, unchallengeable text. In making such judgments he appeals to figures like John Dominic Crossan and Gordon Brubacher.
Hughes focuses on the notion of God's kingdom in the later prophets Isaiah, Jeremiah, Amos, Hosea, and Micah, who are assigned extra weight because they are the ones to whom Jesus appeals “to define his own ministry, identity, and sense of vocation” (36). Hughes argues that “Jesus appealed to those radical Hebrew prophets who rejected war and oppression and proclaimed, instead, nonviolence, peace, and justice” (36). Hughes's analysis of the kingdom of God concept in the Gospels and the Pauline letters finds emphases on caring, mercy, and reconciliation—accompanied by the rejection of empire's hegemonic and materialistic value system. Following Donald Kraybill, Hughes suggests a novel element in the New Testament's portrayal of God's kingdom—that of “inversion,” or the upending of social ranks through which dominance is structured: “the kingdom of God always exalts the poor at the expense of the rich, the powerless at the expense of the powerful, and the weak at the expense of the strong” (52). In an exegetical tour de force, he incorporates the outlier apocalyptic Book of Revelation by showing that despite its retributive narrative, it summons its violence to punish a center of imperial domination—the Whore of Babylon, a coded placeholder for the detested Roman Empire. He concedes that the vengeance of Revelation is inconsistent with the Sermon on the Mount and the New Testament's depiction of “humiliation, patience, and love” as the instruments for bringing the kingdom of God (94–95). For Hughes it is another case of the Bible's own embodiment of the struggle over imperial values.
Chapter 4, “Why Do We Think of America as a Christian Nation?” traces the chosen people conceit back to its roots in English Protestantism and its transmissions through New England Puritan culture, the Great Awakenings, and the thematic periods of Manifest Destiny and the Gospel of Wealth. If we grant Hughes's understanding of the Bible's major themes and recognize the facts of American behavior during its most racist and expansionary moments, a dismissal of the claim to be a Christian nation smoothly follows. But unlike so many evangelicals who would call America to be a Christian nation, Hughes believes that the nation never was Christian (the constitutional consideration) nor should it ever aspire to be one (the anti-imperial consideration).
The book's final words convey his prophetic evaluation. He observes that like the post–Constantine Empire, “the United States abounds in Christian trappings. And yet the United States embraces virtually all the values that have been common to empires for centuries on end. It pays lip service to peace but thrives on violence, exalts the rich over the poor, prefers power to humility, places vengeance above forgiveness, extravagance above modesty, and luxury above simplicity. In a word, it rejects the values of Jesus. How, then, can we claim that the United States is a Christian nation?” (186).
Like any normative analysis of religion's social relevance, Hughes leaves the American Christian in a conundrum. He says that “Christians should behave in ways that are consistent with their faith, especially in America's public square” (4). Hughes wants to nudge Christians toward biblical fidelity while urging them to respect the establishment clause and the anti-imperial notion of religious freedom which lies behind it. One looks forward to an equally eloquent and trenchant book on Christian citizenship.
This book belongs in every library. Despite its severe verdicts, it is always civil in tone. In its clarity of literary style and sources, it seems unusually teachable for a course that offers perspectives on American history.
