When Christianity Becomes American

A Faith Disconnected From Its Origins

The Americanization of Christianity did not begin with American nationalism. Nationalism is one of the consequences of a much deeper problem. Christianity in America has become disconnected from its own history, its own ecclesiology, and ultimately from its understanding of what the Church actually is.

Christianity did not begin in America. It did not begin with the Puritans, the Great Awakenings, or the founding of the United States. It did not begin with the Reformation. It is an ancient faith that existed for centuries before any of these things.

The early Church did not understand itself primarily as a collection of individuals who happened to believe the same things about Jesus. It understood itself as a visible body. It was sacramental, episcopal, communal, historical, and continuous with the Apostles.

The ancient Christians also did not understand the relationship between the Church and civil authority in the modern American sense. Church and state were certainly distinct. The emperor was not the bishop and the bishop was not the emperor. At times bishops rebuked emperors and emperors persecuted, deposed, or interfered with bishops.

But these were not understood as two completely separate realities.

The double headed eagle eventually became a fitting image of this older Christian understanding. There were two heads, not one. The authorities were distinct, but they belonged to one body and inhabited the same Christian world.

Whatever problems existed with that arrangement, it was radically different from the modern American idea that religion is essentially something private.

Christianity Becomes Individual

The larger problem is what happened to the Church itself.

As Western Christianity diverged from the earlier Orthodox practice of the Church, and then fractured further through the Reformation, Christianity became increasingly capable of being separated from a particular historical and sacramental body.

Obviously the Reformers themselves were not modern American individualists. They established churches. They wrote confessions. They practiced discipline. They had ordained ministers and sacraments. Many of them still believed in explicitly Christian societies.

But something had fundamentally changed.

The individual Christian could now stand over the visible Church and judge it according to his own interpretation of Scripture.

Once that Christianity crossed the Atlantic, it found almost perfect soil in America.

America loves the individual.

The self made man. The pioneer. The entrepreneur. The dissenter. The person who pulls himself up by his own bootstraps and does not need anyone to tell him what to do.

If the institution is corrupt, leave it.

If the denomination is wrong, find another one.

If the church teaches something you believe is wrong, go down the street.

If none of the churches teach what you believe the Bible teaches, start another church.

This fits the American ethos almost perfectly.

American individualism and Protestant individualism feed one another.

Christianity becomes less something that is received and more something that is chosen.

The Marketplace of Churches

This creates what is essentially a marketplace of Christianity.

There are Baptists, Presbyterians, Methodists, Pentecostals, Lutherans, Anglicans, non denominational churches, and then countless divisions within each of them.

The individual has to choose.

Which one correctly interprets Scripture?

Which one understands baptism correctly?

Which one has the right view of communion?

Which one has the correct church government?

Which one has the right view of salvation?

Which one fits what I believe?

Even when the individual takes doctrine extremely seriously, he is still operating inside an individualistic system.

I have to determine where the Church is.

That seems almost completely backwards when compared with the ancient Christian understanding.

The question was not, “Which church most closely agrees with the conclusions I have reached?”

The question was, “Where is the Church, and how am I joined to it?”

Christianity was something you entered and received.

American Christianity increasingly became something you selected.

Individualism Cannot Actually Produce Christianity

Eventually there is an obvious problem with this.

Christianity cannot actually be individual.

The Church is the Body of Christ. Christians are members of one another. There is one baptism. There is one bread. Christians are commanded to gather, worship, submit, forgive, confess, reconcile, bear one another’s burdens, and love one another.

You cannot actually practice Christianity by yourself.

So Christians who recognize the problem with individualism naturally begin looking for Christian community and unity.

But if the historic Church has already been replaced by thousands of competing churches, where does that unity exist?

This is where ecumenism becomes almost inevitable.

The Baptist is a Christian.

The Presbyterian is a Christian.

The Methodist is a Christian.

The Anglican is a Christian.

The Catholic is a Christian.

The Orthodox Christian is a Christian.

But these groups make contradictory claims about the Church, baptism, the Eucharist, salvation, ordination, authority, and even what Christianity fundamentally is.

So if all of these churches together somehow constitute “the Church,” Christian unity has to be moved somewhere above the actual visible churches.

The Church becomes an invisible collection of Christians scattered among contradictory visible bodies.

This solves the problem of division by redefining unity.

From Ecumenism to Relativism

Once unity is defined primarily by recognizing one another as Christians rather than actually sharing the same faith, relativism becomes incredibly difficult to avoid.

It does not happen all at once.

At first we say, “We disagree about baptism and church government, but we all believe in Jesus.”

Then it becomes, “We disagree about the Eucharist, salvation, ordination, and authority, but those things are secondary.”

Eventually you have to ask a very basic question:

How many things can we disagree about before our claim to unity stops meaning anything?

There is a strange irony here.

Christian individualism begins because someone believes truth matters enough to separate from a church teaching error.

The resulting fragmentation becomes unbearable, so ecumenism attempts to restore unity.

But because that unity has to include churches teaching contradictory things, doctrine itself gradually becomes less important.

Individualism produces endless division.

Ecumenism can answer that division by producing relativism.

These seem like opposite problems, but they come from the same unanswered question:

What is the Church?

America Fills the Vacuum

This is where nationalism enters the picture.

People need a corporate identity. We need to know who “we” are. We need a common history, common symbols, common stories, and a sense that we belong to something larger than ourselves.

Historic Christianity already had all of this.

But when Christianity is disconnected from its historic Church, that identity becomes increasingly difficult to find.

America is more than happy to fill the vacuum.

America gives us the common story.

America gives us the heroes.

America gives us the symbols.

America gives us the founding fathers.

America gives us the sacred documents.

America gives us the battles, martyrs, victories, and defeats.

America gives fragmented Christians a shared identity that their fragmented Christianity can no longer provide.

Then something very strange happens.

Instead of being Christians who happen to live in America, we become Americans whose Christianity has been formed by America.

American assumptions begin looking like Christian assumptions.

American individualism looks Christian.

American ideas about liberty look Christian.

American economics look Christian.

American political structures look Christian.

American culture looks Christian.

Eventually defending America itself can begin to feel like defending Christianity.

This is how we arrive at the strange marriage of America and Christ.

The Christian in My Mind Looked American

This problem became much more uncomfortable when I realized that it was not simply something happening somewhere out there in American Christianity.

It was happening in me.

At some point I had to seriously consider what I actually pictured when I thought about Christians.

When I imagined Christianity, the people in my mind looked Western. More specifically, they looked American. The churches looked American. The worship looked American. The language and culture surrounding the faith looked familiar to me.

But when I imagined people in the Middle East, my immediate association was Islam.

That realization bothered me because historically it is absurd.

Christianity is an Eastern religion.

Christ was born in the Middle East. The Apostles were Middle Eastern men. The Church began in Jerusalem. Antioch was one of the great centers of the ancient Christian world. Christians were worshiping throughout Syria, Palestine, Egypt, Asia Minor, and beyond long before Christianity ever reached the people who would eventually become my European ancestors.

There are Christians in these places whose communities trace their existence back further than the existence of most European nations, much less the United States.

Yet somehow they had become the foreign ones in my mind.

Worse, I had theological categories available to justify it.

They were not “real Bible believers.”

Their Christianity was too ritualistic.

It was cultural Christianity.

It was folk religion.

They had traditions.

They had icons.

They had strange liturgies and strange clothes and strange customs.

They did not look like the Christianity I knew, so it was remarkably easy to assume that what they practiced was some corrupted version of the real thing.

But eventually I had to confront an obvious question:

Who was actually foreign to historic Christianity?

Was it the Syrian Christian whose ancestors had worshiped Christ in the same region for nearly two thousand years?

Or was it me, an American living two thousand years later, assuming Christianity should look like the religious culture I happened to inherit?

That was an inward reflection I needed to take seriously.

What I had treated as discernment was, at least in part, prejudice. I had taken my own cultural experience of Christianity and made it normative. Then I judged Christians from other cultures according to how closely they resembled it.

There was bigotry in that, and it was something I needed to repent of.

I had unconsciously made the American Christian experience the center and turned ancient Christian peoples into the “other.”

Christianity Came From the People We Made Foreign

This is where the absurdity becomes even clearer.

The Christian in Syria is not my foreign counterpart.

He is my brother.

The Christian in Egypt is not practicing an exotic version of my American religion.

Christianity was in Egypt before it was in England.

Christians in Palestine are not foreigners who somehow found their way into our faith.

Our faith came from their part of the world.

This completely reverses the perspective.

I had inherited a Christianity that allowed me to stand at the end of two thousand years of Christian history, look backward at ancient Christian peoples, and ask whether they looked sufficiently like me to qualify as “real Christians.”

I should have been asking whether I looked like them.

Not culturally. Christianity does not require Syrians to become Greeks, Greeks to become Russians, Russians to become Americans, or Americans to become Arabs.

The question is ecclesial.

What faith did the Apostles hand down?

What did the Christians who received that faith understand the Church to be?

How did they worship?

How did they understand Scripture, authority, baptism, the Eucharist, bishops, communion, and the Christian life?

Once I began asking those questions, “real Bible believing Christianity” could no longer simply mean the form of Christianity that felt most normal to me.

Christianity Is Older Than America

The tragedy is that Christianity already possesses the universality we are trying to manufacture.

Christianity does not need nationalism to give Christians a common identity.

It already has one.

Christianity does not need ecumenism to create a community out of isolated individuals.

It already has one.

The historic Christian answer was catholicity.

The Church was one precisely because Christians belonged to one Body. That unity did not require pretending doctrine did not matter. Communion itself had content.

And that Church existed across nations.

A Christian in Syria could look very different from a Christian in Rome. A Christian in Ethiopia could look different from a Christian in Greece. Christians could speak different languages, eat different food, live under different governments, and inhabit completely different cultures.

They did not need to become culturally identical because their unity was not national.

Their unity was ecclesial.

That is something American Christianity desperately needs to recover.

The Christian story does not begin in 1776.

It does not begin at Plymouth Rock.

It does not begin with the Constitution.

It does not begin with the Reformation.

America enters the Christian story extremely late, and it enters that story as one nation among many.

There is nothing wrong with loving America. There is nothing wrong with being grateful for what is good about this country. Christians should pray for their nation, serve their neighbors, seek justice, and preserve what is good.

But America is not the Church.

America is not Israel.

America is not the Kingdom of God.

America does not give Christianity its identity.

A Church That Does Not Need America

Perhaps this is one of the most damaging things nationalism does to Christianity.

It does not always replace Christ with the nation in some obvious act of idolatry.

Sometimes it does something much quieter.

It makes our own culture feel so normal that we mistake it for Christianity itself.

Then, when we finally encounter Christians who do not look like us, worship like us, speak like us, or share our political history, we mistake their difference from America for a difference from Christ.

The answer to fragmented American Christianity is not better Christian nationalism.

It is also not an ecumenism that creates unity by continually shrinking the amount of Christianity Christians actually need to share.

The answer is something much older.

It is catholicity.

It is Christianity understood as something received rather than invented, a Church we enter rather than construct, and a faith that binds people together across nations without pretending that truth does not matter.

The Church can exist in America without becoming American.

It can love America without belonging to America.

It can criticize America without betraying Christ.

It can survive America because it existed long before America did.

The Church does not need America to make her one.

She already has a Head.

She already has a history.

She already has a people.

She already has a King.

And that King is not the king of America.

He is the King of all.