God or Country?

(2 of 3)

But the country that came closest to the American outcome was France, where 46% of the Muslims polled answered "Muslims first" and 42% chose "French first." Was this a healthy result? You may recall that France experienced weeks of rioting in its majority-Muslim slums last year.

Cross-cultural comparisons are odious, of course. The rioting French Muslims were largely poor, unemployed immigrants or the children of immigrants, familiar with anti-Arab stigma and no doubt aware that the number of fellow-believers in the French Assembly could be counted on one hand — with fingers left over. By contrast, the American Christians who responded "Christian first" are probably employed and ethnically unalienated (to put it politely). Far from being disenfranchised, they are an increasingly powerful voting bloc who — when they wanted to see their views better represented — elected and then re-elected a President.

What I found most curious about the poll was what people in such a relatively enviable position might have been thinking when they responded so naturally to Pew's seemingly impolite question. What scripture or mental scenarios made it so easy to distinguish and choose between their two identifications?

So I called Albert Mohler, president of the 16-million member Southern Baptist Convention's Southern Theological Seminary and thus one of Evangelicalism's most influential theologians. He told me "It's simple."

"Our primary allegiance is to Jesus Christ," he explained, "and we are known... for our citizenship in the Kingdom of God rather than any earthly polity, and that is a clear and unambiguous teaching in the New Testament." Mohler is not a great colloquialist, but, as you might expect, he has an extremely well-developed and internally consistent worldview. The Apostle Paul, he pointed out, at one point refers to Christians as "resident aliens."

Well, that was then... But where, I asked, might a contemporary Christian's interest diverge from an American's? "By God's providence," Mohler said, "we are not to the point where we have to debate the legitimacy of the regime. We are not yet in the position of the confessing church in the Nazi regime." Not yet?!? "There are some tension points," Mohler replied, "... with the structure of law having to do with issues like abortion and marriage. I can foresee the day when Christians would have to constitute an adversary culture."

I wondered whether Mohler meant civil disobedience. "Christians have to think carefully and clearly as to how to be faithful," he said. "It could lead to civil disobedience. It could lead to the acceptance of the [civil] penalty. In the history of Christianity it has led to martyrdom." He laughed. "I'm not jumping there," he said. I told him he had jumped. He replied that martytrdom was not something that currently applied. He also noted that Christians on the more liberal side of the spectrum might feel as he does, but about questions of war and non-violence.

I asked whether secular Americans might not fear (rightly or wrongly) that the 42% favored theocracy. Mohler gently pulled me back from the majority paradigm to the minority paradigm: the caricature would have to be sedition, he explained, or at least "concern about persons in their midst who have a higher allegiance than is understood by the secular Americans to be the basis of the cultural contract."