Preparing for War by Bradley Onishi

Author:Bradley Onishi [Bradley Onishi]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Broadleaf Books

AMERICA, CITY ON THE HILL?

In 1630, John Winthrop proclaimed to his fellow Puritans that New England would be a city on a hill for all the world to emulate. He was drawing on Matthew 5, where Jesus extols his followers to participate in the kingdom of God in a way that will make them a shining light to all people. Winthrop envisioned his people as a “New Israel” and a “chosen people” who would shed light across a world made dark by sin and tyranny.

Americans have long conflated the kingdom of God and the nation-state. The notion that the United States is a shining city on a hill resounds throughout our history. The likes of John Kennedy and Ronald Reagan have called on it during times of war, hardship, and crisis to remind Americans that this great democratic experiment is not the easiest route but is the right one, that democracy is complicated and often painful but worth it in order to live in freedom, peace, and equity. The biggest proponents of the city on a hill metaphor have always been politicians and Christian pastors, two groups invested in forming an image of the American republic as a light to the world morally, civically, and religiously.

During my high school years in the late 1990s, however, many White evangelicals felt as if the country was slipping further and further away from its exceptional role as God’s chosen land. Despite James Dobson’s movement for family values based on the hetero-patriarchal nuclear family, and despite the purity pledges sent to the nation’s capital, there were signs of godlessness all around. President Clinton was embroiled in an adultery scandal involving an intern. This was the era of fierce debate over same-sex civil unions and eventually the legalization of same-sex marriage. The American family was changing. Mixed-race couples were increasingly normalized in many parts of the country. Divorce rates stabilized, while the taboo surrounding divorce was evaporating. Single mothers. Single fathers. Blended families. Children with two moms. Children with two dads. These became standard figurations of American life. And the levers of democracy—elections, policies, and legislation—seemed powerless to stop them. But most of all, American culture kept moving forward in spite of White Christian nationalists’ attempts to stop the progress. It seemed as if all the work to revolutionize electoral politics and stem the tide of cultural revolution in the seventies and eighties wasn’t enough.

“I believe it should be the duty of every Christian to pray for repentance and revival in the land,” Billy Graham wrote in 1993. “If I were not a believer in Christ, I might at this point in history succumb to total pessimism.” While Graham urged Americans to pray to the heavens for renewal, some Christians began to look east for new political and cultural blueprints in Russia and eastern Europe. In order to effect the visions of a “pure” America and to realign the American social body, some White Christian nationalists became enamored of authoritarian regimes as the exemplars of morality and civic structure.

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