The Sign That Got My Attention: “Jesus Wants to Save You, Not America”

As I drove across northern Wisconsin last week, political signs were sprouting like Spring flowers in yards and along the roadsides.

There were far more Trump signs than Harris signs. Republicans, I was told, “Love the Constitution and America.” Democrats, “Support Choice, Freedom and Democracy.”

The sign that got my attention was one small sign outside a Baptist Church in Ladysmith. “Jesus Wants to Save You, Not America.”

It reminded me of growing up in the 1950s, before the culture/religious wars. My parents had been missionaries in China. We were members of a fundamentalist Protestant church where the focus was on individual salvation and a personal relationship with God. The nation would change as its people changed. From the bottom up, not the top down.

But that is not where we are today. Fundamentalist and evangelical denominations, particularly the largely white churches with more vocal leaders, see themselves as soldiers for God in a war of good against evil, Christian morality against secular humanism. Their goal, enshrining the “good” and the “moral” in the nation’s laws. Making America a Christian nation. From the top down.

Increasingly in recent years, the Christian Right (or Christian Nationalism) has become intertwined with the Republican Party. In a speech at a small Christian college in Iowa during the 2016 election, Donald Trump told the audience if he were elected, “Christianity will have power. If I’m there, you’re going to have plenty of power.” Evangelicals responded, giving him 81 percent of their votes.

The religious/political rhetoric we hear today envisions a nation at war with itself. A war that has to be fought until victory is achieved. Until the enemy within is defeated.

 In her Pulitzer Prize winning history, “The Evangelicals”, Frances Fitzgerald wrote about the early thinkers who in the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s created the theological foundation for today’s Christian Right.

Their themes, mostly overlooked at the time, have become familiar.

“Christians must seek a regime based exclusively on biblical law. God had given Moses the law at Sinai not just for Israel but for all nations at all times.”

“Christians have no need for majoritarian politics, or for compromise or accommodation to reach their goal.”

Humanists are “a conspiratorial group intent on destroying the Christian faith, family values, and democratic freedoms.

“It is not too strong to say we are at war, and there are no neutral parties in the struggle.”

Fitzgerald writes that in the second wave of the Christian right which started in the 1990s, an emphasis on grassroots political organizing added muscle to the movement. (According to the New York Times, Wisconsin Family Action, a Christian advocacy group, is on track this election to put an insert into the Sunday bulletins of at least 700 evangelical churches in the state, urging worshipers to vote.)

We are living today in the full flowering of the ideas sown 50 and more years  ago by little known theologians. Those ideas give no space to some of the central teachings of Jesus and the New Testament. “Blessed are the peacemakers.”  “Love your neighbor as yourself.”  “Judge not, that you be not judged.”  “The fruit of the spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control.”

I like to think the sign outside the church in Ladysmith was one small voice from within the church calling for an end to the cultural/religious war. Calling for us to find a way to live together in community and relative harmony. Reminding us that our “neighbor” does not share our ethnic heritage or our religious beliefs.

History tells us that conformity, uniformity, can be achieved only by authoritarian rule, by force. People want to be free. Free to live, believe and express themselves as they choose.

People also want to control. There are always some among us who, certain of being right, certain that what they believe is universally true, work to impose that belief on all of us. For them, conflict is inevitable. Cooperation is impossible. There can be only one winner. As the founder of the American Renewal Project said, “Somebody’s values will reign supreme in the public square.”

The desire to be free and the desire to control are not contradictory. They often exist together. We want to be free ourselves. It is others we want to control.

Puritans came to the New World so they could free themselves from the state churches of Europe and worship according to their beliefs, but expelled from their colony Quakers and others who believed and worshipped differently.

Sometimes it takes a while to realize our freedom to continue acting freely depends in the long run on others also having that same freedom. To recognize we are inherently diverse and we have to figure out a system that allows us to follow our personal beliefs without impinging on the freedom of others to follow theirs. To accept the restraint that my freedom ends where your nose begins. To embrace cooperation.

The desire for uniformity, the drive to control, however, may contain within itself the seeds of its own demise. Because we are by nature diverse, our Truth can never be singular. Continual division is inevitable.

Baptists are only one Protestant denomination among many. Google “Baptist denominations” and you find Conservative Baptists, American Baptists, Southern Baptists, Reformed Baptists, Regular Baptists, Freewill Baptists, Progressive Baptists, Separate Baptists, United Baptists and more than a dozen other kinds of Baptists, each with its own Truth.

In a democracy, politics and religion don’t mix well. The dynamics of each are different. Any alliance is inherently unstable.

Religion has to do with what is True. Politics has to do with what works and what a majority will agree to. Trump and many Republican politicians changed their strong pro-life, anti-abortion positions when the backlash to the repeal of Roe v Wade made their winning election more difficult. Evangelicals feel abandoned.

Religious beliefs vary with the church and the individual. Politics has to do with enacting laws that apply to all.

When the Oklahoma Superintendent of Public Instruction issued a directive earlier this year that the Bible had to be integrated into teaching throughout the curriculum in all public schools, the New York Times reported push back from conservative Christians.  

“Once you introduce this type of teaching about the Bible, there is the opportunity for people to promote their own religious beliefs over others … That’s a well-founded fear.”

One superintendent, a Lutheran, was skeptical of what the directive might look in various classrooms. His 10-year-old son who had attended vacation Bible school at a Baptist church during the summer had been told by an adult there he “would not be able to enter the kingdom of God” because he was baptized only as an infant. “There are different interpretations of the word of God even within the Christian faith,” he said. “We have to be really careful. Who’s going to dictate what the appropriate interpretation is?”

The directive from the state superintendent said teachers can use biblical texts to illustrate how literary techniques like allegory, metaphor and parable are used giving students an appreciation of “the Bible’s literary craftsmanship without delving into religious doctrine.”

One of the main doctrinal differences among churches, however, has to do with how the Biblical narratives are interpreted. Is the story of Jonah literally true? Or is it allegory, metaphor, or parable? What about the Virgin Birth? How are those stories explained in a lesson on “literary craftsmanship”?

In a small town in rural Oklahoma the school superintendent said many parents had told him, “That’s why we have eight, nine, 10 churches in town. They can do that.”

The sign in Ladysmith was simple. The intent more profound. The Christian answer to Christian Nationalism in seven words.