I Pledge Allegiance

A Believer's Guide to Kingdom Citizenship in Twenty-First-Century America

David Crump

• Publisher: Eerdmans
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9780802871749
• eBook ISBN: 9781467449458
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Theology

What does it really mean for Christians to live as faithful kingdom citizens in today's world?

Bitter partisan conflict. State-sanctioned torture. Economic injustice. Ethical corruption. Even a cursory glance over daily news headlines shows a stark contrast between the American political state and the kingdom of heaven. Where, then, does the Christian's ultimate allegiance lie?

In  I Pledge Allegiance David Crump issues a clarion call to Jesus's twenty-first-century disciples, stirring them up to heed God's word and live out their kingdom citizenship here on earth. Closely examining the ethical teachings of Jesus and his apostles in the New Testament and using real-world examples to illustrate the vital issues at stake, Crump challenges Christians to embrace the radical, counterintuitive, upside-down way of Jesus—a way of living and thinking that turns the world's values on their head, smashes through stale political and cultural conventions, and welcomes God's kingdom into the very heart of our shared society. 

Chapter One

Whom Would Jesus Torture?

Stationed at an American air base in Tal Afar, Iraq, Alyssa Peterson was one of the first female soldiers to die in the Iraq war. She was not the victim of a roadside bomb. She did not fall in a firefight. On the night of September 15, 2003, US Army Specialist Peterson positioned her loaded service rifle against her body at just the right angle—something she learned in a suicide-prevention course—and she pulled the trigger. She was twenty-seven years old.

A trained interrogator, conversant in Arabic, and well-versed in the various techniques traditionally used by military interrogators to obtain intelligence from enemy detainees, Alyssa had worked for only two nights in the unit known as “the cage.” That was more than enough for her moral sensibilities to bear. Shocked by what she had seen and been forced to do, she reported to her superiors, refusing to participate in any more sessions that she believed constituted torture.

Records show that she was reprimanded for having undue empathy for the enemy. She was instructed to “compartmentalize” the different areas of her life, keeping the professional separate from the personal. The military investigation into her death makes this statement: “We told her that you have to be able to turn on and off the interrogation mode. . . . She said that she did not know how to be two people; she could not be one person in the cage and another outside the wire.”¹

Alyssa wanted to preserve both her humanity and a clear conscience everywhere—at all times. Neither of these aspects of her life was connected to an internal switch that she could flip on and off whenever she wished. The compassionate humanity that flourished in her personal friendships would not allow itself to be bound, gagged, and locked away in a back closet just because she had stepped into “the box”; neither would her memory of the horrible acts of dehumanization committed inside the box, vicious acts that assaulted her moral sensibilities, be wiped away once she stepped out from behind the razor wire and returned home.

Before that fateful evening, Alyssa had sought the advice of a friend, another intelligence specialist named Kayla Williams. Kayla admitted that she had also been forced to participate in interrogation sessions where prisoners were blindfolded, beaten, burned with cigarettes, stripped and then confronted by a female interrogator. The subjects were also subjected to lengthy periods of cramped confinement, stress positions, sleep deprivation, and waterboarding. Like Alyssa, Kayla eventually refused to participate in any more sessions that used techniques she knew (because her training had taught her to know) constituted torture.²

Unfortunately, standing up for what is right in this world does not always lead to happy endings. Courageously saying “no” to injustice while resisting abusive, illegal authority—as vital and admirable as it was—had not fully satisfied Alyssa’s troubled mind. Perhaps she was disillusioned over the prospects of continuing to serve a government that not only approved of but insisted that its citizens perform such atrocities against the image of God (Gen. 1:26–27). As brief and unwilling as her brush with torture may have been, it seemed to have stained her conscience indelibly with the inky blackness of guilt and shame. A good, honest, caring young woman came to believe that there was only one way to be cleansed.

Thinking back over the entire episode and remembering the friend she described as “deeply religious,” Kayla Williams later wrote: “It made me think, what are we as humans, that we do this to each other? It made me question my humanity and the humanity of all Americans. . . . To this day I can no longer think I am a really good person.”³

Ms. Williams asks a profound question about the nature of humanity at large—not only for Americans but for all people everywhere. Yet the implicit national question also demands an answer: Can anyone today honestly believe that America is a “really good” country? Where is the humanity of a country that loudly and proudly proclaims its historic, global exceptionalism—President Reagan once said that America was “the last best hope of man on earth”—while simultaneously institutionalizing torture as a matter of government policy?⁴ What about the many citizens who insist that our nation’s religiosity, its so-called Christian foundations, democratic principles, and free-market economy are all evidence of America’s divinely ordained special-nation status? Does God condemn torture when it is used by other countries but condone it when practiced by Americans?⁵

I wonder whether the average American would be as shattered and repelled by witnessing such grotesque behavior as Alyssa Peterson and Kayla Williams were. Curiously enough, the answer to that question depends on precisely how a person is religious. In the spring of 2009, the Pew Research Center conducted a survey asking Americans if it was ever justifiable to torture a prisoner. The results show that Ms. Peterson was sorely out of step with her fellow “deeply religious” Americans. According to the Pew study, white religious conservatives, those who call themselves evangelicals—the deeply religious who emphasize the importance of being born again, having a conversion story and possessing the Holy Spirit, those who attend weekly church services, read the Bible, and protest against abortion and gay marriage—these are the people who, by a 60 percent margin, believe that it is “often or sometimes” acceptable to torture another human being. Only 16 percent of conservative Christian Americans said that they definitely would stand side by side with Alyssa Peterson and Kayla Williams in their refusal to have anything to do with torture.

What about the rest of America? Where do we have to look in order to discover a majority of Americans who object to torture? Finding the comparable six-in-ten Americans who believe that torture is rarely if ever allowable requires looking in the other direction, well away from the majority of born-again folks who call themselves conservative or evangelical Christians. In fact, we have to trek all the way to the opposite horizon, into the embrace of the catchall group labeled “religiously unaffiliated” before we unearth a majority of Americans who are opposed to torture. Here we discover the irreligious cross section of citizens who say they seldom or never attend religious services of any sort. Yet, even in this group, only 26 percent believe that torture is never justifiable under any circumstances. Apparently, citizens like Alyssa and Kayla, people of good conscious with the courage of their convictions, are a distinct minority in this “land of the free” and “home of the brave.”

I have to confess that, when the results of the Pew torture survey were first published in 2009, I was completely dumbfounded—and not because I was ignorant of the use of enhanced interrogation techniques. I was well aware of the public controversy surrounding the revelations of torture at Bagram Airbase, Guantanamo Bay, Abu Ghraib, and various US “black sites” scattered around the world. My New Testament studies classes provided numerous opportunities for me to lead class discussions on the ethical questions surrounding America’s use of torture. As a part of these discussions I occasionally mentioned the stories of Alyssa Peterson, Kayla Williams, and the handful of other courageous men and women who had taken a public stand against torture, usually at a significant cost to their careers. Although I was frequently startled by the unreflective “my country right or wrong” approach to patriotism expressed by some of my undergraduate students at a Christian liberal arts college, I was not at all prepared to learn that a sizable majority of professing Christians in this country actually approved of torture. Furthermore, my jaw dropped at the direct correlation the Pew researchers discovered between theological, religious conservatism and the willingness to endorse torture.

What had happened to my country? Where was America’s conscience? More to the point, what had happened to the Christian church in this country? Where was its witness on behalf of justice? Where had God’s people gone?

In case I need to be more explicit about where my sympathies lie, let me put a few of my ethical and theological cards on the table. It is my strong conviction that the Pew research data indicts large segments of the modern American church—especially those who claim the mantle of Bible-believing Christians—to be living in a state of apostasy. Only an imitation, bogus, pretend church, one that is completely out of step with its Lord and utterly unfamiliar with the tone and tenor of his living voice in the New Testament, could conscientiously harbor a 60 percent majority that condones the torture of a fellow human being. This is prima facie evidence that these weekly gatherings of men and women who call themselves Christian are, at best, a collection of spiritual schizophrenics and, at worst, wolves in sheep’s clothing. Such people have forgotten, if indeed they ever truly knew, that the authentic church of Jesus Christ serves a tortured Savior who still bears the bodily scars of torn flesh inflicted by his Roman torturers. It is impossible to have genuinely appropriated a biblical vision of the crucified Lord hanging from a Roman cross while simultaneously approving the torturous abuses being inflicted on others by a new generation of executioners. The mere passage of time, whether two weeks or two thousand years, does not change the moral calculus involved in making this judgment. The American embrace of torture is a cardinal sign of the cataclysmic, ethical degeneration and continuing moral misdirection of the so-called church in this country, a degeneration facilitated by an appalling biblical and theological illiteracy.

My initial shock at the results of this survey eventually became the origin of this book. I have always tried to include an element of ethical reflection in my classroom teaching, because I believe that it is impossible to study the New Testament adequately without some consideration of what the biblical message means for today’s reader. Over the years I have gathered a sizable collection of essays, excerpts, book chapters, and dozens of relevant video clips from YouTube and various online news outlets that I used to spark discussion on a wide variety of contemporary social issues: American militarism, endless warfare, drone strikes, warrantless surveillance, growing economic disparity, civic responsibilities, world hunger, global poverty, pollution, the ecological crisis and other concerns. Eventually, I began to set apart a portion of every Friday’s class for group discussion in all but my 100 level courses, and I started searching for a supplementary ethics textbook that might facilitate such discussions in a biblical studies course.

I quickly discovered a wealth of fine literature available, but the majority of ethics texts I found took a more dogmatic/theological approach to the subject than would be useful in my teaching. The books that followed a biblical-theological approach, though more appropriate to my New Testament courses, were somewhat unwieldy for my undergraduate students. During lunch one afternoon with a friend and colleague, I talked about my unsatisfying search for a brief, undergraduate-level ethics book that rooted its analysis in biblical interpretation, addressed the social issues confronting today’s church, and took the teaching of Jesus as its starting point.

Eventually, my friend broke into my lament and said, “Why don’t you write it?” That thought had never occurred to me. So I did. Or at least I’ve tried. As I mentioned above, my goal has been to offer topical discussions of what I believe are pressing social issues in today’s America, concerns that are related to our “citizenship” and rooted in an exegetical appraisal of the New Testament. At some time or other, I taught the full spectrum of New Testament literature: Paul’s letters, the general letters, Acts, the Gospels, and the book of Revelation. I hope that, whichever area of New Testament literature interests the reader, my discussion here will create a point of contact between (a) studying the biblical literature, which I take to be the divinely inspired Word of God, (b) reflecting on its practical significance, and then (c) applying that significance to the way Jesus’s disciples are called to think and act in their immediate social setting as citizens and political actors.

I realize that my focus on social setting may be a debatable demarcation. The line between social and individual responsibilities is blurry, to say the least. Personal matters such as sexual behavior and truth-telling are not addressed in this study, not because they are unimportant but because every study must limit itself in some reasonable way. My primary concern in this work revolves around the demands of Christian citizenship. Specifically, how does the disciple’s citizenship in the kingdom of God, the personal allegiance that must come first and remain foremost for every Jesus follower (Matt. 6:33), bear on the secondary, more relative obligations of national citizenship? Every disciple has this dual identity. We live in two different realms simultaneously—an eternal kingdom and a temporal nation. Both place their own demands on us. Sorting out how those two realms should relate to each other is not easy, nor are there many universally accepted solutions. I suspect that most, if not all, professing Christians will at least pay lip service to the idea that a Christian’s primary allegiance is to Christ and his kingdom. But what does that priority mean—practically speaking? What does that commitment require of a disciple when she confronts the numerous claims and obligations placed on her by the state? Some will insist that obedience to the state is, in and of itself, the obedience that God requires. Others will disagree—including me.

In 1942, the Swiss theologian Karl Barth was asked to answer several questions put to him by American church leaders about the church’s role in the state (whether in Germany or the United States) during wartime, in this case World War II. Barth was one of the leaders of the Confessing Church movement, which resisted National Socialist interference in the German church. He was also the principal author of the Barmen Declaration, a German confessional statement reaffirming the lordship of Jesus Christ in the face of Nazi political demands. Barth insisted that every Christian must, “to the best of his ability, do his part to perfect and keep the national state as a righteous state.” Whenever the state seeks only to serve its own national interests, “it ceases to be a righteous state . . . in this unrighteous state the Christian can show his civic loyalty only by resistance and suffering.”⁶

I believe that on this point Barth was absolutely correct, which raises a few questions for the contemporary American church. How much resistance has the US church offered recently? How much suffering has the church in this country endured because it refused to remain silent in the face of flagrant human rights abuses planned, approved, executed, and rationalized by the leaders of this country as necessary to defend our national interests?

Many, if not most, American politicians boastfully pronounce the pursuit and protection of American national interests as the guiding principle governing their decision-making in foreign and domestic policy. They then use an unassailable belief in American exceptionalism to justify all manner of bullying and exploitation of other nations, peoples, races, religions, and, of course, inconvenient individuals—because American interests must trump all other interests.

In the heyday of the US auto industry it was said that “what’s good for General Motors is good for America.” Now US actions around the world are directed by an ominous expression of national hubris: what is right for America is right for the world. As always, this nationalist principle translates politically into an age-old pragmatic axiom: the ends justify the means. Whatever our political leaders decide is necessary for securing American interests (however minuscule, managed, manipulated, trivial, and underreported the so-called public debate has been), achieving those goals justifies any and all means that are required to achieve success, no matter the depths of criminality and moral repugnance to which the nation descends in the process. Nothing and no one can be allowed to stand in the way. After all, even if our actions momentarily appear blameworthy, we know that in the long run, if it is good for America (as goodness is defined by the American power brokers pursuing American interests), it must eventually be good for the rest of the world (even if, at the moment, the rest of the world is unable to grasp how good it will be for them). The United States, the lone global superpower, has assumed the title of international disciplinarian, telling those who labor under the weight of our actions—typically military actions—“Trust me, I am doing this for your own good. You will thank me one day.”

So, on a Sunday morning not long after September 11, 2001, Vice President Dick Cheney told a nation at breakfast that it is time “for the gloves to come off” and that “we must begin to work on the dark side” in order to protect America and guard our interests. Some may have wondered, as I did, when America had ever avoided the dark side and protected itself with the gloves on, but the national conscience seemed unperturbed by his announcement.

Not long after that, the director of the CIA sat through a combative television interview in which he defended America’s use of “enhanced interrogation techniques,” the newly m...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Foreword by Soong-Chan Rah
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• 1. Whom Would Jesus Torture?
• 2. What Is the Kingdom of God?
• 3. Seek First the Kingdom of God
• 4. Living with Dual Citizenship
• 5. Aliens in a World of Politics
• 6. How Is the Kingdom Political?
• 7. When Disobedience Is a Virtue
• 8. Taking Exception to Exceptionalism
• 9. Does Kingdom Service Permit Military Service?
• 10. God Hates Poverty
• 11. “Blessed Are Those Who Suffer Because of Me”
• 12. Being a Kingdom Church
• Notes
• Select Bibliography
• Index of Names and Subjects
• Index of Scripture References