matt talbot- agreed.

t. shaw- i am no supporter of “st. barack”. along with your ridiculous comments you make ridiculous assumptions. your buchanan quote is a nightmare.

“The flag represents a living country and is itself considered a living thing”

…is also agreed by all here to be idolatry?

“The United States is the last, best hope of man on earth.”

…may I assume that we are all in agreement that that is idolatry?

Christopher – I do not disagree with the idea of religious freedom.

Apart from the fact of the slave trade. With all due respect, this is kind of like hearing somebody contend that the Third Reich was beneficial for Jews because it resulted in the creation of Israel.

Why West Virginia? Cheap nursing homes. Right, Mike!

Why: because no one has said one positive about America but then was ‘attacked.’

Compared to nearly every other country (we can’t all fit in Sweden), America is a ‘shining city on a hill.’ Sure it has it’s warts. But, all the other places have warts.

But, but, but!!! No one in America ever did anything christian until St. Barack said he would do all things christianly if he gets elected!!!!

[Racist comments deleted. Though the following racist citation will remain, since Christopher addresses it below.]

Regarding African slaves, P. Buchanan (and I agree):

“First, America has been the best country on earth for black folks. It was here that 600,000 black people, brought from Africa in slave ships, grew into a community of 40 million, were introduced to Christian salvation, and reached the greatest levels of freedom and prosperity blacks have ever known.

“Second, no people anywhere has done more to lift up blacks than white Americans. Untold trillions have been spent since the ’60s on welfare, food stamps, rent supplements, Section 8 housing, Pell grants, student loans, legal services, Medicaid, Earned Income Tax Credits and poverty programs designed to bring the African-American community into the mainstream.

“We hear the grievances. Where is the gratitude?”

Regarding the matter of religious freedom, what would you have done differently in formulating the documents which established of our nation?

Can you elaborate on what “foundational principles” did the United States get wrong?

[G Alkon] The spiritual/political, internal/external, church/state split was the fruit of the Reformation, and of Luther’s misinterpretation of Augustine on the two cities.

I posted a compilation a while back on Pope Benedict XVI’s understanding of the separation of religious and temporal authority. He asserts for instance that “The modern idea of freedom is thus a legitimate product of the Christian environment”. Pardon the extensive quotation but he sums up the present situation here:

In practice this means that it is only where the duality of Church and state, of the sacral and the political authority, remains maintained in some form or another that the fundamental pre-condition exists for freedom.

Where the Church itself becomes the state freedom becomes lost. But also when the Church is done away with as a public and publicly relevant authority, then too freedom is extinguished, because there the state once again claims completely for itself the justification of morality; in the profane post-Christian world it does not admittedly do this in the form of a sacral authority but as an ideological authority – that means that the state becomes the party, and since there can no longer be any other authority of the same rank it once again becomes total itself. The ideological state is totalitarian; it must become ideological if it is not balanced by a free but publicly recognized authority of conscience. When this kind of duality does not exist the totalitarian system is unavoidable.

With this the fundamental task of the Church’s political stance, as I understand it, has been defined; its aim must be to maintain this balance of a dual system as the foundation of freedom. Hence the Church must make claims and demands on public law and cannot simply retreat into the private sphere. Hence it must also take care on the other hand that Church and state remain separated and that belonging to the Church clearly retains its voluntary character.

What do you make of this?

Judging by their own words, Benedict and John Paul II appear to be largely in agreement with what the founders intended.

Benedict hails our nation as “guided by the conviction that the principles governing political and social life are intimately linked to a moral order based on the dominion of God the Creator. The framers of this nation’s founding documents drew upon this conviction when they proclaimed the “self-evident truth” that all men are created equal and endowed with inalienable rights grounded in the laws of nature and of nature’s God.” Now, I think that is less the case today than it was at the founding. For instance, how many Americans still have that sense of the proper grounding of “inalienable rights” today?

Nonetheless I think it is still possible to celebrate and call recognition to those original principles at the founding and likewise to think critically of where we have, as a nation, quite obviously strayed from those principles in our nation’s history.

In short, I tend to see the 4th of July no so much as a blanket commendation of the United States as much as a reminder of those principles America was founded on; it is an impetus not to simply wave the flag but for pause and reflection on “ordered liberty” and the nature of this experiment.

why?

no one has called america a hell hole. your sarcasm is in-appropriate for, what i think is, a really good, important conversation among Christ-followers.

there is nowhere in the world to live that does not have a history of violence, racism and neglect of poor people, the United States included.

the question for Christians in the United States is do we see the history of the world as one of power and wars won. if so, we see history as finding its savior in this superpower in which we live.

or….

do we see history as the story of the God of Jesus Christ who said blessed are the peacemakers and the meek and the poor in spirit…etc.

however we answer, i think it changes the way we read scripture, it changes our view of america’s role in the world, it changes our theology and practice.