Dallas Morning News columnist and religious (but not evangelical) conservative Rod Dreher, author of Crunchy Cons: How Birkenstocked Burkeans, gun-loving organic gardeners, evangelical free-range farmers, hip homeschooling mamas, right-wing nature lovers, … America (or at least the Republican Party) was the guest last week on Speaking of Faith with Krista Tippet.
Dreher is an Eastern Orthodox Catholic. Tippet asked him for his view of the close alignment between Evangelical Christianity and the Republican Party over the last eight years. He answered that on the public issues that unite conservatives on the social front — abortion and gay marriage — he’s completely comfortable”standing shoulder to shoulder” but:
Mr. Dreher: Where I really depart…is the sense that you have among a lot of Evangelicals, this sense of mission for the United States, that the United States has what David Reef has called “an American theology,” the idea that we have a special mission in the world and our mission is to serve as God’s instrument to bring liberal democracy and all the things that we cherish in this country to the whole world…
I think that sort of thing has really led the church — I’m speaking of the Christian church broadly, Catholic, Orthodox, Protestant — has led us into a place of nationalism where we don’t stop and realize that we are under God’s judgment as well, and we have made some really serious mistakes that way. And the “worship” of our nation and its special purposes is something that I’ve become really allergic to, and I think it’s a big blind spot on the religious right.
Ms. Tippett: And I wonder if it is specifically the theology of Evangelical Christianity or just the fact that Evangelical Christianity, which of course is a broad spectrum, is so entwined with American culture, that civil theology, that’s just part of our history.
Mr. Dreher: It’s deep within our own history. I mean, it’s — David Reef again has pointed out in a recent essay on world Affairs that the thing that people now call the neo-con foreign policy is actually American foreign policy, and it goes back generations. And this idea, the shining city on a hill, as you know, goes back to the very founding. And I think it is a real American temptation to see America as a sort of secularized Israel, speaking in a biblical sense, and that we are that special nation set apart from all other nations to fulfill God’s providence. And that is a very, very common theme you hear in political discussions among Evangelicals on the right. But I think if anything, the last eight years and our experience in Iraq should have taught us Americans not to be so full of hubris, and that the idea that we know better than the rest of the world is just madness and folly. Unfortunately, it’s a bipartisan folly.
The video clip above [pulled for technical issues] is Sarah Palin in the debate crediting Ronald Reagan for her use of the “City on a Hill” phrase that has become a mantra repeated over and over in every campaign stop she makes.