I hinted in a previous article that Abraham Lincoln embraced the American jeremiad but later came to refine his views about this subject considerably. Other thinkers and religious leaders, including many who were quite conservative and orthodox in their theology, have done the same since Lincoln’s time. Lincoln is, for me, a model of how we can hold a high view of providence while at the same time we refuse to read our understanding of God’s mind into acts of providence. It is healthy that we have a national awareness of God’s role in our public life, but it is not healthy to act as if we know precisely what he means through his actions in our present or historical past.
I can still recall, as vividly as if it was yesterday, when it dawned on me that conservative and fundamentalist Christian leaders were going to try to mobilize political power to change America. President Carter had been chosen, in 1976, because Americans wanted a reformer to clean up the mess of Watergate. He was also seen as a Washington outsider who was decent and “born again.” (This last phrase captured media interest through a number of sources, including an interview in which he discussed the sin of lust with Playboy magazine.)
Last week we considered the
influence civil religion had on America before and during the Civil
War. What we saw in this era has continued to impact American civil
religion down to the present, especially in the form of the jeremiad.
We have heard a number of classic expressions of the American jeremiad
from ministers during the last thirty years or so. Many of these
jeremiads have made it into the mainstream and created quite a
discussion, or one might say quite an adverse reaction. Here is one
modern jeremiad, which is an illustration of many I could provide:
In the Sermon on the Mount Jesus taught his disciples (Matthew 5:1) what life would be like in the kingdom of God. The kingdom of God, in the teaching of Jesus, is all-embracing, i.e., nothing in this life falls outside his authority. Those who are his disciples enter this kingdom by grace and obediently follow his way.
During America’s
moral decline, spanning now over five-plus decades, a number of
prescriptions have been offered. Most of these have been advocated by
Christians. Since the mid-1970s the majority came from conservative
Christians. These prescriptions grew out of what we’ve defined
as the American jeremiad. The jeremiad is a lamentation, a form of
complaint that heavily relies on an Old Testament form of rhetoric.
Many social movements in America’s history have been heavily
influenced by drawing a sharp contrast between a glorious past and a
lamentable present.
In the Sermon on the Mount Jesus taught his disciples (Matthew 5:1)
what life would be like in the kingdom of God. The kingdom of God, in
the teaching of Jesus, is all-embracing, i.e., nothing in this life
falls outside his authority. Those who are his disciples enter this
kingdom by grace and obediently follow his way.
No
Christian I know seriously doubts that America has declined morally.
Evidence abounds inside and outside the church. What is to be
questioned is the correct way to respond to this decline. Both
evangelicals and progressives have commonly responded with political
and religious rhetoric that draws heavily on a tradition that is
almost universally misunderstood by Christians.