I was asked this week how I can be a Christian and support Donald Trump throwing out thousands of illegal aliens. But one of the toughest things about being a Christian is trying to be a citizen. No — scratch that. I mean trying to be a good citizen.
Paul was a citizen, too, but I don’t think he cared a bit about the Roman Empire. He gave the impression that if the Gauls invaded tomorrow, he would just shrug his shoulders and try to baptize them, too. And although he was the polar opposite of Thomas Paine in almost every respect, he shared that one annoying and almost liberal quality: that he didn’t view himself a citizen of any country in particular, but a citizen of the world. Except Paine’s world was too small for Paul. Paul viewed himself as the child of the king of the universe.
Governments were thus always too narrow and short-sighted for a man of a truly religious mindset. Even ethnicity and race got the boot when it came down to it. But to be a good citizen requires a whole set of priorities and principles at odds with the whole gist of Christianity, and if you take both seriously, it tends to put you in a state of cognitive dissonance.
For instance, the first priority of government is what all Americans would today call “racism,” but which is the foundational preoccupation with being any organization at all. And that is saying, “We are like this, and because you are like that, you stay over there.” This is the idea behind all borders, motherlands, and voter ID: the fact that zero identity means zero stability, zero safety, and zero power — the antithesis of all political causes. To have a government totally unconcerned with “us” and “them” would be a contradiction in terms, and a scatterbrained majority can be easily upset and conquered by a small, tight-knit, and organized minority.
The second priority of all governments is running things along the lines of what we call “common sense” — the antithesis of the whole Christian vibe. This means we don’t believe in “do not judge”; we hire judges. It means we don’t follow along with “do not worry.” We fight about a budget. Israel is the first and last country to follow a pillar of fire aimlessly through the desert and eat manna off the floor: a government defines its goals and fights over them, because a government without goals is about to be replaced by another government.
A government can’t tell if you’re actually “saved.” A good government cares whether your neighborhood looks like hell, and if you don’t listen to what they say and you resist arrest, they’re okay with sending you there personally. A government doesn’t just give, as Jesus Christ and John the Baptist told us to do. And if it does, a government takes from somebody else first. None of this “he who does not work shall not eat.” A government eats even if nothing inside the government works. In fact, the worse a government works, the starker a contrast exists between those who eat and those who don’t.
Finally, the third priority of all governments is what we call “treachery.” This means that when you’re not a part of the government, and you’re not a part of the citizenry, and you’re clearly opposed to the main goals of the government, hoo, boy, you’d better watch out. Because a government that loves its enemies does not exist.
If a government has an enemy, it does not go the extra mile — unless it’s in the form of a Trojan horse. If a government has an enemy, it turns the other cheek only when it’s forced to. A government doesn’t cast its pearls before swine because a smart government doesn’t tell anybody, especially in war, the whole truth. Its job is to fool the enemy so that nobody knows what it’s really up to, and even in most democratic governments, I think we can agree that this is how it has to treat the citizenry. This is because all governments are a giant backroom deal. To spill the beans about all your plans is to invite not only criticism, but opposition. It means to lose your advantage of not just mystery, but surprise — two things fatal to any enterprising government, even when it’s good.
If an enemy country has a resource, you oftentimes try to take it. If an enemy country has a plan, you try to foil it. If it has secrets, you try to steal them. If it has soldiers, you may eventually have to try to kill them. You can make peace with an enemy nation and maybe even an ally — but only until you don’t need it, and only if you hate somebody else worse. Treachery is so hardwired into the spirit of government that we view people on our team with these traits as heroes — and the man who tries to ban them, like the saint with a “citizen of the world” mentality, is most usually viewed, by even women and children, as a coward, a loser, and a traitor. Because he kinda is.
Put these things up against Christianity, and, quite frankly, you’re left with a big question: Can any man be a good citizen and a good Christian? Is it possible to have a Christian government at all — even in theory? Or is Christianity a movement antithetical to all law and order? In other words, in order to “love your neighbor,” do you have to throw away the neighborhood?
My answer to this is that Christendom isn’t a movement; it’s a moment. It’s that second when you realize God really loves you and so you fall in love with God and do something crazy — and beautiful. Kinda like what God does for you.
Christians are the salt of the earth, not the main dish. Christianity is thus the flavor and not the meal itself. When people say they want a Christian government, they don’t know what they’re asking. They’re asking for that moment where you’re free in the soul, and feeling wild and gracious, to be put into a regimen and forced on other people — whether those people feel it in that moment or not.
You — yourself — can be truly Christian in moments. You can give your money to the poor and turn the other cheek and go the extra mile. You can take the lowest place and bless those who curse you and even put yourself on a cross. But the second we cross from a Christian moment to a Christian government, we don’t get Christ at all. We get the Devil. What we get is you, a person overflowing with spiritual abundance (or maybe the opposite), forcing other people to throw themselves away, too. We have many terms for that. We call it stealing, or tyranny, or slavery, or murder — the very things that government was designed to protect us from.
My belief — and who knows? maybe I’m wrong — is that you can’t love your neighbor if you ruin his country. And the second you cross from giving yourself away to giving your neighbor away, you’re not being Christian at all. You’re being a sanctimonious jerk and a lunatic.
We thus have no way to really synchronize Christianity and government. But I don’t believe we were meant to. As Thomas Paine put it, government, like dress, is the badge of lost innocence. It’s a tool for living in a broken world by broken means. And love has always been controversial, because loving somebody always means ignoring or fighting somebody else.
Thankfully, God knows what we’re up against. What we need to pray for is wisdom to choose, at moments, which path to take — and also for a lot of forgiveness. I think we’re all going to need it.
Jeremy Egerer is the author of Prejudices – a collection of questionable essays on Substack.
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Jesus Christ is King
