Thursday, January 24, 2008

Our "Civil Religion"

From The Myth of a Christian Nation, by Gregory A. Boyd:
"No version of the kingdom of the world is closer to the kingdom of God than others because it does its job relatively well. For God's kingdom looks like Jesus, and no amount of sword-wielding, however just it may be, can ever get a person, government, nation, or world closer to that. The kingdom of God is not an ideal version of the kingdom of the world; it's not something that any version of the kingdom of the world can aspire toward or be measured against. The kingdom of God is a completely distinct, alternative way of doing life."
"If you peal back the facade of the civil religion, you find that America is about as pagan as any country we could ever send missionaries to .... The fact that we have a quasi-Christian civil religion doesn't help; if anything, it hurts precisely because it creates the illusion in the minds of kingdom people that we are closer to the example of Jesus than we actually are."

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