From time to time, we all hear the well-worn calls of the conservative, fundamentalist Right. They may be arguing for one policy proposition or another, but their arguments eventually meander to a trusted place:
"America is a Christian nation."
In the past, my response has been typical of responses in these types of situations. If I wanted to contest the point, I'd point to the founders, many of whom kept their distance from organized Christianity. But I've decided that there's a better way to address this question, and besides, it more to the point. The familiar statement argues that America
is a Christian nation, not that it was founded as one. They argue that American society is built upon the pillars of Judeo-Christian ethics, and that certain leftist
agendas - gay rights, female reproductive rights, and the like - are doing their part to tear down what's been built upon that strong Christian foundation.
But let's make something clear: America is not a Christian nation, and when you say that, you open a small window into the way you view Christianity. Putting aside, for the moment, the idea that something as amorphous and non-human as "America" can be described with a descriptor so fundamentally and necessarily human as "Christian," let's deal with the reality of what America really is. And if you think America morality is in any way compatible with the Jesus-driven message, then we'll have to part ways, admitting quietly that we believe in two completely different versions of Jesus.
So America is a Christian nation, you say? The country's one that's been so radically changed by the realities of mass incarceration that it shapes our financial outcomes, our educational outcomes, and even the right of all people to vote. The American prison population has grown steadily every single year out of the last 36. Look at the statistics more closely, and you'll see a mind-blowing picture:
The rate of imprisonment in the United States is now four times its historic average and seven times higher than in Western Europe.
If you think that's the worst of it, then you're mistaken. If the American penal system was applied equally across racial and economic lines, and if the system treated its prisoners humanely, it will still be a smear to the concept of American exceptionalism and the Christian morality. But it fails woefully at those things:
Even more striking than the overall level of incarceration is the concentrated force of the penal system on the most disadvantaged segments of the population. One-third of African American male high-school dropouts under age 40 are currently behind bars. Among all African American men born since the mid-1960s, more than 20 percent will go to prison, nearly twice the number that will graduate college.
Just this month, the ACLU exposed the dastardly conditions of a private Mississippi prison, where mentally ill prisoners are left to rot in their own filth. The lawsuit alleges many unconscionable human rights violations, including a man refused treatment for so long that a hard scrotum turned into full-blown, metastasized cancer. And these things aren't just limited to Mississippi, either. In Louisiana, prisoners are subjected to abusive treatment for sport, as they try to pull poker chips off of the head of a angry, horned bull.
In California, prison overcrowding is such a problem that the courts have ordered the state to reduce its prison population by tens of thousands of inmates. In many of these places, our reasonable political discourse is strained by the stench of privatization, as corporate masters have quite literally taken over the incarceration apparatus. In those places, criminal policy is polluted with perverse incentives, as state lawmakers are encouraged to pass laws that will meet contractual quotas with private prison owners who've paid the state millions of dollars for the right to lock people up.
It gets worse, too. The United States is the seventh richest country in the world according to a recent Forbes publication. With a GDP per person of almost $50,000, the United States would seem equipped to follow the Christ-like mantra of providing for the hungry and caring for the sick.
But that's not the case, as 17.2 million American households are food-insecure according to a 2010 Coleman-Jensen study. To put that into context, it represents roughly one in seven American households. Let me state that again: for every six American households that make it through the day with enough food, there is one that's ravaged in some way by the realities of hunger.
Speaking of the least of these, that same survey indicates that one in ten American households features children who are food insecure at some point during the course of the year. Digging deeper into those numbers, we can see that one percent of American households with children have prolonged periods of time where the kids are forced to miss meals.
America is just as bad at caring for the sick as it is at caring for the hungry. In 2010, more than 16-percent of the American people - or around 50 million - did not have medical insurance. That's people who might drop dead tomorrow from a disease because they couldn't afford to see a doctor after experiencing swelling of the lymph nodes. Or people who live with crooked fingers because they were scared to visit the emergency room without insurance coverage.
And after the President pushed through legislation to make insurance coverage more affordable for working-class Americans, federal legislators fought tooth and nail, under the auspices of freedom (or something) to repeal that legislation. Even after it's survived dozens of repeal attempts, Obamacare is now facing a nullification challenge from states like South Carolina, where the chief sponsor of this loathable state legislation explained:
“It is going to get us in court, as we all know.” Bryant told reporters. “It is worth the risk to see if we can protect our state from this far-reaching federal legislation.”
Protect our state. From the dangerous potential consequences of widely available healthcare. Under the proposed and certainly unallowable bill, the attorney general would have the right to sue healthcare providers who attempt to comply with federal law.
This Christian nation has big problems. We're greedy, pursuing immense personal wealth at the expense of people with barely enough to meet their basic needs. And this goes well beyond the cognitive dissonance that allows us all to worry about the next iPhone while people all over the world die of legitimate hunger. Our economic inequality is staggering, with income levels and wealth growing by leaps and bounds for only those people at the very top. In fact, between 1979 and 2007, the income for the top one-percent grew by a robust 275-percent, while the income for the bottom 20-percent grew by only 18-percent. It's a country where the vast majority worship at the church of personal fulfillment, and an unfortunately small few care for the suffering of others.
If you want to call America a "Christian" nation, then I want to know just which Christian values you think are reflected in the current landscape. Because where I'm sitting, the only way to mesh modern America with the message of Jesus is to warp Jesus's message to fit the cult of selfishness and greed.