Melting Pot Melting? Spring 1997

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Last week I watched Ken Burns's documentary on the life of Thomas Jefferson on our local pbs affiliate. Like Burns's programs on baseball, the Civil War, and the history of jazz, the Jefferson documentary told an engaging story close to the heart of the American experience. While I enjoyed the "talking head" segments with such scholars as Garry Wills and John Hope Franklin and the lush visuals of Monticello, I couldn't help feeling a bit of distance from Burns's central character.

To put it more bluntly, the story of Thomas Jefferson was not my story. Jefferson's Enlightenment confidence in the powers of human reason, his conviction of America's special place in history, and his Unitarian rejection of historic Christian orthodoxy clashed sharply with the narrative that forms the heart of my own story: that of Jesus Christ and his church.

The deistic god of the Declaration of Independence bears little resemblance to the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. The "spirit of '76" should not be so easily confused with the Spirit that animates the life of the Christian church.

Of course, many sincere Christians from both the evangelical Protestant and Catholic communities have no problem grafting the legacy of Jefferson and the founders onto the story of the Christian church. Many thoughtful Christians have attempted to tell the story of Christianity in conjunction with the story of American national development.

Yet too often such narratives create a romantic vision of the harmony between America's political creed and the Apostles' Creed, between the cross and the flag, and between the rock under Jerusalem's Dome and the rock at Plymouth, Mass. In actual ity, only one Rock exists; confidence in others remains as illusory as feet set ...

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