Antiseptic America
Charles T. Evans
January 1, 1997
Since we believers started attending the presidential dance again back in the 1970s, one scene has become all too common: we find ourselves wallflowers at the national political prom, and so we tend toward adolescent melodramatics--either recloistering, or revamping our battle plan.
Either reaction proves the same point, which is just how severely we misunderstand our nation's potential for forced rehabilitation. Truth is, this baby-of-a-nation will be included in the judgment of all the world's empires, past and present. And not because Americans have failed to preserve their "Christian heritage." No, as James Boice has written, "America was never a Christian nation. No nation is ever that. Only individuals are Christians."
If this is true, only one real alternative remains, and that is to be a non-Christian nation--a political alignment that, no matter how inculcated with Christian ideas and personalities, opposes the rule of Christ. "A whitewashed sepulcher," Jesus calls such moral fabrications. We would be a people with the appearance of virtue, but whose hearts still thrive on the most distasteful ideas humanly imaginable. And cleaning up this nation from its legislative mess would only produce a sanitized Sodom, an antiseptic America, which would be doubly dangerous.
First of all, the pursuit of an antiseptic America might camouflage the true relationship between sin and grace, or, as the Reformers called it, Law and Gospel. "The law," said the Apostle Paul, "was added so that the trespass might increase. But where sin increased, grace increased all the more" (Romans 5:20, niv). The Reformers would remind us that, in fact, sin has a divine purpose. Without the conscious awareness of sin, grace and forgiveness appear meaningless ...
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