As the events of this election cycle come to a crescendo, many, myself included, have been tempted to fall into despair about the direction and future of our nation. We have seen fit to choose candidates who seem to only represent themselves or the interests of the elitist ruling class. And with that in mind, it is all too easy to buy into the easy answers like hyper-nationalism or the mob mentality of redistributive socialism. But I have a reminder for my fellow Christians who make up approximately 70 percent of this nation: we are Christians first and citizens second, and regardless of whether Hillary Clinton or Donald Trump occupy the White House, Jesus Christ is coming back for all of us — so act like it!
The struggle between that of Church and State might be the defining theme of the past two millennia. Indeed, the “Letter to Diognetus” demonstrates that even in the midst of the Roman persecution of the early Church, citizenship must come second to the relationship we have with our Lord. In a time when the easy answer would be to simply reject Christ and offer sacrifice to the gods of Rome, many faith-filled men, women and children demurred. They chose death to the world and rejected the demands of their country when such demands conflicted with their conscience.
However, these people were not anarchists, as Mathetes (Greek for "disciple") would state: “They live in their own countries as though they were only passing through. They play their full role as citizens, but labor under all the disabilities of aliens. Any country can be their homeland, but for them their homeland, wherever it may be, is a foreign country.” At the end of the day, being a citizen of the United States of America contributes to your faith insofar as it does not hamper the free exercise thereof, but you need not be a citizen of any country to follow Jesus Christ.
In the age of lesser of two evilism ideology, which has brought us to this unstable and dangerous patch of time in our American system, perhaps a reflection on the Mathetes’ letter to Diognetus is needed. If, for nothing else, but to realize that the our Christian morality has always been under attack from the world, the flesh and the devil. However, my hope is that we can begin to move away from the sine qua non ideology of many on the far right and left of the political spectrum. We are called to love one another as Christ loves us, regardless of age, wealth, sex, orientation or education. And any government system that would say otherwise should take time to reflect upon the ash heap of history that is made up almost entirely of defunct empires and nation states.
As Christians, we cannot allow ourselves to forget that we live in the end times and have been doing so since Christ ascended into heaven. Empires, great and small, have risen and collapsed in that time period. And whenever we pledge our unwavering allegiance to states made up of fallible men and imperfect ideas, we run the risk of collapsing as well.
