Can A “Christian Nation” Be Good For Everybody?
The book as a whole is thoroughly researched and effectively argued. Hall’s work is a needed reminder that even if America never was, and is not now, “Christian” in every sense of the word, we can never fully separate—nor should we want to separate—Christianity from America. The fight for liberty, not least of all religious liberty, is ongoing and should be the concern of all Americans.
There are few artifacts more enduring in the American imagination and more symbolic of our national ethos and essence than the Liberty Bell. The bronze “State House bell” was ordered from the Whitehouse Foundry in London by Isaac Norris, the Speaker of the Pennsylvania Assembly, in 1751. After the bell cracked on its first ring, local metal workers John Pass and John Stow melted down the bell and cast a new one. Famously, after 90 years of hard use, their “Liberty Bell” also developed a crack—a crack made more noticeable in 1846 when technicians attempted (unsuccessfully) to repair the bell and stop the crack by making it wider. Today the 2,000-pound bell sits in the Liberty Bell Center in Philadelphia and is viewed by more than a million visitors every year.
The bell is so well known as a historical artifact, and “liberty” has such a universal and positive ring for most Americans, we forget that the Liberty Bell is a manifestly Christian artifact and symbol. The name “Liberty Bell”—first employed, in 1835, by an anti-slavery publication—comes from the biblical inscription that runs around the bronze exterior: “Proclaim Liberty Throughout All the Land Unto All the Inhabitants thereto” (Leviticus 25:10). During the nineteenth century, the bell’s inscription became a rallying cry for abolitionists. After the Civil War, the bell traveled across the country for displays and commemorations, helping to remind the fractured nation that the colonies once fought together for liberty from British tyranny. If there was anything that could bring the country back together after four years of conflict and 600,000 deaths it was an appeal to the nation’s past—a shared history that believed in freedom and believed in the Bible, even if both of these beliefs were sometimes held to with tragic inconsistency.
A Narrow Purpose
Mark David Hall’s new book Proclaim Liberty Throughout All the Land: How Christianity Has Advanced Freedom and Equality for All Americans (Fidelis Books, 2023) seeks to remind us of this shared history. Hall, a Professor of Politics at George Fox University and a Visiting Fellow at Princeton University’s James Madison Program, is no stranger to his subject matter, having written or edited books on America’s Christian founding, on faith and the founders, and on religion and public life in the founding era. The best way to read this new work is to understand that Hall is making an argument. That is to say, Hall does not attempt anything like a comprehensive analysis of freedom and equality in American life, nor does he seek to provide an exhaustive evaluation of Christianity’s contribution to public life in America.
No doubt, the biggest criticism of the book will be along these lines: that Hall has given a truncated, one-sided, overly rosy picture of Christian influence in America. Such criticisms, however, miss the point of what Hall is trying to accomplish. If Hall pushes hard in one direction—defending the salutary effects of Christianity in America and defending the American experiment more generally—it is because so many have pushed hard in the other direction. From academics claiming that the Enlightenment triumphed over Christianity in the American Founding, to the 1619 Project asserting that the American Revolutionary War was fought to preserve slavery, to Christianity Today’s former editor insisting that America was positively not founded on Christian principles, it has become commonplace for many Americans, even religious ones, to assume that the American founding was negligibly Christian and that Christianity has had an overwhelmingly negative influence when it comes to freedom and equality in this country. Hall disagrees:
This book…focuses on the ways in which Christians have advanced liberty and equality in the American context. Contrary to many academics and popular authors, I show that Christians have regularly been motivated by their faith to create fair and just institutions, fight for political freedom, oppose slavery, and secure religious liberty for all. Of course, some Christians have appealed to the Bible and Christian theology to oppose such reforms or to justify evil practices. Americans of other faiths and no faith have also worked to advance liberty and equality for all. Proclaim Liberty Throughout All the Land cannot tell all of these stories; its more modest goal is to put to rest the myth that Christianity has been a regressive force with respect to positive political, legal, and societal reform in the United States. (2)
In this “modest goal,” Hall is successful.
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The Harder Our Earth, the Sweeter Our Heaven
We know that heaven will be a wonder for all who are admitted, a place of perfect peace and perfect satisfaction for all who enter its gates. But surely heaven will be a greater wonder still for those whose joys were fewest, whose sorrows were deepest, whose earth was most distant from heaven.
The man who lives in the Swiss Alps is probably not terribly impressed when he visits North America and strolls through the Adirondacks or the Smokies. The woman who has spent her life snorkeling along the Great Barrier Reef is probably not too enthusiastic about snorkeling off the East Coast of Canada. The person who has grown up on the beaches of Maui is probably not going to break the bank to vacation on the beaches of Lake Superior. There is nothing wrong with the Adirondacks or the Smokies, nothing wrong with the East Coast of Canada or the beaches of the Great Lakes. It’s just that they are not nearly as good, not nearly as impressive, not nearly as awe-inspiring as the alternatives.
It does us good at times to ponder heaven, to ponder the future God has promised to those who love him. He has promised that we will be with him forever in a new heaven and a new earth—a re-creation of this world in which all sin and sorrow, all pain and danger will have been removed. Here we will live out the purpose for which God created us—to spread out over the earth and enjoy it with him and for him.
As we make the pilgrimage from here to there, as we endure this long journey, we expect that it will be difficult. We expect that we will experience the consequences that have come with mankind’s fall into sin. We expect that we will endure sickness, bereavement, persecution, chastisements, and so many other forms of suffering. This is all inevitable in a world like this one.
While we do not wish to suffer, we must be confident that God always has purposes in it.
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Patience Is Love
The reason we must be patient with other Christians, according to Paul, is love. In 1 Thessalonians 5:14, he grounds his command to long-suffering in the terms of family affection, identifying the believers as “brothers and sisters.” In the church, we are not mere acquaintances, or even fellow members of the same club; we are family. In the church, Christ’s love for us compels us to love one another (John 13:34).
One by one, each of my children learned a catechism question that asks, “Have you a soul as well as a body?” And the answer, as it slowly and deliberately arose from tiny toddler lips, always tugged at my heart: “Yes, and my soul will never die.”
Though designed for children, this question and answer trained me as a parent. Whatever frustrations the child had caused me that day — spilled milk, broken toys, incessant questions, delayed naps — couldn’t continue to annoy me when I stopped to remember that the small person in front of me possessed an undying soul.
We become impatient with others when we fail to see that they have significant and lasting value. When they interrupt us, dawdle over their own responsibilities, or require more time and energy than we had planned to allow them, we start to consider them inconveniences. We become so focused on their behaviors in the moment that we don’t consider their value in eternity.
And when we fail to recognize other people as eternally important, we will not love them well. In Paul’s famous love chapter, he begins his list of love’s qualities with this simple declaration: “Love is patient” (1 Corinthians 13:4). In order to love someone, we must value that person’s undying soul more than we value our own temporary convenience.
God Is Patient
This, of course, is how God loves. In his second epistle, Peter writes,
Beloved . . . the Lord is not slow to fulfill his promise as some count slowness, but is patient toward you, not wishing that any should perish, but that all should reach repentance. (2 Peter 3:8–9)
It seems that some of the members of the first-century church were becoming impatient — with God. Why hadn’t Jesus returned? Why weren’t their persecutors being judged? Why weren’t God’s promises fulfilled immediately? Why was God being so slow? Because, Peter explained, God cares about souls. God knows, much more than we do, the horrors of hell. He knows the dreadful extent of his own wrath. And he wants people to be saved.
God, who could justly destroy the earth at any moment, has chosen to wait. He is “the Lord, the Lord, a God merciful and gracious, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love and faithfulness” (Exodus 34:6). He is not bothered by the passing of time — by the minutes and years and millennia that are ticking away — if it means that people will be eternally saved.
In his saving purposes for his elect people, God doesn’t measure time the way we do: “With the Lord one day is as a thousand years, and a thousand years is as one day” (2 Peter 3:8). Unlike us, God isn’t focused on the clock.
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