Mike Pence did it again. During yesterday’s National Prayer Day message on Twitter, the former vice president fused 2 Chronicles 7:14 and the Pledge of Allegiance.
He asked Americans to “pray with faith in those ancient words: ‘that if those people who are called by his name will humble themselves and pray then he’ll hear from heaven and he’ll heal our land, this one nation under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.’”
When evangelicals try to bring the Bible to bear on American public life it usually results in a theological mess.
If America does indeed have a biblical heritage, as many Christian nationalists claim, it also has a long history of manipulating scripture to serve political ends. Pence is not alone.
The Bible was ubiquitous at the time of the American Revolution. It was, without rival, the most cited text in the political pamphlets published in the decades surrounding American independence. During this period it was common for sermons to blend political ideas stemming from the Enlightenment (or what those at the time described as “Whig”) with biblical themes. Since many of these sermons were published, they had the power to shape public discourse related to the imperial crisis with England.
Take Rev. John Allen, for example. In a 1773 sermon at the Second Baptist Church in Boston, Allen fashioned himself a modern day Micah, the Old Testament prophet who challenged the tyrannical reign of King Ahaz. Allen’s Micah was a champion of liberty, a revolutionary who stood for the “liberties and happiness of the people, above the authority of the King.” He did not hesitate to compare Ahaz to the reign of the current English King, George III. In the course of a few pages of sermon text, Allen moved, with little intellectual coherence, from Ahaz to George III to Parliament to “no taxation without representation.”
In 1777, Abraham Keteltas, pastor to Dutch Christians in Jamaica, New York, preached a patriotic sermon from Psalm 74:22: “Arise oh God! Plead thine own Cause.” With little theological reflection, he concluded that God was on the side of the revolutionaries. The people of Jamaica, he claimed, should thus expect Jesus, “our merciful High priest” to intercede on America’s behalf. Since the American Revolutionary War was a battle between the “Parent of the universe” and the “prince of darkness,” a victory was inevitable.
At the same time that Keteltas was explaining the American Revolution as a spiritual conflict, Rev. Samuel Sherwood was comparing the British to the ‘beast” in the book of Revelation. The Connecticut pastor interpreted the woman of Revelation 12 as the “Church of Christ” fleeing into the “wilderness” of the American colonies where God protected her from the “serpent” of Parliamentary tyranny. Once the woman was safe in the virtuous colonies, God was able to nourish her in the “quiet enjoyment of her liberties and privileges, civil and religious.”
As evangelical historian Mark Noll once wrote: “To be sure, patriotic ministers often applied biblical texts to support their cause, but now, after the passage of time, these efforts look more like comical propaganda than serious biblical exposition.”
Pence provides the latest example of this phenomenon. He is not a member of the clergy, but during the Trump presidency he became a high priest of American Christian nationalism.
During his speech from Fort McHenry at the 2020 Republican National Convention, Pence accurately quoted 2 Corinthians 3:17: “Now the Spirit of the Lord is the Spirit, and where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is freedom.” St. Paul wrote these words in the first century to encourage the Corinthian church to live Spirit-filled lives that would free them from the bondage of sin, death, and guilt. But for Pence this was a passage about modern political freedom. In the context of a global pandemic in which Trump supporters were storming state capitals and writing social media posts to express their “freedom” to go maskless and meet in large groups, this interpretation of 2 Corinthians 3:17 was no doubt effective.
In the same paragraph of his speech, Pence made an illusion to Hebrews 12:1-2: “Therefore, since we are surrounded by such a great cloud of witnesses, let us throw off everything that hinders and the sin that so easily entangles. And let us run with perseverance the race marked out for us, fixing our eyes on Jesus, the pioneer and perfecter of faith.” In the previous chapter of the book of Hebrews, chapter 11, the author chronicles the great heroes of Israel—Noah, Abraham, Sarah, Isaac, Jacob, Joseph, Moses, Rahab, Samson, and David, to name a few. These were men and women who walked by faith.
But Pence’s Christrian nationalism reading of Hebrews 12:1-2 at Fort McHenry, the site of the War of 1812 battle that inspired Francis Scott Key to write the “Star Spangled Banner,” sounded a bit different. Pence said, “So let’s run the race marked out for us. Let’s fix our eyes on Old Glory and all she represents. Let’s fix our eyes on this land of heroes. And let their courage inspire us. And let’s fix our eyes on the author and perfecter of our faith and freedom and never forget where the spirit of the Lord is there is freedom.”
This is blasphemy.
As we have seen, preachers and patriots during the American Revolution offered creative interpretations of biblical passages to support the cause of colonial liberty. But I am unaware of a case in which a Christian revolutionary or American political leader actually changed the words of scripture to advance a political cause.
When we quote the Bible in the rough and tumble world of politics—a profane sphere where it is easily exploited, distorted, and misinterpreted—it can easily serve the needs of those in power and those seeking power. The Bible was never meant to do such work. It’s time to keep the sacred text in the Church—the spiritual community that God entrusted with the responsibility of interpreting and applying it to the lives of ordinary Christians.
John Fea is Executive Editor of Current
