Parakalein

Recently someone sent me an email stating that our president stated that American is no longer a Christian Nation.

The email was sent to generate emotional responses, to enlist protesters, and ultimately to plant a seed against the president being re-elected.  This puzzled and perplexed me at several levels.

My greatest concern is that we lose perspective and think of this statement in only one way.  One way thinking is the death blow to a healthy social contract and respectful community building.  It is the cyclops of criticism and is the absence of critical and cooperative thinking.

One way to hear this statement is that of an indication that we have moved form being a Christian nation to a secular nation.  It sounds like an announcement or pronouncement of a  "post-modern" if not "post-Christian" era.  While I hear that I think it is in error.

Another way to hear that is to deal with two realities without fear or threat (emotional triggers) hijacking that reality.  We have a moral and ethical foundation to our nation which is essentially fostered by a Christian world view inclusive of God loving and seeing value in all people and in diversity itself.  We began as a nation with a commitment to religious and social and economic freedom.  The principles of "liberty and justice", Christian principles were inherent in the nation.  So too was tolerance and embracing diversity.  We were never an exclusive or excluding Christina nation.  The pronouncement that we are not a Christian nation is more true even in our inception than a statement that we are a Christian nation.  If the highest ideal of a Christian nation is loving God and loving all of our neighbors without tension and contention.  We can be a nation founded on CHristian principles but not a Christian nation.  to think this way we have to remove the idea of dominance and control and exchange the idea of   sacrifice and surrender of control for the greater good.  Interestingly that sounds like a Christian principle.

It is about perspective and what you want to see.
Open eyes create a healthy world.  Closed eyes is about blindness that leads to destruction.