Jesus Didn’t Come to Make Any Nation Great
A few months ago, a TikTok craze started over the topic of the Roman Empire and the amount of time the average American man spends thinking about it. Apparently, men contemplate it a lot, or at least that’s the vibe of the conversation that transpired around the original post and its more than a billion views and shares.
I must admit that I don’t think about the Roman Empire that often. I do find myself, however, thinking about another era of history daily: the rise of the Nazis in Germany from 1920 to 1945. I want to understand how an entire nation, including most of the Christian church, came to embrace an ideology that so openly espoused racial hatred and ultimately murdered over six million Jews. One might assume that Germany’s population must have been in the dark about Nazi intentions, and certainly the full scale of their atrocities was not entirely revealed until after their defeat in World War II. But the historical record reveals that while Hitler’s party relied on deceptive propaganda to grow popular support, Hitler’s desire to exterminate Jews was explicit as early as his 1925 autobiography. Hitler and the Nazis were elected to power by popular vote in 1933.
While the well-known maxim that “history repeats itself” is certainly oversimplistic, history does reveal what’s possible among human beings seeking to live in relation to one another. The constant of human nature teaches us that if it happened once, something similar could certainly happen again. While the complex historical circumstances that brought the Nazis to power will never reemerge, the human tendency to follow political leaders and movements blindly and enthusiastically without regard to moral character or agenda persists.
I just finished a fascinating biography of Martin Niemoller, the German Protestant pastor who was imprisoned by Hitler for defying the Nazi takeover of Germany’s churches. Niemoller was a German U-boat commander during World War I and twice voted for the Nazi party. He was also the son of a Lutheran pastor who followed his father into Christian ministry, called to stand before his congregation and proclaim the gospel of Jesus Christ Sunday after Sunday. Yet, when Hitler came along, Niemoller initially celebrated him as the right leader to restore the humiliated nation. Niemoller was a proud veteran and a strong supporter of German nationalism. He willingly overlooked Nazi anti-Semitism, an abhorrent ideology for any Christian, because he hoped the party would make Germany great again.
In one fascinating passage Niemoller reflects on what motivated him to join the clergy after World War I: “I felt I could serve my people with an honest and open heart, helping them better in their present hopeless state than I could by withdrawing to a farm and living the life I had intended to live there.” His biographer concludes, “In short, he joined the ranks of the Lutheran Church for the same reason he had joined the Imperial German Navy: to advance the cause of the fatherland.”
Millions of German citizens joined Niemoller in making Germany’s return to greatness the ultimate goal of life and politics. Niemoller even joined the clergy for this very purpose. However, this order of priorities proved detrimental, for it opened the door to broad acceptance of Hitler and the Nazification of an entire nation. If Hitler could lead the nation to the ultimate goal of fulfilling its destiny of greatness, his defects could be easily overlooked and justified. And that’s a clear parallel for today. If a return to some imagined ideal of American greatness is your ultimate goal, you too may find yourself willing to overlook evil on the way to getting there. You too could subjugate Christ as a means to a greater end.
The question “What is ultimate?” has already been answered for those of us who follow Christ. It’s not the greatness of our nation or any nation, for Christ’s kingdom is not of this world (John 8:36). To be clear, we should all want to see our nation thrive, and we should work to form convictions about what needs to happen to get there and commit ourselves to working toward fulfillment of those convictions. But national greatness is never ultimate for people who will one day toss our earthly crowns at the feet of Christ (Revelation 4:10-11). When political interests become ultimate, Christ gets subjugated into something less than Lord and his church becomes compromised. In other words, when national greatness is our highest goal, we’re no longer following Christ and our values no longer match his. Subjugating the Lord of the universe to paltry political goals forfeits the faith once for all delivered to the saints.
Our ultimate goal is not to make America great again but to worship and proclaim the One whose greatness supersedes all competitors. When he is ultimate, we will be in better position to rightly discern the political happenings of our own day. Let’s focus on the greatness of Christ alone. Everything else flows from that starting point.
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