The Gospel According To AmericaA book worthy of reading this summer or anytime but especially in light of the discourse occurring in the Capital, the MSM, and everywhere else in America. David Dark’s The Gospel According to America: A Meditation on a God-blessed, Christ-haunted Idea. A Review by Zachry Kincaid, director of The Matthew's House Project:
G.K. Chesterton who wrote a series of newspaper articles some eighty years ago about his visit to America. Chesterton says that America is a country with the soul of a church. Based in the equality of all human beings principle, Dark relates this church soul to the Apostle Paul’s sameness in Christ. But, Chesterton reminds us that America is either entirely heroic or completely insane. Today’s version of gospel is closer to insane. The abuse of freedom has driven the Gospel out of serious public thought, reduced to Ten Commandments lawn signs and ichthus-marked SUVs. We should pause, Dark says, “as we consider how easily many Americans speak of their faith as a private, personal matter; a relationship somehow contained within the heart; an odd, airy thing called ‘spirituality.’” Ought Christians to rather act in step with the early followers who “are not of this world’s way of doing things, but their hope is still scandalously this-worldly. And the intensity of their passion for a socially disruptive, enduring freedom won’t be diminished, divided, or conquered by the prerogatives of any government.” (6)
Freedom ringing from the mountains to the prairies, Dark argues, can be a corrupting factor to the definition of gospel in America. From Constantine making official the Christian faith as the Roman government’s faith, the West has been riddled with what to do with this system of faith that demands poverty and meekness. America is no exception. How do you take a “rogue” faith, as Dark says, and make it stately? One way President Bush has neatly tied Christianity to the American way is through rhetoric and terrorism and war. (As Dark references) Bush has framed America and Christianity as synonymous:
Ours is the cause of human dignity; freedom guided by conscience and guarded by peace. This ideal of America is the hope of all mankind… That hope still lights our way. And the light shines in the darkness. And the darkness will not overcome it. (14
