(NB: One must assume nothing. If there's one thing your humble servant learned from Sister Godzilla Marie in the second grade it's that - bendy-fingers mine - "when you assume, you make an ass of you and me." There may indeed be considerable overlap between that group of Americans that consider itself Christian and those who believe themsleves patriots, and there may not. If that is agreed, it then becomes our task as probably-patriots and maybe-Christians to un-collapse those two worthy pillars and see if the edifice they presumably support - The Christian Patriot - stands or falls. And in preparing to take on such an aggressively neglected topic - pushed entirely off most intellectual and spiritual maps with a bloody great There Be Dragons Here standing guard at each margin - must not the avowed Christian positively rifle the great sack of gifts The Creator has left each of us, and employ none but the finest of those in this matter, the crown jewel of that cornucopia, the very attribute that presumably sets us apart from the rest of Creation? In matters of such import must we each not take the yoke of responsibility on our own shoulders and resort to Reason as our best guide? Must not we all - as our sainted mothers exhorted us - "use the sense God gave you?")
Now, some may consider a blog that starts with a comprehensive - much less parenthetical - apologia a rocky start, to say the least. But it could well be argued that the form itself is new, that the worthiest paths to clarity have yet to be beaten, and that some incipient bloggers until recently thought that the term 'Blog' referred to a misremembered monster that fought Godzilla in the mid-1950s. Gentle reader, suffice it to say your indulgence is much appreciated.
The question is this: how does one answer those few Americans who seem to be having some trouble reconciling The Current Administration's loudly professed patriotism with a nearly-equally-touted belief in the teachings of Jesus Christ? Those Mystified Few wonder how an ostensibly Christian government can expend such considerable energy defending ... oh, gee ... pick something surprising that The Current Administration is expending considerable energy defending .... say, well, torture, for example. (Admittedly, we could have chosen rendition, the quaintness of The Geneva Conventions, the suspension of habeas corpus or the morality of a Regent College graduate who has invoked 5th Amendment rights in the scandal du jour. As a side note, the irony of Virginia Beach, VA being the location of Pat Robertson's Regent College as well as the site of a rare exhibition of one of four original copies of the Magna Carta is not lost on some.)
But this missive has gone off course already, hasn't it? We are talking about those discerning Few, aren't we, and their apparent inability to reconcile their love of country with love of their God. How, these benighted souls wail, can such inhumane neo-constructions as torture and imprisonment without recourse - defended as they have been recently from the very heart of Mather's Shining City On A Hill - be reconciled with the dying words of humble forgiveness groaned out from the crucifixion mount at Golgotha?
It's a puzzler, all right.
(To be fair to a couple of Christo-patriots to whom this question has already been posed, it must be admitted that no, we never will know if Jesus would have "changed his tune" if he'd known he was wandering all those years just a few hundred feet over truly immense pools of sweet light crude. That's true.)
Clearly this discussion could go on and on. We could weigh at length the quaint words of a man some call The Son of God against the mispronounced ones of those of a man some call a son of a different stripe. But - never one to overstay a welcome - yours truly will place a bookmark right there and surf back here to the blogosphere at a later date to tend whatever little garden may have sprung up around this seed of a question.
Safe travels out there.
PF
