I didn't say anything else, but my response to that question would be quite different. Of course there are very many conceptions about what it means to be patriotic, but I don't generally think of myself as very patriotic. I mean, I vote when I can and have also been known to write to officials about my views on this or that position, even lobby in person, sign petitions or on occasion participate in demonstrations. But what I mean is that I don't particularly feel an obligation to the USA as a nation. I rather consider myself a member of the human race and other political divisions don't really mean much to me.In the same vein, I consider myself an "equal opportunity" critiquer... for example, both Russia/the USSR and the USA end out being the brunt of my criticism for one thing or another. And today I'm going to focus on criticizing something about the U.S.
But before I do that, I also want to mention, without going into a whole lot of detail at this point, that I believe in the separation of church and state (here's one place where a lot of people will undoubtedly get mad at me). Just briefly, though, I believe that the Church's mission is not political (here I'm speaking about Christian churches in particular), but spiritual. The Church is supposed to be changing the world by bringing people into a relationship with Jesus Christ, not by fixing Washington (the other Washington... D.C.). So the Church meddling in politics is detrimental to the soul of the Church.
From the other side of things, I also believe that as the USA is supposed to be a democracy, and as such it should involve all peoples, and not favor one religion (or no religion) over another. In the Old Testament (the Hebrew Scriptures) God - Yahweh - was supposed to be the head of the nation and that should happen when the Messiah returns (as a Christian, I believe Jesus Christ is their once-rejected Messiah who will return and set up His earthly kingdom). But the USA (or any other country for that matter) is NOT the new Israel, and at this time God is not even dealing with Israel that way.That said, since we do live in a democracy, I don't see anything wrong with individual Christians (or other types of believers or unbelievers) getting politically involved. I do think the Church needs to be very careful about any type of collective political activity though.
In other words having anything other than the separation of church and state leads to corruption of both the church and the state, so it's a lose-lose proposition.
That was all to lead up to my real topic today, although the above was an important discussion in its own right.The path to my above convictions didn't happen overnight, but through many experiences and things that I learned along the way, trying to make sense of my life.
For some years I had involvement with several Protestant missions to Eastern Europe/USSR and at one point the V.P. for Finance of the Slavic Gospel Association told me that they took money from the CIA for their short-wave radio work into Communist countries. At the time I didn't really think about the significance of this too much, although it was enough of a revelation to me that it stuck with me. It didn't really sink in, though, until years later after I'd experienced more with some of these missions. At that time in my life I was really trying to put things together and I decided to do a bunch of Freedom of Information Act requests, one of these being to the CIA regarding whether they gave money to SGA. You can read their response below. [Click on the images to get a larger, more legible view.]
I won't say anything else about this right now except to say that about the same time I was told that SGA got money from the CIA a lady I knew from church single-handedly ran a Christian day-care center and she told me she wouldn't take any government money because that would limit her Christian focus at her school. So just imagine, then, what possible impact CIA money might have on a major mission organization to Communist countries...And maybe you can also begin to imagine how my fatal flaw (see my first posting) could lead to an unhappy end.
Until next time...
Meg
