Is God On Our Side?
By Hans Zeiger (03/10/04)
In his 1963 song "With God on our Side," Bob Dylan mocked America's historical tendency to believe that God takes the side of the Red, White, and Blue. In preface to Vietnam, Dylan sang that, "if God's on our side, He'll stop the next war." Of course, the war happened, and the outcome did not suggest that God had taken our side.
The question of whether God is on our side has reemerged in a time when America has forgotten God with an intensive, systematic, painstaking kind of forgetfulness. Elizabeth Bumiller of the New York Times asked Democratic presidential frontrunner John Kerry in a debate Sunday, "Is God on America's side?"
"Well," bumbled the formerly Bob Dylan sympathizing, Vietnam protesting Kerry, "God will -- look, I think - I believe in God, but I don't believe, the way President Bush does, in invoking it all the time in that way. I think it is -- we pray that God is on our side, and we pray hard. And God has been on our side through most of our existence."
In other words, even if God is on our side, we shouldn't care much about God in our public life, "invoking it all the time in that way." As Senator Kerry sees things, we ought to be praying in private seclusion for God to be on our side, but we ought not to speak of spiritual things out in the open. In Kerry's America, men and women ought to be prayer warriors in private and secular fundamentalists in public.
But Kerry's reasoning contradicts itself quite dramatically. For if God is to side with a nation, that nation must be publicly, unabashedly righteous. "Righteousness exalts a nation, but sin is a reproach to any people," says Psalm 14:34. The Bible is quite consistent on this point: God blesses faith and obedience, and He curses sin and evil.
Thus, the question asked of Senator Kerry was a question that cannot be answered without first assessing the moral conditions of the people. Ronald Reagan addressed the issue as follows: "We shouldn't worry so much about whether God is on our side as about whether we're on His."
The Pilgrims and the Puritans knew that God was on their side, for they first knew Psalm 14, that righteousness exalts a nation. John Winthrop said that with God on our side, America would be as a "shining city set upon a hill for all the world to see," but that "if we shall deal falsely with our God in this work we have undertaken, and so cause him to withdraw his present help from us, we shall be made a story and byword throughout the world; we shall open the mouths of enemies to speak evil of the ways of God and all believers for God's sake; we shall shame the faces of many of God's worthy servants, and cause their prayers to be turned into curses upon us, until we are consumed out of the good land to which we are going..."
God was on our side in the War for Independence, and His name was, as John Kerry might say, invoked "all the time in that way" in the Declaration of Independence. In one sense, the Declaration wasn't so much a Declaration of Independence as a declaration of Dependence on God, based on the understanding that the "rectitude of our intentions" was only valid insofar as it appealed to "the Supreme Judge of the World." And again, "with a firm Reliance on the Protection of divine Providence," God was on America's side.
Throughout our history, Americans have treasured the promise of God's blessings that flow from national righteousness. Church pulpits have been aflame with the truth of that indelible link that exists between our duty to God and His mercy on us, statesmen have spoken of that holy connection as the only sure preservative of America's liberty, students have studied it, soldiers have died for it.
But in our own time, we have forgotten all about the God of our Fathers. John Kerry speaks well for secular America. So it really doesn't matter whether God is on America's side or not, because we are not first on His.
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