The Gospel According to America

Zachry Kincaid, director of The Matthew's House Project, reviews David Dark’s The Gospel According to America: A Meditation on a God-blessed, Christ-haunted Idea. (link to amazon.com)

Dark sites 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.”

LINK to the review