American Babylon: Place of Grace and Exile

This month, Americans celebrate the 250th anniversary of our nation’s founding. Many Catholics who love both God and country will resonate with the words of Fr. Richard John Neuhaus in his last book. In it, he wrote, “When I meet God, I expect to meet him as an American.” Quick to clarify that this was not the most important aspect of his being, he nevertheless would face God “as someone who tried to take seriously, and tried to get others to take seriously, the story of America within the story of the world.”

Other Catholics read such lines about taking the story of America seriously within the story of the world and think them idolatrous. Why should people care about America’s place in the story of the world? After all, kingdoms and nations, even ones as big and as powerful as Rome, Byzantium, or the U.S. of A., ultimately come and go. That’s simply the way of all human life.

As C. S. Lewis famously wrote, “Nations, cultures, arts, civilization—these are mortal, and their life is to ours as the life of a gnat.” To put any real stock in being American or part of Western Civilization or any other this-worldly reality is to take stock in something that will soon cease—and may already have ceased, depending on how you look at it.

That view does seem to jibe with at least one part of the biblical witness. Doesn’t the author of Hebrews tell us not to put any stock in this world? “For here we have no lasting city, but we seek the city which is to come” (Heb 13:14). Doesn’t St. Paul tell us that “our commonwealth is in heaven” (Phil 3:20) and that we “are fellow citizens with the saints and members of the household of God” (Eph 2:19)?

If all that is so, should we not merely think of ourselves as Catholics and not as Americans? Shouldn’t we think of ourselves as merely passing through? If a thousand years is to God as one day, what is there to celebrate about America’s 250th beyond a nice morning? Perhaps thinking of ourselves as Americans, especially thinking of ourselves as Americans, makes as much sense as someone on vacation identifying with the flag of the Ramada Inn.

The truth in this point of view is fairly obvious. National identity is something that can never be ultimate for us. It is not even guaranteed to last through this life. An old 20th-century joke told in Eastern Europe has a man standing at the gates of Heaven. When St. Peter asks where he is from, the man pauses to apologize that it’s a bit complicated. After being born in the Austro-Hungarian Empire, the man says, he proceeded to attend school in Poland, get married in the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic, see his first child born in the German Reich, and die in the Soviet Union. When Saint Peter comments on how often the man had moved in his earthly life, he replies: “What are you talking about? I never left the city of Lviv!”

Even more important than the fact that they may not survive our own earthly life, kingdoms, nations, and empires can never fully give us our identity. We are not citizens of Heaven merely because that’s where we will (God willing) end up. We are citizens of Heaven because our deepest identity is found in being children of God in Jesus Christ. Much as being an American is a privilege and an honor, it is far more important to experience the privilege and honor of being one with the source of all life and reality.

It is from that identity that we gain our ultimate rules of behavior. We are bound by the baseline of the natural law, certainly. We also know that the fullness of this natural law available to all is brought to perfection in something much higher, the imitation of God Himself, Who is defined as “love.” As St, Paul writes to the Romans, “love is the fulfilling of the law.” And we know that our duty to follow both the natural law and the law of love always trumps any proclaimed duty to follow our country’s laws. “We must obey God rather than men” is the cry of the Christian in all ages when commands are given that contradict that law.

The earthly reality that we are sometimes, perhaps often, called to go against the traditions, culture, and even the laws and commands of our nation reveals to us how we are to think of heavenly reality. Alumni of the University of Notre Dame have the motto “God, Country, Notre Dame.” While we can quibble about whether one’s status as a member of the Notre Dame community is really third in our loyalties, that placement of God before country is a truth that we can never forget. Catholics in this country have been accused before of dual loyalties. While our loyalties to the Holy See or Vatican City do not trump our loyalties to our nation, our loyalties to the Church’s definitive teachings do.

That identity as citizens of the Heavenly kingdom guides our behavior because it is true and because it prepares us for our ultimate destiny, namely, to rule over the universe with God. “Do you not know,” St. Paul writes to the Corinthians, “that the saints will judge the world?” He adds that we are “to judge angels” (I Cor 6:2, 3).

While political, business, and tech titans like to think of themselves as “masters of the universe” by virtue of the power they wield, that mastership is only temporary. We who serve and imitate the one His disciples called “Rabbi” or “Master” are preparing ourselves to “be like him, for we shall see him as he is” (I Jn 3:2). To be a heavenly citizen is to be royal. That is the final identity, one that we will share with people from all over the world. St. John’s vision in the Book of Revelation is of “a great multitude which no man could number, from every nation, from all tribes and peoples and tongues, standing before the throne and before the Lamb, clothed in white robes, with palm branches in their hands” (Rev 7:9).

So much for the fact that national identity is always second. Why would Fr. Neuhaus even think of his personal judgment as involving being American? It might help to know the name of that last book: American Babylon. If some of the first Americans thought of themselves as building the “City on a Hill,” what our Lord called his disciples in Matthew 5:14, Fr. Neuhaus viewed America as Babylon.

Fr. Neuhaus did not believe, he said in that book, that America is “uniquely Babylon.” Yet it is indeed “our time and place in Babylon,” because this world has not yet seen the fullness of its redemption. It is still “the world,” in the biblical sense of a world that is still under the dominion of evil and death. Yet, as Fr. Neuhaus observed, we must approach it as the people of Israel were told to approach Babylon when they were living there in captivity.

The prophet Jeremiah, still in Jerusalem, wrote to those who were captive in Babylon with advice not to distance themselves from their new, unwanted home. Rather, he told them to live fully there, to build houses, plant produce, and continue to have children and build families. And, while they were clearly to keep in mind their identity as the children of Israel, this did not mean complete separation from Babylon or its own this-worldly goods. The word of the Lord, Jeremiah said, was this: “Seek the welfare of the city where I have sent you into exile, and pray to the Lord on its behalf, for in its welfare you will find your welfare” (Jer 29:7).

As Fr. Neuhaus put it, we must seek the peace of America, our Babylon, “in which, as Jeremiah said, we find our peace, as we yearn for and anticipate by faith and sacramental grace the New Jerusalem that is our pilgrim goal.”

While America is not Heaven, it is the place where God has placed us and instructed us to live out our identity as sons and daughters of the Most High. It is here that we can see how the Holy Spirit has been and is working at all times to open hearts to the Son. It is here that we are to seek out the Heavenly City by following the natural law written in our hearts and the law of love placed in them by the Holy Spirit. Here in this nation, where God has laid before us both tremendous gifts of freedom and prosperity and many challenges and trials to use them well, we are experiencing Christ’s presence here and now.

Let us give thanks for America, seek its welfare, and give thanks that we have met God and will again as Americans.

Read original article