My Country, Right or Wrong

“The Senator from Wisconsin cannot frighten me by exclaiming, ‘My country, right or wrong.’ In one sense I say so too. My country; and my country is the great American Republic. My country, right or wrong; if right, to be kept right; and if wrong, to be set right.” Senator Carl Schurz (1829–1906), remarks in the Senate, February 29, 1872, The Congressional Globe, vol. 45, p. 1287.


Last evening Salem Sojourners had a rather impassioned discussion on the first installment of the Christians and Politics discussion guide. The article that drew the most heat was, “Biblical Politics,” by Jim Wallis, which appeared originally in 1974 in the Post-American, the forerunner of Sojourners Magazine.

The article begins with the powerful statement, “America is a fallen nation. The Fall is the principle spiritual and political fact of the American nation. This is what the Bible teaches and it is what the American church refuses to believe. If we had believed the Bible, we would not ignore the oppression of the poor, we would not have resisted the facts of Vietnam, we would not have been surprised by Watergate.”

America is a fallen nation, a fallen nation within a fallen world. America is a nation comprised of fallen human beings. Even we Christians have to struggle against our sinful natures from the moment we are saved until the moment we die. However, Wallis’ next sentence implies that America is the root of all evil, “The chaos, the insanity, the brutality that is America can only be adequately explained by the biblical doctrine of the Fall: the alienation of the whole of creation from God.”

Here Wallis does not merely identify the sins of America, but equates America with chaos, insanity and brutality. If, as American Christians, we are to become involved in politics, we must have both a foundation in Scripture and an accurate analysis of the American political landscape. In so doing we must avoid two equally hazardous pitfalls – the tendency to blame America for all the problems in the world, and the tendency to excuse all of America’s wrongdoing on the basis of whatever good she possesses.

We live in a country where we have the privilege of electing our leaders and of impeaching them if they do not do not carry out the duties of their offices appropriately. We have a Bill of Rights that empowers and enables us to meet openly, speak frankly, and to plan, organize and implement strategies to address the ills of our society, such as racism, poverty, the health care crisis and exploitative foreign policies. Let us take an objective view of what America does right, so that we may more effectively focus on how we can use what is right about our nation to identify, challenge and overcome what is wrong.