MATTHEW 12:25 “Every kingdom divided against itself will be laid waste, and no town or house divided against itself will stand.”
The most severe forms of mental illness - Schizophrenia, Multiple Personality Disorder and Bi-polar Disorders - all have certain things in common: they are characterized by fragmented, split-off “selves” working in divergent and opposing directions. The internal tension caused by such processes are extreme and lead to some severe form of implosion or explosion. One can easily imagine the destructive force of such a condition if it were physiological in nature. Here, one leg would try to go forward as the other pulled backwards. The eyes would crisscross and never focus together. The index finger and thumb, instead of joining harmoniously to perform tasks, would pull away from each other as if a magnetic field stood between them. Such deep-rooted incongruence takes a heavy toll on the psyche of an individual. It cannot be endured for very long. Implosion, in the form of suicide, catatonia and the like is one possibility. Explosion, in the form of violent behavior, is another. One or the other is inevitable in order to relieve the smoldering internal tension.
Under ideal conditions, there is one, whole integrated self in which all the component “parts” work together toward a common goal - i.e.., survival, happiness, health, etc...
If an individual’s psyche can be frayed and torn apart by polarizing psychological processes, it stands to reason that the “collective psyche” or mental health of a nation can be similarly weakened. Diversity of opinion, freedom of expression are healthy aspects of American culture. I’m not referring to that here. I’m talking about something insidious and dark - a people divided against itself. I believe we may have been at such a crossroads at the time of our Civil War. We were facing a core identity question then that had to be resolved one way or the other. We could not continue as both a ‘slave state’ at home and the ‘harbinger of freedom’ to the rest of the world. We could not purport democratic values of equality and human dignity while perpetuating the evil of slave labor. Something had to give and it did in the form of Explosion!
Today, as a Christian nation once again trying to restore our soul, we are implored to aspire to Christ’s example in all things - to ask the question, “What would Jesus want us to be”? Yet as an imperial military power and an impersonal capitalist machine, we often find ourselves at odds with Christian principles. This internal conflict tears at the fabric of our national mental health. In the same way that geological forces can cause such underlying tension in the earth that it cracks and quakes, our cultural inconsistencies and duplicities cause chasms and rifts in our psyche. There are so many examples of this that I’ll name just a prominent few: The gospel command to ‘heal and serve the poor‘ simply doesn’t align with the Darwinian creed, ‘every man for himself’; the gospel command to ‘love our neighbors‘ cannot co-exist with cultural attitudes and policies that promote ‘fear of those who are different’; hailing the rights of the “unborn” while ignoring the rights and the needs of the “already- born” is the kind of hypocrisy Jesus railed against. Such polarizing forces within our collective psyche serve to weaken our national sanity until the dueling tensions between our fragmented “selves” reaches its breaking point. When this happens to an individual, we call it a psychotic episode or “breakdown”. The person is being torn apart at their soul-level. I believe we’re close to that breaking point as a nation. The tension between our private lives, which the majority of us describe as faith-based and God-centered, and our public lives, whereby the prevailing notions are the amoral creeds of ‘might is right‘ and ‘greed is good’, is about to tear us asunder. We cannot serve two masters.
When the Roman Empire fell, in large measure, it fell under the weight of its own contradictions and hypocrisy. On the one hand, it aspired to be a great “civilization” with parliamentary democratic processes, judicial systems , rule of law and even civil rights. On the other hand, it was very much married to Barbaric culture in which, for sport, Christians were fed to lions, gladiators fought to the death and dissent was crushed with unmitigated, brutal police force. Rome couldn’t figure out what kind of empire it really wanted to be. In the end, I believe, this caused its demise. We are facing a similar question as a nation and as an empire. Who do we want to be? Do we abandon Jesus and his ideals because they are inconvenient and impractical in a materialistic world? Or do we embrace him more fully and challenge ourselves to be ‘his people on earth’?
Are we to be, in the truest sense of the word, a Christian nation or an A-bomb-in-nation?
