God has no hand in the murder of innocents, which happens in all wars, especially modern ones. God does not endorse the American program of oppression and enslavement in the name of peace. You can not domesticate the One Who Calls to sit beneath the stars and stripes.

God achieves victory through the triumph over the power of death in giving ones life openly and defiantly to the powers in the name of the justice of God’s reign. Jesus was executed legally by a state hostile to the reign of God. The powers continue in their hostility to the reign of God in the shape of empires and wars for “the American Way of Life.”

Our God was executed in the person of Jesus Christ. Those who murdered him and shatter the body of Christ through murder are worthy of ambivalence at best–resistance at their worst. The cowardice of murder, military or otherwise, stands in direct opposition to the courage of martyrdom–which is the way of God.

It took a big hit with the American Revolution and Declaration of Independence but mostly in the USA.

Instead of white Europeans conquering vast territory for the KING and his subjects(often under the guize of bringing Christianity to the heathens), we are now witnessing corporate rape and pillage working with corrupt puppet governments to extract wealth from poor countries under unjust terms. The local populations are frequently treated as near-free labor and receive little benefit from the rape of their countries and unsafe, unhealthy labor conditions.

How much is a barrel of Nigerian oil worth?

Is a diamond engagement ring really a symbol of undying love?

Does your SUV really give you freedom?

Is there such a thing as “clean coal”?

What are the true life-cycle, global, costs of
our life-styles? Twenty percent of the world population consumes 80% of the resources. What happens when the 80% strives to live as the 20% do?

When a billion Chinese start up their SUVs in the morning, we will die of exphixation.

Independence from tyranny is a good thing. Living like we are independent of the basic forces of nature is pure folly and irresponsible.

Of course, that leads to the question of how a government reflects Christ. And we discern that by remembering that our primary commitment is to Christ, and so our primary source of reflection for how we live out our commitments is our Church, even above the State. For we cannot serve two masters. And if our primary concern is to the U.S., then our primary concern is to our personal liberty, which does not seem to be much of a concern for Jesus, Paul, the prophets, or other Biblical leaders. There is emancipation from slavery, and the re-establishment of the temple, but individual liberty puts the self first, not God.

I don’t want to live in a country without religious freedom or other personal freedoms. The government is not perfect and a certain amount of autonomy from it is required to prevent tyranny. But for a Christian, faithfulness to God is our ultimate end. And this means, I believe, not shedding the blood of another for his/her sins (as this was what I believe Christ accomplished on the cross), and envisioning our wars differently, both in how we approach our enemies and how we envision the very purposes of our wars (Eph. 6). And our freedom, in relation to this task, is secondary. That is our ultimate point of reflection.

But that does not preclude us from commitments to the State, nor participation in social groups or identification with the varied gifts and national and racial and gender and sexual differences which God gifted to us. So even as we grieve those were unjustly murdered in the name of protecting our liberty and securing land and commodities to make into private property for our freedom, and even as we debate whether or not the earth is “ours” or Gods, we can still celebrate how our system of democracy as Americans still stands as a beacon to the rest of the world.