Remember where you were when you heard the news?
I was sitting in my basement office at Bethel Baptist Church, a lovely country church on a crossroad in Westminster, SC. I was preparing for a funeral, pressed for time and not in the mood for much conversation, when someone banged on my door. I didn’t answer quickly enough, so the person knocked again, and without waiting opened the door. A local farmer stuck his head in. I had known him two years, and I had never seen him look frantic. He did now. “Preacher, you need to see this.”
I gathered with him and our small staff in the administrative assistant’s office where they stood in silence around a flickering TV. Smoke billowed above the twin towers. People running. Fire. More smoke. And the airplanes, replayed and replayed, like misguided missiles but then striking with terrifying precision. And the words scrolled across the bottom of the screen: America is under attack.
The days after were filled with speculations and worry and strategies to prepare for another attack. Prayer rallies, press conferences, and the media gave us all a crash course in al-Qaeda. Islamic terrorism had a whole new face.
And in the middle of it all, something remarkable happened. Politicians stopped arguing about politics but forged a bond around a common cause. Remember President Bush’s speech from Ground Zero? And his call to arms in the joint session of Congress? No one critiqued his speech or cared about his Texas drawl. We just rallied.
And remember that poignant moment on the Capitol steps when Congress joined in unison with the singing of “God Bless America”? Unity, determination, and no political parties. Just Americans with a common identity and a common purpose. Just Americans, that is.
Few things are more dangerous to a movement or a nation than the loss of its identity. Identity produces purpose, and without that common purpose, we gravitate toward personal preferences that divide rather than unite. And it is impossible for the unity to survive if the purposes are at odds.
Jesus addressed this early in His ministry. He liberated a demon-possessed man, and the exorcism had ostensible results. The demon had blinded the man’s eyes and muted his speech. Suddenly he could both hear and speak.
The crowds were “astonished” and wondered aloud if Jesus was the Messiah. The religious leaders bristled. Desperate for an explanation that would not affirm that the power of God was coursing through the carpenter from Nazareth, the Pharisees offered the absurd, “This man drives out demons only by Beelzebul, the ruler of the demons” (Matt. 12:24). That is, they attributed the work of Jesus to Satan.
Jesus pointed out the error in their logic by stating a universal and indisputable principle, “Every kingdom divided against itself is headed for destruction, and no city or house divided against itself will stand” (Matt. 12:25). Satan cannot inhibit his own work and expect to succeed in his overall agenda. If he wants to build a kingdom, he fosters the work of his minions. He doesn’t send someone to tear down his own work. That’s ridiculous. You’re either working for Satan or you’re against Satan. But you cannot do both at the same time.
And it follows that you cannot work for God and against God at the same time. So then He got more personal. Someone who thinks they are not hurting the cause of the kingdom by being passive is deluded. “Anyone who is not with me is against me, and anyone who does not gather with me scatters” (Matt. 12:30). Neutrality is impossible. People who call themselves followers of Christ but do not participate in the advance of God’s kingdom are actually working against it. Watching from the sidelines (or the pews) just means you have partnered with the opposition. Ouch.
The application of Jesus’ illustration to America is so obvious that it hardly needs repeating. But then, why blog?
A nation forged around a common identity is unified, even if not everyone agrees on the details. But as soon as we forget our identity, we will dissolve into partisanship and disintegrate into an ineffective, divided, and confused land of opportunists who are unwilling to give up their own agendas for the common good. Not right away, but over time, we will forget who we are. And so it is today. A nation cannot attack itself from within and expect to survive.
America is only as strong as our unity grounded in our identity. We are all Americans. Or we should be. But we have hyphenated ourselves nearly out of existence. This-American, that-American. Now we clamor for our personal preferences. But here’s the problem. By failing to be for “us,” we are against “us.” There is no neutrality. Only division or unity. But nothing in between.
In 2001, the enemy came from without. We watched the buildings burn, and when Americans died, we didn’t ask about their political preference, evaluate their skin color, or raise banners identifying which America we belonged to. We rallied. Americans one and all.
Today our cities burn, and the aggressors are from inside. They are, by the way, Americans as well, which makes our solution more difficult to ascertain. But the loss of identity means we have also lost our purpose and our unity. The enemy is not the Americans among us. The enemy is the false ideologies and the deification of personal preferences that have been exalted to the throne of power inside the four walls. These weaken our unity and make us vulnerable to collapse.
Our strength is our American identity. It’s our ability to unify around a common cause, to look beyond political parties and set aside personal preferences. To rise to the occasion and be again the America our Founders intended.
But there is no doubt. We will not survive this assault from within if it continues unchallenged and we do not unify again for a common cause. It’s guaranteed. A house divided against itself will fall. The only question that remains is whether we can regain our American identity, and therefore our unity, before it is too late.