St. Augustine saw that a Christian is a citizen of two worlds--the
Earthly City and the City of God. These two cities have been formed
by two loves: the earthly, by love of self even to the contempt of
God; the Heavenly, by the love of God even to the contempt of self.
The earthly city is the state, and although it is a relative good,
it must exist to maintain civil order in a sinful world. The city of
God is the ultimate good where man's highest loyalty must reside,
for as St. Paul pointed out, our true citizenship is in Heaven.
Our Lord himself recognized this double responsibility of man when
he told the Pharisees "to render unto Caesar the things which are
Caesar's and unto God the things which are God's." This shouldn't
be too hard to comprehend, and yet history reveals the repeated
error and tragedy of man's desire to be a citizen of one world
or the other, but not both. Perhaps the difficulty lies in the
fact that citizenship itself is a two-fold affair. It involves
one's allegiance to a state and it also entitles the citizen to
the protection of that state. It may be, therefore, that a double
allegiance is too much for most men to bear, or it may be that the
protection of the earthly state seems so much more tangible. In
any event, the "either-or-ness" has been most unfortunate in its
consequences.
To be a citizen of Heaven alone is more difficult for the average
American to understand. Few men these days are tempted to go
off into the desert and live an other-worldly life in prayer and
contemplation with the sole desire of saving their own souls. And
yet a more subtle form of this escapism is the chief object of
the attack made by politically liberal and radical groups upon
Christianity. Socialists and Communists have with good reason
charged that much of every man's Christianity is a Sunday escapism
with little or no effect upon his daily living, unrelated to his
civic responsibilities and to existing evils.
Bad as this may be, the opposite form of single statism would seem
to be more devastating in our present situation. When Stephen
Decatur made his famous toast to "Our Country, in her intercourse
with foreign nations may she always be in the right, but our
country, right or wrong," he revealed the stupid tragedy of all the
many forms of the American First principle. But he incidentally
admitted the existence and necessity of a superior standard of
judgment by which the nation is seen to be either right or wrong.
Unless our citizenship is in Heaven we cannot be effective and
reliable citizens of this country or any country on earth. All
we are fitted for without it is to be slaves to a Fascist state,
saluting and goose-stepping moronically at the command of a
self-appointed leader. We must have a basis for judging even our own
country and our most honored institutions.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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