Today is Memorial Day in the US. Its origins lie at the end of the Civil War as a way of remembering soldiers who died in service from both the Union and Confederate forces. Since then, it has expanded to include all members of the armed forces who have died in service to the US.
It wasn’t completely strange to hear an advertisement on an evangelically-aligned radio station wave the patriotic flag. What was strange, though, was a particular sentence in this ad. The narrator spoke, ‘On this day we remember those whose sacrifices have enabled us to worship him’. The ‘him’, of course, is a reference to Christ. However, it is theologically wrong to say that one (even an American!) would not be able to worship God or Christ without the death of members of the US military.
If any sacrifice enables Christians to worship God or Christ, it is the sacrifice by Christ. The deaths of people enlisted with the military do not enable people to worship Christ any more than sacrifices made by diplomats to negotiate peace treaties between the US and another country. The service members are representatives of the US armed forces working for the interests of the US government. Yes, their deaths should be remembered but not as being somehow theologically significant.
This kind of contamination of theology in evangelical circles with a flavour of American civil religion is nothing new. However, it highlights the emptiness of evangelical political theology. This kind of marriage between theology and civil religion has replaced the disavowed study of theology in evangelicalism.
