It looked like such a good idea. Jeroboam
has been given ten tribes of Israel to rule, and he wants to keep them together.
If the people of Israel continue to worship in the Jerusalem, their loyalties of
his people will be divided and they might even plot to assassinate Jeroboam. The
obvious solution, the reasonable solution, is to provide a place of worship
closer to home, binding together the ten northern tribes by throne and altar.
After all, Jeroboam thinks, Yahweh wouldn’t have given me ten tribes if He
wanted me to let them split apart.
It looks like such a good idea. So reasonable. So practical. Yet, in Yahweh’s
view, it is an act of contempt, an idolatrous provocation to jealousy. Ahijah
the prophet speaks the word of Yahweh about Jeroboam’s political-religious
reforms: “you have gone and made for yourself other gods and molten images to
provoke me to anger, and have cast Me behind your back.” What looks so
reasonable and practical is in fact throwing Yahweh away like a used candy
wrapper.
This passage condemns all forms of pragmatism, but most clearly challenges and
condemns political pragmatism, and even more specifically the pragmatic use of
religion for political ends. And so we come to George W. Bush, the newly
inaugurated President of the United States, who spent the first day of his
second term at an inter-religious worship service at the National Cathedral,
worshiping alongside Jews, Muslims, and Billy Graham. No doubt, Bush, a
Christian, sees his participation in a joint religious service as politically
useful, a way to symbolize his commitment to tolerance and his desire to work
for unity in a diverse nation. But that does not excuse him. His participation
rests on an implicit theology, which says that alongside the particular
religions that divide us, we can worship a single god that somehow includes or
transcends Allah and the god of Jews along with the Father of Jesus and who
knows what else. Alongside our particular religions, we can worship the god of
American civil religion.
Ahijah would tell us that this is contempt for the God of heaven. For there is
only on God, and He is jealous, a consuming fire.
Bush’s participation in the inter-religious service openly manifests the
official polytheistic theology of the United States as a whole. As a people, we
have established a religion of multiple religions, a
Constitutionally-established attempt at religious neutrality that is nothing
more than contempt for the one God of heaven and earth. At the same time that we
call Bush to renounce his implicit polytheism, we must repent of our own. For
righteousness exalts a nation, but sin is a reproach to any people.