The Christian Nation Delusion
There are professed ministers of the Gospel; hundreds of them, who are deceiving themselves and their people by applying the term "Christian nation" to those governments who spend more for war upon the heathen than they do for their conversion. They are calling the nations "Christian" whose people spend more of their means for strong drink and tobacco than for all the necessaries of life combined. If this logic will apply to a nation, it will apply with equal force to a single individual, for a nation is simply an aggregation of individuals. Then, when the minister tells the people that a nation can be recognized as Christian while engaged in killing the helpless heathen and robbing them of their property, why may not the individual suppose that he can indulge the same propensities and pass as a Christian too? Under such teaching, is it at all surprising that the prophet saw, near the end of time, a popular "Babylon" church, "a habitation of demons, and a hold of every unclean spirit, and a hold of every unclean and hateful bird"? See Rev. 18: 1, 2. Is not this recognition of warlike, usurping, grasping nations as "Christian" a deception that is making them "drunk" with the idea that the conquest and annihilation of the heathen is an aid to Gospel work, and that might makes right? Yet the most active and most popular idea of "national reform" now in vogue in this country is based on this "Christian nation" delusion. If this is reform, pitiable indeed is the nation when it shall have been reformed after such a manner.