What It Means to Be a Citizen of the Kingdom Who Happens to Live in America

Last week, we bought an annual pass to America’s national parks. The park employee handed me the card. Across the front were the words America the Beautiful, along with George Washington—and Donald Trump.

I looked at it for a moment.

“Is there another version?” I asked. “Maybe one with an actual national park on it?”

She looked embarrassed.

“Technically, yes,” she said. “But that one costs $250 instead of the $80 you’re paying.”

Then she did something small but moving.

“I’m going to put your receipt in the transparent sleeve with the card,” she said.

She carefully folded the receipt, slipped it into the sleeve, and positioned it so that it covered Trump’s face. Then she looked up at me and smiled sheepishly.

We both understood.

I went on my way carrying an annual pass to some of the most beautiful places in America, with the president’s face discreetly hidden behind my receipt.

It was funny. Except that it wasn’t.

An American Abroad

Over the past year, I have traveled outside the United States several times. Through marriage, I now have family and friends in Europe and West Africa. They are curious about what it is like to live in America now. Their questions are sincere, but there is often something beneath them.

What is happening in your country? Do people really support this? Why are so many Christians defending it?

I have heard bewilderment in their voices, sometimes sadness and occasionally fear. And for the first time in my life, I have felt embarrassed to say that I am an American, and to them I have joked that perhaps I should begin telling people I am Canadian. That usually gets a laugh.

But it is not really a laughing matter.

I have never believed America was perfect. Our history contains courage and cruelty, soaring ideals and terrible betrayals. But I have loved my country. I have been grateful for it. Until recently, I never imagined wanting to hide the nationality printed on my passport.

But what grieves me most is not merely that America’s reputation has suffered. It is that the reputation of Jesus has become entangled with it.

For generations, American Christians have called this a Christian nation. We have sent missionaries, translated Bibles, built hospitals, funded relief work, dug wells, opened schools, and told the world that Jesus loves them.

Now people abroad watch American Christians defend deportations that divide families, describe desperate immigrants as threats, and celebrate the withdrawal of assistance from vulnerable people overseas.

They are not unreasonable for wondering whether this, too, is Christianity. And here is the truth: many American Christians have tied the cross to the flag so tightly that the world is having difficulty telling them apart.

My Country, but Not My Kingdom

The apostle Paul wrote, “Our citizenship is in heaven, and from it we await a Savior, the Lord Jesus Christ”
(Philippians 3:20).

That does not mean Christians should despise their countries. Love of home can be good. Gratitude is good. Service is good. Seeking the welfare of our neighbors is good.

But America is not the Kingdom of God. So I am a citizen of the Kingdom who happens to live in America.

America may have my loyalty (and taxes), but it cannot have my ultimate allegiance. It may warrant my service, but it does not deserve my worship. It may be my earthly home, but it is not my final country.

Jesus is Lord—not the President, not a political party, not a border, not the flag.

This is the particular temptation of Christian nationalism. It reverses the order. Instead of allowing Jesus to judge the interests of the nation, it recruits Jesus to bless them. It asks whether a policy makes America stronger before asking whether it is merciful, just, or true.

But followers of Jesus must ask more than whether something is legal, popular, or politically useful.

We must ask whether it resembles our King.

A Family’s Exile

My niece recently moved to Mexico. Not because she had always dreamed of building a life there. Not because she and her husband compared several countries and decided Mexico offered the future they wanted.

She moved because her husband was deported.

One day they were building a life in the United States. Now they are trying to construct another life somewhere else, far from the future she had imagined.

A government decision became a family’s exile.

I understand that nations have borders. Laws matter. Governments have a responsibility to maintain order. One family’s story cannot settle every immigration-policy question. But Christians must still ask what happens to the people involved.

The Bible repeatedly commands God’s people to remember the stranger. God told Israel,

“You know the heart of a sojourner, for you were sojourners in the land of Egypt”
(Exodus 23:9)

You know the heart of the stranger.

Not merely the stranger’s legal classification. Not merely the number assigned to a case.

The stranger’s heart.

Israel knew what it meant to live where someone else held the power, where the language and customs were unfamiliar, and where the future depended upon the mercy of others. That memory was supposed to shape the way God’s people treated those who came to live among them.

So God commanded them to love the stranger—not use the stranger as a political symbol, reduce the stranger to a problem, or speak of the stranger as though he were an infestation or an invasion.

Love the stranger.

Christians may disagree about immigration policy, but we do not have permission to stop seeing the people affected by it. Every deportation involves more than a number. There are marriages, children, parents, histories, promises, homes, and empty chairs at family tables.

My niece now lives in Mexico because the man she loves was sent there. Someone may call that enforcement, but I’m pretty sure she experiences it as exile.

And yet, very bravely and, I believe, by the power of the Spirit, she is leaning into her new home with the determination Jeremiah once commended to the exiles in Babylon:

“Build houses and live in them; plant gardens and eat their produce…. Seek the welfare of the city where I have sent you”
(Jeremiah 29:5, 7)

She is not pretending this is the life she chose. She is not denying what has been taken from her. But she is planting anyway. She is trying to make a home in the place where exile has carried her, and there is something profoundly faithful in that.

A Hand Reaching Across the Ocean

The same question reaches beyond our borders.

Yesterday I watched a program about a Christian organization caring for people affected by HIV and AIDS in Côte d’Ivoire, the homeland of my wife. It was doing exactly the sort of work Christians have historically called mercy: caring for the sick, preserving dignity, supporting families, and helping vulnerable people remain alive.

According to the program, the organization now finds itself at risk of closing because American aid has been withdrawn.

Someone tell me how that is Christian.

Yes, other countries should develop strong institutions of their own. Foreign aid can be wasteful, paternalistic, corrupt, or poorly administered. Wealthy nations should not create permanent dependency, and local governments must take responsibility for the well-being of their own people.

Those are legitimate concerns. But reform is not the same as abandonment. Accountability is not the same as shutting down a clinic. A handoff is not the same as a cutoff because a handoff requires another hand.

You do not teach self-reliance to a person with HIV by removing the medicine keeping that person alive. You do not strengthen a government by allowing its poorest citizens to become sick. You do not cure institutional dependency by abandoning children and families before another system is prepared to care for them.

Jesus once told a story about a wounded man lying beside a road.

A Samaritan saw him.

He did not begin by asking whether the man’s nation had become overly dependent upon foreign assistance. He did not lecture him about sustainability while he bled. He did not form a committee to determine whether mercy might accidentally encourage irresponsibility.

He went to him. He bound his wounds. He carried him to safety. He paid for his care.

And then Jesus said, “Go and do likewise”
(Luke 10:37)

The question was not whether the wounded man had earned assistance. The question was whether anyone would become his neighbor.

What Kind of Witness Are We?

America does not have to support every program forever. Immigration laws cannot simply be ignored. Governments must make difficult choices, and not every difficult choice is necessarily cruel.

But Christians cannot baptize every act of national self-interest and call it wisdom.

We cannot pray to reach the ends of the earth while treating people from the ends of the earth as unwanted. Something has gone terribly wrong when we send missionaries to Mexico while celebrating the deportation of husbands and fathers to the same country. Something is badly confused when we preach compassion in Côte d’Ivoire but shrug when a ministry there loses the support keeping people alive.

And we cannot call America Christian while refusing to let the teachings of Christ disturb our politics.

Perhaps America is becoming more feared. Perhaps it is becoming more powerful. Perhaps it is becoming more determined to put itself first.

But none of those things makes it more Christian.

They make it less.

The Kingdom of God does not become visible through domination. It becomes visible when strangers are welcomed, the sick are cared for, the hungry are fed, prisoners are remembered, enemies are loved, and the least powerful are treated as though they bear the image of God.

Because they do.

The Receipt Cannot Cover Us

That park employee’s small gesture has stayed with me. She folded my receipt and placed it carefully over the president’s face, and for a moment, the two of us shared a quiet acknowledgment that something was wrong. It was a tiny act—almost comic, perhaps even a little absurd.

But the receipt can only cover the face on the card.

It cannot cover ours.

It cannot hide what America is becoming from people watching us around the world. And it cannot shield American Christians from the question of whether our political loyalties have eclipsed our allegiance to Jesus.

I am still an American. I am not going to pretend to be Canadian.

This is my country, with all its beauty and all its brokenness. I do not want to disown it. I want it to become more just, more merciful, and more faithful to its finest promises.

But I belong to another Kingdom.

Its King was once a refugee. He welcomed strangers. He touched the sick. He crossed boundaries. He chose a cross rather than a throne.

And he said:

“I was hungry and you gave me food, I was thirsty and you gave me something to drink, I was a stranger and you welcomed me…. Just as you did it to one of the least of these…you did it to me”
(Matthew 25:35, 40)

So the question is not whether America is still beautiful.

Its mountains, forests, coastlines, and canyons remain breathtaking. I bought the pass because I still want to see them. I want to stand beneath ancient trees, walk beside wild oceans, and look out across landscapes that remind me how small presidents and empires finally are.

The harder question is whether the version of Christianity we are showing the world bears any resemblance to Christ.

Because I can cover a politician’s face with a receipt.

But I cannot cover the face of Jesus.

And he keeps appearing among the people we are sending away, leaving behind, and refusing to see.