VISION ONE

In my first vision of a Christian America, Chrisianity has percolated up from the bottom. Somehow the vast majority of our people have been infected with the Holy Spirit and have begun joyously following Jesus in their own lives. The natural outgrowth of this has been the adoption of public policies reflecting the Gospel message and the election of a President and a Congress who see their public service as a way to effectively serve God and his people — not as a way to get rich dispensing favors to lobbyists and lawyers for multinational corporations.

Let us imagine that this process has gone on for several years and that the President of the United States is making his annual State of the Union address. This is what such an address to a Christian America might be like:

State of the Union Address

Part I: Foreign Policy

Mister Speaker, Madam President, Distinguished Members of the Congress, honored guests, and my fellow Americans: in my campaign, I warned you that my Presidency would be a very different one. As a Christian, I envisioned an America dedicated, above all, to following the words and example of Jesus Christ. I told you that this included, in particular, following the nonviolent example of both Jesus and the early church in rejecting warfare and the killing of fellow human beings under any circumstances. I proposed that our nation depend for its security on the promises of Psalm 37: "Trust in the Lord and do good, that you may dwell in the land and have security." This meant, of course, disbanding the Armed Forces and the CIA, ending capital punishment, and destoying all our lethal weapons (from nuclear missiles to hand grenades).

That I was elected on such a radical platform was almost as much of a surprise to me as it was to the Beltway pundits. You, the American people, showed great faith in God by placing your future squarely on His Word.

Buoyed by your faith, we set out to fulfill the promises we had made. We ended the embargo of Cuba and normalized relations with them. We ended weapons transfers and military assistance to dictators around the world. We ended gunboat diplomacy, announcing that never again would American young men and women be used as hired killers and cannon fodder for power politics and the financial interests of big banks and corporations. We ordered a permanent halt to nuclear testing and began the unilateral destruction of our nuclear weapons. We cancelled all orders for military weapons and requested manufacturers to research nonlethal means of dealing with criminals and terrorists. A program was begun under which the entire population, beginning with those then in the Armed Forces, would be trained in nonviolent resistance techniques. We adopted Civilian-Based Defense (CBD) as national policy. Under CBD, the populace refuses to cooperate with an invading or occupying force, but uses nonviolent resistance, at the same time showing love and generosity to the aggressors.

We instituted a new GI Bill for departing members of the military, transferred many to other government departments, and helped find jobs for others. I am happy to report that we succeeded in disbanding the Armed Forces without a single member of the military becoming jobless. To have done otherwise would have been to violate the promises of previous administrations and the unwritten social contract between the people and the dedicated young men and women who have for so long protected them.

Some who served in the military are now in our domestic Service Corps, rebuilding our infrastructure and that of our cities. Others are overseas, helping people in the Third World recover from decades of exploitation by our banks and multinational corporations. Where necessary, we are feeding people; but our emphasis is on enabling local agriculture to revive and once more become self-sufficient.

We paid our huge monetary debt to the United Nations, accepted the jurisdiction of the International Court of Justice, and supported the creation of an International Criminal Court. We stopped obstructing progress toward protecting the earth’s environment, and agreed to a timetable for phasing out the burning of fossil fuels. We, of course, abolished the CIA.

In short, we implemented a new approach to foreign policy — do what is right. In the old Hebrew scriptures, God had his chosen people isolate themselves from the world, so as not to be contaminated by them. But as a Christian nation, we are a New Testament people. The New Covenant applies to all people. As St Paul says, "There is neither Jew nor Gentile, male nor female, slave nor free, but all are one in Jesus Christ." Under the New Covenant, there are no "enemies" or "others." We are to go into the world, making disciples of all nations, not with the sword, but with the Word; not by force or law or coercion, but by the example of God’s love flowing through us.

There are those who predicted that such a course would lead to disaster. Leaving ourselves undefended (they said) would lead to our destruction. But time has passed, and we have not been invaded. On the contrary, terrorist attacks directed against us have diminished markedly. What’s more, other nations are following our example (just as we followed that of Costa Rica). One after another, nations are disbanding their armed forces and directing their efforts toward sustainable development.

Though we are still the richest and most powerful nation on earth, we are no longer using our power to enhance our riches at others’ expense. We have instead become a law-abiding member of the community of nations.

Putting our Christian principles into action has also changed our economic and trade relations with other nations.

NAFTA and GATT were advertised to us as "free trade" agreements. In truth, they were about "free investment." As Christians, we would not mind sharing our wealth, and even our jobs, with the people of Mexico and other countries, gradually raising their living standards up to our own (even if it meant lowering our standards of affluence). But that is not what happened. Free investment under these agreements indeed resulted in new jobs for people in poor countries. But it also destroyed their old jobs, family farming in particular. And the new jobs were always worse than the old ones. The quality of life in poor countries like Mexico actually got much worse. We weren’t raising them to our standard, we were lowering ours and theirs at the same time.

NAFTA critics had said that it would result in money flowing from American workers to Mexican workers. Proponents said that would be OK, because then the Mexicans could afford American products, and some of the money would flow back. Neither was right. What actually happened was that money flowed from both American and Mexican workers to the pockets of the billionaires.

The standard practice would be for a company to pay women in Indonesia (for example) starvation wages (of maybe 80 cents a day) to make shoes which sell here for $150 a pair. And by using tax havens and phony books, they avoided paying income taxes to either the country where the shoes were made (Indonesia or wherever) or to the country where they were sold (usually the United States). All their obscene profits went into the pockets of their billionaire owners.

Consequently, our administration changed the rules by executive order. We told corporations that they could move their investment and jobs to other countries — BUT unless they gave the workers in those countries the same protections and rights we demand for workers in the U.S., they couldn’t import any of their products into this country. We also made it impossible for companies to avoid income taxes altogether by having a dummy headquarters in a tax-free haven where they neither manufactured nor sold.

The result of these new policies was twofold. Some companies came back home and restored jobs to Americans. Others stayed put and provided good jobs at decent wages, raising standards for Mexicans, Indonesians, and others around the world. As Christians, we must be willing to share not only the Gospel, but our good life as well, with those in other countries. We simply could not, in good conscience, continue to use military and trade policy to enable us to consume eight times our share of the earth’s resources.

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