Making us great again (that’s us, not US)

Think carefully about what constitutes greatness

Whoever wants to become great among you must be your servant. —Mark 10:43

The dominant theme in US politics today is “making America great again” or MAGA. Based on recent events, it would seem that MAGA supporters believe the ways to make their country great include:

• Strengthening the economy

• Rebuilding manufacturing capacity and avoiding trade deficits

• Preventing illegal immigration and deporting criminal elements

• Projecting strength in foreign affairs

• Reducing the size and cost of government

• Upholding certain traditional values regarding gender and sexuality

• Forcefully attacking rebel groups

Intelligent arguments can be made for any of these policies. But can any of them make us great?

Of course, I realize that greatness for a nation-state may mean something different from greatness for an individual Christian. Nevertheless, I wonder if Christians of all political persuasions are too easily hoodwinked—whether by national pride, economic need, personal grievances, or other factors—into a sub-Christian understanding of greatness.

It’s easy to get sucked into this pattern if we concentrate on current events. Public recognition is dominated by athletes, entertainers, politicians, and very wealthy people. Media sources rarely treat religion as important in its own right, covering religion only in terms of its impact on politics or culture.

But that perspective prevents us from finding greatness in caring for the “least of these” (Matthew 25:40), unseen acts of generosity, or daily expressions of faithfulness.

Last fall, US political writer Tim Alberta spoke at a university in my city. He is author of The Kingdom, the Power, and the Glory: American Evangelicals in an Age of Extremism (2023). Listeners expected him to talk about the risks of entangling faith with politics. Alberta did get to that point, but in a circuitous manner. First, he talked about how the early church, despite having virtually no political power, transformed the world through servanthood.

Initially, Alberta observed, getting into that servantlike posture wasn’t easy. When Jesus told the disciples that his pathway to messiahship involved getting killed, Peter rebuked him. Jesus responded, “Get behind me, Satan!” (Mark 8:33), using a phrase that he used only one other time—when resisting the literal Satan in the wilderness.

Alberta explained that in both instances, “Jesus is addressing the same thing: temptation to rule the world, temptation to pursue self-glorification, to pursue power for power’s sake, to conflate the kingdom of God with the kingdom of here and now.”

At Jesus’ betrayal, Peter again took matters into his own hands, cutting off a servant’s ear, which Jesus apologetically healed before going off to be beaten and crucified. (Although all four Gospels relate this incident, only John identifies Peter; the Synoptic Gospels all protect the attacker’s anonymity.)

But by the time he wrote the first New Testament letter attributed to him, Peter was a fearless preacher who urged Christians to defend their faith with gentleness and respect (1 Peter 3:15) and to “not be surprised at the painful trial you are suffering, as though something strange were happening to you” (1 Peter 4:12). Quite a change.

This attitude undergirded the selfless behavior that enabled the Christian movement to expand from the margins of the Roman Empire to the mainstream until the fourth century, when the conversion of emperor Constantine introduced a more complex dynamic between church and state.

From that point on, Alberta said, “The church was organized around preserving power. Suddenly a movement that once had nothing to lose had everything to lose.”

Our world is very different from the apostle Peter’s world. Few would say that we can best serve Christ today by withdrawing completely from politics. But we might more effectively pursue the path of true greatness if we acted like Gaetan Roy, the World Evangelical Alliance’s permanent representative to the United Nations, whose first question at every meeting is “How can I serve you?”