The idea of being “chosen” is rarely applauded in modern democracies. Instead if you are “the chosen” you are regarded with jealousy and suspicion, because you have not been elected or selected for your hard labor.

But being “chosen” has a completely different connotation, if you are an Evangelical Christian. It means God has selected you for reasons beyond understanding. It means you are either the Israel of the Abrahamic tradition or the United States of the Puritan tradition, “a city on a hill.”

Being “chosen” by God carried deep responsibilities in the Hebrew Bible. Primarily God’s chosen people were to be an example to the nations, a display of the virtues that God wished for all nations, potentially a model of spirituality on a national scale. Failing this standard resulted in political and economic consequences for “the chosen.”

From the time of the Babylonian Exile, Israel never lived up to dreams spawned under the reigns of David and Solomon.  The covenant of a chosen nation with God appears to be a shattered dream from about the tenth century BCE.  Israel never rose again to the dominance it achieved under Solomon, and the prophets became the voice of foreboding for a nation  once elevated for its reverence and fidelity.

Preachers should heed the biblical judgment of the Chosen People. The national identity from the days of Jeremiah till 1948 was reduced to a journey of repentance, reflecting the failures of a nation in exile, rather than the triumphs of an international empire. Until the time of Jesus, Israel has been a nation in servitude to more powerful empires and after the destruction of the Temple in A.D. 70, a nation in exile.

Instead of seeing the Jewish nation in exile as a biblical cautionary tale, Evangelical preachers have resurrected the Puritan notion of “the city on a hill” to make the United States a successor chosen nation, with all the privileges accorded its status. It means the national identity is Judeo-Christian and all other religions are guests in our country. It means our way of life is sanctified and preferred by God. It means other nations should defer to our leadership. This has been an Evangelical narrative since Ronald Reagan,

The presumption attached to this self-image is clear to anyone not born in the United States, but the concept of a Chosen nation is so embedded in our culture that many of us see it as our natural endowment. God chose the United States to rescue the world from degradation.

Building on this theme, Mark Labberton . . .  president of Fuller Theological Seminary, the largest multidenominational seminary in the world, has spoken about a distinct way for Christians to conceive of their calling, from seeing themselves as living in a Promised Land and “demanding it back” to living a “faithful, exilic life.” (Atlantic Monthly, July 5, 2019).

The mantle of the Chosen people has long since been cast aside for the boots of the wanderer. No throne of empire where Solomon sat to rule the eastern peoples. Rather a tent in exile, where the faithful may preserve holy worship. No less loved by God, but with fewer pretensions.

Great cautionary literature has come from the exilic tradition– the prophetic writings of Jeremiah, Ezekiel, Daniel, Micah and Hosea and many of the Psalms.  Perhaps Evangelical preachers should be reading these prophets to revisit the standards of civility and justice required of a “Chosen people.” The nation that has sunk to historical depths with infighting and fractured diplomacy no longer merits such elevation, if it ever did.

Yet it is not so much a demotion as an acceptance of pilgrimage. The U.S.A. has returned to its seventeenth century identity as pilgrims in search of identity as a diverse people. The Pilgrims of four hundred years ago had a religious identity, but needed a homeland. The homeland they found has transformed them into a diverse people with an evolving mission. They may no longer be in exile, but they are still a nation in need of repentance, a nation struggling to live up to its founding ideals of “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness” for all.