I was asked this week how I can be a Christian and support Donald Trump throwing out thousands of illegal aliens.  But one of the toughest things about being a Christian is trying to be a citizen.  No — scratch that.  I mean trying to be a good citizen.

Paul was a citizen, too, but I don’t think he cared a bit about the Roman Empire.  He gave the impression that if the Gauls invaded tomorrow, he would just shrug his shoulders and try to baptize them, too.  And although he was the polar opposite of Thomas Paine in almost every respect, he shared that one annoying and almost liberal quality: that he didn’t view himself a citizen of any country in particular, but a citizen of the world.  Except Paine’s world was too small for Paul.  Paul viewed himself as the child of the king of the universe.

Governments were thus always too narrow and short-sighted for a man of a truly religious mindset.  Even ethnicity and race got the boot when it came down to it.  But to be a good citizen requires a whole set of priorities and principles at odds with the whole gist of Christianity, and if you take both seriously, it tends to put you in a state of cognitive dissonance.

For instance, the first priority of government is what all Americans would today call “racism,” but which is the foundational preoccupation with being any organization at all.  And that is saying, “We are like this, and because you are like that, you stay over there.”  This is the idea behind all borders, motherlands, and voter ID: the fact that zero identity means zero stability, zero safety, and zero power — the antithesis of all political causes.  To have a government totally unconcerned with “us” and “them” would be a contradiction in terms, and a scatterbrained majority can be easily upset and conquered by a small, tight-knit, and organized minority.

The second priority of all governments is running things along the lines of what we call “common sense” — the antithesis of the whole........

© American Thinker