I still remain unsure of how to approach the situation. Even though I identify myself partly as Egyptian, my pale complexion and my passport say that it is not my place to discuss the future of Egypt. That is for Egyptians to decide, and I do not want to feel as though I am intruding on their decision. All the great democracies of today emerged from domestic democratic movements. I believe that people must feel that democracy is their creation, not an imposition by a foreign power.

As I follow events in Guatemala, I wrestle with this same tension from time to time. Though I had a Guatemalan passport for the first 18 years of my life and lived in the country until age 15, I’ve had a US passport for all of my 28 years. So I wonder: am I qualified to comment on the state of affairs in both countries? In neither? Am I qualified, when it seems best, to intervene?

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It’s called Pocket God, and since it's “one of the iPhone’s best-selling game franchises,� the fact that I’m only now hearing about it shows just how out of touch with the gaming world I really am. Apparently, the game gives you “god-like powers over islanders known as Pygmies.� From the game’s blurb in iTunes:

What kind of god would you be? Benevolent or vengeful? Play Pocket God and discover the answer within yourself. On a remote island, you are the all-powerful god that rules over the primitive islanders. You can bring new life, and then take it away just as quickly. Exercise your powers on the islanders. Lift them in the air, alter gravity, hit them with lightning...you're the island god!

Maybe for those steeped in the worlds of more controversial games Pocket God is mild by comparison (it’s rated 9+ for “Infrequent/Mild Cartoon or Fantasy Violence�), but its striking popularity makes me wonder what the game’s premise reveals about who we are and what we are being taught to desire and value -- even from a young age.

I’m not the first to raise these concerns, I’ve since realized. Others have pointed out that whimsically mastering the art of dominating indigenous peoples might not be simple, harmless fun. And from headlines I see every day, I know that such activities are anything but fictional.

Last week I wrote about Jayakumar Christian, whose book deals with the “god-complexes� that trap the powerless poor in cycles of poverty. He articulates it well, so I won’t bother to reinvent the wheel.

But I ask: what does the popularity of this game teach us about our hearts? Is a game like this harmless, devoid of real-world implications? Or is it possible that in some way it serves to dehumanize real people on the margins of our world, to reinforce the enduring and pervasive (if hidden) belief in Manifest Destiny, and to trivialize life-and-death matters for real people made in the image of God?

Put simply: can a Christian in good conscience “play god�?

Case in point: Sipacapa, Guatemala. Many of my childhood memories revolve around Sipacapa, where we lived in an adobe house with a tin roof and a bare concrete floor. Behind our house was the community soccer field, and on a clear day we could look out past the eucalyptus trees and see Mexico, several mountain ridges away. There was no electricity or running water in the area in those days, so we’d hike down to a spring in the valley and fill jugs with water which would then be used for cooking, or heated on the wood stove and used for bathing in the pulley-operated shower we built on the front porch.

The village now benefits from electricity and running water. They’re even paving the roads, and many community residents have cell phones. The ways in which this unprecedented connectivity improves people’s lives are many. But globalization is a two-edged sword. The same force that has brought these modern advances has also brought, for one thing, the mining industry – not just to Sipacapa but to many remote villages throughout Latin America and around the world. Mining companies promise economic and community development but seldom keep their word because those with power to hold them accountable, quite frankly, don’t bother. Indigenous peoples, meanwhile - whose interests are officially protected under international agreements - are for all intents and purposes powerless when push actually comes to shove. See the No Dirty Gold campaign for more on these life-and-death issues.

Because I grew up in what is now a mining-affected area and because I am a Christian who is concerned about how abuses of power affect the poor, I returned to Sipacapa this spring to learn more about the mine and to do interviews with people in the area. While showing me around, an old family friend pointed out the local radio station, sitting up on a hill with a tall antenna. The station had been instrumental a few years prior when Sipacapa residents organized an official referendum in which the people voted nearly unanimously against mining in their community. The radio station enabled voting at thirteen different locations to occur simultaneously, and allowed for transparency in the process. Ultimately, though, it wasn’t enough, and the mining operation continues.

Early next year in Guatemala, congress will consider a telecommunications reform bill that will determine the fate of 170 of these community radio stations throughout the country that provide news and information to indigenous people in their own languages. The aim of the bill is to set aside a wave band specifically for such stations and to reduce the cost and red tape involved in obtaining licenses. In areas with high illiteracy, community radio is essential for the dissemination of important information like storm warnings and provides a forum for public debate on important issues.

It will be interesting to see whose interests prevail in congress, in a land with a government modeled after our own. And it will be a poignant snapshot of the pros and cons of globalization. From my standpoint, connectivity is good, generally speaking, as long as it’s a two-way street. I think most residents of Sipacapa would agree. But who really gets to call the shots? In the case of community radio in Guatemala we will see whether globalization will be a force for good or ill in the lives of the poor, for whom the world has been anything but flat.

For more on the situation in the Sipacapa area and elsewhere, check out COPAE. Among other things, they are working towards an alternative development plan for the region that will align more closely with the needs of the local people rather than the wishes of a Canadian board of directors. In other words, they are helping the indigenous people to work for flatness on their own terms.

What does it mean to pledge allegiance to the Prince of Peace who instructed you to love your enemies when nearly half of the federal budget of your country - the biggest budget in the world - is spent on bombs and missiles and guns (delivered, all too often, in God’s name)? What does it mean to pledge allegiance to the One who spoke all life into being, who formed you fearfully and wonderfully in the innermost parts, in a society in which one million babies are murdered every year? What does it mean to pledge allegiance to the God of Jubilee when the economy of your country is dependent on human greed, and the chasm between the rich and the poor grows wider and wider with each passing moment? What does it mean to pledge allegiance to our homeless Middle Eastern king, who came preaching good news to the poor, when you live in one of the wealthiest, most church-saturated parts of the world and there are at any given moment 400 homeless people in your nice little city? When a full 25% of the homeless population of your nation is comprised of those who have sacrificed for your country in the armed forces? When few seem to consider these spiritual issues at the core?

It comes as a shock to some folks that America isn’t mentioned in the Bible (not even in Revelation!). And seeing as empires have risen and fallen throughout history, there’s little reason to expect our fate as a nation to be much different. Oh, but we’re a Christian nation, you say. No, we’re not. We were not a Christian nation when we stole this land from the Native Americans nor when we got rich off the blood, sweat and tears of African slaves. We were not a Christian nation when we forced the descendants of those slaves to sit at the backs of busses and when we herded all the remaining native peoples onto reservations out west. And while we’ve certainly come a long way in leaving our days of genocide, rampant injustice and segregation behind, we’re not a Christian nation today. Nor should that be our primary aim. The total merging of religion and government has never tended to go very well for us humans - unless you consider the abuses of the Roman empire, the Crusades, the Inquisition, and Jihad to be steps in the right direction.

What then? America, while a remarkable experiment, uniquely founded on extraordinary ideas, too often fails to live up to its prolific claims. America is not the world’s last best hope or a city on a hill or the twenty-first century version of first-century Israel or anything of the sort that some of our politicians and outspoken TV preachers would have us believe.

And I know all of this may make me sound ungrateful and unpatriotic. So I should clarify. I am very thankful for the freedom and opportunity we possess as citizens of the United States of America. I am thankful for baseball, Johnny Cash, Dr. Pepper, and all the myriad blessings of being American. I am thankful for the freedom of speech (which I am exercising right now), for the freedom to worship, for the right to vote, for access to education and employment and for the belief that anyone can do anything he or she sets their mind to (assuming, of course, they aren’t a minority or anything… oh snap!).

Of course, it is not lost on me that through the years, people from around the world have flocked here to pursue the American Dream, and they’re still flocking. I meet them every day in my work with newly arrived refugees. I grew up among poor, indigenous folks in the mountains of Guatemala who would have given anything to move to California or New York (the two places in the USA they’d heard of) at the drop of a hat. But as so much of the current anti-immigrant sentiment reveals, many of us in the land of the free are rethinking our long-standing policy of welcoming the world’s poor, tired, huddled masses who are yearning to breathe free. We forget that in two inescapable ways, we are bound up with the very people we reject. All white Americans, if not immigrants themselves, are children of immigrants. And as Christians, as followers of the Way, we acknowledge that this world (not to mention this nation) is not our home. Our true citizenship lies elsewhere. We’re just passing through.

I am thankful that I’m an American, rather than to belong to any other country on the face of the earth. Really. I mean it. But I am not just thankful. I am thankful to God, because as a Christian I believe that every good and perfect gift comes from God, our Father in heaven. I don’t thank my lucky stars, I don’t thank my own hard work, I don’t thank Uncle Sam. I thank God. But I have a hard time thanking God for giving us this land of freedom and liberty and opportunity at the Native Americans’ expense or for giving us this wealth at the expense of African slaves. (Wouldn’t that kind of be like thanking Mom for the cookies she told us we couldn’t eat but we stole from the cookie jar anyway?) I have a hard time singing “God bless America� when the America that God has so richly blessed is asking him to bless us as we bomb them (as they, incidentally, pray their own eerily similar prayers).

It breaks my heart. It especially breaks my heart that people around the world now equate Jesus with American militarism and greed and MTV and Paris Hilton and Rambo and arrogance and individualism and 50 brands of toilet paper. Maybe the United States of America has to declare war on terrorists who threaten and/or succeed in attacking us. Maybe that’s just how things have to be. But when our government is making life a living hell for the few remaining Christians in war-torn regions of the Middle East, you have to at least wonder at it all. Whose side am I on, anyway? To whom or what do I pledge my highest allegiance? By baptizing our nation - by effectively equating Christianity with the United States of America - we have cheapened the cross. Cheapened is too tame of a word. Desecrated? Bad enough that people would respond with hatred of America. Worse still that some would mistake the white, middle-class American Jesus for the real one.

So what does it look like to be faithful to our Lord Jesus as American citizens, particularly now, an election year with our nation at war and the nations raging (as they tend to do)? I can’t say I have the answer. But as in any time and place, to follow Jesus is to love God with every last ounce in you and to love your neighbor as yourself. Those are the non-negotiables. That love for God and for others is to influence every last thing we do, even as we disagree over what to do with war and abortion and gay marriage and the economy and our borders and our schools and environmental degradation and on and on and on. But we know what God requires of us - to do justice, to love mercy, and to walk humbly with him - though if we’re honest, most of the time we haven’t a clue what that actually looks like in daily practice. So we move forward, with trepidation, in prayer. We pledge allegiance, first and foremost, not to a flag or a party or a mortal man, but to the King of Kings, and to his kingdom.

And we hear, faintly perhaps, those hope-filled words: “Behold, I am making all things new!� We cling to those words. And we hope in Jesus. Not in Obama. Not in McCain. Not in America, nor its power, nor its vibrant, entrepreneurial spirit. Not in elephants or asses or any other silly animal. We hope in Jesus.

Before (and long, long after) we pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America and to the Republic for which it stands, we pledge allegiance to the Kingdom of God, joining all the saints down through the ages, from tribes and tongues and peoples and nations all around the world, together declaring, “Our Father in heaven, hallowed be your name. Your kingdom come, your will be done on earth as it is in heaven.�

Just don’t be surprised if in heaven, Jesus chooses to lead us in Aramaic rather than English.