Tag Archives: God and Country

God and Country

I believe one failing of American Christians is the temptation to worship country instead of Jesus. I speak as a retired Foreign Service Officer of the U.S. State Department, who proudly served in U.S. diplomatic missions in the Middle East.

Perhaps the temptation to worship America arose in the days immediately after World War II. The Soviet Union threatened Europe with a brand of government openly hostile to Christianity and included persecution of Christians.

Nevertheless, we have too often mixed patriotism, valuable as is the concern for country, with the religion of Jesus, especially evangelical Christians.

Benjamin Crosby, an Episcopal priest, writes: “It is a scandal that the term ‘evangelical’ increasingly means a set of political positions rather than a focus on the gospel of the overwhelming grace of God, not only for those who reject it, but also for those who embrace it.” (“Empty Pews,” Plough Quarterly,” Winter 2024)

Jesus’ messages often drew a distinction between God and country. His gospel was for Romans as it was for God’s called Jewish people, suffering under those Romans.

Jesus was worshiped as God’s Messiah by some of his Jewish followers. However, he ministered to anyone who came to him in need, Jews and Gentiles, zealots and humble fisher folk, religious leaders and prostitutes.

Jesus doesn’t belong only to Americans and those espousing an American way of life any more than He belonged only to Jews in his earthly ministry.

Owning Up to Our History

Tish Harrison Warren, a white Anglican priest, addressed the question lately roiling the political landscape: “Is America Willing to Tell the Truth About Its History?” (The New York Times, November 14, 2021)

“Yes, the white American church has sometimes conflated a sanitized story of America with Christianity to embrace loyalty to ‘God and country,’” Warren wrote.

As a child of the American south myself, I appreciated her commentary. I accepted, as children do, without reflection, the racism of my early years: the separate drinking fountains for “Colored” and the segregated schools.

I began to change as court decisions mandated an end to separate school systems. My undergraduate study was in an all white Southern Baptist college (at the time) in Alabama. Yet we students, especially in our church groups, discussed how wrong this segregation was. By the time I studied for a graduate degree in a state school in Georgia, it had changed. The school was integrated without, it appeared, whites thinking much about it.

Only much later, I confess, did it occur to me that I indeed had been favored by my white skin. I never had to think about my color when I applied for a job or went shopping or approached a teacher in school. I realized that any American of color, stepping into the larger society, knew that the people around them, even if not consciously racist, noticed first that the person before them was not white.

Within my lifetime, black Americans have been killed and mutilated by whites without the whites, at the time, in any way being called to account for their sins.

Do we need to understand this? Do we need to repent? Yes, we do. It can’t be said often enough.

The old South, where white school children, including myself, stood up for “Dixie” as they did for the national anthem, has to repent.