Tag Archives: patriotism

In Their Own Words: Conflating Patriotism And The Gospel

To follow up on that last post, here’s a sermon from Truth Baptist Church entitled In one Accord – Patriotic to God and Country.

There’s really too much here to catalog all of it. After some special music, the pastor starts out by claiming to have gotten his message straight from God while driving down the highway reading his Bible (yes, you read that right), then there’s lionization of patriotism as the ultimate in Christian virtue, sales pitch for the pastor’s book, random congregational pledge to the flag, and then…well…it just gets fun from there.

(Yes, this is the entire sermon, I felt like editing it down would ruin the overall feel of it. Feel free to stop at whatever point you actually start to get physically ill.)

God and Country Sundays

Today around the nation, fundamentalist churches will participate in God & Country Sunday. The national anthem will be sung. The pledge to the flag will be said. The military will be honored. Jesus may or may not get an honorable mention.

To be sure, the conflation of patriotism with Christianity extends far beyond the walls of fundamentalist churches but one can be sure that if they visit most fundy churches around Memorial Day, Independence Day, or Election Day they are much more likely to hear more about the Founding Fathers than our Heavenly Father. Fox News, The President, Congress, Public Schools, Welfare, The Second Amendment, gays in the military, tax laws, and the ACLU also get significant air-time during these patriotic services. Be sure to invite all your unsaved friends and family unless they are Democrats or (worse yet) Canadian.

And woe be unto him who would suggest that perhaps the American flag has little place inside a church full of the citizens of heaven…