In an excellent post at Christians In Context, Andrew Faris discusses his feelings about attending the graduation ceremony for his wife from Loyola Marymount University. In particular, Faris muses on using the song the national anthem and “God Bless America” for the opening and closing of the ceremony.
I think the best quote from the post is:
Which brings us all back to the basic problem with American patriotism: when we choose a nation as our Sovereign, we’re really choosing ourselves.
An interesting quote considering how many conservative Evangelicals associate patriotism with Christianity. In this one sentence Faris sums up the biggest problem that the Conservative Evangelical movement has had since the beginning of the Moral Majority and that is the marriage of God and Country. God is not a nationalist, He is an internationalist, no respecter of man made boundaries. To believe that God, since the New Testament era, has favored one nation over another is making the supposedly favored nation into an idol.
Dr. Gregory Boyd has written an excellent book expanding with more thoughts on this subject, The Myth of a Christian Nation:
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