The phrase “God and country” means different things to different people, but when it is invoked to draw the color line between red and blue—while standing on the red side—it usually means something roughly like this: “God made this country great, and as long as we are a Christian nation, God is on our side.”
For a Christian, saying, “God is on our side,” or “My country right or wrong,” is idolatry, because that is making a god of patriotism and one’s nation. As Jesus said, we must always render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar’s and unto God the things that are God’s. Ultimate allegiance belongs to God, but God is not an American. He may choose to bless America or judge America, but He is not an American. Many Americans worship Him, but He is not an American. We must never presume that America’s policies serve God’s purposes.
The besetting sin of conservatives is to merge God and country as if they are virtually inseparable. A notable example of this error is proudly posted online by radio talk show host Chuck Baldwin, who quotes Pastor John Weaver of Georgia, a graduate in theology of Bob Jones University who has been preaching and teaching for thirty years.
The following excerpt is from Pastor Weaver’s sermon “The Truth about the Confederate Flag.” Pastor Weaver is at pains to establish the justness of the South’s cause as a revolt against the tyranny of the North—a battle of states’ rights over a tyrannical and “unlimited” federal government.
When an uneducated man, one that could not write, needed to sign his name please tell me what letter he made? An “X,” why? Because he was saying I am taking an oath under God. I am recognizing the sovereignty of God, the providence of God and I am pledging my faith.
May I tell you the Confederate Flag is indeed a Christian flag because it has the cross of Saint Andrew, who was a Christian martyr, and the letter “X” has always been used to represent Christ, and to attack the flag is to deny the sovereignty, the majesty, and the might of the Lord Jesus Christ and his divine role in our history, culture, and life….
The Confederate Flag represents truth against error, freedom against tyranny, light against darkness and the Kingdom of Christ against the Kingdom of Governance.
Notice how and with whom Weaver identifies the South as the “just” combatant in what he calls the “War of Northern Aggression,” a term used by some Southerners in place of the Civil War or the War Between the States:
You see, we have forgotten the fact that the War of Northern Aggression was a cultural war. It was a religious war and the North was predominantly Unitarian and humanist, while the South was predominantly Christian. And in reality, the War was an attempt to crush Christianity and Christian culture . . . What you and I need to do is this: we need to study our history. We need to study our heritage.
We need to come back to the basics. We need to come back to our Christian roots. I want you to turn in your Bibles to Jeremiah 6. Let me close with this verse. Jeremiah Chapter 6:16, “Thus saith the Lord, Stand ye in the ways, and see, and ask for the old paths, where is the good way and walk therein and you shall find rest for your souls, but they (the wicked people) said, We will not walk (therein).” What did God say? God said, “Stand in the ways and see and ask for the old paths, wherein is the good way.” Let me tell you something folks, I would trade the culture we have today in a heartbeat for the culture that the South had before the War of Northern Aggression.
That’s easy enough for Pastor Weaver to say, since he is white and would not be one of the three million African-Americans held in a horribly dehumanizing form of human bondage, and since he is a male and would not be a woman in a society where women couldn’t vote and were second- or third-class citizens in virtually every important way anyone could imagine.
Weaver’s views are the stuff of liberals’ worst nightmares, and they have good reason to object to his prejudices. I and millions of my fellow Evangelical and Catholic social conservatives object to it because it is an egregious error to conflate the lordship of Jesus Christ and the authority of the Scriptures with the cause of fallen human beings—a grossly dubious cause, at that. The “old ways” to which the prophet Jeremiah was calling God’s people were the ways of righteousness according to God’s holy standards, not the days of white supremacy.
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