BY : Donald Sweeting, Op-ed contributor
Will America’s pulpits be silent this weekend?
As our nation celebrates its 250th birthday, a recent survey by Lifeway Research reported that only half of Protestant pastors believe their churches should do something special to commemorate the nation’s anniversary (47% disagree, and 3% aren’t sure).
That should concern all of us. Not that I want churches to turn Sunday worship into a patriotic rally. Not because America is the Kingdom of God. Not because the pulpit should become a platform for partisan politics. But because this anniversary presents a rare teaching moment at a time when many in our nation are confused about freedom and increasingly severed from the moral and spiritual foundations that made ordered liberty possible.
To ignore such a moment is a wasted opportunity.
What’s behind the hesitation of so many pastors? Some fear civil religion. They have seen services where the flag seemed more central than the cross, and where patriotic songs carried more emotional weight than the hymns of the church, or when America is spoke of in near-redemptive terms. These concerns are legitimate. The Church must never prize loyalty to country over loyalty to Christ.
Others fear political division and offending someone. They worry that a pastor who speaks gratefully about America’s founding will be labeled a “Christian nationalist.” Or a pastor who acknowledges America’s shortcomings may be accused of progressive revisionism. Silence seems safer.
Still others have slipped into a neo-fundamentalism. Instead of being Gospel-centered, or Gospel-driven, they have become “Gospel-only” pastors. They no longer talk about public things. They have lost the biblical and theological categories for speaking about the nation at all.
Stranger still, they can speak easily about “blessing the city,” which sounds local, humble and missional. But when the subject becomes the nation, they freeze. They know Jeremiah’s call to seek the welfare of the city, but they forget that Scripture also speaks of nations, rulers, laws, justice, judgment, repentance, providence and the public responsibilities of God’s people.
Os Guiness would help us here. Across books such as A Free People’s Suicide, Last Call for Liberty, Zero Hour America, and his recent America Agonistes, Guiness, with the voice of a modern-day prophet. He has repeatedly warned that America’s crisis is not merely political. It is moral, spiritual, historical, even civilizational. America’s deepest danger is not simply that one party may defeat another. It is that many Americans no longer understand what freedom is, what freedom requires, and what makes freedom sustainable.
Guiness’s great theme is that freedom comes with responsibilities. It is not doing whatever we want. It is not autonomy without restraint. True freedom is ordered liberty — freedom under truth, shaped by virtue, directed towards good. He reminds us that American freedom was shaped by the freedom of the Exodus story. It was not “every man doing what was right in his own eyes,” rather it was freedom that led to a covenant. This is exactly where pastors should speak.
The American experiment did not arise in a vacuum. Its language of human dignity, natural rights, ordered liberty, conscience, covenant, accountability and the rule of law drew deeply from Jewish and Christian sources — biblical sources.
America is not Israel. America is not the Church. America is not God’s chosen nation in any redemptive sense. But the American experiment borrowed heavily from biblical assumptions about creation, human nature, moral law, sin, freedom, responsibility and a nation “under God.”
If these foundations are forgotten, freedom becomes fragile. If liberty is cut loose from virtue, it becomes license. If rights are severed from duties, they become weapons. If citizens lose the capacity for self-government, they will eventually invite external control. If truth disappears, politics is only about power — which is exactly where we find ourselves today.
This is why the 250th should matter to the American church. To speak to this occasion, from the biblical text, need not compromise the gospel. It is to apply the Bible’s public truth to the nation and the moment in which God has placed us.
Paul instructed believers to pray for kings and all those in authority. The prophets spoke to nations. Jesus commanded his followers to disciple the nations. Public life, national life, international life, are not spiritually irrelevant. This is a moment to tell the truth about nations.
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