One of my best friends in Seminary was from Haiti. He never ceased to be surprised by our ways in America. He used to say, “Why does anyone in this country have a nose, since there are no smells here?” He was quite terrified of the way we made sport of Halloween. If someone protested that it was all innocent fun, he would reply, “Then why must you x-ray the candy before you let your children eat it?” He was particularly amused by our national anthem. “Why do you glorify your flag?  You even pledge allegiance to the flag, not to the constitution.”

            I explained to him that that point of the song was that the flag still flew – that the nation had survived. I told him that we had many other patriotic songs not about the flag; that it wasn’t until 1931 that the Star Spangled Banner was officially designated our national anthem, and that another song was nearly chosen instead. “What song was that?” he asked. “The Stars and Stripes Forever,” I replied.

            To me, there is no replacement for our national anthem - not even Sousa’s ebullient march.  The tune by John Stafford Smith is the grandest of all national anthems. I am reminded of this every Olympics when our anthem gets played alongside the ditties and drearies of other nations. If I had to choose a replacement, though, it would be “God Bless America.”

            Written in 1918 by Irving Berlin, “God Bless America” has a tune almost as stately and grand as “The Star Spangled Banner,” and its lyric is superior (in my opinion) to that of our national anthem. “God Bless America” is a prayer.  It is a Biblical prayer consistent with the commands of I Timothy 2.1-3.  It is a prayer which has been answered abundantly. God has blessed America with riches of resources, rights, and opportunities.  No other nation has enjoyed such abundance ever.

            America is blessed – uniquely blessed – and we should be thankful to God for those blessings. The United States of America, however, has not been chosen as God’s special nation.

            Nowhere in the Bible does God look forward to a time when He will establish a democracy on a new continent. Jesus never sent his disciples to spread democracy and capitalism. God’s kingdom is the Church, not any particular nation. When John Winthrop preached his sermon on Christian Charity in 1630, and called the Puritan colony in Massachusetts a “City on a Hill,” he was calling his fellow settlers to be an example to the world (Matthew 5.13-16), not endorsing some notion that the nation which would be established a century-and-a-half later would bear the imprimatur of God.

            So can we please stop culling out all those Old Testament passages about Israel being true to God and applying them to the Unites States?  If those passages apply at all today they apply to the Church, not to any nation state.  We know this. We have a straightforward, reasonable approach to scripture – not a millennial or dispensationalist one.

            So why is it that so many of the articles and essays I read by our brethren which deal with the culture wars begin with II Chronicles 7.14, or some other Old Testament jeremiad?  That passage says: (if) My people who are called by My name humble themselves and pray, and seek My face and turn from their wicked ways, then I will hear from heaven, forgive their sin, and will heal their land. The writer usually goes on to describe in lurid detail the sexual sins of our nation, threaten the wrath of God, and promise some sort of Divine cupcake party if we’d behave.  While I agree that the consequences of sin have the same inevitability and the consequences of gravity, such an application of II Chronicles 7.14 and similar passages amounts to a grave abuse of scripture.

            America is not “called” by God’s name – nor are Americans “His” people any more than Uruguayans or Indonesians.  We cannot make a true call to repentance by misapplying scripture. So please, let’s stop misapplying it.