The words patriotism and nationalism can appear to be synonyms to the casual observer. American culture is steeped in patriotic gestures and rituals. When I was a boy, we saluted the flag every day in school. Every morning, before a single lesson, we stood beside our desks, put our hands over our hearts, and recited the pledge of allegiance. Nobody sat us down and explained it. You just did it, the way you learned to do everything else that mattered. That is where a patriot is made. Not in an argument, in a ritual you repeat until it becomes part of you. At our sporting events we still stand for a rendition of the Star Spangled Banner. We even place American flags in our church sanctuaries. That qualifies us to be called Christian patriots.

These are symbols we proudly display, just as citizens of countries around the world profess love and loyalty to the country of their birth and citizenship. And Black Americans have demonstrated a level of loyalty that some would call irrational in light of the manner in which America has exposed us to the most inhumanely sustained oppression known to the human experience.

So patriotism means loyalty to a nation that may not have been loyal to the patriot.

But although they sound like the same reality, nationalism, especially Christian nationalism in America, is a very different reality.

Patriotism is love of country. It is gratitude for a particular place and people, affection for home, loyalty to the land that raised you. A Christian patriot keeps God above country, which means he or she can love America and still tell the truth about her.

Christian nationalism moves the country up a rung. It fuses national identity and Christian identity until they cannot be pulled apart, and it treats the nation as divinely chosen, founded as a Christian nation, meant to be governed as one. Patriotism loves a country. Nationalism sacralizes it.

The old story in the third chapter of Daniel draws the line better than any definition I could write. Nebuchadnezzar built a golden image and commanded everyone to bow when the music played. The image was an idol. To bow to it was to set it in the place of the God of creation, to make a thing the people had built into a god. Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego would not do it. They were loyal subjects. They served in the king’s own government. But they had been raised to worship God and God alone, and they knew the difference between honoring a king and bowing to an idol. They were willing to walk into the furnace to keep that difference clear. A patriot honors the nation. A nationalist bows to it. Christian nationalism takes the country and makes it the golden image. That is the whole matter in one scene.

That difference shows up in a few concrete places. First is the posture toward a flawed nation. Christian patriotism can love and criticize in the same breath. Christian nationalism tends to defend and sanctify, so that criticism starts to feel like betrayal.

Second is the question of who belongs. Christian patriotism can include everybody inside the borders. Christian nationalism ties full belonging to a religious identity, and in this country that religious identity has usually carried a racial one alongside it.

Third is power. Christian nationalism wants the machinery of the state to enforce its vision. Christian nationalists are the Christian version of the Taliban, which wants Islamic theocracy instead of democracy. Theocracy is anti-democratic whether it is Islamic or Christian. Patriotism does not require government to enforce its religious values.

And fourth is what happens to the gospel itself. When the cross gets wrapped in the flag, the flag usually wins, and the gospel ends up serving the political project instead of judging it. Germany already showed us how that ends. In the 1930s a movement called the German Christians stitched the cross and the swastika together and told the church that Hitler was doing God’s work. A smaller group, the Confessing Church, said no. One of them was a young pastor named Dietrich Bonhoeffer, and he paid for that no with his life. When the flag and the cross were sewn onto the same banner, the flag won. It always does.

The Black church has practiced a patriotism that was critical and invested at the same time, and it did so precisely because it experienced the nation’s failures in its own body. Frederick Douglass asking what the Fourth of July meant to the slave is patriotism, not contempt. It is love that refuses to let the country off the hook. Jackie Robinson wrote near the end of his life that he could not stand and sing the anthem, that he could not salute the flag, because he knew he was a black man in a white world. That is not a man who hated his country. That is a man who loved it enough to name what it had done to him. The Black church tradition never confused America with the Kingdom of God, because it never had the luxury of believing the nation was already holy. Folks who loved a country that did not love them back learned a patriotism that is structurally immune to nationalism. They knew the difference between honoring a nation’s ideals and worshiping the nation.

There are those who wonder why there is such concern about Christian nationalism, because it sounds so much like patriotic Christians. But there is such an epidemic of ignorance among people who do not read books and do not listen carefully that many people think Christian nationalism is the equivalent of Christian patriotism. The two are not synonyms. Christian patriotism inspires churches to have American flags inside their sanctuaries. Christian patriotism causes Christian leaders to encourage their followers to abide by the rule of law. Christian patriotism is loyalty to the American experiment, which values religious freedom and pluralism. Christian patriotism is patriotic Christians who love their country and strive to live out the teachings of Jesus in America.

Christian nationalism asserts that America was founded to be a Christian country, and therefore anything non-Christian is considered anti-American. Christian nationalists believe that America must be led by people whose values align with their view of a biblical worldview, and that view is a very narrow interpretation of scripture. Christian nationalism represents a modern version of the Crusades, where the war uses political campaigns as its weapon of choice. Christian nationalism has racial views that emerge from a biblical hermeneutic built on the erroneous teaching concerning the curse of Ham. The story sits in the ninth chapter of Genesis, where Noah, waking from his own drunkenness, curses Ham’s son. For centuries white Christians took that curse, hung it on the dark-skinned descendants of Ham, and used it to bless the auction block. The racial injustice committed by the hands of Christianity is largely justified by this so-called curse.

We do not have to reach back centuries to see it. On the sixth of January in 2021, a crowd came up the steps of the Capitol carrying wooden crosses and signs that read Jesus Saves, and they carried them past a set of gallows they had built in the same yard. The cross and the noose in the same photograph. That is the whole argument of this essay standing on the Capitol lawn.

When thinking about Christian patriotism, think about the men and women who died fighting for colonial America to achieve their freedom from a British despot. When thinking about Christian nationalism, think about a Christian Taliban wanting for this country what the Islamic fundamentalists want in the Middle East.

The American experiment is certainly founded on principles that reside in the Judeo-Christian tradition. But the dominant theme of America is that we would learn to be E Pluribus Unum, out of many, one. One nation made of different people from different places who hold different beliefs. And so we strive toward that goal.

The major change was a financial commitment I made to retirement. I started saving and investing more than twenty years later than I should have. If I had started putting away $500 a month in my mid-twenties, I could have retired five to ten years earlier than I did. But in my twenties I was busy wearing nice clothes and driving nice cars, using credit cards to finance a lifestyle I could not afford. I was not thinking about retirement. I was not reading about investing. I was not even saving for emergencies. I was living paycheck to paycheck. Poor credit and no savings. I was a broke activist.

In my thirties I was trying to climb out of debt in preparation for marriage and family. I had accumulated over $100,000 in consumer and student loan debt, and I knew I could not bring a family into that quagmire. Then my paternal grandmother, Carrie L. Soaries, died, and she left me something that changed the direction of my life. Not the money. The example.

Carrie Soaries had very little education and a husband who had been incapacitated by a stroke. She did not own a car. She did not wear fancy clothes. What she did was buy, sell, and manage real estate. She traveled all over Brooklyn to collect rent from her tenants. No bank would lend her money, so she used her credit union to finance her acquisitions. A woman most people would have overlooked bought property one building at a time and died a millionaire. She left me partial ownership of one of her three houses.

I decided to adopt her strategy. I began eliminating debt, living within my means, paying my bills on time. My income did not change. My lifestyle did. I got married, had children, and the inheritance from my grandmother helped me become a homeowner. But still no retirement plan.

When I entered my forties the word retirement became part of my reality. My compensation package at the church included a small amount for retirement, and the church expected me to invest it. Instead, they gave it to me directly, and I spent it as I received it. I had spent the whole previous decade digging out of debt. Now that I was finally free, I felt like I deserved what that money could afford me. So I kept postponing. I told myself I would start next year. I said that for years.

As I approached my mid-forties I realized that if I did not change, I would have to work until the day I died. I sat down and did the math. I needed a 25-year plan to retire by 70. I also had college tuition in front of me. My sons were nearing high school graduation, and the 529 accounts I had started for them were underfunded too.

So I built a budget that most people would find hard to imagine. I would live on 51% of my income. The other 49% would go to retirement and my sons’ education. Living on half meant no new suits. No new car. No fancy vacations. No fancy restaurants. It was a needs-based budget, and the wants had to wait. The same man who financed a lifestyle on credit in his twenties chose to live on half his income in his forties. That was the turn.

I made some strategic real estate investments that accelerated the plan, the way my grandmother had taught me without ever sitting me down to teach me. And I created a few activities that supplemented my income and later became retirement income.

The 25-year strategy worked. I walked away from a steady income and health benefits into retired life without any worries. I started more than twenty years too late, and it still worked. That is not a testimony to my discipline. It is a testimony to grace, and to a woman with no education and a credit union card who bought buildings in Brooklyn and never lived to see the man her example made possible.

I know that question. I grew up on television that gave me Tarzan, and Tarzan gave a whole generation its picture of Africa and African people. So the question was familiar. When I started leading groups to Ghana in 2007, potential travelers asked me things that revealed how little they knew. People asked me where I stay when I visit, as if there are no hotels in Ghana. I had heard grown folks ask worse. But this was a five year old child, and that alarmed me.

In the 1980s I joined protests that pressured local television stations to stop airing Tarzan reruns that showed Africans as barbaric, uncivilized, half-naked darkies. Those stations pulled the shows. The images did not leave. A generation was raised with them burned into its consciousness, and images like that shape the choices people make in ways more subtle than open bigotry. Teachers look at black children through the lens of Tarzan. Other folks look at black people through the lens of Tarzan. And too many black people look at themselves through that same lens.

So how does a five-year-old come to that question? She did not ask it about China or India, where there are also large numbers of poor people. She had been exposed to something that fixed her small attention on the standing of African people in particular. Somebody handed it to her.

The way the world sees Africa, and the way it sees black people in general, did not come from nowhere. It has roots in Western Christian theology. Much of the racial injustice committed by the hands of Christianity was justified by the so-called curse of Ham (Genesis 9:19-29), the notion that Noah’s curse fell on the dark-skinned descendants of Ham and marked them for servitude. It is horrible reading of scripture put to work for cruel ends. That lie financed slavery, blessed the whip, and outlived both. It is still traveling.

That is the point I want to sit with. Religious belief carries a generational reach. Decades after Tarzan left the screen, more than a century and a half after emancipation, a five-year-old child is carrying an intellectual burden that was born in racism that was born in biblical distortion. She inherited a lie that older and more powerful scoundrels wrote a long time ago, and she is too young to know she is carrying it.

So every chance I get to lead a group to Africa, I take it. I show them the cultural heritage, the history that has been hidden from them, the real and growing economic opportunity. I watch grown people marvel at beauty and development they had been taught not to expect. They come home changed. And they come home knowing that the children in Africa wear shoes.

I understand why he said it. The seminary has done tremendous damage to the faith of a lot of people. I have watched it happen. A person walks in loving God and walks out unsure of what they believe. Some lose their faith entirely. That is real, and it should be taken seriously.

But I want to tell you why it happens. And I want to tell you how it can be avoided. Because what almost killed my faith is the same thing that saved it.

Most of the trouble starts with what people think the seminary is. When folks decide to go, they usually go out of love. They love God. They want to serve the church. They think the school exists to make them stronger in their faith. When I taught first semester students at one of my alma maters, I warned them about this on the first day. I told them the seminary is not there to strengthen your faith in God. That can happen. It happened to me. But it is not the point. The seminary is an academic institution. Even at the most evangelical schools, scholarship comes first. There are a few unaccredited schools that do not care much about that. But an accredited seminary cares about curricula, libraries, credentials, and rigor. You are there to study.

You also need to enter with a healthy sense of what your faith actually is. The seminary answers questions most of us never knew existed. It starts with a hard one. How did the Bible become the Bible? Most churches never touch it. Those of us who grew up in church know what the Bible says. We do not know how it came to say it. We know the stories. We skip the hard parts. We accept the whole thing as the word of God and leave it there.

As a child I never once thought about how the text was carried. I never thought about oral transmission. I never thought about translation from the original languages, or the canon, or how you take an ancient principle and apply it to a life in this century. So my first Old Testament class undid me, in the best way. My professor explained that writing was rare in the ancient world. The stories in the Bible were passed down by mouth, across many generations, long before anyone wrote a single word. That was one of the most liberating hours of my life.

I had been reading Genesis as if someone sat in the corner at creation and took the minutes. So I was offended by anyone who questioned whether God made the world in seven twenty-four hour days. I was raised in a tradition that taught something harder still. If you did not believe the way our denomination believed, you were not going to heaven. Even as a boy that gave me two problems. The Bible says heaven holds a number of people no one can count. Our little movement could be counted without much trouble. Those two things did not fit. My second problem was closer to home. Our teaching meant my grandmother would not make it in. And my grandmother was the finest Christian I have ever known. If grandma was not getting into heaven, then nobody was.

Here is what I finally understood. I had put my faith in the Bible instead of the God of the Bible. I was raised in what you could fairly call bibliolatry. I had made the book an idol. I loved it in the place where I was supposed to love the One it points to.

This is how so many Christians can know the contents of the Bible and still miss the truth about Jesus. The Bible is a written text. A written text hands you facts. And the main fact is that there exists this written text. But the truth the Bible carries sits underneath the facts, and you do not reach it by reciting verses. The writers set down their accounts. We can check those accounts by literary and historical study. The deeper truth takes real work. The violence in the Hebrew Bible, the gory stories, the hard commands in the New Testament, all of it asks something of the reader. It asks us to slow down and inquire. It refuses the easy answer.

The easy answer has a slogan. “God said it, I believe it, and that settles it.” That sentence sounds like faith. It has been the cover for some of the worst things done by Christian hands. Men held up a Bible and defended slavery with it. They found chapter and verse for the auction block and the whip. They found verse to abuse and silence women and to bless segregation. People have justified conquest and lynching and every kind of cruelty by pointing at the page and saying the page told them to. That is not reverence for the Bible. That is the misuse of it. When you worship the book instead of the God of the book, the book becomes a weapon. A movement that will not ask how a text came to be, or who it was written to, or what it meant before it meant anything to us, can make scripture say almost anything. Scoundrels have always known this. It is the oldest trick there is.

So how do you keep from it? You do not have to go to seminary. Most of you will not, and you do not need to. But there are three things you can carry.

Start with the first one. Put your faith in God before you put it in the book. The Bible reveals God. It is not God. Love the One it shows you, and let the text serve that relationship instead of standing in for it. When God is the object of your worship, the Bible can do its proper work. When the Bible is the object of your worship, you are already lost, and you will not know it.

Then, learn to read. You can practice this at your own kitchen table with your own Bible. Before you ask what a verse means to you, ask a few older questions: How did this text come to be? Who wrote it? Who were they writing to, and what were those people facing? What did it mean to them before it ever meant anything to you? Those questions are not an attack on scripture. They are how you honor it. They are the difference between hearing what the text says and hearing what God is saying through it.

And value the ones who are trained to help you. This is why the church needs seminary-trained pastors and teachers, and why a congregation should not be afraid of them. The nickname is wrong. The seminary did not kill my faith. It buried the small faith I brought in, the faith in a book, and it raised up a larger faith in the God the book reveals. A pastor who has done that work can walk you through the violent chapter and the hard command without handing you the slogan. That is a gift to a congregation. Fear of it has cost the church dearly.

I think of my grandmother again. She never took an Old Testament class. She never read a word about canonization. But she was never confused about the object of her worship. She loved the Lord, and the Bible was her means to Him, never her substitute for Him. She had the thing seminary spent years trying to give me. My rigorous training finally caught me up to a woman who prayed on her knees every night of her life. I am fortunate that it did.

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