[This is the final part of a three-part series examining America’s 250th anniversary through the lens of the Gospel. (Part 1: “A Nation Conceived In…”) | (Part 2: “The Story We Don’t Want to Tell”)]

The Sunday before July 4, many church services across the country will look something like this: the worship screen fills with an image of the American flag, the band strikes up something that sounds like a hymn, and the congregation is invited to stand. Perhaps, in one particular church, a woman in the third row stands with everyone else. She loves her country. She loves Christ. She has read along with this series, and she has spent the week sitting with a question she cannot quite put into words.

Something is off. She is not certain she is permitted to say so in church.

The question circling in her mind is theological. What does the Gospel ask of people who belong to both an earthly nation and a Kingdom that will outlast every earthly nation? How do we love a country honestly — honoring what is genuinely worth honoring, grieving what genuinely deserves grief — without confusing America with something it was never meant to be? As America marks its 250th anniversary^[1] with the largest birthday celebration in its history, that question is no longer abstract. Christian patriotism and the Gospel are not the same thing, and the church has rarely needed to understand the difference more than it does right now.

Two Kingdoms, One Life

The New Testament does not treat dual citizenship as a problem requiring a novel solution. It assumes dual citizenship as the ordinary condition of every believer. We live as members of earthly nations and as citizens of the Kingdom of Heaven, and those are not the same thing — but they are not necessarily at war with each other either. The tension is real, but it is navigable. The early church demonstrated that.

Paul grasps this with considerable precision. When a Roman commander is about to have him flogged, Paul invokes his Roman citizenship without hesitation: “Is it lawful for you to flog a man who is a Roman citizen and uncondemned?” (Acts 22:25). He uses the rights the empire grants him. He is not embarrassed by this, and he should not be. Elsewhere he instructs the church in Rome to honor governing authorities, pay taxes, and give respect where respect is owed (Romans 13:1-7). Earthly government is real, its authority is legitimate, and engaging it is appropriate.

Paul’s confidence in Roman citizenship has a clear limit, however. The deeper claim goes elsewhere: “Our citizenship is in heaven, and from it we await a Savior, the Lord Jesus Christ” (Philippians 3:20). The Roman passport is useful. The heavenly one is defining. When those two documents come into conflict, there is no ambiguity about which one governs.

Peter frames the same reality from the other side. He addresses believers as “sojourners and exiles” (1 Peter 2:11) — people who belong somewhere else and are passing through. They are to conduct themselves honorably among their neighbors, honor those in authority, and do good in the communities they inhabit (1 Peter 2:11-17). But the deepest thing that can be said about them is not their nationality. They are pilgrims.

The early church did not resolve this tension by abandoning one citizenship for the other. They participated in Roman society as workers, merchants, and neighbors. They did not withdraw. But they also refused to call the emperor lord in the way Rome demanded, because they had already given that title to someone else. They gave Caesar what Caesar was owed. They gave God what God was owed. They knew the difference, and that knowledge shaped everything.

The woman in the third row is not confused because she is unpatriotic. She is confused because the service around her appears to be treating those two categories as interchangeable. They are not. And recovering that distinction is the work this moment requires.

Christian Patriotism and the Gospel

Before reaching the harder questions, a clarification is worth making. Keeping earthly and heavenly citizenship distinct is not a summons to disengage from civic life. It is, if anything, the opposite. Jeremiah’s instructions to the Israelite exiles in Babylon were specific: “seek the welfare of the city where I have sent you into exile, and pray to the LORD on its behalf, for in its welfare you will find your welfare” (Jeremiah 29:7). The people of God have always been called to inhabit their political and cultural context, work for its flourishing, and pray for those who govern it. Engagement is the calling. Idolatry is the danger.

But the same distinction carries a danger in the opposite direction, and it is no less deadly. It is sometimes used to justify keeping Christian faith entirely private — governing the soul while exempting civic behavior from any moral accountability before God. The twentieth century demonstrated where this leads. The Holocaust was carried out in a country with centuries of Christian heritage; the German church, with some exceptions, failed catastrophically to oppose it, in large part because many had quietly separated Christian identity from any obligation in public life. The Rwandan genocide of 1994 occurred in a nation that was nearly 90 percent Christian; some of the killing took place inside church buildings, carried out in some cases by church members and leaders. The same error was at work in both: Christian identity was preserved while Christian ethics were abandoned where it cost something. Rightly understood, the distinction between the two kingdoms guards against both failures. But it has been used to produce this failure, and the church cannot invoke it without remembering what that has cost.

The standard that Scripture applies to political power is not partisan. Micah’s words are directed at rulers and at those who evaluate rulers: “He has told you, O man, what is good; and what does the LORD require of you but to do justice, and to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your God?” (Micah 6:8). These are the biblical standards of justice against which all political power is measured — not the platform of any party, but the measure Scripture applies to the exercise of power in every age. When the Hebrew prophets held Israel’s kings to this standard, they were not playing political favorites. They were applying the law of God without adjustment for whomever found it inconvenient.

Faithful engagement at America’s 250th anniversary requires the church to do the same.

Concretely, this means celebrating the genuine goods of the American experiment — ordered liberty, the rule of law, the principle that government derives its authority from the consent of the governed, the democratic tradition that has (imperfectly and unevenly) widened its circle over time. Rosie Rios, chair of the U.S. Semiquincentennial Commission, has described this anniversary as an occasion to honor “the contributions of individuals who built this country” and to imagine what the next 250 years might hold.^[2] There is something worth celebrating in that vision, even as we insist that celebration be honest.

And honest means this: the President, the Courts,  and the Congress are subject to the same biblical measures of justice and accountability as any ruler in any era. The treatment of immigrants and asylum seekers in ways that contradict Scripture’s repeated commands regarding the stranger (Leviticus 19:33-34; Matthew 25:35), the dismissal of due process for vulnerable populations, the exercise of power in ways that burden the poor and the marginalized — these are not partisan concerns. They are the concern of Micah, of Isaiah, of Amos. The church’s calling is to name them with the same biblical standard it would apply if the opposing party held power, and the same standard it should have applied when the opposing party did hold power.

What the prophets condemned most sharply in Israel was not the failure of enemies but the selective justice of allies — the willingness to hold others to a standard one refuses to apply to oneself. Matthew 5:13-16 calls the church to be salt and light: a preserving, illuminating presence, not a mirror that reflects back whatever the surrounding culture wants to see. The moment the church’s moral standards become a function of political loyalty rather than Scripture, it has lost the very thing that made its voice worth hearing.

The Church’s Unique Calling at This Moment

There is something the church has that no political movement possesses: a theology of lament.

Political movements can criticize and demand accountability. What they cannot do is hold genuine grief and genuine hope together, because their hope is always invested in the outcome of the contest. When the contest goes badly, the hope collapses. There is nothing on the other side of defeat for a movement whose ultimate horizon is political.

The church’s horizon is different. Paul describes the ministry entrusted to believers this way: “God…through Christ reconciled us to himself and gave us the ministry of reconciliation” (2 Corinthians 5:18). Reconciliation is a different category than political victory or defeat. It is the healing of broken relationships — between human beings and God, and between human beings with each other. This is work no political movement was built to do and that the church alone is called to pursue.

This means the church can grieve America’s failures without despairing of them, because its hope does not rest on America getting it right. It can confess what deserves confession — the sins this series has named, the church’s own complicity in some of them — because confession does not threaten the foundation on which the church stands. The Gospel has already accounted for human failure. Corporate lament is not defeat. It is faith taking history seriously while trusting a God whose mercies are not exhausted by it.

The church is also the only community whose ultimate horizon is genuinely international. John’s vision at the end of Revelation is not a nation standing before the throne. It is “a great multitude that no one could number, from every nation, from all tribes and peoples and languages, standing before the throne and before the Lamb” (Revelation 7:9). Every earthly country represented there will have had its sins and its genuine goods, its moments of faithfulness and its moments of catastrophic failure. America is among them — one nation in an enormous company, honored by the presence of people whose descendants were enslaved by its founding generation. That final picture does not make earthly citizenship irrelevant. It does put it in proper proportion. America is not the main story.

A Word for July 4

The woman in the third row can celebrate.

There is genuine good in the American experiment. The principle that governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed was a remarkable claim in 1776 and remains one. The constitutional protections for dissenters, minorities, and the press have — imperfectly and with constant pressure — constrained the worst uses of political power. The democratic tradition, for all the contradictions this series has traced, has expanded its circle. These things are worth honoring honestly.

She can also grieve. The history this series has named is not a partisan invention. The contradictions between the founding ideals and the founding realities have been documented, and their weight is still with us. To grieve this is not to hate America. It is to love it honestly enough to tell the truth about it. The prophets of Israel did not grieve over Israel because they despised the nation. They grieved because they loved it, and because they believed the God who called it to account was the God who could also restore it.

What she cannot do — what none of us can do while following Christ — is pretend that America is something it is not, or invest in its renewal the hope that belongs only to the Kingdom. We seek the welfare of this city. We pray for those who govern it. We work for justice within it. And we hold it with open hands, because what we hold with both hands is something else entirely.

The Two Horses

In the summer of 2021, before the current political moment had taken its present shape, we wrote this in these pages: “The American church has hitched herself to two horses, the horse of America and the horse of the Gospel. These two are fundamentally incompatible with each other.”^[3]

That observation has only become more pressing in the years since. The America250 celebration has given the entanglement fresh energy and fresh language. The two-horse problem has intensified, not resolved.

What we want to say at the end of this series is not simply that the two horses are incompatible — though they are. It is that releasing the horse of American civil religion does not leave the church with nothing. It leaves the church with the Gospel. And the Gospel is sufficient for the work the church is actually called to do.

The woman in the third row can put her hand down when the flag goes up on the worship screen. She can still stand and sing when the hymn is genuine. She can celebrate on the Fourth of July with her neighbors and refuse to call that celebration an act of worship. She can love her country with open eyes and an honest heart, grieve its failures without bitterness, and point beyond it to a Kingdom that has no term limits and will admit no challengers.

The Gospel makes this kind of citizenship possible — grateful without being idolatrous, honest without being cynical, hopeful without being naive. This is the testimony the church owes America on its 250th birthday. A better patriotism. The only kind grace can actually produce.

Questions for Reflection

• When your church or community holds patriotic observances, what theological questions do those moments raise for you, and how have you processed them?
• Where have you been tempted to apply biblical standards of justice and accountability selectively — more rigorously to political opponents than to those you support?
• What would it look like for your church to hold genuine grief and genuine hope together about America’s history and present moment?
• The article argues that the church’s ultimate horizon (Revelation 7:9) changes how it holds earthly citizenship. How has — or hasn’t — that eschatological perspective shaped your own relationship to national identity?
• What does it mean practically to “seek the welfare of the city” (Jeremiah 29:7) in your specific community, and how does that differ from investing your ultimate hope in political outcomes?

Prayer Points

• For the Church’s Prophetic Witness: Pray that the church would recover the courage and integrity to apply Scripture’s standards of justice and accountability consistently — to leaders it supports as well as leaders it opposes — and that this consistency would strengthen rather than undermine its witness.
• For Those Who Feel Torn: Pray for believers who are genuinely confused by the fusion of national identity and Christian faith they encounter in their churches, that God would give them wisdom, gentleness, and the freedom that comes from knowing their identity in Christ is secure.
• For National Lament and Honest Reckoning: Pray that God would grant the American church the grace to grieve what deserves grief in the nation’s history and present — and the hope to do so without despair, trusting that honest confession is where restoration begins.
• For Those Most Vulnerable to Political Power: Pray for immigrants, asylum seekers, and marginalized populations whose welfare depends on those in authority — that God would move those who govern to pursue justice and mercy, and that the church would not fall silent when they do not.

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^[1]“A milestone in the making,” America250, https://america250.org/americas-250th/.

^[2]“America Gears Up for a Landmark Year in 2026,” International Inbound Travel Association, https://www.inboundtravel.org/news/america-gears-up-for-a-landmark-year-in-2026.

^[3]Michael Floyd, “The Fall of Nations,” Blog post from The Gospel Today, August 13, 2021, https://thegospeltoday.online/the-shepherds-voice/the-fall-of-nations/.