A God Who Asks Nothing
The Gospel according to Christian nationalism, secular patriotism, and the god both tribes built
The first time I was given both a Bible and a room to speak in was during my old high school’s FCA huddle.
My favorite teacher, who was also the baseball coach, led the club and had done so for years. He knew I was a Christian and that I had gone off to college for ministry, and he was one of my biggest cheerleaders. So whenever I came home, I’d give him a shout and see if he had space on the calendar. More often than not, he’d bump the teacher who was supposed to speak so that I could instead. He trusted me and trusted in me. That trust is why this story matters.
One week, as I was prepping, he told me the athletes needed a timely message. Work ethic and hustle were slipping across the spring programs, and he thought the best place to spark some change was with the believers on the teams. He even picked the passage: Colossians 3:23–24. The words had stayed with him: whatever you do, work heartily, as for the Lord and not for men. When I asked why this verse, he believed it was stronger than 1 Corinthians 10:31 and wanted these students to think more seriously about how they competed.
If I’m honest, I had some doubts. I was still new to studying the Bible in depth, but I at least knew enough of the context to feel some pause. Paul wrote those words to slaves whose work brought them no reward on earth.1 He was telling them their real Master was not the person they served each day. What I knew was that the main point of the passage is that your value does not depend on whether people notice your effort, because your inheritance is grace, not wages. It’s about resting from the need for human approval and letting that fuel your work.
I understood that, but I still bent and molded the message.
I shaped my talk around integrity: always doing the right thing and working hard because it’s the right thing to do. That sounds good, and it’s even true. But it’s not what the passage actually says. I made it say that because it fit the occasion.
Like any school club meeting, it was 7 A.M. on a Friday, and the room was still asleep. The students probably didn’t hear much since they were thinking about the weekend, or just wanting to go back to bed. But if I put myself in their shoes, I think they felt like they were being lectured instead of encouraged.
I didn’t think twice about it until years later, when I read more and studied more, realizing I wasn’t as smart as I thought I was. If I could talk to younger me, I’d say this: the Bible already teaches ethics. Integrity runs through all of it. There was a better and more winsome way to say what needed to be said. I didn’t need to contort the text into something it shouldn’t have been. I just needed to trust that Scripture already had what I was looking for.
I didn’t trust it, so I changed its meaning.
The Water We Swim In
This was my small mistake. But here’s the harder truth: it wasn’t just a one-time slip. It’s part of the environment we live in.
All of us come to the Bible hoping it will say what we want. We show up with our minds already made up: maybe about a belief, a complaint, a political issue, or a fear. Then we search for a verse to back it up. This, at its basest level, is what we’d call eisegesis: reading meaning into the text.
At first glance, it doesn’t seem dishonest. It feels like we’re just finding support. Our efforts can even feel like faithfulness or interpretation, especially since we’re usually aiming for something good. Work ethic is good. Life is good. Country is good. That’s why it’s so hard to notice when we do this: we’re rarely twisting Scripture toward something bad. We’re just aiming for something true, but not the truth the text was actually saying.
This goes far beyond a 7 A.M. meeting. Consider the biggest twist in American life, one so old we hardly notice it anymore: the belief that the United States is, in some important way, God’s nation. Our pastors quote 2 Chronicles 7:14 and make it mean that we’re the “people” God was telling Solomon about. We like the sound of it, so we own it and claim it.
Jon Meacham calls this idea the American gospel.2 He sees it as a good thing—a faith that, in his words, “shapes the life of the nation without strangling it,” a balanced middle ground between extremes.3 He means it as a compliment. And in some ways, he’s describing something real, even beautiful: a country where belief is part of public life, but no single church controls the state. But notice what this god is expected to do. He blesses, founds, watches over, and supports the nation. All positive, all joy, and all sunshine & rainbows. What he never does—in civil religion, at July 4th services, or with the flag by the pulpit—is judge the nation, call it to repent, or ask it to give up its own interests. This is a god with no cross, but really just Providence wrapped in Old Glory.
If this were a game of cards, then that’s the poker face breaking. It’s not just that people talk about God in public life. That in and of itself can be good. The real sign is when the god being talked about never asks for anything the group doesn’t already want.
Russell Moore, who frankly lost his denominational career for declining to bend the knee to the political powerhouse taking over his and my spiritual homeland, names the mechanism plainly: civil religions are “a kind of Great Commission in reverse, in which the nations seek to make disciples of themselves, using the authority of Jesus to baptize their national identity.4 The Great Commission runs one direction. This civil one runs the other.
And this doesn’t just happen in public life. It shows up in how we interpret the Bible. A passage about a mother’s faith turns into a case for a political cause. A psalm about God’s people becomes a slogan about America. A verse meant to comfort the powerless is used to push teenagers to work harder. The way I twisted Scripture in that classroom and the way a nation twists its founding story are really the same mistake, just on different levels: reading the Bible through what we already want, instead of letting the Bible shape what we want.
And if that feels like a familiar line that comes up in what you read from me, good. What I’ve done with Redemptive Correlation, the spine that keeps my words and thoughts upright, fights this urge. It’s the opposite of what Scripture is meant to do.
Here’s what should make all of us uncomfortable, no matter our politics (because both sides do this). The right uses Scripture to bless the nation. The left uses it to try to cleanse the nation. One side wants a God who supports the country; the other wants a country without God. But underneath it all, both want the same thing: the authority of something higher, without the Lord who actually gives commands. Both want a god who agrees with their views. Neither wants the God who says you shall have no other gods before me—and that includes the nation.
So before we talk about what the Bible really says, we need to admit what we hoped to find in it. You can’t read Scripture honestly until you recognize the prejudice you brought with you.
I brought my own agenda into that baseball coach’s classroom. But are you willing to ask yourself: what did you bring with you to church last Sunday?
Reading the Nation Through Scripture
So let’s do what eisegesis, the act of making the Bible say something we want it to, never does. Let’s look at our nation through the lens of Scripture, instead of trying to fit Scripture into our nation’s story.
We must begin where the Bible begins, or else we’ll get ourselves confused. People are made in God’s image—not to create meaning, but to reflect it. We are meant to be mirrors, catching God’s light and sharing it with the world. Image-bearers don’t create glory; they carry it. So from the start, worship has a direction: it goes from God, through us, into the world. If you get that direction right, everything else falls into place. If you reverse it, things fall apart.
But what happens in the Fall messes that up profoundly. Fast forward to Moses when he’s receiving the Ten Commandments, and this is exactly what happens at the foot of the mountain when the leader is gone.
The people get anxious. God seems far away, the future feels uncertain, and they want a god they can see—one that goes where they want and does what they need, matching their fears. So they make one. Here’s the detail many miss: they don’t call it a new god. Aaron makes the calf and says, “Tomorrow shall be a feast to the LORD”—using God’s own name. The people look at the gold they shaped and say, “These are your gods, O Israel, who brought you up out of the land of Egypt.” They give credit for the real rescue—the actual exodus, done by the real God—to an idol they made themselves.5
That isn’t atheism. It’s something worse. It’s taking the true God and reshaping him into something the group prefers. Not a rival to Yahweh, but Yahweh changed to fit their wishes—a god who simply follows where they already wanted to go.
Scripture is clear about what happens when people do this. You become what you worship. If you bow to a god you made, you slowly become like it—stubborn, hard-hearted, unable to see or hear.6 A god that never challenges you creates people who can’t change. The golden calf doesn’t just break the first commandment; it reverses the deepest part of creation. Instead of reflecting God into the world, people start getting their identity from something they made. That’s how every civil religion works: a god made from the group’s own resources, credited with their own story, worshiped until they can’t tell the difference between God and themselves.
Now put that false god next to the real God, and see how quickly it falls apart.
Paul writes to the people in Philippi—a Roman colony where citizens believed Caesar was lord—and gives them a different message.7 He says the true God, “being in the form of God, did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped, but emptied himself, taking the form of a servant … and became obedient to the point of death, even death on a cross” (Phil. 2:6–8).
Compare that to the golden calf, and the difference is clear. The idol is a god people grab, shape, control, and use to serve themselves. The living God does the opposite: he never stops being God, but he chooses not to grasp power and instead gives himself away.8 Civil religion is about taking. The gospel is about giving.
And here’s what the American gospel cannot digest: the true God did not bless the empire. In fact, the empire killed him — executed as a state criminal, by the death no Roman citizen could suffer. A civil religion can salute a god who founds nations. It has no idea what to do with a God the nation executed. The cross doesn’t underwrite the empire. It judges it — and then, unbelievably, offers it grace.
That’s the god with no cross, revealed. He was never the God of the Bible. He was just the golden calf, painted in red, white, and blue.
If this is what the idols say, and force us to believe when we worship them instead of the true God, what then is the case when we move forward in the true God’s kingdom, one that’s upside down and inverted away and against this earthly one?
This kingdom is not a Christian nation. It’s something bigger and stranger than any country. John describes the end of the story as a crowd “from every nation, tribe, people and language,” standing before the throne (Rev. 7:9). No flags to use to claim any ground, no party lines to draw, and every earthly loyalty gone in the light of the Lamb. This is the blessed nation the psalmist meant: not a piece of land, but a people—the covenant people, now gathered from every country, a chosen race and a holy nation with no border except the throne.9 The coming kingdom doesn’t baptize America and rubber stamp its advances. It puts all nations of all persuasions in perspective and gathers what it saves from each one.
Look at what happens to these people. Those who worshiped the calf became like it—stubborn, blind, and deaf as the metal they bowed to. Those who are redeemed also become like the one they worship: their robes are washed in the blood of the Lamb, they are led to living water, and God wipes away every tear. You become what you worship, but grace can reverse the process. If you worship a god shaped like your nation, your faith will match your nation’s desires. If you worship the Lamb who was slain, you are slowly and steadily changed into something no nation can explain—a people who can truly repent, who hold their country loosely, and whose hope was never tied to an election.
This means a Christian’s deepest identity is not with any birth certificate, passport, voting card, or bumper sticker. We are strangers and travelers here just passing through. We’re people who love their country like you love a good Airbnb on a long trip: thankful for the shelter, but we know it’s not home. That kind of citizenship is what finally separates a believer from the tribe. You can’t belong completely to a nation and completely to the Lamb. One of them has to be just a rest area for a bathroom break along the way.
So the story of the golden calf leaves us with one important question: what are you becoming?
The Tell
question all day long and kick that powder keg down the road. Don’t believe me? Go find Joel Webbon and Doug Wilson.
The real test is quieter and more personal, one that exposes our real state only after we answer.
When you hear a sermon that matches your politics, and it feels like worship, that feeling is the sign.
When a sermon just confirms what you already believed, and you leave feeling comfortable instead of challenged, pay attention to that comfort. Scripture, when read honestly, does bring comfort—but it also pushes back. It tells you things you didn’t expect. If God’s word never challenges you, never costs you anything, never says what your group would reject, you might not be hearing God. You might be listening to a familiar voice and calling it the Lord.
I wish I could say I’ve moved past this, but I haven’t. I still find myself reading the news with my Bible open, looking for a verse to support the point I already want to make. That tendency never fully goes away. But you can learn to notice it—that small feeling of discomfort, the warning before you go too far—and stop. You can choose not to shape the gold before it becomes an idol.
The real question isn’t which group is right. It’s whether you would still follow Scripture if it led you away from your group. Because if you read honestly, it will do that at some point.
That’s the invitation, and it’s actually better news than it might seem.
Because the God who cannot be twisted is also the God who never lets go. He judges the nation, but not to leave it behind. He judges it like he judged the golden calf: destroying what’s fake so we can worship the real thing again. The same word that calls you out of your group is the word that gives you a better home: a people with no borders, gathered from every nation, so that no nation can claim them.
That’s the kingdom worth belonging to. Not America made holy, and not America rejected. If we’re honest, that would just be lame. Lacking. Boring. The best kingdom is a countless crowd from every nation and language, standing before the throne, worshiping the one Lord no empire could control, and no cross could defeat.
So we hold our country loosely. We’re thankful for the shelter, but always moving toward our true home. We read the Bible as people who would rather be corrected and admonished by God than comforted by something we invented.
That in and of itself is the real practice. Come to Scripture ready to be changed. Pre-decide that you need to be corrected by the God-breathed words on the page. Let it shape you before you try to use it for your own moment. And when it leads you away from the group you started with, follow it.
It’s leading somewhere bigger and better, and it always was.
This piece was written using Redemptive Correlation, the method behind most of what runs here. It works in four movements: listen to the cultural question on its own terms, distill the longing underneath it, reframe it under Scripture's arc from creation to restoration, and respond with something you can actually live. The order matters. Culture asks; Scripture answers. Reverse that, and you get what this article is about.
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Colossians 3:23–24 (ESV). The instruction stands within the household code of Colossians 3:22–4:1 and is addressed to bondservants (δοῦλοι); its logic locates the servant’s true reward in Christ rather than in human recompense, which is why the passage functions as comfort to the powerless rather than as a lever for performance.
Jon Meacham, American Gospel: God, the Founding Fathers, and the Making of a Nation (Random House, 2006), Introduction. The phrase "the American gospel" is Meacham's own coinage, introduced in the Introduction.
Meacham, American Gospel, Introduction. In full: "The great good news about America—the American gospel, if you will—is that religion shapes the life of the nation without strangling it."
Russell Moore, Losing Our Religion: An Altar Call for Evangelical America (Sentinel, 2023), Chapter 3. Moore served as president of the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission of the Southern Baptist Convention; the book recounts the professional cost of his refusal to accommodate the political demands described here.
Exodus 32:4–5 (ESV). Aaron’s proclamation attaches the covenant name (יהוה) to the calf, and the people credit the exodus itself to the idol they have made. See Jay Sklar, “Exodus,” in Genesis–Numbers, ed. Iain M. Duguid, James M. Hamilton Jr., and Jay Sklar, ESV Expository Commentary 1 (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2025), 771–72.
On idolatry as the inversion of the imago Dei—the worshiper progressively refashioned into the image of the object worshiped, becoming sensory-dead and "stiff-necked"—see Richard Lints, Identity and Idolatry: The Image of God and Its Inversion, New Studies in Biblical Theology 36 (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2015), 89–94. The sensory-malfunction language derives from the golden-calf paradigm and echoes forward across the Old Testament (cf. Ps. 115:4–8).
On κύριος ("Lord") as an imperial title set in deliberate contrast to Caesar, and on crucifixion as the servile death from which Roman citizens were exempt, see Gordon D. Fee, Paul's Letter to the Philippians, New International Commentary on the New Testament (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1995), 197–99, 216–18; and Melick, Philippians, Colossians, Philemon, 106–08.
The "emptying" (κένωσις, 2:7) is not a subtraction of deity but the addition of servanthood: Lord becoming servant without ceasing to be Lord. On guarding this reading against a kenotic diminishment of Christ's divinity, see Richard R. Melick Jr., Philippians, Colossians, Philemon, New American Commentary 32 (Nashville: Broadman & Holman, 1991), 102–03.
On the innumerable multitude as the church drawn from every nation—the eschatological people of God who take up Israel's inheritance, designated by titles once given to Israel (cf. 1 Pet. 2:9; Exod. 19:6)—see Robert H. Mounce, The Book of Revelation, rev. ed., New International Commentary on the New Testament (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1997), 159–61, 166–68.