At the last moment he said through clenched teeth, “Jesus loves you.”
I was kicked out of church, and it wasn’t a pretty scene—picture the sheriff of an Old West town throwing someone through the swinging doors into the dusty street. Yes, it was almost that bad.
Yet I hadn’t started a fight, become drunk and disorderly, or cheated at cards. My crime was confronting the wokeness I’ve tired of hearing being pumped from the pulpit of supposedly “conservative” churches.
It all started when the pastor of a fairly large, independent, Protestant church began lecturing his flock on the dangers of patriotism. Not pride, lust, envy, greed, or gluttony—patriotism.
I thought I’d heard every veiled attack on Christian MAGA supporters—all the ridiculous warnings against worshiping politicians (i.e., Donald Trump) instead of God—but this was an unabashedly open ambush to frame flag-wavers as evil-doers.
The pastor began his remarks with the old History Channel trope that America’s founders were deists, making the idea of a country founded on Christian values largely a myth. He then paraphrased parts of Andrew Delbanco’s 1999 book, “The Real American Dream: A Meditation on Hope.”
Here’s the background: In his book, Delbanco drew upon quotes from people like French political thinker Alexis de Tocqueville, anthropologist Clifford Geertz, and Transcendentalists Ralph Waldo Emerson and Walt Whitman to explore the American story.
Delbanco’s premise was that a culture needs to create a story to make sense of things like pain, death, and desire; they need a transcendent purpose, or it’ll grow restless and empty.
To answer that, Delbanco proposed the American story of hope came in three chapters: The Puritan God (roughly 1630s–early 19th century); the Nation (early republic through the mid-20th century, peaking around the Civil War, where Lincoln featured prominently); and Self (from the 1960’s onward, when hope fails as Nation worship recedes).
To summarize, he argues that for the first 200 years, God gave life meaning and kept our eyes focused on lofty realms. Then love of nation took over, and God took a back seat. To illustrate his point, the author used a quote from President Lincoln’s 1854 Peoria speech:
“Our republican robe is soiled, and trailed in the dust. Let us repurify it. Let us turn and wash it white, in the spirit, if not the blood, of the Revolution.”
Delbanco translates this as Lincoln transferring America’s sacred, redemptive language from Christ (“the blood of the Lamb”) onto the nation and the Revolution.
Using this interpretation, the pastor told us we’d been taught to worship our country and put it above God. Following Delbanco’s outline, he said that after the Sacred Nation phase, the culture devolved—by the 1960s—into the final stage of Self, where Delbanco says we still remain. And there aren’t too many people who would argue with that last bit. After all, long before Delbanco’s book, the celebrated journalist Tom Wolfe coined a term for a generation when he authored the 1976 article, “The ‘Me’ Decade and the Third Great Awakening.”
But let’s put the brakes on for a minute and back up to that destructive second phase of nation worship—because these same ideas have morphed into labels used by the progressive left—like Americanism and Christian Nationalism. I’m certainly not claiming Delbanco’s article was the only source for these hybrid terms, but now I’ve seen firsthand how his work has been used as a springboard to rebuke “USA” chanting Americans in 2026.
And let’s be clear, there’s no way I don’t believe the aforementioned pastor didn’t know that he was tapping into the zeitgeist that caused singer Hayley Williams to tell her fans that “The greatest threat to American democracy is Christian nationalism.”
I quietly approached the pastor and asked if this was the time and place to ask questions about his pulpit remarks. He said yes. I said I disagreed with his characterization of patriotism, or maybe I didn’t understand what he meant. He reiterated that “some people” have been worshipping their country more than God.
I told him that I’d known many patriotic Americans through the years, and they always put God first. In fact, Americans’ favorite motto and traditional triad has always been, “God, family, country.” And it was none other than St. Thomas Aquinas who laid the groundwork for the longstanding expression when he wrote:
“Consequently, man is debtor chiefly to his parents and his country, after God. Wherefore just as it belongs to religion to give worship to God, so does it belong to piety, in the second place, to give worship to one’s parents and one’s country.” Summa Theologica (II-II, Question 101, Article 1)
When I asked the pastor for a real-world example of what he meant, his eyes glazed over, and he mumbled something about his father. When I could see we were getting nowhere, I calmly asked if perhaps he was criticizing patriotism from the pulpit to condemn people he disagreed with politically.
His eyes narrowed, and he said, “I have my political views, too, you know, and I can say what I want!”
And that’s true. He can say what he wants, and hide his motives behind philosophical or theological jargon and still keep his tax-exempt status. Pastors are doing that on both sides of the political aisle. The flock also has a right to recognize this and challenge it. But not at that church you couldn’t.
The pastor’s face turned red and puffed up like a blowfish as he said: “Set your coffee down! I want you to leave now!”
He reached out his hand to take my arm, but suddenly stopped about an inch away from grabbing me. At this point, he spread his arms like he was trying to corral a wild horse and guided me toward the door. By then, many of his lingering parishioners looked scared, wondering what kind of threat I posed.
“Wow. You’re really doing this?” I asked.
“Let me be clear,” he seethed. “You are not welcome. Do not come back here.”
He held the door open with one hand and corralled me with the other.
At the last moment he said through clenched teeth, “Jesus loves you.”
“And Jesus loves you,” I said kindly and walked out.
I think it was my day job that made his sermon especially hard to endure. A few hours a week I work with senior citizens, and at that time, I was helping a 104-year-old World War II veteran and former Japanese prisoner of war.
This man had been physically tortured and starved. He’s given many interviews in which he described his longing for food during those long, hard days. One afternoon, I was privileged to have lunch with him as he held both hands over a simple sandwich and thanked God for it in a long, often inaudible prayer. I figured he hadn’t taken one meal for granted in 80-odd years.
I’d also seen this same man cry when he saw the American flag. It was the kind of love and loyalty to country that comes from something none of us want to experience, and only veterans understand.
So when I left the church that day, I had no regrets.
Today’s agitators fail to grasp that no one handed us a playbook. The birth of America was a miracle precisely because it was an experiment no one had tried before. It is exceptional, and it was—and remains—providential. I will not stay silent while others rewrite that history to serve their own agendas.
Published on The Epoch Times here:
https://www.theepochtimes.com/opinion/kicked-out-of-church-for-defending-patriotism-6106804
Photo by Susan D. Harris, October 9, 2026, Blakeman rally, Syracuse NY
