Gen. Michael Flynn received a preaching lesson from me last year in a Baptist News Global article, “Don’t Take Preaching Lessons from General Flynn.” I quoted Flynn’s suggestion: ““What (preachers) need to be doing is they need to be talking about the Constitution from the pulpit as much as the Bible. They have to do that.”
My preaching lesson, like some of the ones I have offered my students over the past 20 years, didn’t take. The lesson didn’t help him. Flynn now has declared preachers need to “put aside the Bible and read the Constitution” during their sermons.
He made the comment as part of a speech at an unidentified location that looks like a church. The video was posted by a group called Patriot Takes. A full set of outtakes is published at Rumble.
Michael Flynn
For the sake of argument, let’s give Flynn’s proposal a chimera’s life. Flynn, absolutely fascinated by the founding documents of our nation, proclaimed there are better preaching texts in the Constitution than the Bible.
Does he realize an evangelical preacher armed only with the Constitution will have no verses of Scripture to back up their dehumanizing opinions about liberals, feminists, gays, lesbians, bisexuals, transgender people and queers? What would an evangelical preacher do without the Bible as primary weapon of debasing other humans?
Evangelicals like Flynn are awful enough with the Bible
Imagine the damage evangelicals would do if not at least restrained by the Bible. Flynn suggests an anarchy that would destroy Christian faith in the United States.
If he thinks through his preposterous proposal, he will want to withdraw it as soon as possible. He will be sending evangelicals into the “culture war” without the only weapon they possess.
“He will be sending evangelicals into the ‘culture war’ without the only weapon they possess.”
The irony should sink in deeply. It would be like sending our astronauts to the moon in Nike “Jordans,” a sweat shirt, and a pair of boxers. Evangelicals will not have a chance competing with the pedagogy of a civic morality that has shamed and condemned evangelicals for their anti-gay, ant-woman and anti-science positions.
Flynn imagines evangelical churches teaching children in Sunday school the Constitution and Declaration of Independence. There could be Constitution Memory Drills. Students would be given an Article, Section and Number and the first one to step out and repeat the exact words would win a point. Each local church would host Constitution Memory Drills. Then the local winners would compete at the associational level, the state convention level, and then there would be a National Constitution Memory Drill Tournament.
There could be Constitution “Sword” Drills for older children. The moderator would say, for example, Article I, Section 1, paragraph 2. Draw swords! Charge!”
Young people would tear through their individualized copies of the Constitution in booklet form attempting to find the exact passage in eight seconds or less. The first student to find the correct passage and step out would get the point. As in the contests for younger children, the event would culminate in a national tournament. Imagine the general’s glee at draping a gold medal over the head of the annual national champion of the Constitution Memory Drill.
Adult Christians could carry copies of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence in their pockets and purses always ready at any moment to pop it out and read an inspiring section to an unsuspecting person who doesn’t appear patriotic enough. There would be patriotic rallies and patriotic training. If a person wasn’t deemed to be sufficiently patriotic, there would be remedial seminars in far-away places that looked and felt like prisons.
Tragically, Flynn heralds a time like that envisioned by the prophet Amos: “The time is surely coming, says the Lord God, when I will send a famine on the land; not a famine of bread, or a thirst for water, but of hearing the words of the Lord. They shall wander from sea to sea, and from north to east; they shall run to and fro, seeking the word of the Lord, but they shall not find it.”
He wants parents to read the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence to their children. He has no idea what he is upending. Jews and Christians already have a pedagogy for their children.
In Deuteronomy 11, God says, “You shall put these words of mine in your heart and soul, and you shall bind them as a sign on your hand and fix them as an emblem on your forehead. Teach them to your children, talking about them when you are at home and when you are away, when you lie down and when you rise. Write them on the doorposts of your house and on your gates, so that your days and the days of your children may be multiplied in the land that the Lord swore to your ancestors to give them, as long as the heavens are above the earth.”
A church with no Bible is a church with no Christian theology
For all our differences in the culture wars, Christians share a 2,000-year theological, biblical tradition that binds us together. We argue and fight over the meanings, but we never have suggested “putting aside” the Bible. Thomas Jefferson took his scissors to the Bible and cut out the passages he didn’t like, but even Jefferson didn’t think preachers should throw out the Bible.
Yet somehow Flynn believes the Constitution and our nation’s other founding documents are based on the Bible, inspired by the Bible, contain the Bible.
The most ancient creed of Christianity, based on the Bible, is the Apostle’s Creed. The Constitution and the Declaration have only one article from the Apostle’s Creed: “I believe in God, the Father Almighty, Creator of heaven and earth.” The rest of the creed with its affirmation of Jesus as Lord and Savior, the Holy Spirit and the church make no appearances in the new “Holy Book” of Flynn.
Churches with the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence would not have a Savior. There would be no doctrine of salvation. The primary tenet of the faith would be universalism. The most important attribute of the new faith would be freedom.
The Declaration of Independence offers these words: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” To the chagrin of evangelicals, there is no hell in the Constitution or the Declaration of Independence — only “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.”
“The God the Declaration of Independence mentions — only four times — is not the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob.”
The God the Declaration of Independence mentions — only four times — is not the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. This is a detached, unavailable, unnecessary God. This is a God easily used by politicians to promote any heinous cause that elevates what the politicians want.
When you have a retired general and political/evangelical charlatan claiming the “God” of the Pledge of Allegiance is the God Christians should worship, that preachers should throw away their Bibles and preach the Constitution, you know we have entered a strange world void of any Christian content.
Stanley Hauerwas reminds, “The Christian God is the Father, Son and Holy Spirit. The Trinity is not some further specification of the generalized god affirmed in the Pledge, but the Trinity is the only God worthy of worship. The Christian pledge is not the Pledge of Allegiance, but rather is called the Apostles’ Creed.”
That someone like Flynn would advocate replacing the Bible as the most important text for worship is a sure sign that Christians no longer know how to recognize idolatry. The “Christianity” represented by Flynn in his ReAwaken America speech is not, in fact, Christian.
I call into question not only Flynn’s sincerity, but also his seriousness. I don’t know a single Christian pastor who would throw his or her (sorry, Southern Baptists) Bible in the trash and start preaching the Constitution.
At least he realizes the Bible is too dangerous for those attracted to authoritarian fascism and admits he wants to replace it. This abstract, malleable god comes straight out of Idols 101.
We have a ‘God’ problem
The name of “God” never appears in the Constitution. I suppose Christian nationalism doesn’t need a god. “God” appears only four times in the Declaration of Independence: God is called “Nature’s God,” “the Supreme Judge of the world,” the “Creator” and the god who offers the “protection of divine Providence.”
This is not a god that even atheists would find interesting enough to deny.
The Bible, on the other hand, has God as its subject. The name of God appears 4,282 times in the Bible, and this doesn’t include all the other names given to God or all the metaphors for God.
The Bible also warns us of people like Flynn who attempt to supplant the word of God with their own words of idolatry.
As for me, I’ll keep preaching from the Bible.
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