“This is a time for us to celebrate America,” Prestonwood Baptist Church Pastor Jack Graham declared in his all-white suit in a scene reminiscent of a Jesse Gemstone sermon in HBO Max’s The Righteous Gemstones.
Top: Jack Graham last Sunday at Prestonwood: Bottom: Danny McBride as Jesse Gemstone on “The Righteous Gemstones.”
“Just because you love America doesn’t mean you don’t love Jesus more. And we do love Jesus most of all, but we love our country,” he said last Sunday at the suburban Dallas megachurch.
As the worship team played the songs of the Army, Navy, Air Force, Coast Guard and Marine Corps to the sounds of explosions and jets flying overhead, those from the congregation who had served in each branch stood when their song was played. With American flags and official branch seals displayed on the screens, commanders from each branch stood on the stage and saluted the congregation.
As they marched off stage, a men’s trio came forward to sing “God Bless America” as larger-then-life images of the American flag swirled across the wall-to-wall video screens behind them, as if they were draped in the flag.
It’s nearly the Fourth of July, so “God and country” services are on full display across the land — although few are likely as over the top as at Prestonwood, which also is known for its extravagant Christmas pageant with flying drummers suspended over the congregation.
Remember it was in downtown Dallas in December 2021 when then-former President Donald Trump delivered the Christmas message at First Baptist Church of Dallas, using the pulpit to criticize his successor, President Joe Biden and warning, “Our country needs a savior right now.”
Trump, of course, sees himself as that savior, as do so many of his followers.
Whether at Christmas or the Fourth of July, these Christian nationalist-themed services are nothing new. When I first began leading worship in the 1990s at an independent fundamentalist Baptist church, I sang a song for the Sunday morning service comparing the U.S. military’s sacrifice to Jesus’ sacrifice, and then comparing our commitment to Jesus with our commitment to the United States.
The worship of Trump and the United States is so over the top and obvious that it can be easy to condemn it as idolatry without reflecting on how its theology is built. But if we’re going to disarm Christian nationalism and turn authoritarian Christianity’s weapons of warfare into plowshares and garden tools, we’re going to need to be secure enough in our relationship with God and brave enough to question some of the underlying theological threads being used to sacralize harm.
Morning worship at Prestonwood Baptist Church June 29.
Echoes of empire
As he began his comments, Graham continued his nationalistic theology by citing the oft-quoted Psalm 33:12. “Blessed is the nation whose God is the Lord.” He immediately added, as in a prayer: “You are our God. You are our Lord. We know that many have turned from you. And many nations roar in these days. But may our nation be a beacon of hope. May we be a light to the world because [of] those of us who follow Jesus.”
But rather than reflecting on this passage’s ancient Near Eastern context in relation to the story of the Israelites, Graham implied this verse can be applied to the 21st-century United States of America by supporting the agenda of the Trump administration.
“Many good things are happening in the strong national leadership that we have,” he said, specifically naming Trump and Vice President JD Vance.
Then Graham moved into specifics, claiming, “This has been a dominant week for biblical worldview in America, especially with the Supreme Court.”
On the screen behind him, with a U.S. flag in the background, Graham highlighted the following decisions:
- SCOTUS allows parents to opt kids out of LGBTQ materials
- SCOTUS OKs states defunding Planned Parenthood in Medicaid
- DOJ loses censorship case — First Amendment prevails
- States move to defund DEI in public universities
- More Black pastors speaking out against Pride month
- Federal courts uphold protections for Christian owners
- Christian school wins hiring autonomy based on biblical conviction
- Multiple states push constitution literacy mandates
Each of these bullet points Graham rejoiced over are somehow related to gender and sexuality, race and ethnicity, and class. It’s no coincidence how liberation theologies focus on freeing people from white Christian supremacist hierarchies in each of these areas.
Graham’s pairing of the word “dominant” with “biblical worldview” is especially notable, given how empire is featured throughout the Bible as the way of Egypt, Assyria, Persia, Babylon, Greece and Rome. Dominance doesn’t seem to appear in the Beatitudes, in the Fruits of the Spirit, or in the Gospel story where Jesus is lifted up on a throne that just so happens to be a Cross.
And perhaps, that gets to the heart of my fundamental problem, not only with these Christian nationalist worship services, but also white evangelical theology at its core.
Image shown in worship at Prestonwood Baptist Church
‘Love ran red’
One of the more popular worship songs of the service was Chris Tomlin’s “Love Ran Red.” The song became one of the top 25 worship songs sung by white evangelical churches in the 2010 decade.
The song sounds cool. But what does it mean for love to run red? Because the top worship songs sung in white evangelical churches are promoted through algorithms determined by non-Christian publishing companies with millions of dollars at stake per song, they tend to say just enough to cultivate white evangelical passion and unleash white evangelical pocketbooks while being vague enough to let white evangelical imaginations fill in the blanks with whatever theological assumptions they’re bringing into the song.
Another song they sing includes the lyrics:
We wait for you Lord, for your justice … in our city.
Again, we need to fill in the blanks. What do white evangelicals think is justice in their cities?
You’re healing what’s broken, rebuilding the ruins.
Remember, this is a patriotic service about the United States. So what do white evangelicals think is broken? Who broke it? And how are the ruins being rebuilt?
Christ our King be enthroned, be lifted high.
Let your glory fill this city.
Given how Graham celebrated the Supreme Court’s decisions to encode white evangelical morality into our justice system as “a dominant week for biblical worldview in America,” it’s reasonable to assume the congregation of Prestonwood believes women, LGBTQ people, the poor and nonwhite people have broken and ruined the United States and that Christian supremacists wielding the government to enforce submission under the threat of violence are healing and rebuilding their city.
And because white evangelicalism has overwhelmingly chosen to sacralize the power dynamics of American empire rather than to subvert them, the blanks in Prestonwood’s celebration of “Love Ran Red” can be filled through the more explicit theology named in their nonpop worship songs.
From Prestonwood Baptist Church Sunday, June 29.
Wielding the terrible, swift sword of wrath
Empires tend to sacralize the power of those at the top, dehumanize those below and wage war against those who won’t submit. And that’s exactly what we find in Prestonwood’s patriotic worship service.
The gathering began with three white guys singing:
He is trampling out the vintage where the grapes of wrath are stored;
He has loosed the fateful lightning of his terrible, swift sword.
It’s the same song that was sung during Trump’s inauguration, which launched his reign of cruelty over women, LGBTQ people, the poor and nonwhite people.
While this song often is sung at patriotic gatherings, it speaks to a theology where justice is considered to be violence against human bodies, where the gospel is not the good news of liberation that comes from God identifying in and among the oppressed, but from God being represented as the empire wielding wrath on those below.
This top-down, wrath-satisfaction view of justice and the atonement was evident in Prestonwood’s use of other song lyrics,
’Til on that cross as Jesus died,
The wrath of God was satisfied.
As R.C. Sproul once said, justice is the most high God saying, “God damn you.”
Or as John MacArthur put it: “Calvary is more about the wrath of God than it is about anything else. God brought hell to Jerusalem that day. God showed up in wrath. And the interesting thing is, it wasn’t wrath on the Romans. And it wasn’t wrath on the Jewish leaders. And it wasn’t wrath on the people. It was wrath on the Son. God unleashed the full extent of his fury on Jesus Christ in wrath with fierce anger. And God, who is the punisher of all the souls in eternal hell, shows up in the darkness of Calvary to punish his Son. And he gives his Son eternal hell.”
In this white evangelical theology of justice, cruelty is its currency.
Patriots in prayer
“Christians should be patriots in prayer,” Graham told the church. “And we should be patriots in love and support for our communities.”
Jack Graham
But which communities? Or as someone once asked, “And who is their neighbor?”
For white evangelicals, perhaps their most important community is Israel because they believe Yahweh’s promise in Genesis 12:3 to bless those who bless Abraham means the 21st-century United States will be blessed by supporting the actions of Benjamin Netanyahu.
“Last week, we spoke of Midnight Hammer,” Graham recalled, calling it “the operation to take out the nuclear reactors in Iran and to end the war between Iran and Israel.” He didn’t mention the Pentagon Defense Intelligence Agency’s report that was leaked by someone the White House called “an anonymous, low-level loser in the intelligence community.” And he didn’t mention the head of the United Nations nuclear watchdog agreeing with the leaked report and contradicting President Trump and Secretary of Defense Hegseth’s over-the-top flexing.
Instead, in typical Righteous Gemstones megachurch fashion, Graham mentioned they built “a beautiful facsimile, a replica of the Western Wall” out in the lobby where anyone present could pray for Israel.
‘A lot of fear … for obvious reasons’
During the worship, the overwhelmingly white congregation sang about having no guilt and no fear. But then toward the end of the sermon, Graham finally recognized what immigrants are going through.
“There’s a lot of fear right now going on in the Hispanic community for obvious reasons,” he said.
For obvious reasons? Since he bullet-pointed the Supreme Court rulings earlier, could he bullet point some of these obvious reasons? Like your congregation’s theology of justice as violent wrath satisfaction against human bodies being applied to rightwing extremist politics?
“How could the affluent white megachurch possibly be racist when it allows a brown-skinned man to preach?”
He continued: “We want to make immigration legal. And we’re dealing with that immigration system that has been broken. And so many people who come to our church here are living in fear of what’s going to happen. So pray for them. And pray as Gilberto leads through this very interesting time, very important time in history.”
That’s right, the sermon for this “God and country” Sunday was delivered by a Hispanic man, Gilberto Corredera. How could the affluent white megachurch possibly be racist when it allows a brown-skinned man to preach? This sounds a lot like nearby Lakepointe Church putting a submissive woman in the pulpit on Mother’s Day.
Regarding Corredera, Graham said, “We are so glad to call him our own.”
When you have to say out loud that someone who looks different than you is “our own,” you’re saying too much.
The Patriot Tour
Lest we all exhale on Sunday, July 6, assuming worship as celebration of the United States through the promotion of Trump’s cruelty will be put on hold until the following Independence Day, Graham closed the service with a major announcement.
“At this Fourth of July season, we’re launching a yearlong celebration of our country,” he declared.
In addition to many events yet to be announced, Graham will personally lead the Patriot Tour, branded as a “Christian tour of Washington, D.C.,” which tour organizers call “the world’s most powerful city.” Graham will lead the tour to help Christians “better understand how our nation’s freedom intersects with God’s word” in order to “reignite your patriotism and passion for Scripture.”
For Prestonwood and Graham, there are no red flags here — only red, white and blue ones.
Yet Graham said he loves Jesus most by loving his country more. “This is all about God, but yes it’s about our country.”
Rick Pidcock is a 2004 graduate of Bob Jones University, with a bachelor of arts degree in Bible. He’s a freelance writer based in South Carolina and a former Clemons Fellow with BNG. He completed a master of arts degree in worship from Northern Seminary. He is a stay-at-home father of five children and produces music under the artist name Provoke Wonder. Follow his blog at www.rickpidcock.com.
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