Any illusion that America is a Christian nation should have been dispelled by now. But some illusions are psychotic -- they hang on well past any evidence to the contrary. This illusion is one of those.
Nowadays, our culture rarely takes notice of anything Christian, unless it's in the context of controversy.
As Christians in the US, we are increasingly back where our forebears have been in many different contexts -- from slavery in Egypt, to exile in Babylon -- that latter word even becoming a shorthand way of describing a worldview antithetical to Christ. Think 2 Peter or Revelation.
That's why, for some time, I've insisted that America isn't Christian. It's Babylonian. It's Roman. It's pluralistic, multicultural, urban, profane, political, and immoral.
So how, then, should we Christians handle our situation?
The New Testament has lots of hints. And none of them find us wrapping the Bible in the flag. None of them encourage us to embrace Independence Day as a Christian holy-day.
Think St Paul writing to the Corithians. When it came to specifically ethical issues, the church at Corinth had all sorts of problems, of course, but it was both inclusive and transformative. It was radically inclusive in the sense that it apparently included those who had previously been "sexually immoral, idolaters, adulterers, male prostitutes, homosexual offenders, thieves, greedy, drunkards, slanderers and swindlers" (1 Corinthians 6.9-10) -- and yet at the same time it was dramatically transformative in that those words described people's lifestyles before they met Jesus Christ. "That is what some of you were", Paul says. "But you were washed, you were sanctified, you were justified ..."
When it came to the broader matter of engaging with the world around it, the church in Corinth sought to avoid two dangers: The first was that of isolating itself from the surrounding culture, cutting itself off from the people it was meant to be loving and serving. The second was identifying with society to such an extent in a desire to engage with it that actually the church began to absorb the values of those outside and so lost all its distinctiveness. Instead, Paul called the Corinthians to be incarnational: To be -- as Jesus was -- in the language of the early Christian "Letter to Diognetus", "in the world, but not of the world".
That's surely what 1 Peter encourages: "I urge you, as aliens and strangers in the world, to abstain from sinful desires, which war against your soul. Live such good lives among the pagans that, though they accuse you of doing wrong, they may see your good deeds and glorify God on the day he visits us" (2.11-21).
As residents of Babylon, but obedient citizens of the Kingdom of God under the reign of our Lord Jesus, that's the Christian calling in America. Not to be good Americans. But to be faithful Christians.
So forget the flag and all its pomp and circumstance.