Guest Entry, My Country

y Country, by Ed Beddingfield, Pastor, Mememorial Baptist Church, Buies Creek, NC

Tuesday, July 1, 2025 (No. 575)

Dear Members and Friends of Memorial Baptist Church,

When I was in college I attached an American flag to the sissy bar of my motorcycle – not exactly like the setup in the photograph, but close enough.

Part of it was my lame attempt at “biker cool.” The film Easy Rider had just been released, in 1969. The lead character, Wyatt (a.k.a. “Captain America”, played by Peter Fonda) had painted his helmet and motorcycle gas tank like the flag: Wyatt also wore a replica of the flag stitched onto the back of his leather motorcycle jacket. Here he takes a last look at his wristwatch before he throws it away as he and Billy (Dennis Hopper) set out on their fateful ride from Los Angeles to New Orleans:

But I had another reason for flying the flag on my bike. The Vietnam War was at its height. The “war hawks” in Washington and in neighborhoods all around the country thought they were the only ones who cared about the flag.

I guess one might see why they would think so. Protesters everywhere, many of them college students, had burned and otherwise desecrated the flag. The Supreme Court consistently had ruled, however, that flag-burning was “protected speech” under the First Amendment; it was not so much the flag that was being disrespected as it was a national policy that was being disagreed with. But the hawks insisted that they were the ones who “owned” the flag, and they should be the ones to decide when, where and how it was displayed and honored.

Call me foolish, but I fervently believed, as I still do, that I own the flag as much as anybody else. We used to sing a song at J. Y. Joyner Elementary School:

This is my country! Land of my birth!

This is my country! Grandest on earth!

I pledge thee my allegiance, America, the bold,

For this is my country to have and to hold.

(“This Is My Country,” lyrics by Don Raye and music by Al Jacobs, 1940).

When they taught us that song in elementary school, I was naïve enough to believe them. I believed the country really did belong to me, and to everybody else, and not just to the Congress, or the President, or the Army, or the war hawks, or to anybody else who thought they were the only ones who owned it. Being a patriot meant that you loved your country, not that you necessarily held the same opinion as everybody else.

That’s why I flew the flag on my bike in college during the Vietnam War. I may have disagreed with the war, but it was still my flag, just like it was still my country. Nobody could take that away from me, even if in that instance I thought my country was in the wrong.

• • •

Stephen Decatur, Jr. was born on the Eastern Shore of Maryland in 1779. The son of a commodore in the Continental Navy during the American Revolution, he followed in his father’s footsteps and joined the Navy when he was 19. At age 25 he was promoted to captain, remaining to this day the youngest person to attain that rank. He was a hero of two wars against the Barbary pirates and also the War of 1812.

In 1816 Decatur gave an after-dinner toast at a banquet in Norfolk celebrating the victory during the Second Barbary War of 1815. He said,

Our country!

In her intercourse with foreign nations

may she always be in the right,

but right or wrong, our country!

(Wiktionary, “My country, right or wrong”)

The toast probably inspired more thoughtful reflection than Decatur ever intended. Thirty years later American novelist James Fenimore Cooper criticized that patriotism which shouts “our Country right or wrong,” regardless alike of God and his eternal laws (in Jack Tier, 1848, Chapter 10).

Carl Schurz was a German revolutionary who emigrated to America in the mid-1800s, joined the fledgling Republican Party, served as a Union general during the Civil War, was elected as a U. S. Senator from Missouri, became the 13th Secretary of the Interior, and retired as a newspaper and magazine editor in New York City. In a speech on the floor of the Senate on February 29, 1872, he offered his own amendment to Decatur’s toast, which has become almost as well-known as the original:

My country, right or wrong;

if right, to be kept right;

and if wrong, to be set right

(The Congressional Globe, vol. 45, p. 1287, cited in Respectfully Quoted:  A Dictionary of Quotations, #1641).

English author, literary critic and religious philosopher G. K. Chesterton was a bit more snarky:

“My country, right or wrong” is a thing

that no patriot would think of saying.

It is like saying, “My mother, drunk or sober”

(The American Chesterton Society, from Chesterton’s first book of essays, The Defendant [1901], from the chapter, “In Defense of Patriotism”).

The Germans – at least the Third Reich variety – were not so self-aware. In the July issue of The Christian Century editor and publisher Peter W. Marty recalls a wooden sign on the wall of the main gatehouse at the entrance to the Buchenwald concentration camp: “Recht oder Unrecht mein Vaterland.” (My country, right or wrong.)

Marty comments, “An uncritical love of country held a warm appeal for the Nazis. Authoritarian governments thrive on the people’s unquestioning obedience, and uncritical patriotism usually follows” (“The Good Kind of Patriotism,” The Christian Century, July 2025, Vol. 142 No. 7, p. 1).

• • •

I write this column on Tuesday, the first of July. Independence Day is only three days off. How are we, as Christians, to honor, to celebrate, even to love our country?

Jesus offers the most direct answer: “Render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar’s, and to God the things that are God’s” (Matthew 22:21). They had asked him, as we all know, about taxes. Jesus asked whose head was on the coin they paid the tax with. They answered, “Caesar’s.” “Then give Caesar what belongs to Caesar,” Jesus said, “and give God what belongs to God.”

Of course! Why didn’t we think of that? But wait a minute: what happens when Caesar and God both have a stake in the outcome, but they disagree? Which side wins?

Some of us are by nature contrarian: whichever side the majority is on, they’ll go the opposite. Others of us are by nature compliant: whichever side the majority is on, count them in! If I read the Bible correctly, and listen to Jesus closely, it doesn’t matter whether we’re complying or resisting. What matters is whether we’re doing right.

When asked which side of the Civil War God was on, Abraham Lincoln famously answered, “Sir, my concern is not whether God is on our side; my greatest concern is to be on God's side, for God is always right” (BrainyQuote).

Peter Marty concludes his editorial in The Christian Century with a nod to William Sloane Coffin, who was the university chaplain and pastor of Battell Chapel when I was in divinity school. Sarah and I worked under him as co-directors of the children’s Sunday School. In his 2004 book, Credo, Coffin identified three kinds of patriots, two good and one bad.

One bad patriot he called the uncritical lover: “My country, right or wrong.” Christians are called to make moral and ethical judgments, not to be blindly compliant. In Marty’s words, “our first loyalty is to the manger and not the throne.”

Coffin called the other bad patriot the loveless critic: “My country, always wrong!” Christians are called to be honest and fair-minded in their judgments, not to be blindly resistant.

And the good patriot, Coffin said, is the loving critic: those who love their country enough to call it out when it does wrong, in hopes that it might become better.

Isn’t that the way God loves us?