Hymns that resist Christian nationalism

LOUISVILLE — A pair of Presbyterian pastors and hymnwriters, the Rev. Dr. Stephen M. Fearing and the Rev. Carolyn Winfrey Gillette, joined earlier this month to offer a workshop on “Hymns That Resist Christian Nationalism.” Together with the Rev. Dr. Leah Schade, Fearing founded the Clergy Emergency League, which hosted the 92-minute workshop for which more than 300 people registered. Watch the webinar here.

Fearing is pastor of Guilford Park Presbyterian Church in Greensboro, North Carolina. Gillette is designated pastor at First Presbyterian Union Church in Owego, New York.

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“Hymns teach. Hymns form memory. Hymns give language to our loves, our fears, our hopes and, of particular interest to us tonight, our loyalties,” Fearing said. “Long after a sermon is forgotten, this preacher will freely admit a congregation will often remember what it has sung.”

A lecture for The Hymn Society last summer by Andreas Teich “reminded us that hymns are not neutral documents,” Fearing said. “They are theological projects. They teach people how to imagine God, themselves and their neighbors.”

Fearing called Christian nationalism “a rival liturgy. It is a rival discipleship,” he said. “It trains us to conflate the kingdom of God with our nation’s destiny. It encourages us to replace the cross with a flag, discipleship with domination, baptismal identity with national identity and the lordship of Christ with the mythology of power.”

The church “must take special care with its hymns,” he said. “We need hymns that refuse to baptize national arrogance. We need hymns that expose the idols of violence, greed, fear and scarcity. We need hymns that widen our vision beyond tribe and border.”

He posed a few questions for participants to consider: What kind of disciples are our songs and our hymns forming us to be? Are our hymns training us to clutch power or relinquish it? Are they forming us in grievance and triumphalism or in humility and hope? Are they making us more useful to empire or mor faithful to Jesus?

Fearing read aloud Philippians 2:4-11, often called the “Christ Hymn.” When Paul sees the church threatened by worldly values, he doesn’t lecture it, Fearing noted, and instead sings. “In the Christian hymn that Paul sings, he gives us not a Christ who grasps, but a Christ who lets go, a Christ that Christian nationalists don’t know what to do with,” he said. “It’s not a hymn about climbing higher; it’s a hymn about stooping lower.”

To Fearing, the church’s truest song “is not a hymn of national glory, but divine humility; not a song of domination but of servanthood; not the song of fear but of self-giving love; not a hymn of empire but the song of Christ.”

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Gillette, who’s written more than 550 hymns that can be viewed here, said she tries to write lyrics “by starting where people are.” Among her goals is to help people “make connections between church and society, between faith and life — what it means in practical terms to love God and love their neighbors.”

Both hymnwriters shared a handful of their hymns with those on the call. Gillette wrote “In This Time of Great Reflection” because Sojourners asked her to contribute to a special edition of its magazine.

“This hymn is a prayer as we celebrate our nation’s 250^th anniversary,” she said. “We look at the best of who we’ve been as a morally responsible and community-building people, and we also repent of our sins and work hard to become who God is calling us to be — a loving and humble people.”

Her “O God of Love, This is a Time of Turning,” set to FINLANDIA, brought to mind a friend who’d been deported from the United States to China after not having lived there for 30 years. “These issues of immigrants, neighbors and refugees are real to many, many people,” she said. “Hymns are prayers. We need to pray we will have faith and that God will help us as we seek to labor on.”

Fearing wrote “We Trust the One Who Brought to Life” as a paraphrase of Psalm 146 and set it to KINGSFOLD. He gives permission for the hymn's use in congregational worship, with appropriate credit given.

“It’s my attempt to give the church language that’s biblical and singable and unambiguous in this moment when many of us are tempted to place our deepest trust in political leaders or political parties or myths of national power,” he said. “Christian nationalism thrives on misplaced trust. Psalm 146 says rulers are mortal and their plans perish, and that they are never worthy of the kind of trust that belongs to God alone.”

The hymnwriters also offered comments on hymns that have long been loved by online participants, including “This is My Song” to FINLANDIA and “Lift Every Voice and Sing,” a hymn that Fearing says “does a lot of theological work. It does not offer a sanitized or mythic version of America. It tells the truth. It sings of the stony road and the chastening rod.”

“Christian nationalism depends on collective amnesia,” Fearing said. “It requires us to forget enslavement and terror and white supremacy. It expects a nation draped in perceived innocence.”

The final line of “Lift Every Voice and Sing,” “true to our God, true to our native land,” “gets the order exactly right,” Fearing said.

“When the Poor Ones” or “Cuando el pobre” is a hymn “that’s shaped by the voices and communities that Christian nationalism treats as marginal or foreign or suspect,” Fearing said. “This hymn is a powerful corrective for the church. Christian nationalism always wants us to look for God in the wrong places — in flags, slogans, victories and displays of force. But ‘When the Poor Ones’ turns our heads in the other direction: If you want to know where God is walking, look to the poor, the thirsty, the peacemaker, the stranger, the neighbor.”

Together with the Wisconsin Council of Churches, Clergy Emergency League will offer a webinar, “Preparing for the Fourth of July Worship: A Workshop to Resist Christian Nationalism,” at 7 p.m. Eastern Time on June 9. Learn more and register here.