Growing up in the “Lord’s Army”
How nationalism slipped into my theology one Sunday school song at a time
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We Called It Sunday School
Here’s the thing nobody told us: we weren’t just learning Bible stories between the juice boxes and crafts. We were getting our first lessons in what it means to be a Christian in America, and those lessons came wrapped in catchy tunes that would stick in our heads for decades.
I remember those Sunday mornings so clearly…the smell of coffee brewing in the church kitchen, the sound of little voices echoing down hallways lined with felt board Bible scenes, and always, always, the songs. We sang about Jesus loving the little children, sure, but we also learned other things. We learned that being a Christian meant being part of something bigger, something that required defending, something that had enemies lurking just outside our church doors.
Nobody sat us down and explained Christian nationalism as a theological concept (frankly, most of the adults probably couldn’t have defined it either). Instead, we absorbed it through repetition, through ritual, through the simple act of singing the same songs week after week until they became part of our spiritual DNA. And looking back now, I can see how those innocent Sunday school moments were actually forming us into a very particular kind of Christian…the kind who thinks following Jesus means picking up a sword instead of picking up a cross.
The Song That Started It All
“I may never march in the infantry, ride in the cavalry, shoot the artillery, but I’m in the Lord’s Army—yes sir!”
Can you hear it? That bouncy, irresistible melody that had us stomping our feet and saluting like tiny soldiers? I must have sung that song hundreds of times, complete with all the motions…the marching, the galloping, the finger-guns pointed at invisible enemies. It was fun. It was energetic. It got us moving when we were getting restless during the longer parts of Sunday school.
But here’s what I didn’t realize then: that song was teaching me theology. It was telling me that faith is fundamentally about warfare, that Christians are soldiers in God’s army, and that somewhere out there are enemies we need to defeat. The melody was innocent enough, but the message was forming my understanding of what it means to follow Jesus in ways that would take me years to untangle.
This wasn’t unique to my church, either. Drive by any evangelical church during Vacation Bible School season, and you’ll probably hear the same song floating out of the windows. It’s become part of the soundtrack of American Christianity, so common that we don’t even think about what it’s teaching our kids about the nature of faith, discipleship, and how Christians are supposed to engage with the world around them.
When Worship Becomes Warfare
The “Lord’s Army” song wasn’t an isolated incident…it was part of a whole ecosystem of military metaphors that shaped how I understood Christianity. We talked about “spiritual warfare” and “fighting the good fight” and “putting on the armor of God.” I participated in a door-to-door evangelism campaign as a teenager called “Frontliners.” Even our worship songs were full of conquest language…we sang about storming the gates of heaven and claiming victory in Jesus’ name.
Now, I’m not saying there’s no place for battle imagery in Christianity. The apostle Paul certainly used military metaphors, and there’s something powerful about the idea of struggling against injustice and oppression. But somewhere along the way, these metaphors stopped being metaphors and started shaping our actual approach to faith and politics. We began to see other people…immigrants, Muslims, progressives, anyone who didn’t share our exact theological and political views…as literal enemies to be defeated rather than neighbors to be loved.
The problem with always thinking of yourself as a soldier is that you start looking for wars to fight. And in American evangelicalism, we found plenty of them: the culture wars, the war on Christmas, the war on religious freedom. We learned to see ourselves as a faithful remnant under attack, which meant that any compromise, any attempt at dialogue or understanding, felt like surrender. You don’t negotiate with enemies…you defeat them.
Pledging Allegiance to Everything
One of my clearest memories from those Sunday school days is the triple pledge we’d recite every week: first to the American flag, then to the Christian flag (yes, that’s a real thing), and finally to the Bible. Looking back, the order feels significant…we started with our country, moved to our faith tradition, and ended with our sacred text.
But here’s the thing about pledges: they’re not just words you recite…they’re commitments you make. And when you’ve spent your childhood pledging allegiance to your country, your denomination, and your interpretation of scripture all in one breath, it becomes really hard to imagine that those loyalties might ever come into conflict. It becomes natural to assume that what’s good for America is good for Christianity, and vice versa. The gospel gets wrapped up in the flag so tightly that you can’t tell where one ends and the other begins.
This is how we ended up with a version of Christianity that knows how to stand for the national anthem but struggles with kneeling to wash feet. We learned to sing “God Bless America” with the same reverence we brought to “Amazing Grace,” and we never stopped to ask whether the God who blessed America might also be calling America to account for its failures and injustices. The prophetic tradition of the Bible…all those uncomfortable passages about justice rolling down like waters and the last being first…got overshadowed by a much more comfortable message about God being on our side, blessing our nation, and helping us win our wars.
The Jesus I Missed
Years later, when I started actually reading the Gospels with fresh eyes (instead of just hearing them filtered through sermons and Sunday school lessons), I was struck by how different Jesus was from the warrior-king I’d been expecting. Here was someone who told his followers to love their enemies and pray for those who persecuted them. Here was someone who said the meek would inherit the earth and the peacemakers would be called children of God. When Peter tried to defend Jesus with a sword, Jesus told him to put it away…because those who live by the sword die by the sword.
This Jesus didn’t look like the general of an army. He looked more like a refugee, a homeless preacher, a friend to outcasts and sinners. He spent his time healing people, feeding crowds, and telling stories about radical grace and unexpected mercy. His kingdom wasn’t something you conquered…it was something you received like a little child. His power wasn’t the kind that dominated others…it was the kind that served them, even unto death.
I started wondering: what would it look like to follow this Jesus instead of the militarized version I’d grown up with? What would happen if churches taught kids to sing songs about healing and hospitality instead of warfare and conquest? What if we spent less time talking about defending Christianity and more time talking about embodying it?
Don’t get me wrong…this Jesus is still challenging, still demanding, still calling people to a radical way of life. But the radicalism isn’t about building walls or defeating enemies. It’s about tearing down the walls that divide us and discovering that our supposed enemies might actually be our neighbors, our siblings, our fellow bearers of God’s image.
The Long, Slow Work of Unlearning
Here’s what I’ve learned about formation: it happens slowly, quietly, and often without us realizing it. Those Sunday school songs didn’t change my theology overnight…they shaped it gradually, week after week, until certain ideas felt as natural as breathing. And unlearning those patterns? That’s slow work too.
I don’t blame the Sunday school teachers who taught us those songs (though I do wonder if they ever stopped to think about what they were teaching us). They were products of their own formation, inheriting traditions and assumptions that probably felt as natural to them as they eventually felt to me. Most of them genuinely believed they were passing on authentic Christian faith, and in many ways they were. The love, the community, the sense of belonging…all of that was real and good and formative in its own way.
But I think it’s important to be honest about what else we absorbed along the way. The nationalism that got mixed in with the gospel. The militarism that shaped our understanding of discipleship. The us-versus-them mentality that made it hard to see critics or outsiders as anything other than threats to be neutralized. These weren’t accidental byproducts of Christian education…they were baked into the curriculum, sung into our souls, normalized through repetition until they felt like essential elements of the faith.
The good news is that formation can be redirected. The same slow, patient process that taught us to think of Christianity as warfare can teach us to think of it as peacemaking. The same repetition that drilled military metaphors into our hearts can be used to internalize Jesus’ actual teachings about love and reconciliation and justice. It just takes time, intentionality, and a willingness to let some old songs fade away while we learn new ones.
A Different Kind of Army
These days, I’m part of a different kind of Christian community…one that takes seriously Jesus’ call to be peacemakers, bridge-builders, and advocates for the marginalized. We still sing songs, but they’re about justice rolling down like waters and swords being beaten into plowshares. We still talk about spiritual warfare, but we understand the real enemy to be systems of oppression and cycles of violence, not other human beings.
Instead of marching in formation, we’re learning to walk alongside people who are different from us. Instead of claiming territory, we’re creating space for everyone to belong. Instead of defending our version of Christianity, we’re living it out in ways that hopefully make the gospel more credible and attractive to a world that’s been hurt by the church.
It’s messy work, this business of following Jesus without the safety net of nationalism or the simplicity of enemy-making. There are no easy answers, no clear battle lines, no stirring anthems that make you feel like you’re on the winning side of history. But there’s something deeply satisfying about it too…a sense that this is what Jesus was actually talking about when he said his kingdom was not of this world.
I’m not in the Lord’s Army anymore, and honestly (here’s where a little humor helps), I’m relieved…I was never very good at marching in formation anyway. But I am trying to be part of something that looks more like what Jesus actually started: a movement of ordinary people learning to love their neighbors, welcome strangers, and work for a world where everyone has enough. It’s not as catchy as a military anthem, but it’s a lot more like the gospel I find in the pages of scripture.
And for the first time in my life, that feels like a song worth singing.
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