It’s July, Welcome to Straight Pride Month 🇺🇸

Like clockwork, every June my social media feeds fill up with the same boring (but predictable) outrage from “good” Christians.

Evangelical pastors clutching their pearls over rainbow flags. Theobros posting memes about how “Pride is a sin.” Church people flooding comment sections with Leviticus verses they’ve never actually studied, let alone understood in context. And it is all fired like weapons at LGBTQ+ people who simply want to exist in the open.

For all of June, the word “pride” becomes a slur, and to Evangelicals, evidence of civilization’s complete collapse.

Then July 1st hits.

And those same people? They’re at the church decking out the communion table in red, white, and blue bunting, giving Old Glory a premium spot next to the pulpit. The Sunday morning setlist includes “God Bless America,” and the pastor wraps up his sermon with a patriotic flourish as the congregation belts out Lee Greenwood at full volume: “I’m proud to be an American, where at least I know I’m free.”

Pride.

Loud, unapologetic, flag-waving,
God-endorsed pride.

It’s July.
Welcome to Straight Pride Month.

What happens in American evangelical churches every July 4th weekend is, by every honest biblical and theological measure, a more direct violation of biblical law than anything that happens at Pride parades in June.

I don’t understand why we aren’t pushing back on the sin of straight-pride hiding behind patriotism.

Why is it only the gays?

If you’ve spent any time in conservative Christian spaces, you’ve heard Proverbs 16:18 more times than you can count: “Pride goes before destruction, a haughty spirit before a fall.” That little gem gets deployed like artillery aimed at innocent rainbow flags every June.

Here’s the problem. They haven’t read the verse. Not really. (It’s a common problem among Evangelical Christians.)

The Hebrew word behind “pride” in Proverbs 16:18 is gaavah—arrogance, haughtiness, the posture of someone who has made themselves the center of the universe. In this verse, pride is the pride of domination. It is the pride of kings who forget they are mortal. It is the pride of empires that confuse military victory with divine favor. If you open your concordance and trace that word (gaavah) through the Hebrew Bible and see whose pride the prophets are actually railing against, you are going to see that it is NOT the pride of a gay man in a sequined jacket or jockstrap in a parade.

And don’t get me started about jock straps, because I will remind you that King David danced naked in public. I will remind you that a guy who was said to be a “man after God’s own heart” was a Sun’s Out, Buns Out kind of guy in public.

So the pride of Proverbs isn’t the “pride” of Pride Month. The pride of Proverbs is the pride of Babylon. It is the pride of Egypt. It is the pride of Assyria. The pride of Proverbs is the pride of nations that run the world on the backs of the vulnerable and tell themselves God is cheering. It is the pride of nations that harm the weak and vulnerable, saying that they are just following the law and doing their national security duty.

Jeremiah 9:23-24 could not be more explicit: “Let not the wise boast of their wisdom or the strong boast of their strength or the rich boast of their riches, but let the one who boasts boast about this: that they have the understanding to know me.” The prophetic tradition has one consistent target for its condemnation of pride: Power. Human achievement. Military might. National exceptionalism.

American exceptionalism is pride.
America First is pride.
’I’m proud to be an American,’ is pride.

“I’m proud to be an American” is not a confession of faith, it is a boast in exactly the kind of strength and national greatness that Jeremiah says God is not impressed by.

But nobody is putting that verse on a meme in July, are they?

THAT kind of pride isn’t just overlooked by the American Church, it is condoned, honored, and promoted with fervor.

We don’t tell the story of the “Golden Calf” enough, to be honest.

I mean, don’t get me wrong, the Gospels are great… but Exodus 32 may have more to say in this moment than Matthew or Mark.

If you don’t know the story: Moses is up on the mountain. The people get restless. They go to Aaron (the top religious leader) and say, essentially, give us something we can see, something we can rally around.

Aaron collects their gold, melts it down, shapes it into a calf, and then (don’t miss this because most people miss this) Aaron says “These are your gods, Israel, who brought you up out of Egypt.” And the next day? They held a festival to the LORD.

They did not stop worshipping Yahweh. They just... decorated their worship with something made by human hands. Something that represented national power and identity. It communicated national strength and virility. It was a tangible, visible symbol to gather around and feel proud of, to feel like they had something to rally around since God had seemingly let them down.

It was focusing on the strength of their nation in place of the strength of their God.

Now walk into almost any evangelical church this Sunday and tell me what you see at the front of the sanctuary. In most, you will find an American flag, given a place of honor alongside or above the Christian flag. The communion table (the table that is supposed to hold the broken body and shed blood of a Palestinian Jew executed by the Roman Empire) will be dressed in red, white, and blue. You will find a congregation singing about national greatness with more gusto than they do about God.

Aaron would immediately recognize the problem.

The First Commandment is not subtle: “You shall have no other gods before me” (Exodus 20:3). No other gods. None. Not even the ones that look like eagles and carry rifles and promise to make the nation great again. God does not share an altar. The communion table is not a display case for the paraphernalia of empire.

This is the Bible’s biggest law—first in position, first in weight—and the God-and-Country crowd breaks it every Fourth of July weekend without a moment of theological reflection.

And truth be told, having a 🇺🇸 anywhere in the sanctuary, anytime, ever, is a violation of our allegiance to God.

The evangelical imagination has turned Jesus into a blue-eyed American who owns a pickup truck and loves the Second Amendment. The actual Jesus was a brown-skinned, Middle Eastern, Aramaic-speaking, homeless rabbi from an occupied territory who was executed by the most powerful empire on earth for being a political and religious threat.

And when that empire tried to get him on record about national allegiance, he pulled off one of the most subversive moves in the New Testament.

“Render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar’s, and unto God the things that are God’s” (Matthew 22:21).

People read this as a tidy separation of church and state. It is not. It is a declaration of complete incompatibility. The coin has Caesar’s image on it, so give it back to him. But you were made in the image of God (Genesis 1:27). You bear the imago Dei, which means you belong entirely, completely, and without remainder to God and not to any earthly empire, no matter how many stars and stripes it flies.

The earliest Christian confession was three words: Iesous Kyrios … Jesus is Lord.

In the Roman Empire, that was not a personal religious statement, it was an act of political defiance because the empire’s confession was Caesar is Lord. The first Christians were not saying their Lord was better than Rome’s Lord, they were saying Rome does not have a Lord.

There is only one Lord, and he was not born in Philadelphia on July 4, 1776.

Paul understood this. His letter to the Philippians was written from a Roman prison, addressed to Christians living in a Roman colony who were proud of their Roman citizenship. It contains this extraordinary line: “But our citizenship is in heaven”(Philippians 3:20). Not in Rome. Not in America. We live in the coming Kingdom that tears down every empire, without exception.

Revelation 13 (which envisions a great evil beast waging war against God’s people) is not a coded message about a future global dictator in “end times.” Revelation is a first-century document describing the Roman Empire as a beast that demands worship and kills those who refuse. The author, John, was not being metaphorical about the danger of empire, he was being a journalist intent on reminding future readers about what happens when you serve nations and empires.

And yet the American church has somehow made peace with the beast and is draping it in red, white, and blue bunting.

There is something deeply hypocritical about the church’s June-to-July pride pivot. The church’s hermeneutic about pride has nothing to do with faithful Bible reading and everything to do with power.

The God-and-Country crowd is not anti-pride in the least.

They aren’t interested in reading their Bibles carefully and arriving at a consistent theology that condemns human arrogance in all its forms. No, they are selectively deploying scripture to police the bodies and identities of people who threaten the social order they’ve built, while completely exempting their own nationalism from any theological scrutiny.

That is the definition of using the Bible as a weapon rather than a mirror.

Meanwhile, Psalm 139:13-14 just sits there, quietly devastating their argument: “For you created my inmost being; you knit me together in my mother’s womb. I praise you because I am fearfully and wonderfully made.”

God knits people, not flags.

And God does not make mistakes in the knitting. Every person who walks through the doors of a Pride celebration was knit together by the same God who knit together the people putting flags on the communion table. The audacity required to look at a human being and tell them that the way God made them is an abomination—while simultaneously pledging allegiance to a flag—is a theological feat that requires considerable commitment to not reading your Bible.

Joshua asked Israel to choose.
So did Elijah on Mount Carmel.
So did Jesus in the Sermon on the Mount:
“No one can serve two masters” (Matthew 6:24).

The God-and-Country church has tried to serve both for so long it can no longer see the contradiction.

The church has traded the cross for a flag and pledged allegiance to the wrong god.

This is not an abstract theological debate. This is happening in real churches, with real people, and it requires a real response.

Here is where to start:

• Name what you see, specifically. Don’t argue in abstractions. Point to the flag on the altar and ask the simple question: “Whose image is on that?” or “What does the First Commandment say about objects placed in positions of worship?” Specificity cuts through the fog faster than broad arguments.

• Use their Bible, not yours. Do not open with progressive theology. Open with Exodus 20:3-5, Jeremiah 9:23-24, and Matthew 22:21. Let the text do the confrontation. You are not challenging their faith, you are inviting them into a deeper reading of the Bible they claim to believe.

• Ask questions more than you make statements. “When Jeremiah says not to boast in national strength, who do you think he was talking to?” Questions create more internal movement than declarations. You are not trying to win an argument; you are trying to open a crack in the wall.

• Refuse to perform the nationalism. You do not have to make a scene, but: Simply do not stand for the national anthem in church. Do not sing the patriotic songs in a worship service. Your quiet non-participation is itself a prophetic act, and when someone asks why, you have an opening.

• Connect the June hypocrisy to the July idolatry explicitly. Most people in these churches have never had anyone draw this line for them. When they condemn gay pride in June and then celebrate national pride in July without any theological self-examination, that is the functional definition of a double standard that protects power. Say that.

• Start with shared love for scripture. The most effective entry point for a committed Bible believer is not progressive theology, it is a better, more rigorous reading of the texts they already love. Ask them to walk you through what the Bible says about pride. All of it. Including Jeremiah 9.

• Ask them to imagine the same scene with a different flag. “If the pastor put a Mexican flag on the communion table, would that feel different to you? Why? What about a Nazi flag, the way German churches displayed them … or a Confederate flag, as churches across the South still do?” The discomfort that question creates is exactly the discomfort that needs to be created.

• Tell them the Early Church story. Many believers have never heard that “Jesus is Lord” was a political confession against Roman imperial power. Many are unaware that the church was born as an anti-imperial movement. That changes the whole picture, and it is historically undeniable.

• Give them time and stay in relationship. You are not going to dismantle decades of theological formation in one conversation. Plant seeds. Lend them Brian Zahnd’s Postcards from Babylon. Come back to it. The deprogram from Christian nationalism is a process, not an event. Be patient with the people, even when you are impatient with the theology.

The prophets were not popular.

Jeremiah was thrown in a cistern. Amos was told to go back where he came from. Micah asked a church that was thriving by every external measure to take a hard look at who was being crushed in the process of that prosperity.

The word is the same today.

The flag does not belong on the altar, the nation is not the Kingdom, and the God who knit every human being together in their mother’s womb is not interested in being co-opted by an empire.

The Bible has far more to say against the pride of nations than it does against the pride of people who simply want to be seen as fearfully and wonderfully made.

If there is a sinful kind of pride and a month that is set aside to celebrate it, then it is the one with red, white, and blue, not rainbows, that is offensive to God.

Kevin Young writes about theology, identity, and the intersection of faith and culture from a progressive perspective. You can find more of his work at kevinyoung.substack.com.

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