CharlotteDems.com Editor’s note: The following letter to the editor by CCDEC member Dan Rodriguez was published in the Sun on Saturday, Feb. 2nd.
Editor:
God doesn’t bless America. That’s not how this works. This kind of wrecks the narrative you’ve been told especially the past 18 months under this administration. This bit of heresy has done enough damage already.
I’m not sure where people are getting their taglines from, but it isn’t from the Bible. I know it isn’t from the coveted and regularly quoted John 3:16: for God so loved “the world” that he gave his only son.
God is in the worldloving business – not just the America-blessing. The world, that massive, spinning sphere of 7.6 billion disparate human beings: (Sunday school hymn) Brown and yellow black and white, they are precious in his sight, Jesus loves the little children of “the world.”
Please check out the scriptures; No America first. No making America great again. No flag or national anthems to pledge.
As for Jesus the son, born in the Middle East, wasn’t white, didn’t speak English, wasn’t evangelical and for sure wasn’t American. Jesus, a rabbi, spent his days as a street preacher (no cathedral), living off the generosity of strangers. A radical way of living where the poor were loved, the oppressed freed and the outcasts welcomed in.
As long as the far-right continue to combine God and America, they’re going to be whitewashing the Good News (1 Cor. 15:1-4) and shrinking God into their own image, corrupting his message of grace.
If your God is America, you need a bigger God.
Dan Rodriguez
Port Charlotte
