Daily Verse | Judges 6:14
“Go in the strength you have and save Israel out of Midian’s hand. Am I not sending you?”

Welcome to another week of Thunderdome: America v. the Cultural Marxists. It’s not me – it’s them.

All of my kids chose soccer as their sport while growing up and two of them still play in college. I don’t know how many hundreds of games I’ve been to over the past twenty years or so, but my wife and I still show up to watch in person when we can.

At the start of every game the national anthem is routinely played. I have always stood at attention, facing the flag with my hand over my heart, treating it seriously as an American citizen and a model for my children. I take great pride in our nation and am grateful for its blessings to us and to the world.

It wasn’t until Colin Kaepernick, the washed up San Francisco 49ers quarterback, found it more financially lucrative to wear an afro and kneel for the Star Spangled Banner than to play football, that the anthem became a point of division in the U.S. He said that he knelt “out of respect” but that “I am not going to get up to show pride in a country that oppresses black people and people of color.” His actions, he said, were protesting “organized [police] brutality,” pitting black Americans against white Americans and, specifically, black men against white law enforcement officers. “There are bodies in the street and people getting paid leave and getting away with murder.“

Kaepernick’s narrative—and those who have picked it up as their own—has been a severe setback for race relations in the U.S. Inasmuch as the data doesn’t support an epidemic of white cops targeting and shooting black people, it is irresponsible for men like LeBron James to say, “Right now for Black people, right now when you’re hunting, we think you’re hunting us.”

That’s why I stopped watching the NFL and the NBA.

However, the ripples of their radical activism continue to this day on the soccer field. One of my daughters plays for a team where most of the players kneel for the national anthem and, after the anthem is played, the “black national anthem,” Lift Every Voice and Sing, is played and all the girls kneel for it.

I appreciate how unifying this “separate but equal” treatment is. It’s so 1950s and 60s. Maybe we could lock in that unity by also playing the German and French national anthems for the international players on the team!

The tragedy, as I see it, is that it’s affected everyone’s experience with national anthem. While at my other daughter’s game this weekend, I couldn’t help but be aware of the controversy attached to the flag and the anthem. I still turned to face the flag, put my hand over my heart, and hummed the Star Spangled Banner. But all the while I wondered if members of either team or the spectators would kneel.

It was in that moment, though, that I was struck by the obvious. The debate over the flag and anthem are often framed in terms of respect or disrespect of the flag or of honoring veterans or whether or not blacks are “oppressed” in this country or whether it’s offensive to use a traditional ceremony to be in the face of all Americans with your grievance.

But the issue goes deeper than that.

When a crowd of people at a NFL stadium or a college game or a pee-wee football game stand at attention to listen to the national anthem, we’re reminded in that moment that there is something larger that binds us all together. We may be met to metaphorically do battle with each other on the field of sports; we may cheer for our team and root against the other team; we may get ticked about the officiating and be passionate about winning; but at the end of the day, the flag and the national anthem transcend our competitive rivalries and remind us that, no matter the outcome, we’re all Americans.

That’s the value it has at the top of every game.

Kaepernick, James and those who have supported them splinter our national identity when they reject the flag and anthem. When a sport incorporates the “black” national anthem, well — I’m not black. That song doesn’t include me and I don’t pledge allegiance to the black national anthem. It’s like I’m watching or listening to another country’s national anthem during the Olympics. Nice and good for you, but my heart doesn’t swell with pride when I hear it. It means nothing to me.

The power-mad elites are squandering our birthright and setting us up for ruin by maintaining the fiction that because some people have less than others, we live under an oppressive regime. Rich, poor, middle-class, Black, Anglo, Asian, Hispanic, white collar, blue collar, single, married, Christian, Jewish, Muslim, Hindu—our national identity is what ultimately binds us together.

E pluribus unum.

Shame on those who would use our national identity to sow division. Let the grievance mongers sulk and whine in their self-imposed grottos about how hard they have it instead of celebrating their good fortune to live in (for now) the greatest country in the world.

Memorial Day is May 31 this year. Use the holiday to teach your younger children about our flag and our anthem, and the value of our national identity. If your kids are grown, use the day to reflect on the blessings this country offers to everyone who calls the United States of America home.

To keep our country unified, we must all proudly stand, without apology, for the American flag and our national anthem. If we lose our national identity, we will become more fractured, divided, weak and vulnerable than we already are. And that is a risk none of us should be willing to take.