*Pastor John Gray is telling his congregation to stop calling America a Christian nation. The Love Story Church leader delivered the message Sunday in Greenville, South Carolina, days after the midterm elections.
“Stop saying that this nation belongs to God. Here’s what you should say. ‘My house belongs to God.’ I don’t know who this is going to offend, but America is not a Christian nation,” Gray said, according to The Christian Post.
Gray rooted that argument in the country’s history of slavery and racial violence.
“Because if you can sing ‘What a Friend We Have in Jesus’ and stand by while a man gets lynched in a tree, then you don’t really have the Jesus of the Bible,” he said. “Don’t tell me that this is a Christian nation when it was built on the backs of people that were not paid for their labor.”
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The sermon, titled “Turn the Lights On,” doubled as his reading of the Nov. 3 results. That election handed Democrats sweeping gains in Congress, including in places that backed President Donald Trump two years earlier.
Gray insisted he was not endorsing a party. “What happened on Tuesday? Pastor, are you coming out as a card-carrying member of the Democratic Party? I’m coming out as a prophet of God to help you to understand what happened wasn’t political. It was spiritual,” he said.
He also criticized Christians who treat a ballot as a test of faith. “The other part of this is that we have reduced what is spiritual to Democrat and Republican,” Gray said. He said conservatives show “selective outrage,” condemning flawed Democrats while excusing flawed Republicans.
The megachurch pastor used several races as evidence. Georgia, he noted, just elected its first Black governor, Keisha Lance Bottoms. In South Carolina, voters chose Democrat Dr. Annie Andrews over Republican Sen. Darline Graham Nordone, who held the seat since the death of her brother, Sen. Lindsey Graham. Gray told the church “his sister took his place, and she lost, because your last name doesn’t qualify you.”
“So you can’t blame minorities; you can’t blame women. Everybody shifted,” Gray said. “Yes, our nation has had its deep challenges with race and with culture and with construct. But the reality is it is not racial. It is spiritual.”
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