An American friend said of a video of a Black girl singing ‘The Star-Spangled Banner’, ‘I am crying. 😭 I love America and everything this country stands for. 🇺🇲 This is America. No amount of propoganda [sic] will convince me otherwise.’
Far be it from me to deprecate patriotic feeling, but I find it quite odd to say, ‘I love America and everything this country stands for.’ What other country has people saying ‘this country stands for’ this and that? It’s hard for me to imagine someone stating what China or France stands for, as an object of patriotic feeling. There are, to be sure, certain virtues that various peoples distinctively value, such as the Roman sense of virtus; but to say that the Roman republic ‘stood for’ virtus (rather than, say, Senatus Populusque Romæ) could only have drawn blank looks from the Romans themselves.
Cogito, Credo, Petam 
What’s your comment on the recent crackdown of Xi Jinping on Christianity?
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Whether it turns out good or bad depends what the Church in China does. God may use persecution to purify the Church, or else the Church, trusting not in Christ but in other things, may double down in everything it has done wrong. To go crying to liberal Uncle Sam, asking for an alien potentate’s sanctions on China in the hope of relief from persecutions, would be exactly the wrong thing to do: it would spiritually defile the Church.
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