Churchgoing: Bellevue Baptist Church near Memphis - Memphis, Tennessee

Christian Century, May 5, 1993 by Randall Balmer

As the teacber, Gary Groat, began his lesson he asked everyone to write down the four most important people or things in life. The class groaned over the difficulty of the assignment. Then Groat instructed everyone to cross off three because, he said, "the Christian life is a collection of priorities." That task completed, he admonished that "Christ ought to be the only item left on the list of any Christian."

The "creek bank" theology at Bellevue also manifests itself in adulation for the military and in old-fashioned patriotic fervor. Virtually every conversation I struck up at Bellevue included a reference to the church's annual "Celebrate America" extravaganza, held around the Fourth of July. Although the church has been staging these events since 1976, the bicentennial year, by all accounts the best such celebration occurred in 1991, the year of Desert Storm. Rogers and Whitmire, his minister of music, eagerly located a videocassette for my edification.

The show opened with John Philip Sousa's "Stars and Stripes Forever," as the performers, decked out in red, white and blue, processed up the aisles and onto the stage, accompanied by a military color guard and the rhythmic clapping of the audience. Some of the performers brandished batons, others military drill rifles. Children carried the flags of every state in the Union. The performers then recited the first few lines of the Declaration of Independence interspersed with readings from the Bible in an apparent effort to underscore the affinity between the two documents. Later in the program, and the flag-waving, banners, fireworks, and musical paeans to the United States, the narrator's voice boomed a bit of historical revisionism over the sound system: "Did you know that out of the 55 founding fathers who were the architects of our Constitution, 52 were orthodox, evangelical Christians?"

Midway through the program, "Celebrate America" paid special tribute to the armed forces with a musical medley: caissons rolling along, anchors aweigh, going off into the wild, blue yonder, from the halls of Montezuma. Several vignettes illustrated various wars, and I wondered if it was significant that in the Civil War scene, the Confederate soldiers outnumbered the Union soldiers by two to one and a Union soldier was being taken prisoner at gunpoint.

The show ended in a flurry of flags, with the performers and the congregation singing "I'm Just a Flag-Waving American" and waving tiny flags furiously. Even the violinists in the orchestra had the Stars and Stripes affixed to their bows. The indoor fireworks were detonated again during the finale; red, white and blue balloons descended from the rafters. The worship center looked for all the world like the Republican National Convention. "There are some who would criticize us for somehow speaking of America and God in the same sentence," Rogers declared in his summation. "They sneer and they talk about wrapping the cross in the flag and civil religion and all of that. But I, for one, am grateful to be a God-fearing American."