The Hymn Christian Nationalists Can’t Use

What “Amazing Grace” and John Newton’s confession still asks of Ameri

The day I became a good writer was the day I realized I sucked as a writer. I hid behind flowery language and clever turns, a thesaurus tab blinking on my screen like a crutch for my fear. You could tell. The day you started to care about my work was the day I stopped begging for you to care. I was desperately grasping at dopamine-fueled Substack refreshes for validation. The day you began to trust me as a witness, not a judge, was the day I admitted I was full of shit. I stopped auditioning and started confessing. I began writing to exorcise my own demons instead of trying to save the world. That’s when the work turned honest and finally had a fighting chance to matter. That’s Amazing Grace. If America has a promise worth keeping, it starts here.

If America’s promise starts with grace, its hymn was born in a confession, and it was British: John Newton was an English slave-ship captain who became an Anglican priest. London-born and hardened in the Royal Navy before he ran human cargo across the Atlantic, he knew the stench of the hold: salt, iron, vomit, fear; wrists eaten by chains, girls priced by age, names replaced by numbers.

“It will always be a subject of humiliating reflection to me, that I was once an active instrument in a business at which my heart now shudders,”

he wrote in 1788 in Thoughts Upon the African Slave Trade. He did not wash his hands and walk away; he turned witness against himself. He mentored William Wilberforce and urged him to stay in Parliament and fight until the law repented. That is how humility lights a fuse under an empire: a captain confesses, and the cargo he once counted returns as a conscience he cannot quiet.

Across the water, Black congregations took that confession and made it thunder. In praise houses and brush arbors, deacons lined out the words so every mouth could carry them; the moan rose, hands kept time, and “wretch” turned witness. Shape-note tunebooks paired the lyric with “New Britain,” camp meetings spread it through the South, and the Great Migration carried it into storefront churches from Chicago to Harlem. We as a nation sang this hymn long before we as a nation loved the people it tried to free. In January 1972, Aretha Franklin recorded a live double album, Amazing Grace, at New Temple Missionary Baptist Church in Los Angeles with Rev. James Cleveland and the Southern California Community Choir; released that summer, it became the best-selling gospel album in history and sent “Amazing Grace” back through living rooms and funerals like a weather front. That is how the song moved: from a British confession to a Black chorus, from guilt to grace, from a captain’s shudder to a people’s survival note.

White abolitionists did not meet this hymn in the abstract; they met it in print and prayer. Newton’s lyric entered pulpits through Olney Hymns (1779), crossed the Atlantic with pastors and printers, and found a home in the revivals of the Second Great Awakening. In New England meetinghouses and Midwestern campgrounds, congregations sang it from Southern Harmony (1835) and later The Sacred Harp (1844); the pairing with “New Britain” made the melody unforgettable. Quaker meetinghouses, Methodist class meetings, and Congregational churches used it in abolition lectures, temperance halls, and prayer vigils, because a confession hymn fit a movement built on moral inventory. Newton’s testimony gave white evangelicals cover to say the quiet part: profit had become a god, and repentance would have to start in the pews. It is easier to preach against a king than to repent of a ledger, but this song kept dragging the ledger into the light.

Here is the irony I cannot unsee: many of those same pews now wave Christian nationalism like a banner, and their chosen party courts the ghosts of secession it once opposed. The altar call has been refitted as a ballot test, the choir loft shares space with a flag, and “wretch” is preached at neighbors instead of whispered about oneself. A hymn that once trained white churches to confess is repurposed as a victory chorus. “Amazing Grace” refuses the assignment. Its grammar is inward first, repair first, mercy first; it will not march to conquest without losing its tune.

Imagine Abraham Lincoln returning to the party that claims his name, only to see its standard-bearer woo the people who broke our Capitol and marched a Confederate battle flag through its halls which was the first time that banner ever breached that building. Wait y’all, we don’t have to imagine. Lincoln warned that “the central idea of secession is the essence of anarchy,” and that “if destruction be our lot, we must ourselves be its author and finisher.”

White nationalism is the opposite of grace. Grace turns the finger inward, nationalism points it outward. Grace says the wretch is me, nationalism says the enemy is them. That logic loaded John Wilkes Booth’s pistol. He imagined himself defending purity against a president who dared bind the nation’s wounds with mercy. He called it honor and country; it was fear dressed for church, and it left Lincoln on a theater floor so the Lost Cause could breathe.

White nationalism is the opposite of grace, and Europe paid the price. A people enthralled by blood and soil turned neighbors into categories and borders into altars. The continent burned, cities fell into ash, trains carried human lists to their end, and millions of white Europeans died under a banner that promised supremacy and delivered ruin. Purity demands sacrifice, then runs out of strangers and starts feeding on its own.

White nationalism is the opposite of grace, and it corrodes institutions from the inside. It storms a Capitol and calls it patriotism. It threatens poll workers and calls it oversight. It rewrites textbooks, bullies school boards, baptizes party platforms, and drapes the cross in a flag. Courts become weapons, truth becomes a team jersey, and the civil service bends until ordinary people are afraid to do ordinary jobs. I know the temptation because I feel it too: I want to win more than I want to heal. That is how the sickness starts in me.

White nationalism always comes home to white people. The Civil War butchered the very sons raised to defend the plantation fantasy. The Klan whipped and lynched white “race traitors” when terror needed a new target. Europe’s fascists devoured their own nations, and our homegrown extremists have killed mostly white victims when their bombs and bullets reached federal buildings and festival crowds. Purity politics does not stop at the border of your complexion; it eats through kin, through class, through the very towns it swears to save.

Grace is the other grammar. Grace asks for confession before conquest, repair before rhetoric, belonging before banners. Hold that thought, because where nationalism devours, Grace can still teach a people to live.

It was Amazing Grace that loosened my jaw and let the painful parts come out in the open, the lines I kept behind pretty written sentences. It was Amazing Grace that broke my grip on performance, sat me down, and made me speak plain. It was Amazing Grace that took an English Royal Navy hand turned slave-trading merchant and set him in a pulpit to indict himself before God and man. It was Amazing Grace that taught him to name his ledger a sin and his profit a wound. It was Amazing Grace that let a nation which once auctioned children from Black mothers’ arms and sold wives from husbands find, for a moment, the courage to place a Black man in the White House with his Black wife. It was Amazing Grace that turned confession into stamina, sorrow into song, witness into work. It was Amazing Grace.

Here is my confession: I’ve sat at the keyboard high on indignation, throwing bottles at the Washington Post because the shatter sounded like justice. I needed a bad guy so I could point a finger and feel like the good one. I called it accountability when I wanted applause; I called it courage when I was chasing clicks; I called it truth when I was tuning for thunder. I worked the room, refreshed the numbers, worked it again. I was the loudest man in the room because I was afraid of being the smallest. And now, turning this Substack toward reporting, I keep asking if I’m doing the work or stitching a press pass out of opinions and if I’m telling the truth or cosplaying some goddamn pretentious coastal elite journalist.

Listen, here’s how I’ll earn your trust: I’ll show my receipts, name my errors as loudly as my claims, keep the ledger on the table before I touch anybody’s, and try to repair what I harm. If I start auditioning again, pull me up. Grace turned the camera around, and it’s staying there.

Now I see. I see the match in my hand and the mirror in it. I see how I wanted the amen more than the truth. I see that grace is not a vibe but a verb: confess, repair, return. If I am the wretch, the neighbor can be a neighbor again. Now I see again.

Let it be Amazing Grace that teaches the country the same lesson. Let it be Amazing Grace that turned an English sailor, hardened by the Royal Navy and the trade, into a priest who wrote his guilt in public. Let it be Amazing Grace that told him to call the ledger a sin and the profit a wound. Let it be Amazing Grace that moved through brush arbors and storefronts and a Los Angeles choir, turning sorrow into stamina. Let it be Amazing Grace that bends the proud toward repair.

Now I see again. If you are reading this with the flag still warm in your hand, I hear you: you do not want to be called a monster, you want order that keeps its word, you are tired of being sneered at from a screen. I am not asking you to love your country less; I am asking us to love it differently—by telling the truth first, repairing what we break, and daring to say wretch in the first person.

Let America learn to sing it in the right key, not as a victory march but as a first step. A British sailor learned this first; a Black chorus carried it; a nation can learn it still. We were blind when we turned a hymn into a weapon; now we see it is a mirror. We were blind when we treated a flag as a faith; now we see faith has a face. We were blind when we thought power would save us; now we see confession is the beginning of repair. Let the laws follow the confession. Let the budgets follow the apology. Let the flag step back from the altar so the human being can step forward. If we are blind, we can say so. If we can say so, we can see again.

“I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just; that his justice cannot sleep forever.” —Thomas Jefferson, Notes on the State of Virginia

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