It’s tempting these days to see a secessionist movement coming out of the sharp divide between Trump and Biden supporters. But long before Trump ran for office, back when Biden was a grandfatherly senator and later vice president, state officials began acting as if their colleagues in other states were the moral equivalent of leaders of rogue nations like Iran. The end of policy debates and the beginning of bans, restrictions on commerce, and punitive actions against American states and localities—these trends have played a major role in fueling secessionist sentiment.

A new poll from the University of Virginia’s Center for Politics finds that large portions of the American public now favor blue and red states going their own ways to form separate countries. The survey results, writes political scientist Larry Sabato, highlight the “deep, wide and dangerous divides” between Trump and Biden voters, presaging a new secession movement. But the schism was already evident in the increasing number of state and local officials enacting laws and policies that ban travel and restrict commerce with other American places with governments they object to—a trend that the Covid-19 emergency has only deepened. In everything from tax policy to travel to contracting rules, a secession movement within the states has been building for years.
California recently banned any state-sponsored travel by its employees to Ohio, based on a 2016 law that imposes penalties on states that California officials deem to be discriminating against lesbian, gay, bisexual, or transgender residents. At issue is Ohio’s new “conscience clause” law, which allows a medical provider to refuse to perform certain procedures, such as gender-transition surgery, if they violate a doctor’s religious or moral beliefs. The Golden State originally passed the 2016 legislation after North Carolina enacted a bill requiring people to use public bathrooms based on their birth gender. Five other states—Washington, Minnesota, New York, Vermont, and Connecticut—joined California in restricting commerce with North Carolina. Since then, the number of laws that allegedly run afoul of California’s 2016 measure have proliferated—and so have the bans. California now restricts government-financed travel in 18 other U.S. states containing 116 million people—including both Carolinas, both Dakotas, Texas, and Florida. Most recently, California applied its restrictions to states that require transgender athletes to participate in high school sports based on their birth gender—even though prominent LGBTQ athletes such as Martina Navratilova have endorsed a similar policy.
Once states and cities embark on these kinds of prohibitions, there’s nothing to stop them from spreading. And they have. A decade ago, for instance, Los Angeles restricted travel by city employees to Arizona because of its immigration policy and urged city departments not to do business with firms in the state. Among other things, city police refused to send helicopter pilots to training sessions taking place in Phoenix, and city council members refused to attend a National League of Cities conference in Arizona. A few years later, L.A. added its own restrictions on travel to North Carolina and Mississippi over their transgender bathroom laws.
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Far from being an artifact of the past, hymnals are vital resources that ensure we remain grounded in modes of piety above and beyond our cultural contexts and fixed in orthodox doctrine. When we consider that worship songs are one of the primary ways that Christians are catechized in the Christian life, it is hard to understate how important this is.

The hymnal is, for the most part, a dying artifact. Fewer and fewer churches have hymnals in stock, and even fewer actually make use of them during Lord’s Day worship. On the one hand, this makes a great deal of sense. It is expensive, after all, to buy a considerable number of physical books that eventually must be replaced—potentially soon, even, if children with Crayons get their hands on one or somebody spills their coffee on one. Why not just project the lyrics to whatever “Psalms, hymns, and spiritual songs” are being sung, up on the big screen? Some people will claim, too, that worship with screens has the added benefit of creating a more somatically natural worship experience. Instead of looking down at a book, one can look forward, project his voice outward, and see the rest of the congregation worshiping alongside him. And instead of holding an object in his hands, his hands are now free to be elevated or held open in a posture of worship. I recently had a lengthy argument with another Presbyterian friend who made all these points.
As compelling as these arguments may be, the demise of the hymnal comes with an unintended, but horrible, consequence: evangelical worship that is marked by “chronological snobbery.” This reveals something about our current moment and has significant theological implications. Abetted by the strong influences of liberalism and consumer capitalism, our culture is one that suffers greatly from historical amnesia and is obsessed with the here and now.
For example, if you quiz a typical American about pre-World War II history, most likely, they have scant knowledge. What little they do know might well be that whatever happened was certainly racist, sexist, homophobic, backward, anti-intellectual, unsophisticated, and outdated. C.S. Lewis, in his book, The Screwtape Letters, labeled this attitude “chronological snobbery,” and rightly characterized it as antithetical to Christianity. Indeed, our religion is not one that has to do with what is hot and fashionable in the current moment but is one that is predicated upon fixed eternal truths and, as J. Gresham Machen insists in Christianity and Liberalism, upon events—especially a set of particular events: the incarnation, life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ—that occurred in the past. We assert, with the church catholic through the ages: “As it was in the beginning, [it] is now, and ever shall be, world without end. Amen.” In fact, this creed, itself—known as the Gloria Patri —is one of the oldest hymns in the Christian tradition, dating back to the first few centuries of the church. It is an heritage of the early church that has been shared by all major branches of Christianity, including evangelical Protestantism. Indeed, it was included in most of the Protestant hymnals published over the last few centuries—even the low-church Baptist Hymnals! But it is a safe bet that most evangelical Christians today have never heard of it. This illustrates the problem we face.
Hymns and spiritual songs from different periods in history reflect different emphases, based on the cultural milieus in which those texts were written. If one looks at the Trinity Hymnal—one of the best modern hymnals out there—one will find a constellation of hymns from different time periods that have different theological emphases or use different sorts of language and style. For example, there are a few of those hymns that have no clear author but have been universal standards in the church catholic since the few centuries immediately following the Council of Nicaea, such as, again, the Gloria Patri, the Te Deum, which appears in the Trinity Hymnal as, “Holy God, We Praise Your Name,” and the Gloria in Excelsis, which appears in the same collection as “All Glory Be to Thee, Most High.” These texts have a characteristic emphasis on the Trinity properly understood, and the centrality of this doctrine in redemption and the Christian life. And far from being relics of Popery, these texts remained centerpieces of worship following the English Reformation. Thomas Cranmer included English translations of all three of these texts in the Book of Common Prayer. Even today, for Prayer Book Anglicans (and Presbyterians), these texts remain important. Other hymn texts in the Trinity Hymnal that were composed by Church Fathers or other early church poets generally emphasize these same themes—dwelling heavily on the Trinity, or walking, over their several verses, through the themes of the Nicaean or Apostles’ Creeds. Examples include the fourth-century text, “Of the Father’s Love Begotten;” “O Light That Knew No Dawn,” written by the Cappadocian Father, Gregory of Nazianus; and Ambrose of Milan’s poem, “O Splendor of God’s Glory Bright.” These texts, unlike the previous three, were less known to early Protestants. They were re-sourced and translated by English clergymen during the nineteenth-century Oxford Movement, which, despite its multiple theological issues that can be fairly summarized as “crypto-Romanism,” nevertheless wrought a laudable emphasis on resourcing hymn texts from the early church.
However, apart from “Of the Father’s Love Begotten,” which has become somewhat of a Christmas standard, and a very small part of the Latin text of Gloria in Excelsis—which, again, appears in the chorus of the nineteenth-century English Christmas carol, “Angels We Have Heard on High,” few evangelicals today know any of these early church hymn texts. Yet the doctrine of the Trinity is one of the doctrines that has most plagued the contemporary evangelical church. I could point to the heterodox doctrine of “social trinitarianism” that has so insidiously pervaded so much evangelical scholarship in the last half century, or simply call to mind all of the poor analogies for the Trinity that venture into modalism, Sabellianism, Arianism, and a whole host of other classic heresies that are prevalent enough among laypeople for Hans Fiene’s Lutheran Satire to have, years ago, created a funny video entitled “St. Patrick’s Bad Analogies” that remains evergreen and salient to all its watchers. Even in the Reformed evangelical world, the most popular systematic theology written the last few decades, Wayne Grudem’s Systematic Theology, despite its general ease-to-read and helpfulness, is unfortunately marred by the crypto-Arian error known as “Eternal Functional Subordination of the Son—a doctrine that ignited a firestorm of controversy in the evangelical world about ten years ago. I must wonder, if the evangelical church had been more diligent in catechizing its members by preserving, in regular worship, these ancient hymn texts that dwell so richly on Nicaean Trinitarianism, would we be dealing with so many trinitarian errors today?
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There is nothing mystical or magical about remembering words, but thinking about, dwelling on and actively pondering the depths of Scripture is an absolute privilege. We can best do this by knowing a passage of Scripture, off by heart, and thinking it through properly. Take Romans 5:1-5, for example, it’s very short but it is jam backed with marvellous truth. Memorising Scripture helps us against the struggles of sin and temptation because in our moments of weakness, we can turn our mind to the things of God. 

‘Spiritual discipline’ I know it sounds weird, it’s a thing that seems to have fallen from the lips of many Christians today. We don’t hear the phrase much, is it because we hate the word discipline? Is it because we worry that calling something spiritual makes it sound mystical and dubious? Or is it because we are sinful human beings who do not like to think about the fact that we need to train ourselves in godliness? It could be one, all or none of those things.
However, whether we use the phrase or not, every Christian engages (or at least should engage) in spiritual disciples. Prayer, Bible reading, fellowship, worship, fasting, and the list could go on. I’ve chosen to mention these because they’re probably the most well-known and practices disciplines.
There is one more disciple that I’m sad to see is not being practiced much today; Scripture memorisation. Memorising the Bible is not just about remembering words, like we would a joke or a riddle, it’s about internalising the very Word of God.
When I studied at Bible College we had to memorise a lot of Bible verses and we were tested and graded on our memory. I remember at the time being frustrated and thinking that it was an annoying practice. But now in pastoral situations, in conversations, in sermon prep and in my prayer life those verses continue to come back to mind and are hugely beneficial. Scripture memorisation is not a pointless chore, but it is a wonderful practice that helps us meditate on the Word of the Lord day and night.
Jesus knew Scripture and used it as he was being tempted by Satan in the wilderness. We’re told to let the Word of Christ dwell in us (Colossians 3:16). We’re called to be transformed by the renewing of our minds (Romans 12:2). There are plenty more reasons, to be found in Scripture, that help us see the importance of Scripture memorisation. So, go and memorise folks!
But I can almost hear the question as I write this post “I get all that, but how does Scripture memorisation help me?” We won’t begin to explore what’s wrong with that question (overtly me-centric, self-serving) that is for a whole new blog post. But I do understand why the question is asked, so here goes…
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