Recently, Sufjan Stevens wrote a post on Tumblr called “Love Thy Neighbor,” which was shared across a variety of cultural news sites. In it, the musician (known for his lush multi-instrumentalism and biblical lore-saturated/ambiguously-queer-but-maybe-still-just-religious lyricism) expounded on the reasons “you cannot pledge allegiance to a nation state and its flag in the name of God.” The post was clearly eloquent and specific enough (and shared enough; and came from an influential enough musician) to get the attention of the Washington Post, who has now published it as an op-ed.
Stevens opines that God, about whom much of his songwriting speaks, “has no political boundary. God is love, period. God is universal, nameless, faceless, and with no allegiance to anything other than love.” He goes on to declare the heresy of the notion of a “Christian nation.”
This was not the first time Stevens had blogged about U.S. politics and its need for acceptance, activating his deeply Christian standpoint in ways antithetical to that which we’re seeing from the isolationist Christian theocratic trends in Republicanism today. He wrote in response to Trump’s frightening blast of xenophobic executive orders:
Stevens stresses, in the note shared by the Washington Post, “eradicat[ing] all the corrupt, theological fearmongering they preach from the pulpit and from behind the political podium. Get real and get right with God,” he says. (Incidentally, he’s said/sung that last line quite a bit.)
Anyway, here’s more moving/personal religiosity:
(h/t Pitchfork)