"I pledge allegiance to one Church, under the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, with liberty and justice for the repenting faithful"

"For in Christ all the fullness of the Deity lives in bodily form, and you have been given fullness in Christ, who is the head over every power and authority. In him you were also circumcised, in the putting off of the flesh, not with a circumcision done by the hands of men but with the circumcision done by Christ, having been buried with him in baptism and raised with him through your faith in the power of God, who raised him from the dead.

When you were dead in your sins and in the uncircumcision of your flesh, God made you alive with Christ. He forgave us all our sins, having canceled the written code, with its regulations, that was written against us and that stood opposed to us; he took it away, nailing it to the cross. And having disarmed the powers and authorities, he made a public spectacle of them, triumphing over them by the cross."
~Colossians 2:9-15~

"If one of the definitions of nationalism is that the nation-state affords one his or her primary sense of identity and belonging, and if Christians on the whole have articulated no real disagreement with such a view--indeed have been wholly complicit with such a view--then it is fair to say that the church has surrendered its central claim that Jesus is Lord to the nation's demand for an unquestioned allegiance to free market capitalism. On the surface, this may seem an outrageous claim. Churches continue, one could argue, to baptize; they continue, in the liturgy and in their efforts at formation and discipleship, to confess the lordship of Christ and to proclaim the good news of the gospel. Yet the more complicated reality is that the church in the West has failed quite spectacularly to understand and to embody in a meaningful way the radical implications of such a confession and proclamation: that those who utter them will find themselves in profound conflict with any and all other appeals for loyalty and fidelity, especially those which would claim for a nation the sovereignty and power that alone belong to God."
(p.7)

"Baptism, then, is a subversive act. It is, like the Eucharist, an act of disaffiliation. It confers an identity at odds with the ways we are named and claimed by family, nation, and ideology. Baptism is the constitution of a new people whose prior loyalties and allegiances are exposed, named, and radically reconfigured. In this way, baptism can also be understood to be a profoundly political act, for if the church itself constitutes a polis--an alternative ordering of human relations governed by the Trinitarian pattern of love-in-communion--then baptism forms a people whose politics are shaped not by suspicion and self-interest but by trust and mutuality, thanksgiving and generosity." (p.8)

Debra Dean Murphy, "Identity Politics: christian baptism and the pledge of allegiance." Published in "Liturgy - God Bless America: Public Worship and Civic Religion." Journal of The Liturgical Conference Volume 20, Number 1, 2005.