Battle Hymn of the Republic is much too religious to be the national anthem. America the Beautiful for the win. Star Spangled Banner is a dumb song, hard to sing, and about the flag (and war), not the country itself.
Generally agree with this. The Star-Spangled banner has the problem of really only making sense if you sing all the verses. We only ever sing the first verse, so we never get to learn if that star-spangled banner yet waves o'er the land of the free and the home of the brave. Plus, nobody in the last 200 years has any kind of personal connection to the battle of Fort McHenry.
As much as I'm a staunch secularist, I tend to think having to sing about the glory of Christ's bosom would be a small price to pay for getting 30,000 people to belt out "Glory glory hallelujah!" at the top of their lungs with accompanying cannon fire to kick off a baseball game.
This Land is Your Land resonates a lot with me today given the state of the country, particularly the line about "on the other side it didn't say nothing, and that side was made for you and me." Plus it would be great to have the national anthem be the product of an anti-fascist activist from Oklahoma.
America the Beautiful, even with its religious imagery would probably be my top choice. It is not explicitly Christian, and there are a lot of variations of it that could be selected and performed differently for different occasions. If anyone ever performed the Star-Spangled banner at its original pace, it would be a lot less dreary.
And one other note, for the infinite list of things wrong with the Confederacy, if it had achieved independence, "Oh I wish I was in Dixie" would have been a top-notch national anthem. Imagine the Olympic medal ceremonies...
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