INDEPENDENCE DAY

Monday, July 4, 2022

Christ Church, Woodbury, N. J.

 

On this Independence Day, when we thank God for the liberties we enjoy in this country, it seems appropriate to reflect on the virtue of patriotism. For indeed, patriotism is one of the classical Christian virtues. 

In the thirteenth century, Saint Thomas Aquinas classified patriotism as a subcategory of the virtue of justice, by which we render to each their due. In Thomas’s scheme, just as filial piety is the virtue by which we render to parents and family the respect that is their due, and religion is the virtue by which we render to God the worship that is his due, so patriotism is the virtue by which we render our earthly homeland or country the loyalty that is its due. 

 

We become who we are as individuals in and through the communities that establish the context for our human flourishing. Our personal stories are inescapably embedded in the larger community narratives that establish our shared identities with our neighbors, colleagues, and fellow citizens.

 

The motive of patriotism is gratitude for the blessings we’ve received as citizens of our country: for all the ways in which it’s made possible not only our “way of life” but the very formation of our individual identities. Even when we judge our nation and find it wanting, we do so according to principles that we’ve learned in the context of our national life, and the freedom of thought, expression, debate, and indeed religious practice that it makes possible.

 

From the beginning, however, Christians have understood that loyalty to the nation (or to the emperor, king, or government) has definite limits. Aquinas writes that when the claims of family or nation come into apparent conflict with the claims of God – then duty to God comes first. (Aquinas knew this conflict firsthand, having defied his family to enter the Dominican Order.) The early Christians prayed for the emperor and all in authority, but they went to the lions rather than deny their faith or yield to Caesar’s demand to be worshiped as a god.

 

Moreover, there’s nothing unpatriotic in principle about protest and dissent. On the contrary, love for our country is often the strongest motivation for working for reform and the remedying of injustice in our national life. 

 

C. S. Lewis writes of love of country in his classic work The Four Loves, published in 1960. He argues that some forms of patriotism are good. Christ himself exhibited love for his country when he voiced his lament over Jerusalem. Patriotism grows out of love for one’s home: “love of old acquaintances, familiar sights, sounds and smells.” But this type of patriotism recognizes that just as one loves one’s own home, so foreigners no less rightly love theirs. Writing as an Englishman, Lewis remarked: “Once you have realized that the [French] like café complet just as much as we like bacon and eggs why, good luck to them and let them have it. The last thing we want is to make everywhere else just like our own home. It would not be home unless it were different.”

 

But then Lewis issued a dire warning: like the other forms of love, patriotism becomes demonic when it divinizes its object, when it makes its object into a god. Then, what began as a virtue degenerates into idolatry, with catastrophic results. Lewis understood those results only too well, having fought in World War I and having lived through World War II.

 

What Lewis was getting at, I think, was a distinction that others have made between patriotism and nationalism. For unlike the classical Christian virtue of patriotism, the modern ideology of nationalism is a perversion of patriotism. 

 

To my knowledge, the first person to oppose the two terms in this way was Charles de Gaulle, who said in 1969, “Patriotism is when love of your own people comes first, nationalism is when hate for people other than your own comes first.”

 

According to both Aristotle and Aquinas, each of the virtues is opposed by vices of excess and defect. Defects exhibit too little of the virtue; excesses take the virtue’s underlying impulse to irrational extremes. The virtue itself strikes the “golden mean” between the two. So, for example, the virtue of fortitude or bravery strikes the mean between the defect of cowardice and the excess of recklessness or foolhardiness.

 

In this scheme, the vices springing from a deficiency of patriotism are ingratitude and disloyalty to one’s country. In their weakest form, these may take the form of a casual disrespect or irreverence for national symbols. In their strongest form they take the form of active subversion and treason.

 

On the other hand, the vices associated with an irrational excess of the patriotic impulse are nationalism, chauvinism, and xenophobia. So, the virtue of patriotism strikes the mean between the defect of disloyalty and the excess of xenophobic nationalism.

 

While I’m on the subject, I’d be remiss if I didn’t say something on the question of displaying the national flag in church. I know that’s been a point of controversy in this parish, with the flags having been removed about twenty-five years ago, and then returned in the past few months.

 

My own point of view—which has evolved over the years—is that there’s nothing inherently wrong with displaying the national flag in church. In worship we offer God our whole selves, everything that we have and everything that we are, including our identity as citizens (or residents) of our county, and the flag’s presence in church symbolizes that.

 

It’s important to recognize, however, that for some Christians, such displays risk mixing religious and national symbols in a way that elevates both the flag and the nation it represents into objects of worship – precisely what C. S. Lewis was warning us against.

 

Believing as we do in the separation of church and state, some Christians also argue that just as it would be inappropriate to have a crucifix mounted on the wall above the judge’s bench in the courthouse down the street, so it’s equally inappropriate to display the national flag among all the religious symbols also on display here in the church.

 

Whatever our own views on the matter, in the life of a Christian community it’s crucial to respect the convictions of those who take an opposite view. Without compromising our own principles, sometimes we need to forbear with one another out of love. 

 

For better or for worse, it will be up to the next rector to decide the matter. In the Episcopal Church, the office of Rector does carry that authority. For the time being, however, my decision is that the flags are staying.

 

But we need to remain on guard against any temptation that the flag’s presence may pose to divinize the nation, to make the nation itself into an object of worship. Instead, let it symbolize our shared aspiration to be “one nation, under God.” Let it stand as a symbol, in other words, not of an idolatrous nationalism but of a healthy patriotism.

 

And in the spirit of such patriotism, I wish us all a happy Independence Day! And may God bless America!