Whether or not they know it, America’s pastors are in the eye of a hurricane. Just in the last year, we’ve seen four major events and trends collide that are testing the limits of the average American church leader’s political theology. Those four things are:
- VP Vance’s appeal to ordered loves in the debate on the Trump administration’s immigration policies.
- The crisis of civic education in America.
- America’s 250th birthday.
- The assassination of Charlie Kirk, his memorial service, and public debate surrounding both events.
I could probably add more to this list, but these four seem to be colliding in a singularly difficult way for those tasked with shepherding the souls of America’s faithful along the straight and narrow.
What these four have in common is the meaning of nationhood, the belonging implied by the terms “nation” and “citizen,” and the role of individual Christians as citizens and churches as civil institutions in those nations. There’s much that can be said as to why these particular items are putting so much pressure on American churches, but I will save that discussion for another day. Here, I simply want to suggest a jumping off point for exploring what I view as a watershed moment in American Christianity: Is patriotism an appropriate affection for the Christian? Is there a place for a love of country in the ordered loves of a Christian’s soul, or is it a form of idolatry? Where is the line between virtuous devotion to one’s country and idolatrous attachment to the ‘City of Man’?
In parsing these complicated questions, it is instructive to recall words from Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s The Gulag Archipelago: “The line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties either — but right through every human heart — and through all human hearts. This line shifts. Inside us, it oscillates with the years. And even within hearts overwhelmed by evil, one small bridgehead of good is retained.”
Put another way, pastors faced with increasing pressure to address political issues from the pulpit, would be wise to begin with the proper role of patriotism in the life of the church.
For some Christians, the universality of Christianity is obviously incompatible with any significant level of devotion to nation, but I would counter with a query: How can one not be patriotic while preserving and practicing a love of family and locality?
In this line of thinking, I’m paraphrasing C.S. Lewis in the early chapters of The Four Loves. I find Lewis’ exploration of patriotism, no doubt in response to Christians similarly wary of patriotic sentiment in his time, to be a helpful framework for clergy and laity alike in rediscovering a Christian framework for patriotism.
Lewis identifies five distinct flavors of patriotism:
Love of home; one’s attitude or posture towards the past; belief in national superiority; the duties and rights of great powers; and the “unconscious denial of itself,” or understanding the nation as the embodiment of an abstract ideal.
In this, love of home is perhaps the purest form of patriotism, being grounded in an embodied reality of a particular place and time as opposed to the abstracted sense of national identity prone to weaponization. Lewis goes so far as to argue that this was the patriotism of Jesus demonstrated in his weeping over Jerusalem. Necessarily, such a posture towards one’s place and people makes it possible to develop virtue and love one’s neighbor in very distinct ways. Only is it with the temptations of pride accompanying belief in national superiority and the privileges of great power status do we start to see the destructive and demonic elements of an idolatrous nationalism that would make the nation God and seek to reshape the world in its image.
That makes one’s attitude towards the past a critical point of individual and national maturity. Here, Lewis notes that mere factual history that describes the chronology of a nation, warts and all, may instill a sense of national humility, but it is insufficient to enrich our love of nation in a way that leads to virtuous self-sacrificial love. For this, Lewis advocates drawing a distinction between the national ideal and the national experience, or history as saga versus history as fact. Both are necessary for a right-sized attachment to one’s people and place. The historical ideal gives us a common national telos while the historical fact keeps us humble in reminding us of our national failings and natural limits.
For Lewis, the dividing line between a healthy, righteous patriotism and an idolatrous, demonic one is whether one sees love of country as an end in itself or as a means to loving God as he is reflected by the concentric communities, including national communities, that shape us.
If one’s love of country is a vehicle to love of neighbor, to the pursuit of virtue grounded in a particular embodied community, then how can we erect the guardrails that maintain an ordered love of country? This framing, as opposed to one being suspicious by default of all forms of national identity, is much more productive for pastors to work out in the context of the local church.
I focus on the local church because developing virtue and love of neighbor is not something done through a one-year civics course, though that may provide an introduction. It also won’t be accomplished via programming aimed at voter registration and local volunteerism while leaving individuals to fend for themselves on the moral and ethical issues at root in public policy debates. It will not be achieved in the company of strangers (though it can be practiced there), but in communities where we are known.
Pastors must guard their flocks against the temptations to national idolatry, but also equip the souls of the saints under their care to truly salt the national culture through a Lewisian view of patriotism. Love your country as your country, not as some abstract entity lacking in any calls for self-sacrificial love. Celebrate and magnify its accomplishments, mourn its failings, pray for its leaders, and exhort your congregation to do the same.
