The Rest of the Schedule 

21 April                 A Defense of Patriotism            

28 April                 Man and Emotions

05 May                  Man and Emotions B

12 May                  Man and Art

19 May                  Man and Art B

26 May                  Man and Death

02 June                 Man and Death B

09 June                 Masculinity

16 June                 [Away]

23 June                 [Away]

30 June                 Masculinity B

What is Patriotism?

Dictionary: love of country and willingness to sacrifice for it; love for or devotion to one’s country.

Patriotism is a unique love of, devotion to, willing to sacrifice for one’s country.  And to add a little nuance, patriotism is a love for one’s country and his people and his nation, country designating the people’s land, people its citizenry, and nation referring to the shared history or ideals or culture that come prominently to mind when one thinks of a particular people.  

Not every nation possesses its own territory, so patriotism doesn’t have to involve thoughts about a place, though it almost always does.  Even if a people are currently landless, they’ll almost certainly have longings for a place they think belongs to them.   I suppose it could happen that one is patriotic in being devoted to his nation’s people, ideals, and culture while considering his country a rather dumpy place.  

More unlikely but still theoretically possible is that a patriot celebrates his nation’s history and culture but finds little to like in its current citizenry.  But what seems impossible to include under “patriotism” is despising or dismissing the country’s history and ideals and culture.    

One last complication: the “state” is the body politic organized for civil rule i.e, the government.  Certainly it’s possible that one can be a patriot even while actively working against the current government.  

Peggy Noonan: It is love of country. It is pride in what a country stands for and was founded on. It is the full-throated expression of that love and that pride. 

George Washington’s Farewell Address: Cherish a cordial, habitual, and immovable attachment to [our country]. . . . Think and speak of it as the palladium of your political safety and prosperity; watching for its preservation with jealous anxiety; discountenancing whatever may suggest even a suspicion that it can in any event be abandoned; and indignantly frowning upon the first dawning of every attempt to alienate any portion of our country from the rest, or to enfeeble the sacred ties which now link together the various parts. For this you have every inducement of sympathy and interest. Citizens, by birth or choice, of a common country, that country has a right to concentrate your affections.

Major Sullivan Ballou, who died at the First Bull run in 1861, writing to his wife a few days before the battle: I cannot describe to you my feelings on this calm summer night, when two thousand men are sleeping around me, many of them enjoying the last, perhaps before that of death—and I, suspicious that Death is creeping behind me with his fatal dart, am communing with God, my country, and thee.

I have sought most closely and diligently, and often in my breast, for a wrong motive in thus hazarding the happiness of those I loved and could not find one. A pure love of my Country and the principles I have often advocated before the people, and “the name of honor that I love more than I fear death” have called upon me, and I have obeyed.

Sarah, my love for you is deathless, it seems to bind me with mighty cables that nothing but Omnipotence could break; and yet my love of Country comes over me like a strong wind and bears me irresistibly on with all these chains to the battlefield.

Case Against Patriotism

• Pride
• Competing with greater loves 
• Confusing
• Blindness to faults
• Pilgrims
• Cover for other uglies – , prejudice, malice, etc: Patriotism – the last refuge of the scoundrel – Samuel Johnson

So then why call it a good thing?

• Modelled:
  • Luke 7:4,5
  • Matthew 23:37ff
  • Romans 9:3
  • Psalm 137 – connecting a place with an idea
• Twice in the New Testament (Romans 1:31; 2 Timothy 3:3) Paul uses the Greek work storge that the KJV translates as “natural affection.”  (To be precise, both times the word is employed along with the negative prefix: so “without natural affection.”)  In these passages Paul says that a society moving away from the good sense of religion and hence entering “times of difficulty” is often marked by this lack of natural affection.  

[By the way, surely we have here a case of a superior KJV translation – in the NIV storge is rendered too baldly, as “love”; the ESV has “heartless,” which is better, but it doesn’t train the light on what kind of heartlessness is in view.  Eugene Peterson’s the Message “cruel” shares the ESV’s shortcoming.]  

The “natural affection” that storge has in view is the reciprocal love between fathers and sons.  Yet storge encompasses more than relationships within the nuclear family.  All the way back to classical Greek (and certainly by the time Paul used it) “natural affection” included ideas of fathers, ancestors, community, fatherland.  

Hence from ancient times, storge has also served to denote patriotism.  Which makes sense.  After all, patriotism emerges from the Latin patri, the “fatherland,” which in turn stems from pater, “father.”  

To put it bluntly: the notion of fatherhood is all over the concept of “nation.”  A fact which helps to explain why storge – remember, which includes patriotism – is a “natural” love, which means a) that it normally arrives to the soul unbidden and b) it is in the proper order of things for this love to be taught and exampled from one generation to the next.

Caveat: for all of that “naturalness,” storge can be buried, eliminated.  I’ve read of it being fashionable for turn of the 20^th century intellectuals to be out of sorts with their fathers.  A little closer to home, and a little provocative: I think the movement toward identifying oneself as a “global citizen” veers toward “without natural affection.”   

Hence, repressing the notion of patriotism, a type of father feeling, is a deeply unnatural thing.  “Unnatural” because it is a kind of rejection, first of one’s ancestors, but then ultimately of one’s self.  Which is why the Greek scholar Kenneth Wuest describes this “natural affection,” including patriotism, as “the binding factor by which any natural or social unit is held together.”  The society devoid of storge must soon collapse.  

This is how the old Princeton theologian B.B. Warfield describes storge: “It designates that quiet and abiding feeling within us, which resting on an object as near to us, recognizes that we are closely bound up with it and takes satisfaction in its recognition. . . It is a love that is a natural movement of the soul, something almost like gravitation or some other force of blind nature.”

Breathes there the man, with soul so dead,
Who never to himself hath said,
This is my own, my native land!
Whose heart hath ne’er within him burn’d,
As home his footsteps he hath turn’d,
From wandering on a foreign strand!
If such there breathe, go, mark him well;
For him no Minstrel raptures swell;
High though his titles, proud his name,
Boundless his wealth as wish can claim;
Despite those titles, power, and pelf,
The wretch, concentred all in self,
Living, shall forfeit fair renown,
And, doubly dying, shall go down
To the vile dust, from whence he sprung,
Unwept, unhonour’d, and unsung. – Walter Scott

• In Titus 1:8 Paul says that a mark of one’s spiritual maturity is that he is a “lover of what is good.”  Well, there’s a lot of good in a country, and we corrupt ourselves by not acknowledging it…not loving it.  A growing maturity entails recognizing and appreciating and attempting to perpetuate good things, including the goods of country and nation.  (It probably goes without saying, but this loving the good of a country is something different than asserting that the nation is necessarily good or even essentially good.)  
• Love of neighbor: we can’t love humanity in the abstract, but in the particular, concrete relationships we find ourselves in.  Patriotism sets us up to love our neighbor, even the dead ones!.
  • Christian historian Beth Schweiger: “In history, the call to love one’s neighbor is extended to the dead.”
  • Herbert Butterfield: A historian should be a “recording angel” rather than a “hanging judge.”  
  • “The two things, celebration and criticism, are not necessarily enemies.  Love is the foundation of the wisest criticism, and criticism is the essential partner of an honest and enduring love.  We live in a country, let us hope, in which our flaws can be openly discussed, and where criticism and dissent can be regarded not as betrayals or thought-crimes but as essential ingredients in the flourishing of our polity and our common life.” – Wilfred McClay
• Be grateful for everything: Ephesians 5:18-20.  Patriotism sets you up to acknowledge the goodness of God that comes through states, laws, institutions.  
• Principle of to whom much is given, much is required.  This moves us to give back to our country. 
• The Scriptures in several passages encourage the importance of place (Numbers 33)
  • CSL: “With this love for the place, there goes a love for the way of life; for beer and tea and open fires, trains with compartments in them and an unarmed police force and all the rest of it; for the local dialect and (a shade less) for our native language.”