3 minute read
Love me a good patriotism quote. The Irish playwright, George Bernard Shaw, suggested, “Patriotism is your conviction that this country is superior to all other countries because you were born in it.” The Spanish cellist, Pablo Casals, asked, “The love of one’s country is a splendid thing. But why should love stop at the border?” The French Renaissance man, Blaise Pascal, observed, “Can anything be stupider than that a man has the right to kill me because he lives on the other side of a river and his ruler has a quarrel with mine, though I have not quarreled with him?”
It makes sense to me to feel a sense of affectionate interconnectiveness to people from the same place. There is a great deal of truth, beauty, and goodness in the lived reality of being formed by a land and a way of life. It’s a moral good to experience a deep sense of love for one’s town, county, city, state, or country. Patriotism goes far beyond that, though, to a strange feeling of combative loyalty stemming from the belief that your people and way of life must be superior to those people and their way of life because they were born on the other side of an imaginary line.
Some people will insist patriotism simply means the love of one’s country and doesn’t necessarily contain any violent themes. Sorry but that’s nonsense. Dictionary.com defines patriot as “a person who loves, supports, and defends their country and its interests with devotion.” This meaning is echoed by Merriam-Webster: “The word patriot signifies a person who loves his or her country and is ready to boldly support and defend it.”1 When we say someone is a patriot, it means they fight for their country. The word is not merely about love, but love that will use violence.2
Patriotism is culturally lauded as an unquestionable virtue, so such discussions are often prefaced with something like, “Sure, patriotism can go bad, but…” I say the exact opposite: “Sure, patriotism can go good, but…” We’re enculturated to initially praise Ukrainian patriotism in standing to protect their national sovereignty from an unjust invasion rather than first thinking of it as a problem of Russian patriotism. Far from being an innate virtue that can sometimes be corrupted toward evil, I believe patriotism is an innate vice that can sometimes be repurposed for good.
The original beatniks didn’t get caught up in the early-Cold War patriotic fervor of the ’50s. They thought American society sucked, tried developing a more globally interconnected perspective, and had real questions about people’s uncritical loyalty to their country of origin. There are always nuances to add but, generally speaking, I support all of that. All I would add is that Jesus is all about shalom.3 Jesus followers are to faithfully incarnate the Gospel wherever we live, and we absolutely should love these people and places, but The Way of Jesus is a nonviolent love.
Here’s more from Merriam-Webster:
“To be called a patriot—the word ultimately derives from Greek patrios, meaning “of one’s father,”—is today considered an honor, but it wasn’t always this way. For much of the 17th century, to be deemed a “good patriot” was to be a lover of one’s country who agreed on political and/or religious matters with whoever was doing the deeming. British loyalists applied the word like a badge to supporters of the ruling monarchy, but then the word took on negative connotations as it was applied first to hypocritical patriots—those who espoused loyalty to the Crown but whose actions belied that espousal, and then to outright anti-royalists. But in the 18th century, American writers, including Benjamin Franklin, embraced patriot to define the colonists who took action against British control. After the American Revolutionary War, patriot settled back into more neutral use, but to this day writers on both sides of the aisle grapple over the word.”↩
Feel free to coin another word that explicitly means “one’s love of country WITHOUT defensiveness and/or violence,” but that word is not patriotism. Never has been. Never will be. Patriotism connotes violence.↩
According to Wikipedia, shalom is a Hebrew word meaning “peace, harmony, wholeness, completeness, prosperity, welfare and tranquility.” I like to sum it up as meaning radical peace.↩
