Summers in the United States have a rhythm all their own thanks to the three National Holidays that we celebrate. For Americans Independence Day marks the midway point of Summer which ends “officially” on Labor Day. Most will celebrate the day with a cookout and fireworks, but despite the all the planning that goes on very few people will actually enjoy it. As Nietzsche said, “the trick is not to arrange a festival but to find people who can enjoy it.” For most of us, with the exception of the fireworks, July 4th is like an extra weekend day rather than a true festival. We may have some vague idea about the Declaration of Independence and the work of the Founding Fathers, but that is history—and because of our treatment of the Native Americans and the slave trade, it is history we would rather forget. Why would we celebrate that?
Independence Day was never meant to be merely a celebration of what happened in the past, but instead a re-presentation of the spirit of the Founders. In other words it was meant to be a day that was marked by patriotism. Unfortunately this has become impossible because, like most civic virtues (except tolerance), it is no longer seen as a necessary good. Most people don’t even know that it is a virtue or that Pope Leo XIII said that love of country is part of the natural law and thus an obligation for all of us. Therefore a restoration of the practice of this virtue is vital and not just so we can celebrate July 4th.
Properly speaking, patriotism is defined as “love of country” but there is certain ambiguity attached to both love and country. For the latter, a better term might be nation or fatherland (from which we derive the word patriot). In a country where the government is becoming the Leviathan, it is important that we see the nation as different from the State or Government. One can certainly love one’s country and despise its government. The object of the patriotic love is the families and individuals composing the nation. But it is also a love that is directed towards those things that make it home—its unique national characteristics that differentiate it from other countries and the natural ties that bind the citizens together. As Chesterton says, a man would not want his country to fall into the hands of foreigners for the same reason that he would not want his house to be burned down; he could not even begin to enumerate all the things he would miss.
This love also includes the entire heritage transmitted to us by our countrymen who have gone before us. It is this particular aspect that we celebrate on July 4th; those things that come to us by virtue of simply being a citizen of this great country. It is a time to recognize those things that we take for granted that are unparalleled in the history of the world—equality, freedom, and self- government. Although foundational to the American Experiment, these three values will always be in jeopardy of being lost if we do not cherish them and protect them.
When St. Thomas presents patriotism in the Summa, he couples it with piety towards one’s parents. Both piety and patriotism incline us to render due honor and service to those who are the source of one’s being and the agents of one’s upbringing. Love of country means a love of benevolence for one’s countrymen and implies a desire to promote their interests along the lines of the national characteristics.
It is coupled with the family for another reason as well, a reason which CS Lewis articulates in the The Four Loves. Lewis says that Patriotism is the concrete way in which we extend love of neighbor beyond our immediate family. If the family shows us the first step beyond self-love then Patriotism offers us the first step beyond our family selfishness. We cannot love our neighbor in the sense the Lord means if we do not love our neighbors locally. In other words, Patriotism is simply the habit of loving your neighbor in the concrete sense. Just as love for one’s family does not exclude love for others so too patriotism does not exclude love of people in other countries. But we must first love the neighbor we can see before we can love the neighbor we can’t.
The duties of patriotism involve honor and actual service. It can become militant when we are forced to protect what we love, but the last thing we want is to the last thing we want is to make everywhere else like our home because then it would cease to be uniquely our home. As Chesterton says the patriot “demands a particular relation to some homogeneous community of manageable and imaginable size, large enough to inspire his reverence by its hold on history, small enough to inspire his affection by its hold on himself.” Still patriotism is more than just a willingness to put on war paint. It must be matched by a willingness to perform the ordinary (and non-heroic) civic duties.
The connection to the love of family also is illuminating in another regard, especially for us as Americans living in a time of great cultural turmoil. There is a tendency to look at all of the evils that our country tolerates and develop, maybe not hatred, but indifference. But when we compare it analogously to our love of family, it becomes clearer how patriotism works. We love our family, not primarily because of its greatness, but because it is ours. We may see the faults of its members or even the ways it is dysfunctional, but we still love it and strive to make it approach the ideal. So it is with love of country. We love our country not because it is great but because it is ours. We can still love it despite all the evil it tolerates without loving those evils. We can “hate the sin, but love the sinner” to use an old Catholic adage. We can look at the sins of our country, even those of the founding, and still love it. We can repent of them knowing that we failed to live up to our standards and our founding principles.
One of the best ways to fight present day evils is to inculcate the virtue of patriotism—one would not want to see the country they love betray its foundational principles. One would not want to see the blood that was spilled by men and women in our past and still today precisely because they wanted to protect those principles be in vain. It is precisely because we love our country and its national principles that we can see evils like state-supported abortion for what they are and for what they do to our country. Rather than growing discouraged, we instead fight those evils precisely because we love our fellow countrymen, including the ones in the womb.
On the 150th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence in 1926, President Calvin Coolidge spoke eloquently on our founding. In closing, I would like to quote his concluding paragraph because it is a clarion call for the virtue of patriotism; a call that we as Americans need to respond to if we are to see this great country become all that God intended.
“It is the product of the spiritual insight of the people. We live in an age of science and of abounding accumulation of material things. These did not create our Declaration. Our Declaration created them. The things of the spirit come first. Unless we cling to that, all our material prosperity, overwhelming though it may appear, will turn to a barren scepter in our grasp. If we are to maintain the great heritage which has been bequeathed to us, we must be like-minded as the fathers who created it. We must not sink into a pagan materialism. We must cultivate the reverence which they had for the things that are holy. We must follow the spiritual and moral leadership which they showed. We must keep replenished, that they may glow with a more compelling flame, the altar fires before which they worshiped.”