Loving your country is not idolatry, a believer's case for patriotism

You can love your mother without worshiping her. Most of us manage it every day, and nobody calls a man an idolater because he cries at his mother's funeral. Yet a certain kind of argument, heard in pulpits and on social media, proceeds as though love of country were the first step on a road that ends at the golden calf.

I want to take that argument seriously, because it comes from good motives. It is made by people who fear that believers will confuse the flag with the cross, and that fear has a long and sometimes tragic history. But it contains a mistake, and the mistake matters. The claim of this post is simple: a believer may love his country, serve it, defend it and be grateful for it, and Scripture itself commands him to seek its good. What he may not do is give it the loyalty that belongs to God alone. The whole question is where one ends and the other begins.

Here is the plan. I will define the terms, because the debate is mostly a fight about words. I will lay out four premises. I will state the critique of what is called Christian nationalism as fairly as I can. And I will mark the line between patriotism and idolatry in a way that any believer, Christian or Jewish, can test against his own text.

Define the terms

Patriotism is love of one's country, understood as a particular place, a particular people and a particular inheritance of laws and habits. It is gratitude, loyalty and a willingness to serve. It is the affection that makes a man care whether his town's schools are good and his neighbors safe. George Orwell, writing in 1945, drew a distinction I find useful: patriotism, he argued, is devotion to a particular place and way of life that one believes to be the best in the world but has no wish to force on other people, while nationalism is inseparable from the desire for power. I am paraphrasing, not quoting, and I do not need to agree with everything Orwell wrote to find the distinction helpful.

Idolatry is giving to a created thing the ultimate loyalty, trust or worship that belongs to God. The First Commandment, in Exodus 20:3, is "Thou shalt have no other gods before me." An idol need not be a statue. It can be money, power, a party, a leader, a nation. The prophets condemned Israel for trusting in horses and chariots instead of the Lord, which is to say, in the state's own strength.

Christian nationalism is a contested term, and I will come to its competing definitions below. For now, notice that the debate turns on this: love of country is not idolatry by definition, and whether a given attitude crosses the line depends on what the person puts first.

Premise one: Scripture commands care for your city

The strongest text for a believer's patriotism comes from an unexpected place. It is in the prophet Jeremiah, chapter 29, and it is a letter.

In 597 BC, and again in 586, the Babylonian empire carried Judah's leaders and craftsmen into exile. The exiles were homesick and angry, and some prophets were telling them to expect a quick return. Jeremiah sent them a letter from Jerusalem with very different advice. They were to build houses, plant gardens, marry and raise families. And then comes the sentence, in the King James Version: "And seek the peace of the city whither I have caused you to be carried away captives, and pray unto the LORD for it: for in the peace thereof shall ye have peace."

Read it slowly. The city was Babylon. The people to whom the letter was written were captives, taken from their homes by force. The place they were told to seek the good of was a pagan empire that had destroyed their temple. And yet the command was to pray for it and to seek its peace, because its welfare was bound up with theirs.

If the exiles were commanded to seek the peace of Babylon, how much more may a believer in a country that protects his freedom of worship seek the good of his own? The argument is a fortiori: if care for a hostile city was required, care for a friendly one cannot be forbidden. The text does not say love Babylon above God. It says seek its peace. That is the biblical pattern of patriotism: concern for the common good, in the place where God has put you, without surrendering your ultimate allegiance.

The New Testament says something similar. Paul urges, in his first letter to Timothy, that supplications, prayers and thanksgivings be made "for kings, and for all that are in authority; that we may lead a quiet and peaceable life in all godliness and honesty." Paul asked for prayer even for the rulers of his day, which is a stronger form of civic care than most modern citizens manage for their own senators.

Premise two: Augustine's two cities

The great Christian reflection on the question is Augustine's City of God, written between about 413 and 426, after Rome was sacked by the Visigoths in 410. Pagans blamed the Christians for Rome's fall, saying the old gods had been abandoned and the city had paid for it. Augustine's answer is among the most important works of political thought in the Western tradition.

His central idea is that humanity is divided, in the deepest sense, into two cities, defined not by borders but by what they love. The earthly city is built on love of self, he wrote, even to the contempt of God, and the heavenly city on love of God, even to the contempt of self. I am paraphrasing his famous formulation from Book 14. These two cities are intermingled in this world and will not be separated until the end.

Now consider what Augustine did not say. He did not say that a Christian should withdraw from the earthly city or despise it. He said that the Christian is a pilgrim in it, using its goods with gratitude and contributing to its peace, while knowing that his true citizenship lies elsewhere. In Book 19 he argues that the heavenly city, while on pilgrimage here, makes use of the earthly peace and desires the cooperation of human wills in the attainment of the things necessary to mortal life. So the believer obeys the laws, pays the taxes, serves in the army if called, raises children who will be good citizens, and does it all while holding the world loosely.

That is patriotism with a ceiling. It admits love, gratitude and service, and forbids worship. The believer does not need to deny his country in order to keep God first. He needs to rank them.

Premise three: Romans 13, and its limits

The most-cited passage on the Christian's duty to the state is Romans 13. Paul writes, in the King James Version: "Let every soul be subject unto the higher powers. For there is no power but of God: the powers that be are ordained of God." He goes on to say that the ruler is "the minister of God to thee for good," that the believer should pay tribute to whom tribute is due, and that he should render "honour to whom honour."

Two things need saying about this text, and a conservative who reads Scripture honestly will say both.

First, it supports order. The Bible is not anarchist. Government is a good thing, a restraint on evil and a provision of God, and respect for lawful authority is the default. A believer who treats the state as inherently the enemy has misread Paul, and so has a believer who treats every law as optional.

Second, the text has limits, and the New Testament itself marks them. When the Jerusalem authorities ordered the apostles to stop preaching, Peter and the others answered in Acts 5:29: "We ought to obey God rather than men." Daniel refused to stop praying and was thrown to the lions. The Hebrew midwives in Exodus 1 disobeyed Pharaoh's order to kill the male infants. And the book of Revelation depicts a state that demands worship as a beast. The same Bible that says "be subject" also says "obey God rather than men," and the difference between the two is the line this post is about.

Think about Dietrich Bonhoeffer and the confessing church in Germany. They had to decide where Romans 13 ended, and the answer was at the point where the state claimed the allegiance that belonged to Christ, a story I tell in Dietrich Bonhoeffer and the church that would not bow to the Reich. That was a state that had made itself an idol, and the believers who resisted it understood the difference between love of Germany and worship of Germany better than anyone.

Premise four: the founders asked for a believing citizenry, not a worshiping one

The American tradition fits this pattern. George Washington's Farewell Address in 1796 called religion and morality indispensable supports of political prosperity, but he did not ask Americans to worship the nation. He asked them to be the kind of people who could sustain a free government, which I discuss in Why Washington's Farewell Address called religion and morality indispensable. The founders built a Constitution that forbids a religious test for public office in Article VI and a national establishment of religion in the First Amendment, precisely so that the state would not claim the place of the church.

The Declaration of Independence grounds American rights in the Creator. "All men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights." The statement puts the nation under God from its first page: the rights come from Him, not from the government, so the government cannot rightly take them away. That is the opposite of idolatry. A nation that says its rights come from God has declared that it is not God. I explore this in Why 'created equal' is a claim about God and not just about politics. You can read the Declaration and the Constitution on the Constitution page.

The critique, stated fairly

Now I owe the critics a fair hearing. The critique of "Christian nationalism," at its strongest, is made by serious believers, including conservative ones, and it deserves to be stated in words they would accept.

It goes like this. The danger, critics say, is not love of country. It is the fusion of Christian identity with national identity, so that being a good American and being a good Christian are treated as the same thing, and so that a particular political program is treated as the will of God. When that happens, they argue, the church loses its prophetic voice, because it can no longer criticize a government it has baptized. It also invites the state to use religion for its own purposes, and it makes the faith look like a tribal badge instead of a call to repentance. Some critics also fear that the phrase can slide toward the idea that those who are not Christian are lesser citizens, and they point to historical episodes in other countries where a national church and a state became entangled to the harm of both.

That is a serious argument, and part of it is right. I agree with the critics on four points. A church that cannot criticize the government has lost something vital. Identifying any party or program with the will of God is a mistake, and the prophets would have been merciless about it. A faith used as a tribal badge is not faith. And the Constitution rightly refuses to make any citizen second-class on account of belief.

Here, however, is where I part company, and I will give three reasons.

First, the term is used with two meanings, and the debate often slides between them. Some people use "Christian nationalism" to mean the demand for a state church or for legal privileges for Christians. That is a real position, and the founders rejected it, and so should we. But others use the same phrase to describe ordinary things: believers who vote their convictions, who love their country, who think its moral inheritance comes from the Bible, or who wave a flag in church on the Fourth of July. These are not the same thing. Merging them condemns the second by association with the first. A fair debate would use different words for different claims.

Second, the argument proves too much. If love of country is suspect for Christians, then every church that prayed for its president, every chaplain who served in the army, every congregation that said the Pledge, has been confused. And the same logic would apply to the Jewish tradition, which has its own deep attachment to a land and a people and its own history of loyalty to the countries where Jews have lived. The believer's patriotism is not a modern American compromise. It is a very old posture of pilgrim and citizen.

Third, the cure is better than the disease. The answer to idolatry is not indifference. A believer who loves his country less, in order to protect his faith, has not become more devout. He has merely withdrawn from the neighborhood God put him in. Jeremiah did not say to the exiles, "Stay aloof." He said to seek the city's peace.

Where patriotism ends and idolatry begins

So where is the line? Here are five tests that a believer can apply to himself, in order, and the examples are mine, offered for examination.

1. The priority test. When his country's demand and God's command conflict, which does he obey? Patriotism says "I love my country, and I will serve it, unless it commands me to sin." Idolatry says "my country, right or wrong, and God had better agree."
2. The criticism test. Can he criticize his country, and its leaders, in the name of God? A patriot who loves his country will say where it has failed, as Lincoln did in his Second Inaugural, which treated slavery as an offense for which the nation answered to God. An idolater cannot bear the criticism.
3. The worship test. Does he confuse the symbols of the nation with the objects of worship? A flag is a symbol of a country. A sanctuary is a place for the worship of God. Putting the first in the second is a question of judgment, and many congregations and believers will answer it differently, but the question is a fair one.
4. The neighbor test. Does his love of country make him love the stranger and the foreigner less? The Bible repeatedly commands care for the sojourner, and a patriotism that cannot do that has curdled.
5. The hope test. Does he place his ultimate hope in the next election, the next policy or the next leader? The psalm says, "Put not your trust in princes." A citizen who votes, works and campaigns is doing his duty. A citizen who believes that salvation will arrive by legislation has mistaken the earthly city for the heavenly one.

None of these tests makes a believer indifferent to his nation. They make him a better patriot, because he cares for his country in the manner of a man who knows it is not God, and therefore does not need it to be perfect to love it.

A last word, and a note on the pledge

The question comes up every time a congregation sings a patriotic hymn on the Sunday nearest a national holiday. The answer, in my view, is that it depends on what is being sung. A hymn that thanks God for a country's blessings is an act of gratitude, in the manner of the thanksgiving proclamations. A hymn that tells the congregation that the country is God's chosen instrument and cannot err has crossed a line. The words of the song, not the existence of the song, decide the case.

The phrase "under God" entered the Pledge of Allegiance in 1954, by act of Congress, a history I tell in From a Civil War coin to the Pledge, how 'under God' entered public life. Whatever one thinks of the politics, the phrase itself is a small confession of the argument above: the nation is under something. It says that the country is not the highest authority. A patriot who says those two words and means them has said all that the critic wants and all that the believer wants.

The case in brief

1. Patriotism, which is love, gratitude and service for one's country, is different from idolatry, which is giving a created thing the ultimate loyalty that belongs to God.
2. Scripture commands care for one's city: Jeremiah 29:7 told captives to seek the peace of Babylon, and Paul urged prayers for kings and all in authority, so a believer's patriotism is biblical, not a compromise.
3. Augustine's two cities and Romans 13 together describe a pilgrim who serves the earthly city while holding it loosely, and Acts 5:29 marks where obedience stops.
4. The critique of "Christian nationalism" is right to warn against fusing church and state or baptizing a party, but it becomes unfair when it treats ordinary love of country as the same thing.
5. Five tests mark the line: priority, criticism, worship, the neighbor and hope, and a believer who passes them can love his country with a clear conscience.

What you can do: read the first paragraph of the Declaration of Independence and Jeremiah 29:4 through 7 in one sitting, then write down one concrete thing you will do this month to seek the good of your own town.