LOVING AMERICA WELL

A Christian Case for Faithful Patriotism at 250

America’s 250th birthday is a moment worth celebrating. But for Christians, it is also a moment worth thinking carefully about, because how we love our country matters as much as whether we do.

Two temptations pull at us from opposite directions. The first is a scornful cynicism that finds nothing worth honoring in America’s history, rejects any expression of patriotism as naïve or dangerous, and views the hatred of America as a kind of moral sophistication. This approach is unfaithful. It abandons the genuine good that exists in our nation’s ideals, its people, and the freedoms it has sought to protect. The second temptation runs the other direction: an unhealthy type of patriotism that wraps the flag around the cross, assumes God is uniquely on America’s side, and refuses to biblically critique the excesses of one’s country. This approach is unfaithful as well. Our ultimate allegiance belongs to Christ and his kingdom. No nation, however great, can bear the weight of that devotion.

The faithful path between these extremes is a modest patriotism, what we might simply call loving America well. G.K. Chesterton put it memorably: “When you love a thing, its gladness is a reason for loving it, and its sadness a reason for loving it more.” A nation is, in some ways, a very large family. We do not love our families because they are perfect. We love them because they are ours, and because love that cannot survive honest reckoning with failure is not really love at all.

The prophet Jeremiah wrote to Jewish exiles living in a foreign city and told them to seek its welfare, to pray for it, because in its flourishing they would find their own (Jer. 29:7). That is the posture of the faithful citizen: loving a home that is not yet the ultimate home, serving a nation that is not yet the Kingdom, with clear eyes and grateful hearts.

Two hundred and fifty years in, America is worth loving that way. Honestly. Humbly. Without illusion and without apology.