To Follow God and Love Your Country

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. —That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.

-The Declaration of Independence

The Fourth of July, which we celebrate this week, can be a complex holiday for many Christians. Concerned by the violence and anger we see in the media, by the sins and selfishness evident in American history, we can become disheartened, wondering if we have not returned to a time when we must choose between Caesar and Christ. And yet, when the words of the Declaration of Independence are read—for all the failure to realize their ideals—I still find myself moved, and called to a people that would proclaim such a vision for the first time in human history. I don’t think this is just naïveté, or the result of indoctrination, but I hear in the Declaration something that adds to the Church and must be affirmed, especially in an age when the Church itself is wrestling with issues of empowerment and equality.

It is hard to say when the American experiment began to lose the sense of responsibility for the common good. Certainly the possibility was always there—even at the time of the Declaration—when the disparate colonies struggled to unite, always considering their own interests first. Though religious belief and tradition would act to check it, still a toxic selfishness would often erupt like a staph infection to sicken our history: during the hysteria of Joe McCarthy and the lynchings of Jim Crow, the racism of Japanese internment and the genocidal exploitation of westward expansion. And, of course, its scar was always present in the original sin of our nation that was slavery. Often fed by fear or greed, this selfish sensibility led us to “group think” and almost invariably to violence, and was often done in the name of an Americanism, even when contrary to the ideals of the Declaration.

Thankfully, in the face of such evil, we have been blessed, often, with truth-tellers and artists, rebels who have shined a light on the sins of our culture, and though often with great struggle, helped us  recover our sense of shame, and return to our first principles. Abraham Lincoln, for example, appealed consistently to the Declaration to move the Republic from its sense of resignation about slavery and enflame it with passion, even at the cost of blood. Likewise, the dignity and determination of Frederick Douglas and the ante-bellum daguerreotypes of beaten slaves, the constancy of Eleanor Roosevelt and the photographs of Walker Evans, the televised viciousness of My Lai and courage of Muhammed Ali, the black-and-white images of an aged Dorothy Day facing down police in Solano, or Robert Kennedy breaking bread with Caesar Chavez, all pierced our hearts and allowed us to see the human face of the inhumanity we so often avoided in the false freedom of divisive independence. In passionate actions and radical communion, we came to identify with those who suffered, and so were ashamed that such suffering could exist among us, and indeed, that we were its beneficiaries. And from that healthy sense of shame arose our compassion and a sense of responsibility for those who suffered.

Today, again, moral responsibility and compassion, the ideals of the Declaration, seem besieged or even dismissed as elitist affectations—remnants of a naïveté that we cannot indulge when so many “other things” (e.g. the economy or national security) are at stake. Perhaps this new age of shamelessness and self-destruction began when the towers fell in New York, and fear led us to rename torture as “enhanced interrogation.” Perhaps it began when we refused to object when the first inmates were detained at Guantanamo, where they had neither the rights of prisoners of war nor the due process of criminal defendants. Through the rumble of war and fear of pandemic, we have been sold anxiety and anger, and have grown weary of responsibility for the care of others. Instead, we blame others for our problems—whether it is feminists or refugees, persons of color or  LGTBQ+ people, Muslims or Jews. And in our hostility, we have become increasingly immune to shame and more accepting of lies and liars. As in the philosophy of Ayn Rand, we have rechristened our sins as virtues and excused our selfishness as our right.

In such a distressing moment, how should a Christian, who is also an American and an heir to the Declaration of Independence, respond? How are we to stand fast as people concerned with the common good, in the midst of so much evil? Is it possible today to celebrate the Fourth of July with gratitude for this nation, and also be a follower of Jesus?

A few months before his execution, the great Christian teacher and martyr, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, addressed this issue for his own time, noting the many futile ways one might try to respond to this havoc, and the one sustainable way. Some, he notes, might depend on reason, as though “with a little reason they can bend back into position the framework that has got out of joint.” Yet, in a time where lying is so rampant and accepted, the ineffectiveness of reasoning wears a person down, leading him to step aside, at last, in resignation or despair. 

Others might resort to what Bonhoeffer calls “moral fanaticism” by which a person pits his or her single-minded principles against the powers of evil, only to grow, at last, exhausted. In a description eerily appropriate to our time, when the “outrage of the day” fills our in-boxes, Bonhoeffer describes the fanatic as “like a bull, [rushing] at the red cloak instead of at the person who is holding it . . . he gets entangled in nonessentials and falls into the trap set by cleverer people.” 

Next, Bonhoeffer describes the one who depends on individual conscience alone, and so becomes prey to the many small compromises that leave one with a “salved instead of a clear conscience,” an allusion that might also apply to many of us today. Bonhoeffer then considers the one who depends on a personal sense of duty (e.g., the party faithful, or the loyal appointee), only to realize too late that conflicts of duty can lead one to do “his duty by the devil, too.” 

He next speaks of the pragmatic person committed to act with freedom, who is always “ready to sacrifice a barren principle for a fruitful compromise,” but who ends up doing great evil with the rationale that something worse is being prevented (and how many, one might wonder, of those who took children from their parents at the border made just such a compromise?). 

Last among these failed ways to respond to evil, Bonhoeffer speaks of those whose goal is only personal virtue, and who seek the good by becoming disconnected from the world. Such a person, Bonhoeffer notes, “must shut his mouth and his eyes to the injustice around him” and will “either go to pieces because of this disquiet, or become the most hypocritical of Pharisees.”

What all of these failed approaches have in common is that they depend, ultimately, on an individual’s own internal ideas. For Bonhoeffer, however, Christian responsibility depends not just on our personal strength, but on our surrender to the God who has become one with us. The responsible person sees the world, as God sees it: honestly, without the lens of fear and theory. And in the face of the world, what God sees—and we are called to see—is the face of Christ, loving each person as Christ does. And it is here, I think, that our faith and our patriotism may find a common ground. 

For in the principles of the Declaration is a call to the same vision: to see all persons as equal to ourselves, and as endowed by rights for which we are called to struggle together. In this way, we can see what is best in our history, without ignoring what is hard. We can be shamed by suffering and take responsibility to relieve it, as Christ did on the cross, as Lincoln, and Douglas, and Day, and Chavez did in their own ways. 

Such responsibility does not demand personal success, but demands only that we try. For our call as Christians and Americans is to see the world honestly, to name evil openly, and to resist it always—to build the common good by our care for all, especially those who suffer. So let us resist, let us take responsibility, as Christians and as Americans, and let us not fear the truth. For in seeing the world as it is, and in loving the world as Christ loves it, we shall become the People of God, faithful to our American context.

Fr. John Whitney