Nations and Kingdoms: Some Inconclusive Thoughts on Patriotism, Freedom, and all That

This reflection has been composed gradually over the past week—before, during, and after July 4.

As an American citizen, I struggle with July 4^th.  I struggle with July 4^th because I struggle with patriotism.  I struggle with patriotism both as a manifest reality and as an idea.

I know that there are other notions of patriotism than “my country, right or wrong.”  I know that there is an actual, active, and vital tradition of defining patriotism as loyalty and obedience to the ideals that a nation supposedly embodies as opposed to the nation itself.  But, even when it’s framed that way, I still have a problem with patriotism.  I struggle with patriotism and its representative holiday always, even when I like the president and feel kind of okay about the shape of the country.  Neither of those things are the case right now, and so my nausea is a little more pronounced this year, but that’s a small matter.  I would feel at least a bit of this anyway.

Even if patriotism is framed as loyalty and obedience to principles instead of the nation, I still struggle with the notion precisely because of those two ideas—loyalty and obedience.  The core of my struggle is that I am a Christian, and as such I have placed my loyalty and obedience elsewhere.  I briefly did some teaching in a few public high schools recently, and I always found it a surreal and troubling experience when I was asked to lead my class in the pledge of allegiance to the American flag in the mornings.  I would pray the Lord’s Prayer aloud with my congregation each week for gathered worship and on my own in my private time of devotion, affirming my citizenship in the kingdom of Christ “on earth as it is in heaven” before any other group, organization, or system.  I was always irked by the persisting thought that it was either one or the other, that I needed either to affirm my loyalty to the reign of God in the kingdom of Christ or to the visible powers of the governing bodies of my geographical home.  And the fact that a sizable and visible portion of American Christians seem to feel no such tension only made this all the more irksome.  Think of all the common phrases—faith and family, God and country—that imply an inseparable link between one’s spiritual identity and one’s national or familial identity.  Think of all the patriotic services that go on in so many churches with so few eyes batted or brows furrowed. 

Given these dispositions of mine, it should be no surprise that I always wince a little at the word freedom.  If I’m in the right mood, all the things that I’ve been told about this abstract noun over the years begin replaying in my mind, only in a sardonic, mocking, and slightly slurred voice (you know the one):  Freedom isn’t free.  It’s more important than life itself.  It’s what we as Americans have that no one else in the world has in the right way or to the right degree.  It’s why the terrorists hate us.  More thoughtful and principled reflections on this word might state that freedom is a right that comes with responsibility; that freedom is given up when one breaks the law or fails to earn one’s keep.  On the other hand, I have often had such questions as “why did you throw all five of those cheeseburger wrappers out the window of your car” or “why did you drink three two-liter bottles of soda today” answered with “because this is America, dammit!”  Freedom, for some, means that I can do whatever I want whenever I want to, and anyone who tells me that maybe I shouldn’t do whatever I want whenever I want to needs to get their head out of their ass and mind their business.

My own church congregation does nothing in our services to commemorate this national holiday, and I am grateful for that.  This past Sunday, however, one of our hymns did offer a reflection on this word freedom and how it might be understood for a person of Christian faith.  The hymn is a setting of the canticle of Zechariah, found in the first chapter of Luke.  The music and text adaptation are both the work of a friend of prodigious musical ability and theological insight.  The text adaptation frames verses 74-75 of this chapter of Luke as a comment on “true liberty,” which is “to be holy, to be righteous, in His sight throughout our days.”  Freedom, in Zechariah’s song, is the freedom to be holy.

To a Christian, to be holy is to be like Christ.  To increase in holiness is to be transformed into the image of Christ.  And St. Paul gives a sweeping and lyrical explanation of what this might mean in the Christ-hymn in his letter to the Philippians (2:5-11):

                   Let the same mind be in you that was in Christ Jesus,

who, though he was in the form of God,
    did not regard equality with God
    as something to be exploited,
but emptied himself,
    taking the form of a slave,
    being born in human likeness.
And being found in human form,
     he humbled himself
    and became obedient to the point of death—
    even death on a cross.

 Therefore God also highly exalted him
    and gave him the name
    that is above every name,
 so that at the name of Jesus
    every knee should bend,
    in heaven and on earth and under the earth,
 and every tongue should confess
    that Jesus Christ is Lord,
    to the glory of God the Father.

There is so much going on here that my head is spinning and singing.  The second half of this hymn declares in no uncertain terms that Jesus Christ is the authority to which every person and every nation, every citizen and every governing body, will finally answer.  For a Christian, this should make pledging allegiance to anyone or anything else extremely uncomfortable at best.  But Paul has just held up the mind of Christ to his audience as the pattern of their transformation, what their freedom to be holy allows them to approach.  And the first half of this hymn tells us that this mind is a mind that knows its position of privilege and relinquishes it for others.  It is a mind that relinquishes privilege in order to exist in solidarity with the slave.  It is a mind that does not place its own safety and well-being above that of others, but instead voluntarily gives up its own life—not even as a fighter or as a warrior, but in complete humility.

All the talk of freedom that happens around this time every year here in the U.S. makes me so uncomfortable because it usually takes a tone that is drastically different from the tone of this hymn.  Freedom, according to many of the voices that I hear, means the ability to protect and safeguard my own rights and my own way of life.  It means the ability to deny others what they want or what they need when those things cause me discomfort.  It means the ability to wield one’s beliefs and convictions as a sword against those whose beliefs and convictions I find abhorrent or inconvenient.

So what am I saying here?  Am I saying that I hate my country?  No.  I find the land on which the United States has grown up and the cultures made up by the people who inhabit it to be endlessly fascinating, endearing, and inspiring.  The history of my nation is a sweeping story that engages my mind and my heart, and it is a story in which I cannot help but situate myself.  The ideals that undergird our political system—that power only works when shared and kept accountable, that every individual should have the right and the ability to realize their place in the whole—are inspiring and noble even if they have often been articulated and embodied by deeply flawed leaders and thinkers.  Even if they have not yet been realized.

Am I saying that I have attained the mind of Christ, or have disciplined myself to learn the freedom to be holy in all my ways?  No.  I see the very ills that I decry in our contemporary American notions of freedom so clearly because I know them to be a part of my own history and my own patterns of living.  Not only am I knowingly and unknowingly complicit in the ills of our social machine by which the oppressed are marginalized, ignored, or trampled upon; I am also guilty of pushing away friends and family, the very people that I am not habitually blinded to, for the sake of my own convenience.  I, too, often live as if freedom means I can do whatever I want whenever I want to, regardless of who may be hurt in the process.

I am simply saying that I want to understand freedom as entering into the holy free-flow through which I am emptied of myself—my privilege, security, and well-being—so that others may be filled with a measure of these very things.  So that, thus emptied, I might be filled again not by pulling myself up by my bootstraps but through receiving the same free-flow of grace.  When I think of this freedom, it includes freedom from the things that I think I want and need so that I might be transformed through experiencing a will other than my own. 

I don’t know a way forward in this.  I don’t have a concluding statement about how to redeem the notion of patriotism or come to a better understanding of how my objective identity as a citizen of the United States does and should relate to the other identity that I claim as more foundational and to which I do pledge allegiance.  But maybe the closest thing I can muster to patriotism is the faint hope that even nations can repent, can free themselves of their own self-conceptions and realize that power and privilege can be given up.  But, again, I also hope that I can learn to embody these things in my own smaller way.