Should Christians be Patriotic?

In this 4th of July special, Joe Heschmeyer tackles Christian questions about patriotism and how it relates to our life in Christ.

Transcription:

Joe:

Happy 4th of July to my fellow Americans, for those of you not from the United States. 4th of July is of course our independence Day, the day when we successfully declared independence from England, from Britain. Now these days there’s like 65 countries on earth that can say some form of that, but we did it first. And I’m not here to bash on England. In fact, one might say this is a good day for England as well. After all her American colonies grew up, left the house and went off and formed colonies of their own, it’s like becoming an imperial grandmother. In all seriousness though, 4th of July can raise some kind of funny questions as a Christian, because as Americans we tend to lean really heavily into the patriotism thing. For those of you who are wondering what I’m wearing, whether you’re listening or watching, I’m wearing a red, white and blue shirt.

But upon closer inspection, it’s got Benjamin Franklin, it’s got the Liberty Bell, it’s got the Bald Eagle, and I thought it was just like an American patriotic shirt. Only upon doing some research for this podcast do I realize it’s actually Philadelphia themed. So it also has a boxing glove for Rocky and it’s got a Philly cheese steak, nevertheless, feels extremely patriotic. But is that good or bad? Should we as Christians strive to be American patriots or patriots of whatever country you happen to be from? Or is that something to kind of rise above? Is patriotism a shortcoming or a virtue? Now, in the American context, this is more complicated because not only do you have the kind of national questions of rah rah, my country, but you also have internal domestic issues because within America there’s a fight over even the word patriot. And CNN pointed this out a few years back in an article called What exactly does it mean to be a Patriot?

Experts Say It’s not easy to define. And in that they rightly pointed out that patriot tends to have connotations of more like right wing these days. And the Oxford English dictionary even recognizes this. It added a new definition to the word patriot doesn’t replace the existing ones, but added to it where it now reads an opponent of presumed intervention by federal government and the affairs of individuals. I don’t know what it means by presumed there, but upon of intervention by the federal government and the affairs of individuals, especially with respect to gun and tax laws, frequently in the names of right wing, libertarian, political and militia groups. So if you say my fellow Patriots, that sounds to American ears that you’re saying I’m on the right side of the political aisle. So you’ve got that level of issues of just patriotism gets complicated. It feels like a very political statement, not just about national politics, but where you stand on things.

But then you also have things like flags in the back of church or in the front of church. Sometimes I don’t think I’m alone and sometimes be uneasy. What are we doing with an American flag next to the cross or sometimes an American flag and a Vatican flag since we’re Catholic? That can be kind of a disconcerting or at least makes you kind of wonder, is this the appropriate time and place for this? Yes, no, why? But I might even add one more thing because sometimes you’ll hear patriotic music in church, especially on 4th of July, but on other days as well. And there’s one song in particular that really rankles me and I wasn’t originally able to say why I’m going to share with you the lyrics and say like, okay, this made me a little uneasy, but I couldn’t put a finger on it. And I think after kind of exploring the theology of patriotism, I can more precisely say what annoys me about the song.

So the song is from an artist by the name of Lloyd Stone and it’s called This is my song as we’re going to hear. He does not originally come up with the tune for it. That’s going to matter in a little bit, but the lyrics say, this is my song of God, of all the nations, a song of peace for lands, APHA and mine. This is my home, the country where my heart is, here are my hopes, my dreams, my holy shrine. But other hearts and other lands are beating with hopes and dreams as true and high as mine. And there was just something about that song where it’s like on the one hand, we now have the questionable like, okay, we’re doing patriotism during mass kind of thing, and then it’s like, but what even is this? It’s like, yeah, I’m patriotic, but everybody else is too and that’s also valid.

So it seems like the kind of thing where it’s like Go sports teams, but also the other team, you’re also very good and valid. I’m rooting for my team, but I also want you to root for your team and we’re all just here to have fun. The whole thing feels weird and I couldn’t exactly, again, put my finger on what it was that drove me nuts about the song and I think I can now, but let’s start with a theological objection here. St. Paul in Colossians three, verse 11 says here, there cannot be Greek and Jew, circumcised and uncircumcised, barbarian ian, slave free man, but Christ is all and in all. And so there’s a certain view that says patriotism really no longer has a place. All that matters is that you’re a Christian. And so all those old distinctions, male and female, slave and free Jew and Greek, none of that stuff matters Now because we’re all just Christians and verses like Colossians three can sound like that’s what they’re saying.

Now that is what they’re saying in one sense that the defining characteristic of your life should not be your race, your gender, your nationality, any of those things, but rather that you’re a son or daughter of God and in relationship to other sons and daughters of God. But Paul, as we’re going to see from other things he says, is not actually knocking patriotism and even nationalism as long as they’re properly understood. So what is the case for patriotic piety? Now you might say piety, that sounds almost blasphemous. Well just wait and hear it out. St. Thomas Aquinas and the Summa, the Summa Theolog, when he deals with the question of patriotism, he puts it under the realm of piety. Now, piety we usually talk about in regards to our relationship with God and Aquinas is going to argue, piety is a form of justice. Now, justice is giving someone what they’re owed and Aquinas is going to say piety.

Basically piety is the kind of justice you give when you actually can’t pay back the debt. If somebody borrows $20 from you and they pay it back, there it is, that’s justice. But if someone’s given you your life, what can you possibly do to repay that? It’s an un repayable sort of debt. And so we can see hopefully even from that description why that would apply to God, but think more broadly and say, okay, well if that’s true of God, who else might that be true of? And that’s exactly the question Thomas Aquinas wants to explore. And so he says, well, we become debtors to other men in various ways according to their various excellence and the various benefits received from them. We owe someone a debt of honor if they’re really honorable or we owe someone something if they’ve done something for us. Now in the first place, this is going to apply to God.

He is the most honorable and he’s done the most for us. But Aquinas says in the second place, the principles of our being and government are our parents and our country that have given us birth and nourishment. You wouldn’t be here today if not for your mom and dad and if not for the country in which you were born and raised and it took care of you that raised you up that really was a motherland or fatherland in a real sense of that term that had the kind of role that a parent has. Now, sometimes the American ear does not like that. You think about, oh, nanny state, whereas other countries tend to be much more comfortable in terms like Fatherland and motherland. But if you think about just what do I owe the country in which I was born, it really is a debt I’m not able to repay, and so Aquinas makes the point that therefore we have this relationship of piety.

Consequently, he says, man is a debtor chiefly to his parents and his country after God. Then he says something even more controversial, therefore just as it belongs to religion to give worship to God. Now, that’s a poor translation. The word worship there is cultus, which is like honor or service. So we want to give honor service to God in the case of God that literally is divine worship, but the word cultus doesn’t just mean worship. So therefore just as it belongs to religion to give honor service to God, so does it belong to piety in the second place? Do give honor and service to one’s parents and to one’s country?

Then he goes, we can go even that. So you’ve got this threefold. I have this debt of piety to God, my country, my parents that then can be extended because what we owe to our parents extends to all of our kin, all our kindred. You can’t love your parents and be totally cruel to your siblings, right? That’s incompatible. Likewise, this honor and service go to our country, extends to our fellow citizens and in fact to all friends of the country. So he says that’s what we mean when we talk about piety. Aquinas is not alone in this, by the way. He’s not just making this up in the 12th century or 13th century. St. Ambrose, the famous preacher of Milan who converted St. Augustine talks about this as well back in the three hundreds, but he has the order slightly different. This is the only major difference when you talk about the piety of justice.

He says it’s directed firstly towards God, secondly towards one country, next toward parents and then lastly towards everybody, and he views this as almost self-evident. So you have chiefly these three God country parents. Now, the difference between Ambrose and Thomas Aquinas is the order Aquinas is going to say God, parents country, for our purposes, it doesn’t really matter. The point is we have a relationship of piety between all three and thinking about it this way is actually super helpful. Now, you might be saying even this far, what are you talking about? How do we know we have this relationship of piety? Now, I’ve already given one answer to that that they’ve given you more than you can ever repay, but is this theologically sound? I think we can see several indications that it is. For instance, God speaks of himself as a father numerous times and expects you to understand the service you owe to him in light of the service you owe to your father.

For instance, in Malachi one verse six, this is one of the texts, St. Thomas Aquinas points to God says a son honors his father and a servant his master. If then I am a father, where is my honor? Right? So if you want to understand how to honor God, look at how you honor your father. Now we’re going to get into a commandment in the 10 commandments that has very similar language about honoring your father, but notice that God views these as analogous. Now, obviously you owe God more than you owe your father, but if you want to make sense of your relationship to God makes sense of your relationship to your father. This becomes even clearer on the other passages like Ephesians chapter three, where St. Paul says, for this reason I bow my knees before the Father Potter from whom every family’s patria in heaven and on earth is named, but not only is family patria, patria is also the term given for one’s country.

In fact, our word patriot comes from this patriot, like literally children of one’s father and the father there is the fatherland. And so the idea of a fatherland is built in even to the word patriot. Now, the etymology dictionary where I pulled that from actually references Orienta fci, who is an Italian writer from the 20th century and early 21st century, who points out that as Americans and English speakers more broadly, we have this strange relationship where we don’t have the word patria. Instead, we have Fatherland motherland native land or my country, which are much clunkier, right? We don’t use those very often and they sound really strange and even stranger to say, my patria. Nevertheless, we have terms like patriotism and patriotic, and she says, apart from France, I cannot imagine another country more patriotic than America. And as an American I’m like, apart from France, excuse me, I think we can do better.

That’s the patriotism. The point there is that relationship to your heavenly Father, your biological father and the father land are all analogously related one to another, and they’re tied together by this theme of piety. So in light of that, can we say patriotism is biblical? I’m going to say in one sense, yes, but we need to understand it correctly. Now, the easy case is this. In one Timothy chapter two, St. Paul encourages us to pray for everybody, but he specifies for kings and all who are in high positions that we may lead a quiet and peaceable life, godly and respectful in every way. Now, that’s the low hanging fruit because that’s the easy kind of patriotism where you’re praying for even someone you may despise as a politician or a leader. And I’m reminded here actually of the prayer from Fiddler on the roof,

Video:

Is there a proper blessing for the tzar, a blessing for the char? Of course, may God bless and keep the char far away from us,

Joe:

But the Christian vision of piety is actually richer and deeper than that. It’s not just praying for leaders that they’ll get right with God or praying for the leaders that they’ll turn their attention away from us so we can live quiet and peaceable lives. Those can be legitimate prayers. Don’t get me wrong, we owe something more. Romans 13, St. Paul talks about this directly. He says, let every person be subject to the governing authorities, and then he lays out a principle that we’re going to see is very important for there is no authority except from God, and those that exist have been instituted by God. Therefore he who resists the authorities resist what God has appointed and those who resist will incur judgment. That is a shocking declaration of civic loyalty, especially when you think about the context that when Paul is writing this, he’s writing about the Roman Empire, which was fiercely anti-Christian, and then he says, rulers are not a terror to good conduct but to bad, would you have no fear of him who’s in authority?

Then do what is good and you’ll receive his approval. For he is God’s servant for your good, but if you do wrong, be afraid for he does not bear the sword in vain. He is the servant of God to execute his wrath on the wrongdoer. Now again, Paul is subjected to an unjust capital punishment as are the other apostles, mostly as was Jesus. Paul is clearly aware that the civil authority can use its sword for evil. Nevertheless, he views the authority of the state as being God-given and suggests we need to be subject, we need to be deferential and honoring in response to that and honoring really is the right term for this because he goes on to say that we must be subject not only to avoid God’s wrath, but for the sake of conscience, for the same reason you also pay taxes for the authorities or ministers of God attending to this very thing.

And then listen to this language. He says, pay all of them their dues, taxes to whom taxes are due revenue to whom revenue is due respect to whom respect is due honor to whom honor is due. Now, if this was April 15th, I’d be leaning more into the fact that as Christians, we need to take seriously the fact we have to pay taxes. We have to civilly participate in the ways open to us, and that includes the unpleasant ways like paying taxes. But honor seems to be more appropriate for the theme of patriotism, and Paul is not alone in saying that. St. Peter puts it really succinctly. He says, honor all men love the brotherhood. Fear God, honor the emperor. And that verse one Peter two, verse 17 is really punchy, especially when you consider that the emperor at the time is not King David. It’s not some pro-Israel pro Christian sort of world leader.

It’s the emperor Nero, a vicious tyrannical monster of a man and we’re told to honor him this same Nero mind you is going to kill St. Peter. He’s going to crucify him upside down. Now you could say, oh look, that was so naive of Peter. He didn’t know he should have dishonored the emperor because the emperor was actually a bad guy. No, absolutely not. St Peter knew the risks, but he knew the very real likelihood he was going to be executed. For a couple of reasons we can say this one, St. Peter describes himself at the time in this same letter as being in Babylon. Babylon is code, if you will, for the city of Rome and is comparing Rome with his oppression to the earlier Babylonian oppression of Israel. So he doesn’t have a rosy eyed image of Roman occupation of Israel or Roman suppression of the church.

He understands that we are in captivity, we are being oppressed by the new Babylonians, the Romans, and here he is in the heart of the empire, in the city of Rome itself, but it’s more than that. He also knew that he was going to be executed because Jesus told him that in John 21, Jesus told him that he was going to have a death that would glorify God by his martyrdom. And so Peter was under no illusions that he was going to somehow get out of this by making nice with the emperor. He knew the same emperor who was probably going to kill him and did indeed kill him. We still have to honor him. That is a rich, nuanced and challenging vision of patriotism. So how do we make sense of them? How can we fear God and honor the emperor after all? Aren’t there times where those two things seem to be intention with one another where what the emperor wants, the president wants what the state wants runs counter to what God wants, and Peter’s not oblivious to that possible tension either.

In fact, he speaks into that in the acts of the apostles when he says, we must obey God rather than men. So is there a way to unite these ideas that we have to honor the emperor, but sometimes we might have to disobey the emperor or might have to do things the emperor wouldn’t want us doing. Remember, at the same time Peter is saying honor the emperor. He’s operating discreetly in Rome because he knows if he’s caught, he’ll be put to death. Those two things are coexisting in his mind at the same time that he’s writing one Peter. So how do we make sense of this for a coherent vision of the duty of patriotism and its limitations? Again, I want us to remember the three dimensions of piety, our relationship to God, our relationship to our country and our relationship to our parents, and I want to actually turn towards how do we harmonize our relationship to our parents, the honor we owe them with the honor that we owe God because there’s a lot written on this in the Bible, both in the old and the New Testament, and it gives us kind of a framework to make sense of our relationship to our patria, to our homeland.

So what does the decalogue have to say about patriotism? Now, for those of you watching this, you might be wondering, why did you put decalogue instead of 10 commandments? And I’ll tell you, 10 commandments didn’t fit. It’s too many letters, but in the 10 commandments you have right after the commandments about honoring God. Now, there’s a difference in how Protestants and Catholics tend to number these, but you have the first commandments are to honor God by making no other God besides him by not building any graven images or idols by not taking his name in vain and by keeping the Sabbath holy. And then immediately after that, what’s the fifth commandment for Protestants and the fourth commandment for Catholics, because we put those first two together, we’re told Honor your father and your mother as the Lord your God commanded you. I want to unpack a few parts of this commandment, but this commandment, which we call the fourth commandment, is quite clear about this need to honor your father and mother, and the catechism of the Catholic church suggests that this, well, it’s addressed chiefly to our relationship to father and mother because it’s the most universal relationship.

Also gives us a principle that sort of extends outward just like St. Thomas Aquinas has said. So it likewise concerns the ties of kinship between members of the extended family. It requires honor, affection and gratitude toward elders and ancestors, and it even extends to the duties of pupils to teachers, employees, to employers subordinates, to leaders, citizens to their country, and to those who administer or govern it that a foundation of patriotism of our relationship to our country and our country’s leaders is actually found right here and honor your father and mother that if you get why the honoring of your father immediately then goes to honor your patria, honor your earthly father and mother, and before you even get to all the commitments about love of neighbor that come after that, the hinge one is this relationship to your parents, right? You’ve got love of God, you’ve got love of neighbor, and then the honor your father and mother sort of falls as a hinge between those two where one way of understanding what you owe to your father and mother is to think about what you owe to your neighbors.

One way of thinking about what you owe to your father and mother is to think about what you owe to God. I hope that makes sense. There’s a reason that this falls in the order that it does because it does really serve as a hinge between the two sort of sets of commandments. The catechism goes on to say that the fourth commandment illustrates our relationships in society and our brothers and sisters. We see the children of our parents and our cousins, the descendants of our ancestors and our fellow citizens, the citizens of our country in the baptized, the children of our mother, the church in every human person, a son or daughter of the one who wants to be called our father. So in other words, honor your father and mother is really an appeal to love in a relational sort of way. I hope this makes sense because this is a critical way of understanding both why this made it into the 10 commandments and why we understand it as being more broad than just literally honoring your biological mom and dad and boom, that’s it.

That if you get why you owe this moral duty, partly again injustice because they’ve given you more than you can repay, but partly also because it grounds this sort of relationality. So think about that back in the context of the commandment. Honor your father and your mother that there’s something very personal and relational about that, that these are not just honor but your mom and dad, and that’s the catechisms point, that this turns our love and our duty and our honor and our service and all of these things away from coming into amorphous grownups or adults or the elderly into something much more meaningful. And this gets into why I really disliked that hymn that I shared earlier. Think about it in the context of honoring your mom and dad. Now, I realize honoring your mother and father in the ancient world included things like taking care of them when they were old.

But think about it just in the most basic sense. You get a best dad ever mug for your dad for Father’s Day, and now imagine someone saying, oh, excuse me. Actually all parents really are owed respect, not just your dad. We should respect all dads, all dads matter. You would I think, recognize that there was something kind of gross about that, that in taking it away from the individual relational subjective like This person is my father and turning it into, yeah, all dad’s everywhere, something’s lost. And in fact, if you know anything about the history of Mother’s Day, there’s a whole debate about this because the original origin of Mother’s Day was a woman wanting to honor her mom and encouraging other people to do the same for their mom. And so it was really important that it was mother apostrophe S Day like your Mother’s Day, not mother’s with an S apostrophe like a day for all mothers.

It’s a day for your mother. Father’s day is a day for your father, and the 10 Commandments don’t tell you to honor fathers and mothers, but your father and mother, if you get that relationality, you can then see how it emanates outward, that therefore you also respect your family members, therefore you also respect the other members of your country as children of the one father land. That kind of idea is not saying, I think my mom and dad are greater than every other mom and dad on earth. Even if you get a best dad ever mug, no one is going to think that literally is true, but rather because they are yours, you honor and respect them. That’s the important things that the heart of patriotism. It’s not that we are patriotic because America is the greatest nation on earth. Some people think it is, some people think it isn’t.

It’s not relevant. We are patriotic because America is our country and likewise, if some other countries who are country, you should be patriotic towards that country. You don’t have to think it’s the greatest. You don’t have to gloss over its flaws, but you can acknowledge that for all of its flaws. It is your country and has given you something that you can never repay. And so you owe this relationship of piety just like on Mother’s Day and Father’s Day. You don’t have to imagine your mom and dad are flawless, but they are your mom and dad. And so someone who can’t do that, when Father’s Day rolls around and someone says, oh, well, what about all the single moms? Or what about all the moms? That is a defect. That is a failure to be able to grasp this relationality in a mature and healthy sort of way that rather it really is good to honor your people in the right time and place more on that in a little bit because I want to turn now to the boundaries of that because as I’ve already alluded to, you can take these ideas too far.

Think about the love of the emperor. If you’d said, well, the emperor wants me to sacrifice to idol, so I’m going to do it, you would be going too far. So what are the appropriate boundaries of earthly piety? Matthew 15 talks about this. We’re going to look at it again in terms of honoring your father and mother and then extend it by analogy to honoring the patria, honoring your country. In Matthew 15, Jesus rebukes the Pharisees. He said, for God commanded honor your father and your mother, and he who speaks evil of father and mother, let him surely die. But you in the Pharisees say if anyone tells his father or his mother, what you would’ve gained from me is given to God. He need not honor his father. So for the sake of your tradition, you have made void the word of God. So what’s going on there is what’s called corban that you could take all the money you were going to use to take care of mom and dad in their old age and instead say, actually, I’m going to donate it to the temple.

And the Pharisees would be like, great, that’s wonderful. If you want to give the religious leaders some money, the religious leaders are very okay with that, but Jesus was not okay with that. That your duty to honor and serve God does not eliminate your duty to honor your father and mother. That you can’t just say, I don’t have to worry about this relationship of filial piety towards mom and dad or towards my country. We would say by extension, because I have my filial relationship to God, the Father, Jesus is going to say, no, doesn’t work like that. You don’t just get rid of these lower relationships because of the higher ones. So that’s the first principle we have to see here. You serving God does not eliminate your need to honor your father and mother, likewise doesn’t eliminate your need to be patriotic. On the other hand though, Jesus also says, if anyone comes to me and does not hate his own father and mother, he cannot be with my disciples.

So what is going on there? Now that is a well acknowledged bit of hyperbole. He doesn’t literally mean hate them. He’s rather showing an order of love that what you owe to God is more than what you owe to your father and mother. And so he’s purposely using the fact that you’re not going to hate your father and mother and wife and children and brothers and sisters and even your own life. He’s going to take these things near and dear to you and say Jesus himself demands to be even more near and dear to you than that He’s not contradicting himself. He’s not following the Pharisees saying, well, you can ignore father and mother as long as you’ve got God. He’s rather saying that, yes, you have both these duties, the family duty and the duty to God, but there’s a hierarchy. The duty to God is higher, doesn’t eliminate the lower duty, but it is higher than the lower duty.

Why does this matter? Well, Jesus explains in Luke 12 that he comes not to bring peace but the sort division including division within family. It’s that you’re going to have father against son and son against father and so on that you’ll find people who oppose you becoming Christian. In fact, I regularly hear, well somewhat regularly hear from people who say, I want to be Catholic, but I don’t want to disobey my father or my husband’s not, and I want to respect. I want be a submissive wife and I don’t want to thwart his authority. And Jesus has spoken into this issue already. Those other duties are all lower than your duty to serve God. And so if God is telling you to do one thing and your husband or your father or your government or your employer or any other earthly authority is telling you to do something else, you must obey God rather than men.

How do we draw all this together in John 19? Jesus is before punches Pilate, he’s being put on trial and is about to be unjustly executed by the civil authority. And it might be a time when we would imagine that Christians would say, well, actually the government doesn’t have any authority. Pilate in necessity does, and Jesus gives a really interesting answer. Pilate says, do you not know that I have power to release you and power to crucify you? And Jesus responds by saying, you would have no power over me unless it had been given you from above. Think about that. He is acknowledging Pilate does in fact have authority, and this authority is in fact God-given there is an extension to this as well though this shows a limitation of the authority. If you give someone else authority to do something, you can control the limits to how they use that authority.

I hope that’s clear. If you say, okay, you can take my credit card and go buy this one thing you need but don’t get anything else, and they come back and they’ve bought 20 other things, they’ve misused your authority and it’s not a just use of the authority, you can even make them pay back the money, right? Because they didn’t have authorization and so therefore they didn’t have authority. Those two words are related. Likewise, if you said, I just be an attorney. So in a law example, you might say, okay, I want you to settle this case between 10,000 and $30,000, but do not pay more than $30,000. And if your lawyer went in there and said, how about 50? No, they’re outside of their authority, you did not give them authorization to do that, and so they don’t have authority. So if you understand where the authority comes from, then you can understand what are the limits of the authorization.

So what are the limits of the authority? So in saying punches, Pilate has authority from on high. Jesus is telling us his authorization has come from God, but also that if Pilate is acting against God, he’s acting outside of his authority because he’s doing something unauthorized. This harmonizes an apparent biblical contradiction. On the one hand, Jesus says to render unto Caesar, what belongs to Caesar? Render unto God what belongs to God. On the other hand, he says, you can’t serve two masters. And on the face he might say, well, how could both of those things be true? How can I both serve Caesar and God without serving two masters? Because you’re serving God in serving Caesar and you’re not serving Caesar if doing so violates your duty to God. Hope that makes sense. This of course applies in the 10 Commandments. Go back and look.

It says, honor your father and mother as the Lord your God commanded you. So when you’re serving your father and mother, when you’re honoring them, when you’re honoring and serving the state and its authority, you are doing so because you recognize as authority as God given. Remember what St. Paul said about that, about civil authority in Romans 13? These same principles apply in all of these cases. So hopefully that’s clear that the reason that you’re patriotic isn’t because you want to serve two masters, the USA and God or because you think they’re equal in authority, but that you realize when your country acts in a godly way, when its authority is being used in a godly way, it is acting with God-given authority because it’s been given the authority to do that. That same conception of the state also tells you when you can and maybe even have to disobey the state, civil disobedience is rooted in this conception of the state.

If you don’t believe me, go read the letter from the Birmingham Jail in which Martin Luther King lays all of this out citing to Aquinas and Augusta that it’s this vision that if the state’s authority comes from God, then that means an unjust law is no law at all because an unjust law is an attempt to do something God didn’t give you permission to do. And so there’s a much thornier question of when and how you can tell whether something’s an unjust law when you can still obey an unjust law because the only person being hurt is yourself. St. Paul says, why not let yourself get robbed? There are times where you endure injustice and there are other times where an unjust law actually has to be opposed. And so you actually have to stand up against to take the easy example, something like the Holocaust and say, this is not okay. I can’t just go along with it because the government says so you can never do evil even when you’ve been ordered to do evil from a superior, from the government, from parents, from fill in the blank. So there’s some clear boundaries and then there’s some gray area of when do I have to disobey? But the general principles are very clear. If something is a legitimate lawful authority, you have to obey it. But if you’re being ordered to do something unlawful and illegitimate, you don’t. In fact, you might even have to disobey.

Okay, so I want to turn now towards a helpful source, and I realize not everyone who watches this is Catholic, but hopefully you’ve found this helpful drawing on the Catholic wisdom. Either way, even if you say, I can pick and choose which Catholics I want to listen to and why, fine, here’s some stuff for you to consider Pope Leo the 13th on patriotism and its limits. Now, to put this in some context, we’re going to be looking at something that Pope Leo wrote in 1890, and at the time, Europe in particular had been through a real period of upheaval. And so the Encyclopedia Britannica, his article on European nationalism talks about how in the second half of the 19th century, so the late 18 hundreds nationalism had disintegrated both the Ottoman Empire and the Austria-Hungarian Empire that these empires, which were what were called supranational, it wasn’t just one nation but a bunch of nations put together as an empire they had dissolved because they’d all been based on pre national authority.

So if you know anything about the history of World War I, you’re going to see a lot of this happen again, that you’re going to have the Arch Franz Ferdinand get killed by a Serbian nationalist. This is nationalism against imperialism. Well, in any case, you also have this stuff going on in places like Russia where you have two kind of national six schools of thought, one that wants to make Russia more western, one that wants to make it very non-European non-Western, very Russian, Russian. In the midst of this Pope, Leo the 13th comes out with an encyclical called S Christiane on the duty of Christians as citizens. This is in 1890, so right in the midst of all of this stew. And what does he have to say in it? Well, he has to say lots of things, but I want to highlight a couple features.

He says, to love both countries that of earth below and that of heaven above. Yet in such mode that the love of our heavenly home surpasses the love of our earthly home and that human laws never be set above divine laws is the essential duty of Christians and the fountainhead, so to say, from which all other duties spring. That was a nuanced and complicated sentence. Let’s unpack it First, he argues that your love of your homeland is part of your essential duty as a Christian. If you don’t love your country, you’re actually failing in an important regard in terms of the love that you’re required, the love that you need to be showing. Nevertheless, this love that you show your homeland, as we’ve already heard elsewhere, is not above the love you owe to God. You don’t love your earthly home more than your heavenly home.

You don’t put your human laws above divine laws. You don’t do any of that. But nevertheless, you still realize that you have a true obligation apart from your obligations as a Christian to follow all of the laws of Christ in his church. You also have the obligation to follow the laws of the country in which you live and you have a duty to love your country. So we don’t want to lose sight of either of those dimensions, either the need to have real patriotism or the limits of that patriotism. Some people are really skittish about any kind of patriotism. Other people lean so heavily into it that it’s like, okay, but what if your country did something God didn’t approve of? What if being a good American and being a good Christian didn’t sit comfortably together? And there are people who struggle with that very idea. So some of you need to hear the one thing, yes, it is okay and even good and even a duty to be patriotic, others need to hear yes, and that patriotism doesn’t trump your duty to God because sometimes the state goes astray.

In fact, Leo 13 says, if we judge Aite the supernatural love for the church and the natural love for our country, proceed from the same eternal principle since God himself is their author and originating, cause that even when we’re talking about the natural love you have for your country that is still ultimately coming from God. We don’t claim it’s the supernatural gift of charity, but there’s still a natural love you have and that is itself a God-given gift. If you find yourself without patriotism, there’s a lack there in your love, and that’s something to be remedied, something to maybe pray to God for more love. Consequently, Leo says it follows that between the duties they respectively enjoy, in other words, what God and country ask of you, neither can come into collision with the other that as long as both are doing what they should and God’s always going to do what he should, there’s not going to be any true tension between loving God and loving your country.

We can certainly and should love ourselves, bear ourselves kindly toward our fellow men, nourish affection for the state and the governing powers, but at the same time we can and must cherish toward the church a feeling of filial piety that the church is mother church. She’s there to take care of you in much the same way. Your own parents, the state and God have this kind of relationship with you and we also love God, the deepest love of which we are capable. So we have that duty and it has limits. The origin of our love of country. The origin of our love of God are coming from the same place God himself. Nevertheless, Leo says, the order of precedence of these duties is sometimes under stress from public calamities or through the perverse will of men that you will find times. And the 1890s were one of those times, in fact, the whole period of the 18 hundreds and 19 hundreds, you see a lot of this where different nations wanted to be treated above God.

They wanted their own will followed rather than God’s will. And Leo says sometimes it happens. The state seems to require from men as subjects one thing and religion from men as Christians quite another, that over here you’re expected to honor God and the nature of the human person over here, you’re expected to do something un-Christian. Maybe it’s something big, maybe it’s something small. Give a referral to do an abortion. Celebrate pride month, fill in the blank, whatever it is, probably not as extreme as offer incense to an idol in the kind of way that all Christians would perk up and say, oh, this is a challenge to my status as a Christian. Instead, it’s compromise in some smaller way. Those are the kind of tensions that Leo warns about, that the state might call you to do something as a citizen, as a subject, and God has called you to do something else.

This in reality without any other ground, that the rulers of the state either hold the sacred power of the church of no account or endeavor it to subject it to their own will. In other words, when states act in this way, they’re trying often quite explicitly and intentionally to usurp the authority of God and to usurp the place of the church. I’ve told this story before, but there was a cardinal, Cardinal Worldl who at the time Washington DC was considering requiring all adoption agencies to do referrals for same-sex couples. And he went in to the city council, I think one of the city council members’ offices and said, look, if you do this, we can’t comply with this. We’ll have to get out of the adoption industry completely. We can’t help refer needy children because we can’t do it in such a way, it’s going to violate our conscience.

And the person he spoke to said, we know that in other words, was something they’d factored in and wanted. They’d passed a law knowing that the effect of it wasn’t that a bunch of agencies were going to start referring to same-sex couples. They knew that was not going to happen. They weren’t going to violate their conscience. Instead, all of the Christian adoption agencies would just have to vacate and the state would step in instead. And that was what they actually wanted, at least according to how Cardinal World tells the story. And certainly anyone who understood the basics of the situation would realize that’s exactly what’s going to happen, and that is exactly what did happen. They passed the law and Catholic Charities doesn’t do adoptions in the District of Columbia, those kind of things. I mean, that’s thing Leo’s warning about. There are people who have a vision of the state, where the state works as a religion, where the state works as a church, where their ideology is so pervasive that it becomes a sort of rival religion and you’re expected to comply with that.

So he’s telling you to watch out for that. So he says, hence, rises to conflict. And on occasion, through such conflict virtue being put to the proof, the two powers are confronted and urge their behest in a contrary sense, to obey both is wholly impossible. No man can serve two masters for to be pleasing for, to please the one amounts to condemning or hating the other. In other words, in such a situation, you actually have to serve one of two masters. You cannot serve both. You cannot serve both God and a state that is purposely trotting on the rights of God in his church there you have to take a stand. So that’s Leo. He talks about this duty you have as a Christian to be a patriot, but he’s not oblivious to the fact that as a Christian, as a citizen, there are going to be times where you feel pulled in two directions. And when that happens, do not hesitate. Go with God.

Final thoughts, I’m going to call this section the Glory of Finlandia. So remember that song I did not like? This is my song by Lloyd Stone, and I mentioned Lloyd Stone didn’t write the music, he just wrote the lyrics and the lyrics are these really all nations matter sort of thing where if you’re getting the reference there, the reason people were bothered by the phrase all lives matter wasn’t that people disputed that all lives really did matter, but because when someone’s making a specific claim and you respond with a generic one, if a child says to you, do you love me? And you say, I love all my kids, okay, that is a failure in your response. The answer is yes, I love you. It’s a specific question. And if you answer in a vague or broader, generic way, even if we can logically draw the conclusion, well, if you love all your kids and you must love me, imagine if you’ve said in response to the question, do you love me?

I love everybody. That is not the answer Somebody’s looking for. They’re wanting to know, do you love me? Likewise, on 4th of July, we’re not celebrating all countries matter. This country, your country, that’s what you are celebrating. And the failure to do that, the failure of specificity there is like the failure of not loving your neighbor and just loving the idea of neighbors. That is a moral failing. And what I found fascinating in digging into the history of this is my song, which I didn’t expect to be doing, we set the original song is so much better. So the tune for this song originally had no lyrics, and the tune was from a work called Finlandia, and it’s by a composer by the name of Sebelius who was, as you might imagine, Finnish. And it was actually kind of a political song from this period in the 1890s that we were just talking about.

So it originally debuts in 1899, and it’s part of a broader work called Finland Awakes. And so what it was was classical music set to depictions of different scenes of Finnish history. At the time when Finland is under Russian occupation and Russian suppression, it’s reminding the fins of their own nation and their own history and the glory of what they had in the past. And it goes through history leading them to kind of the cusp of their desire to be free. And so the last of those six vignettes that were shown while the music is playing is when this music is from. So if you are familiar with this hymn, even though it’s kind of a weird unfortunate hymn in English, the music itself was really powerful when it was played as part of this showing you Finnish history, reminding the fins of the nobility of their history, of the goodness of their nation, of calling them to really have a pride in their fatherland.

And so at the time it was originally called, as I said, Finland awakes. Other names for it were Finlandia Vater land like Fatherland la Patria. So again, Patria and then eventually becomes known as Finlandia. And even that title seems to have been a nod to things like Lit Hungarian or Russia or MLAs like my homeland. So there’s several other classical music pieces from this same period that are celebrating the nation. And so just as it would be inappropriate on your child’s birthday to say, let’s celebrate all kids equally, no, no, this is a time for particularity in particular love. So that’s what I want to invite you to. If maybe today’s not your day, if you’re from any of those other nations that have Independence Day from England or wherever you got your independence from, there’s plenty of other days for you. But take those days to celebrate the goodness of your country. You do not have to fall into the trap of saying, my country is number one my country. Right or wrong, you can just say right or wrong, this is my country and I love it because it’s my country. I’m not blind to its fault. I’m not unaware of its shortcoming means, but I want to celebrate the fact that I’ve received from my country more than I can ever repay. So happy 4th of July for Shameless Popery; I’m Joe Heschmeyer. God bless you.