Dear Friends,
A number of years ago now, David Bentley Hart wrote a couple of columns in the journal First Things in which he discussed the idea of patriotism and whether or not the United States was the greatest country in the world. Both essays were quite enjoyable to read and done in typical Hart fashion with a biting wit and intelligent turn of phrase. You can find both essays online at First Things. Since we are celebrating July 4th this week, I thought I would give you a few thoughts today from his second essay which was entitled, Charity and Patriotism: Further Reflections.
I suppose I shouldn’t think it particularly odd that a great many Americans earnestly believe their country to be not only a very fine place indeed, but the very epitome of what any rightly ordered society should be. The United States was, after all, the first nation born out of an ideology (which is not to say it was not born also out of practical economic and political impulses). From the first, even before the Articles of Confederation or the US Constitution had been drafted, even before the War of Independence had been won, we had already issued a Declaration proclaiming to the world what the proper relation should be between any people and its government, and what liberties had been conferred upon all persons by nature and nature’s God; and it is with the date of the Declaration ”not the date of the first constitutional convention” that we mark the beginning of our country.
Combine the heady idealism of the age of the “Rights of Man” with the North American Puritan conviction that a new spiritual dispensation had begun with the establishment of the protestant colonies, filter the mixture through the odd sensibility of our indigenous religion (Christian Gnosticism), and naturally what results is a kind of evangelical utopianism, an invincible sense of America’s special providential importance, a pure-hearted desire to convert the world to our unique vision of a humanity set free from sin by the twin bounties of limitless divine grace and inexhaustible consumer choices. If nothing else, no other people on earth seems so buoyantly free of any morbid fixation on its failures, historical or cultural, or so irrepressibly certain that the past is only prologue to a glorious future (if we will but keep the faith).
If it seems that I am being sarcastic here, I assure you that is not my intention. I love my country quite sincerely, as it happens. And while I cannot buy into the doctrine of “American exceptionalism,” I am more than willing to acknowledge everything I think truly exceptional about the United States. In fact, I flatter myself that in many cases I feel a deep adoration towards aspects of America that far too many Americans fail to appreciate with anything like the devotion they deserve.
Hart then goes on in the essay to list so many truly American successes that rarely get mentioned, like: The great American composers of the twentieth century, too: Walter Piston, William Schuman, Aaron Copland, Samuel Barber, Roy Harris, David Diamond, Samuel Barber, Ned Rorem, and so on (especially, just at present, Piston). And the horses of Maryland and Kentucky (particularly Maryland). Louis Armstrong. Baseball again, and Ella, and Renée Fleming. Sinatra’s Capitol years. His list goes on for quite a few paragraphs.
He concludes the essay thus: The proper love of country, it seems to me, should have the form of this egressus and regressus : a deep attachment to what is near at hand that is still free from any presumptuous belief in the lesser value of things that are far away, and that is therefore able to grow beyond the local towards the universal, beyond the nation to a larger culture, beyond that to other cultures, and ideally towards the embrace of all humanity and all of creation. That is, at any rate, the only kind of patriotism that I fully understand, and that I find it possible to see as a spiritual virtue. And, I may be wrong, but it seems to me also to be a patriotism that, of its nature, should express itself with a certain seemly humility, and an effortless generosity.
What a wonderful way to truly celebrate our love of our homeland – by being humble when facing others in the world and generous with the goodness we have to offer, by loving what is close to us and being open to others who are far away. Happy 4th of July Week!
Peace,
Fr. Damian