Papers of a Perverted Patriot (Introduction)

Perverted Patriotism is the Christian view of Christianity and the state. It can only be patriotism if it is perverted; and perverted if patriotic. That is, patriotism, the love and honoring our home country, can ever only be a love and honor distinctly and distantly subordinated to love and honor for God and our first nation, the church. Thus, it is perverted from the usual view of patriotism. And only in this perverted way, love of country as a secondary and conditional love, can it be patriotic for a Christian.

Reflection on things patriotic and Christian is necessary and important. All the more so since the church has so often screwed it up.

C. S. Lewis sets us a baseline with his comments on patriotism in The Four Loves.

1. “First, there is love of home, of the place we grew up in or the places, perhaps many, which have been our homes; and of all places fairly near these and fairly like them; love of old acquaintances, of familiar sights, sounds and smells.

“Of course, patriotism of this kind is not in the least aggressive. It asks only to be let alone . . . In any mind which has a pennyworth of imagination, it produces a good attitude towards foreigners.

“How can I love my home without coming to realize that other men, no less rightly, love theirs? Once you have realized that the Frenchmen like café complet just as we like bacon and eggs why, good luck to them and let them have it. The last thing we want is to make everywhere else just like our own home. It would not be home unless it were different.”

2. “The second ingredient is a particular attitude to our country’s past. I mean to that past as it lives in popular imagination; the great deeds of our ancestors. … This feeling has not quite such good credentials as the sheer love of home. The actual history of every country is full of shabby and even shameful doings.

“What does seem to me poisonous, what breeds a type of patriotism that is pernicious if it lasts but not likely to last long in an educated adult, is the perfectly serious indoctrination of the young in knowably false or biased history—the heroic legend drably disguised as text-book fact. With this creeps in the tacit assumption that other nations have not equally their heroes; perhaps even the belief—surely it is very bad biology—that we can literally “inherit” a tradition.”

3. “This third thing is not a sentiment but a belief: a firm, even prosaic belief that our own nation, in sober fact, has long been, and still is markedly superior to all others.

“I once ventured to say to an old clergyman who was voicing this sort of patriotism, “But, sir, aren’t we told that every people thinks its own men the bravest and its own women the fairest in the world?” He replied with total gravity he could not have been graver if he had been saying the Creed at the altar “Yes, but in England it’s true.”

“To be sure, this conviction had not made my friend (God rest his soul) a villain; only an extremely lovable old ass. It can, however, produce asses that kick and bite. On the lunatic fringe, it may shade off into that popular racialism which Christianity and science equally forbid.
…

“If our nation is really so much better than others it may be held to have either the duties or the rights of a superior being towards them. In the nineteenth century, the English became very conscious of such duties: the ‘white man’s burden.’ What we called natives were our wards and we their self-appointed guardians. … And yet this showed the sense of superiority working at its best. Some nations who have also felt it have stressed the rights, not the duties.

“To them, some foreigners were so bad that one had the right to exterminate them. Others, fitted only to be hewers of wood and drawers of water to the chosen people, had better be made to get on with their hewing and drawing. Dogs, know your betters! I am far from suggesting that the two attitudes are on the same level. But both are fatal.”

4. “Finally, we reach the stage where patriotism in its demonic form unconsciously denies itself. ‘No man,” said one of the Greeks, “loves his city because it is great, but because it is his,’ A man who really loves his country will love her in her ruin and degeneration ‘England, with all thy faults, I love thee still.” She will be to him ‘a poor thing but mine own.’ He may think her good and great, when she is not, because he loves her; the delusion is up to a point pardonable.

“But Kipling’s soldier reverses it; he loves her because he thinks her good and great loves her on her merits. She is a fine going concern and it gratifies my pride to be in it. How if she ceased to be such? The answer is plainly given: ‘ ‘Ow quick we’d drop ‘er.’ When the ship begins to sink he will leave her.

“Thus that kind of patriotism which sets off with the greatest swagger of drums and banners actually sets off on the road that can lead to Vichy. And this is a phenomenon which will meet us again. When the natural loves become lawless they do not merely do harm to other loves; they themselves cease to be the loves they were to be loves at all.

…

“I may without self-righteousness or hypocrisy think it just to defend my house by force against a burglar; but if I start pretending that I blacked his eye purely on moral grounds wholly indifferent to the fact that the house in question was mine I become insufferable.

“The pretense that when England’s cause is just we are on England’s side as some neutral Don Quixote might be for that reason alone, is equally spurious. And nonsense draws evil after it. If our country’s cause is the cause of God, wars must be wars of annihilation. A false transcendence is given to things which are very much of this world.”

I start with Lewis’ comments not because I agree with everything in them or would say things the same way he does. But he offers a wise, considered middle of the last century view far from the over-heated tempers and rhetoric of our times. And from that vantage point he also draws near at the end to the perverted patriotism I will be stumping for in these papers. It’s always good to read Lewis. So happy reading at the beginning of this journey.