Marginal Christianity

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 cour...

Rethinking Our Patriotism Gary Gutting THE STONE   FEB. 6, 2017 Continue reading the main story Share This Page Share Tweet Email More Save 226 Photo Credit Lucas Jackson/Reuters Although abstract logic and conceptual analysis are among philosophers’ primary tools, they must, as John Dewey emphasized, use these tools to “clarify the social and moral strife of their day.” In particular, surprising political events, like those currently unfolding on both sides of the Atlantic, can call for some serious rethinking. In my case, this has led me to reconsider my views about patriotism. In 2012, halfway through Barack Obama’s presidency, I wrote  a Fourth of July piece  trying to explain my patriotic feelings for this country. My focus was an apparent contradiction in the idea of patriotism as a moral virtue. Patriotism seemed to require a commitment to the good of this particular country, even when its good was at odds with the greater good o...

04/21/2016 10:09 am ET Lee C. Camp Host of TokensShow.com, Professor of Theology, Lipscomb Univ. Love of Country I do love America. How could one not love the forests of Maine; the gorges of the Cumberland plateau in Tennessee; the mesquite trees of west Texas; the ragged coastline of California? All of it like a hymn of praise, a song of thanksgiving for so much abundance and goodness. And being a grateful citizen of Music City, I must stop there a moment: how could one not love the prophetic consciousness of Johnny Cash, the mesmerizing cadences of Don Williams, the angelic strains of Alison Krauss? Or considering socio-political greats: how could one not admire the virtues of industry and wit in Benjamin Franklin; the democratic impulses of the nineteenth-century religious reformers; the cry for justice in the words of Frederick Douglass, Sojourner Truth, and Martin Luther King, Jr.; the humility suffusing Abraham Lincoln’s Second Inaugural Address; or the persi...

I love my country. I do not love the set of values we have come to live by, but I love my country. I love my country. I do not always love what the government or military of my country do, but I respect those who serve it out of a sense of duty to others, and I love my country. I love my country. It is not God's people more than any other people, though God's people live within its borders. I love my country. I love my country. I do not expect it to be "Christian" as a nation for no such thing can or should exist. God's "holy nation" is the church which exists among every nation without regard for ethnic, gender, sexual, political or anything else that divides us. I love my country. I love my country. This magnificent act of imaginative courage, this experiment in freedom, this "secular" paradise, this I love. I love my country. It is doomed to fail, this magnificent experiment, unfulfilled. For we are not moral peop...