Yesterday was the day after my birthday. To those less in the know, this is commonly referred to as “The Fourth of July”. Per usual, my eyes were treated to a barrage of tweets and status updates bearing messages ranging from patriotic to “patriotic” (I fear we shall never be rid of the scourge that is the faux-clever phrase “Muricah”). As I read through this quagmire of conflicted patriotism, it occurred to me, as it has for several years running, that we Americans need a better model of patriotism in our lives, one that eschews both the extreme of blind fervor and the extreme of detached irony.
First off, a bit of personal history. I was raised in a home that had a decidedly international flavor to it. Both my grandfathers were born outside the U.S. (I never knew my father’s Greek father, but my mother’s father, from Switzerland, has been a formative influence on me). My mother herself was born in Cameroon, where my missionary grandparents had their first calling. They would go on to serve in Taiwan (where they were booted out by Chang Kai-Shek for opposing human rights abuses) and the island nation of Vanuatu. My parents, meanwhile, spend a decade serving in the rural wilds of Australia, where my sister and I were born. So, though I’ve spent most of my life in the United States, I’ve never had that casual diet of “America-first” banter to feed on.
I suspect that is why I am more likely than some of my peers to approach such jingoism with mild amusement rather than disgust. I have no idea how to judge this in a reliable way, but from personal experience I know a great many people in my age bracket who have revolted against the idea of patriotism, either openly or through a veiled ironic patriotism that “celebrates” America through exaggerated tales of her exploits. Related to this is what I will call the Howard Zinn narrative of history, where every event in American history is an opportunity to learn a lesson about how bad and oppressive America has really been. This has become especially prevalent among young, hip Christians who want to disentangle themselves from some of the problematic issuances of civil religion that American Christians have been prone to in the past.
There are good impulses at work here, of course, but this reaction buys into the triumphalist narrative of America much more than it realizes, albeit dialectically. Both the ironic and the deconstructive narrative of patriotism buy into the central American myth: that what matters in life is the complete, unfettered freedom of the individual will, and that America is great/awful to the extent it does or does not live up to that ideal. The bitterness in the Zinn narrative can easily be traced to the sense of disappointment that the Founding Fathers and their subsequent heirs failed to realize how awesome the contemporary liberal vision of freedom is and enact it in their own day and age.
As someone who dissents heavily from any presentation of the “American ideal” of unlimited freedom, this presentation of terms is especially vexing. On the one hand, the extreme patriot demands that I celebrate my country for how many freedoms we have, while the insufferable anti-patriot demands I loathe my country for how many freedoms we still lack. The unifying strand here is the distinct lack of any pragmatic approach to the issue. Pragmatism used to be valued as an American trait, of course, but it seems more and more to have been replaced by a strident idealism on both sides, one that refuses to take any prisoners in the culture war for America’s soul.
No guarantees, but things might be better if more people bothered to read Herodotus (N.B. he’s one of those old, dead “white” men that’s always being batted back and forth like a shuttlecock in the culture wars). In the Histories this creaky old Greek developed a sane, pragmatic approach to patriotism and tolerance that it would serve Americans well to study. More cultural anthropologist than historian, Herodotus peppers his account of the Persian wars with the things he is really interested in, namely the customs of various peoples. What is fascinating about his approach is the even-handedness with which it evaluates non-Greek cultures. Writing in the midst of a Greek triumphalism that boasted its fair share of xenophobia, Herodotus calmly approaches the customs of other people groups, searching for what is good and true in those customs.
What fascinates me about Herodotus is the way in which he creates space for other cultures while not rejecting his own. Many times, when presenting a foreign custom, he acknowledges how different it is from Greek custom while essentially saying “vive la difference”. At times he does make stricter judgement calls – there are some customs beyond the pale even for him – but most often, even when preferring his own customs, he allows that other nations do life differently than his.
In this plea for geo-social tolerance, Herodotus unknowingly provides a map for useful, pragmatic patriotism. What both sides of the American patriotism divide misunderstand is this: we must embrace our customs and society not because they are absolutely great and above all others, but because they are ours. Herodotus understands that for society to function, it must be rooted in particularity. This is the danger of our increasingly globalized world: despite its many advantages, globalization threatens to wipe out all particularities through abstraction to an ideal, one set by the global economic hegemony of the elite. G.K. Chesterton understood this, which is what made him one of the great modern advocates of the small, the local, the particular. He embraced his Englishness not because he believed that the British excelled over all others, but because it was his own home.
This is the patriotism that is healthy and useful: one that accepts limits but embraces what actually is. We need American patriotism not because our customs deserve to be admired, but because we cannot flourish without a full sense of who we are. It goes without saying that this sort of patriotism is not blind; it does not hail every last detail of a country’s history as spotless. We as Americans must come to grips with our many failings – foremost among them the long, sordid history and after effects of slavery. What the deconstructive approach fails to realize, though, is that it is equally susceptible to blindness. By championing only rebels against American society, this anti-patriotism misses the richness of traditional American society. It also does injustice to the complexities of history, no less than the fervent flag waving of the extreme patriot. We must embrace the both/and of American history, recognizing that our society has been far from perfect, yet that it still demands our loyalty and love, for our own sakes no less than the Republic’s.
My coda for the Christian is this: God always works incarnationally (and you can’t spell incarnationally without NATION, amirite???). If you are an American, you have a real need to embrace that part of you. Not out of the belief that somehow our nation is more blessed by God than others – that is anathema – but out of the recognition that, unless we root ourselves in something, we will float off into nothingness. This is hard for me, as someone who very earnestly questions the foundations of our country and the ideals behind it (yes, I think if I had been alive during the Revolution I would have been a loyalist). I think there are many aspects of the American experiment that are detrimental to true human flourishing. Yet here I am, planted as an American, for better or worse. To deny my heritage is to desecrate something essential about myself. So as you spend this weekend chowing down on hot dogs (truly one of the great aspects of our heritage) and launching fireworks, take a moment to bask in who you are as an American: not because that heritage is amazing, but because it is ours.
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