And there’s another country, I’ve heard of long ago
Most dear to them that love her, most great to them that know.
We may not count her armies, we may not see her King
Her fortress is a faithful heart, her pride is suffering
And soul by soul, and silently, her shining bounds increase
And her ways are ways of gentleness, and all her paths are peace.
- Sir Cecil Spring-Rice
I was blessed with a grandfather who modeled a life that represented an impeccably well-ordered hierarchy of loves. Jasper N. Dorsey (1913–1990), whom we all called “Papa,” was a devoted husband, father, grandfather, friend, churchman, patriot, and public servant. He was the most honorable man I have ever known. What made him so was the way he prioritized the things he loved in word, deed, and precept. The effects of his well-ordered life were seen in his irrepressible optimism, his joie de vivre, and his sense of humor all mixed with an uncompromising demand for excellence that he made of himself and those in his charge. He serves as an example of a real person with a nature like ours who demonstrated how to rightly balance the love of two countries: one in the already and the other in the not-yet. Papa knew that the secret to balancing love of God with love of country was no secret, but that it was bound up in the two most simple and significant divine commandments the Lord Jesus taught us in Mark 12:29–31. He faithfully aspired to love the Lord with all his heart, soul, and might and doing that, to love his neighbor as he loved himself.
In his fruitful life, Papa enjoyed a profoundly happy fifty-one-year marriage to my grandmother, raised two children, served his country in the army during World War II, and rose in the ranks of Southern Bell Telephone and Telegraph Company, from climbing telephone poles as a lineman to serving as CEO of all operations in Georgia between 1936 and 1978. Almost from the moment of his graduation from the University of Georgia in 1936, he was dedicated to the advancement of education for young Georgians as citizens and their development as leaders in business, politics, churches, schools, and media. He was an elder in the Presbyterian church, and he wrote a weekly syndicated column that appeared in over forty newspapers in Georgia.
Along with his successes, Papa suffered more than his share of tribulations. He and my grandmother lost two children—one son who was stillborn, and another who was killed in a tragic car accident while he was driving home from college at the young age of twenty-one. My uncle Tucker died before I was born, but my mother always said that her parents were never the same after suffering the loss of their youngest child. Toward the end of his life, Papa faithfully cared for my grandmother during a ten-year debilitating illness that ended in her death. After she died, my grandfather courageously faced the excruciating pain of bone cancer, which finally took his life in August 1990. Still, my experience with both grandparents was of two people who understood, more than most, the great truth that God is the giver of every good and perfect gift, and that the greatest gifts God gives always come in the context of love and redemption. Their lives remain a testimony to the effects that the fruit of the Spirit, borne in ordinary lives, can have on others both near and far in proximity for the glory of God.
As an American conservative in the pre-political and dispositional sense of the word, I am persuaded that the best way to argue a point is to rely on concrete examples rather than on abstractions. Too often, we moderns tend to make abstractions of our love of God and love of country. God and country are not merely expressions with no viable substance, and love for God and country are not just sentiments fit either for kitschy patriotic church services or riots at the US Capitol. Both love of God and love of country involve actual and active love of real persons. God, as the ground of all being, is the source of both our existence and our salvation. We love him because he made us and he saved us. We owe him our whole devotion because of who he is as the sovereign Lord of Creation and as the divine-human savior of his elect. We were created to worship him and to enjoy him in our love for him, expressed in contexts of gratitude, obedience, and suffering. We learn how to love the Lord in everyday experience. We have instruction on how to love the Lord in the preaching and teaching of the Bible in the local church and through spiritual disciplines like meditation on the Bible, prayer, giving, and serving. An orthodox and thoroughgoing ecclesiology will bear fruit in individual Christians of a congregation who love the Lord by walking with him and trusting him each day.
Speaking as an American citizen, it is good to love the United States of America, a real country made up of real people with whom we interact each day in the most ordinary of ways. Our love for our country begins with love and loyalty to those closest to us: the members of our households. As children, we learn to honor our fathers and mothers, and we learn our place in the family hierarchy. Edmund Burke famously saw the family as the basis of all levels of society, the “little platoon” to which we first belong. Burke also saw the family as going far beyond just the nuclear family, in that families and societies extend broadly in space and time. Society, Burke wrote, is “a partnership” between “those who are living, those who are dead, and those who are to be born.” We learn how to love others by practicing self-denial in real time from our earliest childhood. We also come to know the stories about our ancestors when we are children, and those traits they had that are worthy of emulation and those that are not. We come to understand that those who went before us made us who we are. As we grow, we learn how to live with people who are not like us, who do not always agree with us, who do not see the world as we do, but with whom we can nonetheless enjoy friendship and cooperation.
Our love for our own people starts with those in our families and extends out to those in our local associations, our towns, counties, and cities, to our states, and finally to our country. When we see the flag of the United States, we know it is not just a piece of fabric, nor does it stand for some abstract nationalistic trope. The flag represents the people that make up the nation—those who are dead, those who are living, and those who are yet to be born. When we think of “the American people,” we include our ancestors: actual people who stewarded our country and handed it down to us as an inheritance. We consider that it is our responsibility as the living to take care of that inheritance and prepare to hand it down to our children and grandchildren.
The category of “the American people” starts with those I see in the kitchen as I make coffee in the morning, and it extends outward in proximity as I go about my day. Thus the abstract expression of “the American people” becomes concrete from the perspective of proximity. The people I live with in my home, church, school, ball league, and town are my people. I know my people well because I see them, work and play with them, suffer together with them, rejoice with them, teach them, am taught by them, forgive them, and seek forgiveness from them in small and great ways every day of my life.
So, too, are our loves ordered starting with God, who is one in three persons and as real as the air I breathe. My country consists of real persons who are as real as I am. We can think of a right ordering of love in terms of the old Sunday school acrostic song,
J-O-Y, J-O-Y, this is what it means:
Jesus first, yourself last, and others in between!
Such an ordering of loves is the basis for patriotism. Patriotism is a rightly ordered love of country that comes from gratitude and joy in the good gifts God has freely given by his grace. As Papa used to say, rightly ordering our loves is one of those things in life that “ain’t hard; it just ain’t easy.”
There is a popular idea that America is God’s chosen nation, superior in rank to inferior peoples, and commissioned by God to act on inferior peoples as it will—this is one kind of American nationalism. I have referred to this idea as an expression of closed American exceptionalism. It is not the only expression of American nationalism, nor is it unique to Americans. Germans, Russians, French, English, Italians, Greeks, Turks, Armenians, Japanese, and Chinese have all had similar expressions across generations, as have the many tribes and nations of indigenous peoples in the Americas and Africa. Why? Because human nature is sinful and seeks to set the self as the final arbiter of that which is right and true. It is human nature to exalt the self and debase others. Americans have done it—as has every society since Cain. Closed exceptionalism amounts to national idolatry, and Americans no more invented idol worship than they invented closed exceptionalism.
Closed exceptionalism must be sharply contrasted with what I call open exceptionalism. In open exceptionalism, we Americans gratefully recognize that ours is a great country because of its unique contributions to human freedom, one of the most profound aspirations of creatures made in God’s image. The history of the United States is a story of the advancement of freedom, not only within our own borders but around the world. No other country has done more for the advancement of freedom than the United States since 1776. Such an acknowledgment does not mean we should equate America with ancient Israel, nor does it mean that God has specially chosen America over other nations to do his will. It does mean, despite its failures in its national lifespan, that America has been a spectacular blessing to the world. We can be grateful to God for our country, cherish it, and strive to faithfully steward this gift to prepare it for the coming generations.
Closed exceptionalism is problematic for its chauvinism and appropriation of theological categories reserved for the church, like chosen-ness, mission, and regeneration. Like most problematic ideas, however, closed exceptionalism is rarely as simple and recognizable as, say, bowing down in worship to the American flag. Sin usually mixes some truth with error, as we plainly see in the first sin of Adam and Eve in Genesis 3. For this reason, guarding against making one’s nation into an idol entails deep knowledge of and sincere submission to the Bible. If we allow ourselves to be ignorant of what the Bible says about God and his will for his creatures, then the Bible can become nothing more than a symbol, a talisman we carry into the public square. Ignorance of the Bible can easily lead to idolatry because it renders us unable to extract the precious from the vile, as God exhorted the prophet Jeremiah (15:19). When we are ignorant of God’s word, we reject knowledge and the moral correction that attends it, making us stupid (Prov. 12:1). Ignorance and stupidity lead directly to idolatry, and as we wallow in our stupidity, we are like the idolater of Isaiah 44:20 who “cannot deliver himself, nor say, ‘Is there not a lie in my right hand?’”
Christians come to know God through consistent meditation on Scripture. True knowledge of God necessarily results in love and submission to him. Such love and submission result in the application of Christian virtues in dealing with the thorny problems that attend American nationality. Closed exceptionalism is one of those problems: the making of America into an idol. We’ve had hosts of other historical problems: slavery and Jim Crow, unjust territorial expansion, injurious treatment of immigrants, profligate waste of material resources, illusions of national innocence and grandeur, and many other sins of collective commission and omission. What are we to do with these? Does not the “Redeemer Nation” itself need to be redeemed?
We are often told that America is unworthy of the faith our ancestors placed in it, and since we are more enlightened than they, we are in a better position—even morally obligated—to be fundamentally skeptical of the American project and refrain from patriotic expression in the interest of faithful Christian testimony. This is a form of throwing the baby out with the bathwater. Such an attitude is born out of yearning for too-simple explanations of human nature. It is a form of self-exaltation. The proper response for American Christians, I believe, is to patriotically embrace open exceptionalism in rejecting closed exceptionalism.
We see in fallen human nature a tension between two opposing realities. On the one hand, we are made in the image of God. God made persons “a little lower than the angels” and crowned humankind “with glory and majesty,” as David wrote in Psalm 8. At the same time, “all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God” (Rom. 3:23), and our “sins have hidden his face . . . so that he does not hear” (Isa. 59:2). We bear unspeakably profound dignity because God made us in his image, but we also bear an unanswerable weight of guilt and shame because of our sin for which only God can make atonement. He has made atonement for sin through Jesus Christ, but even the reality that Christ’s work of atonement is finished does not erase the tension between human dignity and human fallibility in time and space. The immature mind cannot bear to find a way to hold two opposing realities in tension together, but the mature mind understands that the greatest exemplar of justice and wisdom this side of the incarnation can be a great sinner who is nevertheless worthy of emulation. Immaturity fosters an imagination that can only see unending conflict between purity and stain, with no possibility of redemption. Wisdom discerns how best to hold dignity and fallibility in tension: when to celebrate a noteworthy person and why. Much of the rejection of rightly ordered patriotism in our day is childish. Since immaturity naturally exalts the self at the expense of others in a zero-sum equation, the immature mind is always in search of ways to silence perceived threats to its own illusions of grandeur. The wisdom and charity of a fully formed conscience understands the self as the chief of sinners as the apostle Paul did (1 Tim. 1:15). The virtuous search for truth in history by the wise yields deeper wisdom still.
Every American who has ever lived has had the same fallen human nature. The closed exceptionalist exalts the glory and honor in America over and against the sin. The cynic focuses on American transgressions over the examples of virtue and dignity in the national story. Both the closed exceptionalist and the cynic are making a false choice. Neither can hold human nature in tension, nor can they reconcile the tensions between dignity and fallibility in history. They only see purity or stain. The open exceptionalist patriot—that is, the citizen with a rightly ordered hierarchy of loves—can reconcile that tension by exalting God the Creator and Redeemer first, others second, and the self last.
The patriot can honor and even revere figures like George Washington, who was a slaveholder, and Martin Luther King, Jr., who was an adulterer, by celebrating the virtues they represented while nevertheless recognizing that greatness in a person often manifests itself in great sins. Christians do not hide their faces from their heroes’ sins but consider them honestly and patiently. We seek, in the spirit of Christian charity, to rejoice with the truth and not in unrighteousness (1 Cor. 13:6). At the same time, we recognize moral and spiritual greatness when we see it, celebrate and extol such greatness, and bend our energies to preserve the memory of those that had it, imitating them in our lives. In doing so, faithful Christians in this country must sift American traditions through virtue and prepare to hand down tradition as a trust to the next generation so that they may enjoy the blessings of a nation that is truly great, though certainly not perfect.
In this way, the open exceptionalist patriot is the most grateful person in society. Gratitude is at the heart of rightly ordered patriotism because the Christian patriot understands that every good and perfect gift proceeds from God who works to bring life from death, joy from despair, victory from defeat, salvation from reprobation, and truth from falsehood. Any national blessings we inherited did not come from our own efforts but are a trust handed down to us by someone else who had our best interest in mind.
Even on this side of the eschaton, we can call the United States a great country—even despite its manifold flaws. We celebrate the things in its story that are worthy of celebration without a blushing face. We do not fear those who would mock or condemn us for rejoicing in those things that are true, honorable, right, pure, lovely, and of good report (Phil. 4:8). We are not cowed by the shrill voices emanating from those who cannot hold two opposing realities in tension. Still, we are realistic about fallen human nature, and how it is constantly disposed to worship created things as if they were gods. Because we know ourselves better than anyone else, and because we know that sin is common to all, we know from experience that even the most celebrated heroes had hearts that were “deceitful above all things and desperately sick” (Jer. 17:9). Patriots know that the dead still speak, their deeds outlive them, and we are who we are in great measure because of the consequences of their lives and actions. We get wisdom from taking the meaning of their lives seriously, rather than committing self-inflicted amnesia and intellectual suicide by cancelling those who make us uncomfortable.
My grandfather was a man with a nature like mine. He was a sinner, but he knew his need for a Savior. He understood that he could have no salvation apart from the atonement Christ made for him on the cross. As a young man, he found that to know Christ was to love him and that loving Christ meant receiving with joy and thanksgiving the good gifts the Lord graciously gave him. Solomon wrote in Ecclesiastes 2:24–25, “There is nothing better for a man than to eat and drink and tell himself that his labor is good. This also I have seen that it is from the hand of God. For who can eat and who can have enjoyment without Him?” My grandfather—a great yet flawed husband, father, grandfather, friend, churchman, patriot, and public servant—understood this as well as anyone I have ever known. He was a true patriot and, though dead, he still speaks.
My grandfather followed the example of the Lord Jesus who perfectly demonstrated rightly ordered love in the way he taught his disciples to pray in the Lord’s Prayer (Matt. 6:9–13). We start by hallowing God in our hearts and minds, because all our acts of love are predicated on God first loving us (1 John 4:19). We seek first his kingdom, because in doing so, we demonstrate that our first love is for Christ and his ways (Matt. 6:33). We further demonstrate our desire for our earthly kingdom, America, to reflect the righteousness of the kingdom of God, even though we are realistic about our fallen world and we know we won’t usher in God’s kingdom by our own works. Nevertheless, Christians should bend all their energies toward directing the nation in ways that are pleasing to God. In all this, we Christians are ever aware of our own faults and our need for forgiveness. We know that we are fallible, and we embrace our convictions with humility. As we seek forgiveness for ourselves, we forgive others. The nation can and should be built on such a righteous foundation. True patriotism is possible only when worship, loyalties, and loves are directed rightly.
