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As we continue to celebrate America’s turning two hundred fifty years old, there is a question worth sitting with — one that sounds simple but runs surprisingly deep. Should Christians love their country?
The answer is yes. But how we love it matters just as much as whether we love it.
There are two ways to get patriotism wrong. The first is to love your country so uncritically that it becomes a kind of idol. As C.S. Lewis warned, a nation becomes a demon the moment it becomes a god. The second error runs in the opposite direction — a cynical tearing-down of your own home and heritage, dressed up as sophistication or progress. Both miss the mark. Both are failures of love.
A properly ordered patriotism doesn’t require us to see America as perfect or beyond criticism. America is neither uniquely pure nor uniquely evil. It is a nation founded on genuinely noble principles, shaped by genuinely flawed people — which makes it not so different from every other human enterprise in history. But America is not unredeemable. Far from it!
Abraham Lincoln gave us a model worth remembering. In his 1852 eulogy for Senator Henry Clay, saying that he loved his country partly because it was his own, but mostly because it was a free country. That is the right instinct — an informed patriotism loves America not merely out of sentiment, but because of what America has actually stood for and striven toward.
Christians in particular have reason to love this country with clear eyes. Historians like William J. Federer and Mark David Hall have documented how Christians and Christian ideas were central not only to the founding of America but to its most important moments of reform — the resistance to British tyranny, the abolition of slavery, the pursuit of religious liberty. That heritage belongs to us and it is worth honoring.
Make no mistake, we do not falsely conflate the American Flag and the Cross of Christ. Our ultimate citizenship is in heaven, but the place we express that heavenly allegiance is in the concrete, particular loyalties God has placed us in — family, church, community, and country.
It is right for Christians to love America and to fight for her.
Stay inspired and informed at PhyllisSchlafly.com and join fellow patriots at Eagle Council 55 in Dallas next month! Find all the information and registration at PhyllisSchlafly.com, and join us again for the Phyllis Schlafly Report.
