A crisis of ingratitude

Americans are nearing the most American of holidays: Thanksgiving. On this great civic feast day, families gather to give thanks for the blessings in their lives. But will one of those blessings be their nation? Daniel Darling, in his new book In Defense of Christian Patriotism (Broadside Books, 288 pp.), asks readers to consider what he calls a “crisis of ingratitude” toward our homeland.

The family analogy is instructive. When we gather for holidays, how do we think about our families? It’s fair and even healthy to acknowledge their flaws. Yet to dwell on them during a feast is misplaced, and to fixate on them is to risk losing the family altogether.

The same holds for nations. There is a time and place to address national sins because excessive and uncritical self-congratulation is certainly a problem. But is that the predominant danger today? Darling thinks not. America, he argues, suffers not from overconfidence but from a deficit of gratitude and love.

For Christians, this is more than a civic failure; it is a spiritual one. It is a failure of Christian piety, for we cannot love God and hate our country. Scripture calls us to seek the welfare of the societies in which we live and to order our loves rightly—to show special concern for those nearest to us, the neighbors and nations God has given. Love for our earthly homeland is not opposed to love for the heavenly one. Longing for the city to come should not make us loveless toward the cities here below.

Patriotism, rightly ordered, is a virtue. Darling cites G.K. Chesterton’s “In Defense of Patriotism”: “Patriotism begins the praise of the world at the nearest thing, instead of beginning it at the most distant.” Love of the near and familiar is what enables us to love the far and foreign. “If we can’t see the goods in the familiar,” Darling writes, “it’s unlikely that we’ll perceive the good that’s far away. Instead, we’ll love an abstraction made in our own image.”

How, then, do we perform the duties of patriotism well? Darling flags several errors to avoid.

First, we must avoid national self-loathing—the temptation to view our country as utterly depraved, to interpret its history in the worst possible light, and to assume there is nothing worth preserving. Such a posture, Darling warns, actually undermines the possibility of reform. No one undertakes self-improvement from a place of self-hatred.

What can Americans rightly cherish and build upon? Darling points to our country’s moral achievements: the struggle to abolish slavery and to end Jim Crow segregation, as well as the constitutional system that upholds freedoms of speech, assembly, and worship. These goods, he argues, did not arise from nowhere. They were nurtured in soil tilled by Christian conviction. Slavery itself was hardly unique to America, but the large-scale effort to abolish it was—and Christians were at the forefront of that movement, animated by Scripture and the moral vision it gave them. Likewise, the delicate balance of liberties enshrined in the American order emerged from the Christian-shaped culture of the West.

If those freedoms and virtues are to endure, Darling contends, Americans must recover not only a healthy patriotism but also a renewed civil religion—an acknowledgment that the moral foundations of our republic ultimately rest on transcendent truths.

The second error is the opposite extreme: uncritical affirmation. A true patriot does not say, “My country, right or wrong,” or offer blind loyalty to governments or policy agendas. Love of nation must include the courage to call it to repentance. Yet, as Darling insists, this does not mean Christians should retreat from politics. Power is a reality of human life, and wishing it away is neither faithful nor responsible. Instead, believers are called to steward it wisely. Darling makes a compelling case for principled political engagement—working within parties where necessary to pursue the greatest attainable good—and for rejecting a posture of isolationism in foreign affairs, which he sees as a failure to steward America’s unique resources and responsibilities toward her neighbors.

Even so, Darling cautions against making politics everything. Here he issues a timely reminder of the primacy of the spiritual. To engage in politics faithfully, Christians must first attend to their own piety and to the life of the church. In the second half of the book, Darling makes an impassioned plea for the church as the primary site of cultural renewal. Political engagement has its place, but the church must remain the center of Christian life. We are not to withdraw from political affairs, he writes, but neither are we to make them ultimate.

As part of this church-centered vision, Darling highlights the special responsibilities of pastors and church leaders to speak unpopular truths with boldness—especially those concerning the created order of sex, gender, and marriage. “A Church that preaches the truth without reservation,” he writes, “is a bulwark against confusion, insanity, and chaos in society.” Yet alongside truth-telling, Christians must also labor for unity within the body. In an age when tribalism and party spirit divide the nation—and when some even speculate about the inevitability of civil war—the church must model a better way. Christians should help to strengthen civic virtue and treat political opponents as fellow image-bearers, with inherent dignity and deserving of respect.

I have only a few minor critiques. Darling is too quick to dismiss the postliberal discourses that challenge late-modern Western societies to consider how sustainable secular orders truly are. The sharp distinction he draws between the Baptist ideal of “a free church in a free state” and public secularism is, to my mind, less clear-cut than he suggests. Nor am I convinced by his claim that a nation cannot be called “Christian” simply because it cannot be “saved by grace through faith.” The family analogy, once again, is instructive. We readily speak of a family as “Christian” when its common life is ordered by Christian teaching and oriented toward nurturing faith among its members. In a similar way, a nation and its public institutions can—at least in part—be shaped by and directed toward a Christian vision of the good, fostering a social order that honors God and promotes true religion among its people.

In an age of cynicism and division, In Defense of Christian Patriotism offers a timely reminder that love of country, like love of family, begins with gratitude. Darling’s book invites readers to recover that virtue before it’s too late.