Advancing the stories and ideas of the kingdom of God.
Rachel Ferguson
Daniel Darling calls believers to their political duty, no matter the chaos.
We hardly know how to refer to political philosophies in America these days: What we once called conservatism is now considered “zombie Reaganism” or the passé postwar consensus, overtaken today by populism. Daniel Darling, best-selling author and director of the Land Center for Cultural Engagement at Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary (SWBTS), is what Russell Kirk called an imaginative conservative.
Kirk described this role not so much as a policy program but rather as a posture of deep gratitude for the American tradition. Like reflective conservatives before him, Darling reminds us in his latest offering that we need the virtue of prudence to navigate politics in a fallen world where there are no utopian solutions.
In Defense of Christian Patriotism responds to the ubiquitous question of how to relate faith to politics in a contentious but trivializing age. Darling seems keenly aware of the binary temptations believers will face and weaves a path through each with care: neither to retreat from politics nor be obsessed with it, neither to idolize our country nor condemn it.
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How should we understand our Christian obligation toward our nation? Patriotism is a duty of all citizens across the world. Just as we have duties to love our families and neighborhoods, we ought to love our countries as well. To borrow from Thomas Aquinas, love is the persistent will for the good of the other—the genuine good, not the perceived one.
That means that in countries with political corruption, citizens ought to work for an honest government even when that means opposing the powers that be. A nation, after all, is not only a government but also a people and a place. Wherever there is good in a national tradition, we ought to celebrate it. When the country needs the service of its people, we ought to give it.
For Christians, the call to true patriotism can be puzzling when the culture seems to have rejected the faith and made itself an enemy of the kingdom of God. Even when our own country is spiritually failing, we must love it the way God commanded the Hebrews in exile to love their Babylonian city and work for its good (Jer. 29:7). Christians have a duty to engage in politics despite its messiness.
This is especially challenging given the ever-increasing cadre of those who consider themselves politically homeless. We might ask ourselves whether our exhaustion from the bad behavior of our parties or politicians excuses us from voting thoughtfully, running for office, and helping to shape policy. What happens if the salt of the earth loses its saltiness? Christians of influence can help to preserve what might otherwise rot.
The problem with Christian nationalism is not that it is (or claims to be) Christian but that it is nationalist. Nationalism claims superiority for one’s own people and place over all others. Patriotism understands our own love and loyalty as compatible with that of other people’s love and loyalty to their own nations, as long as it’s all in service to the genuine good.
To love my own nation is not to discount another’s any more than loving my own family means discounting other families. We can and should love other families and nations in a broad sense, even if we do not have the particular obligations to them that we have to our own.
Russell Moore
Darling points us to the story of Jonah. Jonah loved Israel. Since Nineveh and the Assyrians were enemies who had done terrible things, Jonah couldn’t bring himself to love them, even when his explicit mission from God was to call them to repentance and salvation. The fact that he still wanted them destroyed after they had repented and turned to follow God shows that Jonah was a nationalist, not a patriot—and a stubborn one at that.
Differentiating between the real and the overblown threat of Christian nationalism is an important element of responsible citizenship. We must acknowledge a sliver of dangerous and disturbing rhetoric coming from certain Christian circles while taking care not to define Christian nationalism so broadly that we capture normal American politics in our net.
While we can inordinately love our country, we can also inordinately hate it. We must properly lament the sins of our nation while insisting on appreciating its blessings. To do otherwise would be to work against the civil rights tradition, in which everyone from William Lloyd Garrison to Frederick Douglass to the NAACP to Martin Luther King Jr. insisted on the moral authority that the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution gave them to fight for the appropriate inclusion of all in the rights and privileges of American citizenship.
Patriotism rejects claims of ethnic superiority over the inhabitants of other nations, but that doesn’t mean it can’t acknowledge that some nations are exceptional when it comes to certain elements of their cultures or political systems. Every nation on earth has something to lament and something to celebrate. Some nations are famous for their food, others for their natural beauty, others for their art and culture.
America is exceptional in its politics. Its origin story really was without precedent—a true social contract. Its founding documents were revolutionary in their claims of moral and legal equality, creating a striking foil when the nation falls into hypocrisy. And in the bloodiest and most totalitarian of all centuries, America’s role as a stabilizing world power—even with many, many unjust choices—proved an overall gain for freedom-seeking people around the world.
In reaction to the excesses of the left, we’re seeing a sudden turn among famous atheists toward the utilitarian case for religion in society. On the other hand, polling shows that a huge portion of Americans who identify as evangelical do not attend church. Presumably, these two groups associate Christianity with a commitment to truth and a certain kind of cultural groundedness but not necessarily with a life of discipleship to the risen Jesus.
Neither Darling nor I deny that Christianity can play a useful role in grounding and stabilizing society. But our New Atheist friends and their churchless evangelical compatriots may not grasp how much it matters that the faith and commitment be real for them to have the consummate effect. Neither a personally nor a socially effective faith can be cultivated by oneself. Darling condemns the lone-ranger mentality commonly seen among those who identify as American evangelicals. This approach to faith enables the totalizing ideologies we see today on both the left and the right by removing believers from the schoolhouse of grace.
While nonbelieving or nominally Christian citizens can recognize the social usefulness of Christianity, only true believers can successfully reinvigorate the institutions whose loss is creating the most destruction: the family, masculinity, education, and civil discourse.
Progressives need to recognize that the unrelenting cultural attack against these foundations of the social fabric has been alienating and destructive. And some progressives have, including Richard Reeves on masculinity, David Blankenhorn on fatherhood, and Melissa Kearney on the two-parent privilege. However, the conservative Christian tribe can often turn a legitimate cultural battle into a mindless culture war. These fundamental moral issues are worth fighting for, but just as Paul exhorts us to live with others in peace whenever possible (Rom. 12:18), we ought to use our love, wisdom, and self-control to press for solutions.
Justin Giboney
Darling can’t answer every question in this book. Libertarians may object that his encouragement to vote doesn’t solve the rational action problem around low incentives to stay informed. Libertarians and progressives might raise the concern that distinctions between legitimate and illegitimate global action are fine in theory but in practice are subject to the cronyism of the military-industrial complex. Old-fashioned liberals may object that conservatives’ willingness to embrace the Civil Rights Movement now doesn’t answer for the unwillingness of many at the relevant moment.
This kind of pushback is fair enough, but so is the conservative response: Critique of the voting system or of the role of our military does not a positive program make. We still need to determine election outcomes by voting, and we still have to decide whether our departure from this or that global arena will leave a destructive vacuum. Darling admits readily that conservatives had to learn an important lesson when it came to civil rights, but I ask, did progressives learn their lesson from the terrible consequences that followed the social engineering of their utopian federal programs?
Fittingly, Darling closes the book with an encomium to the local and a call to build up our institutions for the good of the neighborhood. His call to vote, run for election, and engage policy questions responsibly does not necessarily translate to a fixation on the nation. After all, a robust Christian patriotism is probably best represented by nothing other than our own towns’ Fourth of July parades.
It’s these kinds of connections—families uniting in their neighborhoods to celebrate the country, cheering for veterans who fought to protect freedom on the other side of an ocean—that undergird the myriad of institutions we desperately need to function well. The great insight of the conservative is that institutions are easy to tear down but hard to build, so “seek the peace and prosperity of the city to which I have carried you into exile” and “pray to the Lord for it, because if it prospers, you too will prosper” (Jer. 29:7).
Rachel Ferguson is director of the Free Enterprise Center at Concordia University Chicago, assistant dean of its College of Business, and professor of business ethics. She is coauthor of Black Liberation Through the Marketplace: Hope, Heartbreak, and the Promise of America.
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