C.S. Lewis on Patriotism

The Fourth of July was two days ago, which means American churches just finished their annual argument about how much flag belongs in the sanctuary. I've seen that argument go badly in both directions — services that felt more like a citizenship ceremony than worship, and pastors so allergic to the holiday they couldn't bring themselves to thank God for the country out loud. C.S. Lewis never saw an American Fourth, but he thought about patriotism as carefully as anyone in the twentieth century, and he did a good portion of that thinking while his own country was at war.

Lewis is useful on this subject precisely because neither side can dismiss him. He was an Irishman who fought for England — he reached the front-line trenches in France on his nineteenth birthday and was wounded in 1918 by a British shell that fell short and killed the sergeant near him. He spent the Second World War giving the radio talks that became Mere Christianity. And in 1951 he turned down a CBE from Churchill's government because he didn't want his Christian books written off as party propaganda. That is a man who loved his country enough to bleed for it and still refused to let it become his religion. Both halves of that sentence matter.

Where Lewis Starts

In The Four Loves, before Lewis ever gets to affection, friendship, eros, and charity, he stops to deal with love of country. The placement tells you his category: patriotism is a natural love, in the same family as a man's attachment to his home and his mother. And his thesis about natural loves governs everything he says about this one. Every natural love is a real good, and every natural love goes bad the same way — not by being too strong, exactly, but by being promoted too high. He borrows a line of thought from Denis de Rougemont at the front of the book: a love starts turning demonic at the moment it starts playing god.

That framing rules out both easy answers before the discussion begins. Patriotism is not a virtue Christians are obligated to perform, and it is not a vice Christians are obligated to renounce. It is a love, which means the question is never whether to have it but whether it is ordered.

Lewis also points out that love of one's own city has a dominical precedent: Christ wept over Jerusalem. The Greek in Luke 19:41 is stronger than English translations let on. The verb is ἔκλαυσεν, from κλαίω — loud lamentation, audible wailing. When Jesus cried at Lazarus's tomb, John reached for a different word, ἐδάκρυσεν, quiet tears, the only occurrence of that verb in the New Testament. Over his city, he wailed. Paul carried the same love — Romans 9:3, wishing himself accursed for the sake of his kinsmen according to the flesh, which is about as far from detached cosmopolitanism as a sentence can get.

The Anatomy of Patriotism

Lewis then dissects the love into its ingredients, and the dissection is where the chapter earns its keep.

The first and healthiest ingredient is love of home — the concrete, particular attachment to a place, its sights and smells and ways of doing things. Lewis borrows a point from Chesterton here: a man asked why he objects to his country being ruled by foreigners is in roughly the position of a man asked why he objects to his house burning down. The list of what he'd lose is too long and too ordinary to finish. That kind of love asks only to be left alone, and it produces a good instinct rather than a dangerous one, because the man who knows exactly why he loves his own place is the man best equipped to understand why a Frenchman loves France. Loving your home doesn't make you want his.

The second ingredient is the country's past — the stories, the legends, the great deeds of the ancestors. Lewis is careful here rather than dismissive, because those stories do real moral work. They hand a man a standard and tell him to live up to it. Marathon and Trafalgar did that for Lewis's countrymen; Valley Forge and Normandy do it for mine. The rot starts when the legend gets mistaken for sober history. A story held as a story summons you upward. A story held as a pedigree convinces you that you were born superior, which requires no effort and therefore produces none.

The third ingredient is that conviction of superiority itself, and here Lewis tells the best anecdote in the book. An elderly clergyman of his acquaintance held the settled view that England simply surpassed everyone. Lewis pressed him — doesn't every nation believe its own men are the bravest and its own women the most beautiful? The old man answered with complete seriousness: "Yes, but in England it's true." Lewis's verdict was that the conviction hadn't made his friend wicked, only ridiculous. But he added that the same conviction, in other men, does not stay ridiculous. It graduates.

Because the fourth stage follows from the third with an ugly logic: if our nation really is superior, then perhaps it has duties toward the lesser ones — duties that look remarkably like ruling them, and profiting while doing so. Superiority becomes empire, and empire hardens into the settled conclusion that other peoples do not finally count. Lewis had watched that logic help produce two world wars in his own lifetime. He wasn't theorizing.

Screwtape Doesn't Care Which Side You Pick

The Screwtape Letters gets at the same problem from underneath. In the seventh letter, Wormwood wants to know whether he should push his patient toward patriotism or pacifism — a live question in wartime Britain. Screwtape's answer is that either will serve, and the method is identical in both cases. Let the man first treat his position as part of his Christianity. Then let partisan spirit make it the most important part. Then let the faith become valuable to him chiefly for the arguments it supplies to the cause. Get a man prizing his religion for what it does for his politics and the file is nearly closed — and Screwtape is explicit that the particular cause makes almost no difference.

That cuts both directions, and I intend it to. There is the fusion where you can no longer find the seam between the cross and the flag, where the faith functions as documentation for a political identity that was settled long before anyone opened a Bible. And there is the mirror image, every bit as religious: the Christian whose spirituality consists largely of being embarrassed by his neighbors' patriotism, for whom sneering at the Fourth of July operates as a devotional practice. Screwtape is content with both men. Each has made the World the end and the faith the means.

Lewis adds a harder observation in The Four Loves that most readers skip. Kill the honest, limited kind of patriotism and you do not get peace; you get crusades. A man fighting for his home can respect the man across the line fighting for his, and the quarrel has boundaries, because neither is claiming heaven's endorsement. But when nations stop saying "this land is ours and we will defend it" and start saying "we are the cause of civilization, of justice, of humanity itself," every war becomes a holy war — and holy wars are the merciless ones, because the enemy of Justice Itself deserves no quarter. Dressing national interest in divine livery made war crueler, not kinder. Lewis watched it happen twice.

Ordered Loves

Behind all of this stands Augustine, whom Lewis is channeling openly — the ordo amoris, the right ordering of loves. Sin, in that older frame, is rarely a matter of loving a bad thing; it is usually a matter of loving a good thing out of order. Country is a real good. God is the final good. Keep them in that sequence and love of country stays what it ought to be. Reverse them and it does not shrink. It metastasizes.

The biblical material runs the same direction. Jeremiah tells the exiles to seek the שָׁלוֹם — the shalom, the whole welfare — of Babylon, and to pray for the city, because their welfare is bound up in its welfare (Jeremiah 29:7). That is real civic love, commanded, toward a pagan empire that had burned Jerusalem. Then Paul writes to Philippi, a Roman colony thick with civic pride over its citizenship, and tells them τὸ πολίτευμα — the commonwealth, the citizenship — is in heaven (Philippians 3:20). He never says citizenship is nothing. He says theirs is located somewhere specific, and that one outranks the local one. Hebrews goes further and uses the actual vocabulary of patriotism for heaven: the patriarchs were seeking a πατρίς, a fatherland, a better country (Hebrews 11:14–16). Scripture doesn't abolish the category of homeland. It relocates the final one.

That yields Lewis's practical test, and it works as well two days after the Fourth as it did in 1960. A rightly ordered love of country can hear the country's sins named without collapsing — the same way you can love a person while knowing their record — because the country was never your god, and only gods have to be spotless. The man who cannot tolerate a word against America has told you what he actually worships. So has the man who cannot manage a good word for her.

Two Days Later

So what does the ordered version look like on July 6th? Something like gratitude without liturgy. Thank God for the country — Jeremiah makes praying for it an obligation, not a compromise. Enjoy the fireworks. Tell your kids the stories, and tell them as a summons rather than a pedigree. And keep the flag off the altar, not because the nation is shameful but because the altar is occupied.

Lewis is buried in a churchyard in Headington Quarry, outside Oxford, in the country he loved his whole life and never once confused with the one he was actually traveling toward. In The Weight of Glory he reminded his hearers that nations, cultures, and civilizations are all mortal — set against a human soul, their lifespan is a gnat's. The line everyone remembers from that sermon is that "you have never talked to a mere mortal," and it's true. But the corollary lands harder in a week like this one: you have also never pledged allegiance to an immortal nation. Every flag you will ever love flies over something temporary, and the people saluting it are not.

Love the country and refuse it your worship.

God bless, everyone.