Christianity, patriotism, and divided loyalties

Ben Myers posted this bombastic Stanley Hauerwas quote (is there any other kind?) for Independence Day:

I assume most of you are here because you think you are Christians, but it is not all clear to me that the Christianity that has made you Christians is Christianity. For example: How many of you worship in a church with an American flag? I am sorry to tell you that your salvation is in doubt. How many of you worship in a church in which the fourth of July is celebrated? I am sorry to tell you that your salvation is in doubt.

The quote is from an address to a group of seminary students, but it’s a good encapsulation of much of what Hauerwas has said about the relationship between Christianity and America over the years. Jim West provided a stern rebuke of Hauerwas here; Fr. Chris has some thoughts here.

The question here is one of loyalties, but I think the terms in which it is debated are often simplistic: you’re either loyal to the nation (in this case, the US) or to the church. This misses the point that we have multiple overlapping and interpenetrating loyalties, which cannot be neatly and hierarchically ordered. (With one important exception that I’ll get to in a minute.)

We find ourselves, simply as a result of the place we occupy in the world, with loyalties to family, friends, spouses, children, communities, employers, professional associations, charitable organizations, social clubs, religious bodies, and various levels of political community. As a general rule, these don’t need to be justified by recourse to some ethical theory, they are simply the warp and woof of our life together. Nor is there any simple algorithm for settling the conflicts that arise between these loyalties. Sometimes I may have to choose between loyalty to my family and loyalty to my spouse, or between my employer and my country, or between my religious community and my political community.

An important qualification of all loyalties, though, is the more universal ethical context in which we exist and which, for theists anyway, flows from, is rooted in, or reflects the divine mind. This means that particular loyalties can only make limited claims on us. For example, a father’s duty to care for his children doesn’t entitle him to harm other people’s children. Loyalty to my country doesn’t justify inflicting injustice on citizens of other countries. In other words, preferential treatment of those to whom we’re connected by special bonds isn’t wrong per se, but it’s subject to qualification in light of more universal duties.

Because our highest loyalty, if we’re Christians, should be to God, we are called to follow God’s will, so far as we can discern it, in all areas of our life. The national community, though it can and has become an object of idolatry, can, acting through the government, be one instrument for advancing these values. And, I’d add, that in many cases it’s the only agent in society that can do certain things. Self-styled radical Christians who want us to live in anarchist communes rarely seem to address things like infrastructure, environmental protection, and the social safety net. Are Christians supposed to abandon our concern with these things and leave the “dirty work” to the “heathens”?

The problem I see with the Hauerwasian view is that it has a tendency to elevate the church to the object of highest loyalty and threatens to collapse the distinction between Christ and the church. Gerhard Forde warned against seeing the church as an “eschatological vestibule” where the kingdom of God has already come in its fullness instead of as an earthen vessel where we hear God’s word and receive the sacraments. The church, as a human institution, is no more immune to corruption than any other, so we can’t assume that it deserves our unconditional loyalty any more than the nation does. In fact, a good candidate for the essence of Protestantism might be the imperative to criticize the church in light of the gospel.

All of which is not to say that Christians should traffic in American exceptionalism. No nation can, contrary to what most of our politicians seem to think, be the world’s last, best hope. That title belongs only to God. Which is why we’re obliged not to identify any of the powers and principalities of this age with the divine will but to seek to embody that will in our life together. The point is that we all have “divided loyalties,” but Christians are supposed to (however imperfectly) order them to our universal duty to God.