July 4, 2005
Interdependence
Hebrew and Christian scriptures record two problems about patriotism as always having plagued the People of God. One is to become so conformed to a culture and its ways so as to merge the two, rather than bringing the culture into the ways of God. The other is through blind denial and grandiosity to allow the rule of God to be replaced by the rule of the State.
We Christians are believers in incarnation, and it is thus not always easy to separate the issues from the people or the symbols who embody them. Patriotism — about which these days some of us hear perhaps more than enough and others never quite enough — is one of those very important issues which we incarnate and which is not all that easy to separate from the persons or the symbols that embrace it.
Few of us, I suspect, would deny that we are patriots. We may find it easier to say what that does not mean than to say what it does mean. One thing we all have in common on the subject, however, is what is called the Declaration of Independence. It seems to me always useful — especially this time of year and in these perilous times — to read it over again thoughtfully as Christians, and perhaps to discover anew what our founders had in mind when they undertook this great American political experiment by which they told us what patriotism meant for them.
On the celebration of our nation’s birthday each year, National Public Radio broadcasts a reading of the Declaration of Independence. Their announcers, reporters, analysts, and essayists each follow in turn reading a short, self-contained passage.
The familiar voices are nameless, and one can only guess whose they are. The anonymity seems not only tantalizing, but somehow appropriate, as well. I like to imagine our founders as they wrote and shaped this great proclamation maybe having read it aloud similarly to one another as they sought to get the its feel and the rhythm, and a sense of its power and authority.
Hearing it in this way even more convinces me that, for whatever and surely well-intended reason, the document seems strangely misnamed. I believe it might better have been called a Declaration of Interdependence, instead. It may be well for us to imagine it that way in these difficult times of another, newer, but not all that different national crisis.
Clearly and well, of course, the Declaration establishes us an autonomous nation among all the world’s geopolitical states. That, in itself, is daring enough. But it continues uniquely and refreshingly to proclaim a new and radical political relationship not only with its own citizenry, but also boldly and courageously with all the earth’s peoples who care to join in such a venture. It takes an incarnational view of the very nature of human being and of the body politic as itself a faithful way to render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar’s and unto God the things that are God’s.
But strangely in that light, we live in a time when independence has come to mean for some a license to run unilaterally amok not only over our own creative system of checks and balances, but, as well, our relationship to whole regions and nations across this entire planet. We seem thus to be abandoning the very corporate nature of the stewardship which this founding document affirmed and for which it called.
True patriotism is not, I believe, some blind, unquestioning loyalty which is no loyalty at all, but an out-and-out denial of responsible citizenship. Rather is true patriotism to love our country enough to see that in a nuclear age it is not going to survive unless the world survives. True patriots are no longer champions of democracy, communism, or anything like that, but champions of the human race. It is not the homeland that they feel called on to defend at any cost, but, as we say in the Eucharist Prayer, “this fragile earth, our island home.”
If in the interests of making sure that we don’t blow ourselves off the map once and for all, we end up relinquishing a measure of national sovereignty to some international body, so much the worse for national sovereignty. For there is only one Sovereignty that matters ultimately, and it is of quite another sort altogether.
On the other hand, we might just celebrate the occasion more or less like King George III who entered into his journal on July 4, 1776, “Nothing of any importance or consequence took place today.”
Memo to: Frederick Buechner, thanks for your notes on patriotism in “Whistling in the Dark,” Harper & Row, 1988, pp 92f.
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