The patriotism of dual citizenship
by Peter Selby

It’s hardly surprising, in the wake of September 11, that patriotism should break out in the U.S. Not only was the attack on New York and Washington experienced by Americans as an attack on the U.S.; that was clearly its intention. Deliberately aimed at targets that symbolized U.S. power in the modern world, the perverted brilliance of the exercise has understandably unleashed a military response which took the lives of further uninvolved civilians in Afghanistan. More than that, it led also to a wave of patriotic sentiment in the U.S. itself and international sympathy for the nation that has – like it or not – provided the economic engine of most nations’ aspirations and therefore the source of their current value systems.

None of that makes it easier either within the U.S. or outside it to engage in the very necessary critique of the concept of a "war against terrorism." It is not an easy time to risk being called "unpatriotic," and those who planned and executed the attacks on New York and Washington are as much responsible for the predictable deaths of Afghan people as they are directly for the deaths of those who died on September 11th.

Yet the risk has to be taken, and for the most patriotic of reasons. Love of country has to include a passionate concern for its values, its hopes and its reputation. No country can flourish if the voice of criticism is silenced in the name of patriotism. That is why many of us in Britain have seriously questioned the powers the government has taken to itself under the pretext of the "war against terrorism," powers which endanger the very civilization we are ostensibly seeking to protect. The right to a fair and speedy trial, and the independence of the judiciary from government are treasured bulwarks of that civilization on both sides of the Atlantic.

This is not, of course, a new challenge to people of faith who also love their country. If there is a characteristic that distinguishes a true prophet from the mere angry ranter against his own nation it is the powerful engine of love. You hear it coming through the verses of the prophets of Israel and Judah, expressing the agony of having to castigate a people they loved. Nobody can speak that poetically to a people they do not love very deeply. And that deep love of country, the sense that these whom I criticize are nonetheless my people, has expressed itself again and again in those women and men of faith who have out of love felt driven to articulate their critique of wrong directions and unacceptable actions on the part of their people and their governments.

So what gave real Christian integrity to Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s confronting of a nation and a church embarked on a road through tyranny to oppression was precisely the fact that he remained till his death a patriotic German. The texts we have show, to his very last days, the conviction that his nation, his people, his church was taking a path that could only lead to national disaster, and to a church that would be a church no longer. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s, famous "dream" was an essentially patriotic dream, for all the claims that he was unpatriotic.

So we are pledged to a place of discomfort in relation to our fellow citizens, one where we assert that we feel an equal love for our country for all our dissent from some of its policies and attitudes. We live out a transcendent citizenship, our membership of God’s sovereign realm, at the same time as loving our earthly country. We value the institutions of the nation in which we are citizens, but never so much as to defend them uncritically. Testing those institutions and values against those of the divine realm we dare to hold out to our fellow-citizens possibilities beyond what has been achieved to this point. That is to say, we live in hope for our country as well as in love of it.

Shortly after the events of September 11th I received a message from the internationally famous Jewish scholar, Jacob Neusner. He was reflecting on where God was on that awful day, and on the prayers being asked for blessing on the U.S. His concluding prayer was "that America might be worthy of God’s blessing." That is a patriotic prayer. We must pray for each other’s countries to be blessed, our own, our friends’ and our enemies’, too – that our and their patriotism will lead on to a sense of what belongs to the peace of all nations. We know, after all, that the tears Christ wept over Jerusalem were the tears of a patriot; we need to care for our countries enough to weep for them and even to cry out against them – but loving them still. l

Peter Selby, author of Grace and Mortgage: The Language of Faith and the Debt of the World (Darton Longman and Todd, 1997), is the Bishop of Worcester, England. His column "Money &Power," can be found at <www.thewitness.org/agw>.