Thoughts from C.S. Lewis
This Fourth of July month, when Americans especially focus on patriotism, is a good time to look at the writings of celebrated Christian (though British) author, C.S. Lewis. Lewis fought in World War I, then saw the tragedies that befell Europe as a result of Nazism World War II. In fact, The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, the first book of The Chronicles of Narnia, opens with the Pevensie children being sent to the English countryside to get away from the bombing of London.
Clearly, Lewis knew about the need to fight countries that are committing graver evils than one's own country. Yet Lewis was no fanatic about patriotism. He shows some shadings, some caution about earthly citizenship and a great deal of clarity about our higher citizenship being in heaven. I, myself, rejoice in the many blessings of being an American. But I am always concerned when people want to muddle my heavenly citizenship with my American citizenship. So this month, I will bring forth some ideas and cautions of C.S. Lewis about patriotism.
In a letter dated May 25, 1951, Lewis wrote: “I think love for one’s country means chiefly love for people who have a good deal in common with oneself (language, clothes, institutions) and in that is very like love of one’s family or school: or like love (in a strange place) for anyone who once lived in one’s home town.” Lewis keeps in mind on the higher matter of our citizenship being in heaven. He went on say: “And it is good, because any natural help towards our spiritual duty of loving is good and God seems to build our higher loves round our merely natural impulses — sex, maternity, kinship, old acquaintance etc.”
Lewis' 1960 book, The Four Loves, grew out of some 1958 radio talks. The book tucks the subject of patriotism into the chapter, "Likings and Loves for the Sub-human." [The actual four loves are affection, friendship, eros/romantic love and agape/charity.] So we see right off that he is cautious about patriotism as a primary motivation. He is generally cautious about elevating any of the human loves too high: “We may give our human loves the unconditional allegiance which we owe only to God. They become gods: then they become demons. Then they will destroy us, and also destroy themselves. Human loves that are allowed to become gods do not remain loves. They are still called so, but can become in fact complicated forms of hatred.” Lewis divides patriotism into four "ingredients" or "layers."
First, there is love of home, of the place we grew up in or the places, perhaps many, which have been our homes; and of all places fairly near these and fairly like them; love of old acquaintances, of familiar sights, sounds and smells. Of course, patriotism of this kind is not in the least aggressive. It asks only to be let alone. It becomes militant only to protect what it loves. In any mind which has a pennyworth of imagination, it produces a good attitude towards foreigners. How can I love my home without coming to realize that other men, no less rightly, love theirs? Once you have realized that the Frenchmen like café complet just as we like bacon and eggs why, good luck to them and let them have it. The last thing we want is to make everywhere else just like our own home. It would not be home unless it were different...
With this love for the place, there goes a love for the way of life; for beer and tea and open fires, trains with compartments in them and an unarmed police force and all the rest of it; for the local dialect and (a shade less) for our native language...As [theologian G.K.] Chesterton says, a man’s reasons for not wanting his country to be ruled by foreigners are very like his reasons for not wanting his house to be burned down; because he "could not even begin" to enumerate all the things he would miss.
"The second ingredient" of patriotism, Lewis writes, "is a particular attitude to our country’s past. I mean to that past as it lives in popular imagination; the great deeds of our ancestors. … This feeling has not quite such good credentials as the sheer love of home. The actual history of every country is full of shabby and even shameful doings." These myths live on in our imagination can "impose an obligation and to hold out an assurance." In other words, they can drive us to live up to higher ideals. Lewis says it’s, "possible to be strengthened by the image of the past without being either deceived or puffed up."
America has it's own inspiring myths: Paul Revere’s ride, peaceful cooperation with (some) Native Americans, the Christianity of many of our Founding Fathers. Some of these myths may have some truth to them, but none tell the whole story, the "shabby and shameful" parts. Any country’s history holds acts of both good and evil. So Lewis warns: "What does seem to me poisonous, what breeds a type of patriotism that is pernicious if it lasts but not likely to last long in an educated adult, is the perfectly serious indoctrination of the young in knowably false or biased history—the heroic legend drably disguised as text-book fact. With this creeps in the tacit assumption that other nations have not equally their heroes; perhaps even the belief—surely it is very bad biology—that we can literally 'inherit' a tradition."
"The third thing", or strand of patriotism is probably the most recognized. Lewis calls it, “a firm, even prosaic belief that our own nation, in sober fact, has long been, and still is markedly superior to all others.” This is certainly a form of patriotism that can steer us wrong over time, so to lose our judgment.
I once ventured to say to an old clergyman who was voicing this sort of patriotism, “But, sir, aren’t we told that every people thinks its own men the bravest and its own women the fairest in the world?” He replied with total gravity he could not have been graver if he had been saying the Creed at the altar “Yes, but in England it’s true.” To be sure, this conviction had not made my friend (God rest his soul) a villain; only an extremely lovable old ass. It can, however, produce asses that kick and bite. On the lunatic fringe, it may shade off into that popular racialism which Christianity and science equally forbid....If our nation is really so much better than others it may be held to have either the duties or the rights of a superior being towards them...If our nation is really so much better than others it may be held to have either the duties or the rights of a superior being towards them. In the nineteenth century the English became very conscious of such duties: the "white man's burden." What we called natives were our wards and we their self-appointed guardians...our habit of talking as if England's motives for acquiring an empire...had been mainly altruistic nauseated the world. And yet this showed the sense of superiority working at its best. Some nations who have also felt it have stressed the rights, not the duties...to them, some foreigners were so bad that one had the right to exterminate them. Others, fitted only to be hewers of wood and drawers of water to the chosen people, had better be made to get on with their hewing and drawing.
He writes of broken treaties with Native Americans, extermination of Australian aborigines, Apartheid in South Africa and Nazi gas-chambers. “On the lunatic fringe it may shade off into that popular Racialism which Christianity and science equally forbid...” Ignoring the achievements and perspectives of other nations and cultures can lead to a sense of superiority that justifies the mistreatment and exploitation of others.
There's a point at which patriotism can even breed lawlessness, the fourth ingredient. "When natural loves become lawless," Lewis writes, "they do not merely do harm to other loves; they themselves cease to be the loves they were--to be loves at all." "We know now that this love becomes a demon when it becomes a god." In this fourth aspect, patriotism can have the ingredient of alleged "duty" toward other countries, but from a position of power, not out of kindness. Patriotism reaching this demonic form unconsciously denies patriotism itself.
“No man,” said one of the Greeks, “loves his city because it is great, but because it is his,” A man who really loves his country will love her in her ruin and degeneration “England, with all thy faults, I love thee still.” She will be to him “a poor thing but mine own.” He may think her good and great, when she is not, because he loves her; the delusion is up to a point pardonable...I may without self-righteousness or hypocrisy think it just to defend my house by force against a burglar; but if I start pretending that I blacked his eye purely on moral grounds wholly indifferent to the fact that the house in question was mine I become insufferable. The pretense that when England’s cause is just we are on England’s side as some neutral Don Quixote might be for that reason alone, is equally spurious. And nonsense draws evil after it. If our country’s cause is the cause of God, wars must be wars of annihilation. A false transcendence is given to things which are very much of this world.
Lewis is not arguing that there is no right side nor wrong side. He is cautioning against seeing your own country as always and only on the right side of morality. This false thinking keeps the citizenry from acknowledging its mistakes. When you equate your movements with God's movings, then you grant your country the status of being beyond questioning. As Lewis says, if any country has this, then they feel they have the right and even the "responsibility" to annhiliate any and all enemies because the nation cannot be wrong. Even act is seen as moral because of the sense that the nation is sacred. Every decision is right because of the country which made it. This is the the demonic patriotism because the nation has become a god.
Lewis also had some interesting thoughts on patriotism in The Screwtape Letters. Here is an excerpt from an elder demon telling his nephew about leading a man away from God: "Let him begin by treating Patriotism or the Pacifism as a part of his religion. Then let him, under the influence of the partisan spirit, come to regard it as the most important part. Then quietly and gradually nurse him on to the stage at which religion merely becomes part of the 'Cause'...Once you have made the World an end, and Faith a means, you have almost won your man, and it makes very little difference what kind of worldly end he is pursuing."
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If we insist that somehow America would never do that, then we are indulging the very pride that increases the likelihood our nation will go down that path. Americans defended slavery for a century. We embraced racial segregation for decades after that. The KKK has seen various resurgencies over the centuries. Besides repression of Blacks, it has bred hostilities towards other vulnerable demographics. Life movements seek to protect other types of vulnerable populations this country that do not have sufficient protections. Whole life movements seek to do this in a broader sense.
As a nation and as individuals, we have and we will make mistakes, often while still insisting how right and righteousness we are. This thinking always has and always will pose a danger for nations and individuals.
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Another danger of muddling our two citizenships is the risk of forgetting our primary citizenship is in heaven. Here on earth, we are wanderers and roamers. In fact, we ourselves are even exiles, as St. Peter writes in I Peter 2:11: "Beloved, I urge you as sojourners and exiles." St. Paul writes in Philippians 3:20: "Our citizenship is in heaven." The unknown author of Hebrews describes the heroes of faith "longing for a better country--a heavenly one" (Heb. 11:16). This world is fallen, broken, and we wait for the new creation in heaven, as spoken of in Romans chapter 8 and Revelation 21.
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