"America, America"

In a recent issue of First Things, James Nuechterlein had an interesting essay called "America, America" (subscription required).  In the course of more general reflections about "patriotism", and echoing a line of argument that I associate with, among others, our colleague Tom Berg, he explained helpfully (I thought) the role and importance of the "under God" language in the Pledge of Allegiance.  A bit:

. . . For Christians of an Augustinian persuasion, it is finally only the city of God to which they owe unqualified allegiance, and they understand, or ought to understand, that on earth we have no abiding city. In the orthodox Christian view of things, all our cities—even the best of them—are greater or lesser Babylons in which we sojourn as strangers and pilgrims. We are alien residents, on the journey to our ultimate citizenship in the New Jerusalem.

This is not to suggest that Christians must be estranged from their own countries. But they do understand that neither politics nor patriotism is of ultimate concern. These things may engage us deeply, but our understanding of human sin and finitude—especially as manifested in collective behavior—serves to inoculate us against the utopian and salvific temptations that lie behind nationalist enormities. The very best of political arrangements, those calling for our deepest attachment, can bring only a very rough justice. That is not nothing, but neither is it worthy of total or unqualified commitment.

All this may sound, in tone if not in substance, vaguely un-American, and so, by extension, somewhat unpatriotic. But in fact it is just that off-center angle of vision that makes orthodox Christians safe for patriotism. They can love America—feel for it that gratitude, pride, and affection that it is natural for people to extend to their homeland—without being tempted to the idolatrous nationalism that has deformed so much of modern history. How can Augustinian Christians make an idol of a nation whose philosophical assumptions of enlightenment liberalism, recurring religious impulses to gnostic antinomianism, and prevailing spirit of romantic optimism stand athwart their most basic understandings? Because Christians are in a deep sense strangers in America, they can be safely at home there.

And, so long as they keep their ultimate reservations always in mind, they can be quite thoroughly at home and quite at ease in saying so. When Americans speak of the United States as a redeemer nation, or refer to it as a city on a hill, or argue that the Constitution is the nation’s bible, they are not—at least not most of them most of the time—speaking literally. They use providential and biblical language because it is for them a common idiom, not because they really think that America is the new Israel. Not every reference to God’s providence extending to America’s role in the world is an exercise in idolatry, and the declaration in the Pledge of Allegiance that we are a nation “under God” is properly understood as a plea of humility rather than an assertion of pride. . . .