Are You a Patriot?

So, okay, we've got this conversation on homosexuality going, which I interrupted just a skosh yesterday, and I'd love to keep that ball rolling if there's any more to be said at the moment than what we've said.

But Independence Day got me thinking about patriotism and my muse is so astoundingly fleeting, I thought I should run with this for the common good.

And, for one more note in the preamble, I'm away again for the rest of this week.  (I'm taking my three young boys on a "boys trip" to New York for two days, upon which the left-at-home girls will join us for three more days.  A Mets game awaits!  [For one thing,  the Mets are at home while the Yankees are not.  And it's probably for the best, as many years of Yankee-revulsion could be hard to overcome as we stepped across the threshold.  But there's probably another great post on the Yankees/spiritual darkness theme, so I don't want to spoil that here.])  All to say, please indulge your "I want to write a post for this blog!" instincts and get them to dan@notreligious.org. And thank you very much to the couple of you who have indeed submitted posts recently that we haven't yet run.  I'll get back to you!  I haven't forgotten.

All to say, I'm not sure why patriotism has repelled me from a pretty young age.  It's not a Jesus thing--though these days I have lots of Jesus-based ammunition for it.  I had it at least by my atheistic mid-teens.  Graduating seniors in my high school could pick a quote to go under the picture in their yearbook, and for whatever reason mine was a political comment from the noted firebrand Neil Simon.  It was from his flop early play The Star-Spangled Girl and went thusly: "I love absolutely everything about this country except people who love absolutely everything about this country."  Somehow that was what I wanted to be remembered by.  It's a mystery.

if you track with some of the terms of this blog, you've probably jumped ahead of me and diagnosed my anti-patriotism as a stage 3/stage 2 thing (note the button on "Stage 4 faith," above, for a description of this).  And you're probably right.  I'm sure patriotism represented a world I was eager to leave behind.  (I was recruited by three service academies.  My dad said I should take them up on it--they would make a man out of me.  I looked at him with wonder, thinking that he profoundly didn't know to whom he was talking.)

Transitioning to follow Jesus included an easy transition on this front.   As followers of Jesus, our loyalty was to God's kingdom on earth, not to one nation or another.  Yes, we were to obey the ruling authorities, but clearly Jesus wasn't a cheerleader for Rome (or for Israel--he left that to Simon the Zealot). 

And July 4 reminds me that I remain in this uneasy place today.  On the one hand, I'm a massive America fan.  I'm so glad to have been born here.  I love Boston, just as I loved San Francisco before it.  I couldn't imagine living in a repressive country (Iran seeming to carry the banner for that in the media at the moment).  I couldn't be happier that America won the Revolutionary War and that Hitler was defeated, and I feel a big thank-you to all those who fought and died in those efforts.  (Some other conflicts are harder to cheer for, through no fault at all of the servicemen and women who fought in them.)  My family had a truly fantastic time at a local fireworks celebration on Saturday.  So in all those ways, I suppose I'm a patriot.

But I nonetheless don't feel like a patriot.  My loyalties flow much easier towards Jesus than they do towards America.  Maybe those two things aren't at odds, but they can stubbornly feel at odds to me.

So help me out.  Are you a patriot?  Why or why not?  Help me out of my muddle.