Before C. S. Lewis starts analyzing the loves that his book, The Four Loves, focuses on, he sets the stage with some preliminary perspectives. In the last couple of posts, I’ve noted his identification of the distinctions between a gift-love, a need-love, and appreciative love. He then tackled the problem with making a religion out of the love of nature. In this new post, I will comment on the question he raises in the latter half of chapter 2.
Perhaps with the memory of two world wars during his lifetime, Lewis begins, “We all know now that this love becomes a demon when it becomes a god. Some begin to suspect that it is never anything but a demon.” Lewis can’t go that far, noting that Christ wept over Jerusalem, exhibiting a deep love for His country. Yet, he sees the danger clearly.
He quickly draws a line between two types of patriotism: a healthy patriotism vs. a demoniac patriotism. A demoniac type of patriotism in the nation’s citizens will make it easier for a wicked ruler to carry out his schemes. Conversely, a healthy patriotism will work against wicked schemes. A lot depends on the proper understanding and practice of patriotism. Lewis warns, “we private persons should keep a wary eye on the health or disease of our own love for our country.”
I found this quote from a British ambassador to the United States who served during Lewis’s lifetime. I think it helps with the definition of healthy patriotism:
Lewis then traces how patriotism can go wrong. It starts with something rather good—a love of home.
There certainly is nothing wrong with a love of home; we feel close to all that we are familiar with. “The second ingredient,” Lewis continues, “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.” Here’s where things might possibly start to go awry. Lewis notes the potential for a shift in the wrong direction.
The temptation to see everything in one’s nation’s past as glorious and/or meritorious overlooks the “shabby and even shameful doings.” All nations have these, and a healthy patriotism will acknowledge them while also maintaining a love for the nation’s stated ideals. For American citizens, recognition of the evils of slavery and racism, for example, is not a hatred of the nation; rather, it is an appeal to the ideals of the Founding. Historical honesty should lead us to strive to attain those ideals. Lewis calls upon historians like me to help in that understanding. As he says,
I think it is possible to be strengthened by the image of the past without being either deceived or puffed up. The image becomes dangerous in the precise degree to which it is mistaken, or substituted, for serious and systematic historical study.
We should never be afraid of the truth. Serious study of our history will reveal both heroic actions as well as the shameful ones. It’s important to contrast them and point our students and readers of history toward emulating the heroic.
A third ingredient toward demoniac patriotism, Lewis writes, is a belief that our own nation has long been, and still is, markedly superior to all others. Here’s where hubris and arrogance can make their entrance. It’s one thing to appreciate a nation’s positive impact on history and celebrate it—Independence Day is a fine holiday—but we need to avoid all talk of “superiority.” It can lead us down a dark path. Lewis continues,
The British said they were taking up “the white man’s burden” to help “backward” people become more “civilized.” Lewis puts it this way:
What we called natives were our wards and we their self-appointed guardians. This was not all hypocrisy. We did do them some good. But our habit of talking as if England’s motives for acquiring an empire … had been mainly altruistic nauseated the world.
Some countries, Lewis says, carried this attitude to the extreme, believing they had the right to exterminate certain people groups. “I am far from suggesting,” he adds, “that the two attitudes are on the same level. But both are fatal.”
Where, then, does this lead us? What should be the proper attitude when we consider the actions of a nation? Lewis again offers what I think is a balanced approach that separates, in the right sense, the two spheres—civil and religious.
A soldier dying for his country is not the same as a Christian dying for his faith. The two must never be equated. The Heavenly Society and the earthly society are not the same. “Our (merely natural) patriotism towards the latter can very easily borrow the transcendent claims of the former and use them to justify the most abominable actions,” Lewis warns. Drawing on his knowledge of how often in history we have combined the two to our detriment, he concludes the chapter with some rather dire words.
Lewis’s concern that our Christian witness to the world be one of integrity should also be our concern today.