If a house divided against itself cannot stand, then a house unloved cannot long endure. But do Americans love their country anymore?
Despite the 250th celebration, which should’ve reignited our collective patriotism and coalesced our melting pot, the essential question is hard to discern. A recent Gallup survey found American pride at a record low.
Undoubtedly, President Donald Trump and party affiliation influenced respondents’ answers. Nevertheless, the widening ideological chasm has been a decadeslong trend, compounded by generational economic and technological anxieties and lack of civic education (or basic literacy). The U.S. has endured intensified political violence and a rise in communism and socialism — philosophies diametrically opposed to Americanism.
America is suffering from malaise. Even despair. Younger Americans are less patriotic “because of America’s past injustices,” writes Dace Potas at USA Today. Indeed, after years of being inundated with critical theory, maligning the “miracle” of the United States’s existence and origins, their disillusionment should not be surprising. In truth, the Zohran Mamdanis of the world did not fall from the sky, but were cultivated in a milieu of anti-Americanism rife in academia and pop culture.
In short, we have forgotten how to love our country, which is necessary for its preservation and survival.
Patriotism, however, is not a vice to be wary of as progressives might claim. Nor is it “merely sentimental or political attachment,” as Cardinal Raymond Burke teaches, but a “moral virtue, rooted in piety by which we render honor to God and to the earthly bonds, through which his providence has granted us life and formed our identity.”
To view fervent patriotism as a “slippery slope” toward extreme nationalism akin to fascism is misguided. Indeed, patriotism is the manifestation of love and the motivation to love: to raise families, go to church, be civically engaged, volunteer, and strive for a better tomorrow.
This love of nation often begins in the family, which is the bedrock of civilization and the “engine which gives our country life,” as President Ronald Reagan observed, but fewer Americans are getting married and having children.
America faces a demographic cliff. Pope St. John Paul II’s aphorism — “As the family goes, so goes the nation” — takes on a new urgency. How can the U.S. be patriotic if the essential societal unit is absent? Who is teaching the next generation of leaders?
This phenomenon affects the nation at large, including a robust and active civil society, which exemplifies both love of country and love of neighbor.
Forming associations and charitable outreach have been uniquely American traits since the founding. This is the nation once hailed by President George H.W. Bush for fostering the “thousand points of light.” Indeed, the U.S. has been one of the most charitable countries ever.
Americans desire community, but they are, ironically, more siloed. Fewer civic associations and churches exist. The hubs for interconnectivity are severed or slipping away into oblivion.
But citizens need a transcendent third: a shared ideal to bind a people together. For past generations, that was God and hope in the country’s future. As President Reagan once emphasized, “If we believe in ourselves and in the God who loves and protects us, together we can build a society more humane, more compassionate, more rewarding than any ever known in the history of man.”
Fewer Americans, however, believe in God or are less hopeful for the future.
Something must change — lest we risk our own country’s ideals of liberty and self-government.
Recently, Samuel Goldman, an associate professor of humanities at the University of Florida, argued America needs to revive its civil religion, or a “system of belief distinct from Christian orthodoxy and secular neutrality.”
While Goldman’s analysis has merit, civil religion requires religiosity’s private cultivation. People need unifying symbols, principles, and shared civic duties. Yet these first must be nourished in the human heart. John Adams noticed this truth quite clearly: “Public virtue cannot exist in a Nation without private virtue, and public virtue is the only Foundation of Republics.”
Things unloved eventually fall apart. But it’s never too late to reverse course, though it might take work.
To thrive, America needs religious people. It needs strong families. It needs children who are educated about the country’s history. It needs a reinvigorated civil society. It needs human bonds and shared views that everyone — Democrat, Republican, left, right — are all created and beloved by God.
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We all live in the same country. We should want it to succeed. And patriotism must be the catalyst for a new golden age of America.
All we need to do is love our country again.