Christians are a transnational people. As such, we have brothers and sisters living all throughout the world, in different countries, in different races, in different ethnic groups, and in different sexes. But to state that truth does not necessarily mean there is no place for a healthy patriotism. It certainly does not mean that a good Christian must hate his country.
We might all be one in Christ, but God has a place for the nations – not only in the past, but in the future as well. For example, we even see the nations worshipping God in the world to come. See Revelation 15:1-4; 21:22-27; and 22:1-2 for example. The second passage says this:
And I saw no temple in the city, for its temple is the Lord God the Almighty and the Lamb.And the city has no need of sun or moon to shine on it, for the glory of God gives it light, and its lamp is the Lamb. By its light will the nations walk, and the kings of the earth will bring their glory into it, and its gates will never be shut by day—and there will be no night there. They will bring into it the glory and the honor of the nations. But nothing unclean will ever enter it, nor anyone who does what is detestable or false, but only those who are written in the Lamb’s book of life.
I have spoken to these matters before, and a key passage on this is of course Jeremiah 29:4-7. It discusses a letter the prophet had sent to those Jews living in exile in Babylon. It said this:
Thus says the Lord of hosts, the God of Israel, to all the exiles whom I have sent into exile from Jerusalem to Babylon: Build houses and live in them; plant gardens and eat their produce. Take wives and have sons and daughters; take wives for your sons, and give your daughters in marriage, that they may bear sons and daughters; multiply there, and do not decrease. But seek the welfare of the city where I have sent you into exile, and pray to the Lord on its behalf, for in its welfare you will find your welfare.
And Jeremiah 25 informs us that this would be a 70-year captivity. So God’s people are even being told to seek the good of a foreign, pagan nation. One writer who has spent a lot of time looking at these matters is Daniel Darling. I have already written a number of articles on his recent volume, In Defence of Christian Patriotism (Broadside Books, 2025).
In Defense of Christian Patriotismby Darling, Daniel (Author)
I return to it again, looking in particular at Chapter 2, “You Can’t Obey God and Hate Your Country”. I start with three quotes he features throughout (some of which I have added to slightly from the originals):
G. K. Chesterton
‘My country, right or wrong,’ is something that no patriot would think of saying. . . . The fundamental spiritual advantage of patriotism and such sentiments is this: that by means of it all things are loved adequately, because all things are loved individually. Cosmopolitanism gives us one country, and it is good; nationalism gives us a hundred countries, and every one of them is the best. Cosmopolitanism offers a positive, patriotism a chorus of superlatives. Patriotism begins the praise of the world at the nearest thing, instead of beginning it at the most distant, and thus it insures what is, perhaps, the most essential of all earthly considerations, that nothing upon earth shall go without its due appreciation. “A Defence of Patriotism” in The Defendant
Chuck Colson
The Christian position is beautifully balanced. On one hand, we don’t deify our country. Our ultimate citizenship is in heaven, and that’s where our ultimate allegiance is. But the only place for expressing that allegiance is in the concrete loyalties God calls us to here on earth—including loyalty to country. We can’t love mankind in the abstract; we can only really love people in the particular, concrete relationships God has placed us in—our family, our church, our community, our nation. “The Cross and the Flag”
C. S. Lewis
There is a 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. Note that at its largest this is, for us, a love of England, Wales, Scotland, or Ulster…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… It would be hard to find any legitimate point of view from which this feeling could be condemned. As the family offers us the first step beyond self-love, so this offers us the first step beyond family selfishness… 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 realise that other men, no less rightly, love theirs? The Four Loves
Richard John Neuhaus
The alternative to loyalty is disloyalty. No community knowingly takes its directions from the avowedly disloyal. We are speaking of course about patriotism. The tragedy is that patriotism has become a negative, or at least a shadowed, concept in the view from the left. Effective criticism, however, depends upon rejoining protest to patriotism. The Naked Public Square
Darling goes on to say this about these writers:
Both Lewis and Chesterton adapted their ideas from Augustine, who wrote that love of the particular helps us foster love of the universal. This is a notable piece of wisdom because we now see everywhere encouragements to love enormous, nebulous abstractions such as “the world” or “humanity.” This can sound like Christian language, but in fact, it tends to end up being a way of sidestepping or diminishing the duty to love the familiar.
Though such calls usually come from the Left, we should also watch out for influencers commanding the love of right-wing abstractions, such as an imaginary, pure country of the past, which diminishes our duty to love the imperfect present neighbour. But because of the conservative philosophy emphasises loving local things and growing out from this base, the Right is inoculated against – though not immune to – losing itself in abstractions.
Neuhaus went so far as to say that a healthy patriotism is “a species of piety.” At its essence, to love one’s country is to demonstrate gratitude, and essential virtue for a faithful Christian (1 Thessalonians 5:18). John Wilsey describes patriotism as “a rightly ordered love of country that comes from gratitude and joy in the good gifts God has freely given by his grace.”
Darling also discusses another relevant OT text: the case of Jonah and how God had to give him a rather large nudge to get him to proclaim biblical truth to a pagan nation. I have already shared some of what he had to say on this in an earlier article I penned on this chapter: https://billmuehlenberg.com/2025/10/08/on-christian-patriotism/
And of course he looks at Jeremiah 29 as well. Many Jews back then in ungodly Babylon, like many Christians today in ungodly America or Australia, wondered how they were to live. The command was to seek its welfare. For the average Jew in exile, that might have been difficult to actualise, but Daniel and his friends, by God’s grace, were elevated to positions of power where they had an impact.
So too Christians today. We may well be strangers in a strange land in the pagan West, but we are called to be salt and light and make a difference. We need to prayerfully and carefully seek to bring this about. Doing this makes us the right kind of patriots.
Near the end of the chapter Darling says about the sort of patriotism that a believer can get behind:
Healthy patriotism seeks the best for the land in which we live. True patriots work to improve the country where possible. They don’t cynically fantasize about her demise. True patriots call America to live up to her promises. It’s the difference, really, between peaceful protests and destructive riots, between political activism and political violence, between prophetic words calling for repentance and cynical rejection of the entire American project.
The constructive approach is the one taken by America’s greatest prophets. A former slave turned abolitionist, Frederick Douglass, aimed not to destroy the American project but to improve it, and called Americans to live up to the statement in the Declaration of Independence that “all men are created equal.” Abraham Lincoln took the same approach, pointing back to the Declaration in his Gettysburg Address and urging the country to reject slavery. Doctor Martin Luther King Jr., a century later, made a similar appeal.
Loving a nation that is hostile to your faith, and seeking its welfare, will not be easy. But we have examples from the past, and we have biblical injunctions, to do just this. A book like Darling’s is an important manual on how we might proceed in these difficult yet necessary paths.
