Here Lies the Nation

     The other day my colleague in our team-taught course in Western Civilization made an interesting point about the passing away of medieval Christendom.  He did not say that it was a good or bad thing that it passed away, and did not say when exactly the demise occurred, but rather showed the students how to identify signs that it had occurred.  So, for instance, when Pope Urban at Clermont preached the First Crusade, regardless of how one views what Bohemond and Godfrey and the other crusaders did, one must still be struck by the bare and remarkable fact that they obeyed the preaching.  This they did, as my colleague justly observed, despite the fact that it was not in the best interest of their own power at home, and despite the fact that they had no discernible desire for colonies or for empire.  Or consider the popular movement, endorsed by bishops and popes, that led to the declaration of the Truce of God and the Peace of God.  Warrior nobles chafed against any encroachment upon their liberty to pillage and lay waste to the lands of their enemies, but they at least sometimes and halfheartedly obeyed, refraining from attacking women and children and the aged, laying their weapons down during the penitential seasons and on certain days of every week, and in general allowing themselves unwittingly to be transformed into something remotely resembling the ideal of a chivalric knights.  People derived their prime sense of identity not from where they lived or what language they spoke, but from the faith they shared even with their enemies; they were Christians before they were Tuscans or Flemish.  By the seventeenth century, the source of a man's identity had shifted: Cardinal Richelieu, that eminence grise, was French first, French second, and French third, and that is why he assisted the Protestants in the Thirty Years' War, and why he arranged a peace between France and the Turk, allowing the Turk to push deep into Hapsburg territories in the east.  Had the Pope then decreed that there would be no fighting between Christian princes, the princes would have laughed.  Christendom as a cultural and cross-linguistic reality was dead, and the nation-state had taken its place.

     But now, he suggested, the nation may be going the same way that medieval Christendom went.  I agree, and I'm not talking about the power of multinational corporations-- and neither was he.  I mean that the virtue of patriotism, which is linked to a sense of belonging to this land, here, and loving it, a virtue that did not begin with the nation-state but could at least survive in it, is fading away.  A man calls himself a doctor or a lawyer, a golfer, a husband and father, a collector of postcards, even a Methodist, before he calls himself an American.  I have an old Army-Navy hymnal at home, and to look through it is to be astonished by the number and variety and quaint eloquence of its patriotic anthems, most of them now long forgotten.  Even our most common patriotic hymns have been reduced, in the lived experience and memories of citizens, to a single verse, usually only dimly understood.  Lines such as these from the hymn that used to be called simply America are almost incomprehensible now, not semantically but affectively, and would certainly never be written:
          I love thy rocks and rills,
          Thy woods and templed hills;
          My heart with rapture fills
               Like that above.

     When did it die, this love, this sense that at the deepest springs of my being I am an American?  Again, I'm not saying that we should feel this way; I'm only observing that we don't.  I don't know when the worm turned, but it has.  How many of the people running for the presidency do not really like America?  How many of them never have anything good to say about it?  How many bear hearts that do not beat warmly when they hear of Teddy and the Rough Riders, or Washington crossing the Delaware to surprise the Hessians at Trenton?  How many do not truly love the ways of Americans, even in such harmless things as food and sport, but rather agree when other peoples think them crazy or foolish?  For how many has the Constitution sunk below a thing of contempt, to become nothing but a dead letter, along with all other venerable American traditions?  I can name at least four or five candidates from both parties, including one of the most prominent candidates, who have never shown the slightest trace of actually liking America, let alone hoping that America is victorious in her struggles with other nations.  We've had such candidates before, but nobody would vote for them; they remained on the fringe.  They are not on the fringe now. 

     And that raises the question: if faith is not the source of a people's prime identity and loyalty, and if the nation is not, then what is?  What do we revere and obey?  We are made for reverence and obedience; something must occupy the altar or the flag.