Loving My Country

I wrote this sermon for a July 4 weekend, but I believe it could be offered at another time of year with only small changes. If you would like to consider my sharing this service with your congregation, please contact me.

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All Rights Reserved.

If you wish to use or distribute this text in any way, for any purpose, please contact me first.

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Music:

All the hymns and readings I included in this service come from Singing the Living Tradition.

Opening Hymn: #67, “We Sing Now Together”

Opening Reading: #435, “We Come Together This Morning”

Reading Before Sermon: #583: “The Young Dead Soldiers”

Hymn Before Sermon: #159: “This Is My Song”

Closing Hymn: #121: “We’ll Build a Land”

Sermon:

This is my home, the country where my heart is;
Here are my hopes, my dreams, my holy shrine;
But other hearts in other lands are beating
With hopes and dreams as true and high as mine.

I would like to talk today, on this Fourth of July weekend, about what it means to me to love my country, our country.

For me, and I suspect for some of you, the word patriotism has somewhat mixed feelings around it. As Unitarian Universalists, we try to affirm the inherent worth and dignity of every person, no matter where they live. We try to build bridges of understanding with people from other cultures and countries. Even as I speak, eight people from our congregation are in Transylvania, meeting and connecting with people in our sister church in Gagy.

We are rightly wary of privileging Americans over others. Why does an American life matter more than a life in Haiti or Afghanistan? And so we often give half of our offerings basket to organizations that are trying to address the injustices of the world.

We also recognize that patriotism can be ugly. Too often groups bind themselves together by preaching fear and hatred of outsiders.

And yet patriotism, love of country, is one of the basic bonds that holds us together as a nation.

Since the 1970s, there has been a chorus of voices saying that working together is useless, that government is incompetent at best and often corrupt, that my money is my money and I can do anything I want with it, and that talk about the common good and American ideals is just blather to cover up the raw fact that taxation is a form of theft.

I see this sort of politics as profoundly anti-patriotic. Citizenship means that we are in relationship with each other just because we happen to live in the same place. When people deny that connection, they attack the very foundation of citizenship.

The anti-tax activist Grover Norquist famously said, “I don’t want to abolish government. I simply want to reduce it to the size where I can drag it into the bathroom and drown it in the bathtub.”

I see government as a way that people come together to solve problems that we cannot solve by ourselves.

How do we keep ourselves safe? How do we get ourselves from one place to another, and know that the bridge we go over will stand? How do we have the trust in other people’s truthfulness that makes commercial transactions between strangers possible? How do we prepare our children for a future that will be different from the life we knew? How do we know our food will not poison us? How do we reliably get electricity, heat, and clean water? How do we clean up a polluted river, or make sure there will be fish in the ocean in twenty years?

No one can solve these problems by themselves. Even if you had enough money to buy anything you wanted, no one can pay attention to everything.

We live in a country that has been blessed with a degree of security and prosperity unprecedented in human history. This is not just luck. It is also because generations and generations of Americans tried to create a country that would be good for their children and grandchildren to live in.

It is because of our democratic ideals of liberty and justice for all. It is because of our commitment to the rule of law, and to the economic structures that are possible only under the rule of law. It is because of our commitment to pluralism, to the belief that people and communities can differ in many ways and yet peaceably come together to create something larger than themselves.

It is also because people have, over the generations, built public institutions that serve all of us. Schools and libraries and universities, where people build their skills. Transport systems and financial systems that make it comparatively easy to create and keep wealth. Clean water and sewer systems and food safety laws, to help us stay healthy. Research labs and extension programs, to provide ever-growing knowledge about technology, agriculture, and health. Public parks and national forests that refresh our bodies and lift our spirits. A military that has protected us against outside forces but has never once risen up against our civilian government.

These are blessings that much of the world lives without. We have been blessed indeed.

Most of what our town, state, and nation do for us is invisible or so familiar that we take it for granted. We notice the mistakes, but much of the time government does what it is supposed to do – it solves and prevents shared problems, so that we can pay attention to the things we want to pay attention to. Our work, our families, our religious communities, our own personal lives.

For example, I do not worry about whether I will get tuberculosis from my milk. We as a society have forgotten what it was like when children frequently died. We also no longer remember that making our milk supply safe required the joint efforts of federal research centers, state agricultural colleges and extension services, municipal public health departments and food inspectors, citizens’ advocacy groups, legislators, farmers, veterinarians, engineers, and merchants.

Today’s intractable problems will require a similar combination of forces. Not just public, not just private. Not just professionals, not just volunteers. That’s the way real problems get solved.

And yes, sometimes government is inefficient or ineffective. Any human organization is flawed, and the bigger it is the harder it is to manage well, especially if we keep asking people to do more and more with less and less. But I challenge you to find any big corporation that is never inefficient or ineffective.

And sometimes government is corrupt, either in simple ways because individual people are corrupt, or in more subtle ways because a whole system has become accustomed to serving the interests of the few rather than the many.

To keep our society functioning well, we need a free press, watchdog groups, and active citizens with high expectations. But if people keep saying that working together is useless, then expectations fall, and reality will follow expectations.

If you want to know what a society without government is like, go to Somalia.

If you want to know what a society without a good infrastructure is like, try to start a business in India.

So yes, I am wary of the excesses of patriotism. But I am also wary of a lack of patriotism. I care intensely about the United States and its future. I want us to continue to build a common life, to solve problems collectively when we cannot solve them individually, and to care about other Americans just because they are Americans.

And yet … I have sometimes struggled with how to keep loving my country even when I am most aware of horrible things we have done.

160 years ago, Frederick Douglass refused to celebrate the Fourth of July. “This Fourth of July is yours,” he said, “not mine. … What to the American slave is your 4th of July? I answer; a day that reveals to him, more than all other days in the year, the gross injustice and cruelty to which he is the constant victim. To him your celebration is a sham; your boasted liberty, an unholy license; your national greatness, swelling vanity. … There is not a nation on the earth guilty of practices, more shocking and bloody, than are the people of these United States.”

Douglass honored the principles on which our country was founded, but slavery betrayed those principles. And Douglas argued that celebrating American freedom and justice rubbed salt in the wounds of every person who had been enslaved.

One way to cope with such history is to say that the past is past. But that is too easy. As William Faulkner said, “The past is never dead. It isn’t even past.”

The more I learned about history, the more true that seemed to me. The threads of the past do not leave us. The history of slavery, the violence and terror inflicted on black people in the century after the Civil War, the systematic exclusion of black families from education, jobs, housing – we are all, whatever our personal ancestry, still living with that legacy. If you think of the past as past, you cannot understand the world we live in.

Let me share with you some of the more recent words of Shirin Ebadi, an Iranian woman who was a judge until the Islamic Revolution expelled all women from such positions. Ebadi won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2003 for her work on behalf of dissidents imprisoned by the current Iranian regime. She began her memoir, titled Iran Awakening, by telling the story of Mohammad Mossadegh, the democratically elected prime minister of Iran who was deposed in 1953 in a coup organized by the American CIA. She writes:

For secular and religious Iranians, working class and wealthy alike, Mossadegh was far more than a popular statesman. … [H]e was a beloved nationalist hero, a figure worthy of … veneration, [and] a leader fit to guide their great civilization, with its more than twenty-five hundred years of recorded history. …

1951, the prime minister had nationalized Iran’s oil industry, [which was] until then effectively controlled by Western oil consortiums, which extracted and exported vast stores of Iranian oil under agreements that allotted Iran only a slim share of the profits. This bold move … earned Mossadegh the eternal adoration of Iranians, who viewed him as the father figure of Iranian independence, much as Mahatma Gandhi was revered in India for freeing his nation from the British Empire. …

[The United States and Britain] were incensed by Mossadegh’s nationalization of Iranian oil … In 1953 … Kermit Roosevelt … arrived in Tehran to … direct the coup d’état. With nearly a million dollars at his disposal, he paid crowds in poor south Tehran to march in protest and bribed newspaper editors to run spurious headlines of swelling anti-Mossadegh discontent.

In a neat four days, the … adored prime minister was hiding in a cellar and the venal young shah was restored to power, famously thanking Kermit Roosevelt: “I owe my throne to God, my people, my army, and to you.”

It was a profoundly humiliating moment for Iranians, who watched the United States intervene in their politics as if their country were some annexed backwater, its leader to be installed or deposed at the whim of an American president and his CIA advisors. …

Only a quarter century later, when the Islamic Revolution overthrew the shah and radicals took the American embassy hostage, did I see how the long arc of the coup had worked its way across our twentieth-century history.

I suspect that most Americans do not know Mossadegh’s name. Most of us were not yet born in 1953. But the modern history of Iran, and the tensions between the United States and Iran, cannot be understood if you do not know this story.

On the night and day when we started bombing Iraq, I wandered around feeling stunned. For me, the sense of trauma reminded me of how I had felt on 9/11. Once again the wheels of history were turning, and I did not like where they were headed.

I am not usually a praying person, but I discovered once again that when I have a profound sense of helplessness I pray in Hebrew – Baruch ata adonai, eloheinu melech ha’olam. Baruch ata adonai, eloheinu melech ha’olam.

As the weeks and months and years went by, my pain sometimes turned to fury. Fury not just at the destruction of lives in Iraq, but also at what I expected this war to do to my own country. The effects of imperial over-reach are not pretty.

And once again I found myself turning to ancient words, this time to the angry denunciations by the biblical prophets, which I knew best from my childhood love of “Godspell.”

Blind guides, blind fools!
The blood you’ve spilled on you will fall.
This nation, this generation will bear the guilt of it all.

A hundred years ago, people around the world thought of the United States, if they thought of us at all, as standing for the values of liberty, equality, justice, and human rights.

Now people around the world still see us as proclaiming the values of liberty, justice, and human rights. But they also see us as often ruthless in using our economic and military power to pursue our economic and political interests.

And they, like Frederick Douglass, can see our celebration of freedom and justice as deeply hypocritical. As rubbing salt in their wounds.

“The past is never dead. It isn’t even past.”

And yet, there is a paradox here. The more I study history, the more I appreciate how fundamentally different people’s world-views were in the past.

We all understand, to some degree, the concept of culture shock – that if you go into another culture you will encounter all sorts of patterns and assumptions, large and small, that are different from your own.

If we could go back in time, I think we would find that time-shock is equally powerful. People a hundred or two hundred years ago lived in a profoundly different world than we do, and one of the fundamental challenges of a student of history is to try to understand their world on their terms, not on our terms. It isn’t easy.

And so one of the things I’ve learned from studying history is that change is not only inevitable, but breath-taking. The world has not always been the way it is now, not just in the ways that are obvious, but in ways that challenge our imagination to comprehend.

The corollary of this realization is that change will continue. People sometimes say, “oh, it’s always been like this,” when what they mean is that it has been this way for thirty years or fifty years or as long as they can remember. But history is far longer than one person’s memory. The present is strikingly different from the past, and so I know in my gut that the future will be strikingly and surprisingly different from the present.

It is easy to see that we still fall short of our ideals. More than 20 percent of American children live below the poverty line. Let me say that again: one in five of our children does not have the bare minimum that our government believes is necessary for healthy growth.

Economic inequality is high and increasing, and affects our people in a multitude of ways. When you compare us to other industrialized countries, we have more signs of distress in just about every metric – more infant mortality, more alcoholism, more depression, more murders. These statistical measures of personal unhappiness are higher not just among poor people in our country, but also among people who are solidly middle class or even affluent. The stress of living in a highly unequal society seems to affect just about everyone.

How do we deal with the imbalance between the government services we want and expect to receive, the taxes we as a country seem to be willing to pay, and the financial limits of our economy?

How do we deal with the imbalance between our fears about the potentially disastrous effects of climate change and our desires to heat our homes, go from place to place, and otherwise live as we are accustomed to live?

How do we deal with the imbalance between our desire to create security and order by projecting our power overseas, and the reality that the world is never perfectly secure and orderly, and our growing realization that our very presence creates fear, anger, and resentment?

And how do we deal with the political culture of animosity and resentment and hyperpartisanship that seems to have gripped our country?

And how do we deal with the reality that so many people around the world see us as not living up to the values we espouse?

Too many people around the world see us as ruthless and selfish for us to ignore that image in the mirror.

Too many Americans feel insecure and stressed and frightened about the future.

Too many people suspect that the institutions and structures of our country are serving the interests of the powerful.

We have a lot of problems to solve. But previous generations had a lot of problems too. This does not make us unusual.

When I was in elementary school, we started each day by reciting the pledge of allegiance. I’m sure the words are familiar to you, perhaps so familiar that they feel old and rote. But try to listen to them, to hear them anew.

I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America,
And to the republic, for which it stands,
One nation, under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.

My step-father always refused to say this pledge. He argued that it is untrue that the United States provides liberty and justice for all, so it is a lie to claim that it does.

Many years later, I learned that this pledge was written in 1892, a time when industrialization had created huge disparities of wealth and working people survived with a level of hunger and filth, disease and deprivation, that we find almost unimaginable today. I say survived, but one in five American children died before the age of five, and many people considered themselves old if they reached 40 years of age.

The pledge was written by Francis Bellamy, who was a Baptist minister and a Christian Socialist. Bellamy contemplated, he later explained, including “the historic slogan of the French Revolution which meant so much to Jefferson and his friends, ‘Liberty, equality, fraternity’. No, that would be too fanciful, too many thousands of years off in realization. But we as a nation do stand square on the doctrine of liberty and justice for all.”

So from its very beginning the pledge has stood in the tension between reality and aspiration. Bellamy knew well that this country did not live up to its ideals, but he stated as fact what he hoped would someday be true, precisely in order to nudge the country towards its higher aspirations.

One way to tell the story of our country is as a long process of working out our ideals into reality. The founders spoke of democracy and equality, but they assumed that only white men who owned property could vote. As our understanding of democracy and equality deepened, we removed the property restriction, then the racial restriction, then the gender restriction, and then some of us worked hard to turn legal rights into real rights.

We still struggle over the meanings of democracy and equality, but we live in a country that lives up to its ideals far more than its founders imagined possible.

In the last ten years, nearly 6,000 Americans have died in the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. It is impossible to get good statistics about Iraqi and Afghani deaths, but some estimates suggest that maybe 20,000 Afghanis and 100,000 Iraqis have died because of these wars.

They say: Our deaths are not ours; they are yours; they will mean what you make them.

They say: Whether our lives and our deaths were for peace and a new hope or for nothing we cannot say; it is you who must say this.

They say: We leave you our deaths. Give them their meaning.

The best way I can imagine to give these deaths their meaning is to turn again to our values, to American values, and to do the best we can to live by those values.

For this country was founded on the basis of ideals and principles that keep calling not just to us, but to people all over the world.

Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Human rights. The rule of law. Separation of powers and an independent judiciary. Freedom of the press. Pluralism and mutual respect. Citizenship and collective self rule. Responsibility of the government towards the governed. Civilian control of military force. The common good. Shared prosperity. Self-development through education and work and personal responsibility. Freedom of thought and speech. Respecting the rights of minorities. Community and solidarity, especially in times of trouble. Dignity and equality. Liberty and justice for all.

This is what democracy really means.

These ideals are the living heritage of our country, and they have echoed through the generations and created the world we were born into. The best way to share them with others is to live them as best we can ourselves.

Please do not let the imperfections of our country lessen your love for it or your desire for it to be the best it can be.

Instead, on this Fourth of July weekend, I ask you to remember that this country is one of the greatest experiments ever attempted by human beings. Can self-government work? Can it work even in a large and diverse nation? Can it set free human energies without splintering into irreconcilable factions?

So far the answer seems to be yes. Imperfectly yes. But yes.

I therefore ask you to remember that every time you are a good citizen, even in the smallest and most obscure of ways, you are helping to support this country, build this nation.

For all of its flaws, this is a good country. Please love it.

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