A friend recently asked if the frequent saying of the Pledge of Allegiance was a sign of American jingoism, or an attempt to inculcate “nationalism” of a bad sort. It seemed to him as a Canadian that that might be the case. That seemed to me to be probably backwards, so I penned this response.

Here is my belated reflection to our Canadian friend (and I keep in mind you are our friend to the north looking at your neighbors to the south–this is not really YOU, but your reflection on us–however, you are one of the ENGLISH speaking people).

I think of Michael Polanyi’s reflection comparing the English speaking peoples to the Austrian-Germanic peoples, in his great book Personal Knowledge,  and all that they had been spared because of the relativizing intellectual environment that both the British empiricism, and also (I would add) the Puritan background, compared to the intellectual and nationalistic fanaticism bred in the Germanic peoples.  My point being here that Polanyi gives a very credible touch stone from outside of ourselves as to what “nationalism” really is.  Until you have seen something else, our attempts at self examination fall rather flat.  The English speaking peoples are amongst the least of nationalistic peoples.

CS Lewis’s Screwtape says, “One of the games we play with them is to always make them think that their excess is their deficiency, and their deficiency, their excess.”  So, he goes on to say, in the Elizabethan era, make them terrified of prudery, and in the Victorian, their sensual excessiveness.

I would dare say that our real errors are almost invisible to us and we are backward in what we fear.  We are in far less danger of fanatical excessive nationalism than of becoming wraith like, Kantian formalized ghosts, who are “citizens of the world” choosing to “affirm the universe”.  The greater danger than that of robot like repetition of “The Pledge of Allegiance” and zombie like sing songing of “The Star Spangled Banner” is a very strong feeling of shame and embarrassment at these exercises.  Which is the nearer to the doorstep?  Feeling of shame and embarrassment at flying the flag on any given national holiday, or a feeling of warlike jingoism and being hardly able to put my flag away when the time comes?  Well, if you are university educated, I guarantee your struggle will be with shame and embarrassment rather than jingoism.  The call of “jingoism” is simply what is needed to justify the terrible feeling of shame that is really there.  If there is pride anywhere, it is not at “being an American” but rather in how much I hate my country and I stand against it.  Every leftist intellectual professor on nearly every campus prides himself on his great and courageous stand against “American jingoism”, when in fact this is entirely the flow of the river everywhere, and at a very fast rush.

Our real danger is gnosticism, and not just in theology and church, but everywhere.  What is hard is to love your country and be grateful for all that it has given.  What is easy is gnostic hating of all particularity, and then mistaking the consequent feeling of resentment as “virtue”. 

Fascism did not grow out of a peasant feeling of rootedness and love of the land and family.  It grew out of Hegelian and Kantian wraith like ghostliness.  Beer drinking, gun wrack toting, Pledge of Allegiance saying good ol’ southern boys are in far less danger of political fanaticism than are disconnected, disembodied, university educated gnostics.  Beware.  The real dangers are in the places not looked for.

Richard Bledsoe is a Theopolis Fellow and works as a chaplain in Boulder, Colorado.