Catholic Citizens & the Temptation of Hypernationalism

St. Augustine saw history with far more sobriety and far less self-importance than the average politician. Let’s consider some of his wisdom. In The City of God he describes two cities moving through history, one formed by the love of God, and the other formed by disordered self-love. He insists that these two cities — the Civitas Dei (Heavenly City or City of God) and the Civitas Terrena (Earthly City or City of Man) — remain intermingled in this world until the final judgment. The point is severe and liberating at once: No earthly regime is the Kingdom of God, and no party platform is the Beatific Vision. Our commonwealth, as St. Paul says, “is in heaven” (Phil. 3:20).

Augustine’s two cities give us the grammar for sanity. The Civitas Dei is the communion of those who belong to Christ. The Civitas Terrena is every social order shaped by pride and lust for domination. The Christian thus lives in a land, serves a people, honors lawful authority, and loves his homeland, yet he never confuses the republic with the redeemed order. He may improve the Civitas Terrena through virtue, sacrifice, and civic service, yet he seeks final peace only in God. He votes discerningly, speaks truthfully, labors diligently, and then goes home remembering that Caesar still dies and Christ still reigns. This is why the Christian can be a serious citizen without becoming a political idolater.

This illuminates the difference between patriotism and hypernationalism, a difference our age badly needs to recognize, as too many people today drape every appetite in a flag and call it virtue. Patriotism in the Catholic tradition is a moral duty ordered by charity and justice. The Catechism of the Catholic Church says that “the love and service of one’s country follow from the duty of gratitude and belong to the order of charity,” and that citizens must contribute to the good of society in “a spirit of truth, justice, solidarity, and freedom” (no. 2239). St. Thomas Aquinas places love of country under the virtue of piety and says piety “pays duty and homage to our parents and country.” Thus, patriotism means rightly ordered love for the land and people through whom we have received language, laws, civic memory, and a public inheritance. Patriotism is grateful, disciplined, and under God.

Hypernationalism is something else. It takes the nation from its proper place and pushes it toward the altar. It absolutizes blood, soil, tribe, ethnicity, regime, or civil mythology. It asks of the soul what only God may ask. It sprinkles religious language over civic self-worship and then wonders why everything begins to smell spiritually diseased. The Church sees the danger plainly. Gaudium et Spes, the Second Vatican Council’s “Pastoral Constitution on the Church in the Modern World,” says citizens should cultivate “a generous and loyal spirit of patriotism” and at the same time avoid narrowness by directing attention to the good of the whole human family (no. 75). Ad Gentes Divinitus, the council’s “Decree on the Mission Activity of the Church,” goes further by calling Christians to be “true and effective patriots” while “avoiding racial prejudice and hypernationalism” (no. 15). The council fathers did us a favor by using direct language before politicians discovered the trick of sanctifying ego with campaign merchandise.

By baptism we belong first to Jesus Christ. The Catechism teaches that the baptized person is “configured to Christ” and bears the spiritual mark of belonging to Him forever (no. 1272). The same Catechism teaches that every Christian is called to “the fullness of Christian life and to the perfection of charity,” which is holiness (no. 2013). That means our first identity is sacramental before it is civic, ecclesial before it is electoral, and Christological before it is national. On Judgment Day, the Lord will ask about our holiness, charity, fidelity, repentance, mercy, and obedience. He will ask whether we loved Him in the poor, the weak, the unborn, the elderly, the stranger, and the sinner. He will not ask how loudly we sang the national anthem.

This is why Catholic public figures who subordinate the faith to party ideology do genuine damage. Former U.S. President Joe Biden serves as an obvious example. He presented himself as Catholic while publicly promoting positions on abortion, contraception, marriage, and gender that would “advance moral evils and threaten human life and dignity,” as Archbishop José Gómez, then-president of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, said. That is a civic tragedy and a catechetical disaster because it deceives people into viewing Catholicism as a decorative family heirloom to be displayed during speeches and shelved during governance. Archbishop Charles Chaput makes a valuable point in his article “Two Cities, Two Birthdays” (ThePublicDiscourse.com, April 16) when he says we must be Christians first for the sake of the country we love. Exactly right. The country needs Catholics whose loves are ordered, whose worship is clean, and whose consciences still function.

Let us remember, as we prepare to honor this nation’s 250th anniversary, that the American tradition at its best supports this ranking of loves. The Declaration of Independence appeals to “the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God” and says rights come from the Creator. George Washington warned in his Farewell Address that “religion and morality are indispensable supports” of political prosperity and added that any man who subverts them hardly deserves the name patriot. In other words, even the founders knew that civic health depends on moral truth above the state. A nation can preserve liberty only if it acknowledges a law higher than itself. Once the nation becomes its own highest court of appeal, power begins writing its own “theology” in the dark.

History offers brutal confirmation. In Nazi Germany, Christians embraced the racial features of a nationalist ideology and sought a Nazified Christianity tied to a Reich Church. In Imperial Japan, Shinto functioned as a nationalistic religion centered on imperial ceremony and state power. In the Orthodox world, the subordination of the Church to ethnic nationalism led the Council of Constantinople to condemn phyletism in 1872. Each case reveals the same disease. Once nation, race, or civilizational myth takes over the sanctuary, society begins marching toward deformity, with formerly religious hymns playing in the background. That road leads to madness, damaged churches and families, and eventually stuffed graveyards.

Chaput also draws fruitfully on Rémi Brague’s observation that Christianity transformed society through the witness of believers in civil society. That matters. Christianity reshapes a society from within. It converts hearts, disciplines desires, builds families, teaches sacrifice, and forms consciences, and then public life gradually changes because men have changed. This is far less glamorous than national mythmaking, which is probably why ambitious people dislike it. Yet it is the Christian way. Earthly power is infected by sin, and the Church improves public life precisely by refusing to worship it.

So yes, love your country. Serve it honestly. Thank God for its goods. Defend its best ideals. Work for laws that protect life, liberty, and the moral order. Yet do all that as a Catholic whose soul has already been claimed by Christ. A holy Catholic is a rightly ordered patriotic citizen. Reverse that order and the soul warps, the Church becomes a mascot, and politics becomes a counterfeit liturgy. It simply does not matter who sits in the Oval Office or who shouts in Parliament. Jesus Christ is on the throne. He is Lord. He will judge the nations. He will judge us. Let us, therefore, be Christians first for the sake of the country we love, because only citizens who kneel before the Lamb can truly serve the common good without turning the nation into a golden calf.

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