I once had a rather extensive collection of C.S. Lewis paperbacks, but I loaned them to someone who didn’t return them. Somewhere in there was a brief essay on love of country. If I’m not mistaken, it was among radio addresses he made during the war. I do wish I could remember which book the essay was in; I’ve had occasion to refer to it in memory many times. It was—if I recall correctly—a reflection on the meaning of patriotism, made during a period when German forces committed atrocities out of devotion to The Fatherland, a period when any intelligent Englishman might be reflective on his own love for country. I hope I haven’t embellished in memory what he said in the brief essay/radio address, but I remember he asked himself what he thought of when he thought of “England”. He thought of Victoria Station, he said. And he found that place very dear to him.

I lived in Europe for five years when I was young, able to return to the States only once when my mother was ill, and I became quite homesick eventually. I won’t share here the things I remembered when I thought of “home”; it’s not relevant, but I know what Lewis meant. One doesn’t think of star-spangled banners, dead heroes, or glorious-sounding words about political philosophies—none of that. One thinks of things, in a single word, familiar, and that is what constitutes one’s “country”. In another post, Joseph worried about the passing of the English pub—that’s an example. Of course, it’s a cliché to answer the question of what our American heroes fought for in World War II: Mom and apple pie. Probably nobody ever willingly gave up life for the sake of “democracy”, and only a few for the sake of “freedom”. Nobody fights and dies for an abstraction, regardless of the degree of intellectual allegiance he might assign to it. What is loved is Victoria Station, or the pub—or Georgia red clay.

But what happens, I think, is that this love of the familiar and dear is extended to encompass things “English” or “American” that do not really belong to it. This emotional tendency is probably very useful to political rhetoric, though truthfully, we fall prey to our own emotional manipulation as well as others’ and make ourselves victims, all too willing, of political agendas.

Love for one’s country, like any love, is a blessing, a gift to be cherished. But what is the relationship, implied in Joseph’s post about the patriotic poetry of A.N. Wilson, between love of country and conversion—as it might apply to Mr. Wilson, perhaps, or (I’m speculating) even to Lewis? How does conversion affect one’s love of country, or vice-versa? There’s no such thing as a universal, typical, conversion. The experience differs, according to one’s past and present. But when the convert has a history of strong atheistic belief, the surrender to belief can be extremely emotional, throwing open doors of the heart that had been tightly closed before—doors to memories, just like one homesick, of the hard benches of a country Baptist church, or perhaps the mossy stones of an Anglican parish church. In the intense liberating joy of our new belief, we embrace all that we had rejected before. Only later, when the intensity subsides, may we even question the connections our emotions have made; and then, fear of the loss of our conversion makes us reluctant to doubt the authenticity of the emotional experience that accompanied the spiritual one.

It’s forgivable, however unfortunate, that we are thus unable to disentangle faith from earthly attachments. Yet we have to. If Christ is supreme, he must be supreme over the local-ness of our emotional, “patriotic” hearts, just as he must be supreme over all our loves, which, when we place any one of them above him, become disordered, fragmented; become, in a word actually, protestant. This breaking of wholeness can be recognized both by what accompanies it and by what is conspicuously absent from it: It’s accompanied by a self-defense, often defiant, even self-glory, in the name of “love”; what’s always absent is humility. And no poetic language, no rationalizing, or verbal sleight of hand can change the hard fact of what it really is. It’s very difficult to acknowledge that; for many, it’s impossible.

Long, intricate intellectual analyses of “culture” have been written and argued, sometimes evolving from the root of the word “cult”, sometimes examining political revolutions, or other historical developments—not just collections of poetry, though such poetry can be more powerful than the arguments and analyses. But St. Thomas More was wise as well as saintly. I think he knew the self-deception the human heart is capable of, just as he knew that he could not be the king’s good servant if he were not God’s first, that loyalty to the crown could not be made equal to his loyalty to Christ and his church, could not be made somehow “the same thing” for the sake of emotional convenience or tidiness. I suspect he even knew that when the monarchy attempted to supersede the Church, it committed suicide. As England’s king tried to behead the Church, so England, driven by the same hatred of the Church that the king himself implanted, later beheaded its king.

Have you ever noticed that all adulterous relationships eventually self-destruct? No matter how much you love someone (or someplace), you may not replace your spouse, neither by argument nor by any emotion that may appear as “love”. It’s a hard truth: Sin destroys love. But repentance resurrects it, and love re-ordered by repentance survives its own infidelity to become indestructible. When the church of England restores primacy to Peter and right order to its loves, it will be resurrected, as England, not the perpetually self-justifying, decaying land it has become.

Anyway, there is, as Tolkien says, always hope.