Critiquing the Country You Love
Real patriotism often calls for tough love
By Justin Hawkins
In fulfillment of our duties as homeschooled children, my three siblings and I would sometimes wear matching clothes. Though decades later I can see how our uniforms likely telegraphed to outsiders our religious conformity and our conservative in-group solidarity, we never consciously intended anything by them.
Except on the 4th of July. Independence Day meant that every member of the Hawkins family wore matching Old Navy American flag t-shirts. Since the early 90s, Old Navy has released a new American Flag design each summer, just in time to corner the fashion market at your local Independence Day parades and cookouts. My family’s ritual, fastidiously observed each year, was for the Stars and Stripes emblazoned across our chests to get sweaty from participating in neighborhood footraces, then covered in dribbled ketchup and mustard from the cookouts. If the stain remover did its magic, the shirt then joined previous years’ models in the dressers and closets for less liturgical displays of our patriotism.
From the moment my paternal grandfather escaped from a Nazi prison camp and made it safely back to his friends in the 82nd Airborne in the process of liberating France, it was inevitable that my family would be patriots. Our patriotism was strengthened week by week when in church we pledged allegiance to the Christian flag then to the American flag, untroubled by the possibility that there might be any conflict or even tension between those twin allegiances. Patriotism was in abundant supply during those heydays of the Pax Americana, and only increased when Americans rallied around Old Glory in the run-up to the Global War on Terror.
Today, I still say the pledge. But I don’t wear American flag t-shirts anymore. I’ve learned since my childhood that the United States Flag Code in fact prohibits wearing the flag as an article of clothing. But that’s not why I stopped wearing those t-shirts. The real reason is that I cannot overcome my suspicions that wearing the flag is to grasp at the symbols of America without necessarily committing to the substance of America. It advertises one’s patriotism without the need for any deeper or more robust commitment to the traditions and culture of one’s country. If a man wore a t-shirt screen printed with his wife’s face on it every day, we might wonder what has gone wrong in the relationship that has led him to such a strange public display.
My skepticism about loud exhibitions of quasi-patriotism could be interpreted as motivated by partisan concerns. A 2025 The Economist/YouGov poll found that 68% of self-identified conservatives own an American flag, while only 32% of liberals say they did. But doubts about demagogues’ ability to hijack patriotism go back as far as the American founding. When at the Constitutional Convention the Founders were deciding whether the House of Representatives ought to be directly elected by the people, Elbridge Gerry of Massachusetts opposed the idea: “The people do not want [that is, lack] virtue, but are the dupes of pretended patriots.” Gerry lost that debate, but there is reason to think he was right to be worried about “pretended patriots.”
Few today believe that covering America with the Red, White, and Blue after 9/11 ensured that the subsequent Global War on Terror was in America’s best interest. Patriotism there seemed to be an atavism, not a virtue. Patriotism’s critics believe that this is all patriotism ever is: the arbitrary preference of real estate over moral principle. According to this critique, it is a vice to be a patriot: all a patriot does is support her country “right or wrong,” irrespective of any deeper moral conviction. Some of patriotism’s defenders act and speak as if such critiques are correct. “If you don’t love this country,” the so-called patriot says to those who critique it, “you are always free to leave it.” The intuition behind such a claim is that critiques of a nation are betrayals of that nation. If you critique America, you hate America. And if you hate America, you should leave America.
But this is spurious reasoning, as we can see in the case of other close relationships. It is the coward who abandons their family or their friends at the first sign of disagreement with them. The excellent friend or family member instead demonstrates their commitment to the relationship by reasoning with her friend or her family member to try to persuade them to change their ways. This is what the critical patriot does when they insist that the nation they love be worthy of their love by pursuing the good instead of the bad.
A powerful rhetorical tool in American politics is to position oneself and one’s allies as patriots, and one’s opponents as haters of America. This is the strategy Speaker of the House Mike Johnson followed when he tried to brand the “No Kings” rally as the “Hate America” rally. The irony of such an argument is that patriotism’s friends end up agreeing with patriotism’s critics that it is nothing more than blind support of one’s nation and its government.
Can patriotism be saved from its friends, as well as defended from its critics? Here we can draw on the resources of Christian moral thought to recover what virtuous patriotism is: a form of the virtue of love. Thomas Aquinas thought that love has two parts: desiring the good of the beloved together with the proper level of union with the beloved. What it means to desire the good of those we love is not that we endorse everything they do, but that we wish them to have what is worth having—the goods that befit their humanity, and the virtues that allow them to enjoy those goods.
So when I love my friend truly when she errs, I desire that she change her ways and live with the grain of goodness instead. So it is with patriotism as a form of love. When I love my country, I desire it to be just and good and admirable. When she is not, I show my love for her with criticism, so she might change her ways. James Baldwin wrote in his Autobiographical Notes: “I love America more than any other country in the world, and, exactly for this reason, I insist on the right to criticize her perpetually.” It was the Christian, not the sentimental, account of love that Baldwin invoked here. Baldwin was simply repeating in a secularized idiom what the Book of Proverbs had already said: “Faithful are the wounds of a friend” (Proverbs 27:6). This account of love prevents critique from devolving into hatred and loyalty from devolving into sycophancy.
Or we might understand patriotism as one instance of the virtue of piety. Medieval Christian thinkers understood piety as a kind of justice, which is concerned with giving to each their due. Piety gives what is due to the creaturely sources of our existence and progress through life. Aquinas says that the origins of our existence and education are “our parents and our country, that have given us birth and nourishment. Consequently, man is debtor chiefly to his parents and his country, after God.” But the honor due to country and parents has its limits. Aquinas considers the possibility that some parents might “incite us to sin, and withdraw us from the service of God.” In those cases, piety can be justly withheld. Likewise, one’s country is owed loyalty and honor only insofar as it deserves it, and does not render us complicit in grave evils. What love owes an erring parent or nation is the same:willing their good requires correcting them insofar as we are able to do so. If patriotism is a form of piety, then it too is fully compatible with criticism..
But anybody who has had to correct a wayward parent or friend knows just how difficult it is neither to abet their wrong by silence nor sever the relationship by excoriation. In other words, the form of patriotism that I am advocating here—patriotism as an act of love—demands a lot from the virtuous patriot, far more than simply buying the $4.50 t-shirt at Old Navy. If James Baldwin and the Book of Proverbs are to be believed, then some of America’s greatest friends will be found not among her fawning admirers, but among her loyal critics. They may stand for the National Anthem at the baseball game even while they wonder why it has to be a B-2 stealth bomber that flies over the arena at the stirring climax of the Anthem—as if a nation’s greatness is synonymous with her ability to project death and destruction around the world, rather than to treat justly all whom she encounters.
Aquinas also believes that love is constituted by the appropriate level of union with the beloved. What is the proper degree of union with a wayward nation? When should a nation’s waywardness induce exit? The Yale political theorist Bryan Garsten noted that one argument in favor of liberal democracies like America is that they do not produce many refugees from among their citizens. People do not choose to exit from them. Yet there are signs that this trend is changing in the last few years as increasing numbers of Americans moving abroad. Their exit suggests that they believe they need less union and more distance from America.
But I’m not there yet. Perhaps it was all those Old Navy t-shirts that brainwashed me in my youth, or perhaps it is still a vicious credulity I possess. But the truth is that the pomp and pageantry of America—the parades and the flags, the public reading of the Declaration followed by Frederick Douglass’s What to the Slave is the Fourth of July?, the fireworks and fire trucks, the hot dogs and hamburgers—it all still works on me. I do cheer for the American delegation at the Olympics simply because they, though strangers to me, compete under the same flag that flies over my local post office.
But more than the pomp and pageantry, I believe in the American idea. I do in fact think that all people in the world are potential Americans if they want to join their fortunes to ours and enrich our culture with theirs. I believe in the creedal nation. I do think that Washington and Lincoln deserve their place in the pantheon of great men, and I still find myself in awe of the idea of a government of laws and not of men. I find the peaceful transition of power and the bipartisan attendance at the funerals of deceased presidents to be cultural riches of which most humans in history have good reason to be envious. I consider these institutions and rituals to be among the finest inventions of the human mind and am astounded to share citizenship with the architects of them.
When George Washington described what he hoped America would be, he quoted the Hebrew Bible: “Everyone shall sit under their own vine and fig tree, and no one shall make them afraid” (Micah 4:4). He quoted that phrase over forty times in his letters, more than any other scriptural phrase.
But today, with increasing costs of living, political turmoil, and the weakening of the nation’s social fabric, the tranquil scene Washington envisioned for his countrymen seems increasingly difficult to secure. Economic insecurity and fearfulness are the ideal conditions for pretended patriots to turn into demagogues.
Justin R. Hawkins is a postdoctoral researcher in bioethics at Columbia University Irving Medical Center. He received his PhD in ethics from Yale University in 2024.