The Order of Love and a Defense of Biblical Patriotism

Our nation’s 250th anniversary brings familiar questions concerning the relationship between Christianity and patriotism to the fore. Should Christians celebrate the Fourth of July? Should the American flag stand on a church platform? Can a believer love his country zealously without committing idolatry? And how does loyalty to Christ relate to loyalty to America?

Underneath all these questions lies a deeper one: what place love of country occupies in the ordo amoris, the order of love—and what the Christian should do about it.

The Ordo Amoris

The concept of an order in love is both biblical and philosophical in origin. The Old Testament affirms the most basic principle of the order: love of God preceding and producing love of neighbor (Deut. 6:4–5; Lev. 19:18). Ancient pre-Christian thinkers, including Plato and Aristotle, viewed education fundamentally as training the affections to incline towards the good, true, and beautiful, and disincline from the contemptible.^[1] And the New Testament further orders social duties—household, then the church, then the unbelieving world (1 Tim. 3:4–5; Gal. 6:10).

Yet it was most famously Augustine who gave the doctrine of ordo amoris its shape. Augustine defined virtue itself as rightly ordered love and taught that a man must love what is truly lovely and love each good thing in proportion to its worth. God ranks above all because he alone is altogether lovely in himself (a se), the highest good (summum bonum); every other good is loved as a gift, to the degree that it points back to the Giver. C.S. Lewis distilled Augustine’s definition as “the ordinate condition of the affections in which every object is accorded that kind of degree of love which is appropriate to it.”^[2]

To this Augustine added a second point, grounded in the simple fact that we are finite: “All men are to be loved equally. But since you cannot do good to all, you are to pay special regard to those who, by the accidents of time, or place, or circumstance, are brought into closer connection with you.”^[3] This is no excuse for withholding charity, but it is a map of how a creature who cannot do everything actually loves.

3. Augustine, On Christian Doctrine, I.28.29; quoted in Kocman, Ordered to Love, 30.

From the patristic era through the Reformation and beyond, Christians have held that grace does not destroy nature but restores it.^[4] That principle governs the question of patriotism. Christ and his kingdom hold our ultimate loyalty, and not in theory only; the believer who, for instance, loses family or friends because of his faith, or who counts the cost of cross-cultural mission, or who opens his home to a child through adoption, takes on a love that in some sense cuts against nature. And yet marriage, parenthood, friendship, and citizenship are natural realities that the new covenant does not abolish.

4. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae I, q. 1, a. 8, ad 2.

The nation is one such natural reality. At its root, a nation is a family of families.^[5] The English word nation descends from the Latin nat-, “born,” the same root behind natal and native; patriot, from the Greek patrios, “of one’s fathers,” carries the same weight.^[6] Nations and their destinies are not absolutely determined by biological descent, but neither can they be divorced from ancestry altogether. A nation may be defined as a constellation of land, lineage, language, law, liturgy, and culture, the particulars that together make a people conscious of itself as a distinct people.^[7]

Here it may be helpful to argue by analogy. If grace does not abolish marriage but points it to Christ and the church (Eph. 5:22–33) and does not abolish parenthood but recasts children as arrows given by God (Ps. 127:3–5), we should expect grace to do something similar with the nation: not to erase it, but to purify it and turn it toward its proper end.

The Witness of Scripture

If the nation is a natural good that grace perfects, we should expect to find biblical exemplars loving their own people or country well. And that is precisely what we see in Scripture.

Nehemiah heard of Jerusalem’s broken walls and sat down and wept, fasting and praying for days over his own nation (Neh. 1:4–11). Esther risked her life to plead for her kin before the king (Esth. 4:13–16; 7:3–4). Paul grieved over his fellow Hebrews to the point of wishing himself accursed for their sake (Rom. 9:1–3; 10:1), even as he carried the gospel to the ends of the empire and appealed to his Roman citizenship to protect his ministry (Acts 22:25–29). The Lord Jesus himself wept over Jerusalem (Luke 19:41–44). His ministry shows the full order on display at once: love for his family (Luke 2:51), for his people (Matt. 23:37; John 17:6–19), and for the sheep of another fold not yet his own (John 10:16; 17:20–23). And across the span of Scripture, each believer is called to honor his forebears (Exod. 20:12), to bless his nation by righteous living (Prov. 14:34), and to seek his people’s delight in God (Ps. 67:1–5).

The Bible can also be sharply critical of the state. When tax collectors and soldiers came to John the Baptist asking what they should do, he did not tell them to abandon their posts; he told the tax collectors to collect no more than they were owed and the soldiers to refrain from extortion and be content with their wages (Luke 3:12–14). The civic vocation is not condemned but reformed. The kingdom of God does not require retreat from national life; it requires obedience within it as well as a degree of affection for it.

Andrew Fuller and Christian Patriotism

Few held these loves together more clearly than Andrew Fuller. In 1803, Britain stood on high alert. The Peace of Amiens had collapsed, war with France had resumed, and across the Channel at Boulogne, Napoleon was massing an “Army of England” and a flotilla of flat-bottomed barges for an invasion. Volunteer regiments drilled in towns across the country.^[8] In Kettering, the Baptist pastor Andrew Fuller, the same man who, with William Carey, had fought hyper-Calvinist apathy to launch the modern missions movement, climbed into his pulpit and preached a sermon called “Christian Patriotism.”^[9]

Arguing from Jeremiah 29:7, Fuller reasoned that if exiled Jews were told to seek the good of Babylon, a foreign land that had carried them off, then Christians who are natives of their own country owe it that much more. Consider: a minister known across England for sending missionaries to the ends of the earth stood up and told his people it was right to love and defend their homeland, while stipulating:

The patriotism required of us is not that love of our country which clashes with universal benevolence, or which seeks its prosperity at the expense of the general happiness of mankind. Such was the patriotism of Greece and Rome; and such is that of all others where Christian principle is not allowed to direct it.^[10]

10. Fuller, “Christian Patriotism.”

Without grace to direct it, love of country may curdle into self-seeking at other peoples’ expense. Fuller named Britain’s complicity in the slave trade as one such case in point. Real patriotism, for Fuller, includes the courage to call your country to repent.

We might synthesize our findings so far as follows: all lawful loves are rightly ordered by grace; love of one’s nation is a lawful love; so, love of one’s nation is rightly ordered by grace.^[11] Yet this raises the obvious question. If this is so plainly biblical, and if the very father of modern missions embodied it, why do so many Christians now flinch at the word patriotism?

11. Kocman, Ordered to Love, 82.

Why Patriotism Became Controversial

For most of church history, the notion of biblically ordered patriotism was not controversial at all. The magisterial Reformers received the order of love without dispute—as did their Reformed and Puritan heirs. The argument that broke into public view most sharply in early 2025, when Vice President J.D. Vance reached for this old Latin phrase in a heated interview,^[12] can be traced to a longer trajectory spanning the past century.

12. On the episode and its framing, see Kocman, Ordered to Love, 2–3.

R.R. Reno has argued convincingly that, recoiling from the horrors of the twentieth century, the West traded what he calls the strong gods—religion, tradition, ancestry, and the natural objects of human loyalty—for the open society and a liberal, rules-based international order.^[13] This deconstruction proceeded, ironically, under the banner of love. The diversity, equity, and inclusion regime—or “wokeness” in general—draws its moral authority from this postwar mythos. C.S. Lewis foresaw this theological and ethical downgrade and diagnosed it in The Screwtape Letters, in which the senior devil instructs his apprentice on how to corrupt a man’s charity by relocating it:

13. R.R. Reno, Return of the Strong Gods: Nationalism, Populism, and the Future of the West (Washington, DC: Regnery Gateway, 2019). See also Kocman, Ordered to Love, 9–10.

The great thing is to direct the malice to his immediate neighbours whom he meets every day and to thrust his benevolence out to the remote circumference, to people he does not know. The malice thus becomes wholly real and the benevolence largely imaginary.^[14]

14. C.S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters (London: Geoffrey Bles, 1942), 37; cited in Kocman, Ordered to Love, 51–52.

Lewis’s point cuts to the heart of the modern suspicion of patriotism. We have been taught to view affection for what is near at hand, family, neighborhood, church, and nation, as morally suspect, while treating concern for distant abstractions as morally superior. Modern life often encourages us to speak passionately about distant crises while remaining strangers to the people who live on our own street. Yet Scripture consistently moves in the opposite direction. It does not deny universal obligations; it teaches that universal obligations are ordinarily fulfilled through particular relationships. The Christian is called to love all men, but he learns that kind of love first among those whom providence has placed nearest to him. Patriotism, rightly understood, is simply one expression of that broader principle of moral proximity.

Countering Objections

Objection 1: Nations originate in sin, not creation

Some argue that marriage and family clearly predate the fall and that local communities arise naturally from human finitude, but that nations proper emerge only in the rebellion at Babel. Since their origin is bound up with judgment, the reasoning goes, there is no reason to treat them as good or redeemable.

The objection fails twice. First, it commits a genetic fallacy, assuming that a thing’s origin determines its worth. Yet the bare fact that sin attended the origin of the nations does not cancel their place in God’s purposes. Second, the objection misreads Genesis. Genesis 10 presents the nations, each marked by lineage, language, and land, as the natural fruit of human generation before Babel is ever narrated in Genesis 11. At Babel, God scatters humanity not for the sin of dividing but for the sin of refusing to divide, of uniting in pride against his command to fill the earth (Gen. 9:1; 11:4). A single undifferentiated humanity is not the Edenic ideal but the product of disobedience. Looking back, Paul can describe the origin of the nations as a creative act of God, who “made from one man every nation of mankind to live on all the face of the earth, having determined allotted periods and the boundaries of their dwelling place” (Acts 17:26). Even apart from the fall, human finitude and geographic spread would have produced distinct tongues, customs, and cultures within a few generations. Nations are not products of the curse but the natural result of the multiplication of human families.^[15]

15. Kocman, Ordered to Love, 94–95.

We might go further and say that nations arise from the expansion of loves that Scripture itself commends. The fifth commandment requires honor toward father and mother. Family affection naturally extends outward into clans, tribes, and peoples. As generations multiply across time and geography, these bonds produce the shared histories, customs, loyalties, and institutions that characterize nations. If Scripture teaches that it is good to love one’s parents, children, and kindred in their proper measure, there is no reason to conclude that affection for the larger community formed by those relationships is inherently suspect. Love of nation is not a rival to these more basic loves but their social and historical extension.

Objection 2: Scripture calls believers to a radical universality of love

Others reason the reverse: that Jesus’s teaching and the Great Commission (Matt. 28:18–20) relativize natural and national ties, so that to stress love of one’s own nation is to downplay the borderless reach of Christ’s kingdom and the missionary mandate.

Yet every man and woman eventually meets the limits of his own creatureliness. No one, however gifted or well-resourced, can carry the weight of the whole world; he must begin with what is within reach. If he is called by God to cross land and sea to love tangibly those far off, then he is limited in his love for those at home; in either case, he must reckon with his finitude. A love spread evenly across all humanity, owed to everyone and concretely given to no one, is a counsel of impossibility. Christianity is unusual precisely because it rises above every culture while taking genuine root within each one. Emotional worries about emphasizing one biblical truth over another must yield to sober exegesis and prudence.^[16]

16. For the full treatment of these and other objections, including whether Old Testament texts about Israel apply to national life today, see Kocman, Ordered to Love, 93–107.

Applications

Corporate Worship

Should Christians pray for their nation in worship? Yes. Should they pray to it? Never. That distinction governs everything that follows.

We may pray for our magistrates in love, and in praying for them, name their sins and call them to repent; we are free to call sanctified “balls and strikes.” Romans 13 and 1 Timothy 2:1–2 lay on us a duty of prayerful submission to those in authority, and Jeremiah charges us to seek the good of the city (Jer. 29:7). The pulpit, too, is a place for prophetic courage: a pastor should take clear public stands on the moral questions Scripture plainly addresses, abortion and marriage among them, and on certain applied questions that follow from Scripture by good and necessary consequence, such as taxation, immigration, or economic regulation. Pray for your leaders by name and sing to God in gratitude for the blessings he gives through the nation. None of this displaces ordinary worship; all of it happens within worship’s bounds, where faithfulness, not the cultural calendar, sets our priorities.

Conversely, the flag should occupy no place of worship in the assembly, where the glory of God alone is to be on display. The pulpit is no place for campaign speeches or partisan stumping and is no place to flatter those in power. Similarly, the obligations of the Lord’s Day take precedence over any civic observances. Thus, when a service gives off the aroma of national pride more than the aroma of new covenant worship, drift has set in. Patriotic songs may stir the affections, but they are not psalms, hymns, or spiritual songs, and the only one to whom we pledge allegiance in the hour of worship is the living and triune God. Sing in gratitude for the nation’s blessings if you will, but take care not to rob God of the glory due his name.

Church Décor

Christians hold many honest convictions about how a church should look: stained glass or plain windows, a prominent cross or none, the ornate sanctuary or the bare Puritan meetinghouse. The principle that should undergird the whole range is worship in spirit and truth (John 4:24), not culture or trends.

Even so, churches may and often should reflect the cultural setting in which God has placed them. A congregation in rural Pennsylvania will not look exactly like one in downtown New York, rural China, or northern Togo, nor should it. Christianity is not culturally rootless. The gospel takes flesh within particular peoples and places, sanctifying what is good, true, and beautiful in each without becoming captive to any of them. Local churches are therefore free to draw upon the architecture, artistic traditions, language, and historical memory of their communities insofar as those things serve the worship of God. In that sense, a congregation may appropriately give thanks for the blessings God has bestowed upon its nation and acknowledge its historical inheritance, particularly during a milestone such as America’s semiquincentennial. Such acknowledgments become problematic only when they compete with, rather than support, the church’s primary purpose: the worship of the triune God.

Body Life

A local church, considered strictly as the church—its budget, its offices, its gathered worship—is not called to be a political actor per se. Nevertheless, those in the pews should act in the civic sphere. First Timothy 2:1–2 commands prayer for kings and all in authority so that we may lead peaceful and quiet lives, godly and dignified in every way. Yet quietness does not mean quietism or absence from public life. Christians lead quiet lives by taking up their stations and ordering them well, not by surrendering them to the forces of unbelief.

Christians ought to participate in civic life in an informed, conscientious, and unembarrassed manner, shaped by a biblical worldview—and not only on the headline questions of abortion and euthanasia. Healthy patriotism attends to local matters too: how a new warehouse or data center will affect the poorer families in town, how water rights are handled in light of the Christian’s stewardship for creation, who sits on the local school board. The order of love provides a useful corrective here as well. Modern media conditions us to invest enormous emotional energy in national controversies while neglecting the institutions closest to us. Yet for most Christians, the school board, zoning board, township supervisors, library trustees, and city council will shape their neighbors’ daily lives more directly than most federal officials ever will. The order of love reminds us that responsibility ordinarily increases with proximity. A Christian who desires his neighbor’s good will not despise civic influence or retreat from public life. Rather, he will seek to exercise whatever influence God has entrusted to him, beginning where he can do the most tangible good. Loving one’s country often starts not in Washington D.C. but in one’s own town.

Conclusion

Baptists in particular have some rethinking to do about the political theology they inherited. The instinct to stand apart from civic life, treating concern for nation or culture as a distraction from the gospel, once made a kind of sense: a broad Christian order held society together, so Baptists could dissent from the establishment and tend their own communities while others kept up the surrounding scaffolding. That scaffolding is collapsing now, and the old posture no longer serves. The choice is between a supposed neutrality that simply lets some other ideology fill the vacuum and the recovery of a sturdier Christian political theology.

We must thus avoid pietistic idealism. Piety itself is essential; the old virtue of pietas meant loyal devotion to God and to one’s fathers, country, and customs together.^[17] Pietism takes that living thing and turns it inward, cutting godliness off from its fruit, until even evangelism shrinks into a formula for escaping this age rather than the announcement of Christ’s lordship over all of it. Scripture commends instead a proper “worldliness”: the glad reception of God’s gifts, real action for a neighbor’s good in body and soul, and gratitude for the goodness God displays in the material world.^[18]

The questions we began with, the flag, the fireworks, and the Fourth of July, are small. What lies beneath them is not. A Christian who has not learned to love his country rightly, beginning with the countrymen he meets day by day, has not yet learned to love his neighbor the way Christ commands. So, love your country. Love it not as an idol but in its proper place and proportion. Love it the way that Andrew Fuller did: a champion of missions and a friend to William Carey, who still gave thanks for Kettering, prayed for it, and sought its good.

Editor’s Note: This essay draws in part on the author’s book, Ordered to Love (Cape Coral, FL: Founders Press, 2026), where these arguments are developed at length.