Patriotism and the Gospel of Jesus Christ

Jesus didn't teach us to love our country. He taught us to love each other.

You may have heard that September has been dubbed “American Founders and Constitution Month” in Utah. This, in itself, is not particularly notable. For context, Utah also declared April to be “Clean Out the Medicine Cabinet Month.” These are just things that government people do.

But the part that makes it interesting is that the Utah Area Presidency asked stakes to observe this “holiday” month by having Constitution-themed talks, lessons, and activities. Commentary on this ask has been covered well elsewhere. But against all odds, I was asked to give the lesson in the second hour meeting. This is a little bit of what I said.

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I’ve lived in a lot of wards in my life.

Anne and I have lived in four different states since we got married 15+ years ago. To my best count, I’ve been in ~20 different wards in my life—not counting the various wards I served in on my mission (while serving on a college campus, I once covered 6 student wards at a time).

We knew when we moved here to Utah that we probably wouldn’t fit in, ideologically and politically. And we were right.

It was probably our fault, more than anyone else’s. In the five years since then we’ve made a few good friends in the ward. But we differed from most of the ward members in ways that quickly became visible, such as in what political candidates we were supporting or how we responded to the COVID-19 pandemic. We were, for sure, outside of the established social groups in the ward; ideological pariahs in a Church that teaches a gospel of inclusion.

Not feeling welcome in your ward is, of course, of little consequence. Again, it’s something we probably brought upon ourselves. But many people, with much more consequence, have not felt welcome in the United States in the course of its history. Black men and women were enslaved for almost another hundred years after the Declaration of Independence declared all men equal. Muslims and people appearing to be of Middle-Eastern descent were killed and mosques destroyed after 9/11. Immigrants and refugees of all kinds face discrimination and other challenges today from people who don’t see them as “real Americans.”

And same, incidentally, for the early Latter-day Saints. The United States had enough religious freedom for the Church to be founded, but it didn’t have enough for the Church to thrive. In some cases the government failed to protect them, such as when Joseph Smith unsuccessfully petitioned then-president Martin van Buren for redress; in the worst of cases, the governor of Missouri called for the Saints’ extermination. The Saints were forced out of Kirtland, then Independence, then Far West, and then Nauvoo, before finally heading further west.

Why is why it’s so ironic to celebrate patriotism and the Constitution here in Utah—the place where the Saints went to flee from the United States.

Earlier this year, President Nelson talked about labels:

In 2006, when I married Wendy, I was in for several surprises—most of them quite wonderful. One of those surprises was the number of clothing items she owned that displayed a logo—universities from which she graduated, places she had traveled, and so forth. Whenever she wore one of those items, I teased her by saying, “Who are you advertising today?” She invited me to join in the fun!

Labels can be fun and indicate your support for any number of positive things. Many labels will change for you with the passage of time. And not all labels are of equal value. But if any label replaces your most important identifiers, the results can be spiritually suffocating.

He spelled out that his top three labels for himself, in order of importance, are 1) child of God, 2) child of the covenant, and 3) disciple of Jesus Christ. He then listed others related to his family (husband, father), his prior profession (doctor, surgeon), and his military service in the Korean War (lieutenant, captain). The 14th label he lists, out of 14, is “American.”

His point is that if you allow other labels to displace or replace the most important ones—like “child of God”—then you’re doing it wrong. My point, then, is that when people allow the label of “American,” specifically, to take the place of any of their top three, that’s where racism and xenophobia come from. If it’s more important to someone to see people as political enemies than as fellow children of our Heavenly Parents, then they need to sort some things out.

The real problem here is having an “us vs. them” mentality. This is a natural state of being for us as mortals, despite Jesus’s vigorous teaching to convince us out of it. We’re far too happy to always sort ourselves into good guys and bad guys—with ourselves, of course, always being on the good side. President Nelson is very specific about what happens when we are in an “us vs. them” mindset:

Labels can lead to judging and animosity. Any abuse or prejudice toward another because of nationality, race, sexual orientation, gender, educational degrees, culture, or other significant identifiers is offensive to our Maker! Such mistreatment causes us to live beneath our stature as His covenant sons and daughters!

I love the story of Jonah for this topic, and specifically how Rob Bell talks about it in his fantastic book “What is the Bible?”. We tend to think of Jonah as being a story about obedience—Jonah disobeys God and is eaten by a giant fish. We’ve decided, for some reason, that the whole fish thing is a proportional punishment for not obeying a mission call. But there’s more here.

First, one bit of context. The story starts when Jonah is called by God to go teach the people of Ninevah. Ninevah was in Assyria, and that’s important—there was major bad blood between Israel and Assyria. The Assyrians are the ones that eventually conquer and deport the northern ten tribes. So, Jonah had a major “us vs. them” thing going on with Assyria. All the Israelites had that mindset, really—they knew that the Israelites were the good guys and the Assyrians were the bad guys.

Because of that, Jonah decides to hop on a boat to elsewhere. To oversimplify the rest of the story, a big storm hits, and he is thrown overboard and eaten by the fish. He repents, and the fish spits him back out onto land.

Post-fish, Jonah actually goes to Ninevah, and the people accept the gospel en masse. We usually end the story, happily, somewhere around here:

5 So the people of Nineveh believed God, and proclaimed a fast, and put on sackcloth, from the greatest of them even to the least of them.

But here’s the rub: Jonah was not happy about it.

1 But it displeased Jonah exceedingly, and he was very angry.

Can you imagine being angry because you were successful as a missionary? And being upset because people accepted the gospel? It feels backward, but neither of those reasons are why Jonah was angry. Instead, Jonah was angry because he was wrong. The Assyrians were the bad guys, but all of a sudden they did good guy things. And if the Assyrians were suddenly the good guys, that made Jonah the bad guy—because he didn’t want to go teach them in the first place.

If you’re familiar with Les Miserables, this is the same whiplash-inducing journey that Javert goes through when he realizes that Jean Valjean was merciful to him, and that maybe he himself was the bad guy all along. It’s a major blow. Javert ends his own life because it’s too much for him to bear.

This twist makes the story of Jonah about much more than obedience. Rob Bell says:

The story is extremely subversive because it insists that your enemy may be more open to grace and love than you are.

It’s easy to be racist, sexist, ageist, homophobic, transphobic, and prejudiced in a variety of other ways if you see people in any of these groups as “them”—the bad guys in any made-up dichotomy. And then, in turn, it’s very easy to not see the divinity that exists within them. To paraphrase Richard Rohr, a mature Christian is one who sees Christ in everyone else.

We need to be ready for the idea that these people we hate so much, whoever they are, are children of our Heavenly Parents the same way we are. More from Rob Bell, and this really brings it home:

This story… blasts to pieces our biases and labels with the declaration that God is on everyone's side, extending grace and compassion to everyone—especially those we have most strongly decided are not on God's side.

We’re familiar with the hymn “Who’s on the Lord’s Side?”, but we rarely think about whose side the Lord is on. The answer is that He’s on everyone’s side, even those abominable people who disagree with us ideologically and politically. All the people that we find disgusting and horrid—He’s on their side, too. And hopefully that changes the way we see people from other countries, cultures, political parties, sexual and gender orientations, etc. etc. Don’t forget that the Lord is on their side.

Ultimately, I don’t think God cares much about our American politics. I don’t think He cares what country you live in, the color of your skin, what language you speak, or who you vote for. I don’t even think He cares too much—at least less than we tend to think—if you’re a full tithe payer or not, if you drink coffee or don’t, or if you’re gay or straight. But I do know that He cares about us loving our neighbor.

We can know this because when someone asked Jesus what commandment was most important, He actually had an answer. Love God, and love your neighbor. Everything else comes after those two.

If you want to be a flag-waving, patriotic American, I think you should. As President Nelson says, those other labels aren’t intrinsically bad. In addition to being a lifelong American, my labels include being an employee at a good company, a Seahawks fan, and an amateur baker. But I’m learning that those labels mean little compared to seeing myself as a child of God, and seeing those around me in the same way.