THIS LAND IS OUR LAND

by Rev. Kenneth W. Phifer, June 2003


Patriotism is one of the most powerful forces in modern life. It is the 
companion to nationalism. It is the spiritual component of a sense of 
belonging to a particular country. As religion has lost some of its 
authoritative appeal in the past several hundred years, patriotism has grown 
in influence. Robert Bellah called it a civil religion, pointing in America to 
the power of national symbols to provide spiritual glue for our country.

Like religion, patriotism offers us a vision of something higher, nobler, 
larger than ourselves to which we can become attached by our faithfulness to 
the nation’s aims and practices.

Like religion, patriotism inspires in us a sense of duty and sacrifice, 
including sometimes the sacrifice of one’s own life. 

Like religion, patriotism provides diversion from the struggles of daily life 
by involving us vicariously or directly in the grander national battles for 
goodness and truth.

Like religion, patriotism can stimulate artistic expression in music, writing, 
and art. These creations in turn can deepen our patriotic sense as we use and 
enjoy them. 

Like religion, patriotism is about all of life. It is about customs, habits, 
attitudes, laws, systems, mores, morals, symbols, songs, games, traditions, 
places, and events that characterize what it means to be a citizen or an 
inhabitant of a particular country. It is about the collective memory, the 
collective present circumstances, and the collective hopes of a nation.

Patriotism is all-embracing. It is an identification and a loyalty to that 
identification. It is a moral lens through which to view the world and a 
feeling of duty to that moral understanding. No matter the country, 
patriotism consists of four essential components.

The first of these is land.

There is no nation that does not identify with or lay claim to some special 
place on earth. Patriotism is about that land.

Even when people are denied the right to live on the land that is dear to their 
hearts, the land remains as precious as ever to them. 

Jews for 2,000 years yearned to return to the ancient land, speaking the 
words, “Next Year In Jerusalem,” in one of their most sacred rituals. 

No less true has this been for Palestinians and their commitment to returning 
to their land. 

Native American tribes have felt the same way about land stolen from them 
by white settlers on this continent.

For Americans, the land to which we feel attached embraces the vast plains 
of the mid-west, the sleepy bayous of the south, the mountains and desserts 
of the far west, the rolling hills and hard soil of New England, the enormous 
cold stretches of Alaska and the tropical lushness of the Hawaiian Islands. 

The land that claims our souls takes in the mighty Mississippi and the wide 
Missouri, the White Mountains and Pike’s Peak, Death Valley and the corn-
fields of Iowa, the Gulf Coast and the Upper Peninsula.

Our land includes cities like New York and Los Angeles and Chicago. It 
includes towns like Ann Arbor and Midland (Texas) and Littleton 
(Colorado). 

Our land has interstate highways and scenic back roads, campsites and 
hiking trails, streams where we have fished and lakes we have swum in and 
breathtaking scenes in the woods and on mountaintops that are printed 
indelibly on our minds and in our hearts.

A knowledge of and a feeling for a certain land is a fundamental part of 
patriotism.

Alexandre Solzhenitsyn illustrates the importance of land for our well-being. 
When he was exiled from the Soviet Union and settled in Vermont, which 
was as close to the climate he had known and loved all his life that he could 
find, he described the experience as the worst punishment that could have 
been imposed on him. His association with what he called mat rodnaya (the 
mother land) is so profound that he was dislocated and found his ability to 
write seriously jeopardized by having to leave Mother Russia.

We need a land that we feel is ours. We need a land with memories and 
dreams. We need a place on earth that we can call our own, even when 
others rule it or we are in exile from it.

Patriotism is about land, some particular piece of land.

Patriotism is also about people, my people, the men and women and children 
who are part of the nation to which I and they belong and to which we give 
allegiance.

We need others who are like us, who as Americans will know who Babe 
Ruth was and what it means to be “as corny as Kansas” and “as high as a 
kite on the Fourth of July.” 

Even when we do not like or value what is said or done, we can recognize 
that certain people are ours. Like Rick Schmidt, founder of the International 
Hummer Owners Group, who told The New York Times that “those who 
deface a Hummer in words or deed deface the American flag and what it 
stands for.”

Like that sentiment or not, it is recognizably American!

In ancient times, the sense of connection that patriotism provides us was first 
familial, then tribal, and in time became part of a wider relationship to a 
city-state or a republic or an autocracy. In today’s world, patriotism draws 
these lines of connection and dissociation along the boundaries of nation-
states.

The people with whom we share this sense of comradeship are not 
necessarily of the same racial or ethnic stock. The nations of the modern 
world almost all have mixed populations. Efforts  to change that—by men 
like Hitler, Idi Amin, the leaders of the South African apartheid movement, 
and the vicious ethnic cleansing of Bosnia a decade ago—have resulted in 
terrible disasters and immense suffering.  Some nations are more 
homogenous than others—the Japanese more than the Indians, the Saudis 
more than the Americans—but heterogeneity is the rule. Few nations do not 
allow outsiders to join them.

History more than genetics teaches us what it means to be part of a particular 
people.

Our history, for example, instructs us that we are partly a slave people 
brought here against our wills who through enormous courage and ingenuity 
have influenced our culture far beyond our numbers in terms of language, 
music, literature, and human rights. 

We are in greater percentage an immigrant people, coming from many 
places on the globe into what was once called a melting pot but what is far 
more like a stew or a mosaic.

These origins have fostered in us a sense of industry, independence, 
individualism, liberty, and opportunism.

Our boundless good fortune in this land has led us to think that we are a 
Chosen People, while curiously rousing in us as well a secular mentality and 
a deep skepticism about any and all claims to authority. Popular American 
slogans like “everybody has a price” and “love it or leave it” reflect the kind 
of people we have been and are: centered on money, of which we have had 
plenty, and highly mobile, because there has always been room to move on 
to another place.

We are a pragmatic, inventive, restless, and oddly anti-intellectual people 
who nonetheless believe that education is magic: get a degree and the world 
is your oyster. Among the spam e-mails that I receive regularly are several 
that urge me to get a diploma without doing any work or to get a degree 
without wasting time in class. That is a very American come-on.

People are an important element of patriotism: this people, my people, 
scoundrels and scalawags, saints and stars, the shrewd and the simple, the 
people of whom I am a part.

Patriotism is about institutions

Institutions are systems and structures that endure in space and time and so 
help to make the world familiar, comfortable, and secure for us.

Institutions are the ways we govern ourselves and the names we give to 
these ways. 

In America, we have such institutions as Congress, checks and balances, and 
representative democracy.

In Great Britain, there are parliamentary rule, prime ministers, and shadow 
cabinets.

In other lands there are city councils and village chiefs and provincial 
legislatures and thousands of other units of governance and the means by 
which they interact with one another.

Institutions can also be buildings that we venerate and use. There are 
defining national symbols like the Acropolis in Athens, the Tower of 
London, and the Great Wall of China. In America, there is the White House, 
the Mall of America, and Disneyland. 

These buildings and others in other lands speak of our history, of what we 
value, of what we want to preserve or how we want to spend our time. They 
help to define the contours of our patriotism.

Anniversaries are also institutions.

July 4 is pure Americana. Bastille Day is French to the core. Only the 
English celebrate Guy Fawkes Day. Only the Israelis observe the fifth of 
Iyyar. 

Each of these and thousands of other anniversaries speak of the kind of 
nation to which we belong and the kinds of values we respect.

Games as well are a kind of institution that can immediately call to mind a 
certain nation and its people.

Think of sumo wrestling and the Japanese come to mind. Bull fighting we 
associate with the Spanish. Hockey is Canadian and chess Russian. Jacques 
Barzun correctly observed that to know America, one must know and 
understand baseball.

It is not that some games are enjoyed only by one country—though there are 
a few instances of this, like hurley in Ireland. It is that for historical, cultural, 
and psychological reasons certain games do seem more favored in certain 
countries. There is something inescapably British about the game of cricket, 
though it is played around the world. 

Institutions, such as governing systems, buildings, anniversaries, and games 
are part of the meaning and content of patriotism.

Perhaps more than anything, patriotism is about ideas and ideals.

What ideas in particular will be part of the heritage and idealism of a given 
nation will vary. No nation can hold together without a sense of trying to 
realize certain noble aspirations. Land, people, and institutions need the 
spiritual glue of ideals to give them focus and force. Without guiding ideas 
to help us measure ourselves, to lift us up, to draw us on, we decline into 
arrogance, indifference, or sloth.

In our country, we have been blessed with some very great ideas. Our 
Declaration of Independence put forth two daring notions for that time: 
equality and liberty. 

Equality was, in the words of the Declaration, a condition in which “all men 
are created equal.” Women were not mentioned, it is true, and that is a flaw. 
It is also true that some of the signers, not the least of them being Thomas 
Jefferson, owned slaves. But they wrote words about an ideal that 
transcended their shortcomings and became an inspiration for the ages.

Abraham Lincoln, in a debate with Stephen Douglas in 1858 said that “they 
meant to set up a standard maxim for a free society, which should be 
familiar to all, and revered by all; constantly looked to, constantly labored 
for, and even though never perfectly attained, constantly approximated, and 
thereby constantly spreading and deepening its influence.”

The ideal of equality, of both worth and opportunity, is fundamental to the 
idea of America. That is why slavery had to end. That is why women had to 
get the vote. That is why there is an American With Disabilities Act. That is 
why someday our country will fully recognize marriages between partners of 
the same sex, as a court in Ontario has just done.

Just as fundamental to the idea of America is the ideal of liberty. That ideal 
was proclaimed in the Declaration as “an inalienable right” and then spelled 
out in some detail in the Constitution. This right was considered to be  a self-
evident truth.

Liberty, as the Constitution makes clear, means that government cannot be 
so strong that individual freedoms are curtailed, that government cannot pass 
laws that restrict our right of free speech or free assembly or our right to a 
free press and our right to be free of an established governmental religion 
and to exercise without restraint our religious beliefs and understandings.

Liberty is what enables our religion and others that are also out of the 
mainstream to survive.

Liberty is what allows from all corners of the political spectrum the wide-
spread criticism of Mr. Ashcroft’s stunning ignorance of the meaning of 
liberty.

Liberty is what makes possible the multitudinous voluntary associations that 
work for justice, try to change the government, raise money for hundreds of 
charitable causes, help people in need, and just have fun.

Liberty and equality are the two guiding lights of America the Beautiful. 
Rightly do they inspire patriotic devotion.

Patriotism is about land and people and institutions that we love. More than 
anything, patriotism is about great ideas and noble ideals that our ancestors 
articulated and yearned for, ideas that can guide us in the present, noble 
concepts that can inspire us with a vision of the future.

Patriotism is an essential part of social cohesion, an element that helps us to 
live together despite our differences. 

It can also be demonic.

Love of one’s own country can become hatred of other countries. The 19th 
century antagonism between France and Germany, the thousand year old 
rivalry between China and Vietnam, the hostility between Greece and 
Turkey played out most bitterly on Cyprus all illustrate the terrible hatred 
that can grow out of a love for one’s own country.

The link to war is another demonic aspect of patriotism. The word 
chauvinism comes out of the Napoleonic Wars and meant originally a naïve 
celebration of war and of Napoleon. Its meaning now is bellicose patriotism. 
This is the kind of patriotism symbolized by the McCarthyite witch-hunts 
and the 21st century version of that disgraceful era, the Patriot Acts I and II.

Mark Twain was called a traitor for his opposition to the U.S. invasion of the 
Philippines more than a century ago. He responded by castigating what he 
called “monarchical patriotism…The gospel of the monarchical patriotism is 
‘The King can do no wrong.’ We have adopted it with all its servility, with 
an unimportant change in the wording: ‘Our country, right or wrong.’”

That kind of patriotism has been the rallying cry of presidents for a long 
time: of Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon in the vexed days of the 
Vietnam War, of Ronald Reagan and George Bush Senior when they lied to 
us about the Iran Contra deal, and of the current president in his demand that 
not just Americans but the whole world be either for us or against us.

The “us” in that phrase, though Mr. Bush may not realize it, cannot refer to 
America but only to his administration.

Wiser was Theodore Roosevelt, who observed that “to announce that there 
must be no criticism of the president, or that we are to stand by the president 
right or wrong, is not only unpatriotic and servile, but is morally treasonable 
to the American public.”

Real patriotism grows out of love, which is not uncritical but concerned that 
we abide by the highest principles we can know or imagine. 

In his neglected book of 1759, THE THEORY OF MORAL SENTIMENT, 
Adam Smith wrote of such a high principle of patriotism: “The wise and 
virtuous man is at all times willing that his own private interests should be 
sacrificed to the public interest of his own particular order of society…that 
the interests of this order of society should be sacrificed to the greater 
interests of the state. He should therefore be equally willing that all these 
inferior interests should be sacrificed to the greater interests of the universe, 
to the interests of that great society of all sensible and intelligent beings.”


What is needed in our times is not an uncritical chauvinistic adoration of all 
things American.

What is needed in our times is a thoughtful love of our land, our people, our 
institutions, and our ideas and ideals.

But more than that what is needed is to enlarge the scope of our patriotic 
love.

What is needed in our times is the kind of patriotism of which Adam Smith 
wrote, “the interests of that great society of all sensible and intelligent 
beings.”

Let our patriotism then be a love of the whole earth, not in an imperialistic 
or manipulative way, but in a manner that honors the earth, honors the deep 
ties that different people have to different parts of the earth, works to 
preserve and protect all the great treasures of our planet. 

In our small corner of the earth, this congregation has begun this kind of 
stewardship under the leadership of the Land Use Committee. By loving this 
land that we are communally responsible for, we can model what the whole 
world needs to do if earth is to be preserved and cared for.

Let our patriotism be a love of all the peoples of the earth, not just those who 
speak our language and go to our schools and watch our television shows. 
Let us learn to appreciate the diverse cultures that our species has created 
and celebrate the many ways that men and women have solved the problems 
of living, of finding food and making clothing and building shelter and 
nursing wounds and teaching the young and honoring the deceased.

We are taking steps in that direction in this congregation with our 
connections to the Unitarians in the Khasi Hills and to the Unitarians in 
Transylvania, people with quite different ways from ours, but people whose 
intelligence and decency have much to offer us. 

Let all humanity become our fellow citizens.

Let our patriotism be a love of not just our own institutions but the 
institutions that represent and include the whole world. Let us learn to 
respect and to give assistance to organizations like the United Nations, 
whose goal is to stop the spread of violence, to stimulate a respect for human 
rights, to encourage economic and political systems that provide the basics 
of life for every man, woman, and child.

Let us give our support to international institutions like the World Health 
Organization, now working to curb the spread of SARS and long involved in 
education and prevention of AIDS. Our government’s recent efforts to join 
in these struggles are to be commended. 

Let us give our support to the International Court of Justice and to the 
Olympics, UNICEF and UNESCO, and to various international treaties and 
agreements designed to make the world healthier and more equitable for all 
people. The Kyoto Treaty deserves support and our government should be 
ashamed at its refusal to honor this treaty and others.

A visit to the United Nations, a better knowledge of the work of their various 
agencies, a deeper appreciation of the interconnections between every 
people and every place on the planet can help us to develop a new sense of 
patriotic commitment to international institutions.

Let our patriotism be a devotion not just to equality and liberty but to love 
itself. What better idea, what better ideal to commit ourselves to than love? 
Every religious culture the world over has some version of the maxim that 
we should treat others as we want to be treated, not do to others as we do not 
want done to us, treat strangers as neighbors and neighbors as we want to be 
treated. 

They are all saying the same thing: love one another; love one another 
despite your differences; love one another because of your differences and 
the excitement and interest and learning those differences offer every person.

Let love be the guiding principle of a new, larger patriotism.

Nearly two thousand years ago Marcus Aurelius said that insofar as we are 
individuals of a particular era and culture, we respect and love our own, but 
insofar as we are human beings it is the whole world that is our country.

In a world as small and as perilous as ours is, we can aspire to no lesser kind 
of patriotism. 

Like the old Universalists, we must learn to transcend those who draw 
circles to shut us out because to them we are heretics whom they can flout. 
We must with love have the wit to win by drawing a circle that takes 
everyone in. 

That is a patriotism that can save us from disaster. 

That is a patriotism that honors the land, the people, the institutions, the 
ideas and ideals of the whole world. 

That is the patriotism needed in our times, a patriotism worthy of our 
commitment.




                                                        


                                                    BIBLIOGRAPHY


1.	Forrest Church, THE AMERICAN CREED: A SPIRITUAL AND 
PATRIOTIC PRIMER, St. Martin’s Press, 2002.

2.	James W. Loewen, LIESMY TEACHER TOLD ME: EVERYTHING     
YOUR AMERICAN HISTORY TEXTBOOK GOT WRONG, 
Touchstone, 1996.
 
3.	Jonathan Schell, THE UNCONQUERABLE WORLD: POWER, 
NONVIOLENCE, AND THE WILL OF THE PEOPLE, Metropolitan 
Books, 2003

4.	Howard Zinn, A PEOPLE’S HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES 
1491-PRESENT, Twentieth Anniversary Edition, HarperCollins, 
1999.