WE LOVE AMERICA ONLY IF WE LOVE ALL OF ITS PEOPLE
When Rebecca and I returned from Malta the summer of 2018 after directing Luther College’s Malta Program, we read about Mayor Pete, a young South Bend, Indiana mayor running for president with a funny and hard to pronounce name – Buttigieg (pronounced Boo-Tuh-Judge). We met a few Buttigieg’s in Malta and so started following Maltese-American Pete, liked what we heard, and settled on him as our presidential candidate.
Living in Iowa, America’s starting line for the 2020 presidential race, we had plenty of opportunities to see Pete. Throughout 2019 we attended four Buttigieg rallies and heard this line each time.
I’m talking about the love of a country that is only possible if you think about the fact that our country is made up of people and you can’t love our country if you hate half the people who are in it.
I wrote this sentence down the first time I heard it thinking its words contained an essential truth about any country but especially a democracy. It is easy to love the idea of America. I can fill up my image of America with whatever content I want. And I can pick the people I want to put in my America. You can do the same.
It is also easy to love God, in the abstract. That is why Jesus’ filled his parables with fleshed-out people such as the Samaritan woman at the well because its easy to love and care for our own kind. I don’t need a parable to nudge me toward someone who looks, thinks or worships like I do. It’s the other kind, the Samaritan, who is easy to hate and thus requires an upside down story to get my attention. Jesus commanded us to love, particularly the Samaritan. Democracy requires us to love, particularly the other side.
JESUS COMMANDED LOVE. DEMOCRACY REQUIRES LOVE
We usually think of democracy as a form of government and distinguish it from its opposite, dictatorship. Modern democracies differ in their particularities. Some are parliamentary systems where the people elect members of Parliament who then select the Prime Minister. Others are presidential systems where the people elect their presidents and members of Congress separately from each other. Regardless of form, all modern democracies share one moral idea in common.
“Democracy begins as an act of imagination about people.” Political Scientist E.E. Schattschneider (1892 – 1971) suggested we begin our thinking about democracy with this statement. He then asked “why people should have any say in how they are governed?” And answered that “the discovery that when we get beyond the externals, the inner person is a human being like ourselves, that all men are human is the greatest discovery in history and the most influential idea in the modern world.”
Democracy, to Schattschneider, is not about “the people” as an abstraction but about the “warm, breathing, feeling, hungering, loving, hating, aspiring, living being with whom we identify ourselves.” And, “the democratic concern for people is not selective…it takes a lot of indiscriminate affection for people as people to run a democracy.”
Buttigieg said we can’t love America if we hate some of its people. Schattschneider told us democracy requires we feel affection for everyone. Jesus turned his world – and our world – upside down by showing us how we should treat whomever we label the other. And then he gave the world two commandments, each found in other religious and humanist traditions.
Jesus said unto him, Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind. This is the first and great commandment. And the second is like unto it, Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself. On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets.
Jesus links love of God with love of neighbor. Thus I love God through the ways I treat the people I meet each day. If I don’t treat them well, I am not loving God.
We can think of American democracy in a parallel way. I love America through my feelings and actions toward the people I share this country with. If I hate them and treat them poorly, I am not loving my country.
Feeling affection for all my brother and sister citizens does not require that I agree with them or that I see the world the way they do. Rather, this affection comes from a mature understanding of what my country requires from each of us to live together peacefully. America requires that I see each of the 330 million Americans as another version of the imperfect being I am. And with the same yearnings to be seen and heard.
Those things overwhelm our differences and set forth an ideal that can withstand the challenges of our living together. This shared humanity is the foundation of democracy and the source of my love for all Americans.
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The E.E. Schattschneider quotes are from Two Hundred Million Americans in Search of Government.
Reader Comments
Paul,
What is the alternative to “loving all Americans”? Or, rather, if there are Americans we do not love, what is our attitude/feeling/belief toward them?
I do not think Buttgieg sees clearly here. He suggests that those we do not love, we hate. I think that is too simplistic.
I do think the second Great Commandment (“love neighbor as yourself”). relevant here. But, to mine this raises two questions.
First, are all Americans my “neighbors”? Must I consider those who happen to be in geographic proximity to me “neighbors” in the sense of Matthew 22:39? Must I consider as neighbor those who happen to to claim co-citizenship with me under a common constitution/social contract?
The second commandment is not a claim to love all men. Though I struggle with who gets excluded: after all, in the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus also insists we love our enemy. If we must love neighbors _and_ enemies, who is left not to love?
Which brings me to the second question, what kind of love ought we extend to our fellow Americans? Is it different than what we ought to extend to our other, non-American “neighbors”? Because whatever else that word neighbor might mean or not mean, it does not depend on geographic or civitas/polis membership.
It is, in the end, that troublesome Greek word, αγαπη, for which English has no exact counterpart. When Jesus commands αγαπη, he commands other-centeredness. For some value of “each other” he commands us to love each other unconditionally the way he loves us. The second Great Commandment is in a way the pre-eminent application of the First — that “like unto it” in the King James — to love God with all our heart/soul/mind/strength means loving our neighbor without conditions.
The Great Commandments tell us that αγαπη supersedes love of country. Or rather, the love I must extend to my neighbors takes priority over the love I extend to those who happen to be my fellow citizens of America because the love I must extend toward my neighbors transcends any (non-αγαπη) love I have toward the once or future American republic.
I don’t think hate is good in any way, shape, or form. But, contra Freudoid philosophy, love is neither the opposite nor the dual of hate.
Hello Wade
Thank you for your thoughtful reply. You raise several important points. Perhaps the most important is that the Commandment to love allows for no boundaries, national or otherwise. Regardless of source, religious or humanistic, that is very powerful and was on my mind as I wrote this blog. You are also correct in stating that those we do not love we do not necessarily hate. Blame me not Pete for that. I think of love in the way similar to how Erich Fromm in The Art of Loving frames the word. As an orientation to the world, a decision and an action and not just a feeling. In this sense, the opposite of love is not hate but indifference. I cannot be indifferent to any suffering but especially the suffering of fellow citizens. Why those who live with me within national boundaries? Because nations matter and provide at this point in history the best protections against a lot of bad things. Again, I appreciate your engagement with these ideas, simplified by the self-imposed requirement of 1000 words.