Godly and quietly governed: in praise of the tradition of Protestant patriotism

It was odd that the Presiding Bishop of TEC chose the Fourth of July this year - the 249th anniversary of the United States declaring its independence - to denounce and renounce "the Protestant tradition of patriotism ... as a tool of dominion". One might wonder why "the Protestant tradition of patriotism" is the particular target of the Presiding Bishop: Catholic and Orthodox patriotisms, after all, cannot be seriously claimed to have avoided the failures known to the Protestant tradition. As for the Presiding Bishop suggesting that TEC in 2025 equates to the Confessing Church in Nazi Germany, this is nothing more than the progressive version of Eric Metaxas' partisan manipulation of Bonhoeffer - equally unserious, no less delusional.

Leaving aside the fact that this clumsy stance only succeeds in handing over to others the formative and influential "tradition of Protestant patriotism", it is also reveals a deep dislike of the heritage of the Protestant Episcopal Church in the United States of America. Indeed, the Presiding Bishop declared that the renunciation of "the tradition of Protestant patriotism" - the "patriotism that has guided our church since its founding in 1785" - was "long overdue". If the Presiding Bishop openly rejects the traditions, history, and allegiances of the Protestant Episcopal Church, it is difficult to understand why he might think patriotic Americans should ever consider TEC as a spiritual home.

That said, perhaps we should thank the Presiding Bishop for making those of us who profoundly disagree with him think with renewed gratitude about "the tradition of Protestant patriotism", and not least its role in the Episcopal and Anglican churches of the North Atlantic. In the very act of denouncing "the tradition of Protestant patriotism", the Presiding Bishop can make us gratefully reflect on those memories, practices, and values which are embedded in Anglican and Episcopal life in the British Isles, in Canada, and in the United States; memories, values, and practices which help shape and give expression to a significant Protestant Christian understanding of national and civic life.

Memorials

The war memorial in my parish holds the names of the "Men of this Parish who came to their Country's aid by volunteering in His Majesty's Forces in the Great European War 1914-1918". 67 names are listed. Beside 15 of the names is a cross, marking those who fell. Each Remembrance Sunday, the names of the fallen - together with the fallen from the parish in the Second World War - are solemnly read. A wreath of poppies is placed at the memorial. The Last Post is heard. Silence is kept. Then Reveille, prayers of remembrance, and the National Anthem. It is a solemn day, in which we recollect loss, duty, war, sacrifice. We remember those who fell to ensure the defeat of the Kaiserreich in 1914-18, of Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan in 1939-45.

Those were times when the vision of the prophet, "they shall sit every man under his vine and under his fig tree; and none shall make them afraid", however imperfectly lived out, however flawed its embodiment in our society, needed to be defended by arms against those who sought by force to impose a very different vision on the community of nations. 

Those who served in the Great War from our parish would have been shaped by "the tradition of Protestant patriotism". They would have have a sense that loyalty to the Crown and service to country was an expression of, in the words of the Catechism, "my duty towards my Neighbour". They would have had an understanding that, in the words of Article 37, "It is lawful for Christian men, at the commandment of the Magistrate, to wear weapons, and serve in the wars". Protestant padres would have ministered to them at the front. Many would have carried small copies of the Church of Ireland BCP. Their loved ones would have sat in the pews of the parish church through the long years of 1914-18, praying for them, praying for a restoration of peace.

As I read the Presiding Bishop renouncing "the tradition of Protestant patriotism" it was to the war memorial in my parish that my thoughts first turned. Here was that tradition, that patriotism, which he denounced. It is a tradition and patriotism also seen in the war memorials found in many Episcopal churches in the United States.

My thoughts also turned to another war memorial. Some years ago, I enjoyed a family holiday in Maine. One quiet afternoon, I came across a memorial in the small town of Searsport. It was erected in 1870. Its inscription reads:

 A Tribute to Our Citizens Who Fought in defense of the Union 1861-65.

Maine was an overwhelmingly Protestant state in the 1860s. Those who came from Searsport to serve in the Union armies would have been overwhelmingly Protestant. And, yes, they would have been shaped by "the tradition of Protestant patriotism", as - at great cost - they defeated the slave power and secured the Union.

According to the Presiding Bishop, "the tradition of Protestant patriotism" is to be merely dismissed as "a tool of dominion". The war memorials in our churches, and cathedrals, villages, towns, and cities across the North Atlantic, set before us a very different account of this tradition: of sacrifice to be honoured, of liberties (however imperfectly defined) defended at great cost. 

National observances

The "tradition of Protestant patriotism" is also found in the national and civic commemorations observed by Anglicans and Episcopalians. As I have already mentioned, Remembrance Sunday has a particular significance in the United Kingdom, from the service at the Cenotaph, to those in parish churches and at village war memorials. Acts of remembrance are also found at other times of the year. Pictured, for example, are two Church of Ireland clergy on 1st July, Somme Day, leading a service of remembrance for the Royal British Legion at a local war memorial. 

Such acts of remembrance, and Memorial Day in the United States, honour the vocation of military service, order it towards the ends of peace and justice, and hold before God those who have fallen amidst the horrors of war. Mindful that war and conflict have a significant place in our national stories, a refusal by Anglican and Episcopal churches to engage in such acts of remembrance is to abandon them to atavistic nationalisms, removed from the context of Christian prayer and teaching.

Likewise, the death of the late Queen, Elizabeth II, and the Coronation of the King, were marked by prayers and sermons, as the death and accession of monarchs have been marked in parish churches across these Islands over centuries. Alongside such national events, local civic services are also widespread, as prayer is offered for the work of, for example, local government and the courts. 

The Book of Common Prayer 1662 (and, in the Church of Ireland, 1926) retains the Accession Day service, praying for the monarch on the anniversary of the beginning of their reign. One of the appointed prayers for Accession Day captures how such commemorations are a focus of prayer for our national life:

Let thy wisdom be [the King's] guide, and let thine arm strengthen him; let truth and justice, holiness and righteousness, peace and charity, abound in his days; direct all his counsels and endeavours to thy glory, and the welfare of his subjects ...

Our prayer, in other words, seeks the good order of the commonwealth, that it would be conformed to the justice, peace, and charity of the Kingdom of God; that it would be oriented towards the City of God.

This is also reflected in TEC's BCP 1979 observance of Independence Day. Despite the progressive disdain of some in TEC (including the Presiding Bishop) for the appointed collect, it rather powerfully petitions that the liberties of America's Founding - fallible, restricted, imperfect - would yet be ordered towards the Kingdom of God:

Grant, we beseech thee, that we and all the people of this land may have grace to maintain these liberties in righteousness and peace ...

The collect gives voice to what one famous American Protestant pastor, invoking "the magnificent words of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence", exhorted: "let freedom ring".

Anglican and Episcopal national observances embody "the tradition of Protestant patriotism" and do so by demonstrating how this tradition seeks that the commonwealth - in the words of the Prayer for the Church Militant - "be godly and quietly governed", with the civil magistrate maintaining "thy true religion , and virtue" in our common life: that, whatever form of constitutional order in which we live, governors and citizens will rightly order common life after the righteousness of God's Kingdom, rather than according to prejudices, greed, hatreds, sectional interest, and selfishness.

For Anglicans and Episcopalians to remove such national and civic commemorations would be to foolishly, recklessly abandon a culturally significant means of ordering the commonwealth towards the Kingdom of God and of demonstrating how we should seek the right ordering of national life through Christian prayer.

Rights and liberties

On the 31st January 1689, John Tillotson - then Dean of Canterbury - preached on "the day appointed for a publick thanksgiving to Almighty God for having made His Highness the Prince of Orange the glorious instrument of the great deliverance of this kingdom". Reminding his hearers that the Revolution of 1688 - "this wonderful Revolution" - was a deliverance from "arbitrary power", Tillotson continued: 

we must not here forget the many Worthies of our Nation, who did so generously run all hazards of Life and Fortune, for the preservation of our Religion, and the asserting of our ancient Laws and Liberties.

Tillotson's sermon was an expression of a fundamental aspect of "the tradition of Protestant patriotism": that inherent to this tradition is a vital, lively account of rights and liberties, of the role of representative institutions, and a rejection of absolutism. Nearly a century later, Charles Inglis, then a New York parson and Loyalist, would give voice to this tradition as it was contested in the context of another Revolution:

The constitution of England, as it now stands was fixed at the revolution, in 1688 - an aera ever memorable in the fair annals of liberty. It was then that the limits of royal prerogative on the one hand, and the liberties and privileges of the subject, on the other; were ascertained with precision ... I assure the reader further, that I am none of your "passive-obedience and non-resist­ance men." The principles on which the glori­ous revolution in 1688 was brought about, con­stitute the articles of my political creed.

On the other side of the conflict in the American colonies was William White, then a minister in Christ Church, Philadelphia. After the Revolutionary War, on the anniversary of Independence, Bishop White preached 'A Sermon on the Duty of Civil Obedience, as Required in Scripture'. He invoked "the revolution achieved by king William the third ... an honourable resistance of arbitrary power", in defence of the American Revolution:

On these principles it is, that he [White referring to himself] never doubted of the lawfulness of the great change, which raised our country to a rank among the nations of the earth: An event that had its origin, not in a desire on our part to remove the established landmarks of law or of prerogative; but in an attachment to invaded rights, which had been handed down to us from the first settlers of the country; on the faith of which they had left the land oft heir nativity, and braved the dangers of the wilderness; and which had become endeared to their posterity, by opinion, and by long enjoyment. Rights like these we might reasonably assert, consistently with the ties which bound us to the parent state. Rights like these we might reasonably defend, by breaking those ties, when security could no otherwise be obtained. 

The opposing allegiances of Inglis and White demonstrate how the legacy of the foundational event in the Anglo-American "tradition of Protestant patriotism", the Revolution of 1688, could be contested. Such is the nature of this lively tradition of rights and liberties: it called forth impassioned debate (and, in the case of the United States, the Civil War) on how these rights and liberties were to be secured, defended, and expanded. 

A few decades later, Bishop John Henry Hobart of New York, while praising the constitutional order of the United States, pointed to the shared Anglo-American tradition of liberty:

Still, though in these respects our governments differ from that of England, let us gratefully remember, that from her we have derived not only many of her unrivalled maxims of jurisprudence, those which protect the freedom of the subject, and secure the trial by jury, but those great principles which constitute the superiority of the modern republics above the ancient democracies. These are, the principle of representation; the division of the legislative, executive, and judiciary departments; the check on the exercise of the power of legislation by its distribution among three branches; the independence of the judiciary on all influence, except that of the constitution and the laws; and its accountability, and that of the executive, to the people, in the persons of their representatives; and what constitutes the characteristic blessing of a free people, a government of laws, securing to all the enjoyment of life, of liberty, and of property.

This is what Burke - a leading Anglican exponent of the "tradition of Protestant patriotism" - described as the "idea of a liberal descent":

Always acting as if in the presence of canonized forefathers, the spirit of freedom, leading in itself to misrule and excess, is tempered with an awful gravity ... By this means our liberty becomes a noble freedom.

The "tradition of Protestant patriotism" offers a rich, vibrant, virtuous tradition - variously embodied in particular countries and their national stories - of defining the polity in terms of rights and liberties, with representative institutions ensuring the consent of the governed, and the chief magistrate maintaining peace and order.  This has profound theological roots, both in the reality of Original Sin and the recognition of liberty of conscience. It is entirely unconvincing that this vision should be abandoned by Anglicans and Episcoplians in favour of a self-serving, self-righteous, and unconvincing comparison with the Confessing Church in the particular circumstances of Germany in the 1930s.

Conclusion

All political and ecclesiastical traditions are flawed. At times, they can be characterised by grievous sin. They can be oriented towards that which is contrary to the Kingdom of God. Patriotism can be gravely disordered. The Protestant tradition of rights and liberties was used to defend greed and slavery. To say this, however, is to recognise the reality of the Fall and Original Sin. From Vendée to the Gulags, the desire for equality has also been characterised by grievous sin. The pursuit of justice has itself often been violently unjust. War can be a means of injustice - but peace also can be appeasement of and collusion with injustice.

Part of the Anglican and Episcopal vocation in North Atlantic societies has been to embody a right ordering of the "tradition of Protestant patriotism", serving the peaceable and just ordering of our societies. It is a tradition that allows for considerable pluralism, vigorous debate, and rival political loyalties, within a context of shared national allegiance, the memory of past sacrifices, and respect for the constitutional order. And it is built into the churches, liturgies, and memories of Anglicans and Episcopalians.

Hopefully it will be the case that the Presiding Bishop's ill-considered article will actually lead to a renewed, deepened appreciation of the "tradition of Protestant patriotism", ensuring that Anglicans and Episcopalians in the United Kingdom, Canada, and the United States give reinvigorated expression to this tradition in a contemporary political and cultural landscape seeking meaningful accounts of what it is to be "godly and quietly governed".

(The first picture is a detail from Washington Memorial Chapel, Valley Forge. The second is of the Regimental Chapel in the Belfast Cathedral. The third is of a Somme Day commemoration in Strabane, Northern Ireland. The fourth is of the stained glass window in Christ Church, Philadelphia, showing the Continental Congress at prayer before signing the Declaration of Independence. The final picture is of St. John's Episcopal Church, Oakdale, Long Island.)