You Cannot Follow Jesus And Love America

When I was a kid growing up in West Virginia, my favorite holiday was always the Fourth of July. At first I just loved summer. The central Appalachians are as cloudy as the Pacific Northwest, so I came to deeply appreciate the few brilliantly sunny days we got—which almost always came in July. To my young mind, this trumped any material gifts I might get in the dead of a gloomy, endless winter.

As I grew older, however, I made a conscious decision to really lean into the meaning of the holiday. After George W. Bush illegally invaded not one but two sovereign, predominantly Muslim countries, it seemed to me most liberals shied away from declaring their love of this country. But not me.

Ever the contrarian (and nerd—as I was almost always more interested in politics than sports), my teenage years were a rebellion against my perceived expectation of a young liberal. I was a liberal who loved his country, waved the flag, sang the Star Spangled Banner, and stood up to power.

What I didn’t realize until I was much older is just how problematic that mindset is if your intent is to follow the historical Jesus and the religion he himself practiced and preached. Because the truth is both damning and clear: you cannot follow Jesus and love your “country.”

First and foremost, there is the issue of loving something that has perpetrated unthinkable violence against the world. The United States’ list of crimes against humanity is long. Our country was founded on the forced kidnapping and enslavement of Africans while robbing indigenous communities of their native lands—and continues through to today with our endless support of the genocidal regime of Israel.

And far from being just the crimes of our government, these were very much crimes of our people. For example, very few Americans were abolitionists before the Civil War, and even those who were were shockingly racist. (John Brown seems to be the lone anomaly here of abolitionists who believed in both ending slavery and equality among the races.1)

It seems hard to justify the love of any institution—or group of people—who can carry out such horrors, if your north star is the teachings of Jesus of Nazareth. Core to Jesus’s message was a commitment to non-violence, a subject we will return to momentarily, and it seems antithetical to “love” something that has produced so much violence.

To be sure, our country has given much back to the world. We are a paradox. A president who enslaved others and raped at least one of them wrote the words that “all men are created equal.” Some 225 years later, another would condemn millions to an early death with wars of choice while leading an effort to save millions more from the horrors of AIDS.2

And the war against the Nazis seems to be one of the very few just wars of history; Western Europe owes a great debt to the blood our countrymen spilled on their behalf.

Also, this argument could be made of any country—especially those with a history of meddling in other people’s affairs. This dichotomy—to love or not to love based on past or ongoing atrocities—faces the Brit, the Brazilian, the South African, the Indian, the Japanese—no major country is immune from such accounting.

But I’m not here to make an accounting for you of the positive and negative things our country has done to and for the world; that must be a measurement one must take in one’s own conscience. If it’s not clear, for me, at least, the negatives far outweigh the good.

But even if you come down on the opposite side of the ledger from me, there is still a greater problem for any Jesus follower—and that’s the danger of loving any country. Not just for the violence it commits, but for how such lines divide us from seeing the humanity in our brothers and sisters across the border.

Of course, to examine this, we must ask: what did the historical Jesus teach about patriotism, nationalism, and/or love of one’s country? The answer is not much, because when Jesus walked the shores of the Sea of Galilee, the idea of a “country” or “nation” didn’t fully exist.

While there was certainly a religious, local, or tribal bond among peoples, including the Jews of ancient Palestine, this desire was far less advanced—and far smaller—than the modern nation. That’s an idea that only began to develop in Europe during the Enlightenment.

That’s when new technologies allowed for the spreading of propaganda in localized languages, and people began to feel interconnected to broader, wider “communities.” No longer did you owe a loyalty to just people in your immediate area, but to a large mass of people who may be hundreds of miles away, who had the same language, culture, and government you did.3

This idea intensified as old power structures started to decline, and took a new turn during the French Revolution. After beheading King Louis XVI, the revolutionaries were haunted by a powerful question. If a foreign power invades us, (cough, Austria, cough, cough), what are we fighting for? The old answer was the monarch; the new answer was their homeland—la patrie.

The shift, in essence, was going from believing that one had a duty or obligation to a monarch or Lord, to believing that one had a duty to a nation. A prominent historian of nationalism, Benedict Anderson, referred to these as “imagined communities.” This development allowed people to feel a deep, personal connection to millions of strangers they would never meet, giving birth to “love of country.”

Saying that you love your country seems innocuous enough; what’s wrong with being proud of your country’s history, tradition, art, language, culture, etc.? The problem is that all too often, devotion to this “imagined community” comes at the expense of devaluing people, culture, history, and art from other countries. This comes in degrees and varies from person to person and group to group: from separate but equal, to ambivalence, to outright hatred.

Education and material wealth seem to (though not always) indicate where you might fall on this scale. The richer, more educated, and well-traveled you are makes you more receptive to the importance of others’ culture, traditions, and interests. But as the world’s richest man demonstrates, this is not a hard-and-fast rule.

Most Americans will never have the privilege to open their mind in this way. Most can barely afford groceries, much less the time and money for travel and education required for a more balanced “love of country.” As such, most only hear and absorb a message of American exceptionalism that comes at the expense of devaluing anyone or anything outside our borders.

This is reflected in common U.S. mass culture. The predominant sentiment is not just that one is “proud to be an American”—it’s that we’re the best country in the world. And that is an even more dangerous proposition, because it grants the opinion holder carte blanche to impose their will on the lives of others.

And if we believe we can impose our will on others—then we are more than willing to use violence to get our way. The history of America, from at least Manifest Destiny onward, is this principle in action. We want it and we’re special—so we’ll take it—by any means necessary.

This, of course, is in direct opposition to the teachings of Jesus. Almost every scholar of the New Testament agrees that core to Jesus’s philosophy was a radical commitment to nonviolence.

Jesus’s commitment to non-violence is found in the Sermon on the Mount of Matthew 5:38–48 and the Sermon on the Plain in Luke 6:27–36. Both are believed, as conservative scholar Dale Allison notes, to preserve the authentic voice, spirit, and historical core of Jesus’s message.4 In both these passages does Jesus’s commandments to love one’s enemies and to turn the other cheek appear.

How can we take these seriously, if our devotion is to an “imagined community,” whose interests are more important than others? Too often we conflate turning the other cheek with not getting into an argument with the in-laws at Thanksgiving Dinner—but this is far from what Jesus meant. To Jesus, the stakes were much higher. And if our nation consistently chooses violence over non-violence—in our names—are we really following Jesus? I find it hard to reconcile these facts.

One can not claim to be non-violent while endorsing any entity that endlessly perpetrates violence on the world. It takes major mental gymnastics to make these two things square. It’s like saying I love a serial killer who’s still on a killing spree. Is that nonviolent? Would Jesus approve? I myself am not committing violence—but I enthusiastically support the person who is.

Again, this is not to single out the United States as the only violent nationstate. All are guilty. But our own country’s record of horrific violence and its continued perpetration—particularly in the Middle East/Southwest Asia—does add more urgency to following Jesus’s mandate of nonviolence.

But the incompatibility of loving one’s country and following Jesus also transgresses another of his most famous—and important—teachings.

In the Gospel of Luke, when Jesus is challenged by a lawyer to name the greatest commandment, he says there are two: to love God, and to love one’s neighbor. The lawyer then attempts to outwit him by asking, but who is my neighbor? It is in response to this question that Jesus tells the parable of the Good Samaritan.

Too often, modern readers simply equate this parable with helping anybody in need. While this interpretation is not wrong, it is certainly deeper than that—which is only revealed by reading the Bible in its historical context.

What’s unknown to most modern readers is how radical Jesus’s teaching is here. Traditionally, the commandment to love one’s neighbor given in the Torah was understood to mean only fellow Jews. The Torah makes a clear distinction between Jews and non-Jews around its other laws (especially regarding enslavement, Jews were forbidden to enslave other Jews). And the lack of qualifier here was understood to mean that a neighbor was only my fellow Jew.

Jesus in this parable flips that. Not only is the Samaritan a non-Jew, they were an historical enemy of Jews in ancient Palestine. When Jesus is asked, who is my neighbor? He responds not by saying anyone in need—but your enemy when they’re in need. It would be akin to saying an Iranian soldier fell into a ditch. Would you help them out? Jesus’s instruction here is far from ambiguous.

What Jesus also seems to be demonstrating is the arbitrary nature of where we draw the line between who’s in—and who’s out. Because despite being the enemies of Jews in first century Palestine, Samaritans weren’t all that different from Jews. They also worshiped the monotheistic god Yaweh, practiced circumcision, and strictly observed the Sabbath.

Only, the Samaritans believed they were God’s chosen people, who ordered them to worship on Mount Gerizim in the north. As such, they only accepted the first five books of the Hebrew Bible and rejected the rest. Jews worshiped on Mount Zion in Jerusalem, and in the 2nd century BCE marched north and destroyed the Samaritan Temple on their holy mount. Needless to say, tensions were high.5

Jesus is thus challenging us to move the arbitrary line which we have drawn in determining who is our neighbor. In short, when Jesus commands us to love our neighbor, he meant everyone—even if it means moving the line to include our ancient enemies.

I realize this is an unpopular position to take. And judging by social media posts of most of my friends and family back home, it will likely fall on deaf ears.6 But there are two major reasons why I make this argument today, and beg you to consider it.

The first is the age of mass migration caused by the climate crisis—an age that has already begun. “Migrants” whose lives are being upended by worsening weather and rising temperatures are already seeking more stable and less sweltering locales. By one estimate, as of 2024 nearly 27 million people—roughly the population of Australia—had already been forced to abandon their homes thanks to climate change.

This crisis will only continue to get worse. The World Bank warns that by mid-century between 200 million and 250 million people may be permanently displaced. This is a humanitarian disaster waiting to detonate. Will we refuse their cries for help, and raise up our border walls—for an imagined community? Or will we help them like the Good Samaritan?

But here’s the good news—and the second reason why I’m making this argument today. Scientists have found that while tribalism seems to be a natural-born trait of humans, the line between who’s in and who’s out is incredibly flexible.

For hundreds of thousands of years, humans survived by cooperating in small bands of hunter-gatherers. Being separated from your tribe meant certain death, so the human brain evolved to rapidly identify who is in the tribe (safe) and who is outside of it (a potential threat).

Neuroscience backs this up. When we view faces of people we perceive as “out-group” members, the amygdala (the brain’s threat-detection center) activates in milliseconds. Our brains literally process “Them” as a potential danger before our conscious minds even have time to register a thought.

While the instinct to form groups is hardwired, the criteria for those groups is practically blank. In the 1970s, psychologist Henri Tajfel conducted a series of studies to find out what it takes to trigger tribalism. As part of his experiments, he brought strangers into a lab and divided them into groups based on entirely meaningless, trivial criteria—such as whether they preferred a painting by Klee or Kandinsky, or even just by flipping a coin.

The results were astonishing. Within minutes, people began treating their random group members with deep favoritism. They actively chose to penalize the “other” group, even if it meant their own group got fewer rewards overall, just to ensure they “won” the comparison. (Anyone who ever took a game of dodgeball in elementary school a little too seriously may identify with this.)

He called this the minimal group paradigm, proving that humans don’t need a deep, historical reason like religion, race, or nationality to form a tribe. We will form an intensely loyal tribe over a coin flip.

In the years since, Tajfel’s findings have been heavily reaffirmed. His minimal group paradigm is considered one of the most robust and highly replicated findings in the history of social psychology.

What all this adds up to is a moral imperative for those of us who claim to follow Jesus. Climate change is about to destroy the lives of millions of people, while love of one’s country draws arbitrary lines that will make this crisis worse. But knowing that the lines we draw are incredibly flexible—shouldn’t we work to move the lines?

I believe this is what Jesus was doing in the Parable of the Good Samaritan. He was challenging us to move the lines. Too often patriotism and nationalism blind us by drawing the lines too close—excluding billions of people in the process. There may be a privileged few who have learned to hold criticism and patriotism in one hand—but the practical urgency of the disaster before us weighs more heavily and demands immediate action.

You cannot follow Jesus and love your country. Jesus taught that all humans are our countrymen—not just those lucky enough to be born inside the borders of our imagined community.

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