How Patriotism Turns Demonic

C.S. Lewis argues that a healthy love of country can sour

Photo by Pete Alexopoulos on Unsplash

C.S. Lewis understood love of country. He fought and lost friends in World War I. Much of his writing occurs in the shadow of World War II. In The Four Loves, he wrote about the importance of patriotism.

C.S. Lewis on Why We Need Patriotism

Good patriotism doesn’t prevent a nation from making mistakes, but it should make those mistakes more obvious. A right love of country will make it more difficult for a nation to act unjustly because that type of patriotism loves a country regardless of the mistakes of its leaders, but refuses to stand silent when those leaders fail to live up to the nation’s ideals. “That is one reason why we private persons should keep a wary eye on the health or disease of our own love for our country,” he writes.

As he’s discussing patriotism, Lewis gives several ingredients involved in love of country and how likely they are to turn bad. Just as there is good patriotism, there can be bad patriotism. Like any wrongly ordered love, patriotism can become demonic once it degrades.

But the first part of patriotism and the least likely to sour is a simple, positive affection toward home.

First, there is love of home, of the place we grew up in or the places, perhaps many, which have been our homes; and of all places fairly near these and fairly like them; love of old acquaintances, of familiar sights, sounds and smells. …

Of course, patriotism of this kind is not in the least aggressive. It asks only to be let alone. It becomes militant only to protect what it loves. In any mind which has a pennyworth of imagination, it produces a good attitude towards foreigners.

How can I love my home without coming to realize that other men, no less rightly, love theirs? Once you have realized that the Frenchmen like café complet just as we like bacon and eggs, why, good luck to them and let them have it. The last thing we want is to make everywhere else just like our own home. It would not be home unless it were different.

This patriotism appreciates the positive features of what makes your country unique. It makes no demand on others, nor does it seek to change the particular aspects of other cultures.

The next element of patriotism is a reflection of the nation’s history. It can have benefits, but Lewis gives warnings to heed.

The second ingredient is a particular attitude to our country’s past. I mean to that past as it lives in popular imagination; the great deeds of our ancestors. … This past is felt both to impose an obligation and to hold out an assurance; we must not fall below the standard our fathers set us, and because we are their sons, there is good hope we shall not.

This feeling has not quite such good credentials as the sheer love of home. The actual history of every country is full of shabby and even shameful doings. … The image becomes dangerous in the precise degree to which it is mistaken, or substituted, for serious and systematic historical study.

What does seem to me poisonous, what breeds a type of patriotism that is pernicious if it lasts but not likely to last long in an educated adult, is the perfectly serious indoctrination of the young in knowably false or biased history—the heroic legend drably disguised as textbook fact. With this creeps in the tacit assumption that other nations have not equally their heroes; perhaps even the belief—surely it is very bad biology—that we can literally “inherit” a tradition.

As the past is viewed through rose-colored glasses and inspiring legends are treated as historical facts, patriotism can drift into superiority. This hagiographic view of the past can gradually flow into the third, even more dangerous, ingredient of patriotism.

This third thing is not a sentiment but a belief: a firm, even prosaic belief that our own nation, in sober fact, has long been, and still is, markedly superior to all others.

I once ventured to say to an old clergyman who was voicing this sort of patriotism, “But, sir, aren’t we told that every people thinks its own men the bravest and its own women the fairest in the world?” He replied with total gravity, he could not have been graver if he had been saying the Creed at the altar, “Yes, but in England it’s true.” To be sure, this conviction had not made my friend (God rest his soul) a villain; only an extremely lovable old ass. It can, however, produce asses that kick and bite. On the lunatic fringe, it may shade off into that popular racialism which Christianity and science equally forbid.

This belief in the supremacy of our nation quickly moves to the fourth ingredient that can be mixed into patriotism.

If our nation is really so much better than others, it may be held to have either the duties or the rights of a superior being towards them. In the nineteenth century, the English became very conscious of such duties: the “white man’s burden.” What we called natives were our wards and we their self-appointed guardians.

For Lewis, this aspect of patriotism has the “sure mark of evil.” Ignoring the achievements and perspectives of other nations and cultures can lead to a sense of superiority that justifies the mistreatment and exploitation of others.

And yet this showed the sense of superiority working at its best. Some nations who have also felt it have stressed the rights, not the duties. To them, some foreigners were so bad that one had the right to exterminate them. Others, fitted only to be hewers of wood and drawers of water to the chosen people, had better be made to get on with their hewing and drawing.

This leads to the point where patriotism becomes demonic, according to Lewis, and denies itself. A superiority-tinged patriotism will inevitably lead others to move to the other extreme, where their version of patriotism rejects loving their nation.

Those holding to this form of self-denying “patriotism” say they will only love their country based on its merit. They can only be patriotic if their nation is worthy of their devotion. Lewis argues these individuals don’t actually love their country.

Love never spoke that way. It is like loving your children only “if they’re good”, your wife only while she keeps her looks, your husband only so long as he is famous and successful. “No man,” said one of the Greeks, “loves his city because it is great, but because it is his.” A man who really loves his country will love her in her ruin and degeneration.

The one who loves their country even in its ruin would strive to keep their country from such a state, but the two demonic extremes only ever lead a nation to ruin. They are never in a position to lead it to something better.

Those who assert some superiority can’t criticize what they see as superior, or else their whole argument fails. They may bring up certain objections about the country. But those faults are always and only the fault of “outsiders,” defined as anyone who doesn’t share whatever unifying feature they’ve deemed to be the characteristic of a true citizen.

On the other hand, those who claim to love their nation but only when it deserves it can’t levy effective criticisms because they only point out shortcomings. They are a room full of boys who cried wolf, whose critiques and laments are easily dismissed because that’s all they ever do. They may claim to love the nation’s ideals, but that never makes its way to practical, and as such, never truly matters.

C.S. Lewis argued that we need good, healthy patriotism that helps a nation live up to worthy ideals even while loving it through its faults. In that sense, demonic patriotism is ultimately any patriotism that keeps a nation from becoming what God created it to be.