Patriotism

Religion for the secular

Ant colonies are programmed to defend themselves against attack by sending members on suicide missions against the attacker. Many die but the attacker is overwhelmed and the colony survives. The response is a reflex wired into the ants’ DNA. The defenders don’t have any choice in the matter.

Homo sapiens is a social species with defense needs not unlike the ants’. The survival of human societies has sometimes required their willingness to sacrifice some of their members for the good of the societies.

But humans, unlike ants, have minds that can override reflexes. Even if humans were inclined to throw themselves against attackers, another inclination is to preserve one’s life. As a result, human societies have had to devise methods to suppress the latter instinct in favor of the former in times of danger.

Peer pressure has often been employed. Young men, the equivalent of the ant kamikazes, have been celebrated for risking their lives on behalf of the group and ostracized for failing to do so. The heroes got the girls. At a later date they got grants for education and loans for buying homes. These days they jump the line in airplane boarding.

Long ago religion was brought to bear on the subject of defense. This worked best when each society or people had its own religion. The ancient Israelites defended their people and their religion simultaneously. Hindu nationalists in India today do something similar.

A special power of religion is its authority to confer martyrdom on defenders of the faith and the confessional group. Christianity and Islam have promised immediate entry into heaven for martyrs.

Religion loses its defensive cachet when the enemies are coreligionists. A workaround is required. One method is to declare the enemies heretics, thereby defining the problem away.

A related method is to start a new religion. After the death of Muhammad, Muslims split into Sunnis and Shias. Christians took longer to split into Protestants and Catholics, and for the Protestants to split into Lutherans, Presbyterians, Methodists and so on.

But this gets you only so far. When societies become secular and religion loses its edge in them, a new fix is required. The European Enlightenment of the 18th century gave rise to the modern age of republicanism, in which religion had little or no connection to government. The new republics still needed to defend themselves. They needed to mobilize their young men to risk their lives for their countries.

They came up with a secular equivalent of religion. In America, the Declaration of Independence took the place of the Nicene Creed. America’s catechism was the Constitution. The Pledge of Allegiance and the national anthem were public prayers. Death in defense of the country and its democratic faith was often referred to as martyrdom. Apostasy, the most heinous crime against religion, transmuted into treason, the ultimate crime against the state.

None of this is to say that religion and patriotism aren’t admirable sentiments. But if they were merely sentiments—if they didn’t serve important societal purposes—they wouldn’t have caught on so broadly and lasted so long.

It’s worth noting that religion and patriotism typically tilt toward the status quo, which makes them conservative in the traditional sense. True, certain varieties of religion and some flavors of patriotism insist that people and institutions become better than they currently are. But on the whole, mainstream religion and patriotism have comforted the comfortable.

It also bears remarking that, people being people, religion and patriotism have sometimes been deployed to cloak dubious deeds. Samuel Johnson characterized patriotism as “the last refuge of a scoundrel.” Others have had equally uncomplimentary things to say about religion, which historically has been cited in support of slavery, imperialism and war.

To draw up a balance sheet tallying whether religion and patriotism have been net positive or negative in human affairs would be a fool’s errand. Life isn’t so tidy.

We shouldn’t believe all the bad things people have said about these staples of human belief. Neither should we credit all the good.