Daniel Darling serves as the Director of the Land Center for Cultural Engagement and Assistant Professor of Faith and Culture at Texas Baptist College (the undergraduate school at Southwestern Seminary in Ft Worth, TX). Dan has also served on staff at the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission of the Southern Baptist Convention. He is the author of several books and articles that aim to help Christians think carefully about the age they live in.

One of the things I have appreciated about Dan over the years is his humility and kindness. He is a man with convictions, to be sure. But Dan can engage winsomely in controversial conversations (for a helpful perspective on “winsomeness” in a negative world, see James R. Wood here). Because of Dan’s ability to engage fairly and kindly, his professional and academic background, and past involvement in the political sector, I was excited to pick up his new book, In Defense of Christian Patriotism. Because I love Jesus and I love this country, I was intrigued to see how Dan would defend the idea that Christians could merge their faith with a robust love of country. After all, we live in a cultural moment where some think the two loves are completely at odds. Dan, however, challenges that notion and shows Christians how to order love of God and love of country in appropriate ways.

What Dan is trying to do, then, is give Christians permission to love God and love country. That is, “A healthy patriotism is not only an acceptable posture for a Christian. [he believes] it is a necessary posture for a Christian” (xi). Dan laments the research-supported reality “that younger Americans recoil at the idea of patriotism” (xi). Sadly, “Only 39 percent of Americans are ‘extremely proud’ of their country. When broken down by generation, the survey found, 50 percent of those aged fifty-five and over were ‘extremely proud,’ 40 percent of those aged thirty-five to fifty-five, and a meager 18 percent of those aged eighteen to twenty” (29). These numbers show that a generation of young men and women is being discipled to lament the land in which they live.

Against that backdrop, Dan writes to show that though the United States is imperfect, it is still a nation for which we should be grateful. And we should thank God for the chance to live and move and have our being in the land of the free. In other words, gratitude for the USA is appropriate.

Helpfully, Dan doesn’t call for a love of country while whitewashing the history of the USA. He pulls no punches in denouncing the history of white supremacy and slavery. He laments the murderous institution and practice of abortion. He recognizes that our involvement on the world stage has not always been without fault. The USA, indeed, has often failed to live up to the ideals outlined in the founding documents. To quote G. K. Chesterton, “‘My country, right or wrong,’ is something no patriot would think to say” (40). To love your country, to be truly patriotic, is not to sweep past sins under the rug or explain sins away. Instead, true love calls us to acknowledge faults and failures and call one another (and a nation) to higher (and foundational) ideals.

Acknowledging that the USA is imperfect does not mean we must now hate our country. “To loathe America may be chic, but it’s certainly not Christian” (49). Instead, “patriotism is a duty as long as it remains ordered in correct priority to our highest calling…” (49). We order our loves. We love Jesus, our families, our neighbors, the nation, and the world.

Thankfully, Dan spends time in the book helping the reader think practically about what patriotism looks like. He challenges the prevailing winds that call us to do nothing but lament the USA. He encourages involvement in politics, particularly at the local level. Dan provides food for thought when it comes to the concept of American exceptionalism and its implications for interventionist and isolationist international policy discussions. And he engages the prevailing war on the family and how to think about the sphere of education in the United States. In each chapter, he calls Christians to engage in the world around them precisely because they love God and love their neighbor and are grateful to live in this land.

Space fails me to comment on Dan’s helpful engagement with the Augustinian idea of ordo amoris, the problems we face as a fractured society, and the way in which the church should lead the way forward. I’ll leave the reader to buy the book and read Dan’s work. For now, I’m simply thankful for Dan’s labor in encouraging us all to love America (and to do so with a clearer conscience), stimulating our thinking about a host of things related to living as a Christian in the USA, while clearly pointing us to an ultimate citizenship that is to come in the New Heavens and the New Earth.