The US devotion to the peoples’ ‘unalienable rights’ is a logical fallacy.
In the calendar of American civil religion, July 4 is a solemnity, the day we celebrate our national creed, formulated in Philadelphia in 1776. “We hold these truths to be self-evident,” we confess in the Declaration of Independence, “that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” By and large, American Catholics embrace this creed with no reservation. Together with our Constitution, we assume that the Declaration provides Catholics in the United States with an arena of political truth within which we may practise our faith unimpeded and unmolested. To the extent that we are hindered in that practice, so the reasoning proceeds, it is because the principles of our national creed have been compromised. (Regardless of our place on the partisan spectrum, we Americans live by the “no true Scotsman” fallacy as to our revered founding principles.) Thus, we suppose that the moral doctrines of our national creed provide us with a solid basis for political patriotism consistent with religious devotion.
But it is not at all self-evident that we are endowed by our Creator with “unalienable Rights”, or that the moral philosophy that informs this article of the creed is hospitable to, nor even compatible with, Christian faith. Neither is it self-evident that the devotion we American Catholics have to the United States is “patriotism” at all, or that patriotism is even an intelligible concept in the US. And if it is not, what we substitute for patriotism seems ineluctably to tend toward idolatry, or something very much like it. Or, at best, what we call patriotism leads to a confusion of discipleship and national identity.
In his 1984 Lindley Lecture, given at the University of Kansas, Alastair MacIntyre asked (in the title of his lecture), “Is Patriotism a Virtue?” Before he explored an answer to the question, however, he distinguished patriotism from a different attitude “easily assimilated into” patriotism. This attitude is devotion to one’s nation because it “is the champion of some great moral ideal” [emphasis MacIntyre’s]. MacIntyre notes that this is the attitude of some Americans “who claim that the United States deserves our allegiance because it champions the goods of freedom against the evils” of other forms of government. This is not patriotism, he continues, because “it is the ideal and not the nation which is the primary object” of loyalty. Because this nation champions the ideal, it is exceptional. Therefore, appropriate deference should be given to both the nation and the ideals it espouses.
In contrast, proposes MacIntyre, patriotism is “loyalty to a particular nation which only those possessing that particular nationality can exhibit”. But in the US, we have no “particular nationality”. We are a hodgepodge of disparate nationalities, usually many generations removed. Indeed, other than those we have displaced and dispossessed when we arrived, we are a “nation” of expatriates. Thus, if MacIntyre is correct, and I think he is, there isn’t any intelligible way of talking about American “patriotism”. What we call patriotism is more like adherence to an ideology – and the interests it serves – than loyalty to a nation. Patriotism is the word that we Americans use to name either devotion to a set of political ideas, or jealousy over national borders and hegemony.
The question, then, is whether these loyalties are compatible with the tenets of Catholic Christian morality. It is not self-evident that they are. The unalienable Rights with which we are allegedly endowed were not obvious truths to anyone, self-evident or otherwise, before the 16th century. In the US, we try to deceive ourselves that these rights are protections against intrusion by governments. And, indeed, a theory of rights does help to inform principles of the limitations of government authority. But this is shared commitment to a fiction, not the embrace of truth. The truth is that the rights we celebrate are not fundamental immunities from intrusion into our liberties. On the contrary, they are the instantiation of absolute prerogative to intrude on everyone else’s liberties in a war of all against all. To the extent that the theory serves a regime of immunities, it is only through mutual agreement to subscribe to the fiction of a social contract.
This is in sharp contrast to the Catholic Christian notion of the solidarity of all mankind, according to which we do not possess rights against, but rather obligations towards, one another. Of course, these obligations necessarily entail the kinds of immunities, privileges, and protections that we sometimes associate with “rights”. But these are derivative of the dignity of the human person, created for community with one another, in the image of a triune God. Perhaps, then, American Catholics might take our annual celebration of the national creed as the opportunity to affirm our supernatural one. As such, perhaps we might even be a witness to the nations of the truth of the Gospel that transcends and qualifies all other loyalties.
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