To maintain our integrity in a period in which traditional conceptions of God and Country don’t apply, it seems we must find our way as an indigestible dissident minority

Catholics: Increasingly a Dissident Minority

by James Kalb

Pro Deo et Patria is the motto of the Army chaplaincy, and an English version of the phrase is part of the Boy Scout Oath and the Girl Scout Promise. The phrase is well chosen for those organizations. It’s a call for loyalty to the particular society in which we live, and to the moral and cosmic order that gives that society its setting, orientation, and meaning.

The effect of such loyalties is to create a public order guided by substantive goods we are all assumed to revere. Something of the sort seems necessary for rational public discussion and decision, since the latter require something to attach us to the particular society of which we are members as well as to common goods that have enough content and particularity to support usable common standards. Nonetheless, the phrase is out of keeping with current demands for diversity and individual autonomy, because it suggests that specific concrete loyalties take precedence over individual and minority preferences. Whose God are we talking about, if we insist on talking about God, and what are the features that attach us to our country and make it what it is? Don’t different groups have different views on such matters? Who has the right to tell people what their loyalties have to be?

It’s hard to make sense of a call for particular public loyalties in a country that is increasingly understood less as a concrete community united by history and culture than an abstract legal order devoted to security, choice, tolerance, and physical well-being, with no connection to any particular cultural or religious tradition, and no loyalty to any history other than the history of the growing coherence and dominance of a governing regime that abolishes all other social loyalties.

Tensions between the implications of phrases like “God and Country” and the demands of the political outlook now dominant have therefore grown to the breaking point. The Canadian Girl Guides recently redid their promise as a “promise … to be true to myself, my beliefs and Canada,” and similar changes have been made in Australia and the United Kingdom. At the same time military chaplains have come under increasing pressure to fall in line with the new orthodoxy, and been slapped down for now-heretical statements such as “there are no atheists in foxholes.”

Instead of loyalty to a particular worldly and transcendent order the current orthodoxy puts self-determining subjectivity at the center of the moral and social world. Will and desire—“choice”—is the ultimate standard, and principles like equal freedom and equal satisfaction are expected to give all choices equal status. Instead of “God and Country,” the new order might choose as its mottos “access” and “free to be you and me.”

The new outlook seems uniquely right, just, and reasonable to those who hold it, but it leads to very serious problems. At bottom it’s a political manifestation of the religion of me, and not surprisingly researchers have found that its rise to dominance has been accompanied by a growing tendency toward narcissism. It is nonetheless a religion, which makes it something greater, and more troublesome, than simple narcissism. It has a conception of the holy in the deification of the other as well as the self, and a corresponding moral ideal that requires treating every me as an equal co-deity. Those conceptions have been found to require the radical transformation of all social relations by elimination of what now counts as discrimination and oppression, a transformation that is thought to trump all other considerations.