Perhaps the most-cited biblical line on Memorial Day is John 15:13. Therein, Jesus tells His disciples, “Greater love has no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends.” While it is no doubt a prophecy about His own death for the entire human race, whom God loves despite their sin and to whom He has offered friendship, it relies upon a truth that is available to everyone.
Love may be a many-splendored thing, but the proof of its strength is not measured by the strength of emotions. Nor is it measured by the eloquence of one’s words and the symbolic shows of loyalty, good as all these things are. Instead, the strength of love is found in deeds done so that the beloved might live more abundantly. The greatest of these deeds are those in which the one who loves acts for the other even though he knows his action will lead to his death.
In 250 years of our nation’s existence, many have laid down their lives fighting for her survival. They did so not because of abstractions but because of love. Katharine Lee Bates’s 1893 poem, “America the Beautiful,” set to music in 1910, has become a cultural cornerstone. It celebrates a beautiful nation with many gifts and a proud history of sacrificial love and virtue that the speaker asks God to increase, even as He mends “thine every flaw.” The third stanza includes these words:
O beautiful for heroes proved
In liberating strife
Who more than self their country loved
And mercy more than life!
That kind of love of country is often considered passé or even offensive. Some ask how we can love a country. Many echo the British novelist E.M. Forster’s line in some fashion: “If I had to choose between betraying my country and betraying my friend, I hope I should have the guts to betray my country.”
This inability (or refusal) to see one’s nation as comprised of those joined in a civic friendship is one of the greatest problems in our modern world. The famous words of Nathan Hale, that he regretted that he had “but one life to give for my country,” are shockingly alien to too many.
What makes this inability, or perhaps we should say “disability,” so much worse is the ideological indoctrination that too many have received in their schools and from popular entertainment. Many point to shameful episodes in American history and ask, “When was America ever great?” They see the history of slavery and the various kinds of racial hatred that have afflicted this country and say that the nation is defined by them. They say that we are afflicted by an “original sin” of racism.
To adapt these ideologues’ own sloganeering, we must respond: “You need to educate yourself!” Racial and ethnic hatreds, bigotry, greed, and all kinds of injustice have been part of every nation and people that ever existed. They are part of the human condition, as Man is a fallen creature.
None of these evils, including racism and slavery, are unique to American history. As bad as they were in certain times and places, what is most notable about America is our penchant for abolishing and dismantling systems of oppression to build a freer and more just world.
The men who died for this nation were certainly not fighting for a nation that they believed to be hopelessly evil. Not in the Revolution; not in 1812; not in the Civil War; not in either of the World Wars, Korea, Vietnam, nor even in any of our 21st-century conflicts.
Those who served and sacrificed their lives may not have agreed on a great many things – even about the conflicts in which they were involved. What they did agree on was that this country was worth fighting and dying for.
To honor our fallen soldiers is to affirm that this country is not defined by evils done here. To slander America as a racist and evil country is to dishonor the countless lives sacrificed to preserve what this nation stands for. Our history is primarily a story of great moral successes rather than great failures, and that is why it is right and good to honor our military dead.
In America’s founding documents, we see that this nation was conceived in a robust understanding of liberty under God, in which rights are granted so that duties may be carried out. Our struggles with various evils have been vigorous, to say the least. We still have work to do in various areas to preserve both the rights and the understanding of duties that animated the Founders.
We can continue that work and that struggle to live up to the ideals that were announced in 1776 because of those who laid down their lives for this country. We do well to remember them because of their great love for their countrymen. They counted their fellow citizens as friends, and they showed the greatest type of love.
Let us remember and give thanks to those who died at Concord, Gettysburg, the Somme, Omaha Beach, and many other places so that this country might live and live abundantly this Memorial Day. Let us then return their friendship and love by working to renew the country for which they died so selflessly.
David P. Deavel teaches at the University of St. Thomas in Houston. A past Lincoln Fellow at the Claremont Institute, he is a Senior Contributor at The Imaginative Conservative. Follow him on X @davidpdeavel.
