I Am Not Patriotic...
Preface
It was Thanksgiving this week and I was in another country. Nothing wrong with it, it’s beautiful and I was among friends and had my best friend, my woman with me. But I wasn’t home and I missed it. I could feel its absence.
Instead of making me sad, however, it made me grateful, and in a moment of introspective gratitude, I thought, what would I do to save this country, to protect her, to preserve her for my children and for theirs?
The answer was, I’d do anything because my patriotism, alongside the love I have for my woman and family, are the ultimate expressions of my most moral self, of my capacity to love, and the best man I can possibly be.
And then I wrote this. I hope you find it as meaningful as I did.
I Am Not Patriotic
At least not for the reasons people usually mean when they use that word.
I’m not patriotic because America is beautiful—though it is, from the red seams of Arizona rock to the green-gold slopes of the Carolinas. Natural beauty is wonderful, but beauty alone doesn’t bind a person to a nation.
I’m not patriotic because the founders were impressive—though they were, impossibly so. No other revolution in human history managed to combine that level of courage, philosophical rigor, and institutional imagination. But admiration for great men isn’t the same thing as patriotism.
I’m not patriotic because America helped save the world—twice. I’m not patriotic because we defeated fascism, or because we out-innovated Soviet totalitarianism, or because our industrial base once lit the planet.
I’m not even patriotic because of our selfless military, though the American warfighter is one of the finest expressions of human courage ever produced. Nor am I patriotic because our flag is beautiful, though there is something undeniably striking about a banner that stands for an idea rather than a bloodline.
These things matter. But they are not the reason I am patriotic.
I am patriotic because America is the first nation in human history built explicitly on the realization of natural law—on the understanding that liberty is the natural condition of man, as Hobbes acknowledged, and that this liberty belongs to all people by virtue of their humanity. America was the first to take that truth, that ancient and universal moral reality, and write it down in ink for the world to see.
Everything else—our beauty, our victories, our culture, our wealth, our dynamism—flows downstream from that one fact.
Defining Terms
Natural Law
Before going any further, we need to define exactly what we mean by natural law, because the entire argument that follows depends on understanding this correctly. Natural law is the idea that there exists a universal, objective moral order built into human nature and the structure of reality itself. It is not invented by kings, parliaments, voters, or courts. It does not depend on culture, geography, or political preference. Natural law is discovered, not created. It is the recognition that certain moral truths—such as the value of human life, the obligation to keep promises, or the impropriety of harming the innocent—are woven into the fabric of the world and can be known through reason.
Throughout history, both religious and secular thinkers have articulated this idea in different ways. Aristotle and Cicero saw natural law as the rational order of the cosmos; Aquinas described it as humanity’s participation in the eternal law of God; Locke grounded natural rights in this moral reality, arguing that life, liberty, and property flow directly from it. And in the modern era, C.S. Lewis called this same universal moral order the Tao—the objective, cross-cultural pattern of right and wrong that every great civilization has recognized in some form, and without which man cannot remain human at all. Even the early modern secularists like Grotius insisted that natural law remains true “even if God did not exist.” In every version, the claim is the same: that human beings, by virtue of what we are, possess certain rights and obligations long before any government grants or recognizes them. This is why Aquinas could say that “an unjust law is no law at all,” and why the Nuremberg trials rejected “just following orders” as a moral excuse—because no positive law can override the higher moral standard embedded in human nature itself.
Natural law is more than mere philosophy; it is the foundation of Western civilization and the basis of every meaningful concept of human rights. Its principles show up everywhere: in international law, in modern debates over life and dignity, and most famously in the American Declaration of Independence, which appeals directly to “the laws of nature and nature’s God.” Natural law tells us that liberty is not a privilege bestowed by rulers but the natural condition of man—something Hobbes acknowledged, Locke built on, and America was the first to put down in ink. It is the standard by which all human laws, institutions, and societies must be measured, and the compass that orients us toward justice, responsibility, and the moral order that makes civilization possible.
On “Belief”
Any conversation about patriotism, duty, or even “knowing”, has to be clear on another word that modern people use carelessly: belief. In our era, “belief” usually means something vague, emotional, or flimsy—more like a wish than a conviction. It is childish hope: the kind of belief that relies on naivete, laziness, or willful blindness. It is the belief of people who prefer comforting illusions over difficult truths. That sort of belief is cheap. It costs nothing, demands nothing, and collapses at the first sign of resistance.
The Greeks had a different word for belief: pistis. Pistis didn’t mean “blind faith” or intellectual surrender. It meant loyalty, fidelity, trust grounded in direct encounter with reality. It was belief rooted in knowing, a word you will see often in this piece. Pistis is the belief a soldier has in the shield that has already saved his life, the belief a farmer has in the sun that rises every morning, the belief a disciple has after seeing the stone rolled away from the tomb. This kind of belief is not naive—it is earned. It is not a substitute for knowledge—it flows from knowledge. It is an allegiance born of experience, a personal recognition of truth.
When I talk about belief in the positive, I mean pistis. I mean the deep, tested, experiential conviction that comes from seeing the world clearly. I believe in natural law in exactly this way—not as a sentimental preference or a cultural artifact, but as a truth embedded in the structure of reality, something I have encountered directly through reason, history, and lived experience. Natural law is not a theory I “believe” because I want to; it is a truth I know because it reveals itself everywhere—through conscience, through human behavior, through the rise and fall of civilizations, and through the extraordinary success of the West when it has aligned itself with these principles.
This form of belief—belief rooted in knowing, belief in the sense of pistis—is what produced Western civilization. It is why our philosophical traditions matured where others stagnated. It is why our legal systems became more just, our political orders more stable, and our societies more free. It is why we produced the world’s greatest art, science, literature, and moral breakthroughs. Because the West did not base its civilization on shallow belief—on superstition, myth, or tribal rules—but on belief grounded in reality, in natural law, in knowing, in truth.
Childish belief is fragile. It dies under pressure. Pistis—belief rooted in knowing—is wisdom. It strengthens under pressure. It clarifies. It grows. It binds a person to the truth in a way that shapes character, duty, and destiny. And it binds people together, because shared knowledge of the truth creates a shared moral horizon. King George III once remarked to John Adams that an honest man is one of the rarest and most valuable forces in public life—a stabilizing presence who can hold nations together.
And that distinction matters, because everything that follows—about America, about patriotism, about responsibility and inheritance—depends on the difference between believing as a child and believing as a free man who knows why he believes.
The Real Reason
I am patriotic because America is the first political realization of natural law—and I don’t mean that in the soft, poetic way people sometimes use the phrase. I mean natural law in the strict, Aristotelian, Cicero-to-Locke lineage: the moral logic embedded in the structure of reality itself.
I believe in natural law, and more than that, I know it’s real. Human history testifies to it long before philosophy ever put words to it. All religion is—at its best—an attempt to interpret natural law in a personified form through rites, rituals, and shared narratives. And frankly, it works. We are pattern-seeking animals. We are tribe-forming animals. Our entire species evolved through rituals of passage that told us who we were, who we had become, and what responsibilities came next: boy to man, apprentice to master, warrior to leader, individual to citizen.
Strip those rites away—as the modern world has—and people don’t become more rational. They become unmoored. Identity collapses because the frame that once anchored it is gone.
But the underlying reality those rituals pointed to never disappeared.
Natural law is not superstition. It’s not mysticism. It is the recognition that human beings are built a certain way, that cooperation and moral boundaries aren’t optional, and that certain ethical truths are self-evident because they are necessary for any stable civilization.
Aristotle said that if you cannot explain why something is true, you don’t know it—you merely believe it. Well, I can explain natural law without appealing to any priest, prophet, or political authority. I can describe it directly from human nature and observable reality.
When Cicero wrote about natural rights, he wasn’t inventing a doctrine—he was articulating a pattern that every human civilization must obey or collapse. When Locke refined property rights into the core of political legitimacy, he was doing the same thing: naming what is already true, no different than scientists discovering the nature of the physical universe.
And the moral implications are unavoidable.
If I want my property, my life, my autonomy respected, then I must respect others’.
If I want my rights to matter, then theirs must matter.
If I want my future secured, then I must participate in securing the future of others.
Golden Rule → Natural Rights → Civilization.
All other morality flows from this structure.
How we treat each other in public and private.
How we handle conflict, commerce, marriage, family, and responsibility.
How we balance liberty with duty.
You can sit there right now and work through a dozen more moral revelations that emerge naturally from this logic, and every one of them is a pillar of Western civilization. Not because of a deity per se, but because of what that deity has historically represented: a personified metaphor for natural law and moral order.
That is why the West works.
That is why the West thrives.
That is why the West outperformed every culture that never recognized these truths.
And it is exactly why the United States is the best country in the history of the world.
Not because our founders were impressive—though they were.
Not because our warriors were courageous—though they were.
But because America is the only nation in human history founded on an idea—and not just any idea, but the ideas born from the Greco-Roman, Judeo-Christian tradition that mapped the very contours of natural law.
America took that inheritance and institutionalized it more completely and more successfully than any political project before or since.
The average constitutional republic lasts twenty years.
Next year, America hits two hundred fifty.
If someone can read this and not feel a deep sense of gratitude for having won the geopolitical lottery, not feel compelled to protect and expand this inheritance, not feel the moral weight of raising children who understand and preserve it, then the reason is simple: they have persisted in naive, childish belief—a flimsy, whimsical sentiment—rather than grounding themselves in knowing, in pistis, the deep belief in natural law.
Because once you recognize these laws—really recognize them—your moral responsibilities snap into focus in high definition. You stop vacantly “believing” them in the childish sense. You start believing them in the pistis sense, knowing them the way you know gravity or fire or hunger.
Reflections
There is a vast difference between what we now call “belief” and pistis, the belief rooted in knowledge, and the distance between them is the distance between insecurity and certainty, between sentiment and purpose, between virtue signaling and actual virtue.
Consider the difference between vacantly believing your wife loves you and knowing she loves you. What you would do for THAT woman. You would walk into the fire first so she never feels the heat. If the world turned hostile, you would become a fortress around her. Lazy, hopeful belief is soft; it wavers with mood, memory, or circumstance. Knowing is solid. It settles in your bones. It becomes who you are. It is that pistis belief that comes from experience, from joy and pain and tested virtue. It changes the way you stand in the world.
When you merely think you are loved, you feel comfort. When you truly know it, you feel secure, proud, responsible. You feel a duty to honor, uplift, protect, and reciprocate that love. It transforms you from a passive participant in a relationship into an active guardian of it. This is my patriotism.
Patriotism is not naive, vacant belief. It is not a mood or a sentiment or a burst of emotion during a fireworks show. Patriotism is knowledge—knowledge of what America is, what she represents, and why her philosophical foundations are the greatest gift any people have ever inherited. And I want you to know what I know, believe what I believe. Because once you do, wishful thinking becomes irrelevant. Emotion becomes secondary. What remains is duty.
The only path to that knowledge is understanding our history—not the shallow version taught in schools, but the full lineage of the civilization that produced America. You cannot love this country in any meaningful way unless you understand where it came from. You must walk through the Greeks and their relentless search for truth; the Romans and their disciplined devotion to law; the Jews and their moral revolution; the early Christians whose pistis-like belief set the Empire on fire; the Catholics who preserved natural law through centuries of darkness; the Protestants who democratized literacy and conscience; the Reformers who risked their lives to challenge corruption; the Enlightenment thinkers who resurrected the ancient truths; and the Founders who bound them permanently into institutional reality.
Once you understand that chain—once you feel it in your chest—you will love America more deeply than you thought possible. Not because you casually believe it is great, but because you know it is in a way that creates a visceral belief deeper than knowledge alone. And because you see that America is not a random historical accident; it is the culmination of thousands of years of human moral discovery.
Of course, none of this should separate you from your relationship with your religion. In fact, it should deepen that bond. The gods and prophets of human history were not arbitrary inventions. They were humanity’s earliest and best attempts to articulate natural law. Jesus, to me, is the clearest example. He understood that power must serve people, not dominate them. He understood that institutions exist to protect, not exploit. He understood that the strong have a moral responsibility to defend the weak—so he recruited a hated tax collector, defended a prostitute, and rebuked every corrupt hierarchy of his day until they killed him for it.
His life is not just the story of a deity; it is a treatise on natural law. It is a blueprint for masculine courage, moral duty, and righteous leadership. If you worship him, do it not because of what someone told you to believe when you were a child, but because you understand the natural truths revealed in his actions, and you will love him more deeply than you ever have. That love will compel you not only to speak—but to act. And it is those deeds, those lived expressions of natural law, that truly make America great.
And this is the call to action. When you move from vacant belief to pistis and knowledge—about God, about your country, about natural law itself—you step into a higher form of responsibility. Your duties sharpen into high resolution. You feel the full weight of the inheritance in your hands. You understand, as Chesterton said of Rome, that men didn’t love her because she was great, but that she was great because the men had loved her—and you act accordingly.
You recognize that the freedoms you enjoy exist because countless others upheld them, protected them, sacrificed for them, and passed them forward. And in that moment, you realize you have a moral obligation to do the same. Nihilism becomes unacceptable. Black-pill despair becomes cowardice. The only honorable response is to contribute to America’s greatness, to reject apathy, to build, to protect, to lead, and to become a better man than you were yesterday—because that is how civilizations survive, and how this civilization will survive through you.
So no, I’m not patriotic because I believe “America is great"as a platitude or simply because I was born here.
I’m patriotic because I know she is great in the deepest sense, and I love her for it. And in that love, she earns my eternal allegiance.
If you are the same, if you share this duty and pistis, this knowing that she is great and worth defending, we are eternally yoked in building and defending this nation and her future.
If this is true for you, you can call me brother.
If you enjoyed this, please subscribe and check out my series: A History of the Constitution
Thank you for this Dan!
Amen Brother 🙏, wow ❤️ 💪🇺🇸