Christian faith perfects the natural virtue of piety. It should lead us to acknowledge and honor the beauty, truth, and goodness we find in other ages and other cultures, not deride or destroy them. It is worth asking what has happened in our country to dry up the natural springs of piety.
Why is it that so many highly educated persons in positions of influence today fail to repudiate unjust accusations leveled against America by a passionate and ignorant mob? How can we explain why so few political leaders are willing to defend our country when shameful calumnies are hurled at our greatest statesmen and our most venerable institutions?
W e should begin by recovering a proper patriotic disposition and encourage it in the young. One feature common to them is the conditionality of modern loyalty to country. The utopian revolutionary will serve his country only on condition that it moves toward his idea of justice and equality.
He may even fight on the side of another country if his own resists his preferred future. The liberal individualist loves his country the way he loves his country club: only on the condition that it enables him to satisfy his desires and ambitions; if it does not, he is happy to move to another club, or another country, that suits him better.
The globalist feels himself to be free of any conditions at all that would bind him to a place. His loyalties, such as they are, are given to everything in the world, indifferently. He cannot have piety because he owes nothing to that corner of the world into which he has been cast. As a product of a meritocratic system, he is inclined to think he has fully earned his position in life. As a globalist, he has no ancestors, no Founding Fathers. The countries where he alights, wafting like a ghost from one to another, may have fought against one another once upon a time, but they did not fight for him.
No one fought to secure his liberties; no nation provided him with noble examples of self-sacrifice. His cost-free religion of human rights has done nothing to improve his character, but it has given him every reason to attack and undermine the moral traditions of countries that do not share his beliefs.
In the men who ventured their lives to found his country, he can see only slaveholders. Bereft of piety, he lacks humanitas. Sadly, in our time pietas has become a weapon of factionalism rather than a source of civic unity.
In American civic culture now, one party uncritically celebrates our history and traditions while another does its best to tear them down. A healthy love of country, one characterized by pietas , takes pride in its great achievements, shows gratitude for what it has given us, feels shame at its faults, and commits with fierce resolve to amend and uphold its highest ideals.
But few can practice this noble patriotism any longer; it has become high-risk, inviting hatred and retaliation from angry partisans.
How to climb out of the deep well in which we have placed ourselves is a question with no easy answer. One clear imperative is that our government must no longer adopt a pose of indifference to the many things of value we have inherited from our forebears.
It must celebrate them, protect them, and reward those who embody our best traditions. It should not allow our history to be forgotten or twisted to partisan advantage. It respects the piety that foreign peoples show toward their own countries. And inculcating piety requires support for the family, civil society, and sound religion. They are the best allies of patriotism, deepening our capacity for civic gratitude and ensuring that it is placed within a proper order of love.
Toppled statues, an educational culture bent on repudiation of the past, media awash with anti-American propaganda, and more, are bringing one truth hideously into view: The old authors were right when they said that a country without pietas will soon disintegrate.
Only by recovering that forgotten virtue can we hope to rebuild the edifice of love and loyalty that shelters our common life. Support First Things by turning your adblocker off or by making a donation. Close Login. Web Exclusives First Thoughts. Intellectual Retreats Erasmus Lectures.
Video Podcasts. Pietas by James Hankins November He quotes a speech of Cicero: However well we think of ourselves, senators, we have not yet surpassed Spain in numbers, nor Gaul in vigor, nor Carthage in cleverness, nor Greece in the arts, nor indeed Italy itself and Latium in the innate moral sense characteristic of this land and its people. Where we have surpassed all other nations and peoples is in piety and religious devotion and in this unique piece of wisdom: for we have discerned that the universe is guided and ruled by the sway of the immortal gods.
James Hankins is professor of history at Harvard University. Prev Article. Next Article. Articles by James Hankins. America's most influential journal of religion and public life. Sign up for the First Things newsletter. This is a bit of a trick question, because when St Thomas talks about piety, he is not thinking principally of our relationship with God, but of that with our parents and our country.
For him, it is filial piety and patriotism that are the fundamental forms of this virtue, which is associated with giving what is due hence its association with justice to those from whom we derive our existence.
Our dependence on God, though, is of such a different order that the virtue of acting in an appropriate relation to him has a separate identity the virtue of religion , and it is only by analogy that we call it piety. A particular moral excellence; as, the virtue of temperance, of charity, etc. Specifically: Chastity; purity; especially, the chastity of women; virginity. One of the orders of the celestial hierarchy. Example Sentences: 1 Enough with Clintonism and its prideful air of professional-class virtue.
Words possibly related to " piety ". Words possibly related to " virtue ".
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