In the introduction to his new book, In Defense of Christian Patriotism, Daniel Darling writes, “In Scripture, God commands a number of loves. We are to love God, love our family, love our neighbors. But what about love of country? It can be easy for a modern Christian to dismiss this love as superfluous to Christian duty. However, a fundamental assumption of the Christian life is that we are to be grateful to God for the things that he gives us. The specifics of our birthplace fall under that category: our family, our home, our community… We’re to love our home as the place where God has planted us, not because it’s the best of all possible homes but because it’s a space we’ve been given to steward.”
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Nadya Williams
Nadya Williams is the Books Editor at Mere Orthodoxy. She holds a PhD in Classics from Princeton University and is the author of Cultural Christians in the Early Church; Mothers, Children, and the Body Politic: Ancient Christianity and the Recovery of Human Dignity; and Christians Reading Classics (forthcoming Zondervan Academic, 2025). She and her husband Dan joyfully live and homeschool in Ashland, Ohio.