The Immorality of Patriotic Morality


 By Timothy Terrell - Posted at The Machen Seminar:

In a 1925 essay on reforming government schools, J. Gresham Machen pointed out the immorality of rooting morality in patriotism. Whether based on nationalism or on broader human experience, however, a humanistic morality is “flimsy,” according to Machen. Machen was willing to accept “secularized public education” as “a necessary evil,” but wanted to reduce “the danger of that institution” by limiting its functions, by discouraging the “garbled” reading of the Bible in government schools, and providing for unhampered competition from private and explicitly religious schools.
"At the root of the Christian attitude is a profound consciousness of the majesty of the moral law. But the majesty of the moral law is obscured in many ways at the present time, and most seriously of all in the sphere of education. Indeed, strangely enough, it is obscured in the sphere of education just by those who are becoming most keenly conscious of the moral bankruptcy of modern life. There is something radically wrong with our public education, it is said; an education that trains the mind without training the moral sense is a menace to civilization rather than a help; and something must quickly be done to check the impending moral collapse. To meet this need, various provisions are being made for moral training in our American public schools; various ethical codes are being formed for the instruction of children who are under the care of the State. But the sad thing is that these efforts are only making the situationtenfold worse; far from checking the ravages of immorality, they are for the most part themselves non-moral at the root. Sometimes they are also faulty in details, as when a recent moral code indulges in a veiled anti-Christian polemic by a reference to differences of 'creed' that will no doubt be taken as belittling, and adopts the pagan notion of a human brotherhood already established, in distinction from the Christian notion of a brotherhood to be established by bringing men into common union with Christ. But the real objection to some, if not all, of these efforts does not depend upon details; it depends rather upon the fact that the basis of the effort is radically wrong. The radical error appears with particular clearness in a 'Children’s Morality Code' recently proposed by 'The Character Education Institution' in Washington. That code contains eleven divisions, the subheadings of which are as follows: I, 'Good Americans Control Themselves'; II, 'Good Americans Try to Gain and Keep Good Health'; III, 'Good Americans are Kind'; IV, 'Good Americans Play Fair'; V, 'Good Americans are Self-Reliant'; VI, 'Good Americans Do Their Duty'; VII, 'Good Americans are Reliable'; VIII, 'Good Americans are True'; IX, 'Good Americans Try to do the Right Thing in the Right Way'; X, 'Good Americans Work in Friendly Cooperation with Fellow-Workers'; XI, 'Good Americans are Loyal.'”

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