Should Christians Be Patriots?

by Wang Yi

In a context in which Christians have been forced to either come under the Chinese government's oversight or face persecution, Wang Yi ponders what it means to be a Christian patriot who loves their country and strives for its betterment versus a nationalist who idolizes their nation.

Editor’s Note

Ryan Zhang is the Assistant Pastor at New City Presbyterian Church in Cincinnati, Ohio and the Translation Manager for China Partnership. He is also a Fellow at the Center for House Church Theology.

When the Apostle Paul writes in 1 Timothy 2 that “supplications, prayers, intercessions, and thanksgivings be made for all people, for kings and all who are in high positions,” it may seem like an innocent and politically neutral statement, but it was a drastic departure from the ancient Roman belief about their emperors. In ancient Rome, emperors were deemed as gods that people pray to, not simply another human being that Christians pray for. Far away in the east, the Chinese Confucian system shared a similar ideology. The emperor derived his legitimacy as the “Son of Heaven,” who represents Heaven to rule over the entire created order in the Middle Kingdom.

Since the founding of the People’s Republic of China in 1949, no Communist Party leader or president ever reclaimed to be a “Son of Heaven,” but the state has not given up control over Chinese peoples’ consciences and worship. The prosperity and strength of the nation are still considered to be the highest goals; Communist Party founders and leaders command (and sometimes demand) people’s reverence and loyalty. Every student in China, every Communist Party member, and even employees of many business sectors are required to go through “patriotic education.” Some of these patriotic lessons include touring Communist revolutionary heritage sites, paying respects at the tombs of fallen soldiers, and visiting and listening to local Party leaders. From a very young age, Chinese students are catechized to be a “patriot.”

But this type of patriotic education runs counter to belief in a higher King that reigns over the entire created world. If Jesus is Lord, then the emperor can’t be, and that should redefine what it means to be a “patriot.” Wang Yi is doing just that in this pastoral letter. Written in a debate format that echoes a Puritan teaching style, he is surgically carving out the often blurry boundary between healthy patriotism and idolatrous nationalism. In the absence of God and an absolute moral standard, there need be no distinction between patriotism and nationalism, because it would not be wrong to seek the glory of one’s nation as the highest good. But if true justice, righteousness, and holiness exist, then our role as patriots is to call out any unjust, unrighteous, and sinful practices of our nation, even if it tarnishes our nation’s image around the world.

Lest we believe that this is only a problem in China, we should examine our own current political climate in the West. While Chinese citizens are required to be loyal to the Party because there is no other option, some American citizens instead choose to be loyal to their political parties and leaders above all else. Whether it is required or chosen, Wang Yi gives a strong caution against such blind loyalty.

Wang Yi is currently serving a 9-year prison sentence for striving to redefine what it means to be a “patriot.” He gave his loyalty to God, not man, and he is paying a high price for it. In this pastoral letter, written on April 23, 2013, long before his arrest and incarceration, Wang tells his congregation, Early Rain Covenant Church, that if he were Daniel, “it would have been better for me to perish in the lion’s den. It would be better to be martyred.” Instead he is still living today, walking the way of the cross and exemplifying for us what it means to be a Christian patriot.

About the Author

Wang Yi is the founding pastor of Early Rain Covenant Church, a Calvinist house church in Chengdu. He is also a productive writer, editor, and social activist, and was a legal scholar at Chengdu University before he resigned to take up the pastorate. As of December 2019 he is serving a nine-year prison sentence for "inciting subversion of state.”

Should Christians Be Patriots?

Peace be to all beloved believers, whether they live in suffering or comfort.

Over the past two days, I have been writing down some thoughts on patriotism and nationalism. There are three contexts or reasons for these thoughts: one is my preaching on the book of Daniel, the second is my recent study of Christian conservatism, and the third is seeing the earthquake in Ya’an (1). The house church today has three dilemmas, just like Daniel did: first, under the pressure of totalitarianism, how to resist the idolatry of putting the state above everything; second, how to be faithful to an unjust political environment in the midst of the pain of persecution; and third, how to insist on the clarity of truth and yet face the complexity of this world.

One of the questions that greatly troubles me is: How could Daniel be faithful to the LORD through his allegiance to Babylon? To me, it would have been better to perish in the lion’s den. It would be better to be martyred. If you survive today, how will you live tomorrow? Why wasn’t Daniel schizophrenic, didn’t he need a psychiatrist? I think if it were me, I might as well have died. I even secretly thought that I might have a stronger character than Daniel.

Preservation

Patriotism is the preservation of the nation, and nationalism is the destruction of the nation. Patriotism is a war of self-defense, nationalism is a war of aggression. For the patriot, the country is the wife who has shared her husband’s hard lot; for the nationalist, the country is the sleeping beauty that has not yet awakened. For the former, opposing corrupt officials is like stopping adultery. For the latter, to love the country is like having a second wife. While healthy patriotism is compatible with faith, nationalism is an alternative to faith.

Terminal Disease

Patriotism is against destruction; nationalism wants to be the center of the world. Patriotism is against killing one's own sons and daughters; nationalism wants to destroy the enemy. Patriotism is love for one's neighbor, nationalism is hatred for those far away. Therefore, it is appropriate to call a person like Li Chengpeng a patriot, just as it is appropriate to call CCTV a nationalist mouthpiece (2, 3). Patriotism is providing a cure to the best of one’s ability, while nationalism is the terminal disease itself.

Peace

Christian patriotism is to seek peace for that city (Jer. 29:7). The desire is for the nation and the people to be subject to God and to enjoy peace, freedom, and justice. This is the responsibility of the local churches to the nation in which they are located. The church loves the nation, but it is not merely a national church. Just as a person needs to eat, but he is not just an eating machine. When love for the nation becomes an attribute of the church, love for the church is reduced to consuming the church. What could be more disheartening than when leaders above plunder the country while citizens below consume the church?

Community

The essence of patriotism is localism. The essence of nationalism is universalism. The passion of the patriot comes from the value of community and the local community itself. The passion of the nationalist comes from the giddiness of seeing his country on the world stage. It’s like someone who loves his wife because she is his wife, while another loves his wife because his wife wins beauty contests. In other words, healthy patriotism is the embodiment of “the Word became flesh,” while evil nationalism is the heresy of “the flesh became Word.”

Watchmen

There is no more simple and faithful patriotism than this: “First of all, then, I urge that supplications, prayers, intercessions, and thanksgivings be made for all people, for kings and all who are in high positions.” (4) An important result of the Reformation movement was the emergence of “national churches.” That is, the universal church was subordinated to the various national communities, which also became the organizational boundaries of the church. This means that God has established the churches on earth as watchmen over different nations.

Three-Self (5)

Missionaries in China ignored the relationship between the transcendent nature of faith and the local nature of the church. This is related to the interdenominational and low church view of modern missions that dominated missions in China, and the individualization of faith (6). The Three-Self Movement, on the other hand, was a nationalistic backlash that degenerated into totalitarianism. To this day, the official churches do not dare to break away from nationalism and manifest the transcendence of their faith, while the house churches are very reluctant to call themselves patriotic Christians.

Totalitarianism

The various forms of totalitarianism in the 20th century all stem from a pursuit of universalism. That is, the search for a universal human community. Why did God confuse people’s languages and set boundaries for all nations? Because God only authorized the gospel of His Son to remove those boundaries (7). There is only one kind of “imperialism” that is legitimate, and that is the imperialism of the gospel. Under the gospel, we are patriots and localists. Therefore, true patriotism demands that we oppose the universalist “Chinese dream.” (8)

Kingdom of Heaven

Rebuttal: Imperialism? Don’t you think the gospel is not an empire, but the Kingdom of Heaven? Answer: The characters “天国” literally mean the KINGDOM OF HEAVEN, which means the “empire” where God reigns. The general outline of world history is the struggle between God and emperor. A world without the gospel must be an imperialistic world. Only the “imperialism” of God can destroy the imperialism of all nations. The general outline of my spiritual life is this: Who is in charge of all my affairs, Christ or me? To believe in the Lord is to be conquered by the “imperialism” of Christ.

People

Rebuttal: Christians should not be patriotic; we are the people of the Kingdom of Heaven. Answer: Food is not our hope, but we love food. Heroic acts cannot give us salvation, but we praise these acts anyway. Houses will change, but we decorate our homes. There is no marriage in heaven, but we are devoted to our spouses until death. It is precisely because we do not belong to this world, that the poisonous melamine cannot diminish our gratitude for our food, and the corrupt government cannot weaken our loyalty to our country. (9)

Citizens

Rebuttal: Jeremiah even urged everyone to surrender to the enemy! (10) The earth is only temporary, so give allegiance to whomever you want.

Answer: Doesn’t surrendering to the enemy mean becoming a Babylonian citizen and giving political allegiance to Nebuchadnezzar? This means that if China had been annexed by Japan in the first place, the call of Christians would have been to love Japan and to seek peace for Japan. (11) Only a heavenly man could obey these words with tears, believing that serving a tyrant is also serving God; living in a foreign land is still living in the Father’s world. That is why Jeremiah was far more insufferable than Wang Yi, and Daniel was far more courageous than Jing Ke. (12)

Immigration

Rebuttal: I have a deep aversion to the word “patriotism.” If I can emigrate to Japan or North America, I don’t mind loving my country under the love of God.

Answer: God asks you to love your country here, but you want to love your country after you emigrate. Is it because God’s sovereignty is not as good in China as in Japan or America? No, it’s because it has hurt us here more than any other country. But this victim complex is precisely what idolatry is all about. If for the sake of the gospel, we still love our country despite all the miseries, then we are no longer prisoners of nationalism. Realizing this is the only way to see what the cross means specifically for us.

Obedience

The evils of totalitarianism and nationalism have robbed us of the power to love and to commit ourselves to a larger community. The gospel has therefore become a refuge for individualism and has nothing to do with the destiny of the community. In ancient societies, kings were the representatives of the state and politics. The Bible teaches us that even in pagan nations and cultures we are still to submit to the king and all the institutions, and to honor and pray for the king. Submission, reverence, and intercession are clearly the elements of love that God requires us to confer to the king.

Slave

In other words, the Bible promises that in a slave’s obedience to his master, there is obedience to God and to the sovereignty of God in his personal life. Therefore, a slave who submits to his master and intercedes for him is not a slave, but a free man. And a person who wants to change from slave to master is a true slave. The house churches have abandoned the idolatry of the state for the sake of the gospel in the recent decades. This is also my firm position of faith. But how do we next rebuild our love for this nation and its destiny for the sake of the gospel?

Country

We reject a Hobbesian or Hegelian conception of the state, but this does not mean that we reject all definitions of the state. (13) The biblical view of humanity has always been a collective view of humanity. In the Bible, the “nation” is the object of love, the object of calling, the subject of repentance, and the unit to be evangelized. In the Bible, the “king” is also a symbol of the nation, and when the Bible addresses our attitude toward kings, it addresses our attitude toward the nations.

Line of Defense

There is no prerequisite for love of country, for God even required Israel to submit to unjust Babylon and to serve under the yoke of Nebuchadnezzar. But there are limits to patriotism, which is why Daniel and his three friends disobeyed the king’s command. Our basic attitude toward the nation is one of obedience, respect, and intercession, even for regimes that are not legitimate. Our defense, on the other hand, is to disobey all royal commands that directly contradict Scripture. Both are the basic positions of the house church.

Judgment

Rewarding good and punishing evil are God’s requirements and accountability for the government, not our prerequisites for obedience to the government. Just as a husband’s self-sacrifice is not a prerequisite for a wife’s submission, so a wife’s submission is not a prerequisite for a husband’s self-sacrifice. Just as the New Testament requires slaves to submit to the institution of slavery, this does not mean that slavery is just, and we still hope and work for its abolition. We must admonish the government with the teachings of Scripture, even if it means going to jail. But we must know that God Himself has reserved the right to judge and has not left it to individual members of society to exercise.

The Cross

To paraphrase Mr. Zhao Xiao, we need “patriotism with a cross” today. (14) The communities in which we live are the neighbors that God has given us in the first place. And the community necessarily takes the form of a state (a political community). May your kingdom come, both universally and locally. Yes, China is my daily nightmare, but China is also the one to which I must commit myself in the gospel, which is what it means to have the patriotism of the cross.

—Wang Yi, the Lord’s servant who is interceding together with you for the king, 2013-04-23

Notes:

This is a 7.0 earthquake that took place on April 20, 2013 in Lushan County, Sichuan. The epicenter of the earthquake was in a small city of Ya’an, about 72 miles from Chengdu.
Li Chengpeng is a well-known reporter and social critic in China. In 2011 he announced that he would seek political office as an independent candidate in Chengdu. He rose to prominence for covering the corruption in China’s professional soccer league.
CCTV stands for "China Central Television." It is the national television broadcaster in China, established in 1958 as the Chinese Communist Party's national propaganda outlet. Its 50 channels broadcast a variety of programming to more than one billion viewers in six languages.
1 Timothy 2:1–2
The Three-Self Patriotic Movement, or the Three-Self churches are state-sanctioned Protestant churches in China. All Chinese house churches, including Wang Yi’s church in Chengdu, exist outside of the Three-self system, and are thereby considered illegal.
Modern mission movements in China, largely led by parachurch organizations, tend to focus on personal conversion and pietistic practices, thereby deemphasizing the importance of being part of a local church in their mission focus.
Wang implies that God used Babel to prevent humanistic universalism and that only the gospel of Jesus Christ creates the universal community established by God.
“Chinese dream” is a term coined by Xi Jinping in the opening of the Chinese National Museum in 2012 to describe the "great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation."
Melamine is a poisonous, tasteless, soluble chemical that was illegally added to baby formulas in China in 2008 to increase their protein content. This resulted in 54,000 infants being hospitalized for kidney stones and kidney diseases.
Jeremiah 27.
The Second Sino-Japanese War, also known as the War of Resistance Against Japanese Aggression, started on July 7, 1937 when Japanese soldiers crossed over the Marco Polo Bridge in Beijing. But as early as 1931, Japanese forces occupied much of northeast China in what was then known as Manchuria. The war lasted for eight years, with many Chinese cities destroyed and citizens slaughtered by Japanese occupying forces. It ended on September 2, 1945 when Japan surrendered to the Allied Forces at the end of World War II.
Jing Ke was an ancient Chinese warrior and assassin hired to kill King Zheng. The assassination attempt failed and King Zheng eventually became the first emperor of China (221 BC to 210 BC), also known as Qin Shi Huang.
Thomas Hobbes (17th century British philosopher) argued that individuals voluntarily consent to give up their natural freedom to obtain the benefits of political order (a social contract). Georg Hegel (18th century German philosopher) believed that the state is the culmination of the peoples' will and therefore they should be subordinate to it, which contributed to the development of fascism.
Zhao Xiao is a Chinese economist who has gained notoriety for arguing that the reform of the cross is the only solution to all the moral problems of the Chinese society and economy.

This article was originally a pastoral letter to Early Rain Covenant Church. This English edition, including the introduction and footnotes, are copyright © 2023 by the Center for House Church Theology.

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