The citizens of the Kingdom of God should be patriots in the highest sense, loving the world by loving those in the nation in which they live because that government was ordained by God to preserve order and promote justice. Perhaps this is why John Adams wrote that a patriot must be “a religious man.” Christians understand that the phrase “a nation under God” not as a license for blind nationalism or racial superiority but as a humbling acknowledgment that all people live under the judgment of God.
Christian patriots spend more time washing feet than waving flags. Ideally, flags should not even be thought of as symbols of military and economic might, but of the common good of the specific people a sovereign God has called them to serve, (pg. 285).