Abstract
The tension between patriotism and religious identity is an acute issue for Chinese Christianity. This chapter reconsiders patriotism from an inter-disciplinary and contextual perspective. It starts with a survey of the academic studies of patriotism from the perspectives of biological and cultural evolution, with a contextual analysis of the problem of patriotism in contemporary China, particularly Hong Kong. Based on the above survey and analysis, together with a review of patriotism from a Christian theological perspective, this chapter concludes with several suggestions concerning whether and how a Chinese Christian may love his/her country. There are several characteristics to this love: free and resistant to hegemony; with criticism and forgiveness; participation in diaspora; universal rather than exclusive; and with proper order.
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Notes
- 1.
Zhongguo Jidu jiao san zi ai guo yun dong wei yuan hui [41].
- 2.
- 3.
The Oxford English Dictionary, 2nd ed. (1989), s.vv. ‘patriot’, ‘patriotism’.
- 4.
Darwin [5].
- 5.
- 6.
See: Wilson [37].
- 7.
Flescher and Worthen [8].
- 8.
Richerson and Boyd [29].
- 9.
de Waal [35].
- 10.
- 11.
Troeltsch [34, pp. 161–163].
- 12.
Baker [1].
- 13.
Parekh [28].
- 14.
Parekh [28, p. 240].
- 15.
Maclear [22].
- 16.
Jenks [13].
- 17.
Baker [1, pp. 252–288].
- 18.
See: Beck [2].
- 19.
Nussbaum [24].
- 20.
Nussbaum [25].
- 21.
See: Parekh [28, pp. 56–79, 239–258].
- 22.
See: Fairbrother [7].
- 23.
Epistula ad Diognetum 5.5 [6].
- 24.
Winter [39].
- 25.
Oberman [26].
- 26.
- 27.
Lewis [15].
- 28.
Ibid., p. 28.
- 29.
Niebuhr [23].
- 30.
Long and Sadd [21].
- 31.
Long and Sadd [20, p. 3].
- 32.
Jenson [14, pp. 147–148].
- 33.
Weber [36, pp. 238–239].
- 34.
Wink [38, p. 22].
- 35.
Tillich [33].
- 36.
Tillich [33, p. 17].
- 37.
Tillich [33, pp. 27–51].
- 38.
Lai [16].
- 39.
See further: Oord [27].
- 40.
See: Schindler [31].
- 41.
Lai and Tao [18] (in Chinese with abstract in English).
- 42.
See: Lai and Tao [17, pp. 183–214 at 197–205] (in Chinese with abstract in English).
- 43.
Hinze [12, p. 134].
- 44.
This essay is a substantially abridged and revised English version of a chapter of my book in Chinese: Lai [19].
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Lai, Pc. (2020). Christianity and Patriotism: An Inter-disciplinary and Contextual Reflection. In: Xie, Z., Kollontai, P., Kim, S. (eds) Human Dignity, Human Rights, and Social Justice. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-5081-2_7
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