What is a country?
It feels like a dumb question, but try to answer in a sentence or less. You might find the words, but does that sentence still feel like less than it should?
That’s because the word “country” is defined as much by our feelings and understanding of our own country as it is by the dictionary.
For many, for years, “country” meant “the land,” much like in the countryside or in our parlance: “This is my cousin. He’s visiting the city from his small town out in the country.” In this usage, we equate “country” with rural and even undeveloped: “Past the highway is the country. It’s just open land.”
For others, “country” is summed up in the people, the citizens, the countrymen with whom we feel a sense of common history and purpose.
But both of these definitions are more about feeling than fact. The land existed before the country, and will survive long after it falls. The people may feel a sense of commonality, but absent an extremely small, close-knit population, the people of a country rarely have a realistic sense of what their countryman or countrywomen at the opposite side of the land thinks or feels should be their common purpose, common history notwithstanding.
This is even more true of my country, the United States of America. We are not a land. At our founding, our total territory was less than a quarter of what it is today. We are not a people but a multitude of peoples descended from the multitudes of fathers and mothers who made us, some having been displaced by conquest, some having been brought here by force, and others having dared it all to breathe free, to strike it rich, or to just try something new.
This is why our country has been best defined, over the years, not as land or as people but by law.
Our country, such as it is, is defined by the Declaration of Independence, by the Constitution and the Bill of Rights. These are our founding documents, our national scripture—not because they are perfect or divinely inspired, neither or which is true, but because they are our connective tissue, the spirit that binds us, and the authoritative source for our faith in the American experiment, the standard by which we are to weigh every policy and every promise to determine its righteousness, its constitutionality.
I would apologize for the religious metaphor, but it’s my religious perspective that helps me to see this more clearly. I am bound to my Christian brothers and sisters by the Spirit of God, and we look to the Bible to help us resolve disputes and find common grace and common ground. It’s not our culture, language, or geography that binds us together. Truly, our connection transcends all that.
And so, if we can consider all of that introductory, I’ll begin my deeper point: No one can save the country outside the law. The law is the country. It’s all we have, imperfect though it is. To go outside it in an attempt to change the country is to engage in a revolutionary effort, akin to an attack fomented by outside agitators.
To return to a Christian analogy, Jesus came under the law, to fulfill the law and thereby save us from consequences of our violation of the law. No political official can step outside the law to save the law, least of all those who have sworn to preserve, protect, and defend that law.
“What about civil disobedience?” you might ask, and it’s a fair question.
Civil disobedience is the method of protest in which the oppressed, the disenfranchised, the out-of-power group or individual refuses to obey an unjust law due to a lack of recourse. This is not a method available to someone in power, as they are not out-of-power and have all manner of recourse.
I have a distinct but limited memory of a TV promo for a special news report that aired when I was young, likely seven or eight years old. I was watching TV in our basement and my father was standing behind me. The TV was showing some b-roll that I cannot remember, but the answer said, “The city that was saved through sin.” I still have no idea what was meant by that phrase, but I distinctly remember my father scoffing at it, telling me that sin can never save anyone, never make anything better.
Wise words, Dad.
So I will end this with a paraphrase of my father’s wisdom: breaking the law will not save a country; it won’t make anything better.