Okay, so you call yourself a patriot. But what exactly do you think that word means?

Is it the patriotism that says, “My country, right or wrong?” Is it the patriotism that says, Might makes right? Is it the patriotism of Samuel Johnson who defined it as “the last refuge of the scoundrel?”

Is it the patriotism of the 16th century Protestant “reformers” who believed that every leader of any “Christian” nation was ordained by God, no matter how much that leader promoted the satanic mass slaughter of fellow children of God, and, therefore, Christians were to be unconditionally obedient to that leader? (See Psalm 137.)

Or are you the type of patriot that loves your country so much that you won’t let tyrants or the super-rich or the mega-corporations take it over out of their greed for more power and wealth? Are you the type of patriot that is willing to have a lover’s quarrel with your beloved country that may be temporarily under the control of those that are close to being indicted as international war criminals?

In order to find out which type of patriot you might be, you should read the following “hypothetical” situation; and then you can judge for yourself.

Suppose you are a white, God-fearing, church-going citizen in a country that prided itself on its inventiveness, its literacy, its art, its culture, its glory in past wars and its superpower status, and suppose you saw your democratic institutions and the human rights of your neighbors being degraded by the lawmakers of your nation.

Say that you saw a bunch of powerful legislators and corporations, who lied consistently to enrich themselves and who were obsessed with the desire to wage aggressive war. Say that they started to grab control of our country’s legislature, judiciary and military. Say these cunning politicians, with the support of ruthless financiers, gained control of the highest office in the land -- without winning the majority vote in any fair election -- and started taking away, in rapid succession, the rights of many of its minority citizens, declaring left-wing peacemakers traitors, purging anti-fascists and other resistance groups from their positions of power, eviscerating its democratic institutions, silencing the “liberal” sectors of the press, working to weaken and eventually violently destroy all political opposition, censoring or usurping the open-minded media and marginalizing and silencing the artists, the poets, the writers and the creative thinkers.

You would be in 1930s Germany and the tyrants would have been Adolf Hitler’s cunning henchmen. And what would you have done in that situation?

If you were an average white, affluent, employed citizen, with all the privilege and power granted to you by that majority status, you would have said virtually nothing in opposition, even as the rights of the Nazis targeted minority groups were legally being taken away, disappearing into the gulag of prison and mental institutions.

As an average Bible-believing Christian, you would probably have obeyed your German war-supporting bishops or pastors, almost all of whom had pledged a solemn oath of loyalty to the Fuhrer, duty-bound to follow him instead of their “Lord and Savior,” the nonviolent Jesus of Nazareth. Because of an out-of-context single passage in the Epistle to the Romans you, as an obedient German Christian would have been inclined to obey St. Paul and therefore the existing rulers in Berlin in the time of crisis rather than courageously and faithfully following Jesus, who forbade homicidal violence, said that all are equal in the eyes of God and that the followers should love -- instead of kill -- their enemies.

If you were an average white lawyer, physician or psychiatrist, you would have joined the Nazi Party, for doing otherwise would have jeopardized your practice. And you would have kept your mouth shut when witnessing the anguish of your Jewish, Slavic, Gypsy, socialist, liberal, or gay clients as they were forced to march toward -- and disappear into -- the concentrations camps and gas chambers.

But the question remains -- would you have been a good patriot? Or would you have been on the wrong side of justice by being obedient to the Fuhrer (“Leader”) and to the cloth flag (swastika) that symbolized his rule?

Knowing that any German citizen seen helping the “enemies of the state” was guilty of treason, on whose side would any of us have stood? Would we have taken the side of the innocents -- those oppressed or outcast -- or would we have stood with the fascists?

Knowing that revering the flag was regarded as a crucial act of patriotism would we have saluted along with the victimizers or would we have resisted?

On whose side would we have been, the freedom-fighting groups (labeled “terrorists” by the State) who were courageously and patriotically trying to save their beloved nation from fascism, or would we have been on the “safe” side with the militarists and corporatists and right-wing politicians who looked like they were going to be the winners? Our answer will reveal our politics -- and our theology.

Now fast forward to America 2006 . . . but that shouldn’t be necessary, for the point has been made.