EXCLUSIVE | Michael Knowles: Faith and patriotism are natural allies in American life

Conservative commentator and bestselling author Michael Knowles told Zeale News in an exclusive June 13 interview that faith and patriotism are not competing loyalties but complementary obligations rooted in the same source: love of God, family, and country.

Speaking with Zeale News during CatholicVote's America 250 celebration in La Crosse, Wisconsin, Knowles reflected on the relationship between spiritual and civic life, arguing that religion cannot be separated from public life and that healthy societies depend on moral truths informed by faith. He also discussed the recent consecration of the United States to the Sacred Heart of Jesus, calling it a significant moment in the nation's spiritual history and a reminder of God's providence throughout the American story.

In the interview, Knowles explains why faith and patriotism belong together, how Catholics can live out those principles in daily life, and why he sees renewed public devotion to the Sacred Heart as a hopeful sign for the country's future.

Zeale News: In your view, how do faith and patriotism intersect?

Knowles: Faith and patriotism, and family, as a matter of fact, all intersect because patriotism is just an extension of filial piety. So it’s just the natural conclusion of the love that you have for your own family. We also know that the civil authority is here for our own good. God actually provides the civil authority for us because we’re social creatures and we’re intended to live in community with one another, and actually living in a well-ordered community is a derivative of the natural law. So these things all go together. 

It’s not that, as some flavors of religion would have it, it’s not that the government is somehow opposed to our faith. It’s not that we’re all supposed to go live as the Desert Fathers out there in the wilderness. I don’t think I’d survive very long. These things all go together: We have a temporal authority, a temporal power that we listen to, and we also have a spiritual authority. God gives us these two powers for our good, to lead us toward our natural ends and ultimately to our supernatural ends. The more that they can work together and the more that the temporal can be illuminated by the spiritual light, the better.

Zeale News: How can Catholics bring this to bear in their own lives?

Knowles: You have to live in a society that follows God, and you need to make sure your religion encompasses the reality of life, the reality of temporal life. Some people want to keep things separate, want to compartmentalize their politics and their religion. You can, of course, never do that. You even hear sometimes that sometimes when  a president and pope get into a little bit of a tiff, as occasionally happens. This has been going back to the 5th Century at least. Pope Gelasius writing to Emperor Anastasius. 

There’s always going to be a little bit of tension there, but you can’t just tell a pope or a president to stay in their lane because while it is true there are particular competencies of the political power and of the spiritual authority, they overlap. And they overlap because the pope leads a flock that lives in the world. And the political powers need recourse to religion because they need a moral understanding and they need moral authority in order to legislate. So these two are either going to be working at odds, or they’re going to be working together. And it seems to me a better idea to have them work together.

Zeale News: There have been a lot of different faith groups, first with the USCCB and yesterday with Cardinal Burke, who have consecrated the nation to our Sacred Heart. Can you talk a little bit about the importance of that and why it's such a key moment in our history?

Knowles: That was a very welcome turn of events that just recently happened, and all the more delightful that the President would acknowledge this from the White House. You know, I think the arch-Protestant founding fathers and early settlers to our nation might be turning in their graves at all this “popery” that's coming out of the White House. 

But one, this was actually predicted by Alexei de Tocqueville, who was one of the great observers of early American democracy. Two, it's very spiritually important, you know, and this all unfolds in the scope of Providence, but, if our Lord could take even a rather Protestant country, such as ours, and now we have proclamations about the Feast of the Sacred Heart…there's there certainly is no limit to what he can do. 

But you even see the seeds … forget about Tocqueville for a second. You can see the seeds in those earliest moments, because I've got this very Catholic side that came over with the Irish and the Italians, but I do have a little bit of a WASP (White Anglo-Saxon Protestant) family too, that came over on the Mayflower, that's what my cigar company is named after, that part of my family on the Mayflower. And when the Pilgrims on the Mayflower landed, and these are arch, arch Protestants. But they have a real sense for God's sovereignty and providence over history. They get off on the shores, they step out, and what happens? 

A Native American comes out and says, "Hello, Englishman.” He greets them in English, and after him a second native comes, speaking basically the king's English. This is Squanto, and he was talking to them about the streets of London, because he had been kidnapped, he had been brought to Europe, he was sprung free, it would appear, by Catholic monks. He then ends up in London, somehow comes back to America. His territory had been ravaged. He was taken prisoner at one point. He finds his way down, and after the Pilgrims are blown off course by hundreds of miles, they land exactly where this guy is, and a baptized Catholic walks out of the woods speaking the king's English. If that's not Providence, I don't know what is!

Knowles will be giving the keynote address at the Zeale for America 250 Rally. To watch the Zeale for America 250 prayer rally, sign up for the livestream here.