My Letter to the “I’m Not Proud” Crowd

Why Rejecting Patriotism Won’t Heal What’s Broken

This past July 4th stood out to me. Not for the fireworks or flag-waving, but for what those displays revealed. In one crowd, I saw an almost defiant joy, a kind of pride that had clearly been stored up for years. For many of them, being proud to be an American wasn’t just about gratitude. It was about relief. They felt they had been told for too long that pride in their country was something shameful, something to be qualified, something for which to apologize. They’d been scolded for celebrating the Founders, accused for the sins of their ancestors, shamed for traditions they didn’t invent and wouldn’t repeat. And now, in this moment, their pride had returned—not quietly, but loudly and unapologetically. It was a kind of backlash, a triumphalism that seemed to say, “We’re done saying sorry.”

And in another crowd, I saw something equally familiar but pointed in the opposite direction. People who felt it was their duty— moral, ethical, sometimes even spiritual, to reject national pride altogether. People who believed that associating too closely with American identity and pride meant cosigning the actions of the current regime, or the country’s past sins, or the injustices they believe are still playing out in immigration courts and prison cells and welfare offices. For some, loving America too openly felt like a betrayal of those suffering. For others, it was simply a matter of principle: if they were going to push for change, they could not be seen as endorsing the nation they were trying to transform.

What struck me most wasn’t just the divide between these groups, but the reality that one was allowing themselves to be pushed outside the tent. The flag-wavers, belligerent as they may be and as disillusioned as they had become the last 4 years, still wanted to lay claim to America. They believe in its exceptionalism, and they see themselves as the true gatekeepers of its promise. But the other group, in its rejection of any kind of national pride, has effectively forfeited the ground. And once you do that, once you declare yourself no longer proud to be part of the story, it becomes much harder to shape where that story goes next.

Because here’s what happens: when you reject the nation in total, your voice begins to sound like that of an outsider. Your critiques (no matter how valid) become easier to ignore. Those still inside the conversation can dismiss you as disconnected, disloyal, or uninterested in actually building something better. And that’s the real tragedy: some of the people most attuned to suffering, most passionate about change, have in many cases surrendered the very thing they need most to be heard—shared identity.

Don’t Step Outside the Tent

One of the worst outcomes of our current political polarization is that we’ve stopped believing it’s possible to love something and want to change it at the same time. We’ve come to think that critique equals rejection, and that pride equals blind loyalty. But that’s never been true—not in families, not in faith, not in friendship, and certainly not in a nation.

If you’ve ever tried to reform a church, or lead an organization through change, or raise a child, you know this already. Real change comes not from those who walk away, but from those who stay. From those who keep showing up. From those who are willing to say, “This isn’t good enough, but it’s still mine.” You can’t renovate a house you’ve moved out of. You can’t raise a child you’ve disowned. And you can’t shape a nation from which you’ve chosen to divorce yourself.

Critique from within is fundamentally different than critique from outside. It carries weight. It signals hope and belief. It tells the people around you that you’re not trying to tear the thing down, you’re trying to make it better. But when you say you’re not proud to be an American, you risk sounding like you’ve given up on the entire project. And people, especially Americans, don’t tend to take advice from those who sound like they don’t want to be part of the family anymore.

If You Stay in the Tent, You Can Shape the Future

This is where the stakes get real. If you choose to disown the identity of “American,” you refuse to share in the burden and beauty of the national story, and you make it easier for those in power to ignore you. They will say you’re not one of us. That you don’t care if the country succeeds. That your critiques are not corrections, they’re condemnations. And that makes them easier to dismiss. But that doesn’t have to be the case.

Because if you stay in the tent, if you say, “I’m proud of who we’ve been at our best, and I’m grieved by where we’ve failed”—then your voice rings differently. It carries credibility. It sounds like ownership. And a refusal to divorce from our shared identity is what gives reform its effective spine. The most powerful agents of change have always been those who loved something enough to confront it, from within. America’s history proves that.

We didn’t start off right— not by a long shot. We were born with contradictions so deep they nearly tore us apart. But we fought a war—against ourselves—to abolish slavery. We passed civil rights laws because the people inside the house demanded better. We created public schools, disability protections, voting rights, and religious liberty protections because reformers refused to walk away. They believed that America could become what it had promised to be.

That’s the kind of pride I’m talking about. Not a pride that ignores injustice, but one that insists we are worth improving.

We’ve Done Good Things Too—And You Know It

But also – let’s not pretend we can’t celebrate the good. Even those who feel alienated from the idea of American exceptionalism would be hard-pressed to deny the simple truth that we’ve given so much good to the world.

Americans give more money to charity than any other people on Earth—by a wide margin. Over $590 billion last year. That’s not including government aid. That’s individuals, families, churches, small businesses, foundations. As far as I can tell, more than half of all charitable dollars given globally originate from the United States.

We’ve resettled more refugees than any other nation. We invented the internet, pioneered air travel, and went to the moon. We fought a world war, twice, and then helped rebuild the very nations we defeated. We’ve created the companies that power the modern economy and the universities that educate half the globe. And no, that doesn’t mean we’re always right—but it does mean we’re not beyond redemption.

And somewhere deep down, we all know that. No one is actually embarrassed to be American. Not completely. That’s why people still come here. That’s why the line at the border doesn’t shrink. That’s why oppressed people in every part of the world still pray for U.S. intervention when their own governments turn on them. We still represent something. Not perfection, but possibility.

The last fifteen years, messy, loud, and bitter as they’ve been cannot damage our core. If anything, they prove how much this experiment still matters. If it didn’t, we wouldn’t be fighting so hard over it.

Renovation, Not Ruin

You don’t have to love everything about this country to be proud of it. In fact, you shouldn’t. But pride doesn’t mean pretense. It doesn’t mean saying we’ve arrived. It means saying we’re worth fighting for.

You don’t fix a nation by leaving it. You fix it by staying in the room. By challenging the assumptions. By reminding the others what the mission really was in the first place. And maybe more than anything, by refusing to cede the entire narrative to those who shout the loudest.

That’s the great mistake I see many thoughtful, justice-minded Americans making. They think that stepping away from pride is a form of moral clarity. But too often, it ends up being a form of political surrender. Because when you leave the conversation entirely, you leave it to those who are more than happy to define patriotism without you in it.

Let me speak directly here: we need you in the tent.

We need you to remind those who celebrate America’s greatness that greatness demands responsibility. We need you to name the suffering and the gaps and the betrayals of our ideals. We need your critiques to keep us honest. But we also need you to belong. Because when you claim your place in the story, when you insist on being both critical and committed, you make the story better.

And to those on the other side, the ones proudly waving the flag, quoting the Founders, and resisting every call to change, hear this too: you’re not better alone. Your story is real, but it isn’t complete. The best of your ideals, limited government, individual liberty, rule of law, require partners who will advocate for the working poor, for the voiceless, for immigrants and orphans and neighborhoods stuck in generational cycles of disadvantage. This isn’t about a watered down compromise for the sake of peace. It’s about a better path together than we can forge by ourselves apart. Not agreement on everything, but shared belief that this thing is still worth building. That this house, for all its cracks and drafts and decades of damage, still has good bones.

We don’t renovate what we don’t love. So come back in.
Not because everything is fixed, but because it’s not.
We cannot do it without you.