Patriotism Has Been Hijacked...And I Brought the Receipts How Religion, Male Chauvinism, Guns, Immigration, and Political Control Got Stuffed Into a Word That Never Meant Any of Them

DISCLAIMER: Before You Get Your Patriotic Panties in a Bunch

You are completely free to love this article, hate it, screenshot it, complain about it, send it to your group chat, call me names, or dramatically announce that I am destroying America. Have fun. What you cannot do is argue documented history into becoming something else simply because the facts interfere with your preferred version of patriotism. The Declaration of Independence says what it says. The Constitution says what it says. The First Amendment says what it says. Historical records exist, dates exist, and dictionary definitions exist. This blog is not the Bible, so there is no need to spend the next two thousand years arguing over what somebody secretly meant. I brought the receipts. If those receipts piss you off, take the argument up with your beloved forefathers whom you supposedly revere so damn much. Some of them wrote the evidence.

Patriotism Has Been Hijacked... And I Brought the Receipts

How Religion, Male Chauvinism, Guns, Immigration, and Political Control Got Stuffed Into a Word That Never Meant Any of Them

Somewhere along the way, America turned “patriot” into a costume. Apparently, if you wave the right flag, own the right gun, vote for the right person, quote the right Bible verse, dislike the right immigrants, and yell “freedom” loudly enough, congratulations—you have achieved patriot status. Except there is one tiny problem with that definition: the dictionary didn’t get the memo.

Let’s start there because words actually mean things. Merriam-Webster defines a patriot as “one who loves and supports their country.” Patriotism is defined as “love for or devotion to one’s country.” Oxford definitions similarly center love, devotion, and vigorous support for one’s country. There is no gun requirement. No political-party requirement. No church-attendance requirement. No immigration position. No masculinity requirement. No requirement that you support a particular president, political movement, military action, religion, or interpretation of American culture. People have attached all kinds of baggage to patriotism that simply is not contained in the definition.

Now, if somebody wants to argue that being a patriot means supporting the interests of America, fine. Then let’s pull the Carfax on America and find out what this country actually claimed its interests were when it declared itself independent.

Before doing that, America’s origin story needs its own receipt. Europeans did not discover an empty continent patiently waiting for somebody to plant a flag in it. Indigenous nations had inhabited these lands for thousands of years. Black people were present in colonial North America long before American independence, both free and enslaved, and Spanish settlements and Hispanic communities existed across areas that later became the United States before the thirteen British colonies declared independence. So when I talk about America being “formed,” I am talking about the creation of the United States as a political nation. Human life, governments, communities and cultures existed on this land long before somebody decided to call part of it the United States of America. Now pull up July 4, 1776.

Two hundred and fifty years ago, the Continental Congress adopted the Declaration of Independence, primarily drafted by Thomas Jefferson. Its central argument was pretty damn straightforward: human beings possess rights that government does not simply hand them, governments exist to secure those rights, legitimate governmental power comes from the consent of the governed, and when government becomes destructive of those purposes, the people have the authority to alter or abolish it.

The famous language is right there: “Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” That is the receipt.

And before somebody reaches for the Second Amendment, leave it on the table for a minute. The Declaration of Independence does not say carrying a gun makes somebody patriotic. The Second Amendment came later as part of the Bill of Rights, ratified in 1791. It protects the right to keep and bear arms. That makes bearing arms a constitutional right within American law. It does not make owning or carrying a firearm the definition of patriotism. Freedom of speech is constitutionally protected too, yet nobody requires you to publish an editorial before receiving your Official American Patriot Badge.

You can love guns. You can hate guns. You can own twenty guns. You can own zero. Americans can argue about the meaning and limits of the Second Amendment until everybody needs a snack. None of that changes the dictionary definition of patriotism. A constitutional right and a prerequisite for loving your country are two completely different things.

Immigration gets even more interesting when somebody actually reads the Declaration instead of using it as patriotic home décor. Among the grievances against King George III was the accusation that he had attempted to prevent the population of the states by obstructing the naturalization of foreigners and refusing measures intended to encourage migration. Well, damn.

That does not mean Thomas Jefferson secretly wrote America’s immigration policy for 2026. Americans can debate border enforcement, asylum, visas, naturalization requirements, immigration levels and deportation policy. Those are legitimate policy arguments. What nobody gets to do honestly is point to the founding purpose of America and announce that rejecting foreigners is inherently patriotic. One of the complaints used to justify independence was that the king was interfering with foreigners becoming part of the developing country. Then there is religion, and this is where the whole conversation gets almost painfully ironic.

The United States emerged from a political world in which government and religion had been deeply intertwined. The Church of England had been established for more than two centuries by the time America declared independence, tracing its separation from papal authority to the reign of Henry VIII in the 1530s. England had spent generations wrestling with state religion, religious tests, persecution, compulsory religious conformity and struggles over who got to decide what people were supposed to believe. Different American colonies handled religion differently, and some colonies themselves maintained established churches. America did not instantly emerge as some perfectly secular liberty paradise. History is considerably messier than the bumper-sticker version.

What eventually emerged in American constitutional government, however, is unmistakable. The First Amendment says Congress shall make no law “respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.” Government does not get to establish religion for you, and government does not get to prevent you from practicing yours.

Jefferson went even further in the Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom. He argued against forcing people to support religious worship and against restricting civil rights because of religious belief. His position was that the human mind was created free and that coercion had no legitimate place in matters of faith.

So you can be Christian. Muslim. Jewish. Hindu. Buddhist. Pagan. Agnostic. Atheist. You can change religions. Leave religion. Return to religion. Believe something your parents think is ridiculous. Your conscience belongs to you. Religious liberty means you may practice your religion. It does not mean everybody else must practice your religion through legislation.

If your religion tells you not to do something, exercise your religious freedom and don’t do it. If your religion tells your neighbor not to do something, your neighbor still has constitutional rights. Your Bible is allowed in America. So is somebody else’s Quran. So is somebody else’s Torah. So is somebody’s decision to own none of them. The moment “I am free to believe this” becomes “therefore government should make you live according to it,” somebody has crossed from religious liberty into religious control.

America spent generations developing protections against that kind of government power, and now some people are trying to rebuild the damn cage while calling themselves patriots. You can decorate the cage red, white and blue. It is still a cage. And while we are pulling receipts, somebody explain to me when male chauvinism became patriotism, because I cannot find that shit in the Declaration either.

There is nothing patriotic about running over women. There is nothing patriotic about treating women as supporting characters in a country they helped build, populate, work, defend and sustain. There is nothing patriotic about demanding women surrender authority over their lives so somebody else can feel more masculine. That is not devotion to your country. That is devotion to a hierarchy that happens to benefit you.

I think these things absolutely belong in the same conversation because when patriotism gets tangled with a particular version of masculinity, religion and authority, “freedom” suddenly develops a funny little set of exceptions. Freedom for me to own what I want. Freedom for me to say what I want. Freedom for me to worship however I want. Freedom for me to decide what happens in my life. Then we get to women and suddenly the conversation becomes what she should be allowed to do, how she should dress, what role she should occupy, how sexually respectable she should be, whether she should submit, what sacrifices she owes, what happens during her pregnancy, and which decisions somebody else should be permitted to make for her. Apparently liberty came with a penis clause nobody bothered to print.

A country cannot spend five minutes calling women essential to the family and the next five treating their autonomy as negotiable. Women literally carry every new generation of a country into existence. Every president, preacher, soldier, senator, judge, businessman and self-proclaimed patriot who has ever strutted around explaining what women should do arrived here through the body of a woman. You do not have to worship women to comprehend the absurdity of claiming devotion to a country while holding contempt for the human beings through whom every generation of that country arrives.

I have said this before, and I will say it again: “If you call yourself patriotic but don’t revere the woman carrying your child, you’re a loaded gun filled with hate for women and a hunger for control. And guns like that don’t protect or grow a country; they TEAR through it.”

Somewhere along the way, some men managed to turn patriotism from devotion to country into a license to be shitty people while calling themselves its protectors. Dominate women and call it traditional values. Push somebody else’s religion through government and call it morality. Decide which Americans are sufficiently American and call it national pride. Treat immigrants as inherently suspect and call it patriotism. Treat disagreement as betrayal and call it loyalty. Then stand underneath a flag and assume the flag settles the argument. It doesn’t.

A flag cannot turn domination into liberty any more than a Bible can turn coercion into religious freedom. Patriotism cannot magically sanitize male chauvinism. If a man claims to love his country while degrading, controlling or diminishing half its population, then show me how that serves the country he supposedly loves. Show me the national interest. Show me the founding principle. Show me the damn receipt. Because I brought mine.

There is another receipt sitting right inside the Declaration that cannot be ignored. The men who approved language declaring that “all men are created equal” lived in a society that spectacularly failed to apply equality. Jefferson himself enslaved human beings. Women were excluded from political equality. Indigenous peoples were treated horrifically, including in the Declaration’s own language. Black Americans were denied the very liberty being proclaimed. The founding generation could articulate extraordinary principles while simultaneously refusing to extend those principles to enormous portions of the human population. I am not interested in sanitizing that history either. The principles were bigger than the men who wrote them.

That leaves America with a choice it has faced throughout its history: worship the founders as though they were flawless prophets or keep applying the principles they wrote until those principles reach the people the founders themselves excluded. I choose the principles. I do not need Thomas Jefferson to have been a perfect human being to recognize the power of saying that legitimate government derives its authority from the consent of the governed. Applying that principle more consistently than Jefferson did does not disrespect the Declaration. It takes the words more seriously than he sometimes did. And there is another historical irony hiding right underneath modern patriot culture: the original American Patriots were dissenters.

They challenged their government. They publicly listed its abuses. They rejected the authority of their king. They organized resistance. They declared that government ultimately answers to the governed. They committed what Britain considered rebellion and built an entire national mythology around having done it. So when did unquestioning obedience become patriotic?

Criticizing your government is not inherently unpatriotic. Protest is not inherently unpatriotic. Disagreeing with a president is not inherently unpatriotic. Refusing to adopt somebody else’s religion is not unpatriotic. Supporting immigrants is not unpatriotic. Owning no firearms is not unpatriotic. A woman refusing to surrender control of her life to a man is certainly not unpatriotic.

Patriotism is not Christianity. Patriotism is not Republicanism. Patriotism is not Democratic politics either. Patriotism is not gun ownership. Patriotism is not military worship. Patriotism is not hostility toward foreigners. Patriotism is not male dominance. Patriotism is not heterosexuality. Patriotism is not forcing women, families, gay people, nonbelievers, believers from another religion, immigrants, or anybody else into a lifestyle prescribed by somebody else’s theology or preferred social hierarchy. You are free to believe your way is the best way. Liberty means you do not automatically get to make it my way.

That is the part of modern patriotism I think has been thoroughly perverted. People have taken a word describing love and devotion toward one’s country and stuffed their personal ideology inside it. Then they use “patriot” as the reward for agreeing with them and “un-American” as the punishment for refusing. That is not a definition. That is marketing.

Two hundred and fifty years after the Declaration of Independence, Americans are still arguing over who gets to be free, whose freedom counts, which beliefs government should enforce, whose body government can regulate, who belongs here, who gets heard and who gets to decide what America supposedly stands for. So I went back to the receipts.

A patriot loves and supports their country. America’s foundational political documents place liberty, rights, consent of the governed and limitations on government power near the center of the American experiment. The Constitution protects religious exercise while prohibiting governmental establishment of religion. The Declaration complains about interference with naturalization and migration. The Bill of Rights protects bearing arms without declaring gun ownership a test of patriotism. And nowhere in any of that did I find a constitutional footnote saying women become less entitled to liberty whenever a man feels threatened by their independence. Funny how that works.

If you love America, love its people enough to let them be Americans without requiring them to become copies of you. Your freedom does not become more American when somebody else loses theirs. Your religion does not become more sacred when government forces somebody else to obey it. Your masculinity does not become more powerful when a woman becomes smaller. And your flag does not magically turn control into patriotism. Maybe America does not need more people announcing how patriotic they are.

Maybe it needs more people who actually know what the damn word means.

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