via the University of Notre Dame:

In a political landscape where many Americans believe political discourse has become unproductive, stressful, and disrespectful, where do we find reason for hope?

Robert Cardinal McElroy joined Notre Dame President Rev. Robert A. Dowd, C.S.C., for a timely conversation that will explore the roots of our societal divides and offer strategies to move forward together toward a more unified future.

Here are some key arguments made by Cardinal McElroy:

• The ties that bind us are not ties of blood or ethnicity.
• We are bound together by the aspirations of our founders.
• What binds us is the aspiration to freedom, human dignity, care for all, the rights of all, the empowerment of all, democratic rights.
• We’re proud to be Americans because of what our country aspires to be and to do.
• That’s a very faith-filled approach to patriotism, in terms of the Catholic understanding.
• It is a self-reforming vision, which calls us always to try to seek those values evermore deeply in the age in which we live.

In 2021, Millennial editor Robert Christian wrote an article at NCR on these competing notions of national identity:

On the one hand, you have civic nationalism, rooted in universal commitments — the belief that all persons are created equal and endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights. To be an American means to be devoted to those rights, to freedom, to democracy.

The foundation for this devotion could be the philosophical liberalism or republicanism of the Founders, but it can also be found in the personalist commitments at the heart of the Catholic faith: our belief in the equal dignity and worth of each person, endorsement of universal human rights, preference for resolving conflict peacefully, and recognition of people’s right to participate in their own government….

At the same time, there has been a competing nationalist vision that has challenged this civic nationalism throughout the country’s history. It is an ethnic nationalism that is dedicated to the preservation and strengthening of white supremacy. And it is antithetical to authentic Christianity, though many American Christians have embraced it and distorted the Christian faith in order to defend it.