“This country can only be loved with a broken heart.”

These poignant words were spoken six years ago on the 75th anniversary of the end of World War II in Europe. They came from the mouth of Frank-Walter Steinmeier, the president of Germany.

He acknowledged his country’s “fractured past, with responsibility for the murdering of millions and the suffering of millions. That breaks our hearts to this day.”

I’ve reflected on and quoted the German president’s words over the past few years while teaching world and U.S. history to undergraduates at a Catholic college in Brooklyn, N.Y.

I have urged my students to think of their own encounter with our nation’s often-painful, sometimes-inspiring past and present as carrying on what William Sloan Coffin called “a lover’s quarrel with their country, a reflection of God’s lover’s quarrel with the world.” The contrast between our ideals and our deeds is impossible to deny and hard to face without eyes that fill with tears.

As Anabaptists in the United States ready ourselves for the nation’s celebration of the 250th anniversary of our Declaration of Independence, we should do so with broken hearts.

And, as “good patriots” — in Coffin’s words — we should carry on a lover’s quarrel with our nation’s past and present, not letting ourselves become “uncritical lovers” or “loveless critics.”

While our primary citizenship is not to an earthly realm (Philippians 3:20), an honest patriotism means holding dual citizenship: being part of our country and making it as good as we can, within the boundaries of our own convictions.

Parents, husbands, wives, teachers, New York Mets fans — all find themselves having to love and somehow carry on with a broken heart at one point or another. A heart that hurts is indeed a heart that works.

But should we even love our country in the first place?

If we look for biblical mandates for whom to love, we find commands to love God with all our heart, soul and mind, our neighbor as ourselves, our enemies, the stranger, a spouse.

We find no command to love a country, partly because the concept of patriotism as a passionate attachment to one’s land is a modern one. Yet we find hints of it in the Hebrew exiles in Babylon weeping over the loss of Zion (Psalm 137) and in Jesus’ weeping over a Jerusalem soon to be destroyed (Luke 19:41-44).

Let us be honest: The part of the Americas that would start to become the United States of America in 1776 has been very good to Mennonites — giving us reasons, if not to love, at least to appreciate it. Maybe even to weep over it, if its current self-destructive path continues.

Mennonites emigrating from Swiss and German lands in Europe to Quaker Pennsylvania in the early 18th century found much to be thankful for. For one, they were recruited to one of only two colonies (Rhode Island was the other) where religious freedom was rooted in principle rather than expediency. They would be free to practice their faith without fear of persecution.

Second, with generous aid from Dutch Mennonites for their Atlantic crossing, they came as part of the one-quarter of colonial immigrants who owned their own labor. The remaining 75% were enslaved, indentured or convicts. Mennonites were immediately free to work for themselves, to buy land on favorable terms and to prosper in ways not open to most others arriving on these shores.

Third, Mennonites were settling in the only British colony in which a policy of friendly collaboration with the original inhabitants was at least being attempted. Dispossessed Native Americans received supposedly just prices for their land and were encouraged to stay on the frontier of the colony. This fragile equilibrium would collapse as the pressure of the White population grew, surging beyond the limits of the Pennsylvania colony and leading to Quaker renunciation of political rule by the mid-1750s.

When the Declaration of Independence was issued in 1776, followed by war, Mennonites were among the 35% of the population that tried to remain neutral. Though not fervent Loyalists, they were reluctant to renounce allegiance to the British monarch who had chartered the colony they now lived in. Furthermore, their pacifist convictions prevented them from taking up arms in the struggle that the 40% of the population known as Patriots were ready to actively support.

(The areas where Mennonites lived were spared the back-and-forth shifting of lines between Loyalists and Patriots of the kind that would traumatize the Mennonite colonies in Russian-ruled Ukraine after World War I and lead to the creation of self-defense forces.)

By 1776 the template was set for much of the subsequent history of Swiss- and German-origin Anabaptists, augmented by later cohorts of immigrants settling in the Midwest and on the Plains, in the expanding, imperial United States of America over the next 250 years: enjoyment of religious freedom and prosperity through land and business ownership while keeping as much distance as possible from violent expressions of patriotic nationalism.

Everyone will find their own reasons for loving their country with a broken heart. In 2026, I find three reasons for doing so.

First is the recognition that many of the advantages European Mennonite immigrants enjoyed have not been open to other immigrants. These benefits often came at the expense of Native Americans, enslaved African Americans and other non-White peoples — some of whom we now count among our Anabaptist siblings.

White Americans have benefited from a political and economic system that routinely has denied equality and justice to others. Further, we now live under political leadership that wants to deny, with a hardened heart, that there is anything worth crying over from this past and that believes White Christian nationalism is our path forward.

The second reason for tears is the terrible irony of marking the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of the Independence from the rule of a British (constitutional) monarch at a time when the current American president imagines himself nothing less than an absolute monarch. If the relatively mild and distant rule of George III sparked a revolt 250 years ago, the er­ratic, autocratic home rule of Donald I is surely leading to some kind of uprising — peaceful and at the ballot box, it is to be hoped.

Finally, I lament that the “decent respect to the opinions of mankind” — to which the authors of the Declaration of Independence addressed their ­appeal — has been jettisoned by political lead­ership that, under the slogan of “America First,” bullies other nations, including our allies, with no attempt to articulate a vision for the world in which views and interests other than our own matter. We have a president turning our powerful nation into a rogue actor without friends or respect beyond our borders.

“Nothing is as whole as a broken heart,” Abraham Heschel once said. It is only with a broken yet whole heart that this country can be loved.

J Robert Charles of Brooklyn, N.Y., is a member of Manhattan Mennonite Fellowship. He teaches history and politics at St. Francis College in Brooklyn.