A new poll by the American Culture & Faith Institute uncovered some interesting—and perhaps worrisome—trends when it comes to how Americans think they can properly support their country.

The study found that Americans think patriotism is generally in decline, but we can’t even agree on how to define it, let alone settle on whether it’s generally a good or bad thing.

For instance, believing that America should always come first, conservatives rated military service and protecting the American flag highly on the patriotism scale, while liberals did not.

Liberals largely embraced the idea that using nonviolent civil disobedience to overcome social injustice was a particularly patriotic act, while conservatives tended to be more lukewarm to that.

There was even a divide over which corporations and organizations are considered patriotic. Conservatives favored retailer Hobby Lobby, the National Rifle Association, and Chick-fil-A as patriotic, while liberals clearly leaned toward Starbucks, The New York Times, and Planned Parenthood.

It was perhaps no surprise that the National Football League, which has been plagued all season by controversy over national anthem protests by players, is viewed very differently by the American left and right.

Only 10 percent of conservatives labeled the NFL “very patriotic,” while 30 percent of liberals in the survey said it is.

If anything, the survey’s findings point to some of the most intense friction points in the culture wars.

That there are sharp political divisions in this country is nothing new. From the earliest days of the United States’ existence we have been fighting over what policies are most effective, who is fit to hold power, and what cultural norms will produce the best outcomes.

But if this poll and the general feeling of America in 2017 are any indication, our divisions are a bit deeper than they had been even up until quite recently.

If we can’t agree on what patriotism is, where are we going to find common ground?

Part of this trend undoubtedly flows from the powerful push by America’s elite institutions to move away from creating unity out of an incredibly diverse nation.

Instead, they aim to divide and elevate what are often the smallest distinctions among us.

America in the past was mostly devoted to celebrating its unity and its institutions designed to buttress our national identity. We were committed to forging this identity through our country’s timeless founding ideas, as well as our unique history.

Our culture now almost reverse-engineers that effort—both in rejecting our founding ideas as untrue or outdated, and abandoning our history as in many ways sordid and indefensible.

In place of a kind of unifying and expanding civic nationalism, we are left with the all-too-familiar squabbles over race, class, and gender.

That’s why battles over identity and patriotism are now so ferocious and seem worse than in the past.

A fundamental disagreement over what defines our country’s cornerstone ideas, along with polar opposite conceptions of how best to define identity, are creating unbridgeable fissures in our society—ones that many Americans desperately want to stitch back together.

Some liberals, like professor Mark Lilla at Columbia University, have pleaded for the left to re-embrace the kind of civic unity of the New Deal-era progressivism or face catastrophe.

“We must relearn how to speak to citizens as citizens and to frame our appeals for solidarity—including ones to benefit particular groups—in terms of principles that everyone can affirm,” Lilla said in a Wall Street Journal op-ed column.

He was mostly attacked or ignored by the intellectual left.

So the culture wars, and the wars over identity, will continue as many Americans grasp for leaders who can effectively re-create a concept of unity from the shattered and hostile factions of our republic.

This is almost impossible to do if, at the ground level, Americans have such a vastly different notion of what human nature is or define patriotism in radically different ways.

The American Culture & Faith Institute poll found that only 10 percent of conservatives consider themselves “culture warriors” as opposed to 22 percent of liberals.

If we are committed to reversing our country’s long-term problems, perhaps that needs to change.

Elections serve their purpose, but it’s clear that culture and outlook define our politics more than anything else. That battleground is more important than any temporary electoral victory or defeat.

COMMENTARY BY

Jarrett Stepman

Jarrett Stepman is an editor for The Daily Signal. Send an email to Jarrett. Twitter: @JarrettStepman.

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The Golden Globe Awards will be presented a week from Sunday; the Oscars on March 4. These star-studded and self-adulatory events are bound to be restrained by Hollywood’s year of scandal, and a friend in-the-know tells me she expects the celebrity presenters to redirect their anguish and frustration at – who else? – Donald Trump.

Meanwhile, there are 2017’s movies to be celebrated, and two – in my opinion, only two – stand out as truly praiseworthy. Whether or not either will receive a statuette, I neither know nor care.

The first is Christopher Nolan’s Dunkirk, which I reviewed here upon its release in July. The second is Joe Wright’s Darkest Hour, a November release, which – for various reasons – I was unable to watch until the other day. (But note: As of December 22, the film is now in wide re-release.) Both films are set in 1940 and both detail the crisis that befell Great Britain at the start of World War II.

Indeed, the evacuation of 300,000 British military personnel from the beaches of northern France, which was the sole subject of Mr. Nolan’s film, is the background for Mr. Wright’s tale of Winston Churchill’s first months as Great Britain’s Prime Minister.

Churchill makes a kind of cameo at the end of Dunkirk, when a soldier – saved from certain death by the famous flotilla of private yachts – reads Churchill’s speech to Commons in which he expresses hope (faint hope as he spoke) that the New World will come to rescue of the Old “in God’s good time.” That speech also ends Darkest Hour.

Gary Oldman

Dunkirk is a superb film. Darkest Hour, however, surpasses it, not in every way – not in its scope or visual power – but in one particular way: the performance of Gary Oldman as Churchill.

It has been said of some performances that an actor disappears into a role, and never has that been more true than here. There was only one moment in Darkest Hour – surprisingly, a straight-on shot – when I actually glimpsed Mr. Oldman’s face. It was wonderfully jarring. But I never detected Oldman in mannerism or voice. He simply is Winston Churchill, and this owes much to the brilliance of the makeup artists, led by Kazuhiro Tsuji, who transformed Oldman into Churchill. (Apparently, Oldman had to talk the 47-year-old Tsuji out of “retirement” to do the job.)

I’ve seen four of Joe Wright’s other films, each of which I liked, but none prepared me for the brilliance of his work in Darkest Hour. Great films may be about great men and great events, as this one is, but a film’s greatness rests on things not “great” in the grand sense, especially in evocations of character, often – in film (as in real life) – revealed in small moments, micro gestures, and other details, visual and audible. A fine director and a great actor discover these things together, which is why film is the most collaborative of all the arts.

But the truest measure of Mr. Wright’s skill – with the able assistance of screenwriter Anthony McCarten, who in turn had the able assistance of Churchill’s speeches and copious writings – is the way he creates a high level of tension in a story the end of which we all know well.

The drama of getting “our boys” off the beaches of Dunkirk before they are slaughtered by advancing German forces is actually a subplot in Darkest Hour, in which the greater drama and finer details are in its account of Churchill’s conflicts with key members of his War Cabinet, especially Neville Chamberlain (Ronald Pickup), whom Winston has just replaced as Prime Minister, and with the Foreign Minister, Viscount Halifax (Stephen Dillane), who share a belief that Britain’s only hope in this darkest hour is, ultimately, a negotiated settlement with Adolf Hitler.

One understands why these men sought, as Chamberlain had earlier described it, “peace in our time.” The Allies, which did not yet include the United States, were losing – and badly – and Churchill’s 1940 optimism seemed nearly delusional.

Gary Oldman as Winston Churchill

To watch Oldman being Churchill being all but crushed by the weight of German successes and Allied failures is to witness what may be the best performance of the 21st century so far. To later watch Oldman’s Churchill rise up from near despair to a more refined optimism, one that rallied the British people to be steadfast in the battle against one of history’s greatest evils, is to be moved to tears.

But, of course, I cry easily.

In a scene that may or not portray actual events, Churchill takes his case for steadfastness and fortitude to the people. At the end of my review of Dunkirk, I wrote: “Tom Hardy wins the war!” (Mr. Hardy plays an RAF pilot giving air support during the Dunkirk evacuation.) Watching the scene in Darkest Hour I’m referring to here (but won’t go into to save the reader the pleasure of watching it with no diminishment of its impact), I thought: Winston rides the Underground! And wins the war!

What does either of these great films have to do with our Catholic thing? Nothing directly connected to the faith. (There IS one brief scene in which some nuns are seen walking along a London street. Anglican Benedictines probably.) Yet Darkest Hour is truly a spiritual experience.

Aquinas asks (ST, Q.123): “Whether fortitude is a virtue?” It is. Then: “Whether fortitude excels among all other virtues?” It does. Why? Because, St. Thomas explains, “fear of the danger of death has the greatest power to make man recede from the good of reason.” The danger of death . . . or of defeat.

The Angelic Doctor concludes by quoting one of his favorite sources, Aristotle, who notes, “just and brave men are most beloved, because they are most useful in war and peace.”

That was Winston Churchill.

Brad Miner

Brad Miner is senior editor of The Catholic Thing, senior fellow of the Faith & Reason Institute, and Board Secretary of Aid to the Church In Need USA. He is a former Literary Editor of National Review. His new book, Sons of St. Patrick, written with George J. Marlin, is now on sale. The Compleat Gentleman, is available on audio.

RELATED VIDEO: The official trailer of “Darkest Hour.”

EDITORS NOTE: Mr. Oldman has received a Golden Globe nomination for his performance, but Darkest Hour did not receive a nomination as Best Drama nor did Mr. Wright in the director category. God willing, it will overcome its financial failure (budget: $30 million; receipts: $7.4 million) in its video releases. Darkest Hour is rated PG-13 (some rough language) and features fine supporting performances by Kristin Scott Thomas as Clementine Churchill and Lily James as Churchill’s secretary.

© 2017 The Catholic Thing. All rights reserved. For reprint rights, write to: info@frinstitute.org. The Catholic Thing is a forum for intelligent Catholic commentary. Opinions expressed by writers are solely their own.