Faith & Spirit Quote by David O. McKay

There is a missionary audacity in McKay’s phrasing: not “encourage” or “teach,” but “instilled” - as if patriotism were a necessary nutrient, best delivered early and decisively. Coming from a clergyman, the verb carries an almost sacramental charge. Education becomes a kind of civic catechism, with the teacher cast as officiant, shaping not just the mind but “the soul.” That single word yokes national loyalty to moral identity, making dissent feel less like a political disagreement than a spiritual deficiency.

Invoking Patrick Henry is a shrewd shortcut. Henry isn’t cited for policy but for heat - the theatrical, clean-edged absolutism of “Give me liberty or give me death.” McKay isn’t asking students to study the Revolution’s compromises; he’s asking them to feel a usable intensity. “Patriotic fervor” is emotion elevated to a virtue, and it signals a preference for conviction over complexity.

The context matters: McKay lived through two world wars, the Great Depression, and the Cold War - decades when American unity was treated as survival technology and “education” was frequently imagined as a frontline institution. His line reads as a rebuttal to perceived softness: cosmopolitanism, secularism, ideological drift. The subtext is anxiety about loyalties competing for young people’s allegiance.

It also reveals a tension that still feels current. When patriotism is framed as something to be implanted in the soul, it stops being love of country and starts looking like inoculation against critique. McKay’s sentence thrills on purpose; it also tells you what it’s trying to pre-empt.