Gordon S. Wood :
For us Americans, the words of the Declaration have become central to our sense of nationhood. Because the United States is composed of so many immigrants and so many different races and ethnicities, we can never assume our identity as a matter of course. The nation has had to be invented. At the end of the Declaration, the members of the Continental Congress could only “mutually pledge to each other our Lives, our Fortunes, and our sacred Honor.” There was nothing else but themselves that they could dedicate themselves to—no patria, no fatherland, no nation as yet. In comparison with the 235 year-old United States, many states in the world today are new, some of them created within fairly recent past. Yet many of these states, new as they may be, are under-girded by peoples who had a pre-existing sense of their ethnicity, their nationality. In the case of the United States, the process was reversed: We Americans were a state before we were a nation, and much of our history has been an effort to define that nationality.
Akim Reinhardt on patriotism:
As I’ve written elsewhere, I have never been one to make a show out of patriotism. It makes me uneasy. And much of that attitude I inherited from my father, which is perhaps ironic because in many ways he fits the profile of someone who would be likely to beat his chest while waving a flag. ... For my father, reality is streaked with a deep pride that comes from many generations of living in, believing in, and fighting and dying for the United States of America. What that has instilled within him is a quiet confidence about the nation, as opposed to an insecurity that needs to frequently and publicly assert itself.
I understand and sympathize. Who was it who said religion should be worn inside like underwear not outside on one's sleeve? I don't like public displays of religion but I actually enjoy public displays of patriotism even if the Declaration is my religion.