During these days of reflection on our nation’s founding, I’ve been pondering something St. Augustine noted in the greatest of his works. He said that a state not governed by justice is no more than a gang of thieves. Augustine wrote those words in The City of God — a book that deliberately contrasts the earthly city, the City of Man, with God’s heavenly city, our true destiny and home, the New Jerusalem.

In the mind of Augustine, Christians were made for the City of God, but we pass through the City of Man on the pilgrimage of our lives. There is no utopia in this world. We can never have perfect justice in the earthly city because of sin. But we can make the world around us better or worse by what we do and how we live as “resident aliens” in the City of Man.

That includes how we shape the character of our shared political life. We ennoble it with our virtues or degrade it with our poisons.

Augustine has always had a very deep influence on me because he was a great writer, a great scholar, and a great model for bishops. But Augustine moves the hearts of so many people — despite his skepticism about the world and our flawed human nature — because he understood how to love.

In his great book of conversion, The Confessions, he wrote that “my weight is my love.” My weight is my love. It’s one of his most famous lines, but many of us are confused when we hear it for the first time. We need to listen to Augustine’s words in context, as he speaks to God:

“The body by its own weight,” Augustine writes, “gravitates toward its own place. Weight goes not downward only, but to its own place. Fire tends upward, a stone downward. They are propelled by their own weights, they seek their own places. ... My weight is my love; by it am I borne wherever I am borne. By Your gift we are inflamed, and are borne upward; we wax hot inwardly, and go forward. We ascend Your ways that be in our heart, and sing a song of degrees; we glow inwardly with ... Your good fire, and we go, because we go upward to the peace of Jerusalem; for glad was I when they said unto me, Let us go into the house of the Lord. There has Your good pleasure placed us, that we may desire no other thing than to dwell there forever.”

For Augustine, the fire of our love carries us upward on its heat. The more we love, the higher we rise toward heaven. It’s a beautiful image.

But why is any of that important in today’s very practical here and now, as we celebrate America’s 250th birthday and prepare for yet another (and unavoidably ugly) midterm election?

Here’s why. In Dante’s Inferno, the lowest place in hell, the very bottom of the pit, is a lake of ice, not fire. Why ice? The reason for the ice comes directly from that famous line of St. Augustine: My weight is my love. Hell at its very worst is bitterly cold, savagely cold, because love is utterly absent. The soul is dragged down by the cold weight of its own anger and pride; its appetite for power; its need to punish the Other; its addiction to conflict, selfishness, treachery and hate.

Does any of that sound familiar, given our current political environment — the dishonesty, the extremism, the bombast and accusative spirit? If not, we’ve been asleep. And for the Christian citizen, sleep is not an option in a turbulent age.

My point is this: Nations, too, have weight. The “weight” of a nation is the love that animates, or fails to animate, its treatment of the poor, the elderly, the unborn child, the person with disabilities, the immigrant — and even those “misguided” people with whom we disagree.

We were made by God to receive love ourselves, and to show love to others. And by “love,” I don’t mean a shallow goodwill. I mean real love, love anchored in the truth about the human person and a passion for life-giving, honorable relationships and virtuous societies. That’s our purpose. That’s why we were created. And it has intensely practical consequences. We’re here to live a witness of faithful Christian love — not only in our personal lives, but in all our public actions, including every one of our social, economic, and political choices; how we think, serve, lead, and vote. Even when our faith is inconvenient. Especially when it has a cost.

Of course, pious words like the ones above change nothing unless they become actions. And it’s true: America at 250 can often seem — more than any time in its history — a mix of extraordinary light and alarming dark; hope and its opposite.

So where does that leave us on this July 4? Just here: We need to remember some simple facts. We’re not powerless. Our time here matters. What we do matters; it has consequences for our own eternity and all those around us. Our lives, gathered together as a people, will shape the future of America’s experiment in human dignity for better or worse.

The world begins to change when we change. So we need to be about that work.

Archbishop Charles J. Chaput, O.F.M. Cap., is the archbishop emeritus of Philadelphia and the author of Strangers in a Strange Land (Holt, 2017) and Things Worth Dying For (Holt, 2021).