"In the imagination of the simple patriot the nation is not a society but Society. Though its values are relative they appear, from his naïve perspective, to be absolute . . . . The nation is always endowed with an aura of the sacred, which is one reason why religions, which claim universality, are so easily captured and tamed by national sentiment, religion and patriotism merging in the process."  --Reinhold Niebuhr, Moral Man and Immoral Society, 1936:96–97