I haven’t anything which could properly be termed a religion. My thoughts on religious subjects are matters of intellectual rather than emotional conviction. The nearest thing to a religious feeling I have, and, I believe, strong enough to justify calling it religious feeling, has to do with the United States of America. It is not a reasoned evaluation but an overpowering emotion. The land itself as well as the people, its culture in the broadest most vulgar sense, its history and its customs. I have no children and few close friends. I have no God. The only thing which always inspires in me a feeling of something much bigger and more important than myself, which calls up in me a yearning for self-sacrifice, is this country of ours. I know it is not logical—I presume that a mature man’s attachments should be for a set of principles rather than for a particular group or a certain stretch of soil. But I don’t feel that way. The green hills of New Jersey, the brown wastes of New Mexico, or the limestone bluffs of Missouri—the mere thought of them chokes me up. That is one reason why I travel so much—to see it and feel it. Every rolling word of the Constitution, and the bright, sharp, brave phrases of the Bill of Rights—they get me where I live. Our own music, whether it’s Yankee Doodle, or the Missouri Waltz, or our own bugle calls—it gets me.

ROBERT A. HEINLEIN,

letter to John W. Campbell, Jr.

January 20, 1942