Jerusalem is not about believing England is special. It’s about refusing to pretend it already is.
Blake’s opening question isn’t mystical and it isn’t historical. It’s deliberately absurd. Of course Christ didn’t walk on England’s hills. Blake is stripping away the comforting lie that holiness, virtue, or greatness can be inherited.
When he names the “dark satanic mills,” he isn’t attacking industry alone. He’s pointing at any system that turns people into parts, labour into numbers, and suffering into someone else’s problem. In Blake’s time it was factories. In ours it’s paperwork, markets, metrics, and polite indifference.
The song matters because it draws a hard line between loving the land and excusing the nation. You can admire England’s fields, towns, language, and history while still insisting that the country has work left to do. That tension is the whole song.
The “mental fight” is the refusal to settle. The sword is conscience. The goal is not glory, empire, or dominance, but a society that earns its own myths.
That is why Jerusalem sits where it does in English life. Sung at Last Night of the Proms, at rugby matches, and at moments of national pause, it doesn’t say “we are great.” It says “we are responsible.”
For an Englishman, Jerusalem is a reminder that patriotism isn’t comfort. It’s effort.
Not nostalgia, but standards.
Not pride in what England was, but pressure on what it ought to be.
If it ever becomes a song of self-congratulation, it stops being Jerusalem and turns into noise.
