Many of our leaders speak habitually of the nation and national character in cynical or critical language, as if denouncing the nation or their nationality were proof of their virtue and enlightened views. Nevertheless, we live in a world constituted by nations, or nation-states, and, until this cultural moment, nationalism was considered the preferred political arrangement—one subscribed to by the most generous and enlightened souls. Progressives like Woodrow Wilson and Franklin Roosevelt, conservatives like Theodore Roosevelt and Dwight Eisenhower, and civil rights heroes like Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King, Jr., to say nothing of overtly nationalist figures like David Ben Gurion and Nelson Mandela, all grounded their thoughts on a fundamental attachment to the nation and those with whom one shares a national community.
Nationalism remains the best possible hope for tempering our present tendencies towards the equal but opposite errors of tribalism and cosmopolitanism, as well as the best possible hope for grounding politics on our natural attachments without disregarding innate human dignity. While moderation is a virtue sung by few people today, nationalism proves to be an effective middle way between local biases and bloodless abstractions.
We are living in a world-historical moment, wherein each of us gets to witness the breakdown of the post-World War II order. Much ink has been spilled describing the characteristics of that order—liberal, democratic, international, commercial, egalitarian, and so on—but none of these words gets to the heart of the idea like Karl Popper’s concept of the “open society” does. In contrast to traditional societies that were closed off, or bounded, by religion, morality, language, local tradition, or national borders, the postwar period would be, for the first time, profoundly “open.” Society was to be purposefully indeterminate with regards to ends. Closed societies, in short, would give way to open borders, open markets, and open minds. The traditional polis, or city, would be replaced by the cosmopolis—the universal city.
The engine of this change, as R. R. Reno has argued in Return of the Strong Gods, was to be international commerce. Commercial relations based on mutual economic interest were expected to replace, or at least soften, our strong, natural commitments to religion, family, and nation. With traditional virtues thus weakened, the liberal virtues of toleration, openness, and skepticism could become a sort of universal moral code of a new international order.
However, after more than a half century of downplaying national borders and national character in favor of an international economic order, the election of Donald Trump to the U.S. presidency, the withdrawal of the United Kingdom from the European Union, and the rise of a nationalist Poland and Hungary all signified a rejection of the supposedly inevitable move towards an international or global “community.” While the postwar order proved lucrative for multinational corporations and urban-dwelling elites, it has been devastating to a certain subset of the population whose lives were upended—both in terms of their economic and social well-being. Although charmed by the prospect of affordable consumer goods, these people had no idea that the “open society” would prove a solvent for many of their local attachments and sources of meaning. Many are now turning back towards the nation as one possible source of purpose and grounding.
Nationalism Rightly Understood
Although there are many definitions of nationalism—most of which are unfortunately pejorative and bear the ugly stamp of partisan bias—one can say that nationalism is at the most fundamental level the belief that the nation is the best constitutive element of the political order. It is the belief that, of all the groups from which one might compose a political order—tribe, religious sect, identity group, or even humanity itself—the nation is the only one which has demonstrated its stability and the one that has shown itself to be least offensive to human dignity. As Roger Scruton put it in A Political Philosophy, nationalism is not “the only answer to the problems of modern government, but . . . it is the only answer that has proved itself.”
This is not to say nationalism is without faults, for any honest person must admit that there have been what Scruton calls “nations gone mad.” Hitler’s Germany was certainly a nation gone mad, as was Mussolini’s Italy. But the existence of evil nations does not therefore make all nations inherently bad any more than an evil person makes all human beings evil. And one must remember that these nations, which developed the appetites of empires, were ultimately opposed and stopped by other nations: the strong and sound nations of England, France, and the United States. Furthermore, the existence of a bad nation does not in any way diminish the idea of an international order composed of distinct and sovereign nations.
In The Virtue of Nationalism, Yoram Hazony defines a nation this way: “A number of tribes with a shared heritage, usually including a common language or religious tradition, and a past history of joining together against common enemies—characteristics that permit tribes so united to understand themselves as a community distinct from other such communities that are their neighbors.”
In similar fashion, Scruton describes a nation as “a people settled in a certain territory, who share language, institutions, customs, and a sense of history and who regard themselves as equally committed both to their place of residence and to the legal and political process that governs it.” Such definitions rightly stress what is held in common: a shared history, language, territory, institutions, and perhaps religion. Contrary to popular opinion, nations are composed of multiple tribes or clans—not a single domineering tribe or clan—and it is indeed the shared elements of the nation that make unity possible among them.
This understanding of nation draws upon a tradition going back to the Old Testament. In many discussions among contemporary political thinkers, there is a wrongheaded belief that Jean-Jacques Rousseau invented the concepts of “nation” and “nationalism.” The argument runs that Rousseau identified something pre-political—something other than the state or the country—which unites groups of individuals. What united people, Rousseau thought, were the common bonds of language, shared geography, and an inherited culture or tradition. Though the idea is a true one, it does not originate with Rousseau. The idea of the nation originates in Genesis 10, when the sons of Noah follow God’s command to go out and establish their own independent nations—groups of people united by “clan, language, territory, and nation,” as the chapter’s repeated refrain goes.
In fact, the idea of the nation is central to the Old Testament. In Genesis 18:17-18, God makes an important promise to Abraham: “The Lord said, “Shall I hide from Abraham what I am about to do, seeing that Abraham shall surely become a great and mighty nation, and all the nations of the earth shall be blessed in him?” God affirms here—and throughout the Old Testament—an order of “self-determining independent nations” (in Hazony’s words) and says that His chosen nation, Israel, will be light unto all other nations. The context of this statement is important. That order of independent nations was threatened perpetually by seemingly omnipotent empires, whose leaders sought to extend their dominion to the ends of the earth: first the Egyptians, then the Babylonians, Assyrians, Persians, and so on. The small tribes and clans of which we hear so much in the Old Testament proved powerless before such voracious empires. A nation, however, might be a viable and beneficial middle way.
God chose a nation as his vessel because it was strong enough to defend itself yet did not entail the imperialistic ambitions of the surrounding empires. Hazony puts the argument this way:
Was there a viable alternative to universal empire? The ancient Near East had much experience with localized political power in the form of city-states. But for the most part, these were helpless before imperial armies and the ideology of universal empire that motivated them. It is in the Bible that we find the first sustained presentation of a different possibility: a political order based on the independence of a nation living within limited borders alongside other independent nations.
The Bible presents us with a way out of the polarity between anarchy on the one hand and empire on the other. We know from the Book of Judges that God’s face does not shine upon anarchy, whether moral or political. Judges chronicles a society in which there is no shared moral or political order, as the refrain of the work suggests: “For in those days, there was no king in Israel. Everyone did what was right in his own eyes.” Scripture’s criticism of anarchy is quite well known, but its criticism of empire is less familiar—despite the fact that it is central to the overarching narrative of the Old Testament. The quintessential statement of the Bible’s view of empire is the story of the Tower of Babel, which appears, importantly, in Genesis 11, between the “Table of Nations” in Genesis 10 and “the Promise to Abraham” in Genesis 18. The Tower of Babel story depicts the people rejecting the divine mandate given to Noah and his sons to “be fertile, and increase, and replenish the earth” and to “disperse throughout the earth.” Instead, all the peoples of the earth desired to unify themselves around a single purpose, language, and capital city. Universal uniformity, or homogeneity, was the objective of Babel. Daniel Gordis explains the story this way:
Humankind, the Bible has already stated, ought to separate into distinct nations, each with its own land and language. Dispersion, in this sense, is part of a divine plan. It is only thus that human beings may fully realize their own unique potential, just as it is only thus that they may fulfill God’s command to “replenish the earth.” Mankind had taken its first steps toward this ideal after the flood, but its progress was effectively stunted. The Tower builders of Babel . . . sought to sustain this uniformity. That was their sin, and that, ultimately, is why they had to be stopped.
God’s solution to this problem—note, not his punishment per se—was to “confound their speech” and “scatter them over the face of the whole earth,” thus getting humanity back on God’s providential track.
The political teaching of the Old Testament seems to be that the nation is preferable because it is, conceptually speaking, a sort of Aristotelian virtue between two vices. Whereas courage is the golden mean between the vices of brashness and weakness, nationalism is the golden mean between anarchy and empire. In the nation, the people with whom one associates are not so close as to be only one’s family or clan but not so distant as to be wholly abstracted from oneself. Shared between members of the nation are concrete things such as language, law, religion, geography, and historical experience, and these serve as powerful bonds.
This space, opened up by the introduction of the nation, historically led to a belief in “collective self-determination,” the idea that each nation has the right to pursue its own unique ways of life and that neighboring nations have no right to impose their ways of life upon others. This idea, Hazony argues, entails a number of benefits: it “inculcates an aversion to the conquest of foreign nations,” “opens the door to a tolerance of diverse ways of life,” and “establishes a life of astonishingly productive competition among nations as each strives to attain the maximal development of its abilities and those of its individual members.” Nationalism makes possible the proliferation and preservation of vibrant and productive nations, for it gives them the right to self-determination.
Protestantism played no small part in the growth of nationalism in the contemporary world, for it provided for a rediscovery and resurgence of that biblical idea of the order of independent national states. Cuius regio, eius religio (“whose region, their religion”) became the political order of the day, with independent nations deciding for themselves whether to be Roman Catholic, Lutheran, or Calvinist. Protestant theologians such as Ulrich Zwingli and John Calvin and Protestant legal minds such as John Selden drew upon Old Testament texts in order to question the ideal of the universal political empire of the church. It is important to note, however, that even some Catholic nations during this period—France, for example—embraced a more nationalist paradigm.
Of course, nationalism is only as good as the nation to which one is attached. What makes American nationalism good and even desirable? In our conception of nationalism, Americans are attached to one another not only by a shared territory, language, culture, or history but also by a political creed: the noble ideals enshrined in the Declaration of Independence. To be American is to believe that “all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness.” It is also to believe that government exists to secure these rights and to effect “safety and happiness” among the people.
Though himself an Englishman, G. K. Chesterton recognized the power of this ideal, writing in What I Saw in America:
America is the only nation in the world that is founded on a creed. That creed is set forth with dogmatic and even theological lucidity in the Declaration of Independence; perhaps the only piece of practical politics that is also theoretical politics and also great literature. It enunciates that all men are equal in their claim to justice, that governments exist to give them that justice, and that their authority is for that reason just.
Built into the American idea of the nation is a concept of human dignity to which one must subscribe as an American. Built into the American idea of the nation, too, is a belief that government is only legitimate when wielded towards the common good and towards the justice of all. An adherence to the American nation, as Abraham Lincoln understood, entailed that the rights that one hopes for oneself be extended to others as well.
The Cosmopolitan Mistake
Many wrongly suppose that the New Testament intentionally supplants the vision of an “independent order of nations” with a new vision of a world unified by the church. One usually sees this argument accompanied with a citation to Galatians 3:28, which states, “There is neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, male nor female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus.” The supposed distinction between Jew and Gentile—that is, the distinction between nations—is said to be obliterated by Christ. On its face, this seems plausible. Context, however, indicates that Paul is making in Ephesians a point about obtaining salvation, not about politics. Paul is addressing whether the Old Testament law is applicable to followers of Christ, and he says that we are, each of us, heirs to salvation by one and only one means: through faith in Christ Jesus. With regard to salvation, there is no distinction between persons. The passage says nothing about the relationship of persons to nations or nations to the international order.
One can see that the vision of an independent order of nations is repeated in that final book of the Bible, Revelation, where the throne of God is said to be surrounded by “persons from every tribe, language, people, and nation”—an intentional allusion to Genesis 10. It should be clear that the Gospel—and the New Testament, more broadly—does not subvert the political teaching of the Old Testament; it baptizes it and shows how nations find their ultimate fulfillment and unity around the throne of Christ. Though it may be fashionable nowadays to equate the two, the Gospel of Christ is not synonymous with globalism or cosmopolitanism. In fact, even the legitimate desire for diversity and originality is at odds with cosmopolitanism.
One would think that with the growth of anticolonial sentiment in the West we would lose the taste for empire altogether, but that primordial desire—for universal uniformity—has proved indelible in the human soul. The desire has only donned new and more socially acceptable garb. The idea of empire has been repackaged for modern sensibilities as cosmopolitanism or globalism.
The Greek philosopher Diogenes first presented the idea of cosmopolitanism as the notion that one is not a citizen of this or that country, but a “citizen of the world.” Diogenes’ concept was adopted by Stoic philosophers, whose philosophy envisioned each person embedded in concentric circles, the outermost of which was one’s attachment to humanity as such. In For Love of Country: Debating the Limits of Patriotism, Martha Nussbaum, a prominent contemporary proponent of this view, defines a cosmopolitan as “the person whose allegiance is to the world-wide community of human beings.” Unlike the ancient Stoics, however, modern cosmopolitans like Nussbaum tend to dispense with the inner rings of family, tribe, and nation. Such attachments, they would suggest, are chimeras distracting us from our duty towards all human beings, regardless of their place or relation to oneself. This cosmopolitanism is another version of the Tower of Babel—a belief that all of humanity must be made to conform to a certain universal ideal, indeed a single moral and legal code. It is only a new façade upon the very sentiment that motivated all previous imperial powers, a façade that accords with modern progressive sensibilities.
Nationalism helps articulate the deepest problem with cosmopolitanism, namely that we have no natural attachment to humanity, construed in the abstract. As the poet Robert Pinsky has argued, the relationship of nationalism to cosmopolitanism is akin to the relationship of English to Esperanto. The former is something real, historic, and inherited from one’s forebears, whereas the latter is an aspiration born of human reason to which one has no unwilled attachment or sentiment. Esperanto and cosmopolitanism assume that the world can be ordered by abstraction from particulars; real languages like English, Spanish, and Farsi initiate us into something historic, concrete, and personal.
Gertrude Himmelfarb, in her contribution to Nussbaum’s For Love of Country volume, shows how cosmopolitanism rests upon an untrue notion of the human person:
Above all, what cosmopolitanism obscures, even denies, are the givens of life: parents, ancestors, family, race, religion, heritage, history, culture, tradition, community—and nationality. These are not “accidental” attributes of the individual. They are essential attributes. We do not come into the world as free-floating autonomous individuals. We come into it complete with all the particular, defining characteristics that go into a fully formed human being. . . . To pledge one’s “fundamental allegiance” to cosmopolitanism is to try to transcend not only nationality but all the actualities, particularities, and realities of life that constitute one’s natural identity. Cosmopolitanism, has a nice, high-minded ring to it, but it is an illusion, and, like all illusions, perilous.
A boilerplate critique of nationalism highlights the fact that multicultural societies bring together the best of many cultures, making available to citizens of the United States the foods of South America, the art of Asia, the television of Europe, and so on. According to this view, to have the good aspects of various cultures, we must forswear nationalism and adopt cosmopolitanism—the assumption being that were Americans to emphasize their national character, there would be no place for other cultures. A moment’s reflection will reveal the inherent flaws of this line of argument.
Only nationalism gives the sense of purpose and uniqueness to a people which results in strong and distinct cultures. Cosmopolitanism results not in cultural distinctiveness but in cultural homogeneity. Tied as it is to an international trade, the cosmopolitan ideal replaces each local restaurant or eatery with a Starbucks or McDonalds; it tears down traditional architecture and erects homes and storefronts with the sterile uniformity of Ikea; it results not in a proliferation of local small businesses but in a consolidation of employment under massive multinational conglomerates. The cosmopolitan ideal is not composed of artisans and tradespersons but laborers who serve the managerial elites of Amazon. One should subscribe to nationalism if one seeks cultural distinctiveness for all.
Christian Nationalism
Leftists have popularized “Christian nationalism” as a term of derision, inventing for themselves a sizable enemy by inflating the numbers of those who supposedly believe America was founded by and for Christians to the exclusion of others. While there certainly is a small contingent of such people, they are hardly mainstream. The term as the left uses it presents a simply false picture of nationalism and its connection to Christianity. Among other things, it ignores the crucial fact that nations are made up of multiple tribes or multiple races and that nationalism supplies moral and political ties that can unite different sorts of people. It ignores, moreover, the elements of toleration and diversity built into the idea of the nation itself. Finally, it fundamentally misunderstands the relation of the words “Christian” and “nationalism.”
Is there perhaps a different way of understanding the term? If the adjective “Christian” is appended to the noun “nationalism” it is because it modifies the noun in important and specific ways. Adjectives delimit, or draw the conceptual boundaries around, the nouns to which they are attached. Thus the phrase could mean that nationalism is bounded by the principles of Christian morality.
Contra the critics of Christian nationalism, it seems that there could hardly be a better political situation than tempering the natural commitment to one’s own with a broader vision of Christian charity and innate human dignity. Unlike secular humanitarianism, Christianity does not seek to destroy our natural affections in the name of one’s abstract duty to humanity. Christianity places our affections into proper order. In The Abolition of Man, C. S. Lewis advocates an Augustinian ordo amoris—a “hierarchy of loves.” According to Lewis (and Augustine before him), we must love things to the degree they ought to be loved: it is wrong to love something too little, but it is also wrong to love something too much. We must establish a priority among the things that we love. Most important for the Christian is the love of God, followed closely by the love of family. There is something like a concentric circle of loves radiating out from each person, with the innermost circles deserving our greatest focus.
Each Christian must be cognizant of his or her duties to others, and it would be the gravest mistake to assume that we owe distant strangers the same care and duty we owe our own. I like to think that God commanded us to love our neighbor, rather than some abstract idea of humanity, because He knew that it is easy to love something distant and difficult to love something near. Humanity is lovable in the abstract, but it is those individuals closest to us who grate upon us. As Fyodor Dostoevsky writes in The Brothers Karamazov (in the Peavear and Volokhonsky translation):
“I love mankind,” he said, “but I am amazed at myself: the more I love mankind in general, the less I love people in particular, that is, individually, as separate persons. In my dreams,” he said, “I often went so far to think passionately of serving mankind, and, it may be, would really have gone to the cross for people if it were somehow suddenly necessary, and yet I am incapable of living in the same room with anyone even for two days, this I know from experience. As soon as someone is there, close to me, his personality oppresses my self-esteem and restricts my freedom. In twenty-four hours I can begin to hate even the best of men: one because he takes too long eating his dinner, another because he has a cold and keeps blowing his nose. I become the enemy of people the moment they touch me,” he said. “On the other hand, it has always happened that the more I hate people individually, the more ardent becomes my love for humanity as a whole.”
It is a mistake to believe that Americans today are too deeply attached to their locality, family, or homeland. To the contrary, the great problem of late modernity is a pervasive rootlessness. We change relationships, homes, jobs, and churches with ever-greater frequency. We moderns, Roger Scruton suggests, are characterized by oikophobia (fear of one’s own) as much or more than any xenophobia (fear of others). Properly ordered affections begin with one’s real and existing affections, for one cannot generate affections ex nihilo. Family proves to be the training ground of other attachments; there we learn the virtues that make it possible to be a member of our wider political communities. Edmund Burke gave this idea classic expression in Reflections on the Revolution in France: “To be attached to the subdivision, to love the little platoon we belong to in society, is the first principle (the germ as it were) of public affections. It is the first link in the series by which we proceed towards a love to our country and to mankind.” We learn to love our family, and that surplus love spills over into our community, our nation, and eventually our world.
We—especially Christians—are pulled in two directions: toward the good of our own and toward what is true and universal. Nationalism is a midway point between the tribal loyalist and the universalist revolutionary, and a nationalist is someone who cares for his own without disregarding the broader duty to humanity. Nationalism proves a corrective to the conceit that human flourishing requires detachment from one’s nation and one’s natural ties. I have never encountered a plant that flourished upon being uprooted, unless suitably replanted. So let us put down roots, and love what is ours, but let that love swell and spill over into every area of life.
