The spectre of Christian Nationalism brings to mind the ugliest American atrocities swaddled in the Stars and Stripes and laid at the feet of a Protestant altar. It represents less the reshaping of a nation to embrace Christian ideals and more the warping of religion into whatever supports existing power-structures. Ku Klux Klanners parading through Washington, DC in the 1920s to defend “Protestant America” were Christian only insofar as Christianity equals White American Protestantism.
This brings a fundamental question: what is the proper relationship between Christianity and national self-conception? Can national and religious identity be fused such that the latter takes precedence over the former? And even if such a wedding is possible, is it desirable? These are some of the questions discussed by Plough Magazine editors Peter Mommsen and Susannah Black with Cistercian monk and noted integralist Edmund Waldstein on a recent PloughCast episode.
The overarching subject of the podcast was immigration to Europe and the United States from much poorer countries, asking what obligations wealthy nations have to the poor and desperate. But, before even attempting such an inquiry, the podcast first discussed what nation-hood should even mean to Christians.
In our modern imagination the nation-state began with the Peace of Westphalia, which determined that a nation entails unified political leadership over a people sharing a common language, history and culture. The suppression of diverse French dialects in favor of the Parisian tongue is a prime example of the unity necessary to justify nationalist claims; a ruler’s sovereignty was predicated on his role as the representative of the people, but if it’s unclear who even counts as French then the claim to French political autonomy falls apart.
The same analysis applies to anti-colonialist movements from Africa to Latin America to Asia: anything but self-determination for a unified people amounts to imperialism, which necessitates the submission of national identity to something more universal like Christianity, Islam or Communism.
The fundamental problem with nationalism for Christians, then, is that it focuses narrowly on the right of sovereign unified people groups (nations) to self-determination without recognition of their providential role in world history. No man is an island and no nation, even if literally an island, is morally isolated from the struggles of their neighbors.
However, this doesn’t mean that Christians shouldn’t feel love, attachment and obligation toward their particularities; our families, our communities, our cultures and our land. In fact, the podcasters argued that we must all gain an even deeper sense of rootedness to whatever tribe we call our own. We cannot become rootless cosmopolitans, equally comfortable anywhere International Business English (IBE), the current lingua franca, is spoken. For this reason, argued Mommsen, we cannot abide by efforts to universalize and homogenize the human experience. For example, having everyone speak Esperanto, an artificial language created for international cooperation, is not the answer.
This leaves us in a seldom-discussed middle ground: Christians cannot wholly be attached to their national communities as the be-all and end-all. That would be the bad form of Christian Nationalism, where Christianity is primarily an aesthetic backdrop for national self-interest. But, we also are called not to scorn all vestiges of parochialism in favor of a global professional managerial class culture.
Instead of choosing between particularist nationalism and internationalist universalism, Christians are called to “a brotherhood through superseding and transcending national and linguistic differences. There’s something good in this vision of a universal civilization of love, which in Christian history has been called Christendom,” waxed Mommsen.
This vision of global fraternity does not discount our connection with the local, yet it also calls us to take seriously the universalizing transnational elements of political Christianity. Returning to the question of immigration, Waldstein, Black and Mommsen agreed that wealthier countries have a Biblical obligation to assist the desperate who come knocking at the door.
“The alien who resides with you shall be to you as the citizen among you; you shall love the alien as yourself” reads Leviticus 19:34. As Waldstein wrote in a related article: “it is not acceptable for a wealthy country to frame immigration policy exclusively in terms of ‘what benefits us.’ The wealth of the world has been given to the whole human race, and we owe the needy a share in it.”
Just as we’re morally obligated as individuals to give what we can to the poor, the national communities we form must give what they can to poorer communities. But in the same way that a call to charity doesn’t mean the abolition of private property, so too does the call to welcoming strangers not necessitate the abolition of borders. American Christian identity is worthy of reverence and preservation, but separated from its calls to transnational justice it can become a window dressing for naked national self-interest. Even the demographics of the U.S. or Europe shift, truly honoring our Christian heritage necessitates thinking and loving beyond borders.
Comment by David on September 23, 2021 at 7:02 pm
I suspect that the opposition to immigration in Europe is due to the fear of losing a culture. This is more the case as many countries there have declining populations. I am not certain Germans want to see a Black man in lederhosen even if fluent in the German language. The US does not really have a culture other than in popular music. We have no national dress other than perhaps blue jeans. Even the cowboy clothing popular in the western states is actually Mexican. The common ornamental cowboy belt actually did not arise until c. 1930. The main question for Christian Nationalism is where the Christian homeland should be located. Historically, one would think of Israel.
Comment by Steve S on September 24, 2021 at 6:37 am
Did you see all the Democrats in the picture near the title??
There shouldn’t be any politicizing Christianity.
Comment by Phil on September 24, 2021 at 10:19 am
Steve,
Who said they were all Democrats? The second KKK was made up of both Democrats and Republicans and chapters in both the North and South.
Comment by Katherine on September 24, 2021 at 3:50 pm
Not too many Republicans in the KKK, even at its height in the 1910s-1920s. Slavery and segregation were basically Democratic Party principles. Consider Woodrow Wilson, for instance.
I’m having a hard time understanding where this alleged current threat from “Christian nationalism” is seen as coming from.
Comment by Philip on September 24, 2021 at 7:04 pm
Katherine,
I take it you have access to membership roles from that period? The second KKK was much larger and more dangerous than the original, which had been virtually wiped out during the Grant Administration. Part of the reason being that it extended its hatred far beyond African Americans to other groups many conservative white Protestants saw as threats as Jews, Catholics, immigrants, and even organized labor (look up the Elaine Massacre). It should be noted that Republicans had a prior history of bigotry toward Catholics and immigrants before then (the nativist Know Nothing Party had been one of the groups that merged to form the GOP in the 1850s). There was even a klan chapter in the state of Vermont, one of the whitest and least diverse parts of the country at the time, which gained members by attacking the the small French Canadian population. The largest state chapter in terms of members in the 1920s wasn’t in the Deep South at all, but Indiana, which had an estimated 100,000 members show up at one 4th of July gathering. The grand dragon D.C. Stephenson had the Republican governor Edward L. Jackson in his pocket and boosted many times that he was the law in Indiana. Prominent Republican klansmen included such figures as Senator Rufus C. Holman of Oregon, Senator William Bliss Pine of Oklahoma, Governor Clarence Morley of Colorado, and Kaspar K. Kubli of Oregon. What also made the second klan more dangerous was the way it twisted Christian rituals and practices into its organization. The founder was a washed out Methodist preacher who attracted fundamentalists by supporting popular conservative ideas of the time like temperance and anti-gambling laws. I’m not saying any of this to try to absolve the Democrats of anything. I’m saying both parties had their prior history of bigotry and violence (Democrats in the Jim Crow South and Republicans in the urban North) that the KKK were able to tap into. Scapegoating one while absolving the other won’t help anyone learn from the mistakes of history. Racism has a long history in this country that transcends both geography and party.
Comment by Theodore Miner on September 25, 2021 at 9:23 am
This posting suffers the same malady as many other regarding “Christian Nationalism”: specifically, lack of definitions and lack of clarity. The author also poisons the well by adding a picture of the KKK – an aberrant, tiny group today with no cultural influence. Exactly who are people today that the author is worried about?
A nationalist is one who supports the sovereignty of the nation and see the role of government implementing policies that benefit the citizens of that country. I am a nationalist. I am also a Christian who thinks that the Christian ethic should be the dominant influence in our nation in all spheres including government, education, workplace and the family. All Christians should think is this way since all other religions are false.
Therefore, I am a Christian Nationalist. This is entirely normal, proper and morally impeccable.
Comment by Katherine on September 25, 2021 at 9:27 am
A good history lesson, and thanks. I have lived in both the South and in the industrial North and I agree that racism was extensive in both areas during my early adult years. What bothers me greatly is the current narrative which claims that all the racists in the South suddenly became Republicans in the 1970s.
I still don’t know where the current “Christian nationalism” these authors worry about is found. There are no doubt people with repellent ideologies among all political groups. Is “Christian nationalism” a large movement, and where is it?
Comment by David on September 25, 2021 at 1:45 pm
And he [Lyndon Johnson] knew that he had a unique capacity, as the most powerful white politician from the South, to not merely challenge the convention that had crushed the dreams of so many, but to ultimately dismantle for good the structures of legal segregation. He’s the only guy who could do it — and he knew there would be a cost, famously saying the Democratic Party may “have lost the South for a generation.”
Comment by Barbara on September 26, 2021 at 5:25 pm
First of all, if we don’t know the background of the people at the Plough Magazine, we can’t know where they are coming from. And when I looked them up, they claim to be Communist Christians, as if there could be such a thing. So, we have a Communist viewpoint presented here, and so of course they would be against nationalism as opposed to internationalism, and they present internationalism in a way which could be acceptable to actual Christians. As for the KKK, in the 1920 we had a breakdown in law and order, brought about by crooked politicians, crooked cops and certain criminal groups of people, like those in the Jewish Mafia and Italian Mafia. And the KKK said they would bring back law and order. When the KKK went beyond that they said they would do, Americans took away their power. People on the Left today are doing away with the police on purpose, right? And, they are for criminal “rights.” And they are against “nationalism.” I see real manipulation going on here by groups who have a bad end in mind for the United States, a SOVEREIGN NATION, the greatest giver to the poor and down trodden in the world. We are being manipulated into thinking totalitarianism is OK. We have stuff to give away because we as a group over a long period of time- worked our tails off. The same can’t be said for the people at the Plough, or any of the rest Communists who want us to give away all we have and then have us become poor like everybody else.
Comment by Philip on September 27, 2021 at 2:10 pm
Barbara,
I can’t speak with any authority on the ideological position of Plough Magazine, but I can tell you Edmund Waldstein is not a communist by any stretch of the imagination. He’s an integralist, which is a fancy academic term for a modern-day theocrat who believes the Catholic Church should reclaim the level of secular authority and state support it once held prior to the Reformation. He also occasionally waxed poetically about the monarchical empires that once ruled Europe prior to 20th Century, such as the Austria-Hungarians. These radical and anti-democratic views certain place him in the camp against nationalism, but not for the same reasons as communists. So while you’re correct that he doesn’t have the best interests of America or its principles in mind, he’s an entirely different monster than the left-wing Marxist you’ve constructed in your head. He’s a right-wing opponent to nationalism, rather than a left-wing opponent.
The overarching danger of nationalism (whether we’re talking about the nationalism in the 19th Century that brought on revolutions in Europe or the later evil expressions of fascism in the 20th Century) is that nationalists have always had a tendency to distinguish and promote themselves at the expense of perceived others. This is one of the key difference I think between nationalism and broader expressions of patriotism. Patriotism strives to celebrate one’s country as a whole in itself without regards to any specific groups, language, race, or religion within that nation. Nationalism has almost always celebrated the image and culture of the majority and favors consistency and rigid unity over diversity and over personal freedom. This is what can lead to authoritarian expressions such as fascism. Anytime I have heard Americans identify themselves as nationalists proudly they are always lifting up one group or faction of Americans as superior, or rather “more American” to others whether that sense of superiority is based on race, religion, language, or culture. The point being that nationalism in America has always expressed itself by treating some group of Americans as more American than others, which is itself antithetical to our very principles of democracy and equality.