A Broken Scale II: Christian Nationalism is Impossible

 The individual is God.

All have fallen in the camps of state supported self actualization, or else in the camp that says every involuntary imposition on a man is slavery.

Every man bought into the idea that his owing others anything in particular without their consent was unjust. We are born owing nothing to any, but owed a great many things. Different things in each accounting, but still we are owed.

It is against the puerile, selfish, and venal attitudes regarding what a person owes and is owed by government--as partly outlined in my previous semi-coherent post--that those standing under the heading of Christian nationalism are reacting.

The steelman of christian nationalism is that we have a particular duty to those God has placed immediately in front of us. That the rulers of the earth owe it to their people to endeavor to establish just government and good order, and that a christian ethical framework is, has been, and must be, better for the ordering of a peoples than the alternative.

To all those who define christian nationalism in this way, I am completely sympathetic. Christianity fundamentally changes the ancient world. The paradigm changes, and suddenly it is no longer allowed to conquer an enemy, sell their women and children into slavery, and murder all the men, as was the norm for millennia.

But I think that this group has seized hold of an unhelpful term, freighted with evils that Christianity had held at bay in the human breast, with mixed success. They are not defining their terms clearly, and what they mean by nationalism is not anything that anyone has ever meant by nationalism.

The problem, as I see it, is that the history of nationalism, even amongst nominally Christian peoples, is typically characterized by men acting in ways that Christians ought not to act.

Nationalism is not only the doctrine of love and self determination of ones own; it holds that one's hand can be against all others, if it benefit the nation.

Consider the nationalism of Pizarro; a fanatical partisan for Spain. He dressed in plain clothes, lived a life of extraordinary austerity, was an absolute lad--warrior, leader of men, etc. But he showed no interest in the conversion of the Inca. A more normal course of events was that a conquest of a town would lead to the local women being doled out to his men after the menfolk were killed for some quality rapine, as the heathen used to do. The Spaniards learned too much from fighting the moors for 200 years.

Or consider the English and the Irish at the time of the famine. The Irish, heirs of a common western heritage, speaking the same language, and possessed of a largely similar culture, were slowly deprived of land over centuries as laws made it difficult to purchase and hold the lands. Along comes the famine, and the English are still shipping wheat out of Ireland the whole time as people starve to death, because the Irish are not 'their own' even though the British have seen fit to rule them.

Both of the above examples, in brief, were bad for the souls of the men who perpetrated them, and neither of those countries is a christian country any longer. When the nation may do any evil to its rivals for the sake of perceived expedience (see, nothing unethical is ever expedient), when a people can convince themselves that they may do evil while fulfilling the law, and when a people can convince themselves that victory and dominance are the measure of God's favor, then they are surely on the road to damnation. The church seemed in no crisis in England before the great wars, but hardship popped their illusionary prosperity gospel.

But these are clear examples of vile ethnic nationalism. Not all nationalism is ethnic nationalism. There can be civic nationalism that is tied up more institutions and ideals. You can have no objections to civic nationalism.

What do you do when the civitas weakens? When the institutions fail? When the promises of liberty no longer seem to be as real for us as for foregoing generations?

America is the world's only true use case for civic nationalism. It is not done yet, but it clearly is not what it once was. The blessings of liberty are waning obviously, though our ample midsections are still tight with prosperity for which we have no gratitude.

And what is the response to this hardship? Is it to say that human institutions require continuous reform and reformation. That the blessings of posterity require sacrifice, and not letting ourselves grow indulgent, for the lean times must come? Civic nationalism is not truly possible, because the course of history is a sure proof that it takes giants to create a government that actually rules for the interest of a whole people.

(As an aside, I'm rereading the Discourses on Titus Livy again, and he reads like a prophet with our republic at its present juncture.)

And even now, as our civic nationalism breaks down, as the institutions that made us a people distort and change, among the champions of national sentiment there are no voices stronger than the ethnic nationalist. The ethnic nationalist would have you know that it came from England. And we have only lost it because we are not anglo-saxony enough.

When John Adams went as a diplomat to England, he was shocked that Marston Moor and Naseby, sacred battlefields of liberty, as he would have it, were unmarked. The Americans, in the possession of a polity where robust local government was the norm, and participation was expected, were shocked that the early heroes of popular sovereignty were forgotten in England. And they would again later be surprised, when the authorities who ruled those same people came to trample on their English rights.

Adams perplexity was strange, as the entire story of that conflict was about how the kind did not want the nobles to even get a say in how taxes were assayed. That Cromwell, when in the driver seat, did not want the commons to have a vote in how they were assayed. And that in the end, the king was welcomed back with open arms, and limited reform. Expanded parliamentary rights would not be a thing, until England once again deposed its King and brought in a pliable who would take the throne and allow parliament some powers in exchange.

England still does not have the constitution the levelers dreamt of, and though they now have popular sovereignty, they have clearly never been a bastion of rights. The greatness of the American polity does not come from England; it was made by the people who left England, Germany, France, Ireland, and parts unknown for the exact reason of not being under oppressive regimes and ossified institutions that defied reform.

And no, Germany was not better. It was, is, and always shall be, worse. All these people who would rather be German's than Pole's should be ashamed. Luther, the Lutheran Confessors, and the German Renaissance is a blip and the work of God Almighty. The rest is bloody handed shenanigans, Hegel, and guys who think it is really okay to schtup kids.

God makes a people great. And he does it by faith, and by leading us to live lives according to our faith. And christian lives demand from us a higher standard of how we treat our enemies than the nationalists can stomach.

Nationalism is an evil child of the enlightenment. It seeks the expressed desires and perceived goods of the 'general will', which you may find described in revelation. Nationalism is not a doctrine that seeks "peace, commerce, and honest friendship with all nations, entangling alliances with none." It seeks advantage rather than goodness, which is foolish, because we can see in history that goodness yields advantage.

You should not be nationalists. Your hand should not be against the nations of the earth, especially not the predominately christian nations. Those are your brothers, though sundered by babel. Pentecost happened. Their weird and clearly less expressive mother tongue is still blessed by the Holy Spirit to create faith and work renewal and rebirth in water.

What you can, and by duty should be, is patriots. Patria--you should love the good things your fathers bequeathed to you. You should cherish, preserve, and propagate the institutions, wisdom, and customs they passed to you, as you heritage; as a dowry that was given to start you off in the right way in this world.

And at the center of it is love. Well ordered republics, with borders, prisons, elected assemblies, potlucks, and beer league baseball, should flow foremost out of love of neighbor, and a desire to do right by others. Sometimes that means saying no. No. You cannot come here right now. You do not have a right to it, and we are not in a place to accommodate you without imposing on or doing an injustice to another, but that is a far cry from saying "my hand may be against you, if it serves my interest."

Nationalism is inherently unhelpful to the christian as a framework, and as I eye the post religious right and consider the formerly Christian nations of the west, I am so surprised that Screwtape did not tell Wormwood about his great success in this vein.

Maybe he was just keeping this one up his sleeve.