Some Christians are leaning hard into nationalism nowadays, which I think is risky. Last year, Stephen Wolfe published The Case for Christian Nationalism. Wolfe defends nationalism as a prelapsarian, God-given instinct, naturally flowing from the command to be fruitful and multiply in number. Regardless of the Fall, Wolfe argues, families and tribes would have spread throughout the world, inevitably forming cultural differences and developing loyalties to their individual communities. Importantly, in this framework (and I believe this point is often missed by critics jumping to conclusions) the Tower of Babel is God’s judgement upon Empire, not nations; it is the erasure of national differences, as humanity works towards a common idol, that draws God’s ire.
A second part of Christian nationalist logic is the bounded nature of neighbour-love. Christians are called to love their neighbour in a radically generous way, highlighted in the story of the Good Samaritan. But although it is theoretically an indiscriminate love, and some people do use the parable to argue against our natural inclinations to the familiar, the neighbour-love described in the Good Samaritan is practically the opposite: a special love for those directly in front of us. Therefore our natural affections for home, family, country, etc. are legitimate and affirmed by Jesus.
I largely agree with Wolfe – I do affirm the value of our local, cultural affections – but his picture is incomplete. In fact, the basic logic of Christian nationalism is that God’s commands are inherently good and would bring prosperity to all peoples, in all places, at all points in history, within their particular traditions. But I see this logic and I believe Christian Nationalism contains the seeds of Christian Internationalism.
A second voice in the Christian Nationalist sphere is Yoram Hazony, an Israeli-American Jewish conservative. In his popular book The Virtue of Nationalism he constructs a dichotomy between Empire and Nation. This opening gambit is devious, because it allows him to smuggle all sorts of conclusions into his argument. Primarily, he taps into our natural instinct that empire equals bad. We are always on the side of rebels and underdogs, Star Wars taught us that. But secondly, more insidiously, he suggests we must choose between the two as if one always comes at the expense of the other. In Hazony’s economy, there is a constant push and pull between plucky nations and evil empires. Implicitly the battle is between freedom and tyranny, as a zero-sum game.
I want to highlight a few issues with Wolfe’s and Hazony’s accounts, because while both offer valuable defences of nationhood, a straightforward desire to return to the Westphalian ideal is neither possible nor desirable. We ought to frame empire in its long, global history and see how Christians have historically understood it. In some form, it must exist in both a present and future Christian political theology.
The first issue with any defence of nationalism is the incoherence of defending it as a universal ideal, or justifying it by universal standards. Whether national self-expression is defended as an inherent good, or nations are instruments for maintaining peace, there is always some universal underpinning. Even to judge that empire is good, or bad, requires shared morality and vocabulary. Some Empires are too dominant for us to realise – Tom Holland’s Dominion, looking at the ways Christianity defines the West even today, is titled appropriately, as is Glen Scrivener’s The Air We Breathe, because they both capture how pervasive Christian morals are.
In other words, there are always empires, we just need to reimagine what ’empire’ looks like. They are rarely as overt as British explorers on a ship armed with cannons. In fact, that’s often the last port of call for effective empires. Britain enjoyed soft power in India for over a century, before formally colonising and populating it with soldiers, civil servants and missionaries after the soft power was threatened.
Empires extend beyond geographical borders to whole systems of logic, language, media, morality, and more. Yes, Edward Said was right. Cambridge students are actually on to something when they talk about decolonising the curriculum, or retelling traditional narratives, or escaping Eurocentrism. Even the British Empire is very much alive today, though it is glacially receding. It did not end when India left in 1947, or after the gradual exodus of colonies through the 1950s-60s, or even after Britain handed over Hong Kong in 1997. Through shared language, sports, diplomatic ties, institutions, religion and an enduring instinct of Britain as ‘home’, the British Empire reshaped the world in the same way earthquakes, volcanoes and ice ages remould the physical landscape.
Importantly, there is nothing to judge at a meta-level between empires. And to the extent there is some arbiter, that tells you about the empire in which we are operating. In fact, the less contested a claim, the more powerful the empire. If we take an intellectual empire like LGBT, we see that in the 1980s it was equivalent to the Jedi movement plotting to blow up the Death Star, quietly biding its time to take on an enemy much larger than itself. In 1985 over three-quarters of Britons disapproved of homosexuality, then through forty years of strategic campaigning this dropped to one in four by 2012. Victory was swift, uncompromising and decisive. Within two generations, homosexuality went from a medical condition, to a lifestyle choice, to a celebrated identity; from treatable disease, to virtue. The fact that forty years ago it was preposterous to describe it as a virtue, and today it is preposterous to describe it as a treatable disease, tells you everything about the power of the respective empires.
It should be clear many empires, often the most effective ones, are intellectual ones more than material, though the two are obviously never separate. And the more we step outside our frame of reference (which is difficult and not always desirable), the clearer it becomes that defences of nationalism only have cultural purchase in a world that already cares about peace, freedom and self-expression. The nationalism espoused by Wolfe, Hazony, et al. is not anarchical or unqualified; it is nationalism subjected to some higher end. A true nationalism would look closer to a Nietzschean ‘will to power’, where every nation has international instincts as it aims to bring other nations into its own empire.
Everything we consider a universal ideal is from an empire, which makes empire the natural defender and promoter of higher ideals. Hence nationalism emerges from empire, and empire emerges from nationalism. Both historically and logically, this seems to be true; nations find self-identity and expression against, or within the confines of, a larger empire. In 1950 the world had fewer than fifty nation states, but several dominant empires (America, Britain and the USSR). In 2023 there are almost 200 states, as those respective empires have contracted. Modern empires – both geographical ones like the British Empire, and softer intellectual ones like America, exported the idea of nationhood, creating fertile soil to cultivate distinct national identities and ultimately nation states.
On the flipside, nations are not always content to exist within their borders. It asks a lot of nations that they embrace distinct identities, even tying it to some mythical shared past, yet admonish them for promoting their ideals further than their imaginary borders. The tension in nationhood is precisely that it is an imagined community and imagination shifts over time. Nations and cultures are organic, while boundaries and borders are brittle and contested. We should fully expect self-confident nations to look further afield. Every country will pull the strings they have to influence the international order, whether through conditional foreign aid budgets, economic or military interventions dressed up in bureaucratic language, or through international institutions.
Particularly when it comes to the question of international justice, the instinct is often to prevent evil, which is an implicit statement about the relative moralities of the nations. The affinity between nationalism and empire is most obvious in Nazi Germany, where extreme nationalism spilled into global ambitions. Similarly with the US as it grew in its self-confidence and self-righteousness; without the threat of the Soviet Union it was free to pursue active intellectual (and military) imperialism by the end of the twentieth century.
This isn’t to criticise America, only to highlight hypocrisies and tensions amongst the defenders of nationalism. Empires have been some of the greatest forces for good in history, while national instincts have often encouraged mob rule, selfish policy or imperial ambitions. The Roman Empire exported technology, the rule of law, literacy, infrastructure and more without erasing national identities, buoyed by self-confidence paired with realpolitik. The British Empire gave the world a great amount without erasing national identities (most of the time it was inadvertently cultivating them). Self-determination was the eventual outcome, as nations frequently formed an identity in opposition to the British Empire.
The virtue of Empire is that it acknowledges some authority above individual nations, more impartial than each can be, and acts as umpire. The liberal world order demonstrates this through institutions like the ICC, WEF, World Bank and the UN. For better or worse, these institutions exist because people don’t actually believe nations contain an internal and absolute moral authority.
If there exists this universal moral norm, the most obvious place to locate it is Christianity, both morally and practically. Morally, because God must be acknowledged as Lord – Christians worship the God who created the heavens, the God who uses his enemies as a footstool in his throne room, who holds all things together and gives his Spirit to Christians today – the very same Spirit received by Israel’s kings to rule in wisdom and righteousness. Practically, because it’s the world’s dominant religion, so it’s where we will find the most truly trans-national, universal institution where a common liturgy binds people together globally.
Historically, international law and Christendom emerged centuries before distinct nation states. Returning to the earlier point about escaping our frame of reference, Christian nationalism is a very recent turn in church history. The nation state is a 16th century phenomenon and it may not last another millennium. Empires are the default in history, and may well be the place to which we return throughout the twenty-first century.
Which leads me on, circuitously, to the EU. The EU may be our best vehicle for a renewed, 21st century Christendom, as it defines itself against an Islamic East and a lonely, divided, commercialised American empire. I’ve become pro-EU because our civilizational affinity within continental Europe cannot be ignored.
Obviously the eventual goal of this EU Empire is the dominion of the whole earth, thought it would need to rebrand itself at some stage before the rest of the Anglosphere, India, and Latin America join. I’m a postmillennial so I have a great optimism about the spread of the Kingdom, within the contours of distinct nations. Christianity can accentuate cultural differences and draw out what is best in each of them, as God’s character is one of maximal unity and diversity. But the type of nationalism that says every nation needs its own state i.e. autonomous political institution, is a pretty recent development and not a move we need to make.
The EU could also be the vehicle for ecumenical unity, finally bringing the Protestant, Orthodox and Roman Catholic strands together in one powerful cord. As with the nation-empire relationship, this unity would celebrate the differences of each Christian tradition. There is enough shared language and culture to begin a dialogue (or trialogue?), where each tradition would listen, learn, probe, push back and teach the others, safe in the knowledge of an ecumenical EU umpire. Far from returning to the early-modern wars of religion, this would mark a new chapter of Church history. One commentator suggests early religious conflicts were defining ‘God’, early-modern conflicts were defining ‘church’, and our current conflict is in defining ‘human’. If that is the battle we fight, may we join forces with elves, ents, dwarves and any other unlikely allies, against the forces of Sauron.
Nations must serve some cause higher than themselves, else we have contained morality. I support a new world order where cultural differences aren’t flattened by technocrats, justice is international, and there is unity in the Church once more. Christian nationalists are not ambitious enough, will you join me in the pursuit of Christian Internationalism.
N.B. I’m indebted to Philip Blond and Jonathan Chaplin for many of these arguments, they did not miraculously come to me.
The Four Discoursemen 