I was recently invited to speak at an online web conference titled “Better Citizens for a Better World.” The conference addressed various aspects of how to live out our Christian citizenship in the here and now.
The conference addressed a wide range of subjects, including an opening talk about “God and Empire” followed by my talk, “Why Christians Can’t be Nationalists.”
My friend Dr. Rob Dalrymple does the first presentation, ending at the 20:15 mark. I then follow up with my presentation outlining what I believe are the proper Christian approaches to patriotism, nationalism and Christian nationalism.
My talk ends at 48:20 when Rob and I begin to answer write-in questions from viewers.
I hope that you find this interesting and helpful in this election season. Thanks for watching:
I am thinking back to that childhood adage about the hypocrisy of pointing fingers. Remember? When I point my finger at someone else, I always have three fingers pointing back at myself.
Funny how we tend to forget the wisdom of childhood.
Instead of pointing fingers, let’s look in the mirror and pay attention to our own faces.
Today Andrea Mazzarino, co-founder of Brown University’s Costs of War Project, has an article at TomDispatchanalyzing the domestic blowback of
Andrea Mazzarino
America’s addiction to perpetual war.
A nation cannot keep itself on a continual war footing, as American has done for the past 20 years, without infecting its citizenry with a self-destructive “us vs. them, where’s the enemy?” attitude. It foments tribalism which spreads like a disease.
As many Americans condemn Russia for its grim invasion, it’s easy to forget that for more than two decades now, others in our world have viewed our post-9/11 foreign policy in much the way we now view Russia’s — as imperialist and expansionist. After all, the U.S. invaded two countries, while using the 9/11 attacks to launch a war on terror globally that metastasized into U.S. counterterror activities in 85 nations.
This has, in fact, been the violent American century, but even less recognized here is how our war on terror helped cause us to turn on one another. It injected fear and the weaponry that goes with it into a country where relatively prosperous, connected communities like mine would have had the potential to expand and offer other Americans far more robust support.
If we don’t find a way to pay more attention to why this didn’t happen and just how we did so much negatively to ourselves, then a police-state mentality and its potential companion, civil war (like the ones we’ve seen in countries we sought to “democratize” by force of arms) may, in the end, become the deepest reality of an ever more polarized America. Of that, Donald Trump is but a symptom.
Advocates for American nationalism, including explicit Christian nationalism, are becoming louder and more numerous in this country, a development that every follower of Jesus can only criticize and resist.
I am increasingly convinced that there is no such thing as an “acceptable” brand of nationalism. All nationalisms want (1) to elevate one group of people, one national body, above all others (2) while claiming some divinely ordained mission in the world.
That way of thinking is always a recipe for disaster, not to mention that it is antithetical to life in the kingdom of God.
Of course, the most disastrous expression of nationalism in modern history appeared in twentieth century Germany during the rule of the Nazi National Socialist party.
Remembering the adage that “those who refuse to learn from history are doomed to repeat it,” I think it is worth recalling one particular criticism of
German poet Heinrich Heine
German nationalism offered by the German Jewish poet, Heinrich Heine.
Heine fled Germany for Paris a full century before the Nazis came to power because even then he could foresee the inevitable dangers of an increasingly robust German nationalism.
As you read the excerpt below, substitute the words America and American for Germany and Germans. Heine’s insights remain remarkably contemporary.
This excerpt is from the work of the German historian Götz Aly titled Why the Germans? Why the Jews? Envy, Race Hatred, and the Prehistory of the Holocaust (pages 59-60):
Heine despised what he called “the jingoistic champions of nationality, our nationalists, so-called patriots, whose heads are full only of race, blood, [that is, national identity markers] and similar idiocies.” The appeal of these “so-called ultra-Germans”. . . Heine wrote, could be traced back to powerful formulas with which one could excite a mob: “The words fatherland, Germany, faith of our fathers, etc., always electrify the muddled minds of the masses far more than the words, humanity, cosmopolitanism [today think of multiculturalism], reason, and truth!” . . .
. . . German advocates of liberty and democracy, cloaking themselves in the flag of nationalism, were among those who originally blazed the paths that would eventually lead to catastrophe. They promulgated the German nation as a unity based on mythic origin [think of our Founding Fathers], religion [Right-Wing Christianity], and language [English only; no bilingual education]. They elevated the value of national particularity, of an ethnically defined popular identity, above that of universal human rights. As a result, in the name of national unity, they excluded others.
This excerpt is from the work of the German historian Götz Aly titled Why the Germans? Why the Jews? Envy, Race Hatred, and the Prehistory of the Holocaust (pages 59-60):