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 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.
