PATRIOTISM AS A LIMITED LOYALTY

(Photo by DAVID ILIFF. License: CC BY-SA 3.0)

On the one hand, it’s natural to identify oneself with, to feel affection for, the land of one’s birth. After all, we are creatures, not gods. We are finite, not infinite. We come into being and grow up in a particular time, and if not in one particular place and community, then in a finite number of them. We are normally inducted into particular forms of social life by our family and by other institutions—schools, churches, clubs, workplaces, political parties, public assemblies, laws. These institutions and their customs mediate and embody a grasp of the universal forms of human flourishing that are given in and with human nature. It is natural, therefore, that we should feel special affection for, loyalty toward, and gratitude to those communities, customs, and institutions that have benefited us by enabling us to flourish as human beings; and, since beneficiaries ought to be grateful to benefactors, it is right that we should.

Of course, institutions at a national level are not the only ones that enable us to flourish as human beings, but they do remain among them; and they are still the most important. This is true, notwithstanding the easy illusion of global identity that today’s social media create. While international institutions such as the United Nations have developed since the Second World War, they haven’t replaced nation-states and don’t seem likely to do so any time soon. Indeed, the UN only has as much power as nation-states choose to give it. So the nation-state is here to stay for the foreseeable future, and it continues to have great power to shape the lives of individual human beings. Insofar as it has shaped our lives for the better, we owe it our gratitude and loyalty; insofar as it has mis-shaped our lives (or other people’s) for the worse, we owe it our commitment to reform. Either way, we owe it our care. In that sense, patriotism is right and proper.

On the other hand, no nation—or even multinational union—deserves our absolute, uncritical loyalty. I’ve already suggested that healthy patriotism involves our commitment to reform, where our nation falls short of justice—and that presupposes criticism. Christians of all people should be aware of this, partly because of the moral gap that lies between all things human, including nations, and God. But also because the emergence of Christianity as a religion distinct from Judaism in the course of the 1st century AD involved a separation of religious faith from ethnicity and place and statehood. As St Paul famously wrote in his letter to the Christians at Philippi, “[O]ur citizenship is in heaven” (Phil. 4.20). A Christian therefore may not divinise the nation. He may not be a Romantic nationalist. Romantic nationalism, which emerged in Europe in the late 1700s and early 1800s, effectively substitutes the nation for God; and seeks immortality, not in the Next Life, but in the nation’s future. Here’s a classic expression of such nationalism by the early 19th century German philosopher, Johann Gottlieb Fichte:

The noble-minded man’s belief in the eternal continuance of his influence even on this earth is … founded on the hope of the eternal continuance of the people from which he has developed .... In order to save his nation he must be ready even to die that it may live, and that he may live in it the only life for which he has ever wished.^{1 J.G. Fichte, Addresses to the German Nation (Chicago: Open Court Press, 1922), pp. 135-36.}

Against such idolatrous nationalism, Christians are bound to refuse the claim that nations have an eternal destiny, and that their survival or their independence is an absolute imperative. So when Alex Salmond speaks of Scotland’s ‘destiny’ to become an independent nation, as if independence were some kind of divine necessity, as a Christian I have to respond simply, “No: there is no such thing”. The nation-state is not a form of human organisation that is inscribed in nature’s DNA, and no particular nation is guaranteed eternal life. Nations are contingent, evolving, and transitory phenomena. They come and they go. Scotland as a nation-state covering all the territory north of the Solway Firth did not exist until the late medieval period. The United Kingdom did not exist before 1707. The United States could have ceased to exist in the early 1860s. Czechoslovakia did cease to exist in 1993. A healthy patriotism, therefore, is limited and conditional, not idolatrous and absolute.

To some extent Roman Catholic Christianity is better placed to remember this than its Protestant counterpart. That’s because Catholicism looks back to a time when the Church in Rome exercised a spiritual and moral authority over all the states in European Christendom, a transcendent authority that could have real political force. It found famous voice, for example, in Sir Thomas More's declaration, moments before he was beheaded for refusing to endorse Henry VIII’s assertion of royal supremacy over the English Church, that he would die “the King’s good servant, but God’s first”.^{2 According to a contemporary report carried in the Paris News Letter. See Nicholas Harpsfield, The life and death of Sir Thomas Moore, knight, sometymes Lord high Chancellor of England, ed. E.V. Hitchcock and R.W. Chambers, Early English Text Society, Original Series no. 186 (London: Oxford University Press, 1932), Appendix III, p. 266: “Apres les exhorta, et supplia tres instamment qu’ils priassent Dieu pour le Roy, affin qu’il luy voulsist donner bon conseil, protestant qu’il mouroit son bon serviteur et de Dieu premierement”.} And it finds contemporary expression in the enthusiasm of Catholic Christian Democrats for the integration of Europe’s plethora of nation-states into federal European Union.

Protestantism, in contrast, has tended to play up the virtues of national sovereignty and identity. This is partly because the very survival of Protestantism in the 16th and 17th centuries was bound up with the independence of Protestant nation-states from Catholic empires. It’s also because the Protestant democratic commitment to the priesthood of all believers led to the translation of the Bible into vernacular languages, which has been a major force in the creation of national identities. For example, the translation of the Bible into Bulgarian by American Protestant missionaries was one of the main sources of Bulgarian national identity over and against the Ottomans in the 1860s. Nevertheless, notwithstanding their nationalist tendencies, Protestants too can tell difference between the nation-state and God. After all, Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s version of Lutheran patriotism led him to plot the assassination of Germany’s tyrannical head of state in 1944.

NOTES:

1. J.G. Fichte, Addresses to the German Nation (Chicago: Open Court Press, 1922), pp. 135-36.
    
2. According to a contemporary report carried in the Paris News Letter. See Nicholas Harpsfield, The life and death of Sir Thomas Moore, knight, sometymes Lord high Chancellor of England, ed. E.V. Hitchcock and R.W. Chambers, Early English Text Society, Original Series no. 186 (London: Oxford University Press, 1932), Appendix III, p. 266: “Apres les exhorta, et supplia tres instamment qu’ils priassent Dieu pour le Roy, affin qu’il luy voulsist donner bon conseil, protestant qu’il mouroit son bon serviteur et de Dieu premierement”.