How Ought We Square Christianity with Nationalism?

The relationship between Christianity and political conservativism has gotten increasingly loaded in recent years, with politicians apparently more and more at their ease in leveraging Christian ideals in service of their political positions – and with their critics apparently more and more mortified at the resulting distortions of their creed and a humane politics (see this piece for a recent take).

It's made for an environment where the term “Christian nationalism” gets slung around a lot. Sometimes hurled as an insult, sometimes embraced as a badge of honor, the term is rife with controversy. But it does present a useful line for thinking through how politics and religion ought to interact in the life and perspective of a mature, faithful Christian. So what should that faithful Christian have to do with such a movement?

It’s worth noting first that it’s difficult, actually, to square genuine Christianity with genuine nationalism. Nationalism, in a lot of ways, is a religion in its own right. It gained traction around the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries as a kind of replacement for Christianity, placing persons’ main source of meaning and belonging in the nation, rather than allowing the nation to maintain a secondary sort of importance in terms of its hold on human identity and loyalties. In other words, it tries to do what the Church is meant to do in the life of a believer; as a result, it has to be taken as an alternative to Christianity in its true form, not something one can genuinely “tack on” to one’s religious practice.

It’s helpful, perhaps, to distinguish between the nation and the state on this topic. A state is simply a necessary entity: it’s an organizational arrangement that maintains order and just governance in the context of our shared lives. It’s just part of the apparatus of how the world works. A nation, on the other hand, is an ethnicity. And when that becomes the core part of a group of a people’s identity, the main locus of their sense of belonging, then the temptation emerges to map the state onto the nation. One wants power and governance only in the hands of those who are “one of us,” part of the same tribe one identifies with. One’s leaders need to speak his or her language, need to come from the same place and culture he or she did, or the situation is fundamentally unjust.

The Catholic Church images the great alternative to this. It’s not typical for Catholics to feel that they’ve been slighted if the Pope is not of their people. Their filial trust and obedience belong just as validly and fairly to him as it would if he were of their same nation or ethnicity.

And while countries can’t necessarily operate exactly like the Church, this can help us to distinguish the position we’re meant to take in relation to political and state leaders, too. Neither nation nor state are where our primary allegiance are meant to lie; nothing at the core of human identity is actually rocked if a leader coming into power holds fundamentally different political positions from one’s own. One simply owes his or her administration the congeniality and respect owed to any genuinely just government, and no more than that. Indeed, while we should be concerned to establish and maintain fair and dignifying governments, ones that uphold policies that truly serve human life, we don’t need to be concerned to ensure that government leaders are absolutely “one of us,” made up of sharers in the exact same political (and sometimes political-made-religious) views we may hold.

So, Christian nationalism is something of a misnomer. Christians can be genuinely patriotic, of course – grateful and dutiful toward the country that’s serving their livelihoods and communities. But beyond that, one gets into choppy waters – and not because we don’t want politicians and religious leaders who share our ideals. Rather, it’s because we’re just not invested in strong-arming together perfected socio-political communities this side of heaven. We know such communities are simply not possible here below. And so we’ve set our sights and our ultimate hopes elsewhere: in heaven indeed, in the promise belonging to that Kingdom truly holds for our genuine happiness, harmony, and fulfillment.