Can a Christian (not) be a nationalist?

There are those who think nationalism is a bad thing and needs to be strongly opposed. President Macron of France, in his Remembrance Day speech, disclosed that he is one of these. So did Prime Minister Justin Trudeau. I, on the other hand, look upon nationalism as a good thing that needs to be protected. Let me explain.

One of the first articles I ever published was “Theological Perspectives on Nationalism” in The Anglo-Welsh Review (1973). The context was the de-Canadianization of universities that made it difficult for young Canadian PhD’s to find jobs after long and expensive training because an old boy’s (they were mostly boys then) network had filled the vacancies in rapidly expanding universities with buddies.

In earlier days they were namely British; later on overwhelmingly American.

My concern, however, was not mainly a matter of jobs. Canadian intellectual and cultural materials suffered neglect: Canadian literature, art history, sociology, political history – all had to struggle for breathing room. The consequent historical ignorance almost had a calamitous outcome. Canadians came within a hair’s breadth of fracturing the country because we (the Anglophones) did not understand the Quebecois struggle for national identity.

Although of Italian origin and proud of my Italianita, I am at the same time a defiant Canadian nationalist. Perhaps being raised in Niagara Falls where our school grounds abutted the Lundy’s Lane cemetery with its stacks of old and pitted cannonballs had something to do with it. I had to fight the War of 1812-14 over and over again.

But there was far more to it than this. I began to study the Bible. The Old Testament is at heart the storybook of the travails and triumphs of the nation Israel in its experienced encounter with God. Of course, there are scary and savage parts but what cannot be evaded is vindication of the historical narrative of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob.

The Gospel of Luke continues this historical orientation. Luke gives the historical context in which John the Baptist began preaching a baptism of repentance: In the fifteenth year of the reign of Tiberius Caesar, Herod, tetrarch of Galilee and similarly his brothers, the high priesthood of Annas and Caiaphas. The salvation events of the New Testament are not extrapolated from a universal human essence discovered by going deep into one’s inner self. They are rooted in concrete social and political – and national – history. The incarnation is the paradigmatic vindication of the reality and worth of history.

This led to my writing for The Anglo-Welsh Review. The Welsh understood the nation as an historical entity. They experienced the distinct career of the Welsh people as something valuable; hence, the struggle to preserve their language under threat of elimination by the dominant English culture.

The Old Testament scholar G. Ernest Wright confirmed my developing engagement with history and its attendant nationalism. During the Kikuyu uprising in Kenya he argued that our historical pilgrimage shapes our identity. When you destroy the culture of a people you destroy their outlooks and values and their sense of who they are. The result all too often, Wright observed, is the descent into alcoholism, violence and mental sickness. The anthropologist Levi-Strauss asserted that wherever western colonialism has gone in “primitive” societies it has destroyed them.

It is possible that the controversy about nationalism boils down to a definition of terms. Perhaps, by nationalism some of its critics really mean chauvinism or imperialism – the social outlook that judges one’s own values and way of life superior to all others.

This runs all the way from the mission civilatrice where the socially dominant feel it is their ethical duty to bring those of different and weaker groups out of darkness into light – construed, of course, as replacing the culture of the weak by that of the dominant power. The residential schools for the indigenous population of Canada undertook not only a Christianizing duty but also a presumptive civilizing one as well where even native languages were expunged in favour of European ones.

The extreme end of this imperialism is evidenced by King Leopold of Belgium’s program of enslavement and massacre of the Congolese. This is not old history contemporaneous with the Spanish conquistadores devastation of the Americas. Leopold’s imperialism in the Congo extended into the twentieth century.

In spite of this horrendous legacy of imperialism, humane nationalism needs to be upheld in order to protect the historical careers that help make people who they are. Can Christians be nationalists? Paradoxically, in order to be anti-imperialist, they need to be.