Since 2001, we have seen a marked decline in American patriotism. A 2019 Gallup poll showed that the number of Americans who are proud of their country began to drop in 2005 and now hovers under fifty percent.[1] In 2013, researchers with the Pew Research Foundation discovered a generational devolution from the Silent Generation (b. 1925–1945) to Millennials (b. 1980–2000) of confidence in America’s prominence compared to other countries.[2]
The sources of these trends are undoubtedly myriad and differ for each person polled. Not everyone would even agree that these changes are bad. Some, like New York Times editor Mara Gay, associate common signs of patriotism like the American flag with Donald Trump and the political right, thus finding them disturbing.[3]
But assuming you have some affinity for the country—a shared language, history, law, territory, and culture—it is still unwise to perform too much handwringing over the matter or call for radical changes in public policy or public schools to try to rectify the situation with a simple three-point-plan. It would be more helpful to dig beneath the discussion to consider one of the primary underlying disagreements that is fueling the division along with debates over immigration policy and foreign affairs.
American and European intellectuals and globalist politicians have waged an extended war on the love for one’s country over the past eighty years. Their aversion to national identity was derived partly from the two World Wars but also grew from their theories about how and why the nation came to hold such affection for the individual.
In this first of three essays on nationalism, we are going to consider how these social leaders understand the origins of nationalism before turning to Scripture for its insights. Two more posts will follow (over the course of this year) exploring how nationalism was manipulated in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, all the while developing a robust Biblical and theological understanding of the matter and its implications for political philosophy.
What is Nationalism?
Perhaps the first thing to address is the ill-defined usage of the word nationalism. Sometimes people use nationalism to refer to the collection of prepolitical commitments and loyalties that a people have toward others in their community based upon shared language, customs and laws, religious sensibilities, and physical place. At other times, nationalism is depicted as an ideology that places the nation-state before all other commitments, including the traditional and prepolitical loyalties of communal identity listed above.
Often an author will use the term in both ways within a single piece, which further muddies the waters. For some, a lack of clear distinctions reflects their belief that communal affinity is inseparable from the ideology. But even those who recognize the difference between the two sometimes use the term loosely. So, attending to context is important when reading or talking about this subject.
Are Nations Ancient or Modern?
Differences of opinion concerning the value and nature of nationalism are rooted partly in theories about its origins. Scholars have deep disagreements about how, why, and when nationalism developed.
Up until the Second World War, the traditional understanding of nations and nationalism was unchallenged. According to this view, nationalism as a distinct political movement was a modern outgrowth of historic communal affinities based on sharing a common language, religion, physical geography, culture, kinship (real or perceived), and pattern of law and custom. Further, these communal connections have been embraced by humans throughout time and space.[4] Thus, advocates of this view held that nationalism is universal and extremely ancient.
Coming out of the nineteenth century, most argued that national identities were unchanging. Therefore, individuals could be easily categorized based on language, history, location, culture, and ethnicity. However, there were clear counterexamples to this view, such as the United States. How could you possibly categorize a gigantic country with so many varied ethnic groups and local affinities and such a complex cultural history?
More recently, scholars like Azar Gat and Alexander Yakobson, building on and responding to Benedict Anderson’s Imagined Communities (1983), have modified the traditional position, arguing that kinship affinity begins with our closest family but then extends out to incorporate those with whom we have tight cultural bonds but little-to-no biological connection.[5] In this way, national identity is flexible and shifting over time. Philosopher Roger Scruton agrees, arguing that this kind of emphasis on shared “territory and custom” of the community has been an essential quality of European civilization.[6] For these scholars, nationalism is perennial and inescapable but subject to modifications that can be good or bad.
However, most academics since the 1940s have rejected the traditional approach to nationalism. They hold that national identity is primarily a function of state power exerted by political figures seeking to solidify control over one group of people and exclude all others. Though these scholars do not concur on precisely how or when nationalism developed, they agree that it is modern (post-1700), artificial, and the product of larger (often malevolent) social forces.
This view is deeply informed by the horrors of the two World Wars and the rise of totalitarian dictators like Adolf Hitler, Joseph Stalin, and Benito Mussolini, who appealed to national sentiment to build popular support for their regimes. This group argues that politicians make appeals to a fictionalized common historical memory, culture, and kinship to amass power to themselves. Further, the key to nationalism is clearly defining who should be cast out of the community for impurity of one form or another. In this way, these scholars see the Nazi and Stalinist approach to nationalism as normative. But is that view accurate? Gat, Yakobson, and Scruton would say that it is a perversion of an inescapable human trait. Thankfully, Scripture does not leave us without counsel in this debate.
The Table of Nations
The term nation first occurs in the Bible in Genesis 10. In fact, this passage is often referred to as the Table of Nations. These verses give the “records of the generations” of Noah’s three sons—Shem, Ham, and Japheth (Gen. 10:1, NASB). The three genealogies begin with Noah’s sons and end after the Tower of Babel debacle recorded in Genesis 11. All three end by explaining that descendants had been organized according to families, territories, languages, and nations. Thus, the nature of national identity is connected to the events that transpired on the plain of Shinar.
The tower seems to have been the work of Nimrod, a descendant of Ham. He was known as a mighty hunter and city builder, whose kingdom began at Babel in the land of Shinar (Gen. 10:9–10).[7] Theologian Peter Leithart argues that Nimrod was assisted in his work in Shinar by the descendants of Shem through the families of Joktan who settled in the “hill country of the east” (Gen. 10:30) near the plain of Shinar that they discovered as “they journeyed east” (Gen. 11:2).[8] If Leithart is correct, this connection would likely have happened during Joktan’s life since his brother was named Peleg, which means division, “for in his days the earth was divided” (Gen. 10:25). Regardless, both the genealogies of Ham and Shem refer to the Tower of Babel.
Rather than obeying God’s reiteration of the cultural mandate to Noah to “populate the earth abundantly and multiply in in it” (Gen. 9:7), Nimrod and the families of Joktan decided to congregate in one small location where they could safely make a name for themselves by using their technological acumen to reach into heaven (Gen. 11:4). As theologian Paul House has noted, they pursued this path for “the express purpose” of disobeying God’s command, but God’s will cannot be overturned.[9]
As punishment for their disobedience, God “confused the language of the whole earth,” which “scattered them abroad over the face of the whole earth” (Gen. 11:7–8) just as He had commanded them. Nimrod went forth from Shinar into Assyria where he built Nineveh (Gen. 10:11–12), and the descendants of Peleg, including the family of Abram, settled in Ur. God had His own plans for connecting man with heaven, but it would be through a specific people at a time of His own choosing rather than by the work of all mankind bending technology to their will. It is also important to remember that God “disciplines us for our good” (Heb. 12:10). Thus, this act of confusion and separation was for our own benefit.
Note that God did not simply change the languages of those burning bricks in Shinar that day. Rather, the whole earth was affected by this act of discipline. This fact is highlighted by the genealogies of Shem, Ham, and Japheth. Even though his descendants are not associated with the Tower of Babel, Japheth’s family is given first and ends by noting that, from his line of descendants, “the coastlands of the nations were separated into their lands, every one according to his language, according to their families, into their nations” (Gen. 10:5). The genealogies of Ham and Shem are identical but slightly different from Japheth’s. They conclude by noting that their sons have been listed “according to their families, according to their languages, by their lands, by their nations” (Gen. 10:20, 31). And the chapter ends by summing up the families of the sons of Noah as the source of the “nations [that] were separated on the earth after the flood” (Gen. 10:32).
Importantly, the characteristics of national identity repeatedly listed by Moses in Genesis 10 match the modified traditional view of nationalism. He describes people being separated by kinship, common language, and shared territory (common religion, customs, and law grew out of this context). These affinities are clearly not immutable, for they were formed over time in response to the confusing of the tongue at Babel. But they are characteristic of what Moses calls gôy or “nations.”[10] So the Biblical understanding of nationalism is that it is a deeply ancient and universal post-Babel human experience created by God for good.
Conclusion
In future essays we will explore how nationalism appears in other parts of Scripture, including in the Eschaton. But nations and national identity were clearly created by God for our benefit to disperse us across the globe and curb our collective sin. This point does not mean that nationalism can never be turned to evil purposes by people looking for power or seeking ideological goals. But it does mean that nations are a good thing and that a healthy love for your country and its success is a good and God-given blessing.
[1] Megan Brenan, “American Pride Hits New Low; Few Proud of Political System,” Gallup (July 2, 2019), accessed June 10, 2022, https://news.gallup.com/poll/259841/american-pride-hits-new-low-few-proud-political-system.aspx.
[2] Laura Thorsett and Jocelyn Kiley, “Most Americans Say the U.S. is Among the Greatest Countries in the World,” Pew Research Foundation (June 30, 2017), accessed June 10, 2022, https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2017/06/30/most-americans-say-the-u-s-is-among-the-greatest-countries-in-the-world/.
[3] Lee Brown, “NY Times Defends Mara Gay for Saying She Was ‘Disturbed’ by American Flags,” New York Post (June 9, 2021), accessed June 10, 2022, https://nypost.com/2021/06/09/ny-times-defends-mara-grays-american-flag-comments/.
[4] Nicholas Atkin, Michael Biddiss, and Frank Tallett, The Wiley-Blackwell Dictionary of Modern European History Since 1789, s.v. “nationalism” (Chichester, UK: Wiley-Blackwell, 2011).
[5] Azar Gat with Alexander Yakobson, Nations: The Long History and Deep Roots of Political Ethnicity and Nationalism (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 25.
[6] Roger Scruton, “The Need for Nations,” in Confessions of a Heretic with introduction by Douglas Murray (Kendal, UK: Notting Hill, 2021), 51–52.
[7] The Septuagint translators transliterated Nimrod’s first city from the Hebrew as Babylon, which, as Peter Leithart points out, means “gate of God.” Regardless, this Babel seems to be the same Babel from Genesis 11 since it was located in the valley of Shinar. See Peter J. Leithart, A House for My Name: A Survey of the Old Testament (Moscow, ID: Canon, 2000), 60.
[8] Leithart, 58–59.
[9] Paul R. House, Old Testament Theology (Downers Grove, IL: IVP Academic, 1998), 70.
[10] The Hebrew word used here is gôy. This term is used hundreds of times in the Old Testament and is almost always translated as nation with only a couple of exceptions. Interestingly, its usage tends to favor common territory, which would include cultural commonality over literal blood relationship, though the distinction is not always very clear. Thanks to language scholar and HSF Contributor Zach Vickery for helping with this linguistic analysis.
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