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Loyalty and Limits

I. Against Cosmopolitanism

In Anglo-American philosophical circles—and even, it seems, in reaches of British government—the view is rising that there is no virtue in national loyalty.1 Since all human individuals are of equal value, we have no good reason to prefer those who speak our language, share our customs, occupy our patch of the globe, or participate in our political community. Indeed, particular loyalties, whether to family or nation, are vices, moving us to discriminate unjustly against those whom Fate has cast outside the boundaries of our favoured group. Rather, enlightened by the speed and ease of global communications, we should transcend the benighted tribal attachments that have spawned so much human conflict and misery in the past, and embrace a new, cosmopolitan identity.

I suspect that a basic reason why my clergyman friend was so sure that the nation-state is in fact passé is that he was sure that it should be so.2 Perhaps he was a nascent—and rather avant garde—cosmopolitan. After all, at first glance Christians have some obvious reasons for being so. Although Jesus did not cease to identify himself with the Jewish nation, he did distance himself from militant nationalist resistance to Roman imperial domination. We are told explicitly in the Gospel of John that he evaded those who would make him “king.”3 More generally, however, the pacific tenor of his teaching and conduct indicated a vision of God’s reign alternative to that espoused by militant nationalism. Moreover, Jesus distanced genuine religious faith from the rites and authority of the Temple in Jerusalem, recognized that it was not the monopoly of his own people, and acknowledged its presence in Samaritans and Gentiles.4 After Jesus’ death, St. Paul further loosened the connection between faith on the one hand, and blood and land on the other. Although he too insisted on maintaining and asserting his Jewish identity, he nevertheless developed an understanding of religious faith that is not oriented toward the particular location of Jerusalem, which transcends ethnicity, and which has no proper interest in the restoration of a Jewish nation-state. Out of such an understanding emerged the trans-national religious community known as the “church.”

Given these origins, it should not surprise that some interpret Christianity as implying a liberal, cosmopolitan stance over and against a partisan, nationalist one, and as preferring love for humanity in general over love for a particular nation. One expression of this can be found in Richard B. Miller’s argument that Christian love for others is properly indiscriminate and unconditional: “Christianity requires an indiscriminate, unconditional love of others, irrespective of political, social, or national affiliation. . . . Christian agape, exemplified by Jesus’ teaching and example, is altruistic and cosmopolitan.”5

This claim has two main grounds, one biblical and the other theological. The biblical ground comprises those passages in the New Testament where “natural” loyalty to family is severely downgraded. Among them are those in the Gospels where Jesus is reported as saying that only those who hate their mothers and fathers can be his disciples,6 that those who would follow him must “let the dead bury the dead,”7 and that his “family” now consists of those who have joined him in his cause;8 and also, by implication, those passages in the Epistles where St. Paul recommends virginity or celibacy as a higher good than marriage.9

The theological ground consists of the typically Protestant concept of God’s love as showered graciously on every human creature regardless of their moral status—a concept that was most fully developed in the 1930s by the Swedish Lutheran theologian Anders Nygren. According to Nygren, God’s love is utterly spontaneous and gratuitous; it is not attracted to the beloved by any of their qualities (how could it be, since those whom it loves are all sinners?) and it is in no sense beholden to them; it is simply and absolutely gracious.10 As God loves us, so should we love our neighbors: with a pure altruism that entirely disregards their qualities. It is quite true that Nygren himself was not directly addressing the question of whether or not a certain local or national partiality in our affections and loyalties is justifiable; and that his focus was on the religious relationship between God and sinful creatures. Nevertheless, he made it quite clear that Christians are to mediate to their neighbors the same unconditional and indiscriminate love that God has shown them.11

What should we make of these biblical and theological grounds? Do they really imply that Christian love should be oblivious to local and national bonds? I think not. Certainly, the so-called “hard sayings” of Jesus imply that natural loyalties are subordinate to the requirements of loyalty to God; and that sometimes the latter might enjoin behaviour that contradicts normal expressions of the former. But, given that Jesus is also reported as criticizing the Pharisees for proposing a piece of casuistry that effectively permits children to neglect the proper care of their elderly parents;12 and given that, notwithstanding his affirmation and commendation of Gentiles,13 he apparently maintained his identity as a Jew;14 there is good reason not to take these “hard sayings” at face-value, and to read them as hyperboles intending to relativize rather than repudiate natural loyalties. As for St. Paul, it is notable that, although he reckoned virginity and celibacy superior, he persisted in regarding marriage as a good. In other words, in spite of his urgent sense of the imminent ending or transformation of the world by God, and of how this revolution of the current order of things would severely strain marital and family ties, St. Paul never went as far as to say that investment in society through marriage and children should cease. What he thereby implies is that, although the arrival of the world-to-come will involve the transformation of this world and its natural social bonds, it will not involve their simple abolition.

Upon closer inspection, then, the New Testament grounds for supposing Christian love to be properly unconditional and indiscriminate are not at all firm. That is even more so in the case of the theological ground. Certainly, if we take Jesus to be God incarnate, we can infer that the love of God for wayward human beings is gracious, or, to be more precise and specific, forgiving. As I have argued elsewhere, the word “forgiveness” commonly means two different things. It points to two distinct moments in the process of reconciliation: first, one of “compassion,” and then one of “absolution.”15 Compassion is unilateral and unconditional and meets the wrongdoer before he has repented; absolution is reciprocal and conditional and meets him only afterwards. God’s love is compassionate in that it sympathizes with wrongdoers in their weakness and confusion and ignorance; and it is absolving in that it is willing to set past injury aside and enter once again into a relationship of trust. But note how limited is the scope of this love: it operates only between an injured party and the one who has done the injury. It is a mode of love, but not the whole of it. Accordingly, it is unconditional and indiscriminate only in part. As compassion, its being proffered is not conditional upon the demonstration of repentance, and it is therefore made available indiscriminately to all sinners. As absolution, however, it is only offered in response to an expression of genuine repentance, and therefore only discriminately to penitent sinners.

Since this analysis, with its denial that all of forgiveness is unconditional, might sound counter-intuitive to Christians, especially Protestants, let me offer a brief defence. I have two points to make, one biblical and one empirical. First, in Jesus’ paradigm of forgiveness, his parable of the Prodigal Son (Luke 15:11–32), the heartfelt repentance of the son is already fully established before we learn of his father’s eager forgiveness: “When he came to his senses, he said, ‘. . . I will set out and go back to my father and say to him, “Father, I have sinned against heaven and against you. I am no longer worthy to be called your son . . .”’” (vv. 17–19a). This he proceeds to do. While it is true that the father is filled with compassion and rushes to embrace him before he has so much as opened his mouth, the very next moment in the story has the son give explicit voice to his penitent intentions: “The son said to him, ‘Father, I have sinned . . .” (v. 21). What this implies, I suggest, is that the parable does not tell a story of simply unconditional forgiveness. Yes, the father’s compassion is unconditional. Nevertheless, the son’s repentance is a prominent part of the story, and not at all incidental, and that gives us reason to suppose that what follows depends on it.

My second line of defence is empirical and briefer, and invites the reader to reflect on her own experience. Such reflection will confirm, I suggest, that it is unloving and foolish to absolve someone who has shown insufficient awareness of what they have done wrong, both because it forecloses their moral education and growth and because it makes it likely that they will proceed to cause further injury.

Such is my defence of the assertion that God’s love, as shown in Jesus and his teaching, is not simply indiscriminate. Let me return now to the larger point: that the kind of love that Jesus mainly models bears on how we should treat those who have wronged us. What it does not bear upon is how we should distribute our limited emotional, physical, temporal, and material resources in caring for the millions of fellow humans who can now claim to be—more or less closely—our neighbors. The argument from God’s agape to Christian cosmopolitanism does not work.

So how should we relate to near and distant neighbors? My view is that Christians should begin their answer to this question with the concept of human being as creaturely. On the one hand, this implies basic human equality. If all human beings are creatures of the one God then they all share a common origin and destiny, and a common subordination. If human creaturehood is then specified in terms of being made “in God’s image,” then all human beings are thereby dignified with responsibility to manage the rest of the created world;16 and each is the subject of a vocation to play a unique part in God’s work of bringing the created world to fulfilment. If we add to the doctrine of creation that of universal sinfulness, then humans are also equal in the fact (if not the degree) of their sinful condition and so in their need of God’s gift of forgiveness, and consequently none has the right to stand to another simply as righteous to the unrighteous.

Given these various kinds of basic equality, each human being owes any other a certain respect or esteem, such that, for example, he will not to take the other’s life intentionally or wantonly, whatever his national affiliation may be. Persons from Britain or America cannot regard the life of a person from India or China as any less valuable than that of a compatriot, for they too are loved by, and answerable to, God, and they too might mediate God’s prophetic word. But human beings might owe others more than mere respect and a commitment to refrain from intentional or wanton harm. They might also owe them aid. In addition to non-maleficence, that is, they might also owe beneficence. However, whereas we are always able to refrain from harming other people intentionally or wantonly, we are not always able to benefit them. We may be responsible, but ours is a responsibility of creatures, not of gods; and our creaturely resources of energy, time, and material goods are finite. Therefore we are able only to benefit some, not all; and there might be some to whom we are more strongly obliged by ties of gratitude, or whom we are better placed to serve on account of shared language and culture or common citizenship. In short, notwithstanding the fact that all human beings are equal in certain basic respects, no matter what their native land, we might still be obliged—depending on the circumstances—to benefit near neighbors before or instead of distant ones.

However, whether near or far, human neighbors are not the only proper objects of our respect and care. So are customs and institutions. Humans 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. A human individual is normally inducted into particular forms of social life by her family and by other institutions—schools, churches, clubs, workplaces, political parties, public assemblies. These institutions and their customs mediate and embody certain apprehensions of the forms of human flourishing—that is, basic human goods—that are given in and with the created nature of human being. It is natural, therefore, that an individual should feel special affection for, loyalty toward, and gratitude to those communities, customs, and institutions that have benefited her by inducting her into human goods; and, since beneficiaries ought to be grateful to benefactors, it is right that she should. We have yet to specify the forms that such affection should and should not take; but that they should take some form is clear.

II. Why Loyalty to the Nation?

It is proper for an individual to have affection for, feel loyalty to, and show gratitude toward those communities that have enabled her to flourish. But why must this stretch as far as a national community or national institutions? Why is it not sufficient to identify with local and regional and even supranational ones? Why is loyalty to family or church—to kin or cosmopolis—not enough? There is no reason in principle why it should not be enough. The nation is not a cultural unit or form of social or political organization that is inscribed in nature’s D.N.A., and no particular nation is guaranteed eternal life. Historically it is surely true, as Benedict Anderson and Linda Colley have argued, that particular nations are human constructs, not natural facts.17 As they have evolved, so they will change and perhaps pass away. 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.

If historians have reasons to be sceptical of the claims of nations, so do theologians. According to many authoritative students of the phenomenon, the nation as we now know it is a specifically modern entity, appearing first in late eighteenth-century Europe and progressively capitalizing on the cultural decline of the Christian religion. As Europeans lost their faith in God, so the story goes, they transferred their faith to the nation; and as they ceased to hope for life in the world-to-come, they began to invest themselves in the nation’s immortality.18 This certainly seems true of Romantic nationalism, judging by the following statement by Johann Gottlieb Fichte:

The noble-minded man’s belief in the eternal continuance of his influence even on this earth is thus founded on the hope of the eternal continuance of the people from which he has developed, and on the characteristic of that people. . . . This characteristic is the eternal thing to which he entrusts the eternity of himself and of his continuing influence, the eternal order of things in which he places his portion of eternity. . . . 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.19

Given the patently idolatrous character of Romantic nationalism, Karl Barth, writing in the shadow of its infamous Nazi expression, refused to accord the nation any special status at all in the eyes of the one true God. As he presents it in Volume III/4 of his Church Dogmatics, first published in 1951, national communities—or “peoples”—dissolve into near and far neighbors.20

Barth is surely right to puncture the pretension of nations to the status of something absolute or essential. Nations are fundamentally constituted by national consciousness, by a sense of national identity, by the feeling of individuals that they belong to this people. And such a sense of community is usually born in reaction against another people, which is culturally different and whose difference grates or threatens: I belong to this people because I oppose that one. Thus, the various clans occupying the island of Ireland developed a sense of Irish identity partly in common opposition to English (and Scottish) intrusion. And the English and Scots together developed a sense of British identity partly in common opposition to French Catholic monarchical absolutism and then French revolutionary republicanism. And the various American colonists developed a common sense of American identity, first in reaction to the cultural difference of Britons and then in opposition to what they perceived as British tyranny. Since nations are constituted by national consciousness, and since this consciousness is reactive, it follows that nations are contingent in origin.

Notwithstanding this, the fading of the original irritant need not cause the dissolution of common national consciousness, insofar as that consciousness has found institutional expression. For through institutions a people’s peculiar linguistic grip on the world, customary incarnation of social values, and political ideals achieve a relatively stable state, which can survive the cooling of the original crucible. These institutions can be cultural and civil social, rather than political; and if political, they can enjoy varying degrees of autonomy. Not every nation is a nation-state; and not every nation-state has maximal sovereignty.

Take Scotland as an example. For almost three hundred years from 1707–1999 the Scottish nation expressed its self-consciousness primarily through the Church of Scotland and the Scottish legal system, both of whose jurisdictions covered the same defined territory. While retaining a measure of autonomy over local government (much of which operated through the church or “Kirk” well into the nineteenth century), the Scots had no autonomous control over economic, welfare, or foreign policy. Insofar as they elected representatives to the British parliament at Westminster, and insofar as their representatives succeeded in wielding influence there, they were able to exercise some control—but it was not autonomous. However, since the devolution of power by the British government to Scotland in 1999, and the creation of a Scottish parliament, the Scots now exercise a much greater degree of autonomy over the shape of life in the territory of Scotland. Nevertheless, this autonomy is limited: while they can participate in shaping and pursuing a British foreign policy, the Scots still cannot shape and pursue a simply Scottish one. The Scottish nation, therefore, enjoys statehood, but not of a fully sovereign kind.

Nations are contingent, evolving, and transitory phenomena. In that sense, they are artificial, not natural. And they are certainly not divine. However, in another sense they are natural, insofar as their customs and institutions incarnate a particular, perhaps distinctive grasp of the universal forms of flourishing suitable to human nature. Like families and churches and schools and supranational bodies, nations too can embody forms of human good, thus wielding moral authority and obliging our love. Moreover, when nations acquire full statehood, they come to possess maximal power to shape life within their borders so as to defend and promote goods. They also become centres of international agency, which bear responsibility for goods between nation-states, not least that of international order. Insofar as a nation-state has a record of virtuous action internally and externally, shaping life well within and without its borders, it deserves a measure of affection, loyalty, and gratitude as much as any beneficent family or global charity.

III. Babel’s Benefit: The Good of Diversity

So far I have argued that considered reflection upon the Christian concept of the creatureliness of human being can justify a preference for benefitting near neighbors over distant ones, compatriots over foreigners; that it can also justify affection, loyalty, and gratitude toward those communities, customs, and institutions that mediate forms of human flourishing or human goods; and that a nation is one such community and set of customs and institutions. Now I want to contend that the creaturely quality of the human condition also implies that a diversity of communities, including nations, is a natural necessity that is also good.

Human communities, being creaturely, can only exist in particular times and places; and different geographical locations and historical experiences are bound to generate diverse communities. Human communities, being human, will all share some common characteristics; but experience of different places and histories is bound to generate differences in political constitutions, institutions, customs, received wisdom, and outlook. As a natural necessity, such diversity could be regarded simply as an unhappy feature of the human condition, providing as it does the occasion for inter-communal incomprehension and conflict, and therefore one to be transcended as soon as possible. But Christians, believing as they do in the unqualified goodness and wisdom of the divine Creator, should be disinclined to regard anything natural—whether created or following necessarily from it—as simply evil. Further, human experience confirms that diversity among peoples can be a source of value as well as of conflict. As postmodernists never tire of reminding us, there is beauty in difference. But to restrict this value simply to the aesthetic dimension would be to trivialize many of the differences that concern us here. For differences between constitutions, institutions, customs, wisdom, or outlook, if taken seriously, should provoke not merely wonder but reflective engagement. It should move each community to ask itself whether others do not order their social life better, or whether foreign wisdom should not correct, supplement, or complement its own. The value of communal (and so national) difference here is not just aesthetic, but intellectual and moral: it can enable human beings to learn from each other better ways of serving and promoting the human good. In other words, its justification is not just postmodernist, but liberal (in the style of J. S. Mill).

This argument that a Christian vision of things should affirm national diversity is supported by history. For, according to Adrian Hastings, Christianity has been a vital factor in the historical development of national diversity through its habit of communicating its message by translating it into vernacular languages.21 Since “a community . . . is essentially a creation of human communication,”22 and since the writing down of a language tends to increase linguistic uniformity,23 the movement of a vernacular from oral usage to the point where it is regularly employed for the production of a literature is a major cause of the development of national identity.24 Therefore, by translating the Bible into vernacular languages, by developing vernacular liturgies and devotional literature, and by mediating these to the populace through an educated parish clergy, the Christian church has played a major part in the development of diverse nationalities.25

And there is good reason to suppose that this role has not simply been the accidental effect of a particular missionary strategy. After all, different missionary strategies are possible; and we must ask why Christianity chose the one that it did. It could, like Islam, have chosen to spread the Word by assimilation rather than translation. Muslims regard the Qur’an as divine in its Arabic, linguistic form as well as in its content, and the consequent cultural impact of Islam has been to Arabize, “to draw peoples into a single world community of language and government.”26 In contrast, Christians do not ascribe divinity to any particular language, and they thereby implicitly recognize that the Word of God is free to find (somewhat different) expression in every language.27 Accordingly, in the New Testament story of the birth of the Christian church on the day of Pentecost, the disciples of Jesus “were all filled with the Holy Spirit and began to speak in other tongues,” so that the multi-ethnic crowd who heard them “were bewildered, because each one heard them speaking in his own language.”28 Whereas the story of the tower of Babel in the Hebrew Scriptures presents linguistic diversity as a degeneration (caused by God’s punishment of sin) from an original state when “the whole earth had one language,”29 here the Spirit of God is presented as graciously accommodating Godself to it. This divine self-accommodation implies a respect for and affirmation of the historicality, and therefore diversity, of creaturely human being. Such affirmation is also implicit in the orthodox Christian doctrine of the divine incarnation, according to which God almighty became human in Jesus of Nazareth, and in becoming human became historical—that is, a particular man living in a particular time and place. According to the Christian story, it is characteristic of God to be willing to meet human creatures in the midst of their historicality and diversity. Although transcending time and space, God is not alien to them; in this case what is transcended is not repudiated and may be inhabited. The Christian theological affirmation of human diversity finds further confirmation in the orthodox doctrine of God as a Trinity. In Christian eyes, as in Jewish and Muslim ones, God is certainly one; but the divine unity is not simple. God is more like a community than a monad splendid in isolation. The divine Origin and Basis of the created world, then, is a unity that contains rather than abolishes difference—a unity in diversity, not instead of it.

In case my affirmation of national diversity should appear idiosyncratic, let me point out that it is a consistent characteristic of Anglican thought from at least the mid-nineteenth century to the present day. So, for example, in 1869 F. D. Maurice affirmed “the sanctity of national life”;30 distinguished a nation’s reverence for its own language, laws, and government from a contempt for foreigners;31 envisaged Christ’s kingdom as “a kingdom for all nations” and not a “world-empire”;32 and argued that war is lawful only as “a struggle for Law against Force; for the life of a people as expressed in their laws, their language, their government, against any effort to impose on them a law, a language, a government which is not theirs.”33 Such views survived the First World War. In his 1928 Henry Scott Holland Memorial Lectures, William Temple affirmed the variety of nations against a non-national cosmopolitanism; and argued that a state has not only the right, but a duty, to defend itself against annihilation, because “each national community is a trustee for the world-wide community, to which it should bring treasures of its own; and to submit to political annihilation may be to defraud mankind of what it alone could have contributed to the general wealth of human experience.”34 A little later in his 1935–36 Gifford Lectures, Hensley Henson drew a sharp distinction between genuine patriotism, which is an extension of neighborly love, and “self-centred, vainglorious nationalism”: “Patriotism pictures humanity as a composite of many distinctive national types, enriched with the various achievements of history. Nationalism dreams of a subject world, an empire of its own wherein all men serve its interests and minister to its magnificence.”35 Most recently, this affirmation of distinctive national life against global imperialism or cosmopolitanism has found expression in the thought of Oliver O’Donovan. In his The Desire of the Nations: Rediscovering the Roots of Political Theology (1986), O’Donovan invokes biblical authority in favour of an international order that is unified by universal law rather than by universal, imperial government, and which is constituted by a plurality of nations, each with their own cultural integrity.36 Unlike empire, “[l]aw holds equal and independent subjects together without allowing one to master the other.”37

IV. National Responsibility to Natural Law

Let us pause and review the route taken so far, before we take a further turn. On the ground of an understanding of human being as creaturely, I have argued that it might be preferable to benefit compatriots over foreigners, and that it is justifiable to feel affection, loyalty, and gratitude toward a nation whose customs and institutions have inducted us into created forms of human flourishing. I have also argued on the ground of the doctrines of creation, the incarnation of God, and the Trinity—as well as by appeal to the consistent witness over more than a century of at least one Christian tradition—that a diversity of nations is a natural phenomenon that generates certain benefits and should be affirmed. That is the rearward view. Now let us turn around again and move forward into different but complementary territory, in order to explore the matter of moral responsibility for the common good and the limitations this places on national loyalty.

Again, our theological point of departure is the doctrine of creation. As creatures, human beings are bound not only by time and space, but also by the requirements of the good that is proper to their created and universal nature. Service of the human good is what makes actions right, and failure of such service is what makes them wrong. This good is not just private, but common; the good of the human individual—the good of each human community or nation—is bound up with the good of others, both human and non-human. Acting rightly is important, then, partly because it respects or promotes the good of others in ways they deserve, and partly because in so doing agents maintain or promote their own good—and thereby help to make themselves fit for eternal life.

So human creatures are bound by an obligation to serve the common human good; but being creatures, their powers of service are limited. No human effort, individual or collective, has the power to secure the maximal good of all human beings (including the dead as well as the living), far less of non-human ones as well. Each of us must choose to do what he can, and what he may, to advance certain dimensions of the good of some, trusting divine providence to coordinate all our little contributions and guide their unpredictable effects to the benefit of the common good. Among those whom we choose to help, it would be right for us to include our benefactors; for gratitude requires it. This is the justification for special loyalties to such communities as one’s family and nation.

But note: what one owes one’s family or nation is not anything or everything, but specifically respect for and promotion of their good. Such loyalty, therefore, does not involve simply doing or giving whatever is demanded, whether by the state, the electoral majority, or even the people as a whole. Indeed, when what is demanded would appear to harm the community—for example, acquiescence in injustice perpetrated by the state against its own people or a foreign one, or by one section of the nation against another—genuine national loyalty requires that it be refused. True patriotism is not uncritical; and in extreme circumstances it might even involve participation in acts of treason—as it did in the case of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, whose love for Germany led him into conspiracy to kill Hitler.38 National loyalty, as Christians should conceive it, shows itself basically in reminding the nation that it is accountable to God, at least in the sense of being obliged by the good given or created in human nature. By thus distinguishing between its object and God, such loyalty distances itself from the Romantic nationalism that absolutizes and divinizes the “Nation,” making its unquestioning service the route to a quasi-immortality.

It is true, of course, that the Christian Bible contains and gives prominence to the concept of a people chosen by God to be the medium of salvation to the world; and it is also true that particular Christianized nations have periodically identified themselves as the chosen people, thereby pretending to accrue to themselves and their imperial, putatively civilizing, policies an exclusive divine authority. But, as I have already pointed out, the notion of the chosen people as referring to a particular nation strictly belongs to the Old Testament, not the New; and one of the main points on which early Christianity differentiated itself from Judaism was precisely its transnational character. Full participation in the Christian religion was no longer tied to worship in the Temple at Jerusalem, and was as open to Gentiles as to Jews; for, as St. Paul famously put it, “there is neither Jew nor Greek . . . for you are all one in Christ Jesus.”39 In early, emergent Christianity, the “people of God” came to refer, no longer to a particular nation (Israel), but to the universal church. Certainly, there have been many times when the church as an institution has become wedded to a particular ethnic culture or the instrument of a particular nation-state. There have been times when the church’s relative and conditional affirmation of a particular culture or nation has lost its vital qualifiers. Nevertheless, in the light of what we have said above, we may judge that these are times when the church has betrayed its identity and failed in its calling. They are times when it has failed to maintain the distinction ironically attested by the Nazi judge, who, before condemning Helmuth James von Moltke to death, demanded of him, “From whom do you take your orders? From the Beyond or from Adolf Hitler?”40 and they are times when it has failed to observe the original priority so succinctly affirmed 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.”41

A properly Christian view, then, insists that every nation is equally accountable to God for its service of the human good. No nation may pretend to be God’s chosen people in the strong sense of being the sole and permanent representative and agent of God’s will on earth; no nation may claim such an identity with God. This relativization still permits each nation to consider itself chosen or called by God to contribute in its own peculiar way to the world’s salvation; to play a special role—at once unique, essential, and limited—in promoting the universal human good. It allows members of a given nation to celebrate the achievements of the good that grace their own history and to take pride in the peculiar institutions and customs in which they have realized it. At the same time, it forces them to acknowledge that their nation’s achievement is but one among many; and so to recognize, appreciate, and even learn from the distinctive contributions of others.

But more than this, each nation must realize, not only that other nations too have made valuable contributions to the realization of the common good of all things, but also that the achievement of the good in one nation is actually bound up with its achievement elsewhere. National loyalty, therefore, is properly extrovert. As Karl Barth put it:

when we speak of home, motherland, and people, it is a matter of outlook, background, and origin. We thus refer to the initiation and beginning of a movement. It is a matter of being faithful to this beginning. But this is possible only if we execute the movement, and not as we make the place where we begin it a prison and stronghold. The movement leads us relentlessly, however, from the narrower sphere to a wider, from our own people to other human peoples. . . . The one who is really in his own people, among those near to him, is always on the way to those more distant, to other peoples.42

The point here is not that we should grow out of national identity and loyalty and into a cosmopolitanism that, floating free of all particular

attachments, lacks any real ones;43 but rather that, in and through an ever-deepening care for the good of our own nation, we are drawn into caring for the good of foreigners. This point is poignantly captured by Yevgeni Yevtushenko in “Babii Yar,” his poem about Russian anti-semitism:

Oh my Russian people!

I know you are internationalists to the core.

But those with unclean hands

have often made a jingle of your purest name.

I know the goodness of my land . . .

In my blood there is no Jewish blood.

In their callous rage all anti-semites

must hate me now as a Jew.

For that reason I am a true Russian.44

Notwithstanding the tensions that may arise between national loyalty and more extensive ones, there is nevertheless an essential connection between them.

V. National Borders: Defending, Transgressing, Erecting

Christianity gives qualified affirmation to national loyalty and the nation, refusing to dismiss such things as the delusory products of false consciousness. It resists liberal cosmopolitanism and Marxist internationalism on the ground that human beings are not historically transcendent gods, but historically rooted and embedded creatures. Accordingly, it recognizes the need to control and limit cross-border mobility. Borders exist primarily to define the territory within which a people is free to develop its own way of life as best it can. Unrestricted mobility would permit uncontrolled immigration that would naturally be experienced by natives as an invasion. Successful, peaceful immigration needs to be negotiated: immigrants must demonstrate a willingness to respect the ways of their native hosts and to a certain extent abide by them; natives must be given time to accommodate new residents and their foreignness.45

Further, the consensus that comprises the cohering identity of a nation needs to be more than merely constitutional; it also needs to be cultural. The reason for this is partly that, since a particular political constitution and its institutional components derive their particular meaning from the history of their development, fully to affirm that constitution involves understanding its history and owning its heroes. The second reason is that, while consensus over individual and group rights is necessary to prevent the outbreak of conflict, it cannot be secured or sustained without a constructive cultural engagement between groups that goes beyond standoffish respect and achieves a measure of mutual appreciation.

On the other hand, Christianity’s qualification of its affirmation of nations means that it is alert to their historical mutability. While outgrowths of a natural love for human goods and of a consequent natural loyalty to their customary and institutional incarnations, particular nations are also human constructions whose culture and ethnic composition are always changing.46 National myths of racial or ethnic or cultural purity, therefore, are immediately suspect; in which case, foreign ways and foreign immigrants can be regarded, not just as challenges or threats, but also as resources.

Christianity’s view of the nation implies that its borders should be patrolled so as to control immigration, but that they should be open to foreign immigrants on certain conditions, and therefore that they should contain cultural diversity. The Christian view also implies that the autonomy a nation enjoys within its borders is not absolute. It does not have the right simply to do with its resources whatever it pleases, but only to manage them responsibly; and where it has resources surplus to its own needs, it has a duty to devote them to the good of others—by welcoming refugees, for example, or by donating aid to foreign countries.47 This concept of a morally limited right to autonomy over material and social assets contradicts the libertarian view that one has an absolute right of disposal over whatever one has acquired legally; and it does so partly on the ground that all creaturely owners are also dependents and beneficiaries. How much we own is invariably due to benefactions and good fortune as well as to skill and entrepreneurial flair. Even where our property was genuinely virgin when we first came into possession of it, the fact that we had the power to discover it at all probably owed something to what we had inherited, and ultimately to what our ancestors had been given and the good fortune that had attended the development of their resources. As we have received, so should we give. Therefore, even de iure—ius being natural before it is contractual, given before it is made—national sovereignty is not absolute. Its exercise is subject to the moral claims of the common good, and when it fails to acknowledge those claims, other nations might have the moral right to intervene—if the requirements of prudence can be met (for example, if it seems that an intervention is likely to achieve what it intends and to do so without risking an escalating conflagration).

In the Christian view that I am commending here, national borders should be conditionally open and they may be transgressed, if national autonomy is being exercised irresponsibly. They may also be changed. Nations, as Christians should see them, are neither divine nor eternal, but human and historical. Investment in a nation is not—with all due respect to Fichte—the route to immortality; for that runs by way of service to the Creator and Sustainer of all things. As historical, nations are mutable. Therefore, the patriot should be willing to contemplate changes in his or her nation—whether in its constitution or even in its very definition—if that is what justice and prudence together require. It is not written in heaven that the United Kingdom should always encompass Scotland, nor the Canadian confederation Quebec, nor the Yugoslav federation Kosovo. Nor is it written that the United States of America must remain united, any more than it was written that the Soviet Union should. Christianity properly precludes a simply conservative view of a nation’s internal or external territorial boundaries, and withholds its support from political movements dedicated to preserve those boundaries at all costs.

On the other hand, Christians should be wary of demands for border-changes that issue from nationalist fervor fuelled by dishonest myths that idealize one’s own nation and demonize or scapegoat another—myths that picture one’s own simply as innocent victim and the other’s simply as malicious oppressor. The Christian doctrine of the universal presence of sin means that we may not fondly imagine that the line dividing virtue from vice runs with reassuring neatness between our own people on the virtuous side and another people on the vicious one. The line between virtue and vice runs right down the middle of each human community, as it runs through the heart of every individual. Accordingly, no human may stand to another simply as righteous to unrighteous, and the wronged party always shares enough in common with the wrongdoer to owe them some compassion. Nationalist myths that say otherwise tend to exaggerate the injustice suffered, demand a radical and revolutionary remedy, totally discount any moral claims that the “enemy” might have, and brook no compromise.

For example, take Northern Ireland. It is true that Catholic nationalists there used to be seriously, albeit not atrociously, oppressed by Protestant unionists; and it is therefore reasonable for Catholics to be less than fully confident in British government and to seek protection under the Irish state. One way of securing this would be for the border between Northern Ireland and the Irish Republic to be completely erased, for the former to be incorporated into a “united” Ireland, and for British jurisdiction in the island of Ireland to be removed once and for all. This is what post-independence Irish nationalists have traditionally demanded.48 The problem with this is that there is a substantial ethnic community in Northern Ireland whose national allegiance is strongly British, and who want to become subject to the Irish state about as much as nationalists want to remain subject to the British one. An alternative solution—and one embodied in the Good Friday Agreement reached between the British and Irish Governments and the political parties in Northern Ireland in April 1998—is to thin the border without erasing it. This involves setting up certain institutions that transcend the borders between Britain and Ireland, on the one hand compromising the substance of British sovereignty over Northern Ireland, while on the other hand maintaining the province’s formal constitutional status as part of the United Kingdom. This reassures Irish nationalists by giving Dublin substantial influence over British government in Northern Ireland; and by creating bodies with specific areas of responsibility (say, for tourism), whose jurisdiction runs through the whole of the island of Ireland and is unhindered by the border. But it also reassures unionists by maintaining the border, eliciting Dublin’s formal recognition of it,49 limiting the jurisdiction of the cross-border bodies to specific areas of economic activity, and thereby securing Northern Ireland’s place in the United Kingdom. One threat to this happy compromise, however, could come from the refusal of nationalists to regard it as a permanent settlement and their insistence on viewing it as merely a step on the road to the ultimate goal of the political unification of the whole of the island of Ireland under an Irish state. Such an insistence would be fuelled by a traditional resentment of all things British and unionist—a resentment that is blind to the considerable progress in remedying the injustices suffered by Catholics that British governments are widely acknowledged to have made since the 1970s, and which doggedly refuses to acknowledge the right of unionists to maintain their British allegiance for ever.

As I see it, therefore, a Christian vision of things militates against the idealization of the self and the demonization of the other that together stifle sympathy and issue in a bitter, dogmatic nationalism that brooks no compromise in its determination to erase a national boundary. The same vision also militates against a nationalism that, enthralled by an exaggerated sense of its own victimhood, a correlative inclination to transfer its own sins onto a foreign scapegoat, and a consequent lust for independence, refuses all compromise in its determination to erect a national boundary.

Sometimes, of course, there are good reasons for a nation to seek expression in its own fully sovereign state—and so to secede from the larger multinational or imperial whole, of which it is a part. The strongest reason is seriously unjust oppression suffered by a national minority, which the majority consistently refuses to remedy. The Dutch in the mid-sixteenth century, for example, had just cause to secede from the Spanish empire, which was committed to the violent suppression of the Protestant religion; and the Kosovars in the late twentieth century had just cause to secede from the rump of the Serbian-dominated Yugoslav federation, which was engaged in the ruthless and indiscriminate ethnic cleansing of Muslims. A less strong but still sufficient reason for seeking greater autonomy (if not outright separation) is the denial to a minority of proportionate representation or the chronic overruling or neglect of its important and legitimate interests. Thus the Irish in the nineteenth century were justified, arguably, in using their representation in the imperial parliament at Westminster to press for a measure of “home rule” in Dublin, so that Irish concerns could receive the attention that they deserved.

Sometimes, then, a nationalist movement is right to demand greater autonomy, even to the point of full sovereignty. But, equally, sometimes it is wrong. Take, for example, the Scottish National Party’s campaign for independence from the United Kingdom in the run-up to the referendum of 2014. Were it the case that membership of the United Kingdom’s multinational state had inflicted some grave and chronic injustice on the Scottish people, for which remedy had long been sought but never found, then the case for secession would have been cogent. Perhaps the Scots were under-represented at Westminster. Perhaps their legitimate concerns were neglected and their needs unfairly met. Perhaps their culture was suppressed. But none of this was so. Since the Scottish parliament came into being in 1999, the Scots had enjoyed representation both in Edinburgh and in London. Indeed, Scottish Members of (the Westminster) Parliament could vote on matters concerning other parts of the U.K. (England, Wales, and Northern Ireland), whereas the representatives of those other parts could not vote on matters devolved to Edinburgh. In the U.K. the Scots received more public spending per capita than the English, and whatever it was that struck visitors to Edinburgh and Glasgow it was not a signal lack of cultural vitality.

How, then, did the S.N.P. justify its campaign for independence? Its strongest card was the argument that the Scots prefer a left-of-centre, social democratic polity with a more generous welfare state, whereas, judging by its propensity to elect Conservative governments, the centre of gravity of the English electorate is markedly further to the right and more favourable to the free market. If this had been true, it would have been an argument for greater Scottish autonomy and a further devolution of powers from Westminster to Edinburgh, although not necessarily for outright secession from the United Kingdom. As it happens, however, the claims of nationalist politicians did not match the evidence of the social scientific data. According to analysis of the British Social Attitudes (B.S.A.) survey of 2010:

it seems that Scotland is not so different after all. Scotland is somewhat more social democratic than England. However, for the most part the difference is one of degree rather than of kind—and is no larger now than it was a decade ago. Moreover, Scotland appears to have experienced something of a drift away from a social democratic outlook during the course of the past decade, in tandem with public opinion in England.50

From this the authors conclude that “the task of accommodating the policy preferences of people in both England and in Scotland within the framework of the Union is no more difficult now than it was when devolution was first introduced.”51

Beyond the false assertion of a major difference in political preferences between Scotland and England, the S.N.P’s platform consisted of claims that membership of the U.K. somehow inhibits Scotland’s economic growth and that the standard of living in an independent Scotland would be higher. These claims were contingent on a number of variable and (in the crucial matter of the price of oil) volatile factors. They were also necessarily speculative and fiercely contested. The debate went back and forth and seemed quite finely balanced. The very least that can be said is that it was not at all certain that independence would make the Scots better off economically, and that there was little reason to suppose that it would make them dramatically so.

What is most striking about the S.N.P.’s case was its vagueness and ad hoc nature. The goal of independence did not seem to be the logical conclusion of a rigorous analysis of particular problems afflicting the Scottish people. Rather, it seemed an article of faith in search of a rationale. This is certainly the impression given by reading David Torrance’s recent biography of Alex Salmond, the S.N.P’s charismatic leader, which identifies no moment of intellectual conversion, when Scottish independence was revealed as the solution to any particular problem.52 As an early colleague observed of Salmond, “when you went through all the arguments you were left with the impression that he didn’t know if Scotland would be better or worse off as an independent country. All that mattered was that Scots should rule themselves.”53

So what is it that filled the sails of the separatists? In part, a sense of Scottish victimhood, which can find little foothold in actual history, together with a correlative scapegoating of the Sassenach.54 In part, a modern and adolescent faith in the fetish of independence. And in part—judging by the barely visible connection between analysis and aspiration—a desire to escape the hard graft of daily politics into the uplift of a grander, purer, freer vision of things.55 Vision is good, of course, for, as we are told, the people perish without it. But vision needs to be born of a sober and moral reckoning with reality. Otherwise, it is just wishful thinking kept afloat on a mixture of self-pity, resentment, and recklessness, and destined for disillusion.

Nationalist calls for independence and erecting fresh borders are not self-justifying. And Christians, with their sensitivity to the creaturely interdependence of human individuals and communities, and with their conviction that God, the Origin and Basis of things, comprises a unity-in-diversity rather than the isolated and alienated unity of absolute self-sufficiency, should be sceptical of cries for it. They should interrogate the demand closely, asking whether it will bring real and substantial benefits to the people as a whole—and not just, say, provide the local political class with a bigger stage to strut upon.

VI. Conclusion