It seems everyone has an opinion about nationalism these days. Something called “Christian nationalism” emerged once Donald Trump came on the political scene a decade ago, and especially after January 6, 2021. Since the publication of Andrew Whitehead and Samuel Perry’s 2020 book, Taking America Back for God: Christian Nationalism in the United States, Christian nationalism has become a veritable cottage industry. Scores of authors, particularly on the left, have sought to get in on the action, publishing title after title excoriating the concept as racist, fascist, patriarchal, violent, and “neither American nor Christian” (in the words of a recently released book by Michael W. Austin).
Others, mainly on the right, have embraced the moniker of Christian nationalism with relish. Stephen Wolfe’s 2021 book, The Case for Christian Nationalism, serves as a manifesto for a magisterial, Erastian polity headed by a Christian prince who serves in the capacity of a king-priest. Whereas the leftist critique of Christian nationalism has developed into a theory of everything progressives hate about conservatives, Wolfe’s book serves as a thumb thrust directly into the eye of the progressive left.
Prior to 2016, the cultural masthead for religious national identity was American exceptionalism—the idea that America was special, unique, and praiseworthy among the nations of the world. A fickle American culture exchanged “exceptionalism” for “nationalism” with little understanding or reflection on the meaning of either term. Since the dawn of the twenty-first century, both “exceptionalism” and “nationalism” have been deployed by the left to describe all that is wrong with America. The left prefers open borders, multiculturalism, multilingualism, and globalism to anything that speaks of American particularity as a nation with a language, culture, governing philosophy, tradition, or heroes of its own. Herein, I hope to briefly explain why this leftist ideology of cosmopolitanism is faulty, and that the better way is not a nationalism, but the conservation of a patriotic nationality that serves as a faithful stewardship of the best of American tradition. This conservative patriotism is in fact a means of loving our neighbor.
Cosmopolitanism
Political theorist Steven B. Smith’s book, Reclaiming Patriotism in an Age of Extremes, helpfully provides a contrast between nationalism, patriotism, and what he calls cosmopolitanism. He writes, “nationalism is not patriotism’s exact opposite but a deformation of the patriotic spirit.” On the other hand, Smith understands cosmopolitanism as a world citizenship—it is universal, not particular. Tracing the history of cosmopolitanism in the West from Plato, to the Stoics, to the Roman Empire, and to the Enlightenment in the modern period, Smith rightly argued the cosmopolitanism is an abstraction, a chimera, utopian, without “passion and intensity” and “a joyless disposition.”
Most compellingly, Smith describes cosmopolitanism by using the term “cool.” He writes, “Cool is above all an aesthetic pose, expressed in dress, cuisine, language, and shopping. It is a stance of detached irony, a withholding of emotional commitment.” Cool became mainstream after World War II, particular during the liberation movements of the 1960s. Cool transcends good and evil and “has an unmistakenly urban vibe, designating hipness and an indifference to conventional norms, with a slightly outlaw flavor.” Cosmopolitanism—a form of globalism that prizes international diversity in the West for the sake of diversity—is the epitome of cool, because to be cosmopolitan is to transcend national distinctives, borders, citizenship, and politics. Cosmopolitanism is thoroughly postmodern, in that it rejects the normative in favor of the sentimental and experiential.
Thus, it is difficult to make a rational case against cosmopolitanism, because it is by definition irrational. There is no concrete example of cosmopolitanism in history. Even multi-national states and empires like the Roman Empire of antiquity, the Holy Roman Empire of medieval and early modern Europe, or the Austro-Hungarian Empire of late modernity took their shapes around contours defined by practice, statecraft, tradition, religion, and physical boundaries over time. Cosmopolitanism is, as Smith lucidly describes it, not much more than a “vibe.” It cannot be lived out, and attempts to implement it in reality can only result in chaos. One need only look to the American border crisis as it has unfolded since 2021, or similar crises in Western Europe and Britain.
Nationalism
In contending against cosmopolitanism, the term “nationalism” is spectacularly unhelpful because it is ambiguous. As a historical term, nationalism refers to European movements beginning in the nineteenth century after the Congress of Vienna, in which people groups who were absorbed into Napoleon’s empire sought to assert their traditions, religions, and cultures over and against the imperial designs of the French. After the world wars in the twentieth century, nationalism took on an anti-colonial aspect as subject peoples under the rule of European powers gained their independence. American history has an uncomfortable fit with these understandings of nationalism.
Nationalism is even more complex than the historical term suggests. One of the marks of this complexity is that nationalism claims its own field of academic study, integrating sociology, psychology, ethnography, religion, philosophy, politics, and aesthetics into “Nationalism studies.” Benedict Anderson’s Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (Verso, 1983), Anthony D. Smith’s Chosen Peoples: Sacred Sources of National Identity (Oxford, 2003), Krishan Kumar’s Visions of Empire: How Five Imperial Regimes Shaped the World (Princeton, 2019), and Diana S. Kim’s Empires of Vice: The Rise of Opium Prohibition across Southeast Asia (Princeton, 2020) are titles that represent the interdisciplinary nature of the field of nationalism studies. Nationalism has a lot of moving parts.
Nationalism can be broadly understood as a particular ethno-political community coming into a national consciousness distinct from its neighbors, a consciousness that takes shape around traditions, history, religion, and culture. It also takes shape around more ordinary patterns, like food, holidays, and nursery-rhymes. But this broad understanding of nationalism is different than the more commonly deployed narrow, ethno-centric sense of the term. Defending a positive expression of nationalism is futile, but there is an alternative available to patriotic citizens who resist silly cosmopolitanism. Historian Paul Nagel helpfully differentiated between nationalism and nationality. He rightly described nationalism in exclusionist terms, as “a deliberate effort to glory in the spirit, fact, or endeavor of a polity.” Contrasted with nationalism, nationality should be understood as “what it means to be a nation. This word encompasses both the matter of citizenship and the ideology arising from belonging to a polity.” If we avoid conflating nationalism with nationality, we can have more precision in our understanding of national identity over and against universal and utopian concepts of world citizenship. A strong sense of nationalism, especially when it appropriates theological themes like chosenness and mission, makes the nation ultimate. Nationality, however, is good and healthy because it takes seriously America’s traditions of the past and its future aspirations as informed by those traditions.
American nationality formation has taken shape over a period of four hundred years. It grew out of a multiplicity of colonial nationalities as they were conceived, born, and grew under the uniquely British imperial project. It was forged into a national identity only after great trials beset the United States in the first half of the nineteenth century: a market, communication, and transportation revolution after the invention of the steam engine and the telegraph; territorial expansion through both conquest and purchase; the implementation of internal improvements like canals, turnpikes, and railroads across what had been an undeveloped wilderness; the founding of cities and towns, along with the religious, financial, educational, and political institutions that were necessary to sustain them; the First and Second Great Awakenings, which led to the reform movements of the nineteenth century; and of course, the political, economic, and social convulsions resulting from the War of 1812, the Mexican-American War, and the Civil War. Nationality answers the question, “What does it mean to be an American?” And Americans of every generation have answered that question differently as their temporal reference points have changed. American identity in the present is shaped by what it has been in the past, and what Americans aspire to be in the future. Nationality, too, has a lot of moving parts.
Ought I Love My Country?
Every generation asks, what does it mean to be an American? Living generations in the 2020s are asking and answering it now. To ask the question, and to attempt to answer it responsibly and beneficially, requires historical and theological thinking. To ask, what is an American, one must ask, what is human nature? If human nature is found in a tension between human dignity (Psalm 8) and human fallenness (Isaiah 59.1–2; Romans 3.23), then reckoning with American identity has to start with biblical anthropology. And if we care about who we are as Americans, we have to know our history as human persons, as fallen yet dignified.
We have to think virtuously about history, exercising faith, hope, love, prudence, justice, wisdom, and courage as we labor to make sense of our past. Coming to grips with American nationality is hard work, but it is the work of the American citizen. Christian American citizens have a special responsibility in this work, because we believe that the tension between dignity and fallenness in human nature has been resolved through the Incarnation of the Lord Jesus, and his substitutionary work in redemption on the cross and the resurrection. The place of the American federal democratic republic is to set the conditions for American Christians to argue for and demonstrate a rightly ordered set of loves in which God is our first love, but love for country is eminently appropriate as a form of neighbor love.
Unlike the empty sentimentality of cosmopolitanism, American nationality has always entailed an aspiration to such a right ordering of loves. Let us aspire to be good citizens of heaven, in order that we will be good citizens of the United States.
