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churches.
benevolence, beneficence, and complacence.
niv).
Aquinas states that “a man ought, out of charity, to love himself more than he loves any other person.”44
one ought to have both a positive regard for his cultural distinctives and ought to act to secure them in the interest of his own good.
Securing particularity is simultaneously an act of self-love and an act of love for others.
“Delightful to everyone is his native soil, and it is also delightful to dwell among one’s own people.”49
Thus, the self has an extension beyond the inward.
The parent-child relation, for example, is part of the extended self—a union of persons based in natural generation—such that the parent feels intense delight in that child to the exclusion of the others.50
Thus, to encounter a countryman is to encounter oneself—to be, in a sense, with one’s self.
Experiences of foreignness and patriotic celebrations, for example, do not generate delight but reveal it to consciousness.
John Locke was onto something when he argued that mixing one’s labor into the earth generates a claim of ownership.54
The land that comes under one’s mastery is worth dying for.
An offense against it is an offense against the man, for he and it are united on account of his activity on it. The offense is based not merely
One is delighted by this place, for it has traces of those in whom he delights.
Everyone loves his country, his manners, his language, his wife, his children; not because they are the best in the World, but because they are absolutely his own, and he loves himself and his own labors in them.59
The nation is not a people united around propositions alone; no nation can be so disembodied and dis-embedded from concrete things.
The people and place are one, for the adorned meaning of space depends on the people, and the people, taken as a whole, are the place.
Nationalism refers to a totality of national action, consisting of civil laws and social customs (e.g., culture), conducted by a nation as a nation, in order to procure for itself both earthly and heavenly good.
The essential conditions for complete nationalism are (1) a national self-conception, and (2) a national will to act for itself.
The people affirm that this place is ours. They have a collective sense of owned space. It follows that the principle of exclusion is a necessary object of the national will. A nation for itself (when rational) is actively exclusionary, for it recognizes its own concrete and fragile particularity, based in intergenerational customs, material culture, and adorned meaning.
Alastair Roberts
to adapt themselves, as far as good conscience permits, to the customs of the place and city where they live in order that they may not be a scandal to others.
Their posture or disposition to the place must be respect, humility, deference, and gratitude.
Aquinas, following Aristotle, suggested that newcomers should not receive citizenship until the second or third generation of residence.63
But the modern West is weird.
The modern West sees its values of openness, tolerance, and liberty not as products of the Western experience and thus its particular inheritance, but as universal values and easily accessible to all.
It should come as no shock to outside observers that these newcomers, far from assimilating to this ideology of universality, often end up transforming neighborhoods into their own particular cultural image.
Western man is enamored of his ideology of universality; it is the chief and only ground of his self-regard. His in-group is all people—it is a universal in-group. Everyone is an object of his beneficence. But in perverse fashion he is his own in-group’s out-group. The object of his regard is the non-Westerner at the Westerner’s expense—a bizarre self-denigration rooted in guilt and malaise.
This last one—altruism—refers to the Western assumption that all non-Western peoples in the West have universalistic aims, not ethno-centric ones.
I say all this because, in my estimation, the primary obstacle for the embrace of nationalism is modern Western psychology. If you do not eradicate or suppress the habits of the mind that (at best) suppress natural aspirations for national greatness or (at worst) project your aspirations on the other (to whom you toss your national birthright), then you’ll never fully embrace nationalism; and ultimately your people will self-immolate in national suicide.
“The Christian religion was only ever able and meant to permeate everything.” —Johann Herder1
the “Christian” qualification does not destroy, eliminate, or preclude the features of the nation described in the previous chapter.
Just as grace clarifies for sinful man his true end and supplies the means to attain it, Christianity completes the nation by ordering the law, customs, and social expectations to heavenly life.
Nations express Christianity like they express gender through dress—a universal is expressed in a particular way.
For this reason, if we were to assume that America is a Christian nation, then to say “Christian American” is redundant; Christianity is assumed in “American,”2
Grace sanctifies sinners, but it does not homogenize personality; likewise, Christianity sanctifies nations but not does not eliminate national distinctness.
a society of a man and a woman with (or expecting) children,
But it is Christianized, for it conducts family worship in Christ, forgives one another in Christ, and has a collective vision for itself that is oriented to heavenly life in Christ.
Thus, the complete Christian nation comes into being synergistically—by the grace of God and the will of man.
Nations are analogous to individuals in this way because nations are real entities, not ad hoc creations of man.
Moreover, Christian nations may consider their governing documents or established laws as products of God’s good providence.
Likewise, the people may look upon the architects of these laws as great men, inspired by God as instruments of God’s will for his people’s good.4
Thus, Christian nationalism is a Christian nation acting to secure and protect itself as a distinct Christian people and to direct itself (via Christian leaders) to procure the complete good, including heavenly life in Christ.
Civil power cannot directly bring about spiritual good. No civil magistrate can command or exercise dominion over the conscience. Civil power cannot legislate or coerce people into belief; it can only command outward things—to outwardly do this or not do that.
classical Protestant position is that civil authorities ought to order outward goods to this highest good or, put differently, to establish and maintain the best possible outward conditions for people to acquire spiritual good.
Religio est summus politicae finis8
The Christian nation is not the spiritual kingdom of Christ or the immanentized eschaton; it is not founded in principles of grace or the Gospel.
for a people ought always to act for the highest good to the fullest extent of their power.
The good we ought to pursue for its own sake—heavenly good—orders lesser goods, assigning them their proper place.
