TRAPPED IN THE
FLAG?
Long before he gained his current reputation for provoking religious passions, Mel Gibson learned an equally potent way to rouse the hearts of cinema audiences. In the academy-acclaimed and highly controversial Braveheart (1995), the director/actor’s portrayal of William Wallace inspired a patriotism so emotionally powerful that it was subsequently exploited by the Scottish National Party in the run-up to the referendum on Scottish devolution in 1997.
And
HOME OF THE BRAVE?
To many European observers, the United States has never ceased to be a nation conducive to the cult of national love (patriotism rather than nationalism as such), with its schooling pledge of allegiance, its totem of the stars and stripes, its regular rendition of the Star Spangled Banner at sporting events, and its presidential candidates’ attempts to outdo their rivals in patriotic fervour. Yet the atrocities of 9/11 provoked a renewal of this affection and a shared spirit of Americanism among an otherwise highly individualised population. As Marc Copper observed very soon after in an article in the L.A. Weekly,
Domestically, the attacks produced a spontaneous outpouring of mutual solidarity and community compassion. People were ready to sacrifice and to give selflessly. Twenty years of Reaganite individualism appeared to melt overnight ….[1]
While the cult of celebrity and the all-determining ideology of consumerism have shown no signs of drowning in their own shallow waters since 9/11, deeper streams do appear to have been uncovered in British and American life. Or at least they are deeper in the sense that the desire to belong to something larger than oneself has been recently reinvigorated, and to something more stable than the various voluntary organisations and groups that many belong to (sporting clubs, sporting supporters’ and celebrity fan clubs, book groups, single issue political groups, issue chat rooms, and so on).
CIVIC OR ETHNIC?
But while Americans seem to know what Americanism is, problems created by recent conditions of immigration are forcing Britains to engage in the difficult debate over ‘Britishness’ - a rather loose national classification that many Scots, Welsh and Northern Irish want out of in any case. Americanism was, from quite early on in its history, given a civic definition since it was composed of immigrants from numerous different nations and increasingly from different races without a common American historical memory.
Britishness, on the other hand, as with most other nations’
self-identifications, was closer to having an ethnic identification with a traceably common historical memory.
That ethnic constitution of British citizenship is now being pressured through
an increasing ethnic diversification – though of course the
REFUGE OF A SCOUNDREL
Nationalism invariably forgets or ignores the ties that bind any particular nation to the rest of the world, and is prone to articulate itself in narrow, partisan, opportunistic, and jingoistic ways, resulting in the exclusion of ones who are defined as ‘other’, ‘not like us’, ‘not our kind of people’. How much of the feeling for Scottish nationalism, for instance, has even been driven as much by Anglo-phobia as Scoto-philia? This is an example of the Bravehearting of our nationalisms at the expense of any global conversation concerning the future of a common humanity.
When defined in that way, patriotism comes to look more like what the old cynic Dr. Samuel Johnson observed as the “last refuge of a scoundrel.” It was Voltaire (1694-1778) who said in 1764 that:
It is sad that often
in order to be a good patriot one is the enemy of the rest of mankind. … It is
clear that one country cannot gain without another’s losses…. Such then is the
human state that to wish for one’s country’s greatness is to wish harm to one’s
neighbours.[2]
Thus the Nazis’ rise to power, for example, fed not only on
the dire economic condition of the time, but also on the widespread German
feeling of having been nationally humiliated by the post-WWI
HOMELAND INSECURITY
One of the most chilling and gut-wrenching pieces of literature that I have ever read is the German Erich Maria Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front of 1929, tracing the harrowing WWI experiences of a group of young German soldiers. It contains a disturbing recognition of the arbitrariness of nationalism, and of the demands placed upon people by their ‘nation’ (or rather by one’s ruling authorities).
In an important scene, young lance corporal Albert Kropp puzzles: “We’re out here defending our homeland. And yet the French are there defending their homeland as well. Which of us is right?”[3] Both the German and the French teachers and newspapers inform that each is the only nation with right on its side. This leads to questioning how war starts in the first place, and here is where the so-called ‘Great War’ begins to look bizarre and tragic. Kropp’s suggestion is that it is “Usually when one country insults another one badly”. Private Tjaden presses this into a reductio ad absurdam:
‘A country? I don’t
get it. A German mountain can’t insult a French mountain, or a river, or a
forest, or a cornfield.’
… [Kropp:] ‘That
isn’t what I mean. One nation insults another…’
‘Then I shouldn’t be
here at all,’ answers Tjaden, ‘because I don’t feel insulted.’
… [Kat replies] ‘…Why on earth should a French locksmith or a French shoemaker want to attack us? No, it’s just the governments. I’d never seen a Frenchman before I came here, and most of the Frenchmen won’t have seen one of us. Nobody asked them any more than they did us.’[4]
The twenty year old narrator, Paul Bäumer, dismisses Tjaden’s perspective as ignorant of the wider issues involved. And yet not too long afterward, the reader is shell-shocked to admit that Bäumer’s was merely a glib response to the catastrophe thrust on these young men as a result of a wave of exuberant and nationalistic war-fever. Later, guarding a group of Russian POWs, he reflects that an order by “some people that none of us knows… has turned these silent figures into our enemies; [and] an order could turn them into friends again.” These are people of whom Bäumer knows nothing and for whom he has no real animosity, in stark contrast to the ‘real enemies’ among his own people – drill-corporals and schoolmasters. Yet, for now,
our main aim in life is the one thing that usually draws the condemnation of the whole world and incurs its severest punishment in law.[5]
WHAT WAR IS
A key moment of realisation is set in a military hospital,
in full view of the torn and distorted bodies that used to resemble men, and an
indictment is laid on the very ‘civilisation’ to which the war was owed and
which causes “people [to be driven] … against one another, … silently, uncomprehendingly,
foolishly, obediently and innocently killing one another.” The dreams, desires,
longings, thoughts, and words of a generation have been drowned in “this river
of blood”.[6]
In this descending darkness, nothing can ever be the same again for either Bäumer or for his continent. He is reduced to silence before his family when on leave – how can they ever understand? They, with their patriotically charged sense of nationhood, have not known the annihilating of the hopes, dreams and desires of those at the Front, where living human beings are reduced to animals desperate not even for life but for bare survival. But it is because Bäumer has experienced these very things that there is the beginning of a suspicion that the nationalist narrative being told by his own people could be not only much too grand but also destructive in its implications.
A CHRISTIAN WAY OUT?
Could the Christian story offer witness to an experience of
precisely something different? Possibly not, some might argue, given that the
‘Great War’ was fought by nations unfurling Christian
war-banners. Moreover, one of the most patriotic nations – the
The image that many non-Christians have of the ‘Christian
West’ (especially in the non-West) could be symbolised by El Greco’s famous
painting of The Adoration of the Name of
Jesus (c. 1578), celebrating the divine victory over the Turks at Lepanto
(1571) through the alliance of
HUMOUR AND HUMILITY
Firstly, the nationalistic and patriotic spirits must be understood, since it is an expression of deep rooted needs and desires. What makes them love their country almost unquestioningly, even to the point of dying for this ideal? The human need for place, context, and the security of belonging require proper analysis and a measured response.
Secondly, exaggerated nationalistic worries may usefully be
defused through the use of a certain amount of humour, by which I mean a sense
of perspective that can deny the absoluteness of the claims of nationalism. A
Christian theology of creaturehood acknowledges the near human inevitability of
patriotic nationalism but denies its theological necessity. That is why early
Christians had a particular problem with periods of Roman Emperor worship – the
worship of the ideal of the
That humbling sense of provisionality seems to have been forgotten by Christians who give absolute support to their nation as the embodiment of the divine will. Both the British and German soldiers marched into the First World War believing that they were fighting for God and country. What, in the light of this recollection, should we make of present confidence among American churches that the USA is the land of divine blessing, the light on the hill as C17th Puritan John Winthrop, Secretary of State John Foster Dulles (1950s), and Presidents Ronald Reagan (1980s) and George W. Bush (2000s) all triumphantly proclaimed? Or of radical Islamist assertive endeavours to create Allah’s Islamic society?
NEITHER JEW NOR GREEK
Thirdly, the Christian story tells of the universality of
grace. Being a creature of God is the primary identification, a creature for
whom the divine Son is the creative source (John. 1:3; Col. 1:16) and Jesus
Christ, the Son incarnate, the image of its perfection (Col. 1:15). In this
context, what happens to geographic, ethnic and other determinations of human
identity when the cosmic scope of the redemptive work of Jesus Christ (Eph.
There is no longer
Jew or Greek, there is no longer slave or free, there is no longer male and
female; for all of you are one in Christ Jesus [7]
The point is not that these differences do not matter, as if the inequalities and divisions in everyday life and practice are to be ignored in some world-transcending spirituality. But rather that we are one in Christ we are called to live accordingly, without inequality of race, class, gender, nationality, and so on, in order to witness to the vision of the newness of life, of all forms of life. What would taking that vision seriously do to churches that evade the possibility for social and political justice by appealing to an otherworldly salvation, a theological mistake that radical Islam, for instance, does not make?
This vision disrupts the ideological sentiments securing nations, and perhaps even of the spirit of patriotism itself. Certainly unlike the more jingoistic nationalism, patriotism does not have to be either blind to the faults in one’s own nation, aggressively alienating in relation to immigrants, or defined by who it excludes. According to the Declaration of Sentiments by William Lloyd Garrison, adopted by the Boston Peace Convention in 1838, patriotism may even be presented at best as inclusive of the good of other nations and of being internationally responsible.[8] Love of one’s country and commitment to its flourishing are here maintained much in the same way that one may have a primary commitment to one’s family and yet simultaneously live and work responsibly for the well-being of one’s society.
A LIGHTER ALLEGIANCE
Nevertheless, even patriotism may well be an odd sentiment for the Christian to entertain, and unhelpful in witnessing to our universal responsibility as humans being created in Christ’s image. One’s birthplace is not the primary indicator of one’s identity, with all the attendant temptations – to triumphalism, to forgetting the moral ambiguities of any particular nation’s history, and to imposing one’s national vision on other peoples and nations. At the very least, becoming like Christ should mean that we have to hold to any particular national affiliation lightly.
What we cannot hold lightly, however, is our responsibility for the multiplicity of life declared ‘creaturely’. It is a matter of knowing when patriotism is not enough, or better, when a certain brand of it is distorting. But perhaps it is even more than that. Why does our love have to stop at geographical borders, and what does love of our country mean especially when the destructive actions taken in defence of that love may well create the very conditions that result in there being no country left to love?
What we need at the very least is an expansive patriotism, a yea-saying to the earth and its densely articulated life. We need to describe being human in a way that transcends the arbitrariness of geographical, racial and gender differences while acknowledging their role in making us the particular people we are, and to do so without any sentimental appeal to the ‘loveliness’ of the other.[9]
Zygmunt Bauman gives his study Globalization a haunting subtitle: The Human Consequences[10]. An equally useful book might be titled Patriotism: The Human Consequences. For it is to these consequences – national competitiveness so often destructive of other nation-states, triumphalist self-assertion, blindness to one’s nation’s flaws, primary geographical self-identification, and so on – that Christians should be attending. Only in so doing can we learn what it means to witness to God’s abundant grace to each and every creature and place in the created world.
ENDS
AUTHOR BIOG: Dr. John C. McDowell is Meldrum Lecturer in
Systematic Theology at the University of Edinburgh, Scotland, and a member of
the Church of Scotland’s Panel of Doctrine. After his PhD at
[1] Marc Cooper, ‘A Year Later: What the Right and Left
Haven’t Learned’, in Micah L. Sifry and Christopher Cerf (eds.), The
[2] Philosophical Dictionary, Voltaire, trans. H.I. Woolf (New York: Knopf, 1924), http://history.hanover.edu/texts/voltaire/volfathe.html
[3] All Quiet on the Western Front, Erich Maria Remarque, trans. Brian Murdoch (London: Vintage, 1996)
[4] Ibid p144ff
[5] Ibid p137
[6] Ibid p 186
[7] Gal.
[9] See John C. McDowell, ‘A Very Unnationalistic Patriotism, Or What the Flag Should Not Blind Us To’, The Witness (March 2004), http://www.thewitness.org/agw/mcdowell031904.html
[10] Globalization: The Human Consequences, Zygmunt Bauman (Polity Press, 1998)