Honey from the Lion

Christianity and the Ethics of Nationalism

Doug Gay

• Publisher: SCM Press
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9780334046479
• eBook ISBN: 9780334052043
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Theology

Doug Gay explores the ethics of nationalism, recognising that for many Christians, churches and theologians, nationalism has often been seen as intrinsically unethical due to a presumption that at best it involves privileging one nation's interests over anothers and at worst it amounts to a form of ethnocentrism or even racism.

1. Rethinking Nationalism as Normal

If you have the temerity to write about nationalism you have first to pull off the trick of sounding as if you know what you’re talking about. Then you have somehow to secure the agreement of your readers that what you are talking about is nationalism. Neither of these is an easy task. In his innovative, much admired and much discussed study, Imagined Communities, Benedict Anderson observed that ‘[n]ation, nationality, nationalism – all have proved notoriously difficult to define, let alone to analyse’ (1991, p. 2).11 In his preface to the 1991 second edition, Anderson noted that in the intervening eight years, the study of nationalism had been ‘startlingly transformed’ (p. xi). The literature on nationalism has burgeoned over the past three decades and shows little sign of abating. In this chapter and at other points in the book, I engage some key debates within that literature with an eye to my own distinctive concerns.12

Some hotly contested issues in nationalism studies have relatively little bearing on my concerns to explore and test the grounds for an ethical nationalism and I will not engage with or try to adjudicate them here. However, an early objection has to be made to the position of Stephen Grosby in his 2005 Oxford University Press ‘very short introduction’ to nationalism. Grosby’s treatment of nationalism appears to me to foreclose the very conversation I want to open, by insisting, tendentiously, on building ethically unacceptable features into the very definition of the term:

When one divides the world into two irreconcilable and warring camps – one’s own nation in opposition to all other nations – where the latter are viewed as one’s own implacable enemies, then in contrast to patriotism, there is the ideology of nationalism. Nationalism repudiates civility and the differences that it tolerates by attempting to eliminate all differing views and interests for the sake of one vision of what the nation has been and should be. (2005, p. 17)

Grosby’s assertions that ‘nationalism repudiates civility’, that it ‘knows no compromise’ (p. 18) and that ‘distinctive of nationalism is the belief that the nation is the only goal worthy of pursuit’ (p. 5) seem to me not only to be wrong, but in their one-sidedness to be profoundly misplaced in a popular critical introduction designed to introduce students to the contemporary study of nationalism. They do, however, serve as an apt example of why the concept of nationalism incites fear and loathing among many people. My argument will be that nationalism can indeed be both imagined and performed in the ways Grosby deplores, but that it need not be and that such ethically objectionable instantiations should not be built into a primary understanding or definition of the term.13

Banal nationalism and banal universalism

While we are about the work of what Stanley Hauerwas calls ‘swamp clearing’, it is worth noting two other common, but unimpressive ways of foreclosing conversations about nationalism. The first is helpfully identified in Michael Billig’s concept of banal nationalism, by which he denotes the myriad often unconscious and unremarked ways in which national affiliations are marked, symbolized, accepted and assumed by the majority of people in contemporary societies.14 Billig’s analysis sheds light on the way many people, just as they find other people’s children more annoying than their own (my comparison, not his), find other people’s nationalisms offensive – find them to be ‘nationalisms’ in fact – while appearing blissfully unaware and benignly accepting of their own. Such attitudes have been highly prevalent within internal UK and Northern Ireland discussions – with Irish, Welsh and Scottish nationalists being seen as ‘Nationalists’, while ‘British nationalists’ are seldom identified or perceived in this way.15 These attitudes, while ethically insubstantial and intellectually indefensible, are surprisingly common, even among those, such as academics (!), who should know better.

A counterpart to this comes in the form of what could be called banal universalism.16 The term takes aim at an uncritical and saccharin appeal to common humanity, to be heard as if accompanied by John Lennon’s ‘Imagine’ playing wearily in the background. The irony of this in a discussion of ‘imagined communities’ lies in the fact that neither the cultural appropriations of it, nor even Lennon’s song itself, represent serious acts of political imagination.17 The banality here lies not so much in its background ubiquity as in the way that, like Bonhoeffer’s notion of ‘cheap grace’,18 such expressions of universalism do not usually come at any cost to other political allegiances and identities held and traded on by those who sing along to them.

We need to avoid both of these (banal) extremes, because both involve a form of hypocrisy. In the first instance, we refuse to acknowledge in ourselves what we deplore in someone else.19 In the second, we pretend that we have transcended lesser identities in the name of a higher identity, while still trading on those lesser identities in our day-to-day living. I will argue in the course of this book that we need to ‘fess up’ to our own nationalisms and accept moral responsibility for disciplining them.20 A barrier to doing that, which lies behind both of the evasions just considered, is a Grosby-like view of nationalism as something inherently unethical. To address that we need to make the case for an alternative way of defining nationalism as a more ambivalent phenomenon. In turning to this it is helpful to bear in mind Rogers Brubaker’s contention:

‘Nation’ is a category of ‘practice’, not (in the first instance) a category of analysis. To understand nationalism, we have to understand the practical uses of the category ‘nation’, the ways it can come to structure perception, to inform thought and experience, to organize discourse and political action. (Brubaker, 1996, p. 10, quoted in McCrone, 1998, p. 3)

Defining nationalism

From the 1970s, the key fault line in nationalism studies has been between two options usually styled ‘primordialism’ and ‘modernism’21 and centred on their competing explanations of whether the origins of nationalism were more ancient or more recent (Hearn, 2006, p. 7). The contours of this division are still visible today, although few thinkers willingly self-identify as ‘primordialists’, possibly because it has a knuckle-dragging ring to it. Jonathan Hearn and David McCrone are among those who do not believe that a ‘single, unified theory of nationalism’ is possible (Hearn, 2006, p. xii; cf. McCrone, 1998, p. 171), meaning a single, explanatory paradigm which could be applied to all instances of nationalism everywhere. In agreeing with them on this, I also stress that my own concerns in this book lie not with questions of historical origins, but with the contemporary ‘performance’ of nationalism. However, what has to be possible for the conversation to move forward is some working definition of nationalism, some sense of the nature of the beast. The definition offered by Hearn is valuable because it is both carefully delineated and ethically restrained: ‘Nationalism is the making of combined claims, on behalf of a population, to identity, to jurisdiction and to territory’ (2006, p. 11) and ‘To be nationalism, these three kinds of claims have to come together as a package and be viewed as interdependent by those who make these claims’ (p. 12).

It is not surprising that, as a practical theologian, I am drawn to a definition in which nationalism is identified as a practice,22 and, as a Scottish practical theologian, there are historical reasons to have a particular interest in its being identified as a practice of ‘claim-making’. In his earlier Claiming Scotland, Hearn offered an original analytic response to questions of national identity via the ‘Claim of Right’ tradition in Scotland from the seventeenth century to the modern era.23

This earlier focus on the metaphor and practice of claiming is now carried over into the heart of Hearn’s definition of nationalism. From the perspective of an enquiry into the ethics of nationalism, his definition also seems to be a good fit. It does not pre-load the bases by building in an ethical deficit, but the terminology of ‘claim’ invites and expects the response of weighing and assessing claims. Those claims may come to be seen as either justified or indefensible, so it does not build in ethical credit either. It directs attention to the nature of the claims being made, but it also implies a need to attend to the process and the criteria by which those claims will be judged. Adopting this as a working definition, I want to explore how Hearn’s three claims can be understood in ways that open up a dialogue with practical political theology.

Nationalism as ‘claim to identity on behalf of a population’

Logically, it would seem that a claim to self-determination implies a prior act of self-recognition. In practice the two often come together – we find our being in becoming – we come to know ourselves in the course of living (cf. the social enterprise not-for-profit company We Are What We do). This idea of becoming who we are, of learning to be ourselves, opens the way for a claim to identity to be understood in terms of an identity that is itself still a work in progress. From a theological perspective, in his discussion of ‘political institutions’ and ‘representation’ in The Ways of Judgment, Oliver O’Donovan comments that ‘to see ourselves as a people is a work of moral imagination’ (2005, p. 151; for a fuller discussion of this, see Chapter 3 below). David McCrone directs our attention away from static, essentialist understandings of identity towards the dynamic processes involved in identity formation, citing Stuart Hall’s reading of national identity in terms of a process of cultural representation or cultural production, as well as Homi Bhabha’s idea of the nation as ‘narrative’.

Each of these formulations points towards an account of nationalism as a way of seeing ourselves which is also a way of working on ourselves; a way of narrating and representing ourselves politically, socially and culturally (Hall, 1992 and Bhabha, 1990, cited in McCrone, 1998, p. 30). The language of claiming captures something of this sense of being in process, of being on the way to something – in this case to a vision, a narrative, a representation of who ‘we’ are. In the preamble to the US Constitution drawn up in 1787, the famous phrase ‘we the people’ claims a collective voice for the citizens of the republic as they ‘ordain and establish’ their constitution.24 On the terraces at Ibrox stadium in Glasgow, fans of Rangers Football Club have for decades been fond of chanting ‘we are the people’. In both cases, context is key to understanding the claims to identity that are being made and in both cases we see that a claim to be ‘the people’ can also be a work of immoral imagination. The context and character of any such claims have to be interrogated, because forming the we of the constitution, like forming the we of the football terraces, involves processes of inclusion and exclusion.25

The constitution of the other or the othering of the other has become such a potent theme in postmodern discourse that we might be tempted to view it as intrinsically immoral. David McCrone is aware of this temptation, as a commentator attentive to the dialectics of identity formation in relation to nationalism; but he is clear that the deeper lesson to learn from thinkers such as ...

Table of contents

• Copyright information
• Contents
• Dedication
• Preface
• Introduction: Practical, Political, Poetic, Public Theology
• 1. Rethinking Nationalism as Normal
• 2. Ecumenical Political Theology
• 3. Something Sweet: The Christian Idea of a Society
• 4. Honey from the Lion? A Theological Account of Nationalism
• 5. The Evolution of Devolution
• 6. Tasting Notes
• 7. Calling Time
• 8. Transforming Scotland
• 9. Constitutional Questions
• Conclusion
• Bibliography