Editorial

In 1945, as the Second World War was lumbering towards it brutal end, George Orwell wrote an excoriation of nationalism as ‘a distorted reflection of the frightful battles actually happening in the external world.’¹ For Orwell, nationalism was mental perversion, ‘power hunger tempered by self-deception’.² The nationalist ‘sees history, especially contemporary history, as the endless rise and decline of great power units, and every event that happens seems to him a demonstration that his own side is on the up-grade and some hated rival is on the down-grade.’³ The result is detachment from reality, diminution if not outright loss of humanity:

Actions are held to be good or bad, not on their own merits but according to who does them, and there is almost no kind of outrage–torture, the use of hostages, forced labour, mass deportations, imprisonment without trial, forgery, assassination, the bombing of civilians–which does not change its moral colour when it is committed by ‘our’ side. […] Whether such deeds were reprehensible, or even whether they happened, was always decided according to political predilection.⁴

Orwell argues that the struggle against nationalism ‘is essentially a moral effort’, beginning in the mind of the individual and flowing from there into political action, but notes grimly that ‘contemporary English literature, so far as it is alive at all to the major issues of our time, shows how few of us are prepared to make it.’⁵

Tellingly, Orwell considered that nationalism’s ‘worst follies have been made possible by the break-down of patriotism and religious belief.’⁶ He does not elaborate, but many scholars have subsequently noted the close parity, at times complete elision, of religion and nationalism.⁷ For the church in the twenty-first century, this has become a question of some urgency. The continued and worrying rise of neo-fascism and right-wing political movements is occurring in too many instances under the banner of Christianity, whether in Brazil, the United States, South Africa, or elsewhere. The church must undertake not only a moral but a theological struggle to understand, first, how to effectively counter an epidemic of ‘power-hunger’ and ‘self-deception’ and, second, how to confront Christianity’s organisational and individual culpability in abetting this moral disease. This requires clear-eyed historical awareness to comprehend what this political wind of doctrine has been and what it may become.

In an important sense, Christian nationalism is a contradiction in terms. The teaching of Christ regarding political identity is unambiguous: ‘My kingdom is not from this world’.⁸ Even his more riddling statements, such as ‘Give to Caesar the things that are Caesar’s’,⁹ indicate a clear dichotomy between the illusory powers of the physical world and the calling of devotion to God. To be both a Christian and a nationalist requires somehow bridging this dichotomy. Specifically, it predicates two simultaneous acts of belief. To be Christian notionally requires believing that Jesus of Nazareth is God in Christ and that Christ’s teachings have been faithfully preserved in scripture and in church tradition. Nationalism requires belief in the geographical, historical, and political superiority of a particular region, discrete from other, often closely adjacent regions. These beliefs have little obvious overlap. Their combination only becomes possible through a complex, even counterintuitive act of imagination.

Benedict Anderson famously defined ‘the nation’ as ‘an imagined political community’ which is ‘both inherently limited and sovereign’.¹⁰ There is a strong quasi-religious element in this: the citizen offers heart and body for their belief in the nation even as the catechumen offers heart and body for their belief in God. Thus, Anderson attempted to distinguish belief in a nation from belief in a deity:

No nation imagines itself coterminous with mankind. The most messianic nationalists do not dream of a day when all the members of the human race will join their nation in the way that it was possible, in certain epochs, for, say, Christians to dream of a wholly Christian planet.¹¹

Anderson’s distinction between ‘messianic’ views of the nation and the notion of ‘a wholly Christian planet’ is spatial. To imagine a political community as nation requires imagining ‘finite, if elastic, boundaries, beyond which lie other nations’.¹² These borders may be themselves partially imaginary – a smooth divide envisioned over inhospitable geography, a lighthouse on a spit of rock, a painted line in a train terminal. They rely on what Doreen Massey has called ‘attempts to fix the meaning of particular spaces, to enclose them, endow them with fixed identities and to claim them for one’s own’.¹³ The politically recognised borders of a nation may differ from its imagined or desired borders – may not, in fact, exist at all. Fealty to a limited, spatial nation thus relies on what Massey describes as ‘a conceptualization of place which rests in part on a view of space as stasis.’¹⁴ Nationalism imposes such stasis within whatever borders it claims, establishing its communities as ‘sites of nostalgia, of the opting-out of Progress and History’ to preserve a certain place the nation ought to hold both in its geographic location and in the minds of people who live there. From this emerges the oddly international nationalist slogan: ‘If you don’t like it, then leave!’

By contrast, the church does not limit itself within borders. The triumphant end given to the Gospels is the charge to ‘Go into all the world’¹⁵ and ‘make disciples of all nations’.¹⁶ While these statements may be apocryphal, nevertheless Christ’s early followers felt the need for a totalising relationship between the church and the world. The Great Commission asserts educative authority over all space, but it does not define itself within any particular place. The going is continuous, as the newly made disciples go out in their turn. The community of the church, then, does not rely on geographic borders but rather on continuity across time.

In her commentary on the works of St Teresa of Ávila, Elizabeth Newman has suggested that the church is an ‘imagined community’ across and outwith time, ‘living in the same time as the communion of all saints’.¹⁷ Newman argues that ‘In the politics of God’s kingdom, time is “reshuffled” such that past, present, and future coexist, making possible a different kind of being together, a different kind of politics’.¹⁸ Thus, ‘the imagined community called “church” lives in a time not its own; it lives on God’s time. This could sound presumptuous, but to live in God’s time is to see all time in reference to God, which is to live providentially.’¹⁹ The church, in other words, is not a physical gathering in time and space, but an atemporal, eternal ‘cloud of witnesses’.²⁰

In this telling, the nation is imagined as a spatial, political community, while the church is imagined as an atemporal, providential community. However, while pleasing, this distinction neglects a basic, conceptual question: what imagination is and how it works. Even the most basic meaning of imagination – to create an image – suggests a dangerous potency, a porousness between possibility and reality. Jean-Paul Sartre has observed that ‘the image is the object’ – what exists as a physical reality and as a mental image is the same thing ‘on two different planes of existence’.²¹ Exerting imagination means balancing these two planes, the mind forming a bridge between two spinning polarities, coruscating from one to the other.

This exertion is, as Ursula LeGuin writes, ‘an essential tool of the mind’, the skill ‘to take off from immediate reality and return to it with new understanding and new strength’.²² LeGuin’s conception of the imagination emphasises its rootedness in physical reality, what Sartre terms ‘the inertia of sensible content’, an object distinct from perception in its ‘existence as a thing’.²³ When minds intersect through images – when a community ‘teaches its children how to be people and members of their people’ through the shared images that minds create – then imagination exercises transformative power on material reality: ‘Home, imagined, comes to be.’²⁴

For LeGuin, the going and returning of the image is its point: ‘Imagination, even in its wildest flights, is not detached from reality: imagination acknowledges reality, starts from it, and returns to enrich it.’²⁵ She contrasts imagination with what she terms ‘wishful thinking’: ‘thinking cut loose from reality, a self-indulgence which is often merely childish, but may be dangerous.’²⁶ This expresses itself, she says, in ‘coercive preaching concealed in a narrative’ and ‘lacks intellectual coherence and integrity’.²⁷ LeGuin elaborates on this concept in a startling political metaphor: ‘Wishful thinking is Hitler’s Thousand-Year Reich. Imagination is the Constitution of the United States.’²⁸

It is tempting to retort that it does, indeed, require inordinate imagination to declare someone to be only three-fifths of a person, as the United States Constitution does.²⁹ Moreover, as Gregory Ablavsky and W. Tanner Allread have explained, in its imposition of narrowly white, male, Protestant elite on a diverse population, the Constitution has provided a framework for oppression: ‘Racialized and gendered exclusion entrenched itself through-out much of antebellum constitutional law, which vindicated chattel slavery, Native dispossession, and women’s supposed subservience.’³⁰ Yet this perhaps unfairly obscures LeGuin’s larger point: that imagination begins from reality, and that the Constitution, as a pragmatic document of governance, exists as an attempt to create order out of post-war economic and civic instability. In that sense, it can be said to typify the physical realisation of ‘imagined political community’ posited by Anderson, even or perhaps especially through what James Baldwin called ‘American pretensions’.³¹ The response of people oppressed, marginalised, and violated through the Constitution has been (and continue to be) a reimagination of the community without the succumbing to those pretensions, and act that Baldwin describes elsewhere as ‘to cease fleeing from reality and begin to change it.’³²

By contrast, when LeGuin calls the Nazi regime ‘wishful thinking’, she risks trivialising atrocity to score a rhetorical point. Yet her broader idea – noting how the ‘Thousand-Year Reich’ lasted a paltry dozen years and slaughtered millions for a nation with no grounding in reality – does help accentuate the grotesqueness of a certain kind of imagined community, a degeneration into barbarity of which nationalism is always at risk. The ‘Thousand-Year Reich’ was not only a spatial, territorial idea but also a temporal, metaphysical claim, becoming not merely national but also religious. It is, perhaps, in the realm of the religious that such claims must be countered. Thus, the poet David Ray writes:

He had in mind a thousand year Reich,

and one thousand years it shall be,

for the grief must be included,

the thousand year Kaddish.³³

By setting up the Jewish funerary prayer against Nazi rhetoric, Ray exposes the hollowness of the ‘wishful thinking’ which vaunted a nation and a national leader into a deity. The mourner’s Kaddish centres on blessing the name of God ‘forever and to all eternity’. As Susan Gubar writes, ‘it simply prays that we pray’.³⁴ With a ‘thousand year Kaddish’, Ray presents unspooling infinities within infinities. Each individual mourning is endless and rooted in the endlessness of God, and the number of mournings is without end. Each moment of grief open into the divine temporality of an eternal now. There is thus an added ferocity to Ray’s evocation of an explicitly Christian eschatological tableau. ‘It will take one thousand years’, he writes,

for those torch-lit faces,

thousands caught in hypnotic trance,

to leave off their worshipful gaze at the sky,

awaiting Herr Hitler, their Savior,

descending out of the clouds,

touching ground as if he were Christ in his robes,

blessing his people.³⁵

The sacrilege of this pseudo Second Coming climaxes with the ersatz Christ blessing his people by ‘touching ground’. Besides the plain meaning, the phrase balances the ambiguity and ultimate meaninglessness of this faux-redemption. On the one hand, ‘his people’ are the dead, soulless and devoured by hellish torch-fire. On the other, the gesture is a trivial localising of space, a static territorial claim that values the perverted idea of a nation far more than the people who live there.

Imagination can thus be said to incorporate both the decoupling of object from perception and the making of images that allow objects to be newly perceived. This can be an act of profound compassion, through which redemption and recovery are made possible. It can also be treacherous and perverted, desecrating the ground it touches. It is, I think, more honest to admit that imagination possesses these two faces (at least) than to resort to the terminology of ‘wishful thinking’. Imagination that diminishes an object into stasis becomes a tool of oppression, poisoning and destroying minds and lives. Imagination that begins with the vibrancy and integrity of the individual can be generative and liberating, as Baldwin powerfully notes about his enslaved ancestors, who, ‘in the teeth of the most terrifying odds, achieved an unassailable and monumental dignity.’³⁶

It is clear, then, that a simple binary of time and space is insufficient to distinguish between church and nation as imagined communities. Moreover, there is no space within the community, physical or temporal, which does not flux and change like the border lands, no place where time and space do not interpenetrate each other. So Massey argues, ‘All attempts to institute horizons, to establish boundaries, to secure the identity of places, can in this sense therefore be seen to be attempts to stabilize the meaning of particular envelopes of space-time.’³⁷ These attempts are, Massey says, ‘constantly the site of social contest, battles over the power to label space-time, to impose the meaning to be attributed to a space, for however long or short a span of time.’³⁸

In one sense, the church has always known this. The Eucharist creates a space which is simultaneously a particular place and every place, in a particular moment and outside of time. The Book of Common Prayer merely acknowledges what has always been been present in the ritual when it prefaces the exhortation to thank God – that is, to practice the literal meaning of eucharist – ‘at all times, and in all places’.³⁹ The declaration that the bread and wine are the body and blood of Christ brings the past suffering into the present, each worshipper enacting and witnessing the moment which occurs and recurs at every moment. The meaning of the act, however, would not be conveyed as a mere mental exercise; it requires the precise and ephemeral physicality of a particular bit of bread and mouthful of wine entering the digestive tract of each individual. The Eucharist, in concept and in action, is perpetual and idiosyncratic at once, bringing into all reality the particular reality of the embodied, suffering Christ.

Yet while the Eucharist orients the believer with and across space-time, it does not explicitly indicate how it relates to other acts of imagination. In the case of nationalism, and the quasi-religious primacy of static space, the imagined community exerts a powerful demand on the citizen, including threat of physical force and power over life and death. To be Christian and nationalist – still more, to be the imbrication of Christian nationalist – requires the individual citizen and believer to negotiate between two imagined communities which do not and perhaps should not overlap, which each make totalising claims over their members. In maintaining this difficult balance, the imagination can flourish and grow, creating liberated communities that thrive and nurture the diversity of their memberships. Or it can collapse into stasis, ‘torch-lit faces […] caught in hypnotic trance’ waiting for a saviour that offers no redemption.⁴⁰ Ultimately, such vacuous and unserious stasis retains nothing of the actual teaching of Christ. It uses the label of Christian at best as marketing for hateful ideologies and at worst as pseudo-justification for atrocity. At the time of writing, in too many countries around the world such movements are shifting rapidly from pretensions of social control towards untrammelled brutality.

Current necessity for the moral struggle posited by Orwell is painfully evident. Both for the church and for the individual Christian, that struggle must begin with understanding that Christ’s kingdom is, truly, not of this world. It is an un-limited community of radical inclusion, within and without space-time, bringing humanity and the whole of the natural world into liberation. This is the reality from which the imagination of the church must begin and to which it must return. It is at odds with the limited community of a nation because it asserts a different starting point for reality. As St Paul eloquently writes, ‘God chose what is foolish in the world to shame the wise; God chose what is weak in the world to shame the strong; God chose what is low and despised in the world, things that are not, to reduce to nothing things that are.’⁴¹ It is in this sense that the church is an imagined community, the radical transformation of ‘things that are’ into the glorious potentiality of ‘things that are not’ revealing the reality from which individuals and congregations are called to pursue moral struggle towards liberation, in their spaces and in their times.

This special issue on Christian nationalism, then, considers differing attempts to reconcile the imagined communities of church and nation. Specifically, it focuses on churches – and, indeed, nations – struggling with beginnings. As such, it does not consider established churches, such as the Church of England, or ethnically identified churches, such as Greek Orthodoxy. Rather, the articles gathered here focus on the personal, intellectual, and theological efforts made by individuals and organisations to reconcile their belief in Christianity with belief in a particular nation. The approach is interdisciplinary, taking in history, sociology, political science, and literary criticism. The issue opens with Atsuko Ichijo’s study of Christians in Meiji-era Japan, examining how key figures attempted to integrate their faith with their fealty to the emperor in the context of State Shintō. Chloë Starr then considers how churches in China adapted to Communist Party ideology in the early years of the People’s Republic. Moving from East Asia to the British Isles, Linden Bicket offers a literary-critical study of the works of George Scott-Moncrieff, showing how his conversion to Catholicism informed his devotion to the Scottish nationalist cause, a combination he expressed through his fiction. Padraig Mc Bennett, by contrast, surveys the current situation in Ireland and the breakdown of church affiliation among Irish young people in reaction against the old ethno-nationalist identification with Roman Catholicism. The articles then turn to consider Pentecostalism’s relationship to the alarming rise of the so-called religious right. Siphiwe Dube looks at how Christian Nationalism is influencing politics in post-apartheid South Africa, and how charismatic and neo-Pentecostal political parties are increasingly touting a right-wing agenda. Lastly, Roger Robins traces the history of Pentecostal political engagement in the United States from the mid-twentieth century to the present with particular attention on the role of prophecy in critiquing policy. The issue concludes with reviews of recent books about nationalism and the church.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

John Patrick Pazdziora

John Patrick Pazdziora (Ph.D., St Andrews) is project assistant professor at The University of Tokyo. He researches Scottish literature in the long nineteenth century and children’s cultures, with emphasis on the interplay between literature and religion. He is the author of Haunted Childhoods in George MacDonald (Brill, 2020) and editor of Christianity in Scottish Literature (Scottish Literature International, 2023).

Notes

¹ Orwell, Notes on Nationalism, 30.

² Ibid., 4.

³ Ibid., 3–4.

⁴ Ibid., 13–14.

⁵ Ibid., 31.

⁶ Ibid., 30.

⁷ See Aktürk, ‘Nationalism and Religion’, for a thorough state-of-the-field discussion of this complex, multifaceted question.

⁸ John 18: 36 (NRSV).

⁹ Matthew 22: 21; Mark 12: 27; Luke 20: 25.

¹⁰ Anderson, Imagined Communities, 6.

¹¹ Ibid., 7.

¹² Ibid.

¹³ Massey, Space, Place, and Gender, 4.

¹⁴ Ibid., 5.

¹⁵ Mark 16: 15 (NRSV).

¹⁶ Matthew 28: 19 (NRSV).

¹⁷ Newman, Attending to the Wounds, 43–4.

¹⁸ Ibid., 38.

¹⁹ Ibid., 44.

²⁰ Hebrews 12: 1 (NRSV).

²¹ Sartre, Imagination, 5 (emphasis in original).

²² LeGuin, Words are My Matter, 4.

²³ Sartre, Imagination, 3, 5.

²⁴ LeGuin, Words are My Matter, 4, 5.

²⁵ Ibid., 108.

²⁶ Ibid.

²⁷ Ibid., 109.

²⁸ Ibid.

²⁹ The Constitution of the United States, I.2.

³⁰ Ablavsky and Allread, ‘We the (Native) People?’ 247.

³¹ Baldwin, ‘American Dream’.

³² Baldwin, ‘My Dungeon Shook’, 10.

³³ Ray, One Thousand Years, 16.

³⁴ Gubar, ‘Cooking the Kaddish’.

³⁵ Ray, One Thousand Years, 16.

³⁶ Baldwin, ‘My Dungeon Shook’, 10.

³⁷ Massey, Space, Place, and Gender, 5.

³⁸ Ibid.

³⁹ Book of Common Prayer, 333, 341, cp. 827.

⁴⁰ Ray, One Thousand Years, 16.

⁴¹ 1 Corinthians 1: 27–8 (NRSV).