I appreciate Wood’s emphasis on “serious engagement with [Christian Nationalism] before critique.” Indeed we need to discern what is right about someone’s position before we can level a credible critique. I would go further than Wood on this score. There is something right about communal solidarity, full stop. Whether that community is the state, the nation, the family, the workplace community, or something else, we rightly celebrate the bonds that hold people together as they live their lives and pursue their daily vocations. There is in principle much good in the fact that Americans and Canadians love their respective countries and take pride in their achievements.
However, I believe there are two central difficulties with nationalism, an ideology that attaches too much significance to nation. First, one might question whether a nation can exist as a responsible agent. Margaret Thatcher famously said that there is no such thing as society, a statement for which she was roundly criticized. Society is simply an amalgam of human beings and their communities who happen to live in proximity to each other and share certain things in common. I believe something similar might be said of a nation. A nation might be attached to a specific political community, but given the ways the term is used, it might be better to see it as merely a network of individuals, institutions, associations, and communities bound together by shared language, mores, and customs, and possibly, but not necessarily, by a shared political framework. Such nations can cross political borders or may exist within borders alongside other nations with which they share political space.
This reality complicates the Christian Nationalist vision and those who would extend God’s covenant with Israel to other nations. The complicating question is who exactly speaks for the nation? What agent might be said to represent the nation as a whole? Christian Nationalists at least implicitly assume that the state plays this role, but this is to make too much of the state as a differentiated institution with a particular limited task to do public justice within its territorial jurisdiction. If a nation is more of an amorphous phenomenon than a responsible agent, this has implications for any effort to place it in a covenant relationship with God. The United States is not the Judah of David, Solomon, or Josiah. But neither is it Edom, Assyria, or Babylon. Drawing parallels between the more undifferentiated, even tribal, communities of the distant past to our complex communal patterns of the 21st century risks animating or reanimating a statism that ignores what I would call the pluriformity of society. There is a sense in which all of the regnant political ideologies, even liberal individualism, end up embracing statism in some fashion, something that Christians should wish to avoid.
The second difficulty is that, even if one could identify the nation amidst this pluriformity, nationalism makes altogether too much of it, demanding an ultimate allegiance that properly belongs only to God himself. I will not belabour this point here. Suffice it to say that all the ideologies, whether liberalism, nationalism, socialism, democratism, or even conservatism, effectively make an idol of something within God’s creation, expecting other legitimate elements to serve that something above all else. This is a thesis that I work out at some length in my Political Visions and Illusions.
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| Photo credit: Eric Hogeterp |
However, I will suggest that Kuyper does make a crucial distinction that takes seriously both the universal claim of Christ on the kingdoms of the world and the historical reality of societal differentiation—something he famously labelled sphere sovereignty. In his inaugural sermon, “Rooted and Grounded,” delivered in Amsterdam in 1870, Kuyper distinguishes between two meanings of church: between church as organism and church as institution. Or between the body of Christ, which includes all Christians in every area of life, and the gathered congregation that meets regularly, and is ordered by the three marks of the church, as specified in the Belgic Confession (article 29), namely, to preach the gospel, to administer the sacraments, and to disciple its members. I would argue that there are even more meanings of the word church, an obvious example being the common identification of certain places of worship as churches, but I’ll stick with Kuyper’s two-fold distinction for the moment.
Making this distinction enables us to recognize that the institutional church functions within normative limits to its sphere of competence—something that does not apply to the larger body of Christ. In the Church Order of Dort of 1619, article 30 specifies that “In these assemblies only ecclesiastical matters shall be dealt with and that in an ecclesiastical manner,” a requirement that has made its way into other denominations in especially the Dutch Reformed tradition. If we fail to make Kuyper’s distinction, this prescription may fall by the wayside as synodical assemblies take on numerous social and political issues better addressed by other agents through other means. If, as Wood asserts, “The Church is the primary political community,” we are in danger of losing sight of what the church as a specific differentiated institution does best, namely, to nourish the faith and life of believers as they gather to worship their Lord on a regular basis.
This is not to say that Christians should shy away from political life. Far from it. But they are better advised to address it through other explicitly political organizations as members of the body of Christ. Such organizations would include the likes of Kuyper’s Anti-Revolutionary Party, the Center for Public Justice in the United States, Cardus, and the Association for Reformed Political Action (ARPA Canada). All could be seen as manifestations of the church as organism properly addressing a complex political life.
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1 comment:
Thanks for directing me to this. I recently wrote a document to help people prepare for the recent Senedd election. That document promoted the view of a diversity of equally authoritative domains, and denied the omnicompetence of the state. Sadly, the Welsh Nationalist Party, Plaid Cymru has formed the devolved Government with its extreme Queer ideology and omnicompetence tendencies.
I was a Member of the Scottish Nationalist Party because I believed in the principle that nations should govern themselves. When it went Woke, I could no longer support it, and joined Plaid Cymru, the Welsh Nationalist party. I joined on the basis of the principle that nations should govern themselves. When it went Queer, I could nolonger support it. I also stopped supporting independence for Wales and Scotland because of their wokeness. I considered that being part of the UK would put a break on that. The UK Government, however, is itself Woke. The Supreme Court has put a break on trans-ideology by declariing that protected characteristic of sex in the Equality Act is biogical sex. The Government continues to be commit ted to Critical Race ideology, which is causing a backlash.
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