The term ’Christian Nationalism’ has had a bit of air time lately. It’s a confusing term. It’s like saying a ‘religious pagan’. It is one or the other, it can’t be both.
I’ll start with a story – a bible story. There was a time when Jesus’ friend Lazarus was very sick, and his sisters sent for the great healer for help. The help didn’t come right away, so Lazarus died before Jesus got there. Everyone upset of course. Except Jesus.
“Let’s go see him”, he said. The sisters weren’t so sure.
“He will be stinking by now”, they said. They went to the tomb. Jesus called out to Lazarus, “Get out of there!” and out he comes, shuffling along as best he could – all wrapped up like a mummy.
Can you imagine it. I mean healing is one thing, but bringing someone out of the grave, days after the funeral folk have all gone home, that’s something else. People were amazed. Jesus demonstrating he was who he said he was – the sent one.
Not everyone was impressed though. The religious rulers certainly weren’t, alarmed more like it. They called a meeting to work out how they could stop him. They said, “if we let him go on like this, everyone will believe in him”.
Let’s pause right there. “Everyone will believe in him”. They must have had reason to think that this was a real possibility, otherwise no need for alarm. I call this a ‘turning point’ in history – it could have gone either way, meaning things could have been very different. Now, we will never know if their prediction ‘everyone will believe in him’ would have turned out that way, but it is worth thinking about.
So they called a meeting and decided to stop him, to have him killed no less, and in a way that looked like it was in the ‘national interest’. A nationalist approach, because their reasoning was, as they stated: “If everyone believed in him the Romans will come and take away our place and our nation”. Clearly choosing nationalism over Christianity. The way of death over the way of life.
Jesus wasn’t a nationalist. He challenged such thinking with statements like this:
I predict that people will come from east and west, and north and south to sit with Abraham, Isaac and Jacob at a great banquet in the realm of heaven. Those who think the realm of God belongs to them will be thrown out into the dark where they will cry tears of bitter regret.
The Gospel of Q (Q64)
This is from source material the gospel writers quoted, although they must have been a bit uncomfortable about it because they toned it down somewhat. Nationalistic thinking suggests God’s realm belongs to us and not them.
Jesus was born to a Jewish mother and raised in that culture, but he was actually from another realm. My favourite historian, Alan Kreider coined the term ‘resident alien’ and it is very fitting. Jesus grew up and worked in Nazareth, probably travelled with his uncle to the tin mines in Cornwall and business in other places – a resident and a traveler. However, his allegiance wasn’t to any country; it was to the realm of his father.
A father who had watched his children go wild, who had established a branch of the family that was supposed to do what he wanted but didn’t, until, finally, the sent one appeared. Not a law, not a commandment, not a prophet, but a son; part of himself. To live and teach what living as the father intended actually looks like. And bring a new understanding of who God is: a father; and who we are: his children made in his image. A father who has no favourites, and children who get along with each other.
Even though the religious people didn’t embrace this idea, thousands of ordinary people did. Particularly the Samaritans who didn’t share the Jewish passion for nationalism, and loved the idea of God being the father of all people, not just one race. It was the opposite of nationalism, it was a new identity and sense of belonging to humanity rather than a tribe. But the most powerful aspect of the idea was getting along with each other as family, rather than creating borders and barriers.
It was a new idea, and it included a radical vision. Actually a prophecy from centuries ago, that people will get along with each other, that swords will be made into plough shares, spears made into pruning hooks, and there will be no more war. As I said, a radical vision.
Not unlike Eisenhower, that tired old warhorse proposing a better direction for his country, reminding people in 1953 that for the price of one bomber you could have two fully equipped hospitals; and for the price of one destroyer you could build 8,000 homes. Sadly, people chose to bomb and destroy instead of heal the sick and house the homeless. His vision was for a better way – a Christ-type vision. He had seen the worst of war and suffering as supreme commander in WW2, but nationalistic pride made the vision look naïve and simplistic. It didn’t fit the culture of individualism, and avoidance of what they called ‘socialism’. Sadly, Christianity was compromised by patriotism and a culture of individual prosperity, and made to look like it was always that way.
Nationalism is subtle. So subtle we are hardly aware of it. Somehow it is in our DNA to think tribally; to orient our thinking into those like us, and those not like us. Nationalism is actually a corrupted sense of identity – seeing ourselves as a unique group rather than part of the human whole. The central message of the gospel is to change our mind about who we are, and to see ourselves as we really are. Related to each other in the best sense of the word, not strangers and foreigners.
I was hardly aware of dangers of nationalism, until I read a book titled ‘Farewell to Mars’ (Brian Zahnd, 2014). It affected me deeply, curiously enough, a passage from Huckleberry Finn took me back to my boyhood and took my breath away. I challenge anyone to read the book and remain unchanged in their thinking. It was written by a man who saw three-quarters of his congregation walk out of his church when he talked about the difference between belief in Jesus and the way of Jesus. One allows for nationalistic thinking and warfare, the other doesn’t.
The apostle Paul was hardly aware of it. He was raised and educated in the worst kind of nationalistic thinking – that unholy mix of religion and politics – and although he experienced a miraculous conversion and change of mind, he still revealed that Jewish ‘chosen by God’ specialness. Intellectually, he embraced the Jesus message, penning such seminal texts such as ‘all one in Christ Jesus … no Jew or Gentile, male or female, slave or free …’ and so on, but his cultural background betrayed him.
There was a time when the Jewish Christians were in dire straits – poor and starving. Paul took up a collection from people in Corinth, Galatia, and Macedonia and took it to the folk in Jerusalem. A wonderful act of charity, except he said they were – one translation has it – ‘duty bound’ to give generously, because the Jews had shared God’s blessing of salvation with them. Paul’s notion of Jewish specialness was still in place. Nationalistic thinking does that.
Which brings me to the Middle East today. Perhaps the worst example of Christian Nationalism on display. Good people deceived into thinking God has special, chosen or favoured people. Christians who have lost, or perhaps they never had it, the notion of God’s realm belonging to all people not just some.
And this deception not only builds on nationalism for one’s own country, it extends it to another – Israel. I had no idea how strong it was until being associated with men of the ‘bible belt’ in the US. In the words of one writer ‘five million Jews have successfully enlisted the support of fifty million Americans to their cause”.
I am not prepared to state the deception was orchestrated, but the link between Lord Balfour, the Rothschilds, Oxford University, J N Darby and a little known political shyster who, although demonstrably unqualified, wrote a bible commentary that went on to rival the King James Bible in sacred status – it makes me wonder. The Schofield Study Bible was the standard text in seminaries and its central end-times theology of Jesus returning to God’s chosen people in their sacred homeland became an article of faith. But more than that, the book promoted the idea that nations that bless Israel will be blessed, and those who don’t will be cursed. This single book was able to take a promise to Abraham regarding his family and extend it to a nation thousands of centuries later.
Curiously this deception doesn’t come from the most devout Jews, it comes from activists using religion to push a nationalist political agenda. Many Jews, especially those of the diaspora, believe that the establishment of Israel by displacing the people already there was a huge mistake. Albert Einstein for example, a Jew and no intellectual light-weight, said: “I would much rather see reasonable agreement with the Arabs on the basis of people living together in peace rather than the creation of a Jewish state”. Christian-type thinking, and certainly not nationalistic.
The idea of Jesus returning to a particular people – ‘The Jews’ – is fraught with difficulties. Apart from the logical difficulty of modifying the universal nature of Jesus’ mission and message for a single group, the real difficulty arises when one attempts to define who exactly are the Jews.
Will it include the people from the Northern kingdom who split from the Southern kingdom?
The Samaritans, descendants of Abraham but hated by the Jews?
The many refugees from Eastern Europe who became ‘jew-like’ as they joined the masses on their way to the new homeland after the war?
The Sephardic Jews with their different worship practices?
Israelis whose god is clearly not the god of their fathers?
Those strict Orthodox Jews fanatically keeping the law in other countries?
My guess is that Jesus hasn’t read Schofield’s Bible so he won’t have to sort out who is chosen and who isn’t from this diverse mix of religion, culture, and ethnicity. That event when it happens, is probably beyond our imagination, but I am sure it won’t focus on a single location or a single people. The last time he was with the Jews, he wept over their ignoring ‘the things which make for peace’ and being caught up in the things which make for war. And the people and their ‘city of peace’ being destroyed in the process.
“Are you anti-Jewish and pro-Arab?” Neither. I prefer we didn’t use this tribal language. It promotes divisions, and disallows calm discussion on how both can best get along without trying to destroy each other.
“So, what are you proposing, apart from this childish pacifist prattle?”
Yeah, it does sound a bit like that.
I guess what I am proposing is awareness. Being aware that our culture influences us more than we realise, and that the general direction of it will run counter to the grain of God and what Jesus lived and taught. And that with awareness comes choice. We can choose to accept the prevailing narratives, or choose to orient ourselves differently. More ‘other-centred’ than ‘self-centred’; more family than tribal.
And, if a single miracle by Jesus could have the learned people who saw it saying “the whole world will believe on him”, perhaps another miracle or two will do it.
But in the meantime, I will just live as though what Jesus said about who God is; who we are, and how to get along was true … and possible.
Also available on YouTube: https://youtu.be/LAuGnL09Txc
