So human creatures are bound by an obligation to serve the common human good; but being creatures, their powers of service are limited. No human effort, individual or collective, has the power to secure the maximal good of all human beings (including the dead as well as the living), far less of non-human ones as well. Each of us must choose to do what he can, and what he may, to advance certain dimensions of the good of some, trusting divine providence to coordinate all our little contributions and guide their unpredictable effects to the benefit of the common good. Among those whom we choose to help, it would be right for us to include our benefactors; for gratitude requires it. This is the justification for special loyalties to such communities as one’s family and nation.
But note: what one owes one’s family or nation is not anything or everything, but specifically respect for and promotion of their good. Such loyalty, therefore, does not involve simply doing or giving whatever is demanded, whether by the state, the electoral majority, or even the people as a whole. Indeed, when what is demanded would appear to harm the community—for example, acquiescence in injustice perpetrated by the state against its own people or a foreign one, or by one section of the nation against another—genuine national loyalty requires that it be refused. True patriotism is not uncritical; and in extreme circumstances it might even involve participation in acts of treason—as it did in the case of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, whose love for Germany led him into conspiracy to kill Hitler.38 National loyalty, as Christians should conceive it, shows itself basically in reminding the nation that it is accountable to God, at least in the sense of being obliged by the good given or created in human nature. By thus distinguishing between its object and God, such loyalty distances itself from the Romantic nationalism that absolutizes and divinizes the “Nation,” making its unquestioning service the route to a quasi-immortality.
It is true, of course, that the Christian Bible contains and gives prominence to the concept of a people chosen by God to be the medium of salvation to the world; and it is also true that particular Christianized nations have periodically identified themselves as the chosen people, thereby pretending to accrue to themselves and their imperial, putatively civilizing, policies an exclusive divine authority. But, as I have already pointed out, the notion of the chosen people as referring to a particular nation strictly belongs to the Old Testament, not the New; and one of the main points on which early Christianity differentiated itself from Judaism was precisely its transnational character. Full participation in the Christian religion was no longer tied to worship in the Temple at Jerusalem, and was as open to Gentiles as to Jews; for, as St. Paul famously put it, “there is neither Jew nor Greek . . . for you are all one in Christ Jesus.”39 In early, emergent Christianity, the “people of God” came to refer, no longer to a particular nation (Israel), but to the universal church. Certainly, there have been many times when the church as an institution has become wedded to a particular ethnic culture or the instrument of a particular nation-state. There have been times when the church’s relative and conditional affirmation of a particular culture or nation has lost its vital qualifiers. Nevertheless, in the light of what we have said above, we may judge that these are times when the church has betrayed its identity and failed in its calling. They are times when it has failed to maintain the distinction ironically attested by the Nazi judge, who, before condemning Helmuth James von Moltke to death, demanded of him, “From whom do you take your orders? From the Beyond or from Adolf Hitler?”40 and they are times when it has failed to observe the original priority so succinctly affirmed in Sir Thomas More’s declaration, moments before he was beheaded for refusing to endorse Henry VIII’s assertion of royal supremacy over the English Church, that he would die “the King’s good servant, but God’s first.”41
A properly Christian view, then, insists that every nation is equally accountable to God for its service of the human good. No nation may pretend to be God’s chosen people in the strong sense of being the sole and permanent representative and agent of God’s will on earth; no nation may claim such an identity with God. This relativization still permits each nation to consider itself chosen or called by God to contribute in its own peculiar way to the world’s salvation; to play a special role—at once unique, essential, and limited—in promoting the universal human good. It allows members of a given nation to celebrate the achievements of the good that grace their own history and to take pride in the peculiar institutions and customs in which they have realized it. At the same time, it forces them to acknowledge that their nation’s achievement is but one among many; and so to recognize, appreciate, and even learn from the distinctive contributions of others.
But more than this, each nation must realize, not only that other nations too have made valuable contributions to the realization of the common good of all things, but also that the achievement of the good in one nation is actually bound up with its achievement elsewhere. National loyalty, therefore, is properly extrovert. As Karl Barth put it:
when we speak of home, motherland, and people, it is a matter of outlook, background, and origin. We thus refer to the initiation and beginning of a movement. It is a matter of being faithful to this beginning. But this is possible only if we execute the movement, and not as we make the place where we begin it a prison and stronghold. The movement leads us relentlessly, however, from the narrower sphere to a wider, from our own people to other human peoples. . . . The one who is really in his own people, among those near to him, is always on the way to those more distant, to other peoples.42
The point here is not that we should grow out of national identity and loyalty and into a cosmopolitanism that, floating free of all particular
attachments, lacks any real ones;43 but rather that, in and through an ever-deepening care for the good of our own nation, we are drawn into caring for the good of foreigners. This point is poignantly captured by Yevgeni Yevtushenko in “Babii Yar,” his poem about Russian anti-semitism:
Oh my Russian people!
I know you are internationalists to the core.
But those with unclean hands
have often made a jingle of your purest name.
I know the goodness of my land . . .
In my blood there is no Jewish blood.
In their callous rage all anti-semites
must hate me now as a Jew.
For that reason I am a true Russian.44
Notwithstanding the tensions that may arise between national loyalty and more extensive ones, there is nevertheless an essential connection between them.
V. National Borders: Defending, Transgressing, Erecting
Christianity gives qualified affirmation to national loyalty and the nation, refusing to dismiss such things as the delusory products of false consciousness. It resists liberal cosmopolitanism and Marxist internationalism on the ground that human beings are not historically transcendent gods, but historically rooted and embedded creatures. Accordingly, it recognizes the need to control and limit cross-border mobility. Borders exist primarily to define the territory within which a people is free to develop its own way of life as best it can. Unrestricted mobility would permit uncontrolled immigration that would naturally be experienced by natives as an invasion. Successful, peaceful immigration needs to be negotiated: immigrants must demonstrate a willingness to respect the ways of their native hosts and to a certain extent abide by them; natives must be given time to accommodate new residents and their foreignness.45
Further, the consensus that comprises the cohering identity of a nation needs to be more than merely constitutional; it also needs to be cultural. The reason for this is partly that, since a particular political constitution and its institutional components derive their particular meaning from the history of their development, fully to affirm that constitution involves understanding its history and owning its heroes. The second reason is that, while consensus over individual and group rights is necessary to prevent the outbreak of conflict, it cannot be secured or sustained without a constructive cultural engagement between groups that goes beyond standoffish respect and achieves a measure of mutual appreciation.
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