The Language of the Debate (10)

Most of the time, I post a quote at the top of our blog’s homepage because I thoroughly agree with it and its author has said something in a way I only wish I might have. Once in a while, I put up a quote I don’t fully agree with, but which nicely distils some current political or theological issue in a way that may provoke thought and inspire our readers to see if they can come up with a better way of formulating the idea.

So it is with the quote I’ve had up since last week from Doug Wilson. Doug writes, “There are three basic ways for us to organize ourselves — tribalism, globalism, or nationalism. As a Christian, I don’t want tribalism, and I don’t want globalism. What does that leave me with?”

Indeed. What does that leave him with?

Christian Nationalism and the Millennium

There’s a lot of talk today about something called “Christian nationalism”, and most people either proposing it or dissing it (and there are lots of those) have skipped a step in the process, so it’s not surprising they are shouting past each other. In order to even begin discussing the difference between nationalism and tribalism, let alone whether one is better than the other and/or preferable for followers of Christ, we’d best have a clear understanding of what a nation really is and what nationalism means in a biblical sense. Doug, I think, probably means it in a sense scripture doesn’t actually use it, and so the moment he goes to his Bible to support the concept of a “Christian nation”, he’s going to be talking about something that doesn’t exist and never has. The verses he wants to use will be about ethnic apples but he will be using them to describe aspirational oranges.

For the record, Doug’s “us” is Postmillennialist Christians trying to bring about a millennium through the gospel and political action in order that the Lord Jesus will return to earth after it’s all running nicely through the hard work of believers. Premillennialists like me don’t have to worry about how we are going to organize ourselves: when the Lord gets here, he’s going to take good care of all that.

14. “Nation”

So where does the word “nation” come from and what did it originally mean? From etymonline.com, a little timely history:

nation (n.)

c. 1300, nacioun, “a race of people, large group of people with common ancestry and language,” from Old French nacion “birth, rank; descendants, relatives; country, homeland” (12c.) and directly from Latin nationem (nominative natio) “birth, origin; breed, stock, kind, species; race of people, tribe,” literally “that which has been born,” from natus, past participle of nasci “be born” (Old Latin gnasci), from PIE root *gene- “give birth, beget,” with derivatives referring to procreation and familial and tribal groups.

The word is used in English in a broad sense, “a race of people an aggregation of persons of the same ethnic family and speaking the same language,” and also in the narrower sense, “a political society composed of a government and subjects or citizens and constituting a political unit; an organized community inhabiting a defined territory within which its sovereignty is exercised.”

In the English language, then, once upon a time the word “nation” simply meant “very extended family”. Marriages of mixed ethnicity have always existed but in ancient times, these were rarely numerous enough to alter the genetics of a people group irrevocably. Egyptians were Egyptians, Chaldeans were Chaldeans, Hebrews were Hebrews and Arabs were Arabs. Rahab and Ruth were drops in the Israelite bucket.

Later, the word “nation” came to be used in a sense that was political rather than specifically ethnic, and this is the sense in which Doug and some others are using it when they speak of “Christian nationalism”. It’s also the sense in which America has been called a “proposition nation”, where ideas rather than shared genetics provide the glue that is supposed to bind diverse people groups together. Israel was a “holy nation” in the first sense of the word, and Christians are a “holy nation” in the second sense, though it is spiritual genetics, not biology, that bind us together.

Apples and Oranges

As Christians, we need to understand that the political element in this latter sense of “nation” is entirely absent from the Bible, and this is what I mean by speaking of apples and oranges.

Our Bibles preserve the original meaning of “nation” between their pages. In Hebrew, “nation” [gôy] is used both of Israel itself and of all the other ethnicities in the world of that day. Anything larger than an ethnicity-based group in scripture is, in biblical parlance, an “empire” or “kingdom” [malḵûṯ], which can either be one national group or an aggregate of many nations under a single ruler (or even multiple rulers, as in the Medo-Persian and Babylonian Empires). This latter word [malḵûṯ] is the one Daniel uses to describe the four great empires of Nebuchadnezzar’s dream.

God created nations. Man created empires, though God will certainly bring them all to a close.

So then, the Western “nations” of the world today are not nations in the biblical sense at all, and neither are Russia or other multi-ethnic, multicultural conglomerates, though some are closer than others. We cannot call these entities kingdoms, because they don’t have kings, but they have more in common with the multinational kingdoms of Nebuchadnezzar, Artaxerxes and Darius than they do with the ethnicity-based nations of the earlier scriptures.

We still have a few nations today in the biblical sense, but these exist where the West has interfered least. Japan and the Koreas are the most ethnically homogenous nations on earth. In fact, with a few exceptions, until the recent surge of immigration into Europe from Africa, the smaller nations of Europe were also quite ethnically homogenous, mostly because their borders had evolved naturally around distinct ethnic populations. This has changed dramatically in the last decade with the globalist push for the browning of Europe.

Tribalism and Nationalism

Hang with me now, because it’s all getting a bit confusing. When Doug Wilson says he doesn’t want tribalism, I suspect what he’s really saying is he doesn’t want Old Testament, biblical nationalism. Rather, he wants something a bit like the church of the New Testament and a bit like present-day USA or Canada, assuming their current populations from all over the planet could ever actually agree about anything. Doug still wants his multiple ethnicities held together by an idea, but a theological idea rather than a merely political ideology. Since this idea derives from scripture, at least initially it would have to be imposed top-down on the secular portion of the population. In time, according to Doug’s eschatology, the gospel would win over hearts and minds and everything would be copacetic.

In the meantime, however, one can see why talking about “Christian nationalism” might get the fur flying even within the Christian community, let alone in the secular media.

“White Nationalism”

To complicate things further, a significant subset of Christian nationalists is using the term “nation” in its original sense. They want to go back to the idea of nations based around ethnicity rather than multinational empires that don’t cohere and never will.

This need not be an inherently racist concept: many of these folks support sovereignty for all ethnicities, not just the descendants of the British in North America, and want each distinct ethnic group to have a place to call home in the world as they did in the beginning. Nevertheless, it is extremely difficult to articulate the concept of this sort of Christian nationalism to critics without getting slapped with the obvious inflammatory label.

Purveyors of versions of this idea get called “white nationalists”, which is inadequate and inaccurate for several reasons, particularly because most are looking for something much more granular than lumping all whites together. There are plenty of nations whose populations are white skinned, but whose languages, cultures and genetics are very, very different, and who could never be made into a coherent, agreeable nation.

Real white nationalists exist as well, but these are even less coherent.

So Then …

Globalists would like us to think empires are nations. Tribalists make ethnic distinctions so fine they’d have Saul’s Benjamin at the throat of David’s Judah for all time.

Personally, I’m expecting the Lord’s return shortly. I feel like it’s about 11:55 p.m. on the clock of human history and the moment I see somebody digging on the Temple Mount, I’ll be lining up to wait for the trumpet if it hasn’t blasted already.

That said, if the globalist push for world domination is successfully repelled for a few more years, I prefer ethnically homogenous, biblical nations the way the Lord made ’em to the Frankenstein’s monsters our politicians and influencers have created.

Not that I’m likely to get a vote.