Nationalism as Idolatry

Why We Must Choose Between Elevating Religion or Country

In recent American politics, there has been mounting concern over the rise of Christian nationalism, the belief that the United States has been an essentially Christian country since its founding and therefore has a providential role to play in history. Christian nationalists advocate for laws, funding, and public symbols that promote Christian practice and Christian morality. In the US today, Christian nationalism is almost exclusively associated with right-wing causes, including opposition to immigrants and to racial, religious, and sexual minorities. Religious nationalism is not exclusive to Christianity or America, and our country’s version of it is generally seen as one instance of a broader worldwide phenomenon: we can readily find variations of religious nationalism in India, Israel, Turkey, Myanmar, and so on.¹

In most analyses of Christian or religious nationalism, the emphasis is on the “Christian” or “religious”: we assume there is something peculiarly dangerous about mixing religion with politics. But here I want to focus instead on the second term in these phrases: nationalism. The problem is not just Christian nationalism, but nationalism, as practiced by Christians and non-Christians alike. The solution to the problem of religious nationalism is not secular nationalism. In fact, nationalism, whether religious or secular, is a form of idolatry, though it is a form of splendid idolatry that is dangerous precisely because it appeals to genuine virtues such as love for one’s neighbors and the willingness to sacrifice for them. The tough question is how to know when such virtue becomes vice.

The idea that nationalism is idolatrous may seem to be a strong claim, but it simply names theologically a reality that some sociologists have recognized for over a century. Many scholars of nationalism are convinced that nationalism as such is a religion, whether or not some faith like Christianity or Islam is involved. To use the term “religion” in this way is different from the way it is commonly used—that is, to refer to the explicit worship of a god or gods. To call nationalism—even secular nationalism—a religion is to assume that religion is broader than just the explicit worship of a named god, and it is to assume that what is decisive is not what people say they believe but how they actually behave. If someone claims to be a Christian but never goes to church and spends their waking hours obsessing about the stock market, then the colloquial idea that capitalism is their religion is closer to the truth. This is the basis of the idea that “idolatry” refers to more than sacrificing a goat to Baal. When Paul says that greed is idolatry (Colossians 3:5), he does not mean that people explicitly and literally bow down and worship money but rather that their behavior reveals an inordinate devotion to a created reality that is not God. People do not have to claim explicitly that their country is their god and nationalism is their religion if their behavior and demeanor demonstrate it.

In sociology, this broad idea of religion is especially associated with Émile Durkheim, who came from a long line of rabbis and studied to be one himself. Once he gave up belief in God, he came to believe that religion was about social dynamics and not any divine reality; religion is in fact the self-worship of the group. “Religious force is only the sentiment inspired by the group in its members, but projected outside of the consciousnesses that experience them, and objectified. To be objectified, they are fixed upon some object which thus becomes sacred; but any object might fulfill this function.”² It doesn’t matter if collective self-worship is projected onto a god or a flag. Durkheim’s definition of religion may seem idiosyncratic to us, but recognition that humans worship all sorts of things is just an iteration of the scriptural critique of idolatry he would have absorbed in rabbinical school; the only difference is that the Abrahamic traditions believe there is one true God amid all the false ones. Durkheim abandoned belief in the God of Abraham and did not mind that devotion to one’s own nation was replacing devotion to the scriptural God in the modern West. He was in fact an ardent French patriot, though the death of his son in World War I finally soured him on the nationalist cause.

Carlton Hayes, professor of history at Columbia, was compelled by the zealotry and carnage of World War I to begin his investigations into nationalism as a form of religion, resulting in his seminal 1926 essay “Nationalism as a Religion” and his 1960 book Nationalism: A Religion. Hayes, like Durkheim, recognized a perduring human “religious sense” that has largely migrated in Western modernity from the church to the nation. The nation is the modern person’s god, on whom they depend for protection and salvation. Hayes details the elaborate myths, feast days, and liturgies surrounding the flag, national heroes, and foundational events in the nation’s history. Nationalism is built especially around theologies of sacrifice: “Perhaps the surest proof of the religious character of modern nationalism is the zeal with which all manner of its devotees have laid down their lives on battlefields of the last hundred years.”³ More recently, Carolyn Marvin and David Ingle have written, “Nationalism is the most powerful religion in the United States, and perhaps in many other countries.”⁴ Nationalism is so powerful because it is the worship of us together, a kind of collective self-worship, one originally engineered by elites, but one accepted and reproduced by the common people.

What do people find compelling and valuable in devotion to the nation? There is a popular sense that devotion to one’s country is one of the most admirable and virtuous traits a person can manifest. It is to be a person for others: to recognize the deeply human reality of our interconnection with other people, not mere humanity in the abstract, but other particular incarnated people with names and faces. It is to want what is best for those people, to want to promote the common good, which is exactly what the great faith traditions require. Devotion to the nation is a school of the virtues because it instills the moral discipline of putting others before oneself. Beyond a merely contractual relationship, in which one does a cold cost-benefit analysis of one’s interactions with others, those who love their country are willing to serve others without calculating the cost, because they feel part of something larger than their individual self. Devotion to the nation calls us to overcome the narcissism of narrow self-interest. Such a sense of belonging is especially compelling in an immigrant nation like the United States, where generation after generation of immigrants has sought to fit in by emphasizing their devotion to the nation. Self-sacrifice is the summit of such devotion, as seen in memes that assimilate the self-sacrifice of the American soldier to the self-sacrifice of Jesus Christ. According to a popular meme, “Only two defining forces have ever offered to die for you: Jesus Christ and the American Soldier.” While we should note that soldiers, unlike Jesus, are also expected to kill for you, people respect the risks, hardships, and disciplines the soldier willingly undergoes on behalf of something larger than the self.

For the most part, Christians, Jews, Muslims, and members of other faiths in Western countries have assimilated their faith with faith in the nation. Many Christians in the United States see their nationalism as flowing from and indeed required by their Christian faith. Christian nationalists often make a syncretic blend of Christian and American symbols and language, as in the Patriotic Rosary, in which each of the fifty beads is associated with a US state, and the Mysteries before each decade consist of quotes from the likes of George Washington, John Adams, and Robert E. Lee. More commonly, Christians have been nationalists but not Christian nationalists. American nationalism and Christianity have operated on parallel tracks, one public and the other private. American politicians, who have been mostly Christians, refer not to Christ or the Trinitarian God in public discourse but to a generic “God” that is identified with America’s special salvific role in human history. Robert Bellah, who saw nationalism as America’s “civil religion,” did not find that necessarily in conflict with Christianity or Islam or Judaism; people can have two religions and see no conflict between the two because both appeal to something transcending this world. For most Christians, Christianity and civil religion—one for private consumption, the other for public use—are manifestations of a larger ultimate and universal religious reality.

Some thinkers are less sure that one can have two religions, and they see the American civil religion as in direct competition with the Abrahamic religious traditions. Hayes, who converted to Catholicism because of the way it transcends national boundaries, thought nationalism was idolatry, “tribal selfishness and vainglory.”⁵ Though he was convinced that “the final great bulwark of mankind against the errors and evils of nationalism is the Catholic Church,” he nevertheless chastised his many fellow Catholics, past and present, who “put nationalism above our faith and thus give aid and comfort to our most persistent and insidious foe.”⁶

Because civil religion borrows the forms of rituals and symbols and myths from Christianity, many think that it is derivative, a mere simulacrum of “real” religion. The opposite is in fact the case: American civil religion is the real religion of American society because it controls and directs violence. The worship of killing authority is central to this religion; the god is the one that commands life and death. Belonging to a sectarian religion is optional, and Americans have very rarely killed or died for Methodism, Catholicism, Judaism, Islam, or Buddhism. Practicing the civil religion, however, is the expected norm, and most Americans consider killing and dying for their country as necessary and laudable. As Marvin and Ingle write, “Though denominations are permitted to exist in the United States, they are not permitted to kill, for their beliefs are not officially true. What is really true in any society is what is worth killing for, and what citizens may be compelled to sacrifice their lives for.”⁷ American presidents generally look benignly on churchgoing but see our true “sacred obligation” as that to our military.

There is a division of labor in the United States between public civil religion and private traditional religion, but only one controls the means of violence; the modern state, in Max Weber’s famous definition, is that agency that holds a monopoly on the legitimate use of violence. And that monopoly depends on the exclusive loyalty of its devotees. Only nationalism can marshal the sacrificial devotion of citizens. One cannot have more than one true religion. Religions that claim to be true in some objective and public way must compete. In many ways, the waxing of nationalism and the waning of Christianity in the West is due to the transfer of killing authority from the church to the nation-state.⁸ Christianity is still practiced by millions in the West, but it is optional, private, not officially true, and only allowed to operate insofar as it does not interfere with the worship of the national god. We may see Christian nationalism as a recognition that Christianity cannot be true unless it holds coercive power. This is why, Christian nationalists believe, Christians must retake the reins of control in the United States. Christianity can only be publicly true if harnessed to American power.

The question we are faced with, then, is this: Is there a true God who does not depend on worldly coercive power? In the Hebrew scriptures, one condemned idolatry is the reliance on military might: “Alas for those who go down to Egypt for help and who rely on horses, who trust in chariots because they are many and in horsemen because they are very strong, but do not look to the Holy One of Israel or consult the Lord!” (Isaiah 31:1). In the Gospel, the devil offers Jesus all the kingdoms of the world if he will fall down and worship him. Jesus’s response, “Worship the Lord your God, and serve only him” (Matthew 4:10), quotes Deuteronomy 6:13, where it is followed by “Do not follow other gods, any of the gods of the peoples who are all around you, because the LORD your God, who is present with you, is a jealous God” (6:14–15). Durkheim did not entertain the possibility of a God who is not just another name for human power. We, on the other hand, might consider the possibility that the officially true national god is an idolatrous god but that there is another God in whom violence does not have the final word.

The Death of General Mercer at the Battle of Princeton, January 3, 1777, John Trumbull, 1831

For believers in that God, avoiding idolatry is both necessary and difficult. It is not simply a matter of declaring our exclusive belief in the God of Abraham, because idolatry is primarily a matter of behavior, not mere belief. Idolatry is not just a metaphysical error but a matter of disloyalty, of directing inordinate devotion to something other than God. This does not mean that beliefs are irrelevant but that what people actually believe is more accurately reflected by what they do than by what they claim to believe. For the same reason, idolatry is on a continuum of more and less. At what point does reliance on military might or my retirement account become inordinate? At what point does love for my country override my obligation to the children of God who live beyond our borders? In the case of nationalism, these questions are especially difficult because devotion to one’s country exemplifies real virtues, such as love for one’s neighbors, devotion to something larger than the individual self, and the willingness to sacrifice for others. The book of Wisdom offers a sympathetic take on idolaters like us who fall in love with creation because God made it good: “Yet these people are little to be blamed, for perhaps they go astray while seeking God and desiring to find him. For while they live among his works, they keep searching, and they trust in what they see, because the things that are seen are beautiful” (Wisdom 13:6–7). It is hard for material creatures to worship an invisible God, especially when God has surrounded us with people and land that are so lovable.

Many faithful people deal with these difficult questions by making a distinction between nationalism and patriotism. Though some people use the nationalist label with pride, others, like the Pontifical Academy of Social Sciences, use “nationalism” pejoratively to mean “a perversion of patriotism,” which is “defined as love [of] one’s homeland and the willingness, derived from this love, to contribute to its development and to defend it.”⁹ Patriotism is noble and inclusive; nationalism is imperialistic and exclusive.

There certainly is a distinction to be made between genuine concern for one’s neighbors and an aggressive exclusion of those who are not yet one’s neighbors. However, that distinction, like idolatry, is on a continuum, and the labels “patriot” (good) and “nationalist” (bad) make the distinction seem sharper than it is. The patriotism-nationalism distinction can also be little more than an attempt to deal with a real problem verbally rather than in terms of our behavior. Idolatry, as mentioned earlier, is more a matter of behavior than of belief. Too often, the language of patriotism instead of nationalism is little better than an exercise in rebranding. More pointedly, the distinction between patriotism and nationalism is often nothing more than the distinction between what we do and what you do. When Turks have a military parade, it is nationalistic; when it is done in the US, it is patriotic.

To be human is to have all kinds of natural attachments—to family, for example—that can, but do not necessarily, distract from the worship of God. We cannot simply reject all earthly attachments to worship God; to do so would be inhuman. So we claim a virtuous patriotism rather than a vicious nationalism, keeping our devotion to the nation in check by our devotion to God. The problem with such an attractively balanced account is that it relies on interior dispositions simply to will away broader social dynamics. Devotion to the nation is no less a religion simply because the individual wills it to be so. More is involved than the individual simply choosing to be a patriot rather than a nationalist or choosing to place God above nation. At issue is the “social imaginary,” how social and political stories, rituals, and symbols operate to form people—soul and body—and the world they live in. At issue, in other words, are the gods that are not simply chosen but given to us. For the question of idolatry, what is publicly true matters.

There is no simple formula to determine when the love of one’s country has become idolatrous, a kind of collective narcissism. I will nevertheless suggest two criteria that must be carefully weighed. The first is violence. Is divinity tied to that for which we are willing to kill, such that the willingness to kill is seen as the height of virtue? Does the god we claim to worship demand access to the coercive powers of the state? The second criterion is exclusion. Does concern for the common good stop abruptly at the historically contingent borders of the nation-state we live in? Does our love of neighbor depend on identifying and vilifying enemies, both internal and external, who threaten the purity of the nation? If the answers to these questions are affirmative, then idolatry is a clear and present danger.

Nationalism is a flexible ideology. It can come from both the left and the right of the political spectrum, and it can be secular or explicitly identified with a religious tradition. I have suggested that the problems with nationalism do not disappear when religious nationalism gives way to secular nationalism, precisely because nationalism itself is a kind of religion that offers us a new god to worship, a new god to save us, one that all too often is little more than a reflection of our own narcissism and fear. We need to worship a God who urges us to both love our neighbor and expand the scope of whom we consider our neighbor to be. Jesus tells the parable of the Good Samaritan in response to the question “Who is my neighbor?” His answer indicates that the neighbor is both anybody, the wounded individual put before you here and now, and everybody, the whole of humanity, which transcends borders. We need to be simultaneously more local and more universal, to be concretely invested in our local communities and also generously open to all of God’s children beyond our borders. This is the way to worship the God of peace in reality and not merely in words.

Endnotes

1 See, for example, Katherine Stewart, Power Worshippers: Inside the Dangerous Rise of Religious Nationalism (New York: Bloomsbury, 2022); and Mark Juergensmeyer, The New Cold War? Religious Nationalism Confronts the Secular State (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993).
2 Émile Durkheim, The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life, trans. Joseph Ward Swain (New York: Free Press, 1965), 261.
3 Carlton J. H. Hayes, “Nationalism as a Religion,” in Essays on Nationalism (New York: Macmillan, 1928), §6, https://www.panarchy.org/hayes/nationalism.html.
4 Carolyn Marvin and David W. Ingle, “Blood Sacrifice and the Nation: Revisiting Civil Religion,” Journal of the American Academy of Religion 64, no. 4 (Winter 1996): 767.
5 Hayes, “Nationalism as a Religion,” §8.
6 Both quotes are from the closing paragraph of Carlton J. H. Hayes, “The Church and Nationalism: A Plea for Further Study of a Major Issue,” Catholic Historical Review 28, no. 1 (April 1942): 12.
7 Carolyn Marvin and David W. Ingle, Blood Sacrifice and the Nation: Totem Rituals and the American Flag (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 9.
8 Marvin and Ingle, 25.
9 Pontifical Academy of Social Sciences, “Final Statement on Nation, State, and Nation-State,” May 3, 2019, https://www.pass.va/en/events/2019/nation_state/statement.html.