Is There a Future for Ethno-Religious Nations?

Henry Srebrnik, [Summerside, PEI] Journal Pioneer

Some nations were originally founded upon a sense of religious “chosen-ness,” the idea that God or Providence had selected them to be a force for good in the world.

And the geographic space they came to inhabit was seen as a “promised land” given them by their deity. It became a “sacred homeland.”

This produced a strong sense of what we today would call national consciousness, an identity very different from that of, say, someone Belgian.

Anthony D. Smith, a scholar of nationalism and ethnicity at the London School of Economics, has examined this form of nationalism in his book Chosen Peoples: Sacred Sources of National Identity, published in 2003.

From the moment of God’s covenant with the Israelites in the Old Testament, the idea that a people are chosen by God has had a central role in shaping national identity in the western world, he writes. And sacred belief remains central to national identity in many places, even in today’s modern world.

Clearly, this has been the basis for the modern Jewish form of nationalism known as Zionism, since even secular Jews had to base their claim to an ancient homeland where they had become a minority over the centuries by reference to the original biblical claim to the land.

While the Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox forms of Christianity were more universal in outlook, the Protestant Reformation saw the formation of renewed Old Testament forms of identity.

Calvinists, in particular, saw themselves as the elect of God. They saw their conquest of new territories as divinely inspired.

The Congregationalists and Presbyterians who settled in colonial New England in the 17th century constantly made the analogy between America and Ancient Israel. The chosen people, they declared, is closer to God than any other and is held to higher standards.

In the words of John Winthrop, governor of Massachusetts Bay Colony, “we shall be as a City upon a hill. The eyes of all people are upon us.”

In his 1988 book God Land: Reflections on Religion and Nationalism, the late Irish writer Conor Cruise O’Brien described this outlook as “providing nationalism with divine legitimation.” The Constitution would become a sacred document.

To this day, American nationalism retains a sense of “manifest destiny,” and the idea of the country as the “indispensable nation.”

Two other Calvinist outposts, Protestant Ulster and the Afrikaner settlements in South Africa, are examples of the concept of “holy nationalism.”

Both groups of settlers considered themselves new chosen peoples in new promised lands, with the God-given right to take over areas inhabited by Irish Catholics and various African tribes, respectively, just as the Israelites had conquered the land of Canaan.

In a study published in 1992, God’s Peoples: Covenant and Land in South Africa, Israel, and Ulster, Queen’s University historian Donald Harman Akenson found a common thread in the views of Ulster Scots Presbyterians, Dutch Reformed Church Afrikaners, and the Jews of Israel.

Each of these peoples, he suggested, were committed to an Old Testament-like covenant with God that promised them the land they had struggled to get if they made the commitment and sacrifice necessary in such a covenant. This religiously-based fervor resulted in some of the world’s most obdurate political conflicts.

However, Akenson suggested that the covenantal mindset was gradually dissolving in South Africa and Northern Ireland, and recent events have borne him out.

In 1994 Afrikaner-based apartheid gave way to majority black rule in South Africa, and Ulster Scots-Irish Unionists are slowly reconciling themselves to power-sharing with Catholics in Northern Ireland, as mandated by the 1998 Good Friday Agreement signed by most of the province’s political parties as well as by the British and Irish governments.

Akensen contended, though, that the Israelis would remain adamant in their determination to fulfill their ancient covenant -- the template for all the others. They remain the last ones standing, but we don’t know if that will last either.