Conor Cruise O'Brien's God Land: Reflections on Religion and Nationalism
Smith, Anthony
GOD LAND: REFLECTIONS ON RELIGION AND NATIONALISM, by Conor Cruise O'Brien. Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1988. 97 pp. $15.95. We have long been accustomed to think of nationalism...
...But it is also fed by modern ideas of secular territorial nationalism, whose proponents, usually the intelligentsia, adapt its ideals to ethnic realities, using the Marxist-Leninist party-state to incorporate and mobilize the chosen population...
...Today's nationalism is often also polycentric, seeking to make an individual contribution to an accepted wider civilization...
...the latter much more on economic unity and resources, legal rights and citizenship, a civil ideology, and common education...
...Renaissance Germany, Puritan England, and New England provided favorable soil for the zeal of holy nationalism as the Old Testament began to be reread in its literal sense...
...The former is just two centuries old...
...Unfortunately, these same forces may accentuate the inequalities between nations, fueling the sense of chosenness and demanding a reversal of disprivileged status...
...As Cruise O'Brien remarks on his penultimate page, the real obstacle to international management is one of understanding: "Any nationalism inherently finds it hard to understand any other nationalism or even to want to understand it...
...Admittedly, territory links the two...
...The myth of election is product, and cause, of ethnoreligious conflicts in the Middle Ages...
...holy nationalism serves this function particularly effectively...
...The former is relatively weak compared to communism...
...But he prefers Roger Williams's antinationalism, while conceding that the United States is more the creation of its Puritan holy nationalists...
...SPRING • 1989 • 281...
...He readily concedes that even today society requires a bonding principle that inspires reverence...
...Even class conflicts within nations can fuel messianic national aspirations, as one class outbids its antagonists ("proletarian" nations are just as messianic...
...The idea of the chosen people was not confined to France...
...Conor Cruise O'Brien's brief survey has provided us with a perceptive introduction to a relatively neglected, but crucial, aspect of contemporary politics, but it is an area that demands much deeper investigation than could be attempted in a few lectures...
...Fichte to politicize Herder's cultural nationalism...
...And the Revolution in America was saturated with holy Protestant nationalism directed against Roman Catholicism as well as British toleration of popery...
...Yet I have to confess to considerable unease over the framework and direction of his argument...
...To begin with, I do not think it helps to bracket ancient collective loyalties with modern national sentiments under a single heading...
...The former are centered on myths of descent, historical memories, religious culture...
...Even the French Enlightenment and Revolution were permeated by Puritan holy nationalism...
...But there are also important differences that a book based on a short series of lectures can hardly be expected to encompass...
...Today, the homeland is linked to a state and culture, to form the "nation-state...
...Rejection of the other is part of the holiness...
...Continuity was broken in many cases, or the "ethnic character" changed, especially with immigration or the adoption of a new religion (for example, when Persia was Islamicized, or Greeks became Orthodox Christians...
...We are all "deified" nations, by that token...
...Without it, societies might well fall apart...
...This is the theme of Conor Cruise O'Brien's book...
...Nationalism, the ideology, is not as weak as he claims exactly because it has managed to 280 • DISSENT attach itself to preexisting ethnic sentiments that proved durable over several centuries...
...There is much to commend in Cruise O'Brien's analysis, not least its erudition and wit...
...He is right to emphasize the close links between religion and nationalism and the messianic fervor in much of today's national sentiment...
...Can we live without holy nationalisms...
...But today, "homeland" is not always "Godland," and often not in the specific sense of a moral-territorial covenant such as we find in the Hebrew Bible...
...We have long been accustomed to think of nationalism as a secular creed, opposed to earlier religious faiths...
...By the time of Joan of Arc, many people had come to believe in the concept of France and the French people arising out of the union of the sacred king with the holy country...
...It is this fanatical religiosity that Cruise O'Brien finds so dangerous and distasteful...
...Rather than opposition, he sees the conflation of religion and nationalism in the concept of "election...
...the latter is the kind that is so powerful and explosive...
...The "holy nationalisms" of "Marxist" Somalia and Ethiopia are predicated on long histories of ethnic (and imperial) solidarity, with all the attendant myths, symbols, traditions, and memories that give meaning and direction to "Ethiopia" and "Somalia...
...These ethnic sentiments, in turn, were often kept alive by priests and scribes and linked to communal forms of religion, which elevated the people in question...
...Spinoza, Rousseau, and Herder, the three Enlightenment prophets of nationalism, were steeped in the Judaic-Puritan myth of election...
...For nationalism as doctrine must be distinguished from nationalism "as a collective emotional force...
...But, although it suggests the magnitude of the contemporary problem, it overlooks the complexity of a situation in which, while rejecting the other, several nationalisms have selectively (but quite extensively) borrowed from the "other" (for example, Japan, Turkey, Israel, India...
...The evidence suggests this remains true for many "nation-states," even today...
...Before the fourteenth century such connections were rarely made, and borders were porous and ill-defined...
...The link with ancient Israel and its liberation from Egyptian bondage was made explicit, and later immigrants to America soon transferred their own holy nationalisms to their adopted country...
...This messianic secular component needs also to be stressed and its ethnic underpinnings further explored...
...So his attitude to nationalism is "Respect, but suspect...
...Similarly, the Jansenists, in securing the expulsion of the Jesuits from France in the 1760s, struck a vital blow against monarchy and for Gallican nationalism...
...Recently, however, the Islamic revival, the reign of the ayatollahs, and ethnic conflicts in Ireland, Poland, Armenia, the Punjab, and Sri Lanka, among others, have forced us to SPRING • 1989 • 279 revise our ideas about the relationship of nationalism to religion...
...Perhaps here, and in historical understanding of the other, lies our hope of national coexistence...
...That was the nationalism of the Third Reich...
...It is there that we find the conflation of nationalism with religion: in God's promises and choice of a particular people and a particular land...
...If being a "chosen" nation tempers arrogance with fear and anxiety, because God can exchange one chosen people for another, being a "holy" nation, i.e., chosen with tenure, though still under God, paves the way for the third and most dangerous form of religious nationalism, the nation idolizing itself, with no entity, law, or ethic above the "deified" nation...
...you need it to warm you, but it can destroy you if it gets out of control...
...Indeed, this is the source of all the dangers posed by nationalism today...
...In other words, the link between nationalism and religion is often less direct than Cruise O'Brien suggests...
...Christianity tried to allegorize the myth of terrestrial election away, but its earthiness gradually returned with the Nicene Creed as the official cult of the Roman empire...
...In our century, holy nationalism in America has fused anticommunism with the national religion, as Cardinal Spellman, Joseph McCarthy, the National Prayer Breakfast, and the Air and Space Museum so eloquently testify...
...As a description of premodern ethnocentrism, this is admirable...
...There is a world of difference between the ethnic loyalties of the ancient and early medieval worlds, including the Old Testament, and the nationalist ideals and aspirations of the modern world...
...For there is little doubt that for the foreseeable future, nation-states (so-called) will remain the building blocks of any wider regional communities and civilizations...
...He is also right to distinguish the doctrine of nationalism from the emotional state, though, to avoid confusion, I. would prefer to call the latter "national sentiment...
...the latter goes back to the Old Testament...
...and it undoubtedly intensifies interstate conflicts in many regions...
...Virgil's Aeneid, the Islamic menace, and the holy wars of the Crusades helped to despiritualize Christendom and attach a holy nationalism to the emergent states of Western Europe...
...They are related but by no means identical...
...If Durkheim is to be believed, all societies (not just the Third Reich) idolize themselves, and must do so to survive...
...A short overview that dwells on the highlights minimizes these changes...
...This is particularly true of holy nationalisms...
...I would also concur in many of his attitudes toward the more extreme manifestations of past and contemporary nationalisms...
...Our image of nationalism is shaped by the French Revolution, that first great eruption of patriotic forces that reverberated throughout Europe and then the world...
...That in turn requires an advance in "civilization" to recognize and accommodate the individuality and contribution of each of its national components...
...The same brevity also means that the "religious" component of modern American, Soviet, and Third World nationalisms is highlighted at the expense of other symbolic and cultural elements...
...Robespierre, Sieyes, Michelet, hastened to replace God by the Nation of Frenchmen...
...In his words: "To use an old analogy: the stuff is like fire...
...Against much modem scholarship, Cruise O'Brien is right to emphasize elements of continuity between premodern eras of ethnic community and the modern era of nations, between ethnocentrism and nationalism...
...But, as Cruise O'Brien suggests, national identity and solidarity may be tempered by regional and global forces—technological, economic, cultural—that evoke wider communities...
Vol. 36 • April 1989 • No. 2
