Is Christianity Nationalist?

So, is Christianity nationalist? The Church clearly thinks the nation is essential and worthy of defense, but what is it? To answer this, we must explore the historical genesis of the modern “nation” itself.

Click to expand...

John Paul II asserted with confidence that the two natural societies recognized by the Church’s social teaching are the family and the nation and that these two are bound up together. The relations of the family are ordered toward unity with a social grouping larger than the family, and so a person emerges through the cultural education provided by the family into the nation, whose culture makes truth accessible, whose culture incarnates, we might say, truth in a way that is not foreign but native to who the person is and to the social and physical geography in which he dwells.[1] The family we might go so far as to say is the training ground for the nation, the place where new sharers in the national culture are formed. And sharing in a culture is essential to what it means to be a man. As John Paul II expressed it: “Man always lives according to a culture which is his own, and which, in turn creates between men a bond which is also his own, by determining the inter-human and social character of human existence…. Culture is that by which man as man becomes more man, ‘is’ more, has more access to ‘being.’”[2] And in another place, the pope asserted: “culture must be held as the common good of every people, the expression of its dignity, liberty and creativity, and the testimony of its course through history. In particular, only from within and through culture does the Christian faith become a part of history and the creator of history.”[3]

Continued below.