A common assumption of those most critical of “Christian nationalism” is that such a conception is inherently racist and opposed to the universal nature of the Christian faith. Many argue that Christian nationalism undermines a catholic sensibility by tethering Christianity to the particularities of the nation, and usually to a particular ethnic grouping within the nation. They condemn this linkage as a form of syncretism that idolizes the nation and its interests above concerns for common and higher goods, and worry that it lacks resources to critique one’s nation.
I want to challenge these assumptions by appealing to a surprising figure: the great French Catholic theologian and Nazi resister, Henri de Lubac. One of the leading expositors of the catholic contours of the Christian faith and the centrality of the Church, he also applied these themes in a few of his lesser known writings on the nation in the early part of his career.
In a 1933 essay, “Patriotisme et Nationalisme,” de Lubac seems to agree with our contemporary critics. In the background of this writing is the rise of Hitler and the national socialist party, as well as the nationalist party, Action française, that was led by Charles Maurras and was popular among anti-republican French Catholics. The nationalism that worries de Lubac here is one that considers the nation as an absolute, elevating it above everything else and making its interests the supreme and universal norm. This pits nations against each other, denies a common good beyond the nation, and resists religious authority that places limits on national concerns. National egoism becomes a source of the sacred, often demanding hatred of rival peoples—including those within a nation who don’t fit neatly into the national story. Such nationalist idolatry is opposed to the catholic mission of the Church and the common destiny of man.
But then not much later, in 1941, de Lubac strikes a different note in a particularly noteworthy setting. During World War II, when France was occupied by the Nazis, de Lubac delivered a lecture to a student group, titled “Christian Explanation of Our Times.” He also distributed a pamphlet with the title: “The Christian Vocation of France.” In this joint lecture-pamphlet, de Lubac essentially provides a defense of a form of Christian nationalism while his country was occupied by national socialists and the Church in France had largely come under the spell of an improper nationalism by supporting the Maurrassian-inspired Vichy regime.
De Lubac starts by explaining that France during this time was facing a civilizational crisis. By this he is referring to the rampant anti-semitism, the domineering imperialism of Germany, and the various violations against the rights of man in his day. De Lubac attributes this all to a loss of European nations’ ties to the spiritual resources that formerly animated them. He argues that European civilization is “basically Christian,” and that it would be foolish to think it could be maintained by continuing to dismiss or neglect Christianity. This echoes what has come to be referred to as the Böckenförde Paradox.
Ideas such as freedom, equality, brotherhood, nationality, progress, and social justice, de Lubac argues, emerged from Christianity and only make sense when integrated within the Church. As these concepts become detached from the community of faith, they are transformed into dangerous ideologies—or, as Chesterton described them: “Christian virtues gone mad.” One can see evidence of this in the radical individualism, woke totalitarianism, and idolatrous and ethnocentric nationalism (where such can be proven to exist) in our day. These ideologies isolate one aspect of Christian truth to neglect of others, and become dangerous distortions of reality.
De Lubac explains that a privatized Christianity offers weak resistance to such developments, and in fact leaves man prone to seek “substitute faiths” in the form of secular (often, political) religions. De Lubac argues that the fault is primarily that of Christians for their compliance with the reduction of the faith to the merely personal, “private” sphere. The end result was the loss of the “profound meaning of the Church,” and this loss was at the center of the civilizational crisis. The nation suffers, de Lubac maintains, when the Church is obscured.
De Lubac makes his proposals for how Christians can and should contribute to the “national recovery” in formerly Christian nations. Catholic Christians have, according to de Lubac, a unique role in helping the nation become herself again. France, he believed, still had a Christian vocation—the recovery of which was key to the national renewal. This Christian vocation does not mean that France has been blameless, or that it must simply return to a pristine past. Rather, the Christian vocation provides resources to critique the nation’s failures and inspires a certain dynamism.
Recovering this national identity would entail at least two recognitions by the nation. First, the nation should receive the Christian revelation of the sacred rights of man who is made in the image of God. Man has a transcendent and common destiny, which must be honored by the nation. All men, regardless of race or ethnicity, have these rights. Second, the nation must also honor the supranational nature of the Church. The Church is not bound to any individual nation, and is concerned for and has authority over her members throughout the world. The nation cannot subordinate the Church to its own interests. In fact, the Church must remind the nation that only in her can man find the true solidarity for which man longs. She is also the only body on earth which can unite the person and the collective without harm to one another. No national collectivity can properly harmonize the one and the many.
At the same time, according to de Lubac, the Church must honor the authority of the state of one’s nation. Theocratic desires—in the sense of directly subordinating the state to the Church—must be shorn, since the “clericalization of the state inevitably means the state-ization [étatisation] of the Church.” To try to make the civil power a mere instrument of the spiritual power would demean the Church and humiliate the state. If the Church really wishes to contribute to the national recovery, “she knows that she can do so only in freedom.” “She must,” de Lubac says, “devote herself freely to her task as educator in order to help the country remake itself by helping it go beyond itself.”
This clearly does not make the nation an end in itself, and two other pieces written around this time provides more resources for national critique. In 1942, de Lubac co-wrote a cahier published by the clandestine journal, Cahiers du Témoignage chrétien, titled “Collaboration et fidélité.” With Gaston Fessard and Pierre Chaillet—his colleagues in the “spiritual resistance” to nazism and anti-semitism—de Lubac explicitly denounces adoration of race, class, or political leaders. These, they argue, pose a threat to the Church, which must bear witness to the fact that Christ died for all persons and be the defender of human dignity, the site of unity amongst men, and the embodiment of compassion of those suffering in the world. But, furthermore, the authors of the cahier argue that collaboration in anti-semitism has brought shame upon France.
Just months later, a similar cahier was written by de Lubac: “Collaboration et STO.” He appeals to the “soul of France,” which is threatened by collaboration with the Nazis. Furthermore, de Lubac argues that Christians have a duty to be the heart of the resistance to nazism so as to protect the country from losing its soul. He explains that the responsibilities of Christians are not opposed to their responsibilities as Frenchmen; on the contrary, these commitments reinforce each other. Yet, he warns, Christians must be on guard against the temptation of placing “politics first” (a popular slogan of Maurras) while, on the other hand, also repudiating a “pure Christianity” which is not political.
De Lubac, in his resistance against racist anti-semitism and nazism, argues for a form of Christian nationalism. This would entail greater recognition of the Church by the state, but such a religiously inspired nationalism would also provide sounder foundations for securing human rights. De Lubac believed that the France of his day retained a vocation to promote Christianity, or at least to propagate the great human values it owed to Christianity. America, a child of Europe, was also animated by Christian ideals. Certainly, it has never fully lived up to them. But this failure does not negate a “Christian vocation” similar to that which de Lubac envisioned for late-modern France, even during a time in which many of his compatriots were embroiled in racism. In fact, it was that Christian vocation which provided the way out, according to de Lubac.
Rev. James R. Wood is a PhD candidate in Theology at Wycliffe College (University of Toronto), graduate of Princeton Theological Seminary (ThM, 2018), and PCA pastor. His writings focus on political theology, ecclesiology, and sacramental theology and have appeared in the Journal of Reformed Theology, Pro Ecclesia: A Journal for Catholic and Evangelical Theology, and Logos: A Journal of Eastern Christian Studies, Mere Orthodoxy, Providence, and Covenant (weblog of Living Church).