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Countries own god

Ferdinand Mount

GOD LAND: REFLECTIONS ON RELIGION AND NATIONALISM by Conor Cruise O'Brien I. first set eyes on Conor Cruise O'Brien in the flesh at a party given for him in the early 1960s. He was then recently returned from the Congo, and he was the man of the moment. Harold Wilson and George Brown buzzed around him as celebrities do round the latest celebrity, hoping some of it will rub off on them. Dr O'Brien (doctor of philosophy, no Schweitzer he) was immediately recognisable from those memorable news photographs of him as UN Special Representative sporting the kind of tropical shirt normally worn on holiday in Hawaii, his impish when-do- they-open expression barely stiffened into respectful attention as he listened to Lumumba or Tshombe expounding the territorial integrity of Zaire or, as the case might be, Katanga. The whole idea of an Irish literary man sorting out a prime Heart-of-Darkness situation was irresisti- ble.

He surfaced again in the public prints as a Minister in, the Irish coalition politics of the 1970s — for such an exploder of antique pieties, a career which was never likely to last long. Later again, he wrote a column in the Observer which was loved by the readers but not by the proprietor. Until his destoolment, he was for a time also the paper's Editor-in-Chief. The last few Years, he seems to have been on the hoof much of the time, giving offence to his fellow countrymen, Protestant and Catho- lic alike, to Jews and Arabs, to South Africans of all races, and indeed to almost any tribe or nation among whom he chanced to find himself on his wanderings.

To return to this first sighting, what struck me was that, in all this well- conducted gathering, the guest of honour was the one person who had not only managed to have a few and was unmistak- ably enjoying himself but also was, in the most amiable way possible, utterly de- tached from the whole proceeding. A kind of exuberant scepticism radiated from him. And his writing too has always had this Cheerful undeceived quality, best shown in his willingness to confront the great inter- twined Irish subjects of religion and nationalism with an unsentimental but not unfeeling eye.

To find him lecturing on the malign connections between the two subjects Promises a strong draught of Gibbon from the cask. God Land is a series of lectures Which Dr O'Brien has been trotting round the United States, until they were deli- vered in their final and now published form at Harvard. Like everything from his pen, they are brisk and enormously enjoyable, but, as compared with, say, States of

Harvard, £9.95 pp. 97

Ireland, they are a trifle underweight. Too many of the hares he starts are off through a gap in the hedge before there is time to work up a sweat chasing them, let alone to knock them on the head. All the same, he is as provoking as ever, and the provoca- tion is well worth the outing.

Dr O'Brien gives us a historical sketch with a simple recurring theme: the prophets of Christianity have strenuously sought to disentangle God from nation, but just as strenuously the ideologues of nationalism have 'territorialised' Him again and tied the divine plan to a particu- lar people settled in a particular region of the earth. The contrast between the national and the universal approach to religion is shockingly evident in the con- trast between the Old Testament and the New Testament. In the Old Testament, it is God who offers land to Abraham, and Abraham accepts. In the New Testament, it is Satan who offers land to Jesus, and Jesus refuses. St Paul does his best to smooth over this embarrassment by mak- ing much of the internationalist sentiments in the Old Testament, in order to prove that the New Testament is a fulfilment and not a contradiction. But, as Dr O'Brien justly points out, the internationalist pas- sages in the Old Testament tend to be remote and vague, while the Promised Land is vivid and immediate.

We come across theologians and writers trying to shift the Kingdom of Heaven on to their own patch throughout the Middle Ages, Dante being among the offenders. As national states become more defined, hard-edged entities, the number of Chosen Peoples seems to multiply. Joan of Arc told the Duke of Burgundy that 'all who make war on the King of France make war on King Jesus'. The German writer of around 1500 who is known as 'The Revolu- tionary of the Upper Rhine' declared that 'the German people had been the genuine Chosen People not merely since Charle- magne, but since the creation; that before the Tower of Babel, the language spoken by the human race had been German'.

Cromwell spoke of the English as 'a people that have had a stamp upon them from God'. Milton was worse. And then came the Americans. By about 1630, as Dr O'Brien notes, 'it appeared that God had chosen not one but two Protestant English- speaking peoples'.

Some early colonists resisted the lure.

Richard Mather reminded his flock that men must not confuse holiness with geo- graphy; 'neither Jerusalem nor any other place' was holy. But the thing was too strong, even for his own son, Increase Mather, who asked in one of his sermons: 'Where was there ever a place so like unto new Jerusalem as New England hath been?' And so on to our own day, with Ronald Reagan describing the United States as 'an anointed land' and 'a shining city on a hill'.

Only the most rigorous moral intelli- gences, like Roger Williams, that conten- tious colonial divine and friend of Milton, stood out against the idolatry of 'God Land' and denounced 'the leaders of Christ's churches turned into the wilder- ness of national religion'. The history of Israel was not a blueprint for the American colonists, and, when they pretended it was, they 'lost their path and themselves.'

With the ebbing of the tide of faith, nationalists turned to commending nation- worship less as a fulfilment of true religion than as a substitute for it. The French historian Michelet openly implored his country to take the place of le dieu qui nous echappe and to fill the immeasurable abyss left by the extinction of Christianity.

At this point, we come across the first signs of weakening and even of muddle in Dr O'Brien's attack. Perhaps, he muses, there may, after all, be something to be said for a drop of religion in the patriotic brew. 'Were the United States a less religious country in the ordinary or God- fearing sense, I think American national- ism would be more dangerous than it is. . . Religion at least attempts to place certain inhibitions on the destructive potential of nationalism.'

But earlier on, Dr O'Brien handed us a three-stage diagram of holy nationalism: 'in ascending order of arrogance and des- tructiveness, "chosen people", "holy na- tion", and finally "deified nation", the most manic, malign and literal version of God's Land.' There was nothing about nationalism acting as a moral brake. On the contrary. The more the rhetoric of nationalism was soaked in religious lan- guage and sanctioned by divine approval, the less inhibited the demagogue would be and the more manic and malign his actions.

In any case, should not Dr O'Brien's three-stage diagram be reversed (or better still abandoned)? Surely it is the choosing of the People, in preference to and hence in potential opposition to all other peoples, that unleashes the real mischief.

Now and then, in fact, Dr O'Brien slips right over to the enemy camp. 'It seems impossible to conceive of organised society without nationalism, and even without holy nationalism, since any nationalism that failed to inspire reverence could not be an effective bonding force he tells his American audience. 'Would rationality, self-interest and pragmatism continue to hold you together, or would you burst apart, once you had lost the common bond of national religion? My guess is that you would burst apart.'

Does he need to concede nearly so much, or present the alternatives in such black-and-white terms? Nation-worship, like all excessive affections, is condemned as idolatrous by the tradition of most Christian churches. The limitless, hyped- up ideologised version of nationalism is only about two centuries old. Is it impossi- ble to recover a more tranquil and ordered version which might even be dignified by the name of patriotism?

What prevents us from setting ourselves this sort of task is that the ghastly experi- ences of this century have left us all living on our nerves. The anti-nationalists can think only of breaking down national institutions and loyalties and replacing them with decaffeinated international bureaucracies. Nationalists bristle with suspicion, their eyes bloodshot with para- noia, as they scan the horizons for fresh threats to independent nationhood. Neith- er faction is terribly eager to examine why nationalism became quite so dangerous to the human race, and whether this was inevitable.

Dr O'Brien scarcely refers to any con- nection between socialism and national- ism, perhaps because he retains some Leftish residues from his days in the Irish Labour Party. Yet these connections are both logical and crucial. The more control the State assumes over our lives, the more it will feel itself entitled to our loyalty and gratitude. From Rousseau's General Will to Jesse Jackson's We The People, the Nation has been draining loyalty and au- thority away from lesser intermediate and independent institutions. The little pla- toons have not had much of a look-in. De-nationalising as many decisions, cor- porations and contractual arrangements as possible may help to restore the human scale and to pluralise loyalties again.

Even in the Communist world and the Third World there are the beginnings of a recognition that high-intensity nationalism may be both inefficient and unstable and that independent institutions and private enterprise may help to anchor a country. And these intimations are not unconnected with the new international civilities of both the Soviet and the Chinese leadership.

The question which O'Brien poses — is 'holy nationalism' essential to 'organised society'? — might more aptly be asked of organised religion. There does seem to be a real dilemma here, one which can be glimpsed even in the history of the word 'religion'. All the earliest meanings re- corded in the OED involve social obliga- tion. The etymology is dubious, but most authors derive it from religare, to bind again. These early definitions — 'the bonds of monastic vows', 'a particular religious order or religious house' — come centuries before 'belief in some higher power' or 'devotion to some principle of conscien- tiousness'. Subsequent history of the Re- formed Church — which itself also came to be known as 'the religion' — does suggest the question whether unorganised religion can survive for very long without some kind of social anchor. Can private commit- ment replace collective discipline? And how long can true religion avoid being watered down in a de-tribalised secular society in which toleration is the governing principle?

This fear is common to both sets of zealots in Northern Ireland. The con- tinuance of the tribal conflict there is a sign of religious vigour as well as of irreconcil- able national allegiances. Something simi- lar may be discerned in the zealotry of orthodox Jews in Israel, who fear modern materialism as much as they fear the Arabs. Is Dr O'Brien really saying that without the orthodox rabbis Israel would fall apart? I wonder how Israel managed to get itself founded in the first place, with the majority of orthodox rabbis indifferent or even hostile to this risky and improbable project.

I find O'Brien's glum tone a little too glibly deployed. The proportionate under- standing of loyalty — the idea that patriot- ism should not be the be-all and end-all of life — is not new or desperately hard to grasp. It is the standard teaching of West- ern religion, law and philosophy since the year dot. Too much cavil, not enough Nurse Cavell.