Fighting for a Decolonial Feminist Europe

By Françoise Vergès

March 18, 2024
Source: Green European Journal

Françoise Vergès | Image credit: 9th International Degrowth Conference



From the idea of blood purity to the “Great Replacement” conspiracy, from colonial slavery to the risk of a new green colonialism, Europe’s prosperity is built on segregation and exploitation. Françoise Vergès, a decolonial feminist active in the environmental struggle, argues that the collective fight for liberation can only succeed if it confronts all forms of dispossession.

Green European Journal: You are amongst other things a political scientist and historian. Could you say a bit more about who you are and what you work on?

Françoise Vergès: I’m based in Paris but I come from Réunion island, a small island in the Indian Ocean, which was a French colony and is still under French rule. I now write books and essays on feminism, the aftermath of slavery, the question of colonialism, and the question of environmentalism. I also curate and work with young artists of colour in Europe and elsewhere.

In your work you talk about decolonial feminism – tell us more about what this means.

It started with a very simple question: who cleans the world? For any society – anywhere in the world – to function, it needs to be cleaned. Banks, schools, restaurants, they all need to be cleaned and it is very likely that the people doing the cleaning will be Black women, women of colour, or racialised poor women. This work is today totally made invisible, underpaid, and exploitative. If we start from these women and their struggle, we can begin to imagine a decolonial feminism.

White bourgeois feminism has never really looked at these issues; it considers housework as alienating and boring, which it is, and so has not looked at the work these women are doing. So let’s start from cleaning and see how it has been organised historically, why it was assigned to women of colour, and what it means. From here, we can work towards a decolonial feminism which would be radically anti-racist, anti-capitalist, and anti-imperialist. It’s not just about equality and certainly not just about equality with men, because men are also dispossessed and exploited. Decolonial feminism is against all regimes and structures of dispossession and exploitation.


Decolonial feminism is against all regimes and structures of dispossession and exploitation.

So it goes beyond pulling some women up so they can enjoy the same opportunities as the most successful men in business and politics?

A woman who becomes a CEO can do so by relying on the same exploitation. Behind a successful female CEO, there lies the invisible work of women taking care of her kids, cleaning and doing the housework, and stitching her clothes. That kind of equality is not the objective of decolonial feminism. The objective is to dismantle the system of oppression, domination, and exploitation.

What you are talking about is systemic and structural. Yet the very idea of structural racism is controversial in public debate, even in the United States with its history of slavery and in Europe with its history of colonialism. Why do so many people deny the idea of structural racism?

The idea that racism is a matter of bad people or poor education is an idea that serves to protect the West from looking at the way in which it arrived at the “good life”. The reason that life in Europe is much better than anywhere else is because of racism, and, by racism, I mean how exploitation and domination through slavery and colonisation were justified.

To this day, so many things that arrive on the table in Europe, that make for the good life, are taken, extracted, from the Global South. Once you look at the way that Europe has constructed itself on exploitation and domination, it becomes clear that racism is not just a matter of bad people but is something that is structural and associated with how you live.


To this day, so many things that arrive on the table in Europe, that make for the good life, are taken, extracted, from the Global South.

You must confront what made Europe. Why is Europe wealthy? Why is the United States so wealthy? It is not because of some incredible talent. No, we are not talking about exceptionalism. We are talking about domination and exploitation.

Some people in Europe argue that the idea of structural racism is not relevant for Europe. They argue that it is a debate imported from the United States. Are there differences? Or is it the same? Are we talking about whiteness?

Of course, a major difference between Europe and America was that those enslaved by European powers were in their colonies in the Caribbean, the Indian Ocean, and North and South America, while in the United States, slavery was there, and Africans were among the first Americans. The genocide of the Native American peoples marks another difference with Europe: it was done on American soil.

However, that is not to say that the question of racism applies any less to Europe and its history. Europe saw processes of racialisation well before colonisation, against Jewish people and Roma people for example. I’m not talking about Europe as in people living in Europe, but when you talk about the idea of Europe, it is based on a common identity with two elements: whiteness and Christianity. This common identity can be seen reflected in historical documents such as the Treaty of Utrecht from the early 18th century and it has nothing to do with the United States. Historians have shown that the very idea of blood purity came from Spain, whose monarchs expelled the Jewish and Muslim population in 1498. We need to recognise this, and then understand those racial structures that were born in Europe and then exported elsewhere.

In his Discourse on Colonialism, Aimé Césaire explains and shows how even the worst crimes of fascism and Nazism in Europe had already been perpetrated elsewhere in the world by white Europeans. Remember that the contemporary idea of the “Great Replacement” [the theory that the ethnic white European populations at large are being demographically and culturally replaced with non-white peoples] that provided the ideological basis for massacres in New Zealand and the United States, is from France. Its inventor Renaud Camus is a French man. Europe is still providing racist ideologies to the world and European countries and the European Union support some of the most murderous anti-migrant policies in the world.

A supporter of the EU and today’s Europe might say, yes, Europe has this past, but the European project today represents human rights, democracy, and the rule of law. Can that humanist Europe extricate itself from the civilisational Europe or will it always be tied up?

There are people in Europe who are fighting against structural racism, helping refugees, and opposing racist laws and Islamophobia. We must distinguish between the people in Europe – the activists, writers, journalists, and underground associations – and today’s political and institutional structures.


The idea of Europe as it has been conceived and set up needs to be deconstructed.

The idea of Europe as it has been conceived and set up needs to be deconstructed. Any new Europe must be based on listening to the people excluded from today’s Europe. After all, all the progressive laws in Europe, even its ideas of equality and liberty, are only there because people fought for them.

The environmental movement is one of the important social movements in Europe, not the only one by any means but one of the most vibrant. How does decolonial feminism connect with the environmental crisis that the world and everyone living in it is going through?

Decolonial environmentalism is today one of the most important struggles, as long as it always connects with the question of race, class, and gender and how people are and will be impacted differently.

There is a risk that we see the emergence of a form of environmentalism constructed in Europe that will be both greenwashing and that will also ignore the role of European colonialism in the destruction of other parts of the world in ways that are only emerging clearly today. Because understanding the impact of what regimes of extraction and dispossession do on the environment can take centuries. Historians today are for example uncovering the link between desertification and sugar and coffee plantations.

Be careful about greenwashing. Be careful about corporate-washing. Because recycling, while important, cannot solve everything while capitalism produces more waste than can ever be recycled. Decolonial environmentalism should not only be about the Global South but also about Europe. The Global South must do its part, but it is not Europe’s place to say how or what that is. Meanwhile, Europe has a lot of work to do to break with its imperial mode of living and oppose the megaprojects in France, in Germany, in Serbia, that will only accentuate devastation.

You are involved with Earth Uprising, the struggle based in France against the construction of mégabassines, these huge industrial reservoirs described as “water grabbing” that have led to large-scale protests. Why did you get involved?

Earth Uprising is a vast platform. The French government thinks that it is an organisation, but it is much more. This vast platform connects people who have been organising against agribusiness for 40 years with more urban, younger people who can see the damage that megaprojects are doing and oppose more and more motorways and reservoirs. They’re fighting against mégabassines, these huge open reservoirs for water, and are also opposed to industrial cattle farms.

I became involved because I am from Réunion, which was a French slave colony. I saw how our geography had been shaped by colonialism and slavery. Our roads run the way they run because they connected the sugarcane plantations to the port. The ownership of the land was shaped by the same questions. Some people have huge gardens and beautiful homes, and other poor people are parked where the government put them. Living in different places, I always questioned the environment and patterns of what we would now call environmental racism. Cities are segregated in terms of trash collection and exposure to pollution, and this can be mapped out. The environment in the larger sense is organised by class, gender, and race, and the territorial struggles of Earth Uprising are about this.

Are you an eco-feminist?

I wouldn’t say that I am an eco-feminist. I mean, there are many eco-feminisms but for me the most important thing is to make sure that feminism is about the liberation of all. Paraphrasing Black feminism, the essence of decolonial feminism is that only when the most oppressed and most exploited woman is free will all women be free.

Rather than eco-feminism or any other kind of feminism, we need to remember that the name does not matter. What’s important is what you are doing, how you are doing it, and with whom.

What is the most important lesson of decolonial feminism?

Colonial slavery lasted four centuries, between the 15th and 19th century. In all those years, there was not a day when the enslaved did not resist and fight back. The first insurrections and rebellions were usually terribly crushed, but the enslaved never gave up. It was a day by day, by day, by day struggle. This is how progress is won. Constant fighting back.

Of course, it’s going to be difficult. Of course, we have enemies. We have seen how the oil industry and the tobacco industry lie. We have seen how they use their billions to lobby and buy people. And we have seen the devastation that they inflict on people and places before they leave. They make their profit and leave behind a wasted land. But we do not have their dream of escaping to Mars. All we have is the earth.

As an indigenous artist told me, we have no choice but to fight back and appropriate that land. Don’t do that by yourself. Whether you’re an artist, a student, a journalist, the struggle must be collective. Then take the situation you are in and ask, okay, what can we do? From there, we multiply the places of action, and fight.
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Françoise Vergès is a decolonial feminist active in the environmental struggle. She is from Réunion island, a small island in the Indian Ocean, which was a French colony and is still under French rule.

Pessimism of the Intellect, Pessimism of the Will

 

BY SCOTT REMER

 MARCH 15, 2024
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Image by Ehimetalor Akhere Unuabona.

On November 14, 2019, Tim Wu, an NYU professor with a reputation for outspoken liberalism, delivered a talk on “The Curse of Bigness: Antitrust in the New Gilded Age.” Wu was accompanied by antitrust crusader Zephyr Teachout, attesting to his liberal bona fides. He gave a serviceable account of American history: the First Gilded Age’s capitalist excesses, Progressive Era reformers’ struggle to rein in the robber barons, the New Deal and the construction of the regulatory state, the postwar glory days of antitrust legislation, the Great Society and the high-water mark of American liberalism, and then the long march of deregulation and laissez-faire orthodoxy which culminated in the 2008 disaster. Then, he discussed the need for progressives to reinstate Progressive Era controls on monopolies to, Sisyphus-like, roll the rock of regulation back up the hill of capitalist resistance to regulations that would harm their profit margins.

It all sounded innocuous enough, but I had some doubts. I raised my hand and said, “The conservatives have undone most of the Progressives and New Dealers’ successes. Suppose we have a second Progressive Era and a second New Deal. What’s to stop them from doing the same thing? In 2060, will our children be having another discussion like this one about how to reverse the Third Gilded Age? Is slapping a regulatory Band-Aid on capitalism genuinely the best we can hope for?” Wu shrugged, smiled wryly, said something to the effect of “Yes, I think so,” and moved on to the next question.

Wu served as Joe Biden’s National Economic Council as a Special Assistant to the President for Technology and Competition Policy from 2021 to 2023. Liberals initially cheered the Biden administration on, hailing its surprising taste for Keynesian stimulus and asking breathlessly if Biden would become a second FDR. Such a line of thinking demonstrated a clear blind spot, an odd memory-holing of the recent past. Obama, Biden’s former boss, was also welcomed as FDR’s second coming. Newsweek ran an 2009 article which went further than that, declaring that “We Are All Socialists Now.” Based on their appraisals of what was politically feasible, Larry Summers and other White House economic advisers presented stimulus options between $650 and $900 billion, despite Obama economist Christina Romer’s estimate at the time that $1.8 trillion was necessary. Obama’s resultant failure to pass a large enough stimulus—and his unwarranted obsession with deficit reduction—doomed us to a lost decade and a half and set the stage for the rise of Trumpism. As Biden’s “disappearing welfare state” and the continued concentration of our economic life in the hands of oligarchs of Bezos, Musk, and Zuckerberg has demonstrated, contemporary liberals like Wu and neoliberals like Biden still suffer a poverty of political imagination. They lack the appetite to pursue permanent, long-term fixes to the corporate chokehold which plagues American life.

One might attribute this to the power of capitalist ideology and leave it at that. But I think the full answer is more interesting. As Wu suggested when he compared today’s grotesquely unequal, monopoly-ridden society to the First Gilded Age, revisiting politics at the turn of the 20^th century can help us make sense of politics in the 21^st. It isn’t a coincidence, I suspect, progressives like Wu admire the Progressives of the 1910s and 1920s and question the feasibility of genuine economic democracy today. Reexamining the Progressive Era will help us understand exactly where the American left went wrong and what we can do today—at least in the realm of ideas—to get things right.

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In 2011, Barack Obama explicitly drew inspiration from Teddy Roosevelt’s New Nationalism speech by traveling to Osawatomie, Kansas, to deliver a speech on the fate of the middle class. It’s understandable that Elizabeth Warren, Tim Wu, Barack Obama, and other self-styled progressives look to the original Progressives for inspiration. They accomplished a great deal: they laid the foundations for the New Deal, began to tame the great corporations, and passed a raft of laws regulating labor and rooting out corruption. And there is much to admire in the Progressives’ fiery denunciations of corporate power, especially in an era where—with the notable exception of Bernie Sanders—our politicians have accustomed us to rhetorical timidity. In the New Nationalism speech to which Obama alluded, Roosevelt declared that “our government, National and State, must be freed from the sinister influence or control of special interests…now the great special business interests too often control and corrupt the men and methods of government for their own profit. We must drive the special interests out of politics.” Even a much more conservative Progressive like Woodrow Wilson called it “absolutely intolerable” that the federal government was “under the control of heads of great allied corporations with special interests.”

Unlike Wilson and Teddy Roosevelt, most Progressives weren’t politicians. Many of them were reformers, political and community activists. Some of them, like Jane Addams, dedicated themselves to the “settlement house” movement which provided cultural and economic uplift in immigrant communities. Others worked on promoting food, factory, and drug safety regulations, abolishing tenements and unsafe housing, and putting an end to child labor. As author Joshua Zeitz writes, “The typical progressive reformer was young, college-educated, and middle-class. Reformers tended to value scientific studies and the recommendations of professional ‘experts’ whether they were promoting efficiencies in society or fighting corruption in politics.”

Nothing’s inherently wrong with coming from a middle-class background, of course. Many prominent leftists and revolutionaries throughout history—Leon Trotsky, Eugene Debs, and Karl Marx, to name just a few—have. But members of the upper middle and professional classes tend to universalize their points of view. They often act as if they are bias-free arbiters of objective truth instead of bearers of subjective, class-conditioned, education-dependent perspectives.

Reflecting this rationalist bourgeois naïveté, many Progressive reformers behaved as if they were unimpeachably civic-minded. They tended to presume that the new sciences of sociology, psychology, political science, and epidemiology were pure sources of truth, generally uncontaminated by prejudice, racism, or economic incentives. They often succumbed to the savior syndrome, viewing the immigrants and workers whose interests they purported to represent as less than fully developed citizens who were dangerously susceptible to European doctrines like socialism, anarchism, and communism, in need of American teachers to instruct them in the etiquette and practice of democracy (this despite socialism’s deep American roots). Progressives were proud Americans, believers in American exceptionalism. The fact that Teddy Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson, both ardent imperialists, were also progressives is instructive.

Many Progressives dismissed socialism as excessively anti-individualistic, reliant on the theory of class conflict as opposed to consensus and disinterested decision-making in the public interest. Famed Progressive Robert LaFollette gave voice to this suspicion when he proclaimed that “the Progressive Movement is the only political medium in our country today which can provide government in the interests of all classes of the people. We are unalterably opposed to any class government, whether it be the existing dictatorship of the plutocracy or the dictatorship of the proletariat. Both are essentially undemocratic and un-American. Both are destructive of private initiative liberty.” In the name of the “general will” and civic republicanism, the Progressives declared a ceasefire in class conflict—without consulting the working classes.

LaFollette made it seem like the Progressive movement was unified and easily defined. But as Joshua Zeitz nicely observes, “Historians have struggled for decades to characterize the progressive movement. Was it a coalition of middle-class reformers dedicated to good government? A top-down drive by politicians and businessmen to smooth out the sharper edges of industrial capitalism and blunt the appeal of socialism? The political project of urban working men and women who demanded better working and living conditions? A full assault against concentrated economic power? A case could be made for any of these interpretations.”

The fact that it’s difficult to characterize Progressivism is telling. In this, the Progressives differed greatly from the Populists, who famously vowed to “raise less corn and more hell” and whose 1892 platform railed against Wall Street and called for postal banking and the nationalization of railroads and telecommunications. Progressives were willing to combat vested interests, but only to a certain point. Their taste for disruption to the status quo was limited, attenuated by a desire to avoid strife. The ideals of technocracy and disinterested bureaucracy exerted a sirenic appeal upon the progressive imagination. Progressives found the promise of resolving social discord through social scientists’ ministrations; government adjudication between capital and labor; and bureaucrats’ expert, competent administration immensely more pleasant than the clash of class conflict, the rough-and-tumble of combative politics. They preferred to stay aloof from the conflict between capital and labor, advocating compromise because such a resolution seemed more statesmanlike.

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All this should sound familiar. It describes bien-pensant liberals of the Obama-Clinton-Biden persuasion to a tee: their aestheticization of politics, their fetishization of entrepreneurialism and expertise; their studied avoidance of polarization, partisanship, and partiality; their distaste for class conflict; their elevation of technocracy and science as beacons of reason; their belief in the pretense that politics can be reduced to interest-group bargaining and consensus seeking; their desire to keep the labor movement at a distance; their continued fealty to American exceptionalism even when looking to European models would be exceptionally edifying; and their general attitude of deference towards big business. Neoliberals’ demography—disproportionately white, upper middle class, professional, and college-educated—also parallels the original Progressives.

Obama and Biden’s desire to portray themselves as above the fray clashes with labor unions’ traditional question “Which side are you on?,” and that’s no accident. Progressives sought a third way between collectivism and individualism, hesitating to fully embrace the workers’ movement and policies administered directly through the federal government. This “third way” became a straitjacket which has constrained mainstream progressives’ imagination for many decades, well before the term “third way” was coined to describe neoliberalism in the 1970s and 1980s. Recently, it’s the reason that the Obama administration never attempted to fight for “Medicare for all” or nationalize the banks, it’s the reason Obama reneged on his promise to pass card check legislation which would have strengthened labor unions immensely, and it’s the reason that Joe Biden resisted Medicare for all and had to be cajoled into countenancing even very incomplete student debt relief.

The love of triangulation—the original Progressives’ vestigial attraction for unfettered capitalism and individualism and their wariness of forthrightly socialist economic policy—also helps explain why liberal economic policy has long been so confusingly inconsistent vis-à-vis monopoly and oligopoly. Two major approaches to monopoly predominated among the Progressives: one camp advocated strict regulation but no limits on size, while the other advocated “breaking them up” and then championing free-market competition.

As the famous Progressive Louis Brandeis described it, “Those who advocate ‘regulation of monopoly’ insist that private monopoly may be desirable in some branches of industry, or is, at all events, inevitable; and that existing trusts should not be dismembered nor forcibly dislodged from those branches of business in which they have already acquired a monopoly, but should be made ‘good’ by regulation. The advocates of this view do not fear commercial power, however great, if only methods for regulation are provided.” On the other hand, he wrote, those who sought to break up large corporations “believe[d] that no methods of regulation ever have been or can be devised to remove the menace inherent in private monopoly and overweening financial power” but wanted the government to simply restore the initial conditions of markets before monopolies began forming. This tension persists to the present day. It played out in both the 2016 and 2020 presidential elections, with Bernie Sanders largely playing the role of break-them-up progressive and Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden playing the role of (not particularly credible) advocates of subjecting Big Business to stringent regulation while permitting it to exist.

Both these positions are incomplete: the strict-regulation position is overly blasé about the dangers of concentrated private economic power, while the break-them-up camp romanticizes market competition and individualism. The break-them-up Progressives did have a better appreciation of the possibilities of public ownership, though. As Brandeis notes, they believed that “if, at any future time, monopoly should appear to be desirable in any branch of industry, the monopoly should be a public one—a monopoly owned by the people, and not by the capitalists.”

But it is there—in their refusal to forthrightly champion the socialization of key industries—that we see the Progressives’ squeamishness about following their analysis through to its logical conclusion. We will never be safe from capitalist assaults on our economic security and democracy as long as capitalism exists. This requires us to strive to end capitalism altogether; liberalism leads logically to socialism. The famed liberal philosopher John Dewey acknowledged this when he wrote in 1935 in Liberalism and Social Action, “If radicalism be defined as perception of need for radical change, then today any liberalism which is not also radicalism is irrelevant and doomed.” Reinhold Niebuhr, Obama’s favorite theologian, agreed and wrote in Moral Man and Immoral Society that, in human societies, “conflict is inevitable, and in this conflict power must be challenged by power.” But the unwillingness to admit this truth, which both Niebuhr and Dewey readily accepted, manifests in liberal political analyses like Tim Wu’s to this day.

We are only condemned to Wu’s Sisyphean vision of history as an unending cycle of reform, regulation, reaction, and deregulation if we accept capitalist domination as an essentially unchangeable feature of American life. Contemporary liberals’ choice to hearken back to the original Progressives imprisons them in this traditional center-left acquiescence to the status quo. Yet even during the Gilded Age and Progressive Era, millions of Americans, Populists, trade unionists, and socialists alike, recognized that this was a false choice and that there was an alternative: taking control of the economy and running it for the people, not for profit. Many years ago, the great Progressive Louis Brandeis said, in words which ring equally true today, “We must make our choice. We may have democracy, or we may have wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, but we can’t have both.” Whether our democracy survives our Second Gilded Age may well depend on whether the center-left recognizes this fundamental truth.

Scott Remer has published in venues such as In These Times, Africa Is a Country, Common Dreams, OpenDemocracy, Philosophy Now, Philosophical Salon, and International Affairs.

The Monotheistic Roots of Nationalism 

Part I 

What Is The Relationship Between Nationalism and Religion? 

by Bruce Lerro / March 12th, 2024

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Do religion and nationalism compete with each other? Do they replace each other? Do they amplify each other and drive each other forward? Do they exist in symbiosis? Theorists of nationalism have struggled with this question. At one extreme of the spectrum is the early work of Elie Kedourie (1960), who argued that nationalism is a modern, secular ideology that replaces religious systems. According to Kedourie, nationalism is a new doctrine of political change first argued for by Immanuel Kant and carried out by German Romantics at the beginning of the 19th century. In this early work, nationalism was the spiritual child of the Enlightenment, and by this I mean that nationalism and religion are conceived of as opposites. While religion supports hierarchy, otherworldliness, and divine control, nationalism, according to Kedourie, emphasizes more horizontal relationships, worldliness, and human self-emancipation. Where religion supports superstition, nationalism supports reason. Where religion thrives among the ignorant, nationalism supports education. For Enlightenment notions of nationalism, nationalism draws no sustenance from religion at all.

Modern theorists of nationalism such as Eric Hobsbawm and John Breuilly (1993), share much of this position. For these scholars, secular institutions and concepts such as the state or social classes occupy center stage, while ethnicity and religious tradition are accorded secondary status. For Liah Greenfeld (1992), religion served as a lubricator of English national consciousness until national consciousness replaced it.

Conor Cruise O’Brien (1999), Adrian Hastings (1997), and George Mosse (1975) have added sacred texts, prophets, and priests to the list of commonalities between nationalism and religion. Benedict Anderson (Imagined Communities) argues that just as sacrifice is important to religion, the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier is the equivalent translation for the nation. Just as religion has its rituals of religious conversion, nations have citizenship rites in which immigrants sing a national anthem rather than religious hymns. Just as members of a religious community are encouraged to love the stranger, members of a nation will never know, meet, or even hear about most of their fellow members.

Anthony Smith (1998) argues that nationalism used and secularized the myths, liturgies, and doctrines of sacred traditions and was able to command the identities of individualists not only over ethnic, regional, and class loyalties, but even over religion itself. What Smith wants to do is conceive of the nation as a sacred communion, one that focuses on the cultural resources of ethnic symbolism, memory, myth, values, and their expression in texts, artifacts, scriptures, chronicles, epics, music, architecture, painting, sculpture, and crafts. Smith’s greatest source of inspiration was George Mosse (1975), who discussed civic religion of the masses in Germany.

My article will help us understand not only which social institutions command people’s loyalty, but how they accomplished this. It is not enough for states to promise to intervene in disputes and coordinate the distribution and production of goods, although this is important. Individualists must also bond emotionally with each other through symbols, songs, initiations, and rituals in support of nationalism. In this effort, the state does not have to reinvent the wheel. There was one social institution which, prior to the emergence of absolutist states, was also trans-local and trans-regional. Interestingly, this institution also required its members to give up their kin, ethnic identity, and regional identity in order to become full members. That institution was religion.

Civic Religion In The French Revolution

During the great calling of the Estates-General in 1789, Abbé Sieyès contended that the rights of the nation had been usurped by the nobility. He wanted a “nation-state” to end the aristocratic rule of regional privileges, along with intermediate institutions and corporate bodies that came between the individual and the state. By 1793 the revolution swept away regional bodies, resulting in a centralized regime with no parallel in the history of Western Europe.

Understood from a secular view, the state was seen as a sole and absolute sovereign, directing and advancing the process of secularization by limiting ecclesiastical power. Religion was totally subordinate to the state. A new national community was to be based on reason and nature without reference to the customs of the past. It did not appeal to ethnic or linguistic commonalities, but to a centralized education. The nation was envisaged politically as calling for unity as well as liberty and equality. The idea of democracy was strong, coming from the working classes. These classes wanted to push for popular sovereignty, not national representation.

On the surface, French nationalism was secular, political, scientific, and anti-clerical. The beheading of the king during the French Revolution deprived France of its divine protector. This left an increasingly autonomous sphere for humanity to construct an earthlier protector: the nation-state. Reinforced by the horrors of religious wars, patriotism was seen as a counter to religious strife and appealed to an increasing number of people, both educated and uneducated. Patriotism was the sacred communion of the people in arms. If the nation simply replaced religion with a more enlightened view, there would be no need for religion’s rituals and techniques. But this was not what happened.

If we examine the process of how the state commands loyalty, we find the state uses many of the same devices as religion. After the revolution in France, the calendar was changed to undermine the Catholic church. The state tried to regulate and dramatize the key events in the life of individual—birth, baptism, marriage and death. French revolutionaries invented the symbols that formed the tricolor flags and invented a national anthem, La Marseillaise. The paintings of Delacroix and Vermeer supported the revolution. The Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen became a new belief system, a kind of national catechism. By 1791 the French constitution had become a promise of faith. The tablets of the Declaration of Rights were carried around in procession as if they were commandments. Another symbol was the patriotic altar that was erected spontaneously in many villages and communes. Civic festivities included resistance to the king in the form of the famous “Tennis Court Oath,” (Serment du Jeu de Paume) along with revolutionary theater. The revolution, through its clubs, festivals, and newspapers, was indirectly responsible for the spread of a national language. Abstract concepts such as fatherland, reason, and liberty became deified and worshipped as goddesses. All the paraphernalia of the new religion appeared: dogmas, festivals, rituals, mythology, saints, and shrines. Nationalism has become the secular religion of the modern world, where the nation is now God.

In his book, Nationalism: a Religion (1960), Carlton Hayes says that:

Nationalism, like any religion, calls into play not simply the will of the intellect, but the imagination, the emotions. The intellect constructs a speculative theology or mythology of nationalism. The imagination builds an unseen world around the eternal past and the everlasting future of one’s nationality. The emotions arouse a joy and an ecstasy in the contemplation of the national god who is all good and all protecting. (pages 143–144)

For Hayes, nationalism is large-scale tribalism. Modern national identity appears in Western Europe at a time when all intermediate bonds of society were collapsing due to the industrial revolution and religion was losing its grip on its populations. What occurs is a reorganizing of religious elements to create a social emulsifier that pulverizes what is left of intermediate organization while creating a false unity. This unity papers over the economic instabilities of capitalism as well as the class and race conflicts that it ushers in.

How Monotheism Differs From Animism and Polytheism

Anthony Smith is not simply saying that religion itself is the foundation of nationalism. He claims that the monotheism of Jews and Christians forms a bedrock for European nationalism. However, Smith does not account for why animistic and polytheistic religious traditions are not instrumental in producing nationalism. What are the sacred differences between magical traditions of tribal people and monotheists—the high magical traditions of the Egyptians, Mesopotamians, Aztecs, and Incas on one side, and Jews and Christians on the other? We need to understand these religious differences so we can make a tighter connection between monotheism and nationalism.

The five parts to a monotheistic covenant vs polytheism and animism

The following discussion draws from my book, From Earth Spirits to Sky Gods, along with the work of Anthony Smith. According to Smith (2003), the foundation for the relationship between a monotheistic people and its God is a covenant. A covenant is a perceived voluntary, contractual sacred relationship between a culture and its sacred presences. This contractual relationship is one of the many differences that separates monotheism from polytheism and animism. Polytheistic and animistic cultures perceive a necessary, organic connection between themselves and the rest of the biophysical world, and this connection extends to invisible entities. The monotheistic Jews were the first people to imagine their spiritual relationships as a voluntary contract.

The first part of a covenant agreement is that God has chosen a group of people over all other groups for a particular purpose. This implies that God is a teleological architect with a plan for the world and simply needs executioners. Polytheistic and animistic people imagine their sacred presence as a plurality of powers that cooperate, compete, and negotiate a cosmic outcome having some combination of rhythm and novelty rather than a guiding plan. Like Jews and Christians, pagan people saw themselves as superior to other cultures (ethnocentrism), but this is not usually connected up to any sense of them having been elected for a particular purpose by those sacred presences.

Still another side of this contract is that people have to consent to join in the agreement. There has to be choice. This choice implies that the elected culture could get along well enough even if they refused God’s offer. For polytheistic and animistic people, spiritual presences are the life blood of their communities. There are no debates, negotiations, qualifications, or haggling with sacred presences as to whether or what kind of a relationship will exist. There relations are already and always the case.

The second part of a covenant is the announcement of a promise of prosperity and power for the chosen people as part of the bargain if they behave themselves. In polytheistic and animistic societies, the gods make no promises. Some people are born into ecological settings that are bountiful while others are born into austere conditions. Why this has happened has more to do with the success or failure of magical practices than it has to do with spiritual kindness or cruelty on the part of the gods.

The third part of a covenant is the prospect of spreading good fortune to other lands. This is part of a wider missionary ideal of bringing light to other societies so that the blind can see. It is a small and natural step to affirm that the possession of might—the second part of the covenant (economic prosperity and military power)—is evidence that one is morally right. We know that the ancient Judaists sought to convert the Edomites though conquest. On the other hand, while it is certainly true that animistic and polytheistic people fight wars over land or resources, these are not religious wars waged by proselytizers.

The fourth part of a covenant is a sacred law. This is given to people in the form of commandments about how to live, implying that the natural way people live needs improvement. In polytheistic societies, how people act was not subject to any sort of a plan for great reform on the part of the deity. In polytheistic states, the gods and goddesses engaged in the same behavior as human beings, but on a larger scale. There was no obedience expected based on a sacred text.

The fifth part of a covenant is the importance of human history. Whatever privileges the chosen people have received from God can be revoked if they fail to fulfill their part of the bargain. The arena in which “tests” take place is human history, in the chosen people’s relationship with other groups. For the animistic and polytheistic, cultural history is enmeshed with the evolutionary movement of the rocks, rivers, mountains, plants, and animals. There is no separate human history. Please see Table 1 which  summarizes these differences.

Animistic and polytheism rituals vs monotheistic ceremonies

Lastly, in polytheistic societies, sacred dramas enacted in magical circles and temples were rituals. This means they were understood as not just symbolic, representational gestures of a reality that people wished to see in the future. Rather, they were dramatic actions believed to be real embodiments of that reality in the present. In the elite phase of monotheism, rituals were looked upon with suspicion because people became superstitiously attached to the ritual and thought their rituals could compel God to act. In From Earth Spirits to Sky Gods, I coined the word ceremony to describe sacred dramas that were more passive and less likely to create altered states of consciousness, intended to show deference and worship to a deity who was not subject to magical incantations. In contrast, a religious ceremony, at least among middle and upper-middle class, is more passive. The priest or pastor does most of the work while the congregation supports what the priest or pastor is doing.

Table 1 Monotheism vs Animism and Polytheism

Judeo-Christian Monotheism	Type of Sacred System	Animism, polytheism
Contract between two free parties (covenant)	Type of connection between a culture and sacred powers	Organic bond between two interdependent powers
A culture is chosen. Ethnocentrism with a spiritual justification.	Is a culture “elected?”	Ethnocentrism without any spiritual justification
Yes. Promise and deliverance of land, prosperity, and power	Is there a promise of abundance?	No. What abundance exists comes from magical rituals upon ecological settings
Missionary ideal to bring light to others (religious wars and proselytizers)	Expansion or provincial?	Fight wars and expand for land or sexual and material resources, but they do not fight over spiritual beliefs.
Obedience to a law, typically written texts, for purposes of reforming humanity	Expectations of humanity	Altered states using imagination and the senses, transmitted orally with no purpose for reforming humanity
Holy and all good —qualitatively different from humanity	Qualities of sacred beings	Gods and goddesses are the same as humanity, except on a larger scale
Human history is important as the arena in which people will be blessed or punished	Place of history	Human history is less important. More important is an extension of the ecological relationship with plants and animals
Ceremony—symbolic, representational gestures that show deference	Dramatization	Ritual—real attempts to compel the spirits

Common Elements Found In Monotheism And Nationalism

Elite monotheism vs. popular monotheism  

Just as we saw in my previous article Nationalism as the Religion of Modernity that there was elite nationalism and mass nationalism, there was also an  elite monotheism and popular monotheism. In the early Iron Age, (1000 BCE to 200 CE) elite monotheism was an intellectual reaction of the prophets and upper classes to what they perceived as the degenerate superstition of polytheism and animism among their fellow Jews as well as of the agricultural states of West and East Asia. These qualities included a close identification of people with animals and plants, particularly through the use of the arts—music, dance, mask making—to create altered states of consciousness using imagination, sensory saturation, and trance states.

In some cultures, this pagan magic was used by state officials, such as priests and priestesses such as the Canaanites and the Babylonians. The first monotheists were reformers and outsiders to pagan magic. In societies where monotheism acquired state power, as when Christianity became the state religion of the Roman Empire, Christianity had to appeal to the lower classes. It had to bring back some of the magical ways that it had first rejected. To overcome the huge gap between the transcendental power of a God who had no human qualities and human beings, intermediaries such as saints, the Virgin Mary, and angels were brought in. Something similar also occurred in India when the Buddhism of the merchants acquired more influence among the lower classes.

Loyalty to one God; loyalty to one nation requires pulverizing intermediaries

All sacred systems have to answer the question of whether the sacred source of all they know is singular or plural. Monotheistic religions break with the pluralistic polytheism and animism in pagan societies and assert that there is one God. It is not a matter of having a single God who subordinates other gods. This is not good enough. The very existence of other gods is intolerable. Any conflicting loyalties are viewed as pagan idolatry.

Just as monotheism insists on loyalty to one God, so nationalism insists on loyalty to one nation. Claiming national citizenship in more than one country is looked upon with suspicion. Additionally, within the nation, loyalty to the nation-state must come before other collective identities such as class, ethnic, kinship, or regional groupings. To be charged with disloyalty to the nation is a far more serious offence than disloyalty to things such as a working-class heritage, an Italian background, or having come from the East Coast. In the case of both monotheism and nationalism, intermediaries between the individual and the centralized authorities must be destroyed or marginalized. 

Loyalty to strangers in the brotherhood of man; loyalty to strangers as fellow citizens

The earth-spirits, totems, and gods of polytheistic cultures are sensuous and earthy. In tribal societies, they are part of a network among kin groups in which everyone knows everyone else. The monotheistic God is, on the contrary, abstract, and the community He supervises is an expansive non-kin group of strangers. Just as monotheism insists that people give up their ties to local kin groups and their regional loyalties, so the nation-state insists that people imagine that their loyalty should be to strangers, most of whom they will never meet. The universal brotherhood of man in religion becomes the loyalty of citizens to other citizens within the state. In monotheism, the only way an individual can be free is to belong to a religion (pagans or atheists are barely tolerated). In the case of a nation-state, to be free the individual must belong to a nation. One cannot tolerate individuals with no national loyalty.

Many inventions and historical institutions facilitate one’s identifying with a nation. The invention of the printing press and the birth of reading and writing helped build relationships among strangers beyond the village. Newspapers and journals gave people a more abstract sense of national news, and they were able to receive this news on a regular basis. The invention of the railroad, electricity, and the telegraph expanded and concentrated transportation and communication.

The problem for nationalists is that all these inventions can also be used to cross borders and create competing loyalties outside the nation-state. Increasing overseas trade brought in goods from foreign lands and built invisible, unconscious relations with outside producers. In the 19th century, another connection between strangers began with the international division of labor between workers of a colonial power and workers exploited on the periphery.

Religious contract of equality before God; constitutional contract of equal citizenship

 In polytheistic high magical societies, it was only the upper classes who were thought to have a religious afterlife. If a slave were to have an afterlife at all, it was to be as a servant to the elite. Monotheism democratized the afterlife, claiming that every individual, as part of God’s covenant agreement, had to be judged before God equally. So too, nationalism in the 18th century imagined national life as a social contract among free citizens, all of whom were equal in the eyes of the law and the courts of the nation. In the 19th and 20th centuries, popular nationalism included the right to vote in elections.

Monotheistic and nationalist history as mythology 

According to Anthony Smith, the history that religions construct is not the same as what the professional historians aspire to do. For example, historians ask open-ended questions for which they do not have answers. They accept the unknown as part of the discipline and accept that an unknown question may never be answered. In contrast, accounts of religious history are not welcoming to open-ended questions. Rather, they ask rhetorical questions for which they have predictable answers. Those believers or non-believers who ask open-ended questions are taught that the question is a mystery that will only be revealed through some mystical experience or in the afterlife. Further insistence in asking open-ended questions is viewed as blasphemy or a sign of heresy.

So too, nationalist renditions of history most often share a mythological conception of history as well. The history books of any nation generally try to paper over actual struggle between classes, enslavement, colonization, and torture that litters its history. Members of a culture that have built nationalist histories like to present themselves as being in complete agreement about the where and when of their myths. But, in fact, myths compete with each other and are often stimulated by class differences within the nation. Smith (2003) gives the following examples:

• The Celtic pagan vs. Christian antiquity in Ireland
• The Gallic vs. Frankish origins and culture in France
• The Anglo-Saxon vs. Norman origins of Arthurian cultures in England
• The Classical Hellenic vs. Byzantine origins in Greece
• The Islamic-Ottoman vs. Turkic origins in Turkey
• The Davidic-Solomonic vs. Rabbinic Talmudic traditions of the Golden Age of Israel

Nationalist history is sanitized, polished, and presented as the deeds of noble heroes. This mythology is intensified by the way the founders of religion and the nation are treated. It is rare that Moses, Christ, or Mohammad, in addition to their good qualities, are treated as flesh and blood individuals with weaknesses, pettiness, and oversights. So too, in the United States, George Washington and Thomas Jefferson are treated like Moses or Christ, having charismatic powers (Zelinsky, 1998). Just as religion attacks open-ended, critical questions of heresy, so nationalists tar and feather citizens as unpatriotic when they question national stories and try to present a revisionist history.

Written records and artifacts comprise the building materials for historians. Myths are often treated as untrustworthy and are interpreted sociologically or psychologically for their “real meaning”. Historians might say that myths tend to oversimplify, exaggerate, and act as comforting devices rather than describe events that actually occurred. Collective memories are treated by historians as untrustworthy because, just as individuals have selective memory, so can whole cultures. However, for both monotheism and nationalist histories, the search for records and artifacts tends to be used to support the memories and myths that cultures already believe.

Further, what makes nationalist histories and monotheism different from the work of professional historians is the direction of history. All national histories have a cyclical shape. They begin with a golden age and are followed by a period of disaster or degradation and, after much struggle, a period of redemption. First, there is a selection of a communal age that is deemed to be heroic or creative. There is praise for famous kings, warriors, holy men, revolutionaries, or poets. Second, there is a fall from grace, whether it be a natural disaster, a fall into materialism, or external conquest. Third, there is a yearning to restore the lost communal dignity and nobility. In order to return to the golden age, they must emulate the deeds and morals of its past epoch. For Christianity, the golden age consists of the story of Adam and Eve. For the Hebrews, it is the Old Testament with Moses in the wilderness. In the United States, it is the time of pioneers, frontiersman, cowboys, and Western expansion. These are mythic archetypes that are endlessly recycled today in the names of banks, television commercials, television programs, and movies.

Contrary to both nationalism and monotheism renditions, among professional historians, whether there is a shape to human history is controversial. Some 18th and 19th century historians also saw history as having a linear time direction. The movement from beginning to end was categorized as progress. This means that things are gradually getting better for human beings as we progress through history in the areas of technology, economics, political institutions, and morals. However, after two world wars, the Great Depression, and the rise of fascism, this position has fallen into disfavor among most historians.

The Function of the golden ages 

Smith identifies four functions of the golden ages. The first is to provide a sense of continuity between the present and past. Golden ages do this either through the presentation of a cyclic mythical story or through an archaeologist’s geological discovery of a long-lost vernacular language, a sacred book, or artifact. Second, the golden age grounds nationalist culture with an identity in the flux of historical change. Third, a golden age provides a community with temporal roots, a time for beginnings and endings. Lastly, golden ages give expression and sanction to a quest for authenticity. It provides models for the nation’s true identity, stripped of cultural mixing, corruption, and decline.

Creating altered states of consciousness 

Everyday life is composed of small conflicts and problems that most often require neither a sense of adventure nor a great deal of social solidarity to resolve. But extraordinary life circumstances require both risk-taking and group support. Whether the sacred tradition is magical, religious, or nationalistic, it appeals to the big picture and requires the adventure and support that goes with it.

In tribal societies, rituals before war or harsh rites of passage induce altered states of consciousness, which are memorable because they require both courage and dependability. Popular monotheistic states of consciousness invite speaking in tongues, devotional emotional appeal, and the promise of being taken care of in exchange for obedience. In nationalistic settings such as recruiting offices, prospective soldiers are promised they will be taken care of by a strict military discipline while having great adventures in other parts of the world. Like monotheism, nationalism appeals to the petty side of humanity. Participants are told they are an elite group, superior to other nations. Once inside the military, boot camp becomes the arena in which individual will is broken. New recruits are taught to be dependent on authority and to not question things.

Altered states can be created by either sensory saturation or sensory deprivation. A great example of sensory saturation to create an altered state is the Catholic mass. Here we have the bombardment of vision (stained glass windows), sound (loud organ music), smell (strong incense), taste (the holy communion), and touch (gesturing with the sign of the cross). Sensory deprivation in a monotheistic setting includes fasting, prayer, or meditation. Sensory deprivation in nationalistic settings is at boot camp and on the battlefield of war itself.

Sensory saturation occurs in nationalistic settings at addresses by prominent politicians, such as the presidential state of the union addresses, in congressional meetings, at political rallies, and during primaries. Presidential debates and elections are actually throwbacks to rituals and ceremonies. Those diehards of electoral politics who attend these rituals are at least as taken away by the props as were participants in a tribal magical ceremony. In Yankeedom, the setting includes the Great Seal of the United States hanging above the event, along with the American flag, a solemn pledge of allegiance, a rendition of “God Bless America,” and a military parade.

Attachment vs. detachment to land

As Yi-Fu Tuan (1977) and others have pointed out, tribal societies’ sense of physical setting contains a psychic element, where rocks and rivers are not physical things separated from our psychological states, but rather they have a psychic field before we even interact with them. When we interact with them, they deepen our own memories, dreams, and emotional life. This sense of attachment was not attachment to a nation, but a kind of group loyalty to the ecological setting of trees, mountains, and rivers. Tuan refers to this as attachment to “places.”

With the rise of monotheism, and later commerce in city-states, physical nature as a psychic, sacred place is undermined by a geographical conception of “space” as being purely physical and secular. Correspondingly, outside of churches, much of Christianity saw natural geography either as a temptress—a lush and tropical jungle—or as a wasteland.

The relationship between monotheism and territorial attachment is conflicted. On the one hand, elite monotheists depreciate the importance of territorial attachment as an expression of pagans whom Christians feel are enslaved to the land. The prophets promote a kind of cosmopolitanism. Yet on the other hand, the more fundamentalist sects in popular monotheism insist on locating the actual birthplace of the religion and making it the scene of pilgrimages—Muslims go to Mecca, Christians to Bethlehem—or even a permanent occupation as with Zionist Jews in Palestine. In a way, on a more complex level, the rise of a nation’s sense of loyalty based on geography is a kind of return to pagan attachments to place.

Promised lands of the past: the Swiss Alps

 We need to make a distinction between the promised land as an ancestral homeland (the past) and the promised land as a land of destination (the future). During the late Renaissance, the Alps were becoming a source of interest for artists like Dürer, Bruegel, and da Vinci as a vortex of the great powers of nature (Tuan, 1977). Naturalist Conrad Gessner climbed Mount Pilatus in 1555 to lay to rest stories about evil spirits in the mountains, and he raved about the clarity of mountain water. But the link between the Alps and the national identity of the Swiss was made only by 18th-century Enlighteners. They championed the primitive virtue of simple Alpine rustics. A century ago, Ernest Bovet, professor at Zurich University, wrote that Swiss independence was born in the mountains:

A mysterious force has kept us together for 600 years and has given us our democratic institutions. A good spirit watches our liberty. A spirit fills our souls, directs our actions and creates a hymn on the one ideal out of our different languages. It is the spirit that blows from the summits, the genius of the Alps and glaciers. (Tuan, 1977, page 161)

In his play William Tell, Friedrich Schiller links the origins of the Swiss confederation to the purity of the Alpine landscape.

Promised lands of the past: Anglo-Saxons

For the Anglo-Saxons who had traveled across the waters to Britain, the analogy with Israel’s election was established by the time of King Alfred and his successors before the 10th century. The parallel between the Exodus of the Israelites and the journey of the Saxons across the seas from Denmark and Germany to Britain was already present, according to Anthony Smith, in Bede’s work as long ago as 730 CE.

It was the Anglican Church that, supported by the monarchy, advanced providential interpretations of Anglo-Saxon history. England was imagined, in biblical terms, an island nation under God in the manner of ancient Israel. The Germanic invasions of Britain were understood as divine punishment. The invasions of Anglo-Saxon land were compared to the assaults of the Assyrians upon the Jews.

According to Adrian Hastings (1997), the Norman Conquest did little to diminish the sense of English nationhood, except that the French language replaces Anglo-Saxon languages among the elites for almost two hundred years. It was only towards the end of the 13th century and into the 14th century that a more aggressive and widespread English national sentiment appeared in a series of wars conducted by Edward I against Wales, Scotland, and later France. Nationalism was also fueled by the rise of English literature in the age of Chaucer and the use of English in the administration and the courts.

During the 17th century, Cromwell’s New Model Army and the English Civil War against Catholic influence deepened the connection between the English people and their feeling of being chosen. In fact, men going into battle for Cromwell’s New Model Army were inspired by hymns and songs from the Old Testament. Myths of the English Protestant election was carried over into the constitutional settlement after 1689. Hans Kohn (2005) also claims that the Puritan myth of missionary election became deeply entrenched in subsequent English nationalism. Christopher Hill (1964) points out that Milton’s writings contain frequent assertion of the English having been chosen. This is carried over into colonial attitudes of cultural superiority and paternalism overseas.

Promised lands of the future: Yankeedom and the Dutch

For the Puritan settlers in America, who fled the Restoration and experienced a perilous exodus in crossing the seas, it was easy to create in their imaginations an “American Israel,” or a “New American Jerusalem.” Though conditions were difficult at first, the scale and abundance of the continent held promise for many immigrants. American Puritans’ ideal of the “City on the Hill” was originally confined to small settlements and towns. From the early 19th century on, the promised-land concept came to include expansion across the United States. As the Western frontier expanded and indigenous populations dwindled from disease or conquest, the belief in a providential and manifest destiny was extended. This is exemplified in the epic paintings of Thomas Cole, Edwin Church, Frederic Remington, Thomas Moran and Sanford Gifford that glorify the majesty of the West. Anthony Smith (2003) points out that the relationship of sublime landscape to nationalism was not unique to the United States.

Even more than the British, the Dutch returned to the Old Testament—the idea of themselves as the chosen people and the children of Israel—to build their national and colonial identity. At first the Dutch strove for their rights to their land in their struggle with Spain. But then it was used later in the story of the Dutch Afrikaners who colonized South Africa.

The Great Trek of Dutch-speaking farmers from the British-ruled Cape Colony occurred 1834–1838. The wandering of the Boers from British oppression to freedom in a promised land was interpreted as deliverance of Israelites from Egypt. The Dutch saw themselves as a later-day version of the Puritans—the prototypical Israelites, fleeing a British pharaoh. But the Dutch were also taking the land of the Zulus. In the Battle of Blood River, the badly outnumbered Boer farmers linked ox wagons in a circle and held off an army of three thousand Zulus. A few had taken a vow that if God would deliver them from their enemies, they would honor Him on that date, and so the Battle of Blood River was celebrated annually.

The covenant and the Great Trek amplified later Boer drives for purity through separation from all other peoples:

The genealogy of Ham…legitimated the servitude of non-white heathen to the Judaeo Christian children of Shem. Just as the Pentateuch and Book of Joshua had commanded the Israelites to drive out the idolatrous peoples of Canaan… their descendants believed they were destined to take the lands of heathen natives and expel or rule over them. (Smith, Chosen Peoples, page 81)

To be “the elect” was to justify land conquest.

Using the theme of the promised land as both a past and a future for the nation is powerfully described at the hundred-year anniversary commemoration of the Afrikaner Great Trek. Daniel Malan, a chief instigator in the Dutch Reformed Church, said the following in his speech:

You stand here upon the boundary of two centuries. Behind you, rest your eyes upon the year 1838 as upon a high, outstanding mountain top, dominating everything in the blue distance. Before you, upon the yet untrodden Path of South Africa, lies the year 2038, equally far off and hazy. Behind you, lie the tracks of the Voortrekker wagons, deeply and ineradicably etched upon the wide outstretched plains, and across the grinning dragon-tooth mountain ranges of our country’s history. Over those unknown regions which stretch broadly before you there will also be treks of the Ox Wagon. They will be your Ox Wagons. You and your children will make history. (Smith, 2003)

Smith concludes, from these and many other examples, that no amount of manipulation by elites of myths and biblical texts could have mobilized and transplanted such large numbers unless these myths and texts were rooted in sacred beliefs of ethnic election. He shows that these beliefs were deeply rooted in the history of everyone in the ethnic group, not just the elite. Modern theorists of the nation separate nature from the history of cultures and separate the human psyche—emotion, memory, inspiration—from the landscape, but, according to Smith, they simply cannot explain this kind of attraction to nationalism.

From mission of the chosen people to Manifest Destiny

Earlier we said that what separates monotheism from polytheism is the expansionary, missionary zeal of monotheism. This tendency was also characteristic of many nation-building projects throughout history. Both monotheism and nationalism wish to expand. There is an exclusive commitment to either one religion or one nation; yet once that exclusive commitment is made, the religion or nation sometimes advocates for expansion around the world. Table 2 below shows a summary of the commonalities between monotheism and nationalism.

Table 2  Commonalities Between Monotheism and Nationalism: Beliefs and Dramatization

Monotheism Judeo-Christian	Category of Comparison	Nationalism  (United States)
A sacred system prevalent stratified state societies with possible developing empires in which a single, abstract and transcendental deity presides over “chosen people” via a contract or covenant	Definition	A secular system which exists in capitalist societies in which a single nation claims territory regulated by a state. It is an ideological movement for the attainment and maintenance of three characteristics: autonomy, unity, and identity
Destroys gods and goddesses, ancestors, spirits, totems, and earth spirits	Destruction of intermediaries	Destroys loyalty to kin groups, regions, religion, and social class
Singular: “I am the Lord thy God, thou shalt not have strange gods before me” (Idolatry)	Sacred Source	Singular: One nation— “Thou shalt not have other nations before me”
Covenant: contract of equality of participants before God as opposed to class or status differences in access to God.	Type of binding to source	Constitutional: contract of equality as citizens as opposed to class and status differences
Chosen people	Status in relation to other groups	Chosen people (American Exceptionalism)
Lighting up the world; opening a blind eye (missionary work)	Expansion	Manifest destiny, making the world safe for democracy, and flooding colonized countries with commodities
Human history is important, but it combines facts, myths and memories. Distorts and omits conflict and atrocities. Resistance to revisionist history.	Importance of history	Human history is important, but it combines facts, myths and memories.  Distorts and omits conflict and atrocities. Resistance to revisionist history.
Golden ages: Adam and Eve, Old Testament and wilderness	Importance of origins	Golden ages: Founding of Jamestown, taming the western wilderness with pioneers, frontiersman, and cowboys
Strangers united in the brotherhood of man	Composition of community	Strangers united as citizens of the nation.
Moses, Christ	Founders mythologized	Washington, Jefferson, Franklin
Ceremonies: going to mass, speaking in tongues, dancing in the aisles, blessing one’s self, crucifix	Ceremonies; symbolic reality; giving thanks	Presidential elections, rallies, Great Seal of the United States, military parades, pledging allegiance, flag
Sensory deprivation: prayer, fasting, meditation Sensory saturation: Catholic Mass (stain glass windows, organ music, incense, Holy communion)	Methods of altering states of consciousness	Sensory deprivation: boot camp, fighting in a war. Sensory saturation: singing the national anthem, flag waving, hot dogs, apple pie
Religious paintings: Gothic Cathedrals, Sistine Chapel (Michelangelo), The Last Supper (Da Vinci)	Paintings	Patriotic paintings: Washington Crossing the Delaware, redemptive Western landscapes (Remington, Moran)
Liturgical hymn books: “Amazing Grace,” Christmas music	Music	“The Star-Spangled Banner,” “My Country, ‘Tis of Thee,” “God Bless America,” “Battle Hymn of Republic
Catechism	Literature	Novels about the American West

 

•  First published at Socialist Planning Beyond Capitalism

Bruce Lerro has taught for 25 years as an adjunct college professor of psychology at Golden Gate University, Dominican University and Diablo Valley College in the San Francisco Bay Area. He has applied a Vygotskian socio-historical perspective to his three books found on Amazon. He is a co-founder, organizer and writer for Socialist Planning Beyond Capitalism. Read other articles by Bruce, or visit Bruce's website.