on solidarity
Christian nationalism and Augustinian cosmopolitanism
We are born to live with and for each other.
Nearly every semester I teach Aristotle’s ethics or political philosophy, and I tell my students that this is what Aristotle means when he says that humans are political animals. Walk down the street, I tell them. Your life is intertwined with those of the others you see, whether you know them or not.
But, for Aristotle, the outer bound of this kind of concern is the polis, the city. I live in a city of eight-and-a-half million people, but, even so, my life is intertwined with many others well beyond it, through our shared political lives and the economic and communications networks that now span the whole inhabited Earth.
While the apparatus of technology that underwrites global modernity was beyond the imagination of the ancient Greeks, the idea that all human beings, wherever they are, might belong to one community was not. The Stoics were cosmopolitans in this sense, following in the footsteps of Diogenes the Cynic who, when asked where he was from, replied “I am a citizen of the world (kosmopolitēs)”.
For the Greek Stoics it was only the sage, living in perfect accordance with the reason that is the universe’s ordering law, who belonged fully to this universal community, the cosmo-polis. In the hands of Cicero and other Roman interpreters of Stoicism, common human rationality suffices for membership, which binds us all together beyond and outside the borders of particular political communities, just as the Roman Empire made fellow citizens of people living thousands of mile apart.
The puzzle that cosmopolitanism has always faced is that the weaker the criterion for membership in the universal community is, the weaker the obligations that bind the community together are. After all, even the modern nation-state is just an imagined community: a set of institutions (-state) that translates the exercise of power into a shared identity (nation-).
Then again, imagination is among the central faculties of moral life. Many of the strangers we meet in our everyday lives are typically just a few social links away from us: we may not know the name of the barista at the coffee-shop, but we probably know something about their lives. Sometimes even New York City feels like a small town to me after a chance meeting with a person I last saw a few years ago in a neighborhood where neither of us lives. Living in a vast city like this one also offers many opportunities, typically daily, to enter imaginatively into the lives of others who are unlike us. This imaginative work is the beginning of the work of solidarity.
We are born to live with and for each other.
I have been thinking lately about Saint Augustine’s conception of Christian life as a life of pilgrimage, a life in-between cities, in The City of God, especially after attending a wonderful lecture on this text by Rowan Williams in September. Augustine takes on and refigures the Stoic idea of the cosmo-polis, which was a universal community that consists of people who may never encounter one another who nevertheless participate in a shared rational life.
In Augustine’s hands, the Stoic cosmo-polis becomes the heavenly city, which is the destination of this pilgrim life – the city of God. The sphere of worldly attachments that draws us away from this path is the ‘earthly city’.
Ordinary political communities – the communities we live in here and now – are neither heavenly nor earthly by nature, though they tend toward the latter. The best that ordinary political power can do is achieve peace and justice and it can only achieve these things for a time. Human nature is too corrupt and too ignorant to rule itself. Still, peace and justice are very great goods, and they allow us to order our attachments more wisely. In times of turmoil – like those Augustine was living through in the aftermath of the sack of Rome or like our own – our first impulse is to seek refuge in material things.
Augustine’s thinking inherits from Stoicism a qualified attitude toward our ordinary political lives. We must not disengage from the world to retreat to our cloister – or our garden, as the Stoics’ great enemies the Epicureans advocated – but we must not think that our highest aspirations are to be sought in political life, either. One reason is that our ethical obligations extend more widely, to those outside our political communities and to those within them who may not be full members in the political sense.
Christian charity is cosmopolitan charity. As we read in the Gospel, “Come, you who are blessed by my Father; take your inheritance, the kingdom prepared for you since the creation of the world. For I was hungry and you gave me something to eat, I was thirsty and you gave me something to drink, I was a stranger and you invited me in, I needed clothes and you clothed me, I was sick and you looked after me, I was in prison and you came to visit me.”
For all the abuses of empire and dominion perpetrated in its name, the Christian faith asks us to treat the stranger as belonging to us, that is, to treat them as our neighbor. The shock of the parable of the good Samaritan, which is Jesus’ reply to the question ‘and who is my neighbor?’, wears off unless we realize that the beaten traveler is a Jew rescued and cared for by a Samaritan, who should by rights have nothing to do with him. The Torah likewise teaches “Love ye therefore the stranger: for ye were strangers in the land of Egypt”.
We are born to live with and for each other.
It is utterly perplexing to me, then, that the most prominent form of Christian politics in the United States of America today is Christian nationalism. The Christian nationalist like JD Vance thinks that the purity of the people, conceived of as a Christian ethnos, depends on keeping strangers out. But there cannot be such a thing as a Christian ethnos in the first place. The idea is itself incoherent.
From a sociological perspective, of course, religious identity can serve as the basis for binding a group together. But, taken on its own terms, Christianity is not merely a culture or a set of cultural practices. It is not merely universalistic in the sense that it is open to anyone, from any background, to convert. It is universalistic because the solidarity at the heart of Christian ethics is extended to all, without exception.
Phil Christman articulates this thought beautifully in his recent book Why Christians Should be Leftists. Roughly speaking, Phil’s argument is that Christianity calls us to universal solidarity and the politics of universal solidarity is leftist politics. A lot of what Phil has to say concerns free-market capitalism and the winners and losers that it creates within a society that does not guarantee the basic needs of people. But he also wisely considers the effects of this economic model on the poor and downtrodden around the world, the invisible foreign workers who make our consumer electronics and our clothing, who pick our coffee beans and our avocados, and whom we are typically even further from recognizing as our neighbors than those who live in poverty around us.
Most leftist political discourse in the US tends to focus on workers here and on the yawning gap in wealth between mi’ionaires and bi’ionaires, as Bernie Sanders calls them, and the rest of us. It is indeed morally abhorrent that the wealthiest country in the world fails to take care of so many of those who live here. But it was also notable to me that most of the left-wing outrage about the activities of DOGE earlier this year was on behalf of professional-class government workers who lost their jobs and not the many thousands of children who starved to death because of cuts to foreign aid.
Of course, the case for solidarity is strongest when we are face to face with those who have been excluded from the benefits of shared living. The Samaritan stops to help the injured traveler when he sees him by the road. But the imaginative work of solidarity that Christian cosmopolitanism invites us into is truly cosmic and not just political: it depends on the hope that all will some day be reconciled to God and, thereby, to one another.
I suspect that is one reason Phil defends a leftist vision in his book that is bolder than social democracy, which can so easily be combined with nativism, as we see on the rise in the Scandinavian countries often held up to us benighted Americans as paragons of political virtue. Phil shies away from talk of revolution, let alone world revolution, but the socialism he favors has an internationalist flavor.
One needn’t be a proletarian internationalist to recognize the moral demand of cosmopolitanism, of course. Augustinian cosmopolitanism makes a primarily negative case: not to rest our hope in the political communities of this world, as so many had done with Rome until the Visigoth sack, and as so many people do with the United States. Political communities, even when we recognize their necessity and perhaps the good qualities they possess, are simply not the sort of thing in which we can rest our hope. Neither is the family or even the church.
It is against the background of all these idolatrous temptations that we should locate the idolatry of Christian nationalism, whether the more Völkisch forms that have left anonymous corners of the Internet to become a major political presence in this country or the more benign and chummy sort one finds in the Episcopal Church and other parts of the Protestant mainstream, where church services with patriotic hymns are held on July Fourth and the American flag stands in a corner of the sanctuary. (I consider myself a patriot, and I even enjoy singing national songs – “Battle Hymn of the Republic” has been my favorite since I was a child – but this kind of religious patriotism makes me cringe.)
We might even describe such nationalism as a kind of ‘safetyism’: looking to the nation for a sense of identity and a feeling of protection. The question for all of us to ask, not just religious believers, in the moments when this fantasy is tempting, is what exactly we want protection from. All too often the answer is: the stranger already in my midst, who is and has always been my neighbor.
The list of concerns you describe are a fascinating mix of genuine issues or questions (e.g. about what sort of national project we have) and bizarre fantasies peddled by right-wing media (the Democrats haven’t talked much about sexuality for years and certainly don’t have a policy platform built around it). I think the lost young men who are increasingly voting for the Republican Party have absorbed a narrative to explain their problems — cultural, economic, spiritual — that is laced with contradictions. How, for instance, can they be at once the bastion of traditional masculinity and powerless victims in a culture war? Where I do have sympathy is pushing back on a contentless liberal cosmopolitanism, but blood and soil nationalism is, to put it mildly, not a credible alternative, especially in a country as genuinely plural as ours. It is telling, isn’t it, that the President is married to an immigrant with a foreign accent and the Vice President is married to the brown-skinned daughter of immigrants.