Who do we think we are? National and religious identities #1

In a series of extracts from the new edition of Faith in Politics? Richard Harries discusses both national and religious identities ...

Multiple Identities?

In a 1990 interview with the Los Angeles Times former Conservative MP Norman Tebbitt said:

‘A large proportion of Britain’s Asian population fail to pass the cricket test. Which side do they cheer for? It’s an interesting test. Are you still harking back to where you came from or where you are?’

This remark highlights an issue that has been with us for some decades now, and is of growing importance. Where do our loyalties lie? It is not of course a new question. After Tebbitt’s remark a cartoon appeared showing a Scotsman in full regalia in jail complaining, ‘I failed the Tebbitt cricket test.’

The main reason why this is an issue of growing concern, as revealed by Tebbitt’s remark, is of course immigration. But there are others that feed into it. One is the decline of the British Empire, another is devolution, with the existence now of a Scottish Parliament and a Welsh Assembly. These factors alone raise two questions. One is: what is it now to be English? The other is: what is it to be British? Further reasons why questions of identity are now very much on the agenda include the debate over regionalisation, membership of the European Union, the growing importance of religion as a marker of identity, and a general weakening of our national institutions, from the Sovereign and Parliament down to the local church.

Issues of identity are important in themselves. But I have a particular concern, and that is how a Christian perspective might make a difference to the way we understand and value them. Before anything else, though, it is important to try to make some clear distinctions between different kinds of identity, because this is a confusing, disputed area.

First, there are racial identities and ethnic identities, which can overlap but need not do so. We say someone is African or Asian or Caucasian. Such identities do not in themselves make for a political identity unless a particular government wishes to make it so – for example, the Nazis tried to make Germany an exclusively Aryan state, and in the modern world we have the terrible phenomenon of ethnic cleansing, which aims to create a political unit composed of people of identical ethnicity.

Secondly, there is national identity. A nation is a people with a common language and culture and a shared historical narrative. The people who belong to it are conscious of belonging together as a community over a period of time, but they may or may not form a state or even a political community. The Welsh and the Scots form nations and they now have a form of political expression through the Scottish Parliament and the Welsh Assembly, but they are part of a wider, British state. The Palestinians are a nation, and they have a form of political expression, but as of now they have no state of their own. The Kurds regard themselves as a nation, but they are split between different states. The concept of the nation state belongs primarily to the period in Europe from the Reformation until the twentieth century, when there were many attempts to create culturally and religiously homogenous political units under different sovereigns. Before that period European unity, in so far as it existed, was built around the Papacy. With the Reformation, states sought their own centre of

unity round the sovereign. This was always fraught with the potential for conflict, as the history of Europe shows. The origin of the terrible First World War is often attributed to the growing nationalism at the end of the nineteenth century, so now nationalism is usually regarded with deep suspicion. With nationalism in Europe there went along the concept of patriotism, and after the war there was a reaction against both nationalism and patriotism, as expressed, for example, in the poems of Wilfred Owen or the remark of E. M. Forster, who said:

‘If I had to choose between betraying my country and betraying my friend I hope I would have the guts to betray my country.’

Whilst we are right to be very wary of the concept of nationalism, and its associated idea of patriotism, which Dr Johnson termed ‘the last refuge of the scoundrel’, there are several reasons why we should not simply turn from it to a bland internationalism. One is that loves that are real and strong begin with the local, with our parents and family, and then outwards to the communities of which we are a part, and then out to include humanity as a whole. So a poet like Blake emphasised the importance of the particular rather than the general or abstract. Love of the local can and should grow into a love of the wider realm. A love of the wider realm that is not also rooted in the love of the local, can become abstract and unreal.

Then, as the Russian theologians tend to emphasise, nations are a special part of God’s purpose. As Alexander Solzhenitsyn put it:

‘Nations are the wealth of mankind, its collective personalities; the very least of them wears its own special colours and bears within itself a special face of divine intention.’

That kind of view has its own great dangers; nevertheless we might say that individuals in their personal identity take on something of the special colour of the nation of which they are a part. They are in part shaped and nurtured by a national community which is ‘a special face of the divine intention’.

Another reason is a more practical one, and related to our own time, with its intense drive towards globalisation. Globalisation erodes the traditional power of the nation state, because capital can be moved swiftly from one part of the world to another. A number of trans-national corporations are bigger than all but the largest states. This means that if the world, particularly in its economic realm, is to be ordered for the common good, the nation state needs to be strengthened – not on its own, but in regional and global alliances. Unless there are these groupings to strengthen the power of individual states in alliance with other states, the juggernaut of capitalism will carry all before it.

That said, there is a fundamental paradox about love of one’s country. As Reinhold Niebuhr put it:

‘There is an ethical paradox in patriotism which defies everything but the most astute and sophisticated analysis. The paradox is that patriotism commutes individual unselfishness into national egoism … so the Nation is at one and the same time a check upon, and a final vent for, the expression of individual egoism.’ 

To these identities, racial, ethnic and national, we might add cultural identity and religious identity. So people now talk of Britain as a multicultural society or a multi-faith one, meaning that the population now contains significant communities of people of differing cultural and religious backgrounds, though our public institutions in fact remain still predominantly Christian.

One of the advances in recent years has been the realisation that it is entirely right and proper for us to have multiple identities. In fact there is nothing new about this. St Paul defined himself as religiously a Jew. He lived in Tarsus in what is now south east Turkey, and like everyone at that time, he would have had a strong sense of identification with his city, which was much stronger then than now, and Paul was proud of being ‘a citizen of no mean city’, as he put it. The Judaism in Tarsus, Hellenistic Judaism, was culturally very Greek. So Paul would have received a Greek, as well as a Hebrew education and he wrote his letters in the koiné or common Greek that was spoken all over the eastern Mediterranean. But if his culture was Greek, he also claimed proudly that he was a Roman citizen, and this entitled him to certain legal privileges, not least in his case, the right to appeal to Rome. So

Paul had multiple, overlapping identities, and so do most of us if we think of it. I define myself as nationally Welsh, a British citizen, religiously Christian and culturally European.

This is an extract from Faith in Politics? Rediscovering the Christian Roots of our Political Values  by Richard Harries newly updated and reissued for 2015, available in paperback and eBook priced £12.99.