Coming to grips with American nationality is hard work, but it is the work of the American citizen. Christian American citizens have a special responsibility in this work, because we believe that the tension between dignity and fallenness in human nature has been resolved through the Incarnation of the Lord Jesus, and his substitutionary work in redemption on the cross and the resurrection.

It seems everyone has an opinion about nationalism these days. Something called “Christian nationalism” emerged once Donald Trump came on the political scene a decade ago, and especially after January 6, 2021. Since the publication of Andrew Whitehead and Samuel Perry’s 2020 book, Taking America Back for God: Christian Nationalism in the United States, Christian nationalism has become a veritable cottage industry. Scores of authors, particularly on the left, have sought to get in on the action, publishing title after title excoriating the concept as racist, fascist, patriarchal, violent, and “neither American nor Christian” (in the words of a recently released book by Michael W. Austin).

Others, mainly on the right, have embraced the moniker of Christian nationalism with relish. Stephen Wolfe’s 2021 book, The Case for Christian Nationalism, serves as a manifesto for a magisterial, Erastian polity headed by a Christian prince who serves in the capacity of a king-priest. Whereas the leftist critique of Christian nationalism has developed into a theory of everything progressives hate about conservatives, Wolfe’s book serves as a thumb thrust directly into the eye of the progressive left.

Prior to 2016, the cultural masthead for religious national identity was American exceptionalism—the idea that America was special, unique, and praiseworthy among the nations of the world. A fickle American culture exchanged “exceptionalism” for “nationalism” with little understanding or reflection on the meaning of either term. Since the dawn of the twenty-first century, both “exceptionalism” and “nationalism” have been deployed by the left to describe all that is wrong with America. The left prefers open borders, multiculturalism, multilingualism, and globalism to anything that speaks of American particularity as a nation with a language, culture, governing philosophy, tradition, or heroes of its own. Herein, I hope to briefly explain why this leftist ideology of cosmopolitanism is faulty, and that the better way is not a nationalism, but the conservation of a patriotic nationality that serves as a faithful stewardship of the best of American tradition. This conservative patriotism is in fact a means of loving our neighbor. 

Cosmopolitanism

Political theorist Steven B. Smith’s book, Reclaiming Patriotism in an Age of Extremes, helpfully provides a contrast between nationalism, patriotism, and what he calls cosmopolitanism. He writes, “nationalism is not patriotism’s exact opposite but a deformation of the patriotic spirit.” On the other hand, Smith understands cosmopolitanism as a world citizenship—it is universal, not particular. Tracing the history of cosmopolitanism in the West from Plato, to the Stoics, to the Roman Empire, and to the Enlightenment in the modern period, Smith rightly argued the cosmopolitanism is an abstraction, a chimera, utopian, without “passion and intensity” and “a joyless disposition.”

Most compellingly, Smith describes cosmopolitanism by using the term “cool.” He writes, “Cool is above all an aesthetic pose, expressed in dress, cuisine, language, and shopping. It is a stance of detached irony, a withholding of emotional commitment.” Cool became mainstream after World War II, particular during the liberation movements of the 1960s. Cool transcends good and evil and “has an unmistakenly urban vibe, designating hipness and an indifference to conventional norms, with a slightly outlaw flavor.” Cosmopolitanism—a form of globalism that prizes international diversity in the West for the sake of diversity—is the epitome of cool, because to be cosmopolitan is to transcend national distinctives, borders, citizenship, and politics. Cosmopolitanism is thoroughly postmodern, in that it rejects the normative in favor of the sentimental and experiential.

Thus, it is difficult to make a rational case against cosmopolitanism, because it is by definition irrational. There is no concrete example of cosmopolitanism in history. Even multi-national states and empires like the Roman Empire of antiquity, the Holy Roman Empire of medieval and early modern Europe, or the Austro-Hungarian Empire of late modernity took their shapes around contours defined by practice, statecraft, tradition, religion, and physical boundaries over time. Cosmopolitanism is, as Smith lucidly describes it, not much more than a “vibe.”

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