The new nationalism & the gospel witness: Western tolerance vs. Christian repentance.

Early in the summer of 1990, I visited Armenia for the first time. This was on the heels of the massive protests and rallies of 1987-88 and the terrible earthquake in December 1988. In Armenia the expectation was that Gorbachev's days were numbered--as indeed they were--and talk everywhere was of independence. Even the cautious and conservative Armenian church had begun to shift its position and support the popular nationalist movement.

How could I help but embrace these Armenian hopes for sovereignty and self-determination, having been raised knowing how much this meant to my grandparents? And when I returned in the spring of 1991, it looked as if their dreams were coming true. Still, I was wary of the excesses of the nationalist fervor in Armenia, dangers that I had identified even before my visits and that looked even more serious when viewed up close.

I was especially troubled by the behavior of the Armenian church. The diversity of opinion on the national question within the political realm gave reason for a cautious optimism--a genuine civic life and political culture seemed to be emerging. However, the unmistakable mark of expediency in the church's shift from cooperation with the Communist regime to sacralizer of the new nationalism was worrisome; its neglect of the spiritual needs of the people was conspicuous and unforgivable. The gospel pure and simple needed to be preached and practiced in the cities and in the remotest villages. The hierarchy and clergy seemed more comfortable wearing ethnic pride under gold filigreed ecciesiastical robes.

The attitude that the Armenian church (and other churches like it in former Soviet lands) takes toward the new nationalism is a critical matter. Western observers obsessively try to take readings on how well democracy is doing in the emerging democracies of Eastern Europe. The central question raised: Is this nationalism compatible with liberal values? Certainly the development of democratic institutions is essential, but I submit that the more important and immediate struggle is a spiritual one.

What are the possibilities for the self-professed Christians of these Orthodox Christian lands to practice virtue and love their neighbors during a time when nationalism is on the rise and violence common? In Armenia people are struggling with the tangled religious and moral question of the relationships of faith, identity, and Christian love. It is important to try to understand the nature of the new nationalism in Armenia and how it exists in tension with Christian witness to the gospel, for Armenia is a microcosm of the nationalist struggle and turmoil that affect much of the old Soviet Union and Eastern Europe.

Before proceeding, something needs to be said about the Western analysis of the ethnic, religious, and nationalistic struggles going on in the East. From an Armenian, Russian, or Ukrainian perspective, Western observers all sound remarkably alike, judging the struggles of peoplehood always from the insistent secular and political criteria of whether the outcome will be liberal and democratic in a recognizably Western way. Pluralism and tolerance are not incidental concerns for many people in the emerging democracies. But there is a kind of Western blindness in easy assumptions about multiculturalism and nationhood that is historically naive and patronizing as well as morally obtuse. As Benjamin Schwarz has recently written in the Atlantic Monthly (May 1995), "At least as much as other countries, the United States was formed by conquest and force, not by conciliation and compromise .... The ideas of foreign-policy experts about finding reasonable solutions to internal conflicts are distorted by an idealized view of America's own history."

That doesn't mean conquest and force are to be condoned. But it does mean that Americans should not expect democracy in the East to look exactly like democracy in the West or that pluralism and tolerance have been easily achieved anywhere. Culture and history matter. Too often Western assumptions about Eastern Europe display ignorance of or lack of interest in the distinctive religious histories of the peoples of these Orthodox nations and how that history is related to their aspirations for self-determination and national sovereignty. The United States, after all, is arguably a nation founded on a set of ideas, not an ethnic nationalism. Germany, France, and England are also democracies but in each, nationhood is much more entangled with questions of ethnic and/or religious identity. Such is also the case in Eastern Europe.

In an article published over twenty years ago, long before virtually anyone anticipated the extraordinary events of the past decade, the liberal political philosopher Sir Isaiah Berlin gave the "new nationalism" a name. He called it "bent twig" nationalism. With this metaphor he brought attention to the peculiar characteristics of nationalisms that are reactions against repressive forces that have stolen people's dignity and imposed a deadening control over their collective life. Such nationalism, Berlin argued, has value in and of itself-independent of democratic principles. It has the potential of being an important first stage in the healing of old wounds.

Berlin's thesis was an advance over standard liberal prejudices and blindness, which often insisted on a coercive universalism. Liberal universalism was, after all, notoriously sympathetic to imperialism. The "bent twig" analysis encouraged a broader approach to nationalism and even argued that nationalism needn't be antithetical to broad liberal values and democracy. The interplay of faith, identity, conflict, and concord in Eastern Europe or Russia needs to be seen in this light.

Michael Ignatieff, a British historian and journalist, examined these issues in characteristically liberal and Western fashion in his Blood and Belonging: Journeys into the New Nationalism (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1994). Ignatieff argued that there are two kinds of nationalism, ethnic and civic. "Ethnic nationalism claims ... that an individual's attachments are inherited, not chosen. It is national community that defines the individual, not the individuals who define the national community." For Ignatieff, this is unacceptable. Civic nationalism, on the other hand, embraces pluralism and envisages the nation as a community of equals in which ethnicity is only one component of modern identity, and a diminishing factor at that. Ignatieff concludes that of the two types of nationalism, civic nationalism "has a greater claim to sociological realism" because "most societies are not monoethnic; and even when they are, common ethnicity is only one of the many claims on an individual's loyalties. Civic nationalism is right to hold that what keeps a society together is not common roots but law."

Rhetorically this abstract celebration of law sounds very soothing to Western ears. But I find Ignatieff's claim about where the greater realism lies incredible. What makes him think ethnicity (and its accompanying component of religious belonging) are diminishing as a source of identity? Like so many other observers, he chooses to disbelieve what he sees. Ignatieff dismisses as fantasies of nationalist ideology the testimony of people in Croatia, Serbia, Ukraine, and other places who insist that religion and ethnicity are at the core of their identity. But if self-determination is a democratic goal, mustn't we take the identity claims of a self-determining people seriously?

Ignatieff describes himself as a nationalist in the limited sense of civic nationalism. He equates this with cosmopolitanism--a creed, as he says, that is not beyond the nation because it depends upon "the capacity of nation-states to provide security and civility for citizens .... [As] a civic nationalist, [I am] someone who believes in the necessity of nations." But have nations ever been forged or defended out of such a thin sense of identity? Believing in the necessity of nations in an almost administrative sense is very different from believing that one belongs to a nation in a deep, thick, bloody and membranous sense. It is not surprising that Ignatieff's discussion of Christianity in the Orthodox and Roman Catholic lands, especially Eastern European countries and the Ukraine, is largely anecdotal. He doesn't dig deeply into the religious and ethnic identity issue, which is the underbelly of so much of the new nationalism.

Much of what we in the West want or fear will happen in the East is a projection of our own worries or concerts. Even among many who take religion as a serious component of democratic culture, the unstated assumption is that a rigidly secular liberalism is somehow a prerequisite and precondition of civic virtue. We are deeply suspicious of, if not simply hostile to, kinship and language as components of civic culture. Equally unacceptable is the notion of church that (in Ernst Troeltsch's sense) is identified with a people or land as an ecology and history and not just real estate sold or distributed by contract. We even sometimes call such expressions of solidarity unchristian.

Given such assumptions, it is next to impossible for us to appreciate why the Bosnian Muslim or Serbian Orthodox would fight to the death over the same land, why Palestinian Arabs and Jewish Israelis spill blood over the territory of the West Bank, or why Armenians surrounded by Azerbaijanis refuse to abandon the mountains and valleys of Nagorno-Karabagh. Or, I would suggest, why Virginians opposed to slavery felt compelled by honor to fight for the Confederacy and Northerners with no sympathy for abolition were willing to die to preserve the Union. Fundamental allegiances are complex and overdetermined, never merely self-interested.

Let me at least try to convey a sense of the thick human reality that often ties Christianity to nationalism in the East and in doing so challenges some of our bedrock secular suppositions. No one could possibly deny that the gospel of peace and reconciliation is having hard going in Armenia, Ukraine, or Serbia. My own experiences in Armenia have proven that to me. But I am equally aware that the history and resources of Christian ethics in these Orthodox lands are not well understood by Christians in the West. Several personal experiences illustrate this, but also suggest how Christian ethics might actually begin to enter public life more positively in Armenia and the East.

One afternoon in June of 1991, I was strolling through the streets of Yerevan with Lillet Zagaryan, a historian of medieval art, and Erna Melikyan, a classicist. The two women explained to me how many Armenians were returning to the church in search of something to believe in after the spiritual desolation imposed by the Soviet system. Lillet said that a new morality was needed. She believed that morality is a universal, but suspected also that there is something specific and compelling about Christian morality, which requires supererogatory acts toward one's neighbor, even the neighbor who is an enemy. I said that I thought that Christian ethics includes more than moral principles or universalizable rules, that it is joined to a person whom Christians are asked to imitate and follow. "You mean Jesus," she responded. "I do not dispute that he was an historical person .... But Christianity teaches us to turn the other cheek and love our enemy. That is difficult. How can we love Turks or Azeris? ... When faced with such enemies maybe it is better not to be so moral, so Christian." Erna agreed: "Such a morality is nearly impossible for Armenians."

Several days after my conversation with Lillet and Erna, I was with a group of young men and women who form the core of an active youth movement at the diocesan church of Saint Sarkis in Yerevan. The bishop, who was present, asked if someone would explain what it means to be Christian. The young people were quick to respond. "It means to follow Christ and to become as much like him as possible" was the unanimous answer. I asked these young people whether they were familiar with the twelfth chapter of the Epistle to the Romans, where Saint Paul exhorts his audience to offer themselves to God to conform no longer to the pattern of this present world, but be transformed by the renewal of your minds, and to know what is good, acceptable, and perfect." Everyone was familiar with the passage and they all volunteered that it was very important, especially for Armenians.

"We must reach an understanding," said one, "about the passages that mention blessing your enemies and not seeking revenge, but giving help to your enemy when he needs help." I then told the group about what Lillet and Erna had said to me, especially about turning the other cheek. The nearly unanimous opinion of the eight or ten young men and women was that there was no escaping the directness of these passages. They were not surprised by what Lillet and Erna said. They had seen this resistance to the radical nature of the Christian gospel in others and experienced it themselves. Love of neighbor, even the neighbor who is our enemy, was the greatest challenge the gospel posed to Armenians. These youths were not pacifists, although they entertained that possibility. Instead, they wanted to wrestle with the question of who is truly an enemy and what is vengeful and uncharitable in oneself.

My young friends believed that nothing short of re-evangelizing the Armenian people would supply the moral fiber needed to forestall violence and the cycle of revenge. Remember, Armenians, like Russians and Ukrainians, live deeply in the past as well as in the present. All of these peoples, even nonbelievers among them, trace their origins as a people back to stories of conversion to Christianity. Moreover, these young men and women were moved by the rock-bottom truth of Christian faith that pride and fear block love, and that the gospel clears the ground for love and justice to grow. Can any society afford to squander such moral capital?

In May of 1994, James H. Billington wrote on Russia and Orthodoxy in the New Republic, grappling with the realities I have described. Billington urged his readers to take seriously the power of the explicitly Christian language and symbolism of repentance and forgiveness in Russian and how that has been a fabric of social peace in Orthodox lands. He described the coup attempt of 1991 and how it echoed so much of Russian history and the religious imagination in Russia:

After the putsch collapsed, Russians were brought together

emotionally by the quasi-religious burial procession for

the three young men killed during the coup attempt.

Memories were evoked of the first Russian saints, Boris

and Gleb, young medieval princes who voluntarily accepted

death in order to prevent dissension in the Russian

land. And the classic totalitarian avoidance of individual

responsibility seemed to end with the moving words

addressed [by Boris Yeltsin] to the parents of the three

fallen martyrs: "Forgive me, your president, that I was

not able to protect and defend your sons."

"Forgive me" is what Russians say to each other before

taking Communion. They are the last words uttered

by an earlier Boris in Russia's greatest national opera,

Boris Gudunov. "Forgive us" were the words on many

of the bouquets sent to Andrei Sakharov's funeral in

December 1989. Almost with these words alone, Yeltsin

seemed to invest power with a higher authority.

Someone blameless was assuming responsibility in a society

where people in power never used to accept responsibility

for anything. And he did it in the language

of faith.

Billington's reference to the Communion service of the Orthodox faith is not incidental. Indeed, eucharistic atonement is central to Orthodox ethics, and is the key to unlocking an understanding of our love of neighbor as a process that begins with individual penance and moves toward mutual reconciliation. Orthodox Christians consume the bloody flesh of their Lord after having embraced their near neighbor, not just with a polite handshake but with a full embrace. They are challenged in this act to embrace the flesh of their more distant neighbors as gift and not to repeat the ancient legacy of the race to mutilate their neighbor's flesh and spill his blood. Billington did not mention that the three young men who died defending Russian democracy were of different faiths: Orthodox, Muslim, and Jew. But, of course, this only adds more force to his comments.

Unfortunately many Westerners, and ironically many Christian Westerners, instinctively recoil from such public religious language. Perhaps this is one reason why Alexandr Solzhenitsyn (and often John Paul II) has been written off by many as a kind of authoritarian crank. For Solzhenitsyn persists in calling Russia to repentance and placing more faith in the power of conversion of the heart than in any modem political ideology. Listen to how he addressed his countrymen twenty years ago before anyone seriously imagined what we see happening today.

We have so bedeviled the world, brought it so close to

destruction, that repentance is now a matter of life and

death--not for the sake of a life beyond the grave (which

is thought merely comic nowadays), but for the sake of

our life here and now....

It is now only too obvious that we have throughout the

ages preferred to censure, denounce, and hate others , instead

of censuring, denouncing, and hating ourselves....

[Nevertheless we are] reluctant to believe that the universal

dividing line between good and evil runs not between

countries, not between nations..., not even between

good men and bad men; the dividing line cuts across nations

and parties, shifting constantly, yielding now to the

pressure of light, now the pressure of darkness. It divides

the human heart of every man....

We must stop blaming everyone else--our neighbors

and more distant peoples, our geographical, economic,

or ideological rivals, always claiming that we are in the

right.

Repentance is the first bit of firm ground underfoot,

the only one from which we can go forward not to fresh

hatreds but to concord ("Repentance and Limitation," in

From under the Rubble).

We in the West seem incapable of hearing this language of repentance spiritually or with an appreciation for its powerful cultural and institutional embeddedness within Russian national life. We think tolerance is a principle that stands on its own outside of any larger moral narrative or agreement about the common purposes of life. Naively, I think, we believe that democratic institutions and procedures alone will secure civic peace. Yet it wasn't so long ago that Reinhold Niebuhr argued that the spirit of democratic tolerance is not solely the product of secular values nor secured by democratic institutions alone. Niebuhr judged that the humility born of repentance was one "of the great resources of ... faith for social achievement." He believed that strong religious faith could and ought to be "a fount of humility" and that if such humility became a disposition in political life it was "capable of moving men to moderate their national pride."

Interestingly, Reinhold Niebuhr was named by the religious intelligentsia that I met during visits to Russia in the early 1990s as a Western theologian they found especially helpful in sorting out issues of faith, ethnicity, nationalism. and democracy. These religious democrats dreaded the possibility of a renewed triumphalism within the Russian Orthodox church, but they also believed that faith provided resources for building the moral foundations of a new, more democratic order. That is the paradox at the heart of developments in the East.

At least in this regard Solzhenitsyn may know the Russians--and by extension the Ukrainians. Armenians, and others--much better than do the people who dismiss his invocations of faith and repentance. The appeal to a self-consciously Christian sense of repentance need not have anything to do, either, with a worn--out belief in the old sacral order of Christendom. The progress of secularism in Russia or Armenia, however, does not have the same history as our liberal secularity--it was imposed by totalitarian dictatorship, not by the forces of liberal individualism or consumerism. That makes a big difference.

In Russia and perhaps Armenia the decision the church makes, whether to return to bad old habits of sacralizing ethnic pride and the political order or to act as the conscience of the nation, will make an enormous difference. I cannot say for sure what the political outcomes will be in these lands. But we should not expect that our style of liberalism will necessarily triumph, nor that the dogmas we treat as infallible--such as separation of church and state--will be cloned exactly. Neither should we rule out the possibility that new forms of democracy that do not bear our imprimatur will evolve. If this leads us to despair of the possibility of distributive justice and regional peace in these countries. I suspect that is our despair not theirs. More blood might be shed; more shameful human tragedies such as we have witnessed in Bosnia and Chechnya might be repeated. One hopes such dreadful things will not continue. But we cannot expect to understand or influence events if our eyes pass over all of what is at stake in these lands, not only the fate of democracy but the ethos and faith of peoples who are struggling to reenter history after a long submersion in darkness and humiliation. The churches will play an important role in Ukraine, Russia, and Armenia in sowing seeds of either discord or of peace. Let not our own secularity or even unbelief blind us to that force and all of its possibilities.

VIGEN GUROIAN teaches theology and ethics at Loyola College in Baltimore, and is also a member of the faculty at the Ecumenical Institute of Saint Mary's Seminary and University. His most recent book is Ethics after Christendom (Eerdnians).