Flying home to America from East Africa a few days ago and watching television coverage of the ICE raids, detentions and deportations, I have had nationalism on my mind.

As nationalist rhetoric pulses ever more fervently through American political culture — full of slogans like “America First,” “Great Again,” the renaming of the “Gulf of America,” denunciation of “globalists” and talk of a “disastrous invasion of our country” and “American carnage” due to migration and the push to narrow “birthright citizenship” — I was reminded of a forum organized by the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops in Washington during the first Trump Administration.

I am not a Roman Catholic but come from a Christian family. I attended both conservative Catholic and free-thinking Jesuit schools. Over the years after I had left senior policy posts in the U.S. Government, the Conference of Bishops had occasionally invited me as an outside expert to address public policy topics, both domestic and international, under their pastoral consideration.

In October 2019, just before the COVID pandemic the bishops asked me to speak on a small panel addressing “Nationalism: Cautions and Opportunities.” Our session that day several years ago prefigured the widening political and cultural schism about “us and them” and how to live together — not only among Catholics but across American society.

The underlying questions are about morality, quite independent of dogma or even claims of revealed truth. They engage the idea of a definable set of universal values that inspired the American founders to create a country committed to “liberty and justice for all.”

I started writing these lines from Nairobi, where I met a noted Somali lawyer friend during Ramadan. He told me of his nomadic mother’s wise words from when he was a boy growing up among the mixed tribes around the Kenyan capital. She said to him: “Remember, you must respect the ways of others, for you are your neighbor.” She meant that because we are all different, we are all really the same. I believe this nomadic insight can help us see the world with the open hearts of good neighbors.

We meet between the Feast of St. Francis, patron saint of animals and ecologists, and the Jewish Day of Atonement. We should probably be thinking about atonement for what we are doing to our ecosystem and to each other on our crowded and shared Planet Earth.

Our topic today is not unrelated: “Nationalism: Cautions and Opportunities.” I believe I have been invited to speak mostly on behalf of the first aspect, the “Cautions,” which I will do briefly.

From early childhood, I have been fascinated by the Biblical story of the Tower of Babel. As I saw more of the world, I continued to puzzle over its meaning. Genesis 11 is one of those interpretive conundrums in the Bible — a legend that seems easy to dismiss as ancient myth, and yet also somehow urgently modern and relevant in its implications.

Looking at the ambitious tower being built by the Akkadians in Babylon, “The Lord said, now nothing they plan to do will be impossible. Come, let us go down and confuse their language so they will not understand each other. So the Lord scattered them abroad from thence upon the face of the earth” Genesis 11: 6-8. No doubt there is a lesson in here about pride and hubris: our too-big plans falling apart.

The Lord’s words also seem to suggest a rather jealous or insecure Deity: why would the Creator fret so much about human cooperation across tongues and tribes?

In any case, for people without the benefit of the Internet, GPS or Google Earth, the ancient Akkadians of Mesopotamia must have been uncannily aware of linguistic diversity. They must have encountered many other tribes speaking different tongues and using disparate writing systems such as Elamite and Cuneiform.

As we have learned from the deciphering of ancient tablets by archeologists and linguists, these proto-languages had their own words or ideographs for the concepts of homeland as opposed to other places, one’s own tribe as opposed to foreigners.

Another striking detail of the Babel story is that, in the beginning, before the Flood, “the whole earth was of one language, and of one speech” Genesis 11: 1. So it may not be entirely crazy for humans to aspire to unity, to speak as one and to repair the breaches that confound and divide us.

Therefore, in my view, the legend of Babel is better read as evolutionary anthropology than fatalistic prophecy: not how we are doomed to be, but a warning about how we are if we do not strive for better.

You see, my parents were refugees who made it to America from different European lands and spoke different languages, Slavic and Scandinavian. My father happened to be born an Orthodox Christian, and my mother a Lutheran. Theirs was a union formed, as it were, in defiance of Babel.

Their marriage was by no means free of strife, but the proximate cause of their frictions was neither their different origins nor their confessions at birth. They built bridges across cultures and created their own form of multiculturalism and multilingualism under one roof. Dinner parties at our home were a cross between Noah’s Ark and the United Nations.

My parents made their home in America, but they never gave up their other identities. They further confused matters by sending me to Catholic parochial schools. Together as a nuclear family, we learned to cope with our own little Babel of identities.

These days we are witnessing the sweep of resurgent ethno-nationalism. Looking at many contemporary leaders across the world map, it is easy to spot the muscular nationalist trend in words and policies: Vladimir Putin in Russia, Narendra Modi in India, Xi Jinping in China, Recep Tayyip Erdogan in Turkey, Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil, Viktor Orban in Hungary, Matteo Salvini in Italy, Rodrigo Duterte in The Philippines, and others. Such tribalist leaders, elected or not, are all supposedly making their respective countries “great again” in the name of some kind of national purity.

America is far from immune. Some of our own fellow citizens are today echoing Charles Lindbergh’s “America first” rhetoric of the 1930s and proudly declaring they are “American nationalists.” At the UN General Assembly two weeks ago, President Trump explained that “the future does not belong to globalists; it belongs to patriots.” He said, “if you want democracy, hold on to your sovereignty. And if you want peace, love your nation.”

As Tolstoy might have said, every nationalism is unhappy in its own way. Yet there are certain common features to the neo-nationalist ideology across borders.

The neo-nationalist argument goes something like this: Globalization has ignored some fundamental truths about the importance of native soil and national bonds. It is now urgently necessary to restore a sense of place and identity because globalization has run amok over the past thirty-odd years. They say a super-class of “globalists” — a cosmopolitan elite who pursue worldwide economic efficiencies powered by new technologies — has led the world astray. These rootless people, it is claimed, have unwisely and unpatriotically subordinated national identity and undermined sovereignty, ignoring the legitimate interests, grievances and dreams of real people at home.

It would be foolish to ignore the nationalist thesis. It expresses anxieties and aspirations that are widely and genuinely felt. People feel left behind by what they think — or what they are told — are the effects of globalization. They long for a stronger sense of sharply defined homeland and community. The answer is better socio-economic policies, not a spiritual capitulation to the chaos of Babel.

Keep in mind that globalization has been a broadly Western-driven and quintessentially American project. Things like the UN, the WTO, the European Union, and the World Wide Web are all part of that architecture-across-borders, designed or supported by the U.S. over many decades largely in our own image.

Thus, in a sense, America has been coming to grips with the global consequences of its own success based on the attractiveness of its economic, political and technological model. At the same time, the singular dominance of the U.S. is waning. American ingenuity gave birth to an idea much bigger than itself. So it is ironic that America should turn away, culturally and politically, from that idea.

Since the end of the Cold War, living standards have risen dramatically for much of the world’s population. Billions of people have been lifted out of dire poverty thanks to technological advances and freer trade. It is noteworthy that the pressures of migration, which intensify nativist attitudes in destination countries, as in Europe after the Middle East wars, likely would have even been worse today without these material gains from economic growth spread around the world.

While government policies have supported it, globalization is not just a set of policies, it is a fact of life. Like it or not. Indeed, we are becoming only more aware of how existentially interconnected and interdependent we are, in terms of both risks (such as nuclear war, climate change, supply chains) and opportunities (for example, collective action for peace, prosperity and justice).

Global communications including social media should open our minds ever more to our common humanity. As sentient and cognitive beings, we are so fallible that we do not always see what is before our eyes. Information about the world is more available than ever, even if we do not always exercise the intelligence or wisdom to understand it.

The neo-nationalists’ focus on the supposed evils of globalization is likely a case of misdiagnosis. The discontents of the age of globalization are many and real, but globalization is the context not the cause. A reversion to the fortress mentality of nationalism and ethnic autarchy is not the answer. Nativism is a curse, not a cure.

The temptation to normalize and institutionalize the neo-nationalist way of thinking should be resisted in an advanced democracy.

It is ironic that those who decry “identity politics” in progressives — who tend to engage in solipsism of their own whether about ethnicity or gender — embrace identity politics when it comes to nationalism. This means that what we are witnessing is not really an honest debate about principle but rather an intensely political power struggle over dominance and which myth of identity should control the common narrative.

Let me mention briefly three types of fallacy inherent in nationalism — epistemic, experiential and ethical. Taken together, these are my main reasons for profound caution about neo-nationalist fervor whether in America or elsewhere.

I.

The FIRST fallacy of the nationalist way of thinking is philosophical, specifically epistemological. It relates to how we know things about the world.

Nationalism simply cannot take us very far intellectually. As a frame of inquiry, it is too simple and too solipsistic, that is, self-referential. It does not tell us enough about the world, for it entails a crude reduction of what it means to be human.

Of course, who our parents are, where we are born and grow up means almost everything to us emotionally. And yet little or nothing of intellectual or moral significance really follows from our place of birth or parentage. We typically gain our nationality and citizenship by blood or by soil, as Roman law held, but our humanity precedes and transcends those important personal contingencies.

We are naturally inclined to love our parents and to favor our kith and kin. But filial and familial piety has its limits and it is not a model for citizenship. Loyalty to country is quite natural. But if everybody is allowed to be naturally loyal to his or her country of birth, then dictatorships and democracies cannot be distinguished in terms of duties owed.

In his July 6, 1852, eulogy for Henry Clay, Lincoln noted that the great senator had “loved his country partly because it was his own country, but mostly because it was a free country.” That last part about principle not place — going beyond where you happen to be born — is key.

By contrast, I think it is the accidence of birth and the plurality of identities that are the most salient things about the human condition. Awareness of this contingency allows us to free ourselves of illusions about who we are and who other people are.

The Nobel Laureate Amartya Sen wrote an important book in 2006 titled Identity and Violence: The Illusion of Destiny. Sen tells his story of growing up a Hindu amid terrible ethnic violence around identity politics in Dacca, East Pakistan.

Sen warns against the folly of labeling humans according to ethnicity, nationality, religion, civilization or other convenient and seemingly meaningful categories. These are all gross reductions of who we are as three-dimensional humans. Sen calls the tendency to use distortive categories the “miniaturization of humans.” Nationalism is a prime example of this shrunken way of thinking.

By contrast, Sen emphasizes our “plural identities” and “diverse diversities.” He distinguishes between multiculturalism understood merely as an aggregation of solitary (national, religious, civilizational) identities and a truly multicultural awareness of the deep interdependence of human societies through centuries of encounter and exchange.

Sen is in effect arguing that we must treat the supposed “clash of civilizations” — Samuel Huntington’s famous metaphor — as an illusion based on gross over-simplifications of who we are as humans. For, if Babel is taken as a given, clash and conflict become self-fulfilling prophecies

Proponents of exclusionary nationalism tend to conflate their favored concept with citizenship and patriotism, which are quite distinct and grounded in a natural sense of community. The ultra-nationalists confuse packaging with substance.

A famous 19^th century German philosopher wrote of “the idiocy of village life.” Nationalism embodies the idiocy of village life writ large. Our opportunity and our calling is to lift ourselves beyond the horizons of the accidence of birth and to appreciate the global village.

The familiar trappings of nationality — for example, wearing the flag on the lapel, saying the pledge of allegiance, singing the anthem — are patriotic rituals and perfectly healthy, but they should not be turned into false icons and idols. It is important to know the difference between proclaiming the faith and living the faith.

Nationalism is adolescent, not mature. It reminds me of PDA between teenagers. In moderation, it could just reflect uninhibited passion and bad taste. It reveals weakness not strength. Patriotic citizens are confident in their own skins; nationalists are insecure.

Sporting team colors and rooting for the home team can be fine. But there are limits. “My country, right or wrong” is a form of false pride, wrong-headed thinking.

An aphorism often attributed to Lincoln is apt: “True patriotism is better than the wrong kind of piety.” Our Civil War president well understood the risk that sectional nationalism could even tear the union asunder.

In short, we already know far too too much about ourselves and the complexity of the world to accept the intellectual over-simplifications of neo-nationalism as a guiding idea.

II.

Reference to the Civil War brings me to a SECOND big fallacy of the nationalist way of thinking, namely its experiential track record.

The U.S. civil war was precisely a contest between two competing claims of nationalism, between the Confederate South and the pro-Union North. There is nothing about nationalism per se that provided the right or better answer in that conflict. Instead, deeper principles of “we the people” and equality were at stake. It is no accident that adherents of American neo-nationalism today echo the aggrieved sentiments of the post-Civil War “Lost Cause” movement.

Nationalism has an exceedingly poor track record as an ideology. We have seen this phenomenon before and we should not be fooled again.

Nationalism may have been a positive force for self-determination during the breakup of empires in earlier centuries. The national cause was a rich topic for the Romantic poets. But, again, as a form of political life it is a decidedly adolescent ambition with limited utility and many dangers in practice.

Since the 20^th century, two World Wars and numerous other conflicts about national identity have taught us as much. The weight of this dark history means that the burden of proof lies squarely on those who espouse nationalism.

Allow me to go back to my family memories for a moment. My Danish mother grew up in Nazi-occupied Copenhagen, supported the resistance and heard all about the ideology of Aryan racial superiority. To survive WW2 as a prisoner of war, my father had to certify that he was not Jewish even though in fact he had Jewish ancestors of whom he was unaware. His Russian-Ukrainian father could not do enough to prove his pro-Soviet credentials, was declared an “enemy of the people” and perished at the hands of Stalin’s NKVD. My father later served in the U.S. Army and naturalized, giving me the precious gift of birthright American citizenship. The scourge of extreme nationalism and identity politics has long scarred European history.

So who are we really? If we take DNA tests, it should be clear all of us came out of Africa. Our deep ancestry is a shared genealogy. Other identities that appear over time and across space are constructs. Our genotypes point to an undeniable common humanity, while our phenotypes are open to new expression, new identities.

As St. Paul said in Galatians, “there is neither Jew nor Greek” Galatians 7:28. Paul’s teaching has implications for how we should approach each other. Incidentally, who the Galatians were is not exactly clear. Their name suggests they could have been a tribe from Gaul —nomads or sojourners — who wandered and eventually settled in Asia Minor.

National identities are useful tools, but they are mostly illusions if pushed too far. To be sure, this universalist viewpoint can be interpreted as too sophisticated, risky and seditious by those who seek to lock up and control the human spirit.

The nationalist impulse in practice, when carried beyond a healthy sense of civic duty and patriotism, is an intellectual and moral affliction likely to end in tears.

III.

The THIRD fallacy of hyper nationalism, related to the others, is ethical.

The American political philosopher John Rawls in his theory of “justice as fairness” used a thought experiment of making decisions about distributions of goods from behind what he called a “veil of ignorance” — that is, how would you establish the rules of sharing not knowing the particularities of your birth or place in the world.

In a sense, Rawls’s device was an updated variant of the classical Golden Rule of doing unto others as you would have done unto yourself. Interestingly, as the Chinese side of my extended family likes to point out, the Confucianist version of this ancient maxim is usually expressed in the negative: don’t do to others what you don’t want them to do to you.

The Rawlsian viewpoint makes sense when we think about our birthright moral equality and our responsibility to the least advantaged in society — because we could all be “those people,” but for the aleatory grace of blind luck.

But awareness of the mutuality and reciprocity of the human condition is merely an intellectual starting point for Judeo-Christian ethics. Our higher goal should be love and compassion, which are not based solely on the selfish but prudential calculation about the shoe being on the other foot.

The Bible counsels us to open our doors to the neighbor, the sojourner and the stranger. “The foreigner living among you must be treated as your native-born. Love them as you love yourself, for you were foreigners in Egypt” Leviticus 19:34.

Our love of family, like our love of country, is generally a given; but it is how we treat strangers that is the true test of our character as individuals and societies.

Indeed, so much of the Bible’s teaching, both the Torah and the New Testament, is about avoiding selfishness and working for reconciliation, healing a world torn apart by strife and division. Tikkun olam, as say the Jewish teachers: Repair the world!

According to Isaiah, our mission is to be the “repairer of the breach.” As spiritual creatures, we should be healing, not accentuating, the arbitrary divisions among humans that the fall of Babel has bequeathed.

Nationalism is a convenient ideology, giving in to our acquired prejudices and preference for the familiar. Likeness and sameness are reassuring; difference and diversity are difficult. Dealing with strangers takes more intellectual sweat; it demands moral insight; it requires compassion and generosity.

The words of the French Jesuit teacher Teilhard de Chardin (1881-1955) are on the walls of Georgetown University’s School of Foreign Service, my alma mater: “The age of nations has passed. Now, unless we wish to perish, we must shake off our old prejudices and build the Earth.”

Indeed, we must strive to shake off the old prejudices. Teilhard was perhaps ahead of his time; we are at risk of falling behind ours, indeed of going backwards.

Envoi

For all those reasons — epistemic, experiential and ethical — I think the various temples and churches should resist the scourge of neo-nationalism. There is no evidence or logic that says any divine power would endorse nationalism. Pastors should speak up to bridge, not to deepen, what divides humanity.

We must not take the Babel story as the final word about how to deal with other people. We are all our neighbor.

When we, children of Babel, ask somebody “where are you from?” it should not be done as a challenge about origin or identity but in the spirit of open encounter — an invitation to broaden horizons.

We should eschew solitary nationalism and rededicate ourselves to the harder work of solidarity across borders, without diminishing healthy patriotism in any way.

Of course, Matthew was right that we ought to “render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar’s” Matthew 22:21. We owe fundamental allegiance to our country. Fortunately for us Americans, our country was founded not on a notion of historical nativism but on the idea of commitment to future-looking “justice for all.”

Mark Medish is a former senior White House and U.S. Treasury official in the Clinton administration, and co-author with Joel McCleary of “Dancing in the Dark,” the influential three-part series of political essays published in the Spectator in 2024.