In the books of Judges, the hero Samson kills a lion in the land of his mortal enemies, the Philistines. Returning a few days later, he finds the carcass of the lion full of bees and honey. "Out of the eater came something to eat - Out of the strong came something sweet".
This little story, pregnant with theological meaning, provides Doug Gay with the title of his Christian rehabilitation of nationalism. Gay, lecturer in Practical Theology at the University of Glasgow, is a nationalist and a Scot. The book, therefore, is not an idle academic exercise, but carried a particular intent in the run up to the referendum on Scottish independence – to think theologically about the nationalism that very nearly ended a 307-year political union.
The lion and the honey Gay reads as a metaphor for the central question of political theology and ethics, the “relationship between power and virtue”. Even more suggestively, by his conclusion, the lion has become nationalism itself, which must be broken before the sweetness within can be discovered. Only a nationalism which renounces the vices of “imperialism, essentialism and absolutism” can become a source of sweetness – a more just society. He implies, though doesn’t say outright, that an independent Scotland rooted in this ‘discipled nationalism’ would have been a more Christian society, though the relationship between church and society is one he draws more carefully than that description would suggest.
His argument is that Scottish nationalism is more textured and complex than the flat nationalism which theologians and others have found easy to dismiss. Gay points to Scottish nationalism’s adoption of Gramsci’s notion of the ‘national popular’ where a national culture – as against politics – becomes the place of revolutionary struggle. Gay is clearly right, in that what was seen during the referendum campaign was far more civic than it was ethnic. From Gay’s point of view, this is a nationalism worth sitting down with - its object is the pursuit of the good within the nation and beyond it. It’s a provisional, Augustinian civic nationalism – subject to interrogation about the nature of its claims and loves.
Drawing eclectically from Catholic Social Teaching, the Reformed and Anabaptist traditions, he offers a ‘Christian idea of society’ – riffing on TS Eliot’s ‘idea of a Christian society: beloved and joyful, free just and equal, landed and lawful, complex and peaceful. Crucially, Gay acknowledges that independence would have had to ‘work’, in the sense of drawing Scotland toward the above. So even when nationalism may be retrievable from the perspective of political theology, there is still a range and practical and prudential judgements to be made about whether the nation state of Scotland would have in fact been better placed than the United Kingdom to deliver a good society.
On balance, Gay argued, an independent Scotland would have been no more at risk than a Scotland which remains part of the Union, and in key areas would have experience greater opportunities for the ‘sweetening’ of society. We will never know (?). For what it’s worth now, I thought that Gay underplayed the risks, and overplayed the opportunities. After what would have been a period of absolute pandemonium, an independent Scotland would have found itself muddling along on more or less the same course, facing all the same challenges as every other social democracy, and struggling with the often contradictory expectations of independence supporters. That’s politics – some might say, and many a nationalist took and take the view that if Scotland is going to be in a mess it ought to be a mess of Scottish making.
And there's the rub. Gay does not so much idealise as fail to appreciate the extent to which nationalism is Scotland’s version of a wider family of ‘anti-politics’ movements and figures haunting politics on these islands and beyond. Some of these are more benign and coherent than others. All simplify the complex political and economic challenges and offer a single attractive solution – withdrawal from the EU, bearing down on immigration, Scottish independence. These exist because people have genuine grievances – and claims which are not being satisfied, nor even heard, in the existing settlement. But at their worst, they’re little more than movements of political recrimination. The irony of the claim that the ‘No’ campaign was relentlessly negative, while the yes campaign a carnival of hope, is that independents had their own bogeymen, ideological (‘neo-liberalism’), personal (‘toffs’ and ‘quislings’) or geographical (‘Westminster’).
Readers might be wondering why we’re reviewing this book after the referendum and not before. First, it’s a book that continues to deserve attention – the vote went one way, but the issues remain. There continues to be a huge appetite for political change in Scotland, expressed in a broad-based nationalist movement. Gay’s book is an important theological reading of the movement up until 18 September 2014.
Second, it is a reminder that we need to pay careful attention to the theo-politics of the present moment, with all its uncertainties and opportunities. There’s another reading of the Samson story which I think reflects the discourse of discontentment which has marked this decade. The chosen and sweet people will flourish in the broken body of the lion/the Philistines/the ‘Westminster-elite’/the European Union/the immigration system. There are certainly lions that need slaying. It’s the exceptionalism, and the bitterness with which that comes, that we ought to be wary of embracing.
Honey from the Lion: Christianity in and the Ethics of Nationalism is published by SCM.
Image by James Bradley from flickr.com under the Creative Commons Licence.
