Steven Nemes has written an essay arguing that the Hebrew Bible underwrites nationalism, by which he means the desire for “a land and a people of your own.” His method is disarmingly simple. God offers Abram land, progeny, greatness, and the defeat of enemies; God later threatens a disobedient Israel with conquest, subjection, and demographic eclipse; therefore the things offered must be good in themselves, the things threatened bad in themselves, and therefore these same goods are legitimate objects of desire for any people in any age, with Americans as his chosen application. He states the conclusion plainly. Nationalism, “specifically in the sense of wanting a land and a people of your own, need not be regarded as morally suspect,” because it is “a matter of wanting good things for oneself and for one’s nation which, precisely because they are good, are legitimate objects of desire.” The argument has the shape of a syllogism and the texture of common sense, but it is mistaken twice over. The two mistakes are worth holding apart, because they belong to different disciplines and because each lends the other a borrowed plausibility.

The first mistake is one a historian is trained to catch. Nemes has read a modern political doctrine back into a set of Iron Age narratives and then praised the narratives for containing it. The second mistake belongs to the theologian. The procedure by which he draws his universal goods out of the text, the claim that any person in any generation can recognize them as naturally and intuitively desirable, is a textbook instance of a theology of the orders of creation. That is the theology the Confessing Church repudiated at Barmen in 1934, and it repudiated it precisely because German Christians had used it to consecrate blood and soil nationalism. I want to follow the essay roughly in the sequence Nemes wrote it, because the force of the response lies in watching the same pair of errors surface at every stage of his argument.

The anachronism of the nation

Everything turns on a single noun that Nemes never defines: nation. He moves without friction between the goy and ’am of Genesis, the natio of classical antiquity, and the modern nation that issues passports, conscripts armies, manages immigration quotas, and worries aloud about its birthrate. He treats all of these as one continuous thing, a natural human kind desired alike by a Bronze Age patriarch and an American voter today. The conflation does its first work immediately. From the call in Genesis 12:1–2, he concludes that “having a land of your own and a people of your own must obviously be a good thing,” and the word “obviously” is carrying the whole edifice. This is the assumption that a century and a half of careful scholarship exists to dismantle.

The dominant position in the study of nationalism, and the one I take to be broadly correct, is that the nation, understood as a sovereign people whose culture and polity should coincide, came into existence only in the late eighteenth century, or at the earliest in the century preceding the French Revolution.^[1] Ernest Gellner put it most sharply: nationalism is “primarily a political principle, which holds that the political and the national unit should be congruent,” and such a principle can arise only in a world where the centralized state and standardized high culture are already taken for granted.^[2] Benedict Anderson taught us to see the nation as an imagined community, a thing made possible by print capitalism and vernacular literacy, far from any primordial fact of human belonging.^[3] David Bell, working on France specifically, traced the invention of nationalism as a political program to the long eighteenth century, and he insisted on a distinction the literature has too often blurred, between a diffuse national sentiment of long standing and nationalism proper, a political program whose goal is “actively to construct” a nation, “casting its human raw material into a fundamentally new form.”^[4]

The discontinuities between that modern artifact and the peoples of the ancient world are concrete, and they are worth spelling out. The ’am of the Hebrew Bible is a community of kinship and cult, bound by covenant to its God; it knows kings, tribes, genealogies, and shrines, and nothing of popular sovereignty. It has no fixed borders administered by a state, no citizenship distinct from descent and worship, no schooling that standardizes a national culture, and no principle that every people deserves a government of its own. The modern nation presupposes all of this apparatus: the census and the passport, the citizen as bearer of rights, mass literacy in a standard vernacular, and the doctrine that political legitimacy flows upward from the people. What Nemes calls a natural and universal desire is therefore a historically specific construct with a datable birth. The desire for “a land and a people of your own,” as a political claim that a people so defined ought to possess sovereign territory of its own, is roughly as old as the steam engine. To find it in Genesis is to find one’s own reflection in a well and report the discovery of a face at the bottom.^[5]

Ernest Renan, whom Nemes does not cite but should have, named the mechanism with unusual clarity in 1882.^[6] The nation, far from being a natural inheritance, requires a strenuous and ongoing labor of forgetting. “Forgetting, I would even go so far as to say historical error, is a crucial factor in the creation of a nation,” he told his Sorbonne audience, a sentence that circulates in English, via Eric Hobsbawm, as the maxim that getting its history wrong is part of being a nation.^[7] What must be forgotten, Renan saw, is above all the diversity of the groups the nation has absorbed: every nation is an amalgam of once-distinct peoples that has learned to narrate itself as a single family. The irony is that the patriarchal narratives are themselves a monument of exactly this labor. The Abraham cycle reads as a founding mythology, an ancient exercise in peoplehood-making that smooths the tangled history of the tribes, with their separate shrines, rivalries, territories, and wars, into descent from one ancestor. If there is nation-building in Genesis, it lies here, in the text’s own work of unification, oriented to cult and kinship rather than to state sovereignty; and Nemes never notices it, because he is busy quarrying half-sentences for moral principles. To make Abram an exhibit for modern nationalism, he must forget the historical distance between the patriarchal household and the nation-state, and he must forget what the rest of the canon does to his premises. The forgetting does the argument’s whole work. It is the argument.

Reading Genesis as a goods catalogue

Watch the basic logical move, because Nemes repeats it at every verse. From “God offers X to Abram” he infers “X is good in itself,” and from “X is good in itself” he infers “X is a legitimate object of desire for all peoples.” Both inferences fail, and they fail in instructive ways.

The first inference slides from the descriptive to the normative without paying the toll. That a narrative reports God promising land and offspring to one called man does not establish that “having a land and a people of your own” is a free-floating natural good, detachable from the promise and available for general distribution. The text presents them as the unrepeatable content of a particular election, given by sheer promise to a man who, in the very next breath, is told the point of the whole arrangement. Abram receives a summons; the narrative knows nothing of a man surveying the human condition, rationally desiring certain goods, and then obtaining them. Even the land inside the promise is held on terms that undercut ownership in Nemes’s sense: Israel will be told, at the heart of the law, that the soil belongs to the LORD and that they dwell on it as resident aliens and tenants (Lev. 25:23). I will come back to this, because it bears directly on what a border can mean for a people whose tenure is confessed as tenancy.

That point is the clause Nemes works hardest to neutralize. Genesis 12:3 ends, “in you all the families of the earth shall be blessed.” Nemes prefers the alternative rendering, “by you all the families of the earth shall bless themselves,” following a note by the NRSVue’s editors on the Hebrew, and he supplies a theological reason of his own: the universal-blessing reading sits awkwardly beside the preceding promise to curse those who curse Abram. He concludes that “it makes better sense to say that Abram will be a standard and example of blessedness to others than that he will actually somehow be a cause of blessing for every nation on earth,” and he commits to this reading, by his own admission, “even despite Paul’s use of the latter (Gal. 3:8).” Read that last phrase slowly. Nemes has reached an interpretation of the promise to Abraham that he must defend against the Apostle Paul’s interpretation of the same verse, and he proceeds anyway. Pause over the strategy itself, because it deserves to be named before the Hebrew is weighed. Nemes hangs a major premise of his essay on a verse he concedes admits two readings; that is poor theological method by any standard, and it would be poor method even if the philology favored him. It does not. The rendering he prefers is the one the NRSVue’s own editors declined to print, keeping “shall be blessed” in their text and relegating the reflexive to a note, so that Nemes is reading against the in-line judgment of the very edition he cites. And the Hebrew weighs against him further still. The niphal of Genesis 12:3 can, taken alone, be read as a passive or as a middle; but Genesis has an unambiguously reflexive form available, the hithpael, and deploys it in the parallel promises at 22:18 and 26:4.^[8] The writers reached for a different form at 12:3, which suggests the difference was felt; had they meant the reflexive sense, the form lay ready to hand. Nemes’s reading requires the two forms to mean the same thing everywhere, and the burden of that argument falls on him. Even so, the grammar buys him nothing. On the reflexive rendering, Abram remains the one name by which all the families of the earth bless themselves; the scope of the promise is as universal as before, and the canon’s reception of it, from the psalter through the prophets to Paul and on into the rabbis, treats Abraham’s election as the hinge on which the blessing of the nations turns.^[9] What the preferred translation actually does for Nemes is convert Abram from a means of blessing to the nations into a mere standard of blessedness that others invoke. The maneuver is too convenient. The election of Abram is centrifugal in its very scope; it reaches outward toward “all the families of the earth.” Nemes cuts away the half of the verse that points beyond Abram’s household toward everyone else, and he does it because, left standing, that half sinks a nationalist reading. An election whose stated purpose is the blessing of all peoples cannot be conscripted into an ethics of keeping one’s own.

The second inference, from “good for Abram” to “good for all peoples,” is where the theological error first shows itself, and I will return to it. For now notice only that Nemes himself feels the objection and waves it away. He raises the obvious protest, that “God has only made such a covenant with Abram, not with others,” and answers in a single dismissive sentence: “This may be true, but it’s also irrelevant.” His reasoning is that “the things God offers Abram in this covenant are good in themselves. That’s why they’re being offered.” The particularity is dismissed so that the goods can float free of the covenant that bears them. This is precisely backward. The particularity of the covenant is the subject matter; to brush it aside as a technicality on the way to a universal principle is to change the subject. The canon even marks it structurally. Genesis 1–11 is the Bible’s universal history, the whole of humanity under blessing and curse, flood and dispersion; the call of Abram in chapter 12 is the precise point at which that universal frame narrows to a single ’am. Nemes reads the promises as though the narrowing had never happened, as though chapter 12 still spoke of humanity in general; the entire literary point of the call is the scandal of one family singled out from the nations just catalogued in chapter 10, and singled out for their sake. Israel is chosen, in the Deuteronomic idiom, precisely as the fewest of peoples, on no ground but that the LORD loved it and kept the oath sworn to its ancestors.^[10] To extract a general theory of national self-assertion from this is to miss the one thing the text will not stop saying about itself.

The play-by-play

Having named the engine, I can run through Nemes’s individual readings quickly, because most of them are variations on the same stall.

On Genesis 12:2, Nemes reasons that because God promises to make Abram a “great nation,” and because greatness is comparative, it must be good to be greater than other nations, who are correspondingly lesser. He states the inference as an identity: “if being great is good, being greater than others must also be good, because these two conditions are really the same.” The inference smuggles a competitive zero-sum premise into a word that need not carry it. Gadol in the promissory idiom of Genesis connotes fruitfulness and the fulfillment of a barren couple’s hope; it answers Sarah’s empty womb rather than ranking Abram on a table of the nations.^[11] Nemes converts a promise of life given against the odds into a warrant for supremacy, and then admits in a footnote that he means a “competitive advantage over other nations.” That gloss is his, supplied to the text and then read back out of it.

On Genesis 12:3 and the curse of Abram’s enemies, Nemes distills a maxim, “Good for those who wish one good, evil for those who wish one evil,” and calls it “a basic conception of justice found in many ancient sources.” His example is “Polemarchus’s definition of justice as doing good to friends and evil to enemies in Plato’s Republic I.” Helping friends and harming enemies was indeed a Greek commonplace, old enough that Polemarchus can spin it out of a saying of Simonides. But the Republic cites the commonplace precisely in order to demolish it. Socrates dismantles the definition before Book I is out, on the ground that it is never just to harm anyone, since harming a person makes him worse with respect to human excellence.^[12] Nemes has cited the stalking-horse as though it were the horse. And the Hebrew Bible’s own treatment of enemies is far more complex than “reward friends, punish enemies.” The canon that contains the imprecatory psalms also contains the command to feed your hungry enemy and return his straying ox, and the prophetic insistence that God takes no pleasure in the death of the wicked.^[13]

On Genesis 14 and Abram’s rescue of Lot with his “three hundred and eight” [sic] retainers, Nemes reasons that since Abram is promised a people, “he must also have the means to defend his own land and people from strangers who don’t care about them,” and from there derives the maxim that “any good thing must be kept safe at least in part by the threat of force.” A rescue of one’s nephew from raiders is made to license a general theory of national defense. This is a Rorschach test, with the verse for an inkblot. The narrative blesses Abram for delivering his kinsman and immediately stages the encounter with Melchizedek, whose blessing redirects the glory away from Abram’s prowess and toward “God Most High, maker of heaven and earth,” the God “who has delivered your enemies into your hand.” Abram then underlines the point himself, refusing the king of Sodom’s goods under oath so that no one may say, “I have made Abram rich.”^[14] The text takes the credit Nemes wants to give to the sword and gives it to God, and the enrichment Nemes celebrates across these chapters is exactly what Abram declines when it would come from a human king’s hand.

On Genesis 24 and Isaac’s marriage within Abraham’s kindred, Nemes infers a transhistorical endorsement of ethnic endogamy: “it is legitimate to prefer to marry within one’s own people rather than from other people-groups.” He insists the practice is “obviously required for the continued existence of one’s people into the future,” since “if no one did this, no people could survive as a distinct group.” Here the modern is most nakedly imposed on the ancient. A clan-marriage custom, motivated in the canon’s own framing by the fear of Canaanite religion rather than by anything we would recognize as ethnicity,^[15] becomes a principle of demographic self-reproduction. It is, moreover, a principle the canon itself refuses to settle in his favor. Ezra and Nehemiah do police the marriage bed in the interest of a “holy seed,” dissolving unions with foreign wives (Ezra 9–10; Neh. 13:23–27); the book of Ruth answers them with a Moabite woman who binds herself to Israel’s God, “your people shall be my people, and your God my God,” and becomes the great-grandmother of David (Ruth 1:16; 4:13–22). What grafts her in is fidelity to the LORD alone; Ruth is something like a naturalized citizen, a figure for which Nemes’s nationalism has no category. Nor does the royal line stop there: Solomon’s heir Rehoboam was born of Naamah the Ammonite (1 Kgs 14:21). A Bible whose Davidic house descends from a Moabitess and continues through an Ammonite is a poor charter for endogamy. And this, not incidentally, is the hinge where Nemes’s argument joins a darker grammar than he seems to realize. The conversion of marriage into an instrument for the reproduction of a people, the policing of who may breed with whom in the interest of the collectivity’s survival, is exactly the biopolitical logic that scholars of race and nation have traced through the modern period. Elisa Camiscioli’s study of early twentieth-century France bears the title Reproducing the French Race for a reason: the nation, once it must be reproduced, recruits the bodies and the wombs of its members into a project of selective continuity.^[16] Nemes arrives at this threshold by way of Isaac’s wife and does not appear to see the company he is keeping.

On Deuteronomy 28, finally, Nemes treats the blessings and curses as a value-theory. “Clearly a blessing is supposed to be a good thing and a curse a bad thing,” he writes, and so the content of each can be lifted out as a list of universal goods and evils. He reads the threatened punishments, conquest and dispossession and exile, and concludes that “they must evidently be bad things that anyone would want to avoid.” But the blessings take their shape from a particular covenantal fidelity and are unintelligible apart from it; lifted out as a catalogue of universal goods, they stop meaning anything at all. Even the verses he leans on cut against him. The curse of Deuteronomy 28:43–44, the resident alien rising while Israel sinks, presupposes the stranger living lawfully in the land; what it threatens is a reversal worked by Israel’s own infidelity, so that the stranger’s prospering is the symptom and covenant-breaking the disease. Nowhere does the chapter prescribe the stranger’s exclusion as the cure. Worse, Nemes reads the chapter while suppressing the book it lives in. Deuteronomy is the text that commands, again and again, love of the ger, the resident stranger. “You shall love the stranger, for you were strangers in the land of Egypt.”^[17] The same legal corpus that threatens exile for infidelity makes care for the foreigner a test of that very fidelity, grounding the command in Israel’s own memory of being the despised migrant. A reading of Deuteronomy that finds in it a warrant for keeping foreigners out, while passing over in silence its relentless command to take them in, amounts to a selection from the book, made in advance by the conclusion it intends to reach.

“Good enough for God, good enough for us”

Then comes the summary, and with it the theological heart of the matter. Nemes writes that if a land and a people of one’s own was good enough for God, Abram, and Israel, “then it can be good enough for us in the present day as well,” and he asks, “Why shouldn’t Americans or other peoples want the same thing for themselves?” He is careful to add that he need not assume the Bible is inspired revelation. He presupposes only that Scripture “presents certain things as though people in every generation can recognize them to be good.”

Read that sentence again, because it gives the whole game away. The foundation of Nemes’s argument is a natural human capacity, available to anyone in any generation apart from revelation, to recognize certain goods as good; the LORD who calls Abram out of Ur arrives on the scene only afterward. Scripture, on this account, arrives to confirm a knowledge that fallen reason already possesses. This is natural theology in its purest form, and it is the precise structure that apocalyptic interpreters of Scripture have spent a generation exposing. Douglas Campbell calls it the foundationalist or “prospective” move: you establish, on grounds of universal rational recognition, what the good is and what God must therefore be like, and only then do you allow revelation to fill in the details.^[18] The trouble is that the platform built on universal recognition is never theologically neutral. It always turns out to have been built from the materials nearest to hand, which is to say from the desires of the one doing the building. Nemes’s “goods that anyone can recognize” are, on inspection, the goods of a man who already wants to keep his country demographically as it is. Revelation is invited in afterward to bless what natural recognition has already decided.

This is the method Karl Barth thundered against, and the history here is precedent. When Emil Brunner proposed in 1934 that there remained in fallen humanity a “point of contact,” a created capacity to recognize God’s ordinances in the structures of creation, Barth answered before the year was out with a pamphlet whose title was a single word: Nein!^[19] His reasons were concrete. He had watched the Deutsche Christen discover the orders of creation, Schöpfungsordnungen, in the face of German life: the Volk, the soil, the blood, the leader, all of them presented as goods that any healthy German could recognize as naturally and intuitively desirable, all of them then crowned with biblical sanction. Barth said plainly that Brunner’s natural theology, whatever its author’s intentions, lent aid and comfort to that party. The Theological Declaration of Barmen, drafted chiefly by Barth in May of that same year, exists to say that the Church knows no source of revelation alongside the one Word of God, and that it rejects the doctrine that “other events and powers, figures and truths” could be acknowledged as God’s revelation beside that Word.^[20] The first thesis of Barmen is a direct strike at the move Nemes makes. There is no second book, no creation-order goods-list, that runs parallel to the gospel and confirms its conclusions in advance.

I do not invoke the comparison between Nemes and the theological reasoning of the Nazi era for shock. I invoke it because the structure repeats point for point: goods alleged to be recognizable by nature apart from revelation, and Scripture summoned after the fact to confirm a list that begins and ends with the land and continuity of one’s own people. And I invoke it because I have spent years reading the documents of regimes that took the nation at its word. To think and act as a Nazi, Johann Chapoutot has shown, was to reason with relentless consistency from the Volk’s internal premises, and those premises were founded on boundary-drawing, exclusion, and the alienation of the stranger.^[21] When Nemes argues that a people may rightly fear “the displacement and fading away of their own people and culture,” that it is “bad for a foreign people or culture to fare better on American soil than their own people and culture,” and that endogamy is “required for the continued existence of one’s people,” the voice we hear is the nation’s own. He is reasoning from its internal logic, and arriving where that logic always arrives. The biblical citations are the Schöpfungsordnung, supplied after the fact.

The domestication of Paul

Nemes anticipates that the New Testament will be turned against him, and his handling of Paul is the most revealing failure in the essay. He grants that Galatians 3:28 is “certainly true,” then insists that “Paul never says that nationality does not matter for anything at all or that it must be done away with.” He goes further, claiming that “by arguing that they need not become Jews by taking up the Law, Paul seems to want the Gentiles to remain Gentiles,” and he reads Revelation 7:9 to mean that “national distinctions between groups won’t be erased but rather will persist into the eschaton.” Paul becomes a friend of the nations, a guarantor that the boundaries hold all the way into the new creation.

This is Paul with his apocalyptic nerve cut. The interpreters who have most shaped how my generation reads Galatians, J. Louis Martyn, Martinus de Boer, Beverly Gaventa, read 3:28 as the announcement of a new creation that has invaded and shattered the old cosmos and its constitutive pairs.^[22] Where Nemes sees diversities to be celebrated and preserved, these interpreters see in the binaries Paul names, Jew and Greek, slave and free, male and female, the load-bearing antinomies of the present evil age; on Martyn’s reading they belong to the very stoicheia tou kosmou, the elements of the world, whose grip Christ’s apocalypse has broken.^[23] Paul ends Galatians by declaring the cosmos crucified and insisting that “neither circumcision counts for anything nor uncircumcision, but a new creation.”^[24] The point of “neither Jew nor Greek” is that the very framework within which one ranks and bounds peoples has been crucified. To read it as a charter for the persistence of national distinction is to make Paul say the opposite of what he labors to say, which is that in Christ the old cosmic dividing wall has come down.

Let me be fair to the strongest version of Nemes’s claim. One serious school of Pauline scholarship does hold that Paul expected gentiles-in-Christ to remain gentiles; Paula Fredriksen has made the case more rigorously than anyone, and on that narrow point Nemes keeps respectable company.^[25] But the concession buys him nothing. On Fredriksen’s reading, the gentiles who remain gentiles have abandoned their ancestral gods, the very gods who constituted peoplehood in antiquity, and have been grafted, as gentiles, into the eschatological family of Israel’s God. Their hope is the pilgrimage of the nations to Zion, and a pilgrimage of all peoples to one mountain is a strange proof-text for the inviolability of borders. Paul’s own practice breaks the analogy further. The gentiles who remain gentiles are integrated with Jews into a single assembly, one body at one table; when Peter drew back from eating with gentiles at Antioch, Paul opposed him to his face (Gal. 2:11–14). For the analogy to the nation-state to hold, Paul would have needed to plant assemblies sorted by ethnicity, an ecclesial separate-but-equal, each people worshiping behind its own border; the actual communities did the opposite, and the mixing is precisely what scandalized their neighbors. Even Revelation 7:9, Nemes’s own citation, preserves the nations precisely by gathering them, an innumerable multitude before a single throne; and the city into which the kings of the earth bring their glory keeps gates that are never shut.^[26] Ethnic difference persisting within the one assembly of God establishes nothing about a people’s right to keep its land demographically its own. Nemes needs that second claim, and no school of Pauline interpretation will hand it to him.

The same anti-apocalyptic flattening governs Nemes’s treatment of the parable of the Good Samaritan. He cannot let the Samaritan be a stranger, so he reclassifies him as “(estranged) kin,” sharing ancestry and worship with the Judean. The Samaritan’s good deed, Nemes writes, “is that of helping his own ethnic cousin, so to speak,” and whatever compassion the parable shows, “these are still boundaries within a people-group.” Luke himself forecloses the reclassification: when one Samaritan among ten healed lepers returns to give thanks, Jesus calls him an allogenēs, a foreigner.^[27] The evangelist who preserved the parable felt no need to soften the Samaritan’s foreignness, and a reading that must soften it has already left the text behind. The deeper problem is that Nemes is asking the lawyer’s question. A lawyer asks “who is my neighbor?” in order to draw a boundary around the obligation, to keep “neighbor” within the bounds of his own. Jesus answers with a story whose hero is the despised outsider and then hands the question back reversed: “to whom will I be a neighbor?” Nemes performs the lawyer’s boundary-drawing as though it were the parable’s lesson, when it is the parable’s target. To ethnically domesticate the Samaritan is to side with the question Jesus refused to answer.

His reading of Hebrews 11 inverts the text by the same method. The chapter says plainly that the heroes of faith confessed themselves strangers and exiles “on the earth,” that they desired “a better country, that is, a heavenly one,” and that God “has prepared a city for them.”^[28] Nemes works to keep them earthbound nationalists. The heroes, he proposes, were said to seek a heavenly homeland “only in the sense that they wanted a nation established and kept firm by God’s promise,” so that on his reading “the heroes of Heb. 11 are looking forward to the land and the people all the same.” The phrase he leans on, epi tēs gēs, describes the heroes’ estrangement, their condition as resident aliens; the object of their hope the author has already named, a heavenly country and a city God builds. Hebrews 12 then names the destination outright: the readers have come to Mount Zion, to the city of the living God, the heavenly Jerusalem. And the letter’s valediction settles whatever doubt remains: here there is no lasting city; the faithful seek the city that is to come.^[29] The writer of Hebrews makes earthly homelessness the very mark of faith, and Nemes makes it an embarrassment to be explained away.

Even on the love of enemies, Nemes concedes the command and then so qualifies it that it permits everything it was given to forbid. Loving one’s enemies, he writes, “is consistent with finding joy or at least relief in their eventual defeat and even working to defeat them oneself as the situation demands if they should never repent.” Perhaps; the tradition has always reckoned with magistracy and self-defense. He even enlists the parable of the pounds, taking the slaughter ordered by the throne claimant inside the story as Jesus’s own forecast concerning his enemies.^[30] But notice what the concession is recruited to protect: the nation’s right to keep the stranger out and to guard against the foreigner who might “fare better on American soil.” The police officer and the soldier under discipline appear nowhere in the application. The command to love the enemy is invoked only to be domesticated into the prior project of loving one’s own.

Race without the name

I said the historian’s error and the theologian’s reinforce each other, and the reinforcement is clearest here. Nemes wants a nationalism cleansed of race. His “people” is a matter of culture and kinship, he would say, and he notes in a footnote that there is nothing wrong with marrying out, “which I have done as an ethnic Romanian married to an American.” He even turns the charge around on his opponents, arguing that liberals and communists also crave a land and a people, except that “they identify their ‘people’ ideologically rather than ethnically or culturally.” I take the disavowal of racism as sincere. It is also beside the point, because the grammar he is using is the grammar of racialization whether or not he reaches for the vocabulary of color.

Étienne Balibar’s argument, developed in Race, Nation, Class, is that the nation produces itself through what he calls fictive ethnicity, the retrospective fabrication of a common descent that lets a population imagine its unity against other possible unities.^[31] Racism, on this account, belongs to the interior of the nation-form, “always indispensable to its constitution,” because the nation must continually draw and police the line between those who belong and those who merely reside.^[32] Racialization, for Balibar, is “a historical system of complementary exclusions and dominations which are mutually interconnected,” and in the French case the hatred of the Jew, the colonial subject, and the immigrant have been variations on a single grammar.^[33] When Nemes builds an ethics around the demographic continuity of “one’s own people,” the policing of marriage in its interest, and anxiety about strangers who might outcompete the natives in their own land, declining to mention race avoids nothing. He is operating its machinery with the label filed off. The disavowal of pigment is exactly what Balibar would predict, the “racism without races” of a respectable nationalism that has learned not to say the quiet part.^[34]

This is why the historian’s correction and the theologian’s correction are finally the same correction. The reason it is anachronistic to find modern nationalism in Genesis is the reason it is heretical to baptize it: the modern nation is constituted by an exclusion that the call of Abram exists to overturn. Abram is blessed so that the families of the earth may be blessed. The nation, in its modern self-understanding, is blessed in order to remain itself against them.

The cruelty at the end

All of this comes to ground in Nemes’s conclusion, which is a response to Phil Christman’s case for welcoming climate migrants. Nemes’s counsel is blunt. “Americans should instead insist that other countries do the work of strengthening themselves against natural disasters, plagues, etc. so as not to feel compelled to migrate elsewhere.” America may help if its assistance is requested, “since it would be a nice and neighborly thing to do.” But “Americans certainly don’t need to feel obligated to welcome massive numbers of migrants into their own country,” and they should not “be indifferent to eventual death of their own people and culture.”

Set this beside Leviticus and Deuteronomy and the distance is the whole gospel. Where Scripture grounds the obligation to the stranger in the memory of having been a stranger, Nemes grounds the refusal of the stranger in the fear of becoming one. Where the law gives the ger a place in the covenant assembly, owed the gleanings of the field and the rest of the Sabbath,^[35] Nemes makes him a guest who may be received on conditions and asked to leave for any or no reason. The law’s deepest word about the land, glimpsed already in the promise itself, returns here with full force: “the land is mine; with me you are but aliens and tenants.”^[36] Israel holds even the promised soil as the LORD’s resident strangers, and a people whose tenure is confessed as tenancy has no ground from which to absolutize its borders. Paul, whom Nemes wants for an ally, widens the promise in the opposite direction: what Abraham and his seed are promised to inherit, he writes, is the world (Rom. 4:13), the particular soil opened out to creation itself. Nemes calls his counsel becoming “a blessing for others while at the same time preserving their own national identity and sovereignty.” But a blessing that may not cost you your borders is not the blessing Abram was made to be. The whole scandal of the promise is that Abram’s people exists for the others, and that a people which exists only to preserve itself has, in the canon’s own terms, forfeited the reason it was called.

What Nemes has found in the Bible is his own reflection in the well. He brought nationalism with him, vested it with the authority of nature, and asked the text to confirm what he already wanted. The historian recognizes this move, because the nation has always needed the past to underwrite the present and has always been willing to misremember in order to get it; Renan’s maxim, that getting its history wrong is part of being a nation, has rarely had a neater demonstration. The theologian recognizes it too, because the Church has seen this exact argument before, made with the same structure and the same Scriptures, and has already given its answer at Barmen. The Word that calls Abram refuses every harmony with the voice of blood and soil. It is the voice that calls a man out from his country and his kindred and his father’s house, and sends him toward a blessing meant for all the families of the earth.

Notes

My thanks to Ross Neir for reading an earlier draft of this essay and providing comments.