Italian nationalist Giuseppe Mazzini was in many ways the father of modern nationalism. It may surprise 21st-century readers accustomed to thinking of nationalism as a right-wing phenomenon to discover that in the middle of the 19th century, Mazzini was a man of the left. His principles were profoundly Christian, but Mazzini did not see the Roman Catholicism that dominated Italy as a vehicle for nationalism; and that wasn’t because Mazzini wanted to fracture Christendom into a cacophony of jingoistic, self-glorifying nations. Mazzini feared that the Roman Catholic hierarchy obliterated the political and social ability for humans to treat each other with Christian fraternity. Nationalism, paradoxically, became for Mazzini a means of actuating universal Christian brotherhood. “Your first duties — first as regards importance — are,” Mazzini wrote, “towards Humanity. You are Men before you are either Citizens or Fathers. If you do not embrace the whole human family in your affection, if you do not bear witness to your belief in the Unity of that family — consequent upon the Unity of God — and in that fraternity among the peoples which is destined to reduce that Unity to action…” If, wheresoever a fellow creature suffered, “or the dignity of human nature is violated by falsehood or tyranny — you are not ready, if able, to aid the unhappy, and do not feel called upon to combat, if able, for the redemption of the betrayed or oppressed — you violate your Law of life; you comprehend not that Religion which will be the guide and blessing of the Future.” Humans, then, were made to help fellow humans in their embodied and natural associations. Roman Catholic polemics, Mazzini infers, were capable of moving Christians towards charity, but only so that charity would ultimately help humans escape their natural lives for something profoundly beatific, spiritual, and unnatural.
If the Roman Catholic Church’s commitment to universalism was incapable of aiding fellow humans to attain their true humanity, so too was any individual person. “The individual,” Mazzini declared, “is too insignificant, and Humanity too vast. The mariner of Brittany prays to God as he puts to sea: Help me, my God! my boat is so small and Thy ocean so wide! And this prayer is the true expression of the condition of each one of you, until you find the means of infinitely multiplying your forces and powers of action.” If the universalism of Roman Catholicism, and conversely the autonomous individual, were unable to create healthy Christian fraternity, what institution would help mankind order the various human communities of Christians worldwide?
“This means was provided for you by God when he gave you a Country; when, even as a wise overseer of labour distributes the various branches of employment according to the different capacities of the workmen, he divided Humanity into distinct groups or nuclei upon the face of the earth, thus creating the germ of Nationalities. Evil governments have disfigured the Divine design. Nevertheless, you may still trace it, distinctly marked out — at least as far as Europe is concerned — by the course of the great rivers, the direction of the higher mountains, and other geographical conditions. They have disfigured it by their conquests, their greed, and their jealousy even of the righteous power of others; disfigured it so far that, if we except England and France, there is not perhaps a single country whose present boundaries correspond to that design.”
Nations were not so much ethnographic tribes as they were distinct groups of peoples who lived and loved in particular places in particular ways through particular customs and traditions. That humans had bastardized aspects of nationalism through jingoism and lust for conquest did not annihilate the fact that human nations were real and could act as brother peoples, loving each other in Christian charity.
For Mazzini, nations were inevitable. “The Divine design will infallibly be realized. Natural divisions, and the spontaneous innate tendencies of the peoples, will take the place of the arbitrary divisions sanctioned by evil governments.” The map of Europe would, Mazzini hoped, “be redrawn.” Countries of the peoples, “defined by the vote of free men, will arise upon the ruins of the countries of kings and privileged castes, and between these countries harmony and fraternity will exist.” Before men could “associate with the nations of which Humanity is composed,” said Mazzini, “they must have a National existence. There is no true association except among equals. It is only through our Country that we can have a recognized collective existence.”
The church, because of its spiritual nature, could not rightly give a collective political voice to a respective people. A distinctly secular and non-ecclesiastical expression of Christianity informed Mazzini’s desire for the nations. Protestantism, he believed, corrected some abuses of Roman Catholicism, but by the 19th century, in his reading, tended towards individualism. Mazzini, reared and educated in a Roman Catholic realm, was most likely unaware of the distinct Protestant conception of Christ as a universal mediatorial king. Rev. Dr. Scott Swain, president of Reformed Theological Seminary Orlando, conveyed this idea succinctly in a social media post. The reason, Swain noted, “Protestants don’t seek one world government — politically or ecclesiastically — is because we have one world Governor: the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, who rules all nations and all national churches.”
Whether Protestant thought believed that the state needed to confess that in its constitutions was immaterial. Christ was and is the universal king, and all nations were in submission to him. The Protestant principle of churches delineated along national lines was not, by this standard, fracturing a universal ecclesial and political order. Instead, Protestant national churches were a medium for uniting Christians with various cultural, linguistic, ecclesiastical, and social characteristics under the universal kingship and high priestly office of Jesus.
Nationalism, then, was a unifying principle rather than a divisive one. Mazzini’s understanding of nationalism as a means of Christian fraternity was therefore not antagonistic to Protestant ecclesiastical commitments. If anything, they would have been mutually affirming, had Mazzini himself had more exposure to Protestant thought.