In 1776, a group of European men began a new community on the edge of the New World. Their project was both universal in its ambition and local in its focus as it sought to extend timeless ideals to a new context. And over the next 250 years, what these men started would amass worldwide influence and come to see itself as developing a new future for all humankind.
Of course, this revolutionary founding was that of Mission San Francisco de Asis in northern California. At its inception, San Francisco was little more than a far-north outpost for the Spanish Empire, but over the next couple centuries, it would become one of the most important and powerful American cities. While George Washington was leading the United States’ struggle for freedom from British domination, this separate community with a different language and ancestry was taking shape on what would one day be American territory.
Today, Christian nationalists in the United States emphasize the importance of loving the American nation. According to this theology, a nation is a community “based in common language, manners, customs, stories, taboos, rituals, calendars, social expectations, duties, loves, and religion” as well as the “ancestral connection” that bind people to a specific “people and place.”[1] And each nation, Christian nationalists argue, “has the right to be for itself,” to prioritize its own interests over others’.[2]
But applying these ideas to the United States requires fundamentally misrepresenting American history and development: as Mission San Francisco de Asis shows, the contemporary United States is not a homogenous nation with a unified history but rather a multinational polity governing many nations with different languages, customs, stories and rituals.
And what we see in San Francisco’s history is not unique. Consider, for example, Florida. In recovering the forgotten history of Spanish North America, Carrie Gibson highlights how a 1759 Catholic parish registry in St. Augustine included Mandiga, Fara, Arara, Congolese, Carabali and Mina members who had been brought to Florida as slaves but were now free.[3] Well before the American Revolution—and before Florida was part of the United States—people of European, African and Native American ancestry, manners and custom all called Florida home.
The multinational character of American political communities was not, of course, unique to Spanish colonies. While British colonists, like the Puritans in New England, may have shared a common nationality in the way Christian nationalists imagine, their interactions with Native Americans and participation in the transatlantic slave trade meant that their political life was always multinational. Prominent New Englanders like Samson Occom or Phillis Wheatley Peters make this point clear even on the east coast: the United States has always been a contentious collection of nations.
And as America expanded geographically over the next couple centuries, this multinationalism only grew. The Norwegians settled in Minnesota, the Polish in Texas, the Chinese in California, and with time, these different parts of North America and the different nationalities that inhabited them were annexed and absorbed by the American Empire.
Since the United States has always been multinational, whether through consent or coercion, the nationalist vision that Christian nationalism promotes cannot be squared with American politics.
Instead of looking to European nationalism for guidance, then, we might look to another multinational polity, just as America’s east coast founders did. In his lesser-known work Behemoth, Thomas Hobbes, the famous 17th-century British political theorist, gives credit to Rome for securing buy-in from so many different nations:
The Romans were masters of many nations, and to oblige them the more to obey the edicts and laws sent unto them from the city of Rome, they thought fit to make them all Romans; and out of divers nations, as Spain, Germany, Italy, and France, to advance some, that they thought worthy, even to be senators of Rome, and to give every one of the common people the privileges of the city of Rome, by which they were protected from the contumelies of other nations where they resided.[4]
In other words, Rome’s greatness came from its citizens enjoying a kind of hyphenated identity: they were not just Roman but Spanish-Roman or French-Roman. The many peoples under Roman rule could be good Roman citizens without giving up their distinct national identity.
Like Rome, America is at its best when it embraces multinationalism. Filled with Irish-Americans, Korean-Americans, Pakistani-Americans and more, the United States stands to offer all nationalities rights and freedoms without making them surrender their independent identity. And rather than excluding nations or forcing them into a national box they don’t fit, we might, like Rome, find ways to inspire multinational support for the contemporary, continent-spanning American Empire.
The United States has grown and changed significantly over 250 years, and the same is true of Mission San Francisco de Asis. While the original adobe chapel still stands, a beautiful, ornate basilica stands beside it, serving the needs of the community in both Spanish and English. In the surrounding area, there are more tech bros than friars, and a statue to Miguel Hidalgo, the father of the Mexican nation, stands at the center of the neighboring Mission Dolores Park. In many ways, these changes testify to the promise of the American Empire, the ability to hold on to old languages and customs while affirming the freedoms that the United States extends to all.
[1] Stephen Wolfe, The Case for Christian Nationalism (Canon Press, 2022), 136, 139.
[2] Stephen Wolfe, The Case for Christian Nationalism (Canon Press, 2022), 118.
[3] Carrie Gibson, El Norte (Atlantic Monthly Press, 2019), 105.
[4] Hobbes, Behemoth, ed. Sir William Molesworth (John Bohn, 1840), 205.
Comments
Nothing yet. Say the first thing.
Sign in to join the conversation.