My apologies, brother, not to have understood correctly what you were saying.
Thank you for explaining your thoughts further. It is genuinely appreciated. May the Lord bless you in your service for Christ.
Gratefully accepted, Brother.
I'm not sure how familiar you are with the current controversy in the United States regarding "Christian Nationalism," which has (in my view) gone off the rails by conflating ethnicity with how Christ's crown rights apply to political entities. I have been steering clear of discussion of national identity and how ethnicity applies to that because I don't want to be associated with ethnic bigots who might, if given the chance, make my interracial marriage illegal.
But my ancestors are from Italy, and I am very much aware of the role of building a national identity based on shared Italian ethnic heritage that was central to the Risorgimento in Italy, and the parallel movement in creation of the German Empire, and centuries earlier, in the creation of a unified French state as the French monarchs slowly absorbed the once-independent small principalities of what is now southern and southeastern France, including major cities like Lyon. You, unlike most people reading here, live on the Continent. If I say that my ancestors are from the Italian Alps where they had to assert an Italian identity against "foreign" influences during the 1800s and early 1900s, you'll understand the issues in ways most people in the United States will not. This wasn't just ancient history; as recently as the outbreak of World War II, the Italian House of Savoy insisted on being given back their historic Savoyard territories in far southeastern France on the west side of what is now the Italian-French border. It didn't make any sense politically or economically, but the reigning monarchs of Italy had a centuries-old dispute with the French and took the opportunity to take the territory.
Much of this makes little sense to Americans. The United States, as a multiethnic immigrant society, is an outlier in world history.
Many of the criticisms in America of French "ethnic pride" are made by Americans who are ignorant of European history, not uncommonly including the history of their own ancestors before they emigrated to America. When I hear an American with a Polish last name criticizing the French for being "too proud of being French" following a two-week vacation in France, I feel like reminding that person that Poland would not exist today if it had not been for Polish national pride in an ethnic identity when Poland was repeatedly partitioned and for many years no longer even existed as a government.
Other criticisms of "national pride" are made by people whose view of "internationalism" owes more to pre-Stalinist versions of communist and socialist "one world" ideals than they admit, or sometimes than they even know themselves because "one world" assumptions and "cosmopolitanism" have become part of the accepted liberal worldview in much of the West.
When Americans blast the French for "pride in their Frenchness and their language," far too often they're taking American presuppositions that simply don't apply to Europe and don't realize that what they're blaming the French for doing is what nearly all European nations had been doing for centuries until just the last half of the 1900s, or they are uncritically accepting a European anti-nationalist view of cosmopolitan internationalism that really is quite foreign to conservative politics.
This isn't just political theory. It directly affects mission work.
A Protestant church in Italy needs to "look Italian and appreciate the Christian heritage of Italy." A Protestant church in France needs to "look French and appreciate the Christian heritage of France." Same for Protestants in Spain or any other European nation with a strong ethnic heritage.
If it doesn't, it ends up being attacked as "those ignorant American evangelicals who don't care anything about our culture and our heritage, and think we all need to worship with hands in the air when they aren't clapping, and singing from an overhead projector to the accompaniment of guitars."
In other words, French or Spanish or Italian people end up rejecting the gospel because it "looks like Americans who don't value history or heritage."
Conservative Christians in foreign missions need to understand the cultures into which they come, and "buy in" when possible.
Much about the success of Korean Presbyterianism has to do with successfully co-opting the pre-existing Confucian model of traveling village teachers, and teaching Koreans, very much like what the Apostle Paul once did in Greece with the altar to an unknown God, that the unknown Korean deity in the pre-Buddhist shamanistic Korean worldview, known as "hannanim" (translated to "most holy one") about whom nothing could be known but who was remote and had created the world and all in it, was the Creator God of the Bible. When the Japanese persecutors tried to force Korean Christians to bow to the emperor of the hated Japanese occupiers and worship the Japanese emperor as god, Korean Christians came to be viewed as heroic advocates of Korean nationalism who were willing to die rather than worship the Japanese emperor. Secular Koreans looked to Christians in Korea, and rather than regarding Christianity as a foreign faith, said, "these people are better Koreans than we are, because they are willing to die for their faith by refusing to worship the emperor, while we bow to the imperial Shinto shrine to save our lives."
Tapping into nationalism and building an indigenous national church are not bad things. It worked in Korea, and worked spectacularly.
It might well be what worked five centuries ago in the Netherlands and Scotland, and what the Huguenots tried to do in France.
The gospel is more important than ethnicity. I know that. Salvation is by grace, not by race, and we forget that at our peril.
But if we don't understand the culture of a country where we want to bring the gospel, what we're usually doing in fact is bringing American values into a foreign country, and that rarely works very well.
