Nations and the Kingdom

Nations have no place in the Kingdom of God. They create loyalties that are false. They divide groups of people apart on false grounds.

Actually the entire concept of a nation is vague and artificial. Benedict Anderson has explained that a nation is an imagined community. Any community that is bigger than a tribe or a village has to be imagined, because its members do not know one each other. It is hard to belong to a group that you do not know (Imagined Communities).

Nations are often assumed to have a common racial origin or language. That is never totally true as most nations are a mixture of races and many have more than one language.

The other common fallacy is that a nation is defined by a common culture, but that is not true either. Most nations consist of various cultures. In a political system, one culture usually gains dominance.

Nations are is a modern invention. Up until the eighteenth century, most people did not see themselves as part of a nation. Their strongest connection was with their immediate family. They may have felt a weaker link to a broader tribal group or town. They did not see themselves as part of a nation.

Nations are artificial entities created for political purposes. Membership of a nation is actually defined by submission to political powers. The modern nation state needs this loyalty to survive. Without nationalism, modern nation states would not survive.

Our loyalty is to the Kingdom of God, not to a nation, or race.
As the Kingdom of God emerges, the barriers between nations will become irrelevant. The only division will be between those who are in the Kingdom and those who are not.