Belloc, Chesterton, and Lewis: now there’s a trifecta of Christian philosophy if ever there was one.
These weren’t cloistered, bloodless intellectuals; they were men who’d seen the world rip itself to shreds. Chesterton lost his brother Cecil in the meat grinder of WWI, and Lewis took a near-fatal hit on the battlefield.
In the post-war hysteria, as nationalism was tossed into the same toxic bin as imperialism, Chesterton fought like Achilles to uncouple the two. It wasn’t nationalism, he argued, that led to trench warfare and mustard gas. It was imperialism, the force-fed sauerkraut at bayonet-point. “Loving your wife too much doesn’t cause adultery,” he famously noted.
A clean distinction: Nationalism is loving your country as it is and wanting it to stay that way. Patriotism? A fuzzier, blander notion that gets tossed around like an old flag at a football game.
And let’s be real: I don’t want Japan to be anything but Japanese. The idea of immigration in Japan? Hate it. Not because I have some deep-seated grudge against Pakistanis, but for the same reason that, when I go to Italy, I don’t want to eat lamb curry.
I don’t want Tokyo to turn into some diluted, culturally neutral, big-box-store version of itself. I want Little Shop Around the Corner, not another godforsaken Barnes & Noble of globalism where everything looks the same, tastes the same, and thinks the same.
That doesn’t mean I want to live in Japan. Or that I want Japan to somehow transplant itself into America. I want to celebrate Japan being Japanese from a respectful distance, without the homogenizing creep of cultural corporate buyouts. The world is crazy, wonderful, and varied, and I’d like to keep it that way.
Here are the 10 greatest quotes from these Christian Philosophers that form the bedrock for how Christians should think about nations.
