“Nationalism refers to a set of political and ethical commitments that arose at the end of the eighteenth century and was then shaped throughout the nineteenth century by romanticism and the industrial revolution.”
Kevin De Young
6 Questions for Christian Nationalists
The idea that Nationalism is what De Young says it is, is a fantasy. Nationalism has been around from Old Testament times. Nationalism is simply defined as the prioritizing of one’s people as descended from a common ancestor, sharing a common history, while owning a common religion. If De Young wants to talk about Modern Nationalism that is one thing but to suggest that Nationalism didn’t exist before Modern Nationalism is utter nonsense.
Ironically, by defining nationalism in terms of Jacobin thought, DeYoung is acting as a hostile witness against his own position. Because he admits his presuppositions on the subject lay aside the definition of nations found in genesis in favor of the definition cooked up by Liberal revolutionaries in direct defiance of Christianity. (Dan Brannan)
It is interesting that DeYoung is using the same reasoning that the pro-homosexuals use when they claim the word homosexual did not occur in the Bible before 1946 when the RSV added it.
The pagan Roman Empire was the great predecessor of modern civic nationalism, and incidentally the Jacobins admired pagan Rome very much (that was part of their anti-Christian worldview; they wanted to return to the “virtuous” Rome of early days, the Rome of Cato and Brutus, and they most certainly rejected the Christian Rome of Constantine).
https://archive.org/details/cicerospractical0000unse/page/182/mode/2up?view=theater
“Thus, though the level of political integration in the Italian peninsula in Cicero’s time was not yet as high as it would be in Augustus’s time a generation later (when Augustus could speak of tota Italia), it was certainly comparable to the level of political integration of a proto-modern state (seventeenth-century France, for example). To put the point provocatively, the Roman commonwealth in Cicero’s time, at least in the Italian peninsula, had more in common in important respects with a proto-modern state than with a small Greek polis, despite the superficial similarity in political institutions between Rome and the typical Greek polis.3
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The similarity between Cicero’s model of political community and the model of the modern national state is not entirely surprising, as I have already intimated, since Rome shows important similarities to the modern state.”