Nativism v. Globalism

A century ago, our country was ramping up for WWI. The goal: to save the world for democracy. My father used to say US flags first appeared in churches after WWI, when we thought we had saved the world from despots and monarchs, saved the world for democracy. All that death and all that misery, the worst the world had ever known till then, had somehow made the world more holy. Or so we thought, till WW2.

Soon after WWI, a monumental evil began rising in Europe, a kind of nativism gone wild.

Purity of race, the superiority of whites, and the nobility of culture and tradition, all these roots twisted into something that grew into medical, political, legal and social theories, and into a German patriotism that wanted to rid itself of all kinds of people who were thought to be dragging Germany down.

And so the walls began to arise. The purging began.

The first to be taken away were leftists. People were terrified of what had happened in Russia, and feared leftists. But it was conservative Germans who built the Third Reich.

Then it was dark-skinned people (Gypsies, who were everywhere and had been for centuries; and Africans, many from America, who had been making a living playing jazz in cabarets, were next. Germans were to be white, racially pure.

Homosexuals were next. Germans were to be straight – not gay. Though no one has ever been sure about Hitler’s sexuality.

Then it was the retarded and disabled. Germans were to be in perfect health, not malformed.

Finally it was Jews – Germans were to be Christians.

Here was the West — after a hundred years of empire-building around the globe, years in which Germany and Britain and France and Holland had brought home exotica of every kind, and displayed it – animals in zoos, native peoples in universities, artifacts in museums, art in galleries — as part of the glory of their nation – their nations, whose universities were dependent on brilliant Jewish scholars, whose lawyers, doctors, scientists, had world roots.  They pulled in and in and in, seeking to purge all manner of foreign influences.

And here we are, in 2016. Our election rhetoric dances with all these ideas, examining their possible strengths, and labelling many of them virtuous.

Are Moslems Americans? Should we quarantine them? Expel them? Put them through rigorous tests of fealty?

Does God despise gays? Is it alright to kill them or not?

What kind of money should we spend on special needs programs and people?

Are black people more murderous, more sexually deviant, than whites? Do they all carry guns?

Should we stop allowing immigrants?

Who will save us? And what is going on here?

It isn’t just the US. These fears, this turbulence and these ‘solutions’, are appearing all over Europe now. Brexit. Anti-immigrant movements. Attacks on young Moslem men coming out of temple services. All of this is everywhere.

Where are the speeches about loving your neighbor? About doing good to those who spitefully use you? About turning the other cheek? About the infinite mercy of God?

Who is telling the stories of Ruth and Job, and of the good people of Ninevah, all of them followers of other religions, worshippers of other deities, and all of them heroes for Jews and Christians – and Moslems – heroes who live in our Scriptures as examples of the great goodness that comes forth from God’s other peoples – the people who are not us?

Jesus, who held up a Samaritan for exemplary virtue, who healed a Syro-Phoenician woman’s child and proclaimed her wise about virtue, who cured a Roman soldier’s servant, whose Spirit fell on a crowd from many nations, is clearly a Globalist. Not a Nativist.  And I, when I am lifted up, will raise all people unto me, he said. Not, all Christians. Not, all Jews. No one left behind. One world.
___________________________________________________________
Globe: Image from Openclipart.org