Opinion | Nationalists Don’t See What Is Special About Our Biblical Nation

And the political implications of the Bible are not straightforward. Nationalist conservatives emphasize sexual morality and strong borders. During the revolution, by contrast, the central issue was the danger of monarchy. Not only Paine and Franklin but also more orthodox writers contended that the Hebrew Bible promotes skepticism toward charismatic rulers and the centralization of authority. With the growth of executive power since World War II, this lesson remains essential.

The fundamental problem is that the Bible balances a depiction of an autonomous Hebrew commonwealth with a transcendent standard of justice. “If there is a central political message for Israel throughout the Bible, it is this,” writes Rabbi Meir Soloveichik. “For Israel to deserve independence, it must remember that it exists for a calling more important than independence itself.” Indeed, much of the biblical narrative is devoted to Hebrews’ failure to uphold their covenant.

The Declaration of Independence echoes the idea that sovereignty must serve a higher purpose. Rather than merely presenting a case against British rule of the colonies, it affirms universal truths. In an 1859 letter, Abraham Lincoln put it this way: “All honor to Jefferson — to the man who, in the concrete pressure of a struggle for national independence by a single people, had the coolness, forecast, and capacity to introduce into a merely revolutionary document, an abstract truth, applicable to all men and all times, and so to embalm it there, that to-day, and in all coming days, it shall be a rebuke and a stumbling-block to the very harbingers of re-appearing tyranny and oppression.”

Lincoln further developed that argument following his election to the presidency. During his journey to Washington to take the oath of office, he speculated that “there must have been something more than common that those men struggled for; that something even more than National Independence; that something that held out a great promise to all the people of the world to all time to come.” Americans, Lincoln concluded, are an “almost chosen people” dedicated to principles of freedom and civic equality.

It is understandable that conservatives — and others — have become wary of this rhetoric. Too often it has served as an excuse for costly and unnecessary wars. Americans’ responsibility to oppose tyranny at home is not a calling to overthrow it abroad.

At the same time, we should resist an impulse that also afflicted the biblical Hebrews. In 1 Samuel 8, the Hebrews demand to become “like all the other nations” by abandoning their special obligation to God and choosing a king who fights for only them. Like Israel in its faithless moments, America is untrue to itself when we neglect individual rights and equality among citizens of various origins, faiths and creeds in favor of cohesion and power. Nationalism that opposes what is unique in the nation is not conservative. It is a contradiction in terms.