WHY EVERY NATION NEEDS GOD… OR A REVOLUTION

How do nations establish their authority? From Hobbes and from quite a few others we know how easy it is to do this on the domestic front, that is, by appealing to the sovereign power, granted by the citizens’ Covenant for the governance of their Commonwealth. Yet such a covenant affords no special authority, and with it legitimacy, to any nation among other nations. For this reason each nation needs God to provide His Absolute authority to legitimize its existence and its actions, and to make them both consequential.

As if the nations wanted to tell the world: You don’t have to believe me, but here is what the Lord God will tell you about me…

Annuit Coeptis (see the eponymous entry in the American section), such is the ambitious motto inscribed on the reverse of the Great Seal of the United States, consistent with the American nation’s self-awareness of her Manifest Destiny. Rooted in the hallowed antiquity (being a paraphrase from the great poet of the early Roman Empire Virgil), and appealing to the supernatural authority of the Almighty, it affords a supernatural imprimatur (God Himself “gives a nod”) to all America’s undertakings!

Another interesting fact of America appealing to the authority of God is the following, seldom-quoted passage in the Star-Spangled Banner:

Then conquer we must, when our cause it is just,

And this be our motto: “In God is our trust.”

As we can notice here, God promises America victory whenever her cause is just, and the reciprocity of the nation’s trust in God is in relation to this Divine promise.

Curiously, the erstwhile mottos of the old German Empire (Gott mit uns!) and of the old Russian Empire (S nami Bog!) are indistinguishable, both meaning God is with us! (the Biblical Imanuel!) Once we are on this subject, the latest version of the lyrics of the Russian National Anthem, rewritten by the late Soviet/Russian poet Sergei Mikhalkov from his own two versions, previously written in 1942 and 1977, speaks of “the one and only beloved land, kept under God’s watch.” As we see here, God’s promise is purely defensive in this instance (God’s shield is in front of God’s sword, whereas the previous Soviet Cheka/NKVD/KGB emblem had the sword in front of the shield), playing up Russia’s solemn pledge not to fight any wars except defensive wars, reiterating the centerpiece of the famous Soviet song (to Yevgeni Yevtushenko’s words) that the Russians are not bent on fighting wars for wars’ sake, even though they know how to fight and win wars.

An even sturdier reliance on the imprimatur from God is demonstrated in the lyrics of the British National Anthem God Save The Queen/King (its author unknown!), quite belligerent, as a matter of fact, containing these words, among others:

O Lord our God arise,

Scatter her enemies

And make them fall;

Confound their politics,

Frustrate their knavish tricks,

On Thee our hopes we fix,

God save us all!

Needless to say, Israel’s national symbolism is thoroughly permeated with religious themes and substance, although an effort has been made to downplay and even minimize these references by the secular Zionists. For more on this, read through the Tikkun Olam section, and particularly, The Legend Of Tikkun Olam (the Jewish Manifest Destiny), and the Hatikva entry, which discusses the religious content of Israel’s National Anthem. Meanwhile the following two lines from the original Hatikva are significant in this respect despite the fact that they were censored, with several other religious allusions, from the official text of the Anthem:

“Israel: Your healer is God, the wisdom of His heart,

Go my people in peace, healing is imminent…”

Most modern European anthems, despite the general secularization and de-theologization of Europe contain strong references and even direct appeals to God (e. g., the Dutch anthem!). The modern (since 1922) German anthem characteristically suppresses religion in favor of a nationalistic German unity, which has been threatened historically by the North-South, Protestant-Catholic divide. The lyrics of the French anthem, La Marseillaise, go back to the French Revolution, when the French nation demolished the old royalist culture, and the old royalist religion with it, as reflected in its 1792 words. Although French Catholicism did not die on the guillotine, it was definitely weakened enough to justify the substitution of God by the Revolutionary passion of the French nation, with the words surviving intact up to this day.

So we see, that in all those cases when the authority of God is absent from the national symbolism, the void is always filled by nationalism and /or revolutionism, or otherwise the words become meaningless, and end up discarded. In my view it is much better to keep the words of the sixteenth century (the Dutch anthem) or of the eighteenth century (the French anthem) than not to have them at all (the Spanish anthem).

It would be most interesting to examine other nations’ relationship with the God concept as well, for which reason, I will be rewriting this entry on a much larger scale at a later time. In writing this entry, I am always following the line of God’s specific promise to the nation in question, thus rendering God indispensable to national authority, and thus indispensable to the nation itself.