Emil Kauder · 1950
Emil Kauder’s article in The Virginia Quarterly Review examines nationalism as a religious inheritance transformed by secularization. Across six sections, it moves from a theological account of collective spirit through the historical displacement of Christendom by the nation, then distinguishes nationalism’s mythical self-understanding from its sociological reality. Its central claim is that national spirit appropriates the unifying and life-giving functions of the Holy Ghost. This approach addresses two connected problems: whether national spirit is a real social phenomenon or an illusion, and whether it joins communities together or drives them into conflict.
The national spirit, one of the main ideas of nationalism, is not only a sociological concept for the scholar, but also a pseudo-religious idol for the nationalist.
Kauder understands secularization not simply as the disappearance of faith, but as the transplantation of religious attributes into earthly institutions. Reason and empirical knowledge can explain nature without satisfying the demand for an ultimate purpose; secular philosophies consequently borrow theological forms while suppressing their religious foundations. State omnipotence, secular martyrdom, and national adoration reproduce attributes or practices formerly associated with God and Christianity. Kauder acknowledges that direct historical connections cannot always be demonstrated: part of his argument rests on strong structural analogies.
The Holy Ghost supplies his principal model. As an all-pervading spirit, it joins believers to God, transforms individual life, and creates a mystical community. Nationalist philosophy transfers these capacities to the nation. Hegel’s national spirit exists independently of individuals, yet inspires them and supposedly produces cultural achievements through their genius; Savigny’s historical school of law participates in the same reconstruction. British, Irish, and Russian thinkers exhibit related patterns, with differing empirical or mystical emphases. The decisive change is the restriction of spiritual community from believing humanity to a particular national group. Kauder treats these doctrines as scholarly articulations of popular sentiments, while leaving their precise direction of influence unresolved.
The historical argument explains why this transferred theology found an audience. Medieval Christianity offered an encompassing community, made perceptible through preaching, images, ritual, and ecclesiastical authority. Reformation divisions and subsequent secularization weakened that imaginative unity. The nation became its replacement because it combined an extensive social horizon with constant involvement in everyday life.
Man had lost his all-embracing community. However, man cannot exist without belonging to a social universe, so he sought for a new totality and found it in the nation.
Language, continuous territory, and the state bind individuals to this new totality. Military victories and achievements in culture, science, technology, and sport offer participation in collective glory. National anthems, sacred anniversaries, heroes, and relics reproduce religious instruments of belonging. Kauder situates this development chiefly within Western history and regards nationalism elsewhere as a Western import. That historically situated premise limits the article’s reach: its genealogy follows the dissolution of Western Christendom, rather than establishing an account of every form of collective identity.
Section IV develops the psychological and material mechanisms sustaining national faith. Individuals unable to secure personal fame acquire glory vicariously through celebrated compatriots. Popular history therefore differs from critical historical scholarship: it assembles exemplary ancestors, achievements, and golden ages to confirm the group’s greatness. Legends and discredited heroes remain effective because their function is devotional rather than evidentiary. Portraits, vernacular storytelling, monuments, battlefields, and state emblems form what Kauder calls the national “memory book.” His concept of the cultural landscape is particularly important: geography becomes nationally meaningful through the historical landmarks and remembered events embedded within it.
Kauder then separates the nationalist’s supernatural explanation from the sociologist’s account of collective influence. Rejecting both idolatry and wholesale dismissal, he locates national spirit in shared memories and valuations reproduced through education, daily exposure, and transmission between generations.
The author presents here a theory of immanence: the national spirit is inherent in all the minds of the co-nationals.
This is the article’s central conceptual correction. National spirit need not exist as an independent oversoul to possess social reality: it persists through overlapping dispositions within individual minds, surviving changes in their human carriers. Nor does it require agreement on clearly formulated principles. Asked to define their national way of life, individuals would produce contradictory answers; their practical solidarity depends instead on indistinct feelings.
In effect, vague feelings are the common denominator of the national spirit in the different minds.
Vagueness both enables unity and conceals moral contradictions. National memory blends courage with brutality, honesty with treachery, and cultural achievement with domination. Uncritical admiration treats the whole inheritance as glorious. The same mechanism that joins compatriots can thus sanctify aggression against others.
The final section considers competing evaluations of nationalism. Against critics who identify national spirit with demonic idolatry, humanitarian nationalists recognize cultural accomplishments that are national in origin but international in validity. Kauder accepts this distinction: works deserve recognition through standards extending beyond their contribution to national prestige. Yet he doubts that humane education can expand this critical outlook quickly enough to restrain fanaticism.
National truth, tempered to meet the ends of national glory, is no longer straightforward truth; it may even be a lie if it is in the interest of a nation.
The conclusion turns the genealogy into a warning: when national glory becomes the supreme criterion, truth and justice lose independent authority. Germany’s descent into Nazism exemplifies the danger, but Kauder explicitly refuses to exempt the United States. His proposed safeguard is a humanitarian Christianity governed by tolerance and charity, not an uncomplicated restoration of religious power; he acknowledges Christianity’s own history of persecution. The article’s enduring relevance lies in explaining how collective identities can inherit sacred authority while remaining socially immanent—and how attachment to a shared past becomes destructive when loyalty overrides moral judgment.
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