Reading and Thinking about Imagined Communities

When I was in a historiography class in grad school, I remember getting introduced to the idea of the imagined community, a term coined by Benedict Anderson in 1983 in his attempt to explain the rise of nationalism. The title of his book was, perhaps not surprisingly, Imagined Communities. 

Apparently, this concept has influenced scholars well outside the historical profession. This summer, I started working toward a graduate certificate in human geography to extend my ability to teach undergrad classes in another field. My first class was Political Geography, and the concept of the imagined community came up during a week that focused on nationalism. I'd at least gutted the book in my doctoral program and had a decent understanding of the main point, but I decided to read it again, and it got me to thinking about certain how this concept intersects, or more accurately conflicts, with historically Christian views of ultimate reality. 

Anderson noted the universalizing nature of Latin as it was used in medieval Europe. This started to unravel as modern print culture came into being with the use of the printing press, which contributed to the use of the vernacular in print. It also led to the concept of print capitalism as these printing presses needed to sell books and papers in the vernacular to make money. 

Anderson writes about the importance of the novel to the concept of empty time and how it created the imagined community of the nation. The novel has multiple characters carrying out different actions simultaneously. Time is not always depicted in a linear manner headed toward a singular end in this construction. Now people could imagine multiple people as historical actors carrying out their lives at the same time in the same community. 

Newspapers were important factors as well, because they reported on news from the various parts of a given nation or empire. This allowed people to imagine themselves a part of a broader community that expanded outside their immediate neighborhood. They spoke the same language and sometimes had similar ethnic and/or religious backgrounds. To make a long story short, this provided an important starting point for the idea of the nation as the primary unit of political organization. Prior to the rise of print capitalism, political organization tended to focus on kingdoms (i.e., patron/client relationships) or multi-national empires (keep in mind that the nation in a geographic sense is defined as pretty much synonymous with an ethnic group--it's slightly more complicated, but not by much). 

Effectively, Anderson makes the argument that all of this tended to create a world in which people in disparate geographic locations could imagine themselves as members of a nation. These people don't know each other. They experienced life in different lived communities, but they imagined themselves as a part of the nation. 

There is a fairly robust literature (including Coakley, 2004) that looks at the ways officials have created national origin myths to contribute to social cohesion within a nation. At times, these are rooted in some historic fact, but sometimes, they are entirely fabricated. While even Anderson would argue that nationalism is ubiquitous, it seems in many ways to be a house built on shifting sand. 

There is currently a debate over Christian nationalism, and a few authors, most notably Stephen Wolfe with his The Case for Christian Nationalism, seem to base the Christian nation more on the Christian NATION (in terms of ethnicity) as much, as if not more so, than on the idea of a CHRISTIAN nation (with the emphasis on the Christian part). Wolfe goes so far as to argue that it's good for a Christian nation to keep out Christian refugees who do not look are talk like them. This is only one argument Wolfe makes, but it's salient for this issue of the imagined community. 

This has caused me to reflect on the concept of the Christian community, historically speaking. Traditionally, Christians have referred to themselves in familial terms, even when looking back into the New Testament texts. In the first century, both Jews and Gentiles made up the Christian community, and the community had ties that transcended ethnicity or even natural families. Early Christians found their ultimate identity in Jesus Christ, and that was the primary tie that bound them together. If the Christian view of the world is correct, they were correct on ultimate, and even eternal, reality, whereas the current nationalists who focus on a given political entity are focused primarily on a transitory social structure.