Jorge Lara-Braud at the Borders of Christian Nationalism

At an August 1967 mission conference in Montreat, North Carolina, Jorge Lara-Braud offered his Presbyterian audience a vision of American exceptionalism that depended on mutuality and solidarity. He argued that the United States, at the peak of its post-Second World War power, might be uniquely redeemable by its humility. And that Presbyterians have everything to do with that.

We recently digitized his speech, “Out of the Shackles of Nationalism into the World,” something worth returning to as the church continues to respond to white Christian nationalism.

To begin, Lara-Braud offers that his audience likely conceives of the political world in binary terms—communism or Americanism—and he reorders those terms. In contrast to the outpourings of national liberation sentiment in the recently-decolonizing new nations of Africa and Asia, he warns of the greater danger of the “aggressive nationalism of powerful nations, which, with missionary fervor, attempt today to recreate the world in their image.” He would address himself not to the nationalisms of the impoverished and dispossessed Third World, but to the United States.

Lara-Braud then acknowledges that his audience is likely to see him first as a foreign national, and to take any criticism of US interests or actions as those of a stranger—or an enemy. He parries this idea, building up his status as an insider by sharing that he is a graduate of the Presbyterian Pan-American School, of Austin College, of Austin Theological Seminary, and of Princeton Theological Seminary. He claims “thirteen years of sustained United States Calvinist indoctrination,” adding that he is a permanent resident, pays taxes, and has a draft card, “which I do not plan to burn.”

The American War in Vietnam—a nightmare version of American perspicacity and ingenuity, with its computer-tabulated body counts and new industrial defoliants—haunts the speech, and despite Lara-Braud insisting throughout that he faces American nationalism from a position of admiration and love, his audience “will hear also at times expressions of chagrin or disillusionment bordering on anger.” 

His core theme is that nationalism, properly understood, is an “expression of uniqueness in solidarity”—that the uniqueness of peoples, the national character, is not inherently a tool to dominate others. To the possible surprise of contemporary readers, Lara-Braud holds that for much of its history the United States and American nationalism were a liberating force. Beginning with the Calvinist settlers of the Northeast, who through hard work and Yankee ingenuity made the cold desert bloom, to the 18th century revolutionaries who threw off the yoke of empire, Americans believed they had divine sanction for the national project. Lara-Braud points out that this terrified the powers and principalities of Europe, quoting Klemens von Metternich’s complaint that the United States of the 19th century was “fostering revolutions wherever these Americans go.” Lara-Braud can’t help but compare the United States to Cuba—“a little island in the Caribbean fostering revolutions”—but he’s not being glib. The example of the American project—seditious to Europe, liberating to Latin America—built up respect for us abroad.

For Lara-Braud, the Calvinist churches identified Christianity with the United States’ sense of national destiny. Following Alexis De Tocqueville, the separation of church and state meant, ironically, that “the church could offer her blessing but never her criticism” to the state. He quotes a minister in Troy, New York, speaking in 1859 of the California gold rush: “As long as pagan people occupied California the gold below its soil remained hidden,” vowing that Christianizing all of Latin America would “deliver over their rich internal resources to the Anglo-Saxon and Anglo-American races.” By the end of that century, liberating American nationalism had putresced into Yankee imperialism. Lara-Braud quotes the Indiana senator Albert Beveridge justifying American occupation of Cuba, Puerto Rico, and the Philippines in 1898: “We govern the Indians without their consent. We govern our territories without their consent. We govern our children without their consent.”

For Lara-Braud, the missionary endeavor and the American sense of national destiny come from an authentic feeling of divine sanction, even if he delivers this idea slightly sardonically: “After all, the blessings of God are not to be withheld from the benighted people who still dwell in darkness.” Each impulse goes awry when believers insist that strangers become “either possessions or replicas of the United States.”

What are believers to do with this legacy? Jorge Lara-Braud instructs the audience to go back to the founding texts of American democracy and take them at their word—he’s a believer in the American Dream. But taking the founding texts literally also means that Christians must “look with repentance at those people for whom the Dream became a nightmare.”

Lara-Braud makes clear that American actions reverberate in and across the world. We affect others by our moral example, our political aims, and our material assistance. He tells his audience, “The plain truth is that today the greatest missionary service you can render for Mexico, the greatest missionary service you can render for Korea, the greatest missionary service you can render for Congo, is to strive for the humanization of American society.

Despite everything, the missionary endeavor carries within it radical seeds. For Lara-Braud, the equality of all people before God is a revolutionary idea, creating authentic encounters between peoples, despite the realities of geopolitical and economic power. The reconciling ministry of the church prepares us to find a way “out of the shackles of nationalism into the world.”

Listen to Jorge Lara-Braud's full speech in Pearl. 

Learn more

Emily Conroy-Krutz, "Christian Imperialism: Converting the World in the Early American Republic" (2018)

Katie Geneva Cannon, "Christian Imperialism and the Transatlantic Slave Trade" (2007)

Richard Poethig, "The Missionary As Change Agent" (2018)