The debate over America’s role in the world has, in recent years, collapsed into a binary between two ideological extremes. One is the idea that nations and their states are intrinsically parochial and should therefore be gradually dissolved in favor of cosmopolitan ideas and institutions. At the same time, nationalists argue the opposite position: that the nation is the only community that matters and that, as a corollary, foreign policy should be thought of as a zero-sum game where any concern for other nations must inevitably come at the expense of one’s own.
Christian realists like Reinhold Niebuhr have spent decades resisting the first temptation, arguing that “nations,” from the Greek ethnos, are both morally and prudentially legitimate building blocks of the international system. Yet today, having spent decades primarily concerned with debating cosmopolitan liberals, the rise of Christian nationalism has taken many center-right Christians by surprise. Resisting the pull of Christian nationalism will require a theological approach to nationhood specifically, not just to sin and power generally. That theology is sitting, mostly untouched, in the dogmatics of Herman Bavinck.
Bavinck is enjoying something of a renaissance, with his Reformed Dogmatics and the recent reissue of his shorter works introducing him to a generation of Christians as a theologian of common grace, faith and science, and the Christian worldview. But, in contrast to his contemporary Abraham Kuyper, Bavinck is far less known as a political theorist. However, as a Dutch parliamentarian and Reformed theologian, Bavinck wrote amid the rise of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century nationalism, the expansion and contestation of European imperialism, and the earliest efforts to establish an international legal order through the Hague Peace Conferences. Bavinck offers an account of nationhood that holds in tension both the particularity of all the peoples in the world and Christianity’s message of universal brotherhood of all men.
The Nation as Organism, Not Mechanism
Bavinck’s instinct, inherited from the broader neo-Calvinist tradition of Kuyper, is grounded in his own conception of creation wherein nations developorganically rather than being politically engineered. As he points out, “family, society, and state exist and live by virtue of the order of God in nature and retain their full independence alongside the church.” A nation is not merely a social contract across individuals, nor a tax-supported bureaucracy, nor an ethnic unit. It is a providentially formed community, typically with a shared sense of language, history, custom, and religion woven together over generations into a distinct way of life. This idea of organic formation runs through Bavinck’s broader view of creation not as a collection of discrete atoms but a living unity-in-diversity representative of the broader created order. Further, “Christianity preserves the harmony [between them] and reveals to us a wisdom that reconciles the human being with God, and, through this, with itself, with the world, and with life.”
In international relations, Bavinck’s views run counter to both extremes of nationalism and cosmopolitanism. For the cosmopolitan technocrat, Bavinck insists that nations are not arbitrary administrative inconveniences standing in the way of a universal rules-based order; they are real, durable, and morally significant communities that cannot simply be dissolved in the name of free trade and open borders. Simultaneously, against nationalism, he would insist that no nation is self-generated or self-justifying. A nation’s particularity is a gift held in trust, not a possession to be worshipped. The organism metaphor itself implies dependence, as an organism does not create its own life.
Pluriformity Without Fragmentation
The term Bavinck and Kuyper used for this is “pluriformity”, the idea that the diversity of peoples, churches, and all spheres of life is not a product of the fall but a positive feature of the created order intended to display a richness that no single nation ever could. After all, “The foundation of both diversity and unity is in God.” Applied to international relations, pluriformity posits as the ideal a world of sovereign nations against notions of a one-world government, even an efficient or well-intentioned one. This is not merely prudential caution about concentrated power, though that is a real concern Niebuhr would share. Instead, it is a positive theological claim: the world is supposed to be composed of many peoples, not one.
But pluriformity for Bavinck is always held in tension with catholicity. This is what separates him from a tribal “blood and soil” form of nationalism. Bavinck’s catholicity, as distinct from unity under a pope or liberal universalism, entails the conviction that the gospel addresses every people without erasing any of them, because “all are one in Christ Jesus” (Gal 3:28). There is a unity available to the nations that does not require their dissolution. In international relations, the goal is neither rootless cosmopolitanism nor a fortress mentality. Instead, Bavinck’s ideal is something more like ordered plurality, where nations may recognize a common moral horizon above them while preserving their own unique identities.
What This Means for Statecraft
Bavinck’s pluriformity has a few concrete implications for how Christians might think about foreign policy today, beyond rhetorical positioning between “realists” and “internationalists.”
First, it gives weight to the idea of national interest without collapsing into myopic self-interest. A nation has standing to act for its own preservation and flourishing because it is an organic community united by the pursuit of the common good. This is very different from a Hobbesian vision of international relations: a war of all against all where might makes right. Second, it gives a principled (not merely pragmatic) reason to resist projects that aim to dissolve the nation-state as a category, whether through aggressive supranational governance or through the slower erosion of subsidiarity by international bureaucracy. Bavinck’s sphere sovereignty, which Kuyper applied to family, church, and domestic politics, has an international analog, as no single sphere, including a global one, should swallow the others.
Third, it constrains nationalism from within, rather than without. Because the nation’s particularity is a gift rather than a possession, a Bavinckian nationalism cannot easily justify cruelty toward outsiders, indifference to other peoples’ suffering, or the idolization of national power as an end in itself. Catholicity keeps showing up to discipline pluriformity. A foreign policy shaped by this theology would look more humble about universal projects and more morally serious about obligations beyond the border than either current pole in the American debate tends to be.
A Resource, Not a Doctrine
None of this hands Christian realists a ready-made guide to foreign policy. Bavinck never wrote a treatise on statecraft, and any extrapolation from his dogmatics to 21st-century policy questions must be done with care and humility about what the texts can bear. But theology of this kind is exactly what is missing from a foreign policy conversation that has become almost entirely about interests, power, and institutions, with little room for an account of what a nation actually is and why nations morally matter. Bavinck gives Christians engaged in that conversation a way to honor the nation as real without making it ultimate—something Christian realists have long emphasized.
