From Tribal Society to National Church

Abstract

“For sheer and pervasive fervor, the love of nationhood has no equal among contemporary political passions. Independence is the fetish, fad, and totem of our times. Everybody who can muster a quorum in a colony wants Freedom Now—and such is the temper of the age that they can usually have it. Roughly one third of the world, some one billion people, have run up their own flags in the great dismantlement of empires since World War II, creating sixty new nations over the face of the earth. In the process they have also created, for themselves and for the world, a congeries of unstable and uneasy entities that are usually kept alive only by economic aid and stand constantly on the verge of erupting into turmoil. Nationhood is not an easy art to master as Ghana, Nigeria, and Indonesia have painfully learned in recent weeks.”¹