BELONGING: BENEFITS AND RESPONSIBILITIES

In the 1980s an advertisement for a major credit card company aired on North American television screens ending with these words: “Membership has its privileges.”1 To be a member of a community entails belonging to a particular group of people. The group may be an amorphous one forming spontaneously out of a shared interest or pastime. It may be an ethnic group with a language, religion, and traditions in common. The group may or may not be organized for a specific purpose. Like all such groups, it has outer boundaries that could be flexible or rigid. In either case, only a select number of people can belong to a given community; otherwise, it ceases to be a community in any meaningful sense. The numbers can vary widely, from fewer than ten on the board of a local chamber of commerce to several scores of millions in a political community or an institutional church communion. To belong to such a community means that it has a certain claim on one’s loyalty. In turn, the member makes reciprocal claims on the community.

Membership has a significant affective side. The feeling of belonging is important to virtually everyone. To belong gives us a place to feel that we are at home. We need to sense that we are part of something larger than ourselves. Membership in the more proximate communities tends to bring them closer to the members’ hearts. The intensity of our feelings of belonging increases as the group to which we belong decreases in size. We are likely to experience a greater sense of camaraderie with family, coworkers, and church community than with a nationwide professional association or a large impersonal corporate entity. Our feeling of belonging to the human race is probably weakest of all since a “community” so large and nebulous is generally incapable of commanding more than a minimal sense of obligation. In fact, those claiming the human race as their highest loyalty, when pushed, would probably have to admit that in reality they are loyal to a fairly small group of like-minded people who profess humanity as their highest loyalty. They constitute, as it were, a parochial community of professed cosmopolitans.

Citizenship is one form of membership. Historically as well as etymologically, it was attached to a particular city. In our English translations of Acts 22 and 23 we read that the apostle Paul was a Roman citizen, the Greek indicating simply that he was a Roman, although he was born in Tarsus in southeast Asia Minor. To be a citizen meant to have a privileged relationship with the city of Rome, something that not all residents of its empire possessed. We still speak of the citizens of, say, London or New York, although those cities do not, of course, issue formal certificates of citizenship. In a political system characterized by a federal division of powers, in which different levels of government share power, we can speak as well of multiple levels of citizenship. When I was growing up, I was a citizen of Wheaton, Illinois, one of the many western suburbs of Chicago. I was not born there, as there was no hospital within the city limits, but the mere fact of our family living there made us citizens. We were simultaneously citizens of the state of Illinois, but of course neither do individual states or provinces issue citizenship certificates. The United States of America does issue such documents. The birth certificate functions thus for the majority of Americans, as does the passport, while a substantial minority, including my late father, became naturalized citizens in adulthood.

Today we expect that anyone born within the borders of a particular country is a citizen by birth, although not all countries necessarily recognize this. There have always been groups of human beings who lack citizenship for one reason or another, perhaps due to war, revolution, undetermined borders between states, or a clash between different legal definitions of citizenship. A stateless person is in a precarious condition indeed, deprived of the protections of a particular government and unable to claim to belong to the community defined by a particular homeland. The number of stateless people in the world today is unknown, but they are variously estimated to be between four and twelve million, depending on the source. Although the United Nations adopted a Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948, in practice the enjoyment of rights is dependent on being under the jurisdiction of a government willing to protect them. One might still argue that stateless persons have rights in principle that governments ought to acknowledge. These might be termed natural rights. But the United Nations is scarcely in a position to compel governments to protect these rights, which might then be said to exist merely as abstract principles or, worse, mere ideals.

To what extent do we identify with the country of which we are citizens? This will vary from one person and from one community to the next. Many French-speaking citizens of Québec identify first with the province of their birth, with loyalty to Canada coming in second place. For citizens of Ontario, however, Canada probably comes first in their loyalties, although other Canadians accuse Ontarians of too closely identifying their own provincial interests with those of the country as a whole. If the feeling of loyalty to one’s country varies too greatly across its territory, and if the people in one region sense that they are constantly neglected or oppressed by the central government as it sets policies for the whole, this could fuel a movement to separate that region from the remainder of the country. A succession of Irish rebellions against British rule and Polish rebellions against Russian rule were rooted in grievances that could be resolved only by the creation of separate states and citizenships out of the larger territory.

A strong sense of loyalty to a political community is needed if citizens are to fulfill willingly the responsibilities that accompany citizenship. Citizenship is not only about rights and the protection of those rights. Any membership comes with a set of responsibilities for the community of which you are part. Fulfilling these responsibilities may present a burden of greater or lesser degrees on the member. If you have a strong sense of belonging to a group, you are more likely to bear these burdens willingly and happily because you care for the other members and for the community as a whole. In a small community, you can witness first hand the positive results of discharging your responsibilities and are likely to experience the gratitude that its other members express to you. These are among the rewards of membership in such a community.

If, however, the community seems remote to you, like membership in, say, the American Automobile Association or the Canadian Association of Retired Persons, your stake in that community will be diminished accordingly. Created in God’s image and invested with authority over his creation, we are embedded in a variety of communities, to each of which we owe a measure of loyalty. However, they are not all equal in our eyes, given the natural limitations to our affections. We inevitably give priority to some communities over others. Parents naturally favor their own children over other neighborhood children, and it could scarcely be otherwise. We may value our church membership over our citizenship in a political community. Or we may value our national identity over a narrower ethnic identity. It varies with each person.

As many have observed, our sense of nationhood does not come to us automatically. A nation is a slippery entity, even an “imagined community,” as Benedict Anderson famously described it.2 But its members may not be the ones doing the imagining, at least not initially. A sense of nationhood has often been forged deliberately by a government presiding over a territory of disparate peoples. The ancient kingdom of France comprised speakers of the langue d’oïl and the langue d’oc (also known as Occitan), Breton, Alsatian German, Basque, and the Corsican dialect of Italian. But centuries of concerted efforts by the Bourbon kings and a succession of revolutionary and postrevolutionary regimes created a French people bound together by a unified language, education, culture, and political institutions centered in Paris. Loyalty to la France did not spring up spontaneously from below; it had to be instilled intentionally from above. A common enemy may also knit disparate peoples together into a single nation quite apart from a policy imposed from the top, yet the catalyst for this too originates outside the people’s hearts.

During my childhood near Chicago, a sense of loyalty to country was nurtured in my peers and me by daily rituals practiced in the public schools: pledging allegiance to the flag, singing “My Country ’Tis of Thee” (rather than “The Star-Spangled Banner,” whose vocal range is too wide for the average seven-year-old), and observing such special days as Lincoln’s and Washington’s birthdays, Memorial Day, Independence Day, and Thanksgiving. We learned American history and were taught to take pride in our country’s accomplishments. The Cold War imbued this process with a certain nervous urgency as we all were aware of the Soviet Union’s belligerency under the irascible Nikita Khrushchev, who had dared to station nuclear weapons just offshore in the newly communist island nation of Cuba. A few years later, when I was in grade eight, we...