Column

Culture

Nationalism

Politics

20 March 2025

4 min read

What Tom Paine really said about globalism and religion

We can’t live without homelands, but we need to be generous with them.

George Pitcher

George is a visiting fellow at the London School of Economics and an Anglican priest.

A statue of a 18th century man holding a pen and a book.

Richard Croft, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons.

We live near Lewes in East Sussex, a town surrounded by genteel Conservatism but which inherits a certain edgy radicalism from Thomas Paine, whose utopian politics emerged there in the eighteenth century to inform both the French and American revolutions.

Paine haunts Lewes and his paraphernalia are everywhere. Walk the streets and it won’t be long before you spot posters quoting his most famous lines, among them “My country is the world and my religion is to do good”, from his seminal work Rights of Man.

He was a vicious critic of all organised religion, leading to the widespread assumption that he was an atheist. More accurately, he was a deist, a believer in a God who could and would deliver a global redemption of humankind, if we could and would only work towards that. The bit that’s most often left out of that famous quote is the phrase: “… all mankind are my brethren.”

Sometimes it takes a prophetic voice from outside mainstream religion to point us towards a world peace and a concord that seems beyond our faithful grasp. As ultra-nationalism is the go-to political ideology of our age, it’s such a voice that demonstrates that these populist creeds are the very antithesis of Paine’s globalist utopia.

There are tinpot nationalists throughout the world – Erdogan of Hungary, Meloni of Italy, Bolsonaro of Brazil, the list goes on – but it’s the superpowers that demonstrate most starkly the contrast between the narrow, inward and dark heart of ultra-nationalism and the generous, outward and illuminated vision of the globalist revolutionary.

It’s not just the contrast between what we currently have on the world stage and what we could have that’s remarkable, it’s the similarities between the psyches and prejudices of the ultra-nationalist super-powers, all of which sacrifice any worldview they might hold on the altar of their homeland self-interest. Take Russia, Israel and the United States. Don’t even start me on China.

Vladimir Putin’s Russia is embarked on an imperial expansionism that is positively tsarist. The attempted annexation of Ukraine is only the start, before reclaiming what are purported to be “Russian” state assets in the Baltics and beyond. Putin channels Peter the Great. This isn’t just demented desire for historical legacy, it speaks at home to the restoration of the motherland.

It’s the same incentive for Benjamin Netanyahu in Israel. Only continuing to oppress and purge the Palestinian state from its lands can the homeland of Israel be protected. It is precisely to satisfy the ultra-nationalists behind him that pushes him forward.

President Donald Trump in the US isn’t the peacemaker he fantasises about. To “make America great again” he has to put “America first”. This is about satisfying the baying boot boys that form the sump of Trump’s power base. Americans must live high on the hog at the expense of the rest of the world. Hence tariff wars, watch-the-lady trade deals and pan-arctic territorial aspirations.

This is not to say that peoples are to live without homelands. But it is precisely to tell us to be generous with them, to be good neighbours and to govern self-sacrificially.

What these three world leaders absolutely have in common is a worldview that predicates itself on satisfaction of nationalism at home that has to be paid for with suffering elsewhere. What they tell us is the exact opposite of Paine: “My borders are my country and my religion is to do harm.” They might add the sub-phrase: “… only my people are my brethren.”

The difference between patriotism and nationalism spawns many aphorisms. One such is that patriotism prioritises love of one’s own people and nationalism prioritises hate for other people other than one’s own. That’s not quite right, because both still hold the primacy of one’s own people over others, while Paine inferred the primacy of all people.

That’s what ultimately gives religious fervour to his voice. His declared detestation of religion seemingly ignores the tenets of the three Abrahamic faiths of the world, which have in common the welcome of the stranger, a duty to the poor and equality of all before God.

These commandments extend patriotism to love of all people. And, rigorously, they leave no room for nationalism at all. As for ultra-nationalism, we’re in the territory of abomination and sacrilege.

This is not to say that peoples are to live without homelands. But it is precisely to tell us to be generous with them, to be good neighbours and to govern self-sacrificially. That’s admittedly a tall order, but these are qualities that can either be identified in or imported into national identities as diverse as the American Constitution and Zionism.

The methodology for that is, admittedly, demanding. But it requires the ability to look outwards to the world, rather than inwards towards nation. And that becomes a religious vocation.

Our instincts, as nations, are inwards, but our callings our outwards. Sometimes it takes an outsider, like Paine, to point us in the right direction, outwards.

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Review

Culture

Music

Politics

25 July 2025

6 min read

As the congregation gathers Bruce Springsteen leans hard into hope

Chords of confrontation and communion

Elizabeth Wainwright

Elizabeth Wainwright is a writer, coach and walking guide. She's a former district councillor and has a background in international development.

Bruce Springsteen crouches down and holds a hand out to a sea of outstretched hands

Springsteen plays Manchester.

Brucespringsteen.net.

I finally got to experience a Bruce Springsteen concert recently. Which is to say, for three hours, I touched a land of hope and dreams.

We walked along a canal to get to the arena – my husband, my father-in-law, and me –Manchester shimmered with the arrival of summer, and light bounced off red brick and still water. We neared the arena and the air felt dense with anticipation. T Between us we carried heartbreaks, elections, hopes, failures, and a collective return to music that had accompanied and clarified it all. We were drawn by loyalty and nostalgia and joy, but also I sensed by a hope that Bruce would meet the moment — the frayed, furious, anxious now — with something that mattered.

We found our seats and gripped our drinks as the lights dimmed. Thousands of people stopped individual conversations, and hushed, and then joined voices into a deep and reverent chant. “Bruuuuuuuce”. To my right, the glow of a screen, the woman holding it sending a text – “yes babe, 1pm, lovely” – and it seemed incongruent and true. In the tension before the release, in the dark before the light, we hold our breath even as the ordinary carries on. The ordinary carries on even as the world fractures and glows. The ordinary is what Bruce often sings of, it is one reason why fans feel heard and seen by him. That night though, all the ordinaries he sang of formed something extraordinary.

Then there was light, and Bruce walked slowly from the side to the front of the stage, his guitar suspended across his body, his face a relaxed, broad smile, his bandmates and companions beside and behind him. Then there was music. No videos, no pyrotechnics; just old songs that felt as if they existed for the now. My City of Ruins, Death to My Hometown, Land of Hope and Dreams, The Promised Land. The song Long Walk Home was introduced as a “prayer to my country”. It is a country that he embodies, despairs of, and loves. He sings of his home with fury, sorrow, tenderness, and love.

Riffs and rhythms that were decades old were being made urgent again. Springsteen’s music holds both grit and glory, and hard-won joys leave space for sorrow. I write this and lines by Mary Oliver come to mind: “We shake with joy, we shake with grief / what a time they have these two / housed as they are in the same body.” What a time they had, joy and grief, that night with Bruce.

The evening unfolded not as spectacle but as liturgy; all of us involved in something like devotion – in part to Bruce, but also to moral clarity, to the power of poetry, to the promise of who we could be. At times the crowd seemed silent, ushered into something deeper – not entertainment or escapism, but something like confrontation and communion. We were being offered the joy of music and memory, but also an opportunity to reckon with who we are.

Between songs, Bruce spoke. He apparently rarely does so in his gigs. His voice slowed and deepened – not chit chat, not to entertain, but to bear witness and stand defiant and call us to the best versions of ourselves. “I’ve spent my life singing about where we’ve succeeded and come up short in pursuit of our civic values,” he said. “I just felt that was my job.” He proceeded to describe how those values are being torn apart, and why they matter. The crowd roared. He was making civic values shine, speaking about them with urgency. He acknowledged both the dream and the failure, but still he believes in the promised land and he asks us to as well. Before he belted out Rainmaker, he said, “when conditions in a country are right for a demagogue, you can bet one will show up.” He spoke of America, and really of the world – what it is, what it is becoming. His honesty and poetic rage situated us, then became a map for how to keep going.

We can be glad to be alive even while we are honest about sorrow, injustice, broken politics, fractured families, and tired hearts.

I found myself wondering: why is it that Bruce can sing and speak about justice, warped politics, and who we are becoming, and be met with cheers, while so many churches avoid doing so, preferring instead to whisper in neutral tones while the world burns? That night, I stood in a crowd of thousands and I heard a kind of moral clarity that orientates the soul and made me cry. It wasn’t partisan, it was human. Why can it feel riskier to speak specifically and prophetically in a sermon than in a stadium? I wonder if it’s because Springsteen has always rooted his politics in people’s real lives – in work, family, grief, memory. He doesn’t gesture toward abstract ideologies for fear of alienating people, or in the hope of retaining fans: he tells stories and gives names to problems and injustices, singing about crooked institutions, boarded-up factories, buses that never come, lovers who don’t come back.

The evening felt, for me, like the kind of church I long for and sometimes touch: no tidy answers, no insincere lyrics, no vague calls for justice, but rather honesty and specificity and the chance to stand alongside strangers and feel something challenging, beautiful, true.

I scribbled a question as the music soared: can a chord be mystical? Because that’s how it felt. As if there are progressions – minor then major, dissonance into harmony – that can reach past language and speak directly to the part of us that longs for love more than cynicism, to the part of us that still dares to hope even when there is very little obvious reason to do so, to the part of us wondering how to be truly alive.

Near the end, Bruce quoted the American writer James Baldwin:

“In this world, there isn’t enough humanity as one would hope. But there’s enough.”

There’s enough. It was a small phrase but it hung in the air like incense. For Bruce, there is enough humanity to keep singing for, and about. Now, he seemed to ask the crowd, what will you do with that enoughness, with that humanity?

In the final stretch, Bruce leaned hard into hope with songs like The Rising and Born to Run. The energy in the room felt like resistance – not against something, but for something. He didn’t pretend everything’s fine, but he sang anyway. “It ain’t no sin to be glad you’re alive.”

We can be glad to be alive even while we are honest about sorrow, injustice, broken politics, fractured families, and tired hearts. Gladness is being asked to stand its ground now, and to do something with our improbable aliveness. For the final song, Bruce played Bob Dylan’s Chimes of Freedom. It is a song about lightning and exiles and freedom, about the trembling of the soul and about a sky that “cracked its poems in naked wonder.” He sang it slowly, tenderly, like a prayer – which can also be a trembling of the soul, a song of naked wonder. Perhaps he prayed to God, perhaps to some other sacred thing: our better angels, or the fragile hope of who we might yet become.

In a BBC documentary about Bruce Springsteen’s history with the UK, someone says “there’s something in Bruce fans, you know you can implicitly trust them.” As we filed out of the arena, it felt like 25,000 of us briefly knew each other, trusted each other, could take on the world together. Perhaps we just had.

Soon it was just me, my husband, my father-in-law, and the silent dark canal as we walked back into the night. We were tired, we were awake. I thought of Bruce’s belief in the promised land, and of Baldwin’s line: there’s not enough humanity, but there’s enough. These are beliefs that can feel risky. So can belief in God. But enough is plenty. Enough can turn up the volume and let the spirit be our guide. With 25,000 other people, I’d turned that volume up and I could hear the spirit defiant, unifying, guiding. It is – has always been – time to go and sing of it, despite everything.