Dual Loyalties - Ancient World, The Christian Era, Enlightenment And Revolution, Modern Era, Bibliography
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Loyalty is devotion to a cause and is marked by faithfulness, a sense of just purpose, and a willingness to serve in spite of any suffering that may result from service. Dual loyalty involves simultaneous obligations, express or implied, to two parties, with the second party typically constituting a state. Multiple loyalties can threaten the security and survival of a state. Nationality may affect political allegiance by prompting immigrants to place the interests of their country of origin over the welfare of their adopted home. Religion may influence loyalty when those people holding minority religious views feel a loyalty to their faith that is greater than the duty owed to their country. Soldiers fight and citizens pay taxes out of loyalty, a fact that has led many states to link dual loyalties with treason.
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As long as the people of a state shared the same religion, loyalty involved allegiance to rulers or forms of government. The rise of Christianity threatened this type of loyalty by presenting a strong competing claim for allegiance. In the Bible, early Christians are recorded as asking Jesus Christ for guidance on dual loyalties. They were advised that no compromise was possible where spiritual ma…
After the ascendancy of Christianity to a position of worldly power, the issue of loyalty to God became entangled with the problems of loyalty to the church as an institution with influence in the world. The theologist Saint Augustine (354–430) believed that the church should be the supreme ruler of all Christian nations. Underpinning Saint Augustine's idea of the unity of Christendo…
The idea that the divine right of kings mandated loyalty began to die in the seventeenth century. Thomas Hobbes (1588–1679) tied loyalty to passion and self-interest by arguing that the power of a state derived from fear of disorder. He saw no personal loyalty to a monarch, only allegiance to the person providing peace and security. John Locke (1632–1704), perhaps the most widely rea…
Dual loyalty has formed a political threat in the modern era because difference is only acceptable between national identities and not within them. The modern state sought to instill political loyalties in order to maintain territorial concentrations of power. In doing so, it came into competition with communal centers of loyalty. These ethnic, religious, and regional ties resisted the state…
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