Doug Gay explores the ethics of nationalism, recognising that for many Christians, churches and theologians, nationalism has often been seen as intrinsically unethical due to a presumption that at best it involves privileging one nation's interests over anothers and at worst it amounts to a form of ethnocentrism or even racism. Gay argues that there is another tradition of thinking nationalism, which can be related to state formation in early modern and modern Europe and North America, decolonisation in the 20th C and the reshaping of Central and Eastern Europe post 1989.