Corwin Smidt, a college professor from Michigan, writes in Religion and Nationalism – a Reflection from Hungary:

When language, nationality, religion, and state are basically the embodiment of different facets of the same underlying sociological entity, it is difficult to discern just where culture, religion, nationalism, and loyalty to the state begin and end. This linkage of national identity, language, and religion has important consequences. Probably two of the most basic, and firmly rooted, identities that can be forged in human beings are one’s religious and national identities.

Sometimes, these identities begin to overlap to such an extent that the two become linked together—” making it is difficult to separate them without some serious, and concerted, effort to do so. This is particularly the case when, embedded in one’s particular culture, one seeks to discern just where one’s fundamental loyalties lay —” whether to one’s nation or to one’s religious faith. This is difficult enough in the American context, but when culture and language get added to the mix, it becomes even more difficult.

As he walks through different ecclesiastical models he ponders the intersection between culture, nationalism, and religion. In the Christian context that intersection can be problematic, as he points out, but it can also be fruitful.

I would love to see the professor do a comparative between his experiences and insights from Hungary and Bishop Hodur’s writing on this very subject.

In short, I think Bishop Hodur took a far more anthropological view of nations and religion, with nations as a tool in God’s hands. Each nation and culture has specific gifts and insights which add to the totality of Christian experience. Religion cannot espouse the dissolution of national and cultural boundaries as its goal — a sort of straw man argument for those who define everything in terms of separation, but must focus itself on the transcendent nature of God. God speaks to every nation and draws no distinction between Jew or Greek, slave or free (Galatians 3:28) — using each to declare His name (Acts 17:26-28).

And he made from one every nation of men to live on all the face of the earth, having determined allotted periods and the boundaries of their habitation,
that they should seek God, in the hope that they might feel after him and find him. Yet he is not far from each one of us,
for `In him we live and move and have our being’; as even some of your poets have said, `For we are indeed his offspring.’

Personally I understand it this way: Our gifts are particular. Our faith is transcendent. In Him we are all one body.