A people has a right to retain its land.

Private property is an important part of any just and healthy society. Private property should not be vulnerable to eminent domain (i.e. the government going ‘Mine now’, al a Naboth’s vineyard) or to property taxes (which are the same sin writ wider and thinner) or to other abuses, like environmental poisoning. But ‘private property’ is only allodial (autonomous) with respect to other men; private property ultimately is a fee held from God, a possession predicated on fulfilment of the duty of stewardship in all He gives (Gen. 1:28; Ps. 147; 1 Cor. 4:2). Thus, all property is held conditionally and with limits. One of those limits is that a people can rightly prevent its members from transferring their land to those outside the people.

The modern, blunt way of phrasing this is: the civil government can and should prevent its citizens from selling their land (‘real property’ in legal terms) to foreign government and members of a foreign people.

See, private property rights are complex. If I own a plot of land, I own it conditionally, from God. I own it also as a member of a people. That people has, through me, certain property rights in the property. Those rights do not rise to control of the property, to preventing me from transferring it within the people, to ordering how the property may used. That way lies Rousseauian ideas of a General Will (and whatnot). It does rise to preventing me, the owner, from transferring ownership out of my people.

It is mete here to clarify that ‘people’ refers to the members and participants in a collective identity built around inheritance of history, worldview, and family (but not necessarily ethnicity- persons and even families can be adopted into the people, though the greater threshold for this generally results in a strong predominance by one genetic locale.

A people who has self-governance exerts a certain portion of its power, justly, in the civil government. In dealing with the preservation of property rights, of course, the civil government is justly involved. Here, the property right is of the people’s property right over the land of their members. This right does not obtain over all the parcels owned worldwide; it does not rise from the mere ownership of land by a member of the people. No, it rises from the long association and occupation of that land by the people and their progenitors. Such land is not merely mine but also my people’s. If a man of Israel sold his plot to Syria or Babylon, he sinned against and defrauded not only his own children and his Lord but the people of Israel generally, for whom the land of Israel was a sacred trust. If I, having land given to me and my people and my fathers as a sacred trust (under the terms of Genesis 1, Genesis 9, and many other passages, including Psalm 150), hand over that land to another people, I defraud at the least my people, moving what is theirs to steward out of their legal capacity to steward.

From another perspective: for a foreign person or power to seek ownership of my people’s land is an act of conquest. Conquest is theft, even if accomplished by cozening and peaceful treaty, just as a conman’s fraud is no less theft for being nonviolent and perhaps legal. A people has a right of self-defense against such acts of conquest.

In sum, Christian nations ought to forbid and prevent the sale of their land to foreign powers, however friendly, and to the members of foreign peoples, who act either actually or in principle as the agents of that foreign people or its government. This does not forbid foreign investment entirely; it does not forbid even renting land, so long as such arrangements do not become de facto ownership and so long as the arrangement is not a means to abuse the hosting people (as China’s investments in the US generally are). It certainly does not forbid selling to the sojourner who becomes a member of the people (Deut. 23:7-8). But it ought to be a rule we observe, for principle and for the sake of obedience to the Lord.