As opposed to Judaism? Or Islam? Or paganism? Perhaps some Eastern religions are immune to this sort of ethnocentrism? Japanese Shinto certainly wasn't. Nor apparently is Hinduism. That's not necessarily to say that they see God as a person of their own ethnicity, but certainly a lot of religions produce "holy lands" or "chosen peoples."
I don't think Christians actually see God or Christ or Jesus in that way either. Of course Black and White artists have different ways of depicting Jesus and of course churches reflect the thinking of local populations, but few Christians would seriously argue that Jesus was Ukrainian or Irish or Spanish.
If you're willing to repudiate ideas of "chosenness" you can go after those ethnocentric traces, but you seem to be hung up on them, while willing to excuse other forms in other peoples which may be stronger.
I have literally been trying to figure out this "left wing ethnic pride" business for decades. It has never made any sense to me, because logically there should be nothing to hold the Great Left Wing Coalition together. Moslems should not get along with militant homosexuals, nor Hispanic Catholics with radical Reform Jews nor Black Baptists with secularists at war with chrstianity. Yet there is, so far as I have been able to see, not the slightest crack anywhere in the whole gang. In fact, there doesn't even appear to be any fault lines among all these groups.
Any coalition has more to do with what what it opposes than with what it supports. I'm not at all sure all these groups actually get along at all. They just tend to vote together.
Think of 19th century America. The old evangelical Protestant groups (many of whom have now become the "Mainstream Protestants") voted together as a bloc as Whigs or Republicans. Everybody who wasn't in the bloc voted together against them. There were some exceptions, the most notable being African-Americans.
Many German Jews voted Republican with German Protestants before FDR, and many Italians, fed up with Irish control of the Democrats, also voted with the GOP, but by and large you had this alliance of Irish and German Catholics, New York Dutchmen, and troubled Western farmers with White Southerners, rich and poor, against the dominant Northern White Protestant group.
Fault lines appear when the coalition wins power and wields it for an extended period, or when one group becomes much more powerful than the others. And of course, groups have moved from one coalition to another. Orthodox Jews, once heavily Democrat, have moved to the Republicans. Muslims have gone the other way: Bush swept the Muslim vote in 2000.
One thing I think we all well know: Western leftists are absolutely convinced that "indigenous pipples" have absolutely no sexual taboos whatsoever. Everyone from Margaret Mead on down has insisted that the indigenii (if I may coin a new word) have not yet been corrupted by sexual guilt and possess no non-rational taboos whatsoever, sexual or otherwise. Maybe this is the connection. The shaman and the scientist both dismiss the old social taboo against homosexuality. One has allegedly never known it, the other has "gotten over" it.
You heard a lot about that in the 1960s. Since Mead died you don't hear it so much. Now the idea is that indigenous peoples are "greener" than Westerners, which isn't necessarily true: whatever damage they did was just on a smaller scale.
The idea of sexual liberation and the absence of taboos as natural and the association of them with "primitive tribes" is probably there in the background, but except for where homosexuality is concerned you don't hear it expressed much nowadays.
Because of its incarnationism, its insistence that G-d became a human being, chrstianity is susceptible to a radical localization. Not only does G-d become a human being, he becomes a Black human being, or a white human being, or a Spaniard, or a Georgian, or a Ukrainian. In chrstianity every people becomes "the chosen people" and every traditional chrstian country becomes "the holy land."
As opposed to Judaism? Or Islam? Or paganism? Perhaps some Eastern religions are immune to this sort of ethnocentrism? Japanese Shinto certainly wasn't. Nor apparently is Hinduism. That's not necessarily to say that they see God as a person of their own ethnicity, but certainly a lot of religions produce "holy lands" or "chosen peoples."
Apparently I didn't quite make myself clear. My point was not that chrstianity is different from these other religions (Judaism and islam excepted) in its localism and ethnocentrism, but that it is like them. Incarnationism is a step back from an Objective Universal G-d back to the local "gxds" of the Japanese, hindus, etc.
Islam is indeed less localized and less "rooted" than chrstianity. Its worldwide aspirations (such as a restored caliphate) are very different from localist religions.
Judaism of course is different from everything. The universal hatred of the Jews by the "nations of the earth" is precisely because they are not a nation of the earth at all, and all the attacks about "rootlessness" and "having no G-d" (as though G-d were a local spirit who lived in a well somewhere) spell this out quite explicitly. Unfortunately, since the "enlightenment" decided to pick the Jews as the poster children for religious subjectivism, this is no longer so clear to everyone. Now anti-Semitism is simply a (if the worst and most distinctive) ethnic prejudice which will be done away with when we all learn that all gods are equally valid (and invalid).
Of course, that was actually quite clever of the enlightenment. It not only removed the greatest historical proof for the existence of G-d but turned that proof into an indictment of religious belief.