Brubaker - Religion and Nationalism Four Approaches

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NATIONS AND J O U R N A L O F T H E A S S O C I AT I O N AS

NATIONALISM
FOR THE STUDY OF ETHNICITY
A N D N AT I O N A L I S M EN
]] (]]),
Nations and Nationalism 18 (1), 2012,
2011, 2–20.
1–19.
DOI: 10.1111/j.1469-8129.2011.00486.x

Religion and nationalism: four


approachesn
ROGERS BRUBAKER
University of California Los Angeles

ABSTRACT. Building on recent literature, this article discusses four ways of studying
the relationship between religion and nationalism. The first is to treat religion and
nationalism, along with ethnicity and race, as analogous phenomena. The second is to
specify ways in which religion helps explain things about nationalism – its origin, its
power or its distinctive character in particular cases. The third is to treat religion as
part of nationalism, and to specify modes of interpenetration and intertwining. The
fourth is to posit a distinctively religious form of nationalism. The article concludes by
reconsidering the much-criticised understanding of nationalism as a distinctively
secular phenomenon.

KEY WORDS: ethnicity; Islamism; nationalism; Reformation; religion; secularisation

Introduction

‘Religion’ and ‘nationalism’ have long been contested terms. Both terms – on
almost any understanding – designate large and multidimensional fields of
phenomena. Given the lack of agreement on what we are talking about when
we talk about religion, or nationalism, it is no surprise that one encounters
seemingly antithetical assertions about the relation between the two - for
example, the assertion that nationalism is intrinsically secular, or that it is
intrinsically religious; that nationalism emerged from the decline of religion,
or that it emerged in a period of intensified religious feeling.
Because both ‘nationalism’ and ‘religion’ can designate a whole world of
different things, few statements about nationalism per se or religion per se, or
the relation between the two, are likely to be tenable, interesting or even
meaningful; a more differentiated analytical strategy is required. Rather than
ask what the relation between religion and nationalism is – a question too
blunt to yield interesting answers – I seek in this article to specify how that
relation can fruitfully be studied. Building on the literature produced by a

n
Thanks are due to Matthew Baltz and Kristen Kao for their assistance, to anonymous referees
for their comments, and to Bernd Giesen and Philip Gorski for the opportunity to present an early
version of this article at a conference on ‘Nation/Religion’ in Konstanz.

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Religion and nationalism 3

recent surge of interest in the topic1, I delineate, develop and critically engage
four distinct ways of studying the connection between religion and national-
ism. The first is to treat religion and nationalism, along with ethnicity and
race, as analogous phenomena. The second is to specify ways in which religion
helps explain things about nationalism – its origin, its power or its distinctive
character in particular cases. The third is to treat religion as part of
nationalism, and to specify modes of interpenetration and intertwining. The
fourth is to posit a distinctively religious form of nationalism. I conclude by
defending a qualified version of the much-criticised understanding of nation-
alism as a distinctively secular phenomenon.

Religion and nationalism as analogous phenomena

Consider first the strategy of treating religion and nationalism as analogous


phenomena. One way of doing so is exemplified by efforts to define or
characterise nationalism by specifying its similarity to religion, or by simply
characterising nationalism as a religion. An early statement of this approach,
which can be traced back to Durkheim’s Elementary Forms of Religious Life
(Durkheim 1995: 215–16, 221ff, 429; Smith 2003: 26), is found in the work of
Carlton Hayes, who devoted one chapter of his 1926 book Essays on
Nationalism to ‘nationalism as a religion’. According to Hayes, nationalism
mobilises a ‘deep and compelling emotion’ that is ‘essentially religious’. Like
other religions, nationalism involves faith in some external power, feelings of
awe and reverence, and ceremonial rites, focused on the flag. Straining a bit to
sustain the metaphor, Hayes argued that nationalism has its gods – ‘the patron
or the personification of [the] fatherland’; its ‘speculative theology or mythol-
ogy’, describing the ‘eternal past and . . . everlasting future’ of the nation; its
notions of salvation and immortality; its canon of holy scripture; its feasts,
fasts, processions, pilgrimages and holy days; and its supreme sacrifice. But
while most world religions serve to unify, nationalism ‘re-enshrines the earlier
tribal mission of a chosen people’, with its ‘tribal selfishness and vainglory’.2
More recently, Anthony Smith has provided a more sophisticated, and
more sympathetic, account of nationalism as a ‘new religion of the people’ – a
religion as ‘binding, ritually repetitive, and collectively enthusing’ as any
other. According to Smith, nationalism is a religion both in a substantive
sense, in so far as it entails a quest for a kind of this-worldly collective
‘salvation’, and in a functional sense, in so far as it involves a ‘system of beliefs
and practices that distinguishes the sacred from the profane and unites its
adherents in a single moral community of the faithful’. In this new religion –
which both ‘parallels and competes with traditional religions’ – authenticity is
the functional equivalent of sanctity; patriotic heroes and national geniuses,
who embody and exemplify such authenticity and sacrifice themselves for the
community, are the equivalent of prophets and messiah-saviours; and poster-
ity, in which their legendary deeds live on, is the equivalent of the afterlife. It is

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4 Rogers Brubaker

this religious quality of nationalism, in Smith’s account, that explains the


durability and emotional potency of national identities and the ‘scope, depth,
and intensity of the feelings and loyalties that nations and nationalism so
often evoke’ (Smith 2003: 4–5, 15, 26, 40–42).
While such characterisations of nationalism as a religion are suggestive and
fruitful, I want to propose an alternative strategy for considering nationalism
and religion as analogous phenomena. Rather than characterise nationalism
with terms drawn from the field of religion, as Hayes and, to a certain extent,
Smith do – faith, reverence, liturgy, cult, god, salvation, scripture, sacred
objects and holy days – it may be useful to connect both phenomena to more
general social structures and processes. Without any claim to exhaustiveness, I
want briefly to discuss three ways of considering religion and nationalism (and
ethnicity as well) under more encompassing conceptual rubrics: as a mode of
identification, a mode of social organisation and a way of framing political
claims.
Ethnicity and nationalism have been characterised as basic sources and
forms of social and cultural identification. As such, they are ways of
identifying oneself and others, of construing sameness and difference, and
of situating and placing oneself in relation to others. Understood as
perspectives on the world rather than things in the world, they are ways of
understanding and identifying oneself, making sense of one’s problems and
predicaments, identifying one’s interests and orienting one’s action (Brubaker
2004). Religion, too, can be understood in this manner. As a principle of
vision and division of the social world, to use Bourdieu’s phrase, religion too
provides a way of identifying and naming fundamental social groups, a
powerful framework for imagining community and a set of schemas,
templates and metaphors for making sense of the social world (and, of
course, the supra-mundane world as well).3
Secondly, like ethnicity and nationalism, religion can be understood as a
mode of social organisation, a way of framing, channelling and organising
social relations. I’m not referring here to churches, ethnic associations or
nationalist organisations per se. I’m referring rather to the ways in which
religion, ethnicity and nationality can serve as more or less pervasive axes of
social segmentation in heterogeneous societies, even without territorial con-
centration along religious, ethnic or national lines. This is in part a matter of
what van den Berghe, in an effort to distinguish social pluralism from cultural
pluralism, called ‘institutional duplication’ (van den Berghe 1967: 34). Even
when they are territorially intermixed, members of different religious, ethnic
or national communities may participate in separate, parallel institutional
worlds, which can include school systems, universities, media, political
parties, hospitals, nursing homes and institutionalised sporting, cultural and
recreational activities as well as churches and ethnic associations (Brubaker et
al. 2006: chapter 9).4
Even outside such parallel institutional worlds – though more often in
conjunction with them – religion, ethnicity and nationality can channel

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Religion and nationalism 5

informal social relations in ways that generate and sustain social segmenta-
tion. The key mechanism here is religious or ethnic endogamy, whether more
or less deliberately pursued from the inside, or imposed from the outside.5
Religious injunctions against intermarriage, together with clerical control or
influence over marriage, have often helped reproduce socioreligious segmen-
tation. This, in turn, has helped reproduce religious, ethnic and national
communities over the long run and has worked to prevent their dissolution
through assimilation (Smith 1986: 123).
Finally, from a political point of view, claims made in the name of religion
– or religious groups – can be considered alongside claims made in the name
of ethnicity, race or nationhood. The similarities are particularly striking in so
far as claims are made for economic resources, political representation,
symbolic recognition or cultural reproduction (the latter by means of
institutional or territorial autonomy, where institutional autonomy involves
control of one’s own agencies of socialisation such as school systems and
media). These claims are part of the general phenomenon of politicised
ethnicity, broadly understood as encompassing claims made on the basis of
ethno-religious, ethno-national, ethno-racial, ethno-regional or otherwise
ethno-cultural identifications, which have proliferated in both the developed
and the developing world in the last half century.6 Widening the analytical
lens still further, claims made in the name of religious communities can
fruitfully be seen as part of a very general pattern of the politicisation of
culture and the culturalisation of politics.7
In this perspective, religion figures as a way of identifying ‘groups’ or
political claimants, not as a distinctive way of specifying the content of
political claims. Of course, politicised religion involves not only claims for
resources, representation, recognition or reproduction; it also involves claims
to restructure public life in accordance with religious principles. I will return
to this issue later, when I discuss the question of whether there is a
distinctively religious form of nationalism, defined by the distinctive content
of its claims.
The three perspectives I have sketched suggest potentially fruitful ways of
treating religion, ethnicity and nationalism as analogous phenomena, and as
parts of a more encompassing domain. But they all abstract from the specific
content of religious belief or practice, the specific ways in which belief may
shape life conduct, and the specific role played by religious organisations and
their relation to the state. As a result, their treatment of religion remains
inevitably ‘flattening’, and they miss much of what is distinctive and interest-
ing about religion and its relation to nationalism.

Religion as a cause or explanation of nationalism

A second way of analysing the relationship between religion and nationalism


seeks to specify the ways in which religion helps explain nationalism. Such

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6 Rogers Brubaker

arguments can be cast in several ways, depending on what it is about


nationalism that is said to be explained (for example, its origins, persistence,
emotional power, content or form), and what it is about religion that is said to
explain it (religious ideas, institutions, practices or events).
Most of the literature in this tradition focuses on particular cases,
specifying the ways in which particular religious traditions have shaped
particular forms of nationalism. Thus, for example, scholars have traced
the influence of Puritanism (and Protestantism more generally) on English
nationalism (Greenfeld 1992; Kohn 1940), of Pietism on German nationalism
(Lehmann 1982), of Catholicism on Polish nationalism (for a critical review,
see Zubrzycki 2006), of Orthodoxy on nationalism in the Balkans (Leustean
2008), of Shinto on Japanese nationalism (Fukase-Indergaard and Indergaard
2008), of Buddhism on Sinhalese nationalism (Kapferer 1988) and of the
Hebraic idea of covenant on Northern Irish, Afrikaaner and Israeli nation-
alism (Akenson 1992).
However, a number of scholars have advanced broader arguments, notably
about the ways in which religion has figured centrally in the origins and
development of nationalism. One important cluster of work has addressed the
ways in which religious motifs, narratives and symbols were transposed into
the political domain and used to construct the first recognisably nationalist
(or at least proto-nationalist) claims. Much of this work has focused on the
motif of chosen-ness, or what Smith (2003) calls the ‘myth of ethnic election’.8
This and associated motifs, narratives and symbols from the Hebrew Bible
were central to political rhetoric and iconography in The Netherlands
(Schama 1988: 93–125; Gorski 2000b) and England (Hill 1993) during the
tumultuous and tightly interlinked religious and political struggles of the
sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Gorski (2000b) has argued forcefully that
this early modern ‘Mosaic moment’ was distinctively nationalist in scope and
content. In his most recent work, Smith (2008) agrees that this period saw the
birth of nationalist movements and programmes that he calls ‘covenantal
nationalisms’ (Smith 2008: chapter 5).9 Chosen-ness and other religious motifs
and symbols, Smith argues, are ‘deep cultural resources’ that continue to
provide the ‘basic cultural and ideological building blocks for nationalists’
(Smith 2003: 254–55; see also Hutchinson and Lehmann 1994).
Religion contributed to the origin and development of nationalism not
only through the political appropriation of religious symbols and narratives
but also in more indirect ways. For example, scholars have suggested that the
Protestant Reformation and the broader process of ‘confessionalisation’
contributed to the development of nationalism in three ways: by generating
new modes of imagining and constructing social and political relationships, by
promoting literacy in and standardisation of vernacular languages, and by
bringing polity and culture into a tighter alignment.
The new ways of imagining and institutionalising religious community
fostered by the Reformation provided new models for political community.
This line of argument emphasises the egalitarian potential inherent in the

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Religion and nationalism 7

notion of the priesthood of all believers, the individualism involved in the


emphasis on the direct study of scripture, and the direct and unmediated
relationship between individuals and God. These new ways of imagining
religious community have a striking affinity with understandings of ‘the
nation’ as an internally undifferentiated, egalitarian community to which
individuals belong directly and immediately.10 And practices of congrega-
tional self-rule in sectarian Protestantism furnished models for democratic
and national self-rule (Calhoun 1997: 72). A complementary argument about
new modes of imagining community focuses on the long-term trajectory of
Christianity, furthered by (although not originating in) Protestantism. For
example, Bell (2001: 24–26), drawing on Gauchet (1997) and Baker (1994),
argues that the intensification of the perceived gap between human and divine
allowed the social world to be conceived in terms of its own autonomous laws.
New understandings of nation – along with related foundational notions
including society, patrie, civilisation and public – emerged in this context.
Secondly, by fostering literacy in and prompting the standardisation of
vernacular languages, the Reformation laid the groundwork for imagining
nationhood through the medium of language.11 The Protestant emphasis on
direct, unmediated access to scripture promoted the development of mass
literacy, while the concern with making the Bible accessible to the widest
possible audience, and the explosion of popular religious tracts occasioned by
multiplying religious disputes, generated a surge in printing and publishing in
vernacular languages. The proliferation of printed material, in turn, gave a
powerful impetus to the standardisation of vernacular languages. In Ander-
son’s argument about ‘print capitalism’, the publishers of religious tracts and
other materials sought wider markets and assembled varied idiolects into
smaller numbers of increasingly standardised ‘print languages’; these ‘laid the
bases for national consciousness’ by creating ‘unified fields of exchange and
communication below Latin and above the spoken vernacular’ (Anderson
1991: 44).12
The third line of argument focuses not on the Reformation per se but on
the broader Reformation-era process of ‘confessionalisation’ that embraced
Catholic as well as Protestant regions and involved ‘the emergence of three
doctrinally, liturgically, and organisationally distinct ‘‘confessions’’ [Catholi-
cism, Lutheranism and Calvinism], and their gradual imposition on an often
passive population’ (Gorski 2000a: 152). Confessionalisation substantially
tightened the relationship between political organisation and religious belief
and practice. In so doing, it provided a model for and matrix of the
congruence between culture and polity that is at the core of nationalism.
Confessionalisation involved the fusion of politics and religion through the
emergence of territorial churches that were subordinated (more or less fully
and expressly) to secular political control. Intensified religious discipline and
new forms of social control heightened the pressure for conformity. The
persecution of dissent and consequent waves of refugees generated an
‘unmixing of confessions’ that anticipated the later ethnic and nationalist

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8 Rogers Brubaker

‘unmixing of peoples’ (Gorski 2000a: 157–58). Rulers’ explicit concern with


the religious homogeneity of their subjects marked a sharp departure from the
generic pre-nationalist condition portrayed in stylised fashion by Gellner, in
which rulers ‘were interested in the tribute and labour potential of their
subjects, not in their culture’ (Gellner 1994: 62). Rulers were now very much
interested in the culture of their subjects, though not in their language. The
state-led cultural homogenisation that was licensed by the formula cuius regio,
eius religio provided a model for later, expressly nationalist, modes of statist
national homogenisation.
Nationalism centrally involves a distinctive organisation of sameness and
difference. Nationalist ideology demands – and nationalist social, political
and cultural processes tend to generate – cultural homogeneity within political
units and cultural heterogeneity between them. The territorialisation and
pluralisation of religion entailed by the process of confessionalisation and
codified in settlements such as the 1555 Peace of Augsburg and the 1648 Peace
of Westphalia institutionalised and legitimated this distinctive pattern.13
Religious homogeneity – a model for (and often a component of) national
cultural homogeneity – was produced and legitimised on the level of the
individual polity, while religious pluralism was institutionalised within the
wider state system. More broadly, the territorialisation and pluralisation of
religion entailed by the process of confessionalisation placed religion ‘in a
competitive, comparative field’, in Benedict Anderson’s phrase (Anderson
1991: 17). The emergence of such a field – replacing the single, vast field of
medieval Christendom – made it easier to imagine a world of distinct,
bounded nations.14
As this brief and highly selective sampling suggests, religion can be
understood as contributing to the origins and development of nationalism
in a great variety of ways. What these heterogeneous arguments have in
common is their rejection of an older understanding according to which
nationalism arises from the decline of, and as an antithesis to, religion. Of
course, sometimes nationalist claims are formulated in direct opposition to
religious claims; but even in these cases – most strikingly in the French
Revolution – nationalism may assume a religious quality, taking over some of
the forms and functions of religion. Moreover, earlier forms of nationalist (or
proto-nationalist) politics and national (or proto-national) consciousness
emerged in a period of intensified, rather than declining, religiosity. And
scholars have suggested ways in which nationalism, like capitalism in Weber’s
account, emerged in part as an unintended consequence of religious develop-
ments (Gorski 2003).

Religion as imbricated or intertwined with nationalism

A third way of analysing the connection between religion and nationalism sees
religion not as something outside nationalism that helps to explain it, but as

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Religion and nationalism 9

so deeply imbricated or intertwined with nationalism as to be part of the


phenomenon rather than an external explanation of it.
One kind of intertwining involves the coincidence of religious and national
boundaries.15 This has stronger and weaker variants. In the stronger variant,
the nation is imagined as composed of all and only those who belong to a
particular religion. This is illustrated by at least certain forms of Sikh
nationalism and Jewish nationalism. In a weaker variant, local religious
boundaries coincide with national boundaries, and religion may serve as the
primary diacritical marker that enables one to identify ethnicity or nation-
ality, yet the religious community extends beyond the nation. This is
illustrated by the doubling of religious and ethno-national identities in
Northern Ireland, or by the role of religious affiliation as a diacritical marker
distinguishing Catholic Croats from Orthodox Serbs in the former Yugoslavia
(both of whom spoke what used to be considered one and the same language).
In a second kind of intertwining, religion does not necessarily define the
boundaries of the nation, but it supplies myths, metaphors and symbols that
are central to the discursive or iconic representation of the nation. This theme
has been developed most fully in the work of Smith (1986, 2003, 2008). The
question that religious resources help to answer in this case is not necessarily
‘who belongs?’ but rather ‘who are we?’ and ‘what is distinctive about us as a
people, in terms of our history, character, identity, mission, or destiny?’ This
second kind of intertwining involves the religious inflection of nationalist
discourse. If one interprets nationalist discourse broadly as embracing not
only the discourse that accompanies and informs nationalist movements or
specific forms of nationalist politics, but any form of public or private talk
about particular ‘nations’ or countries, then this offers a broad and fertile
terrain for studying the connection between religion and nationalism.
For example, there is a large literature on the religious or religiously tinged
language and imagery that infuse American political rhetoric. Although this
rhetoric is not for the most part linked to distinctively nationalist forms of
politics, it can be seen as part of the phenomenon of nationalism, or
nationhood, in a broader sense. Historically, religious language and imagery
have deeply informed and infused ways of thinking and talking about
America and ‘Americanism’, about the origins of the nation, its mission, its
destiny, its role in the world, the ‘righteousness’ of its causes and the ‘evil’ of
its enemies. America has been represented as a nation uniquely blessed by
God, indeed chosen by God for a ‘redemptive’ role in the world, ordained to
serve as a ‘New Israel’, whose providential mission it was to serve in
exemplary fashion as a ‘beacon unto the nations’, or, in its interventionist
Wilsonian form, to take the lead in recasting and regenerating world order, to
‘lead the world in the assertion of the rights of peoples and the rights of free
nations’ (Woodrow Wilson, quoted in Stephanson 1995: 117).
The legacy of this discourse is evident today, even if the notion of a
distinctive mission is seldom cast – in mainstream political rhetoric – in
expressly religious terms. It may be difficult to imagine a modern American

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10 Rogers Brubaker

president declaring, as Theodore Roosevelt famously did in the 1912


campaign, that ‘we stand at Armageddon, and we battle for the Lord’. But
just days after the September 11 attacks, President Bush did declare it ‘our
responsibility to history’ to ‘rid the world of evil’. It may be hard to imagine a
speech on the floor of the Senate today using exactly the language of Albert
Beveridge, who in 1900 justified the war against the Filipino independence
movement by claiming that God had made ‘the English-speaking and
Teutonic peoples . . . master organizers of the world to establish system where
chaos reigned’, to ‘overwhelm the forces of reaction throughout the earth’, to
‘administer government among savage and senile peoples’ and to prevent the
world from ‘relaps[ing] into barbarism and night’, marking ‘the American
people as His chosen nation to finally lead in the redemption of the world’
(Tuveson 1968: vii; Bellah 1975: 38). Yet a century later, the rhetoric of
mission used in connection with the war in Iraq and, more broadly, in
connection with the ‘global war on terror’ and the mission of ‘spreading
freedom’, has certain evident similarities.
Nevertheless, while it is easy enough to identify the ways in which religious
or religiously tinged language and imagery are used to frame talk about the
special character, mission or destiny of a nation, it is more difficult to specify
the precise nature of the connection between religion and nationalism or
nationhood in such cases. Consider briefly three conceptual and methodolo-
gical difficulties. Firstly, what is religious about the religious or religiously
tinged language, narratives, tropes or images that are used to frame or colour
nation- or country-talk? Consider the political uses of the language of
‘sacredness’. When state representatives or nationalists speak of ‘sacred’
ideals, ‘sacred’ territory or ‘sacred’ causes, does this signal an intertwining
of religion and nation (or state)? Or can it be considered simply one of many
ways in which originally religious language can be used metaphorically in
other domains? Allusions to the Bible, for example, permeate all of English
literature – even literature that is in no obvious sense religious. Should we
think of this in terms of the intertwining of religion and literature? Or should
we note that, while the modern English language has indeed been profoundly
shaped by religion, metaphors and other figures of speech that derive
ultimately from religion can be used, in English as in any other language,
to communicate in ways that are not distinctively religious? After all, some-
times a metaphor is just a metaphor.
When reference is made today to America’s distinctive mission in the
world, is this evidence of the religious nature of American nationalism? Or, if
one were to trace the rhetoric of mission from the New England colonies of
the seventeenth century through to the present day, would one be more struck
by the progressive secularisation of that rhetoric? The specifically religious
resonance or force of the rhetoric of national mission would seem to be much
weaker today than in the New England colonies or in the seventeenth-century
Netherlands. In the peroration to the Protestant Ethic, Weber (1958) spoke of
victorious capitalism no longer needing the support of religion. Whatever the

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Religion and nationalism 11

role of religion in the origins of nationalism, we might well say the same thing
about victorious nationalism today (cf. Greenfeld 1992: 77).
One question, then, is what counts as religious language and imagery, as
opposed to religiously tinged or originally religious but subsequently secu-
larised language and imagery. A second issue concerns how to judge in
comparative perspective – whether over time or across cases – the salience or
pervasiveness of religious language or imagery. In almost any setting, the field
of nation-talk is vast, heterogeneous and chronically contested; one can’t
judge the degree to which nation-talk is framed in religious terms simply by
giving examples of such religious framing, no matter how numerous or vivid.
To judge the relative importance of distinctively religious ways of framing
nation-talk (as opposed to other ways of framing such talk) in different times
and places, one would need a systematic discourse-analytic study of the field
of nation-talk as a whole, so as to avoid sampling on the phenomenon of
interest.
A further issue concerns the resonance or effectiveness of religiously
framed, coded or tinged nation-talk. The force, meaning and resonance of
national or nationalist rhetoric, like those of any other form of rhetoric,
depend not on the rhetoric itself, or on the intentions of the speaker, but on
the schemas through which the rhetoric is interpreted. This suggests that the
intertwining of religious and nationalist discourse should be studied not only
on the ‘production’ side, but also on the ‘reception’ side. For example, in the
American case, even if the rhetoric of national mission used to justify post-
9/11 foreign policy is not in and of itself distinctively religious, and indeed is
cast in much more secular form today than in the past, that rhetoric may have
religious resonance, and may be interpreted in religious terms, by some of
those to whom it is addressed. It might therefore be claimed that the
distinctive degrees and forms of American religiosity help to explain the
initially broad-based public acceptance of post-9/11 American foreign poli-
cies, and of the invasion of Iraq in particular. But it is far from evident how
exactly to study the intertwining of religious schemas of interpretation and
nation-talk on the ‘reception’ side.
Scholars have studied not only the religious inflection of nationalist
discourse but also the inverse phenomenon: national or nationalist inflection
of religious discourse. More broadly, they have studied the ‘nationalisation’ of
religion in its organisational and practical as well discursive aspects: the ways
in which religions – particularly supraethnic, ‘universal’ religions such as
Christianity and Islam – have been transformed by their encounter with
nationalism and the nation-state (Haupt and Langewiesche 2004: 12 ff;
Schulze Wessel 2006: 7–14).
In the Christian context, nationalisation is in part a matter of what might
more precisely be called the ‘etatisation’ of religion, through which states have
sought to establish control over church affairs, appointments and property. In
the realm of Orthodox Christianity, especially in south-eastern Europe,
the nationalisation of Christianity involved the fragmentation of Eastern

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12 Rogers Brubaker

Christendom into a series of autocephalous national churches, which pro-


vided a key institutional framework for nationalist movements and promoted
a strong symbiosis of religious and national traditions. The nationalisation of
religion is also a matter of the varying cultural inflections of religious thought
and practice in different state and national contexts. This cultural inflection of
religious practice has been fostered by the fact that Christianity, unlike Islam,
has never been tied to a unifying sacred language, but has been from the start
a ‘religion of translation’ (Hastings 1997: 194). Although universalistic
tendencies in Islam have been stronger than those in Christianity, scholars
have studied the nationalisation of Islam as well, delineating the various ways
in which Islam has accommodated itself to – and been inflected by – differing
national and state contexts (Lapidus 2001).

Religious nationalism as a distinctive kind of nationalism

The fourth and final way of analysing the connection between religion and
nationalism that I want to consider involves the claim that religious nation-
alism is a distinctive kind of nationalism. The claim is not simply that
nationalist rhetoric may be suffused with religious imagery, or that nationalist
claims may be framed and formulated in religious or religiously tinged
language. This is indisputably true. It is not simply a claim about a religio-
national symbiosis or interpenetration, which no doubt often exists. The
argument I want to examine here concerns not the rhetorical form of
nationalist claims, or the language or imagery used to frame them, but the
content of those claims. It is a claim that there is a distinctively religious type
of nationalist programme that represents a distinct alternative to secular
nationalism.
The claim for a distinctively religious form of nationalism has been
articulated most fully by Roger Friedland (2002; see also Juergensmeyer
1993). Friedland defines nationalism in statist terms. He characterises nation-
alism as ‘a state-centred form of collective subject formation’; as ‘a program
for the co-constitution of the state and the territorially bounded population in
whose name it speaks’; and as ‘a set of discursive practices by which the
territorial identity of a state and the cultural identity of the people whose
collective representation it claims are constituted as a singular fact’ (Friedland
2002: 386).
This statist definition allows Friedland to conceptualise religious nation-
alism as a particular type of nationalism. Nationalism is understood as a form
with variable content. The form prescribes the ‘joining of state, territory, and
culture’ (Friedland 2002: 387), but does not specify how they are to be joined.
It leaves open the content of state-centred collective subject formation, the
content of the discursive practices through which the territorial identity of
a state and the cultural identity of a people are ‘constituted as a singular
fact’. Religion provides one way of specifying this content. It provides a

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Religion and nationalism 13

distinctive way – or a distinctive family of ways – of joining state, territory and


culture.
Religion is able to do so, in Friedland’s account, because it provides
‘models of authority’ and ‘imaginations of an ordering power’ (Friedland
2002: 390). Religion is a ‘totalising order capable of regulating every aspect of
life’ (ibid.: 390) – although Friedland acknowledges that this is less true of
Christianity, given its origins as a stateless faith. Religious nationalism joins
state, territory and culture primarily by focusing on family, gender and
sexuality: by defending the traditional family, as the key generative site of
social reproduction and moral socialisation, against economic and cultural
forces that weaken its authority or socialising power; by upholding traditional
gendered divisions of labour within and outside the family; and by promoting
a restrictive regulation of sexuality, seeking to contain sexuality within the
family.
This is a sophisticated and interesting argument. It usefully focuses
attention on the distinctively religious content of programmes for the ordering
and regulating of public and private life, rather than on the religious inflection
of political rhetoric or the religious identities of those involved in political
contestation. Neither of the latter is necessarily associated with a distinctively
religious nationalist programme. In Northern Ireland, for example, political
rhetoric is often inflected by religious motifs, images and symbols, and
religion is the key diacritical marker that defines the parties to the conflict.
Yet the conflict is not ‘about’ religion; no major claims are made about
ordering and regulating public life in a manner conforming with religious
principles. This is a classical nationalist conflict, not a distinctively religious
kind of nationalism (Jenkins 1997: chapter 8).
What, then, is a case of religious nationalism in this strong sense? Friedland
casts his definitional net widely; he sees religious nationalism at work in a wide
range of settings, including the USA, India, Iran, Israel, Palestine, Turkey,
Algeria, Egypt and Pakistan. But while he discusses Christian fundamental-
ism and Hindu nationalism in some detail and touches on Jewish nationalism,
he devotes his most sustained attention to Islamist movements. Because these
pose, in sharp form, certain questions about the category of religious
nationalism, I will focus on them.
There are certain striking similarities between Islamist movements and
familiar forms of nationalism. Islamist movements invoke a putatively
homogeneous pre-political identity (the umma or community of Muslims)
that ought, on some accounts, to have its own state, a restored Caliphate.
They hold that public life should safeguard and promote the distinctive values
of this community. They seek to awaken people to their ‘true’ identities and to
bring culture and polity into close alignment. They protest against the ‘alien’
rule of non-Muslims over Muslims or of governments that are only nominally
Muslim; and they seek to purify the polity of corrupting forms of alien
influence (moral, cultural or economic). In Friedland’s terms, they seek to join
state, territory and culture. In these and other ways, Islamist movements

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14 Rogers Brubaker

partake of the underlying ‘grammar’ of modern nationalism even when they


are ostensibly anti-nationalist or supra-national. Moreover, Islamists have
often allied with nationalist movements, and they have sometimes fused with
such movements. Hamas, for example, combines a classical state-seeking
nationalist agenda with a distinctively religious programme of Islamisation,
although not without considerable tension (Aburaiya 2009; Pelham and
Rodenbeck 2009). Yet most Islamist movements, although they work through
the state, are not oriented to the nation.
The territorial nation-state remains the dominant political reality of our
time; reports of its death or debility have been greatly exaggerated. Islamist
movements – like other forms of politicised religion – accommodate them-
selves to this reality, even when they have transnational commitments or
aspirations. The claim of the nation-state to regulate all aspects of life makes
it an inescapable arena of engagement. In pervasively state-organised socie-
ties, ‘no movement that aspires to more than mere belief or inconsequential
talk in public can remain indifferent to state power’ (Asad 2003: 200). But the
fact that Islamist movements seek to gain or influence the exercise of power
within particular nation-states does not make them nationalist (Arjomand
1994; Asad 2003: chapter 6).
Nationalism is a useful concept only if it is not overstretched. If the concept
is not to lose its discriminating power, it must be limited to forms of politics,
ideology or discourse that involve a central orientation to ‘the nation’; it
cannot be extended to encompass all forms of politics that work in and
through nation-states (cf. Smith 1991: 74). There is no compelling reason to
speak of ‘nationalism’ unless the imagined community of the nation is widely
understood as a primary focus of value, source of legitimacy, object of loyalty
and basis of identity. But the nation is not understood in this way by most
Islamist movements. This points to the limits of Friedland’s state-centred
understanding of nationalism. If Islamism is a form of nationalism, it is
nationalism without a central role for ‘the nation’.
Some scholars have argued that the umma – the worldwide community of
Muslim believers – is a kind of nation. On this account, the forms of
transborder politicised Islam that have taken root especially among margin-
alised second- and third-generation immigrant youth in Europe – oriented to
the global umma, nurtured primarily in cyberspace, articulated increasingly in
English and promoted by a new class of internet-based interpreters of Islam
(Anderson 2003), who have broken the monopoly of traditional authorities –
therefore represent a kind of de-territorialised nationalism (Saunders 2008).
Abstracting from the ethnic and national identities and the traditional
religious beliefs and practices of their parents and grandparents, ‘Muslim’
has indeed become a powerful categorical identity in Europe. This holds even
among the non-observant, so it is correct to say that ‘Muslim’ is not simply a
religious identity. But there is no compelling reason for regarding ‘Muslim’ as
a specifically national identity. A key distinguishing feature of nation as an
imagined community – and of nationalism as an ideology –is that any given

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Religion and nationalism 15

nation is imagined as limited, as just one among many other such nations
(Anderson 1991: 7). The social ontology of nationalism is in this sense
‘polycentric’ or ‘pluralist’ (Smith 1983: 158–59, 170–71). The umma is not
imagined as limited in this way, as one nation alongside others. Nor is the
umma imagined as actually or potentially sovereign – as the ultimate source of
political legitimacy (Asad 2003: 197–8). The forms of politics built around this
categorical identity are therefore better conceptualised under the broad rubric
of politicised ethnicity that I discussed in the first section of this article
(involving claims for resources, representation and recognition) than under
that of nationalism.

Conclusion

The four ways of studying the relationship between religion and nationalism
that I have distinguished and delineated are neither exhaustive nor mutually
exclusive. They do not represent alternative theories: they do not provide
different answers to the same questions, but ask different kinds of questions.
My aim has not been to argue for the merits of one of the four approaches
over the others; all represent interesting and valuable lines of research.
Rather, I have sought to give a sense of the range and variety of questions
that can be asked about the relationship between the large and multidimen-
sional fields of phenomena we call ‘religion’ and ‘nationalism’.
I would like to conclude by reconsidering the much-criticised understand-
ing of nationalism as a distinctively secular phenomenon. A secularist bias in
the study of nationalism, like the secularist bias in many other domains of
social science, long obscured interesting connections and affinities between
religion and nationalism. Long-dominant modernisationist arguments, em-
phasising socioeconomic modernity (Deutsch 1953; Gellner 1983), political
modernity (Breuilly 1994; Hechter 2000; Tilly 1996) or cultural modernity
(Anderson 1991), neglected religion or saw it as being replaced by national-
ism. The paradigmatic instances on which the literature focused were
European nationalisms between the late eighteenth and early twentieth
centuries; this truncated range of cases marginalised other cases – from early
modern Europe, South Asia or the Middle East, for example – in which
religion was more obviously central. A widely shared understanding of the
modern nation-state – an understanding at once normative and predictive –
relegated religion to the realm of the private.
This secularist bias has been challenged powerfully in recent years (Asad
2003; Spohn 2003; Van der Veer 1994). A substantial body of work, several
strands of which have been discussed above, has explored the multiple
connections and affinities between religion and nationalism. This work has
highlighted the religious matrix of the category of the secular itself, and has
challenged the notion that modernity requires the privatisation of religion
(Casanova 1994). These developments are entirely salutary. But is there

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16 Rogers Brubaker

perhaps something in the secularist understanding of nationalism that,


reformulated and shorn of various palpably untenable claims and expecta-
tions, might be worth preserving?
As a distinctive form of politics, nationalism involves demands for
congruence between ‘the nation’ – however defined – and the state or polity;
in a slightly different idiom, it involves claims that ‘the nation’ should be fully
expressed in and protected by an existing or projected state or polity. The
fundamental point of reference of nationalist politics is ‘the nation’; its social
ontology posits nations as fundamental social units (Smith 1983: 178).
Nations are seen as legitimately entitled to ‘their own’ polities, and as
‘owning’ those polities once they are established. Authority is seen as
legitimate only if it arises from ‘the nation’. This complex structure of
political argument and cultural understanding involves a distinctive social
ontology, a particular social imaginary (Anderson 1991; Taylor 2007) and an
‘ascending’ doctrine of political authority and legitimacy (Calhoun 1997).
It can be argued that the development and diffusion of this structure of
political argument and cultural understanding were made possible, in part, by
a process of secularisation. Not by the decline of religion, or by the relegation
of religion to the private realm: as Casanova (1994) has shown, these aspects
of the ‘secularisation thesis’ are untenable. But the core of the secularisation
thesis – the claim that the differentiation of various autonomous realms of
human activity from religious institutions and norms has been central to, even
constitutive of, Western modernity – remains valid (Casanova 1994). This
process of differentiation – and in particular the emergence of understandings
of economy, society and polity as autonomous realms – was arguably a
precondition for the emergence and widespread naturalisation of the social
ontology, social imaginary and ascending understanding of political legiti-
macy that are characteristic of modern nationalism.
Moreover, nationalist politics – based on claims made in the name of ‘the
nation’ – remain distinct from (even as they are intertwined with) forms of
religious politics that seek to transform public life not in the name of the
nation, but in the name of God. To be sure, as I have discussed above,
nationalism and religion are often deeply intertwined; political actors may
make claims both in the name of the nation and in the name of God.
Nationalist politics can accommodate the claims of religion, and nationalist
rhetoric often deploys religious language, imagery and symbolism. Similarly,
religion can accommodate the claims of the nation-state, and religious
movements can deploy nationalist language.
Yet intertwining is not identity: the very metaphor of intertwining implies a
distinction between the intertwined strands. As I suggested above, religious
movements that pursue a comprehensive transformation of public life do not
become nationalist simply by working through the nation-state; nor do they
become nationalist by allying with secular nationalists in anti-colonial
struggles or by deploying the rhetoric of anti-colonial nationalism. Similarly,
nationalist movements do not turn into specifically religious movements by

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Religion and nationalism 17

virtue of deploying religious symbols, emphasising religious traditions, or


even making religious affiliation a criterion of full membership of the nation.
Languages of religion and nation, like all forms of language, can be
intertwined pervasively. But even when the languages are intertwined, the
fundamental ontologies and structures of justification differ. We can be
sensitive both to discursive intertwining and to this fundamental difference.

Notes

1 The collections edited by Hutchinson and Lehmann (1994), Van der Veer and Lehmann
(1999), Geyer and Lehmann (2004), and Haupt and Langewiesche (2004) are indicative of this
surge in interest.
2 Hayes (1926: chapter 4); the quotations are from pp. 95, 104 and 124–5. The centrality of this
notion for Hayes is suggested by the title of his 1960 book Nationalism: a Religion. In a somewhat
more analytical discussion, Ninian Smart (1983) specified six dimensions on which nationalism
can be compared to religion (although by ‘nationalism’ he means what he admits might better be
called ‘patriotism’, namely ‘devotion to [one’s] own nation-state’). Thus understood, nationalism
is weak in doctrine, strong in myth, strong in ethics, intermittent in ritual, strong in experience and
strong in social form.
3 On the ways in which people use religious terms to define civic identities, see Lichterman
(2008).
4 The notion of social pluralism was developed with primary reference to colonial societies, but
varying degrees of social segmentation and institutional parallelism can be found elsewhere. The
‘pillarised’ (or formerly pillarised) society of The Netherlands is one classic example of a relatively
high degree of social pluralism.
5 Other mechanisms may be at work as well, including residential segregation and occupational
niches. These are analytically distinct from institutional duplication, although they usually work
in tandem.
6 Geertz’s seminal essay on politics in postcolonial societies (1963) provided an early argument
for treating all such claims together. See also Rothschild’s argument that it would not help to
separate out ethnicity from ‘religious, linguistic, racial, and other so-called primordial foci of
consciousness, solidarity, and assertiveness . . . If religious, linguistic, racial, and other primordial
criteria and markers were to be peeled off, it is difficult to see what precisely would be left to, or
meant by, the residual notion of ethnicity and ethnic groups’ (Rothschild 1981: 9). For a more
recent argument on the merits of treating race, ethnicity and nation as a single field, see Brubaker
(2009).
7 In addition to claims made on the basis of ethno-cultural or ethno-religious identity, broadly
understood, these include claims made in the name of the deaf (understood as a linguistic
minority; Plann 1997) or the autistic (as a neurologically based cultural minority; http://
www.petitiononline.com/AFFDec/petition.html; cf. Hacking 2009).
8 For Smith, the myth of ethnic election and divine covenant is constituted by a number of
linked ideas including divine choice, collective sanctification and conditional privilege (2003:
chapter 3, especially 50–51).
9 Smith has consistently distinguished nationalism as a distinctive ideology and movement from
national consciousness or national identity (see, for example, Smith 2003: 268). And he continues
to argue that while national identities have deep roots in pre-modern ethnic and (often) religious
identities (Hastings 1997; Smith 1986), nationalism crystallises as a fully elaborated doctrine only
in the late eighteenth century (Smith 2008: x). But he now dates the first nationalist movements to
these seventeenth-century cases.
10 See, for example, Gellner (1983: 142), for whom the key elements of Protestantism
‘foreshadowed an anonymous, individualistic, fairly unstructured mass society, in which relatively

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18 Rogers Brubaker

equal access to a shared culture prevails, and the culture has its norms publicly accessible in
writing, rather than in the keeping of a privileged specialist. Equal access to a scripturalist God
paved the way to equal access to high culture. Literacy is no longer a specialism, but a pre-
condition for all the specialisms . . . In such a society, one’s prime loyalty is to the medium of our
literacy, and to its political protector. The equal access of believers to God eventually becomes
equal access of unbelievers to education and culture’.
11 For a different perspective on religion and vernacular languages, attributing less importance to
Protestantism and more to Christianity per se (which, unlike Arabic, never had a sacred
language), see Hastings (1997: 193ff).
12 Smith (1986: 27) has observed that scholars of nationalism have paid too much attention to
language, and too little to religion. Ironically, it is partly through religious developments that
vernacular languages acquired the distinctive importance that they would come to have as a key
criterion and medium of nationality in Europe.
13 The Peace of Augsburg codified the territorialisation and politicisation of religion in the
German lands by making the jus reformandi – the right to determine the religion of a territory – an
attribute of [princely] sovereignty (Rice 1970: 165). The political fragmentation of Central Europe
meant that the fusion of culture and polity associated with confessionalisation occurred on lower
levels of political space than those later associated with ‘nations’. Nevertheless, the territorialisa-
tion and politicisation of religion were still significant in establishing the principle of the
congruence of polity and culture, and in providing both conceptual models of culturally
homogeneous political spaces and organisational infrastructures for establishing them that were
transferable to larger scales of political space and to other domains of culture.
14 ‘The fall of Latin exemplified a larger process in which the sacred communities integrated
by old sacred languages were gradually fragmented, pluralized, and territorialized’ (Anderson
1991: 19).
15 The coincidence between religious and ethnic boundaries is suggested by the term ‘ethno-
religious’; there is no corresponding combination term denoting the intertwining of nation and
religion, or the symbiosis between nation and religion.

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