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This article aims to provide a conceptual framework for exploring the relations between liberal nationalism and religion. Combining multidimensional analyses of autonomy as well as religion, the article aims to provide a framework for considering, with greater precision, different potential versions of liberal nationalism, and which kinds of prioritisations and trade‐offs they would involve. Religion is approached in terms of Wittgensteinian family resemblances, referring to a host of overlapping narratives, norms, objects and practices. Autonomy is analysed in terms of collective and individual autonomy, and the latter is divided into four major dimensions: liberty (freedom from coercion) opportunity (available options) capacity (for making choices) and authenticity (the degree to which choices are genuine). These, furthermore, may be distributed differently across space and time: for example, liberty may be restricted in the present to preserve it over time. Liberal nationalism ultimately has to balance intrinsic and instrumental arguments, while respecting human rights.

The concept of ‘nihilism’ is ambiguous and has had and continues to be attached to several different usages. This special Focus primarily looks at the ways in which ‘nihilism’, in and following the works of Friedrich Nietzsche, has been understood as specifically tied to a crisis of European culture or civilisation, and has come to be politicised in conjunction with the National Socialist and Fascist movements in Germany and Italy during the twentieth century. Specifically, the individual articles deal with the connection between an understanding of nihilism and what it entails for the question concerning political responsibility. This introductory article presents this thematic, introduces the other contributions, and attempts to situate these debates on nihilism in the context of processes of secularisation. The article retrieves three major themes in relation to the critiques surveyed in this special Focus: nihilism as a crisis of beliefs and values, as an appropriation of religious elements into ideological grand narratives, and as the unshackling of an instrumental approach towards reality, and argues that all of them remain relevant to contemporary debates.

Inspired by the works of Marx and Engels, this essay addresses the role of religion in postcapitalist communities by adopting a Wittgensteinian understanding of religion as a series of elements held together by family resemblances rather than a monolithic entity with a core essence. It analyzes proposals concerning both the content of religion, in terms of needs and functions, and also the potential form of religion, in terms of the degree of voluntary cooperation and the extent to which practices are open to continuous reinterpretation and transformation. The essay concludes that it would be desirable to retain many elements commonly considered as core components of "religion"-including collective rituals, sacred sites and symbols, metanarratives, and altered states of consciousness-but consciously transformed and organized in a framework characterized by voluntary cooperation and an openness to continuous transformation that is comprehensive in range and adapting to the shifting cultural and power-political contexts of the communities in question.

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