Nationalism and Religion in Comparative Perspective: A New Typology of National-Religious Configurations

Abstract

Does religion motivate and intensify nationalism, or does religion moderate and even suppress nationalism? Six kinds of relationships between nationalism and religion are critically reviewed: nationalism as a modern religion in competition with traditional religions; religious origins of the “Chosen People” as the mythomoteur of nationalism; religious exclusion as nation-building; religious influences on national policies; influence of religious observance on national identification; and religiously based “civilizations” transcending nationalisms. Western Christian experience with nationalism is not generalizable due to the institutional autonomy and supranational organization of the Catholic Church. Western European nationalisms were premised on religious sectarian homogeneity, and the homogenous “confessional state” served as the template of European nation-states. Furthermore, I argue that the late medieval eradication of Muslims and Jews across Western Europe prefigured sectarian and ethnonational purges of the following centuries. Finally, I argue that different configurations of religion and nationalism depend on two critical conditions: the degree to which the dominant religious tradition is doctrinally supraethnic and institutionally transnational, and the religious identity of the main adversary in the constitutive conflict that culminated in national statehood. The crises of Marxism and liberalism provide the context for the resurgence of religion and nationalism at present.

A Comparative Analysis of National-Religious Configurations: Which religious traditions correlate with higher and lower nationalism?

“…In this subtype of nationalism, violent conflict at the origins of nation-building has been between groups of the same religious tradition, and therefore nationalism and religiosity are expected to moderate and weaken each other, which was strongly confirmed in at least one of the three cases I briefly examined in this manuscript (Lebanon). These findings provide preliminary but significant confirmation of the expectations I laid out in my fourfold typology of nationalreligious configurations (Aktürk 2022).…”

“…This is very much in line with the argument suggesting that there are multiple modernities (Eisenstadt 2000), which are also reflected in different types of relationships between nationalism and religion in different geopolitical regions of the world dominated by different religions or civilizations (Spohn 2003). At the one end of the spectrum, Catholic Christianity and Sunni Islam have a supraethnic doctrine and transnational institutionalization, whereas at the opposite end of the spectrum Hinduism, Judaism, Protestant Christianity, and Shintoism have an ethnic doctrine and/or national institutionalization (Aktürk 2022, Table 1). The relationship between national and religious identities is not determined by religious doctrine or institutionalization alone.…”

“…However, this question has not been subjected to a systematic cross-national empirical investigation guided by the expectations and predictions found in the scholarship on nationalism to the best of my knowledge. Moreover, attempts at comparative theorizing with an exhaustive typology of all possible relationships between nationalism and religion have been exceedingly rare (e.g., Rieffer 2003;Brubaker 2012;Soper and Fetzer 2018;Aktürk 2022). This paper has a single overarching goal: A cross-national empirical examination of the key expectations I formulated regarding the relationship between particular nationalisms and particular religious sectarian identities as well as levels of religiosity based on the fourfold theoretical typology that I outlined previously (Aktürk 2022).…”

A Comparative Analysis of National-Religious Configurations: Which religious traditions correlate with higher and lower nationalism?

“…There are significant differences among major religious traditions in terms of both doctrine and institutionalization (Aktürk 2022) such that we may expect systematic differences in their interaction with various nationalisms. This is very much in line with the argument suggesting that there are multiple modernities (Eisenstadt 2000), which are also reflected in different types of relationships between nationalism and religion in different geopolitical regions of the world dominated by different religions or civilizations (Spohn 2003).…”

“…Moreover, attempts at comparative theorizing with an exhaustive typology of all possible relationships between nationalism and religion have been exceedingly rare (e.g., Rieffer 2003;Brubaker 2012;Soper and Fetzer 2018;Aktürk 2022). This paper has a single overarching goal: A cross-national empirical examination of the key expectations I formulated regarding the relationship between particular nationalisms and particular religious sectarian identities as well as levels of religiosity based on the fourfold theoretical typology that I outlined previously (Aktürk 2022). The cross-national empirical investigation is necessarily limited due to two major constraints: First, most of the reliable sources of crossnational data on nationalism(s) and religiosity are primarily at the country level, and not at the indiviudal level; and second, they provide snaphsots at a given point in time, rather than tracing changes in the same individuals' levels of nationalist feeling and religious belief, belonging, and behavior.…”