Religion and Nationalism in Global Perspective

Soper, John C.; Fetzer, Joel S.

doi:10.1017/9781316995280

Cited by 33 publications

(19 citation statements)

References 121 publications

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“…Carlton Hayes wrote, already in 1926, that nationalism is the religion of modernity, a thesis he maintained throughout his academic career, and restated in detail in his last book, Nationalism: A Religion (1926,1960). More contemporary scholarship on the topic mostly does not engage with or even cite Hayes' arguments on this relationship (Smith 1999(Smith , 2015Soper and Fetzer 2018). This is particularly puzzling since Hayes was a faculty member at Columbia University from the 1900s until the 1950s, advised dozens of PhD students, and served as the president of the American Historical Association in 1945.…”

Section: ) Nationalism As a Modern Religion In Competition With Traditional Religionsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Fourth, there is a body of scholarship on religious influences on national politics, mostly focusing on the study of religious organizations' influence on government policies, as these are often related to historical legacies of national-religious configurations, such as a national-religious fusion enabling religious organizations to have significant influence over policy-making (Rieffer 2003;Mavrogordatos 2003;Grzymala-Busse 2015Grzymala-Busse and Slater 2018;Soper and Fetzer 2018). These studies are useful in illustrating the concrete manifestations of religious influences in politics and policy-making, such as in political decisions regarding abortion (Grzymala-Busse 2015), divorce, same-sex marriage, religious education (Grzymala-Busse and Slater 2018), and religious affiliation in official identity documents (Mavrogordatos 2003).…”

Section: ) Religious Influences On National Politics and Policy Makingmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…A major shortcoming observed in some studies of religious influence in national politics is the acceptance of "religious demography" as an exogenous cause, "[a]rguably, the most important variable," in determining whether a country adopts religious nationalism (Soper and Fetzer 2018, 14), whereas religious demography is often the outcome, rather than an exogenous cause, of the type of nationalist-religious configuration particular polities adopted (Marx 2004;Aktürk 2009a;Terpstra 2015). Relatedly, in their evaluation of three pairs of countries with different types of nationalisms (civil-religious, religious, and secular), Soper and Fetzer (2018) find the Christianmajority polity in each paired comparison (United States, Greece, and Uruguay) to be "stable," in contrast to the non-Christian polities in each of these paired comparisons (Israel, Malaysia, and India) that they find to be "unstable." Although their finding of stable Christian nation-states and unstable non-Christian nation-states in their paired comparisons may be coincidental, it may also be due to the overwhelming religious homogeneity (Christian-majority) of Greece, United States, and Uruguay compared to India, Israel, and Malaysia, which itself is an outcome, not a cause, of deliberate choices in their political history.…”

Section: ) Religious Influences On National Politics and Policy Makingmentioning

confidence: 99%

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

Aktürk

2021

Nationalities Papers

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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.

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Section: ) Nationalism As a Modern Religion In Competition With Traditional Religionsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: ) Religious Influences On National Politics and Policy Makingmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: ) Religious Influences On National Politics and Policy Makingmentioning

confidence: 99%

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

Aktürk

2021

Nationalities Papers

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“…Secular nationalism can be understood as an ideology in which collective identity and loyalty to the nation are defined through the citizenship, and religious affiliation becomes subordinate to the regionally defined citizenship (for discussion see Juergensmeyer 2008, chap. 1;Soper and Fetzer 2018).…”

Section: Supplementary Materialsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Co-optation and Repression of Religion in Authoritarian Regimes

Schleutker

2020

Politics and Religion

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Abstract Comparative research on authoritarianism has largely neglected religion. Yet, in order to understand the logic of authoritarian control over the civil society, it is necessary to study how the authoritarian regimes deal with religious groups. In this paper, lessons from the two rapidly expanding fields on regulation of religion and comparative authoritarianism are combined. In particular, a conceptualization of regulation of religion in the authoritarian context is proposed, according to which positive endorsement of religion can be understood as co-optation, whereas negative restrictions can be seen as repression. By employing data on positive endorsement and negative restrictions on religion from 2014 for ca. 70 countries, three different clusters of authoritarian countries regarding the regulation of religion are identified. Finally, it is argued that capacity and ambition of both the religious groups and the authoritarian regimes are the main determinants of regulation.

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“…Institutionally, secular nationalism posits the separation of church and state as well as the decline of religious power as natural and inevitable. 26 In fact, there was a tendency until recently to characterize modern nationalism as an inherently secular phenomenon. 27 As Smith points out, these modernist theories of nationalism "relegate religion and the sacred to the premodern past."…”

Section: Religious Nationalism: a Global Phenomenonmentioning

confidence: 99%

Religious Nationalism and Religious Freedom in Asia: Mapping Regional Trends in a Global Phenomenon

Neo

Scharffs

2021

AsianJLS

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In recent times, religious nationalism has emerged as a major basis for identity and mobilization. In Asia, religious nationalism specifically challenges existing pluralist approaches to constitutional government, which have generally been seen as necessary to ensure peaceful coexistence. The increasing alignment of religious and national boundaries has the worrying capacity to neutralize the “cross-cutting cleavages” that could otherwise vitiate the centrifugal tendencies of pluralistic societies. In the context of pluralistic Asia, therefore, religious nationalism is fundamentally anchored in a rejection of ethnic, religious, cultural, and even legal plurality. This has serious consequences for the freedoms of religious groups, particularly minority groups and minorities within dominant religious groups. This article introduces the Special Issue studying not only the phenomenon of religious nationalism in Asia, but also its impact on the rights of religious groups and their religious freedoms, broadly conceived.

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Religion and Nationalism in Global Perspective

Cited by 33 publications

References 121 publications

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

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

Co-optation and Repression of Religion in Authoritarian Regimes

Religious Nationalism and Religious Freedom in Asia: Mapping Regional Trends in a Global Phenomenon

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