The religions are nothing but instrumental myths designed to preserve certain arrangements that favored certain groups in the name of an empirically unverifiable entity called ‘god’. Carl Sagan’s embraced view is that ’it is far better to grasp the universe as it really is than to persist in delusion, however, satisfying and reassuring’; and Dawkins’ assertion that ‘religion is about turning untested belief into unshakable truth through the power of institutions and the passage of time.’ One of the prevailing myths about religion is that the religions are archaic myths that bring more harm to the world than good. In many ways, nationalism too works like religion. Specifically, nationalism works like a parochial religion. It is parochial because it simultaneously breeds and reinforces particularistic identities and interests. However, unlike those dominant religions with universalizing tendencies and aspirations, nationalism and its advocates do not aspire for the entire human race to join their respective imaginary nations. Whereas some religious extremists would consider killing people to create their desired ‘Christian’ or ‘Muslim’ world; even today’s most patriotic nationalist leaders would not dream of say, an ‘American earth’ where everyone is an American citizen or a ‘British planet’ where the entire human species holds a British passport.
Nations exist because of the imaginary limits that people socially construct among and between them selves. And because nationalism is founded on such exclusivity that separates the in-group from the out-group, people argue that racism is embedded in nationalism. nationalistic thinking is often viewed as an inherently positive trait that many people all acquire at an early age. Like any religion, nationalism demands three key things from people a absolute faith, unqualified allegiance, and quiet obedience. The nationalism, like religion, was merely circumstantial. Just like people’s faith in some god, and faith in an imagined community is neither natural nor fixed. Like religious identity, nationalism is neither in people’s blood nor in their genes. It is all in the mind. The religion full allegiance is demonstrated through the willingness of the faithful to live and die for the teachings of their god; with nationalism, allegiance is shown through the willingness of citizens to live and die for the artificial imageries and symbols defining their imagined communities.
Whereas with religion, quiet obedience to god is shown by embracing your predestined life without questions; with nationalism, quiet obedience to the nation is shown by accepting and advancing its pre-existing culture without questions for the continued survival of people’s race and the nation. When confronting parochial hatreds, resentments, and fears, which are frequently expressed in the language of bombs, most of people find comfort in those assimilationist flags; those monuments that people built for their war heroes; those geological maps depicting the territorial lands and seas; and perhaps even those portraits of past presidents or prime ministers. Anything that would make people believe that people are all a part of one, cohesive community. That is worth fighting for, living for, and dying for. Like religious beliefs, these nationalist fervors can be very consuming but still reassuring.
The interface between religion and the nation-state is complex and influences a wide range of critical issues, from national governance to international relations. The relationship between religion and nationalism is much less explored. Recent events highlight the ways in which religion and nationalism can meet—citizenship policy in India, COVID-19 response in Russia, and ongoing conflict in Syria serve as just a few examples across different faith traditions and country contexts. The United States has also seen the relationship between religion and nationalism play out on the public stage, including in 2020 presidential elections displays of both white Christian nationalism and civil religion.
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. the late medieval eradication of Muslims and Jews across Western Europe prefigured sectarian and ethnonational purges of the following centuries. The 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.
In the run up to the 2022 Beijing Olympics, the United States and many of its allies announced a diplomatic boycott of the games in response to Chinese treatment of Uyghurs and other Muslim minorities, which the United States described as “genocide and crimes against humanity.” One need not look far to find other examples of religion playing a prominent role in national identity and politics today. In just the past five years, the Hindu nationalist government of Narendra Modi changed Indian law to allow immigrants an avenue to citizenship, so long as they were not Muslim; the Buddhist nationalist government of Myanmar has targeted the predominantly Muslim Rohingya with acts of violence; and far-right populist parties have risen to prominence in Hungary, France, and Germany, largely in opposition to rising numbers of refugees; and the presidency of Donald Trump has reminded us of the continuing role of Christian nationalism in U.S. politics. As Mark Juergensmeyer (Mark is a noted American sociologist and scholar specialised in global studies and religious studies and a writer),has pointed out, nationalism and religion are competing “ideologies of order.” They both play a similar role in our lives by helping us to make sense of the world, giving our lives a larger meaning, telling us who we are, and conferring legitimacy onto leaders. Religion’s powerful impact on modern politics may seem obvious, but for much of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, there was an assumption among social scientists that religion was destined to wither away. The nationalism exploded in the nineteenth century, religion often played a smaller role in society as it gave way to newer and more secular notions of society. For example, in addition to replacing the monarchy with a republic, the humanist revolutionaries of the French Revolution also transformed Catholic churches into “Temples of Reason.” Both the monarchy and the Church became anachronisms.
The religion refused to go away. By the late-twentieth century, clear reminders of the importance of religion in the modern world were abundant. In Europe alone, the Troubles in Northern Ireland between Protestants and Catholics, the genocide in Srebrenica carried out by Orthodox Serbs against Muslim Bosniaks, and the Catholic-fueled Solidarity movement in Poland all showed the importance of religion in modern politics and modern nations. Scholars now recognize that modernity can in fact undermine religion, as was predicted for many years, but the very same modernization is also destabilizing. And as the pace of change accelerates in the world around us, that instability is disconcerting, and it can lead us to seek out those forces that provide us with a greater context and help us to feel more grounded. In that way, the chaos of the modern world can actually strengthen religion.
In order to understand the role of religion in modern nationalism, it’s important to first recognize that nationalism is, at its most fundamental level, a form of identity. It tells us who we are, and that in turn can impact our values, our purpose, and our sense of where we belong. And like all forms of identity, nationalism is inherently tied to the concept of “the other.” If you pause and think about your core identities—whether that be your national identity, ethnicity, gender, occupation, religion, or role in your family—each identity is shaped in response to what you are not. The identity of fathers is shaped in response to what sets them apart from both mothers and children.
The identity of Protestants is shaped in response to what distinguishes them from Catholics. Similarly, American national identity is tied to those values and characteristics that distinguish it from other nations. Universal characteristics aren’t useful in group identification. As a result, national groups are always informed and shaped by the traits that distinguish them from other groups. The forces that shape national identity, the most powerful “others” are often those that are the most threatening to the nation. It is human to be powerfully shaped by the events in our life that bring us face-to-face with our own mortality. Nations are the same. Irish identity is forever shaped by those factors that set it apart from England, and so the Gaelic language and Catholicism become central to the Irish nation. American and Soviet identities profoundly impacted one another during the Cold War, and so their identities become wrapped up in what differentiates them.
Once these identities are formed, they have a lasting impact. Long after the end of the Cold War, they continue to play a role in both American and Russian culture and politics. The places in the world where religion has bonded itself to nationalism most extensively are those places where national survival was threatened (or perceived to be threatened) by a ‘religious other.’ As societies become more diverse, the usefulness of religion as a tool for national mobilization wanes. A pattern emerges in which the early stages of immigration often lead to a nationalist backlash, but with time, diversity—including religious diversity—can itself become part of what defines a nation. The task in the meantime is to protect minorities until the national self-concept can evolve to a more inclusive one that sees religious diversity as an asset and not a liability. Both involve faith in an external power, feelings of awe and reverence, and ceremonial rites focused on a sacred object, such as the national flag (which in many European countries displays a cross). Both nationalism and religion unite their adherents in an imagined moral community, sharing a common good, and both are concerned to maintain the boundaries and purity of their community. Both nationalism and religion claim utmost loyalty to a transcendental cause, to kill or die for. Therefore, a person can have only one nationality and one religion (but can have multiple citizenships). Both nationalism and religion seek to regulate human reproduction (marriage, divorce, celibacy, abortion, natalist policies) and death.
