This is an excerpt from my essay in the Routledge Handbook of Religion and Nationalism.
Nationalism and religion are frequently contentious. Their relationship has often been conflictual, and sometimes quite violent. Though the idea of nationhood as conceived in the Peace of Westphalia in 1648 would seem to privilege religion as a defining characteristic of the nation-state, the Enlightenment concepts of secular nationalism usually rejected the influence of religious institutions. Yet religious things—ideas and institutions—have remained in the shadow of nation states, ready to emerge as supporters or rivals, as needs be.
Religion can mean many things, from ideologies to institutions and social identities. As a prescription for righteous living it can provide the moral legitimation for a variety of human activities, including violent ones. Max Weber famously said that the state held the monopoly on the moral authority to coerce lives and if necessary to kill—whether for policing, punishment or warfare (Weber 2015, 136). But the state does not quite hold this monopoly. Religion also has that ethical ability. Religious bodies and creeds can legitimize violence in the service of defending a religious community or enacting righteous punishment or waging what may be perceived to be a holy war.
For these reasons, religion can be a stalwart ally of the nation. But it can also be a potent weapon for those who oppose national authority, perhaps to supplant it with political aspirations of their own. Religion can buttress the status quo, or it can be an agent of rebellion.
The ideas of secular nationalism formulated by European Enlightenment thinkers in the 18th century conveyed a distinctly anti-religious bias, especially regarding the power of the Church. John Locke’s notions of civil community and Jean Jacques Rousseau’s ideas about a social contract ignored religious divisions and beliefs (Locke 1689, Rousseau 1762). At the same time the Enlightenment had what the historian, Darrin McMahon, calls its “religious enemies” who laid the groundwork for anti-secular nationalism that has confounded politics from the 18th century to the present (McMahon 2002).
The Enlightenment notion of nationhood was ambivalent about religion. One the one hand it was adamantly secular and opposed to any religious interference with governance. On the other hand it depended on cultural factors, including religion, to define the natural boundaries of what constituted national entities (Smith 1986, Lie 2004). Religion helped to define “modern peoplehood,” as the political scientist John Lie put it (Lie 2004).
Moreover, secular nationalism appeared to many to be its own kind of religion, poised as a dagger to traditional religiosity and communities. The French philosopher, Alexis deTocqueville observed that the secular order brought into existence by the French revolution was a “strange religion” that in time would, “like Islam, overrun the whole world with its apostles, militants, and martyrs” (Tocqueville 1856, 43-44). Tocqueville was right regarding its global reach. It was shipped throughout the world as the unaccompanied baggage of colonial occupation. It became indeed the “strange religion” of then new nations of Asia, Africa, and Latin America.
The educated and modernized pioneers who led the new nations, figures such as India’s Jawaharlal Nehru and Egypt’s Gamal Abdel Nasser, were determined to keep traditional religion under control. Secularism in India, for instance, meant state control over religious institutions and equal support for them (Bhargava 2023). Communalism—the clash among religious communities and the preference and prejudice given to dominate over lesser ones—was fiercely to be contained.
To many religious activists in the new nations, the government’s secular ideology was seen as a competitor for the social dominance that religion had previously provided. It represented one side of a great encounter between different perceptions of social reality and ways of conceiving the relationship between the state and individuals. On one hand was the Roussean concept of the social contract, and on the other the familial ties bound by the patriarchal authority of religion. The division was a basic one, and though it was possible to ascribe simultaneously to both, the seeds of discord were laid, ready to rise into conflict and violence in later competitions for supremacy. It is no wonder, then, that the political character of the late twentieth and early twenty-first century has been so replete with bloody clashes between nationalisms secular and religious.