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Decoloniality article

On the Advantage of Not Fitting In: Religious-National Identities as Border-Living


Gazi Husrev Beg Mosoque, Sarajevo. Painting by Spiro Bocaric (1909). Public Domain. Via Wikimedia Commons.

The Balkans are somewhat of a challenge for those thinking and writing about colonialism and its afterlife. Before the decolonial turn in the human and social sciences scholars debated whether the Balkans belonged to the colonial world at all. There were, on the one hand, those who argued that the Balkans ought to be considered as part of colonial experience and an aspect of the study of orientalism. Larry Wolff, Milica Bakić-Hayden, and Vesna Goldsworthy, among others, produced influential studies of the region and broadened the horizons of postcolonial scholarship—even as other, non-regional postcolonial critics, were very slow to acknowledge their insights, as Dorotea Kołodziejczyk’s has shown.

On the other hand, however, there were scholars who resisted the view of the Balkans as a subspecies of orientalism. One of the most recognized in this group was the historian Maria Todorova. For her, the Balkans merited investigation on their own terms, rather than under the umbrella category of the colonial. In the Balkans, Todorova notes, there is an absence of self-understanding as colonized peoples. Moreover, neither the Ottomans nor the Habsburgs—which dominated the Balkan region for centuries—could be described as colonial empires. In these two instances, Todorova elaborates, we can find “no abyss or institutional/legal distinction between metropole and dependencies”; “no previous stable entity which colonized”; “no amelioration complex, no civilizing mission obsession comparable to the French or the English colonial projects”;  “no hegemonic cultural residue” that would be “comparable to the linguistic and general cultural hegemony of English in the Indian subcontinent . . . or of French in Africa and Indochina.” Finally, Todorova identifies the distinctive character of the Balkan religious experience. She stresses that Balkan religious heterogeneity is among the chief reasons why Western Europeans have perceived the region as ambiguous and anomalous—so different from the Western European drive for religious homogenization that was part and parcel to the rise of modern Western European nation-states.

Todorova’s remarks, especially her highlighting of the Balkan religious in-betweeness, provide the starting point for the challenge I want to pose to scholars and activists from this region who identify with decoloniality, especially those who trace connections between postsocialist and postcolonial trajectories and politics while overlooking the role of religion in social life and in the modes of “being and living locally” (16). It is plausible that their inattention to religion is an extension of the secularist bias that characterizes postcolonial approaches more generally. It is also possible to see their inattention as a problem for their own decolonial practices and goals. As An Yountae and Nelson Maldonado-Torres contend elsewhere on this blog, if one is to follow Frantz Fanon, religious ideas ought not only to be subjects of critique but also explored as sources of radical change. On my reading, the absence of a focus on religion in decolonial studies of the Balkans merits probing because the region’s religious experiences fit neither the patterns of the Western European religious homogenization nor of religious colonization. As such they can be analytically, normatively, and politically generative. Defined by multiple peripheralities—as neither the colonizer nor the colonized— the Balkans and their religious-national configurations emerge not only as a reflection of the established nation-states but also as border-living that, through the local experience of life, contests those nation-states.

Examining the complexities of the religious in-betweeness of the Balkans and what they imply for our understanding of nationalism in relation to the nation-state is especially relevant since, as Nikolay Karkov has shown,  decolonial scholars and activists from the Balkans follow the lead, among others, of Madina V. Tlostanova and Walter Mignolo as they attempt to bridge post-Soviet/post-socialist and subaltern considerations and resistances, in order to “revisit the local histories . . . within the colonial matrix of power” (6). Decolonial thinkers from the Balkans thus reject the questioning of the region’s colonial status and posit that everyone is part of coloniality/modernity: “Its totalizing reach,” writes Nikolay Karkov, “leaves no place untouched and no stone unturned,” so that the Balkans (as constitutive of Eastern Europe), “while formally never colonized by the West,” are “no exception to coloniality’s logic” (46).

Defined by multiple peripheralities—as neither the colonizer nor the colonized— the Balkans and their religious-national configurations emerge not only as a reflection of the established nation-states but also as border-living that, through the local experience of life, contests those nation-states.

Moreover, the new generation of decolonial scholars from the Balkans considers the incorporation of this region into the European Union a neocolonial event. They turn to decoloniality as a frame of analysis and a reminder of the radical power of decolonial praxis against neoliberalism,  And, while the region’s thinkers and activists are careful to separate their decolonial resistance to the neocolonial transnational projects from the populist nativist politics that rejects Western European modernity, they reassert the view of nationalism prescribed by the subaltern decolonial experiences, imaginaries, and practices. They follow thinkers like Ramón Grosfoguel when he contends that nationalism can provide only “Eurocentric solutions to a Eurocentric global problem as it reproduces an internal coloniality of power within each nation-state and reifies the nation-state as the privileged location of social change. . . . Nationalist responses to global capitalism reinforce the nation-state as the political institutional form par excellence of the modern/colonial capitalist/patriarchal world-system” (25).

Within the decolonial framing, where the whole problematic of nationalism is, then, identified as the domain of nation-states and, in turn, as constitutive of the colonial matrix of power, the phenomenology of Balkan nationalisms cannot be explored as arising from the complexity of the local border-living. Rather, it is relegated to the “right-wing . . . activist, and violent politics,” the “narratives and movements [that] remain subscribed to an ontology of difference that categorize spaces and people according to frameworks of race and nation,” and “the exclusionary and dehumanizing logics of the self-proclaimed national emancipatory agendas” (28). Put another way, despite the in-betweeness of the Balkans in relation to the abyssal line—despite them being neither on the side of the colonizer or the colonized—decolonial thinkers from the region see nationalisms primarily or exclusively as the embodiment of the nation-states’ logic, ideology, and power.

Balkan religious heterogeneity—also shaped by border-living as a historical reality for centuries—complicates this straightforward picture. As the Bosnian Islamic theologian Enes Karić underscores, in one thousand to two thousand years of history, the Balkan region never “entrusted its whole to one religion alone.” The centuries of proximity of Orthodox Christians, Roman Catholics, and Muslims shows “the meaninglessness of theories that divide religions into ‘native’ and immigrating ones”; they also demonstrate that the decolonial framing of Christianity as another aspect of domination invested in western colonial modernity does not have much in common with the place of Christianities in Balkan local life and experience. There is nothing here that resembles the spread of Orbis Christianus to the Americas where colonization and Christian missionary endeavors were a joint enterprise. Christianities, western and eastern, arrived to the Balkans early and, from being central to the power of various local medieval states, often became constitutive of the Ottoman Empire’s millet system. Balkan religious history, in other words, is one of constant shifts in power constellations among different religious groups; it is also a long history of proximities, both conflicts and encounters, among Orthodox and Catholic Christianities, and Islam.

These shifts in power relations and the “movement” of borders that accompanied them, provide the backdrop for the ways in which both Christianities and Islams in the Balkans have enabled religious-national connections expressed as border-living, rather than merely boundary-maintenance. In my considerations of the Bosnian Franciscan radical peacebuilding in the 1990s and the Rhodopes’ Christian-Muslim living in the context of komshuluk—“good neighborly relations”—I uncover the ways in which particular religious and national identities are affirmed while also remaining open. For the Bosnian Franciscans, the latter meant the affirmation of the Bosnian identity in the midst of violent conflicts as an identity that embraced but did not abolish religious or national particularities. It demonstrated, in the words of Father Mile Babić, the possibility of both freedom and belonging. For the Rhodope Christian-Muslim komshuluk, this word, of Turkish origin but perceived as part of the Bulgarian language, was lived as “a closeness in separation” and “the efforts to maintain it.” While keeping alive the memories of conflict and violence among different groups, all members of komshuluk also work to sustain the ideals of good neighborly relations as a moral good justifiable in religious terms. Put another way, in both the Bosnian and Bulgarian examples, the ways of border-living have long faced, responded to, but also resisted the attempts of various nation-states, including those of communist provenance, to determine and regulate the religio-national categories in these regions. And in both instances of border-living, religious and national intersubjectivities remained irreducible to nation-states: when they were rooted and embedded, national without being nationalistic, religiously humanistic yet particular, these configurations of religious and national intersubjectivities promoted deep pluralism while contesting whichever nation-state they faced.

Balkan religious history, in other words, is one of constant shifts in power constellations among different religious groups; it is also a long history of proximities, both conflicts and encounters, among Orthodox and Catholic Christianities, and Islam.

The religio-national border-living I retrieve in the Balkans might not be as critical or radical as envisioned and enacted by either the subaltern or Balkan decolonial thinkers and activists. It is, however, border-living and doing through which, as Tlostanova and Mignolo suggest, it is possible to evade the colonial matrix by way of not belonging to “its memories, feelings, and ways of sensing” (7). Why, then, work to fit in the Balkans in either postcolonial or decolonial frames, if it is their liminality that is valuable? I don’t posit this question to circumvent but rather to engage a decolonial understanding of border-living, and to do so in a way that can complicate and perhaps even deepen that notion. The Balkan religio-national in-betweeness also challenges the decolonial approach to nationalisms as the phenomena that is first and foremost embodied in the structures of nation-states. If we consider religio-national connections and configurations in the Balkans as instances of border-living, isn’t it plausible to ask whether the decolonial view of nationalism is another iteration of methodological nationalism—the understanding that nation-states are the dominant formation and representation of modern political life, which in this particular iteration would imply that nation-states absorb the complex collectivistic phenomenology of national belonging?

My invitation to take the Balkans in their singularities rather than fitting them into the pre-established decolonial frames of thought also reflects an ethical concern. In my view, only when the Balkans are, to follow Romina Istratii, considered as succumbing to neither Northern nor Southern theoretical or praxis-oriented frameworks, can we ensure that all ways of being and living locally are truly listened to, rather than considered through a gradation of levels exploitation (as sometimes happens in decolonial considerations). And, only if the Balkan experiences and stories, modes of resistance, and affirmations are taken not only on their own but also as constitutive of those knowledges that have far too often been silenced,[1] can we enact an expansive vision of pluriversality, in which decoloniality, as Walter Mignolo puts it, is only one option, and it is always a truth in parentheses (115).

 

* This post draws on the proposals that the author develops in two essays, “Linking Identity and Solidarity:  A Reflection from the Periphery” (forthcoming) and “Neither Exclusionary Religious Nationalisms, Nor Abstract Religious Humanisms: Belonging and Border-Living in the Balkans,” in Balkan Contextual Theology, ed. Stipe Odak and Zoran Grozdanov (Routledge, 2022). I am grateful to Stipe Odak and Zoran Grozdanov for their comments and for permission to use some material from the essay I published in their volume. I am also grateful to Joshua Lupo and Atalia Omer for questions and suggestions in the development of this piece.

[1] For the notion of silenced knowledges, see Boaventura de Sousa Santos, The End of the Cognitive Empire: The Coming of Age of Epistemologies of the South, 8

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Slavica Jakelić
Slavica Jakelić is the Richard P. Baepler Distinguished Professor in the Humanities at Valporaisio University. Her scholarly interests and publications center on religion and nationalism, religious and secular humanisms, theories of religion and secularism, theories of modernity, and interreligious conflict and dialogue. Jakelić has worked at or was a fellow of a number of interdisciplinary institutes in Europe and the United States—the Erasmus Institute for the Culture of Democracy in Croatia; the Institute for the Study of Economic Culture at Boston University; the Institut für die Wissenschaften vom Menschen in Vienna; the Martin Marty Center at the University of Chicago; the Notre Dame Institute for Advanced Study; the Erasmus Institute at the University of Notre Dame; and the Kroc Institute at the University of Notre Dame’s Keough School. She is a Senior Fellow of the national project “Religion & Its Publics,” placed at the University of Virginia, where she was a faculty member and co-director at the UVA’s Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture for several years. She is also a Senior Fellow of the international project "Orthodoxy and Human Rights," placed at Fordham University.

Jakelić 's writings have appeared in journals such as the Journal of the American Academy of Religion, Journal of Religious Ethics, Political Theology, The Hedgehog Review, The Review of Faith &International Affairs, Studies in Religion, Sciences Religieuses, and Commonweal. She co-edited three volumes: The Future of the Study of Religion, Crossing Boundaries: From Syria to Slovakia, and The Hedgehog Review’s issue "After Secularization." Jakelić is the author of Collectivistic Religions: Religion, Choice, and Identity in Late Modernity (Routledge, 2010) and is currently working on two books, Pluralizing Humanism (under contract with Routledge) and Ethical Nationalisms.
 
Theorizing Modernities article

When Politics are Sacralized: Religion and Nationalism in Zimbabwe


Participant of a demonstration in favour of Zimbabwe’s independence from British rule. Image via Wikimedia Commons. CC BY-2.0

While reading When Politics Are Sacralized: Comparative Perspectives on Religious Claims and Nationalism, I was drawn to compare the arguments of some of the contributors to the book to the recent political situation in Zimbabwe, on which I have conducted extensive research. Zimbabwe gained independence in 1980 following a protracted war of liberation against Great Britain. The liberation war was fought with a nationalist ideology as its motivating force and Zimbabwe today is constitutionally a secular state. However, like in India, as Tanika Sarkar shows in this book, true secularization in Zimbabwe is difficult to imagine because the society continues to be highly religious, and religion and politics intertwine. Political elites often appeal to either Christianity or African religion to ground their nationalist positions.

What follows from the arguments presented in the book and my own reflection on the Zimbabwean context is that the fusion of religion and nationalism is not a necessary outcome. Rather, fusing the two is an instrument used by political elites to justify and legitimate particular political policies, actions, and imaginaries. This proposition converges with Amnon Raz-Krakotzkin, Nadim N. Rouhana, and Yaacov Yadgar’s assertions in the book. They show how religion and nationalism—or religion and the state—are connected, and how religious terms are deployed to legitimate and establish entitlement to land and settler colonialism. As Yadgar points out in the book, when dominant religious traditions cease to serve political purposes, new ones are invented (Hobsbawm and Ranger, The Invention of Tradition). 

The Construction of Religious Justification: Iran and Zimbabwe

The religious justification for political processes are often invented and/or constructed by those with political aims. As Yadgar again points out in his chapter, the language used in the conflation of religion and nation is deliberate and not neutral. A good example that demonstrates that there is nothing necessary about using religious claims in pursuit of political ends can be found in the history of modern Iran, which Ali Banuazizi describes in his chapter. Under the reign of two monarchs in the twentieth century (1925–41 and 1941–79), religion was undermined in favor of nationalism. This changed after the revolution in 1979 when Iran became an Islamic republic. When the war with Iraq (1980–88) intensified, however, the regime again relied on nationalist propaganda. The lesson we might take from Banuazizi is that how religion and nationalism relate depends on the political interests of those drawing on them. Both religion and nationalism ultimately serve the same purpose, namely political mobilization and state legitimacy.

In Zimbabwe, political elites often invoke African religion and Christianity to similar ends. The link between African religion, Christianity, and nationalism dates to the liberation struggle of the 1970s. It persisted during Zimbabwe’s two republics, from 1980 to 2017, under the late President Robert Mugabe, and has continued into the present under President Emmerson Mnangagwa. What makes religion so powerful and compelling in this context is that it dogmatically sacralizes, and thus provides an absolute and non-negotiable quality to, policies and actions. Sacralization thus closes off debate over policies. 

African Independent Churches and Nationalism in Zimbabwe

An example of this sacralization is the fusion of African Independent Churches (AICs) with nationalism in Zimbabwe. AICs provided a sacred canopy to the policies and actions of the Zimbabwe African National Union-Patriotic Front (ZANU PF) under then-President Robert Mugabe—who held office from 1987 to 2017—and continue to do so in the present under President Emmerson Mnangagwa. The arguments that emerged from the churches were colonial critiques that protested against all kinds of oppression (Isabel Mukonyora, “Religion, Politics, and Gender in Zimbabwe,” 146).

The fusion between religion and nationalism is not inherent or necessary. It is an instrumentalist relationship that is used to justify and legitimate particular political policies, actions, and imaginaries.

In post-colonial Zimbabwe, most of the churches endorsed the Zimbabwe African National Union-Patriotic Front (ZANU PF) and Mugabe, who was then its leader. This was because of the ideological convergence of their messages with the political aspiration for independence, indigenization, and sovereignty. To this day, AICs have become dependable support bases even as ZANU PF’s urban support has gone down (Ibid., 137). Thus, instead of pursuing social justice, they have prioritized loyalty to the individuals and movements they supported during colonial times, even as the latter has engaged in practices similar to those of colonial governments. This confirms my proposition that the fusion between religion and nationalism is not inherent or necessary. It is an instrumentalist relationship that is used to justify and legitimate particular political policies, actions, and imaginaries.

Religious Rhetoric in Zimbabwe’s Politic

As Peter Berger notes in The Sacred Canopy, “religion legitimates social institutions by bestowing an ultimately valid ontological status, which is locating them within a sacred and cosmic frame of reference” (33). People take the sacred to be the absolute, normative reality that exerts an unquestionable claim on the conduct of social life (Gordon Lynch, The Sacred in the Modern World). Religious legitimation involves transforming human products into supra- or non-human products: the humanly made world is explained in terms that deny its human production (Berger, 89). In the early 2000s, the regime used religious rhetoric to seize land and mobilize for land redistribution.

Graffiti calling for Zimbabwe’s independence from Great Britain (2008). Image via Flickr user Ben Sutherland. CC-BY-2.0

To give a concrete example, the government ran an advertisement on television which went as follows: “In the beginning, was the land. The people were on the land. The people owned the land. As it was in the beginning, so shall it always be. Welcome to Zimbabwe. We are down to earth.” The land question was ideologically linked to the creation story of Genesis 1 (Ezra Chitando, ‘“In the Beginning was the Land,’” 224). Mugabe was likened to the biblical Moses who delivered people to the Promised Land. His leadership was depicted as fulfilling a divine prophecy. The government also appealed to Indigenous religion. President Mugabe was said to be acting in accordance with the demands of the ancestors and obeying ancestral oracles (see Mukonyora, 137). 

While the mainline churches, including the Catholic church, as well as many Protestant churches may not always be as direct as the AICs in enabling the ruling regime, they have also been a part of this fusion. When postcolonial Zimbabwe found itself in a situation of political instability, the mainline churches responded with diplomacy and rationalization, addressing peoples’ need for order and engagement through ritualistic theological and pastoral statements. The stance of the mainline churches and apex bodies works in favor of political elites. It allows no change of order or political system. This corresponds to what the book captures about Israel, Iran, and India and Berger’s assertion (Berger, 59) that religious positions may function to legitimate a particular institutional order. This however does not mean that there are not any non-conformist religious actors from the institutional churches (Joram Tarusarira, Reconciliation and Religio-political Non-conformism in Zimbabwe).

Selective Application of the Policy on Religion

What also emerges from reading the book and reflecting on Zimbabwe is that political elites selectively apply the policy of religious freedom. They form an alliance with religious actors who support them and condemn those that challenge them. Thus, in the process, they define what is good or bad religion and how religious actors should participate in politics.

Political elites selectively apply the policy of religious freedom. They form an alliance with religious actors who support them and condemn those that challenge them.

They restrict religious actors who criticize them as holding only humanitarian and/or social roles rather than as critical contributors to political issues. In other circumstances, they co-opt other church denominations so that they can also provide them with a sacred canopy. This compromises what Francis Verstraelen sees as the ideal attitude of the church: to exercise a prophetic mission, denouncing policies of injustice perpetrated by governments and standing up in support of the poor, rather than remaining neutral, which itself is also to be co-opted or to require accepting compromises.

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Joram Tarusarira
Joram Tarusarira is an Assistant Professor of Religion, Conflict and Peacebuilding and former Director of the Centre for Religion, Conflict and Globalization at the University of Groningen. He is the author of Reconciliation and Religio-political Non-conformism in Zimbabwe (Routledge, 2016), co-editor (with Ezra Chitando) of Religion and Human Security in Africa (Routledge, 2019) and Themes in Religion and Human Security in Africa (Routledge, 2020), and co-editor (with Ezra Chitando and Loreen Maseno) of Religion and Inequality in Africa (Bloomsbury, 2022).
Theorizing Modernities article

When Politics are Sacralized?


Sign calling for the separation of church and state from a manifestation in Paris, 2013. Image via Wikimedia Commons. CC0 1.0

Let’s imagine the title of When Politics are Sacralized: Comparative Perspectives on Religious Claims and Nationalism, edited by Nadim N. Rouhana and Nadera Shaloub-Kervorkian, going the other way around: Instead of investigating when politics are sacralized what if we examined when the sacred is politicized? If we were to investigate the latter, rather than the former, would the book look the same in terms of content, analysis, and conclusions? And if so, then what does that tell us about the main contribution of the book in particular and of the literature on nationalism, religion, and the sacred, more generally? Further, let’s ask another question: What imaginary do we inhabit when we ask about the sacralization of the political? Has there been any time, era, or epoch when the political was not sacred, when it was detached or divorced from the religious? And what does a politics devoid of the sacred look like? Can we identify such a politics? In addition, is it even possible to identify such a religion before it has been political? And does religion stand by definition as the opposite to politics? Or does the title assume a certain specific conception of the political that is by definition secular? The chapters in this book bring these tensions to the surface and shed some light on these old questions that have been and continue to be at the center of the narratives of modernity and secularization.

It is common within critical circles to note that it is almost impossible to think, write, or conceptualize the secular without thinking of religion, the sacred without the profane, science without myth. It is common knowledge that these concepts are mutually constitutive, socially constructed, have different meanings in different historical epochs, and are always part of a power game. However, to argue that they are mutually constitutive is one thing, while to argue that they are one and the same, is different. It is hard to find scholars who will consider the sacred and the profane and the religious and the secular as one and the same. We know that the boundaries are always shifting, and we know that there is a politics of definition in drawing the line between concepts. We also know that drawing the line is subject to power relations and the distribution of control and symbolic resources. Still, despite the mutual constitution of these concepts, we still feel some need to use and deploy these different concepts and we are never ready to collapse them into one concept despite their mutual constitution and the fact they are socially constructed.  How are we to account for this persistence of differentiation of concepts, spheres, and disciplines? My claim is that we should be able to continue to use concepts such as these while historicizing them at the same time. This requires that we stay aware that they are part of power game and avoid the trap of essentializing them.

Modernity as the Autonomy and Purity of Spheres

One way to view the project of modernity writ large is as a project of differentiation and purification. Philosophically, it was probably Immanuel Kant who managed, with a series of endless distinctions, to separate science from religion and knowledge from faith, nature from freedom, and following that, “is” from “ought,” happiness from morality, and morality from legality. Kant offered peace between these conflicting concepts/disciplines by assigning a separate “jurisdiction” for each of them that did not invade or conflict with the jurisdiction of others. Sociologically, it was both Émile Durkheim, through his theory regarding the division of labor, and later Max Weber, who gave this separation a sociological account. Historically, it was the French revolution as a historical-political event that gave this scheme concrete content by separating the economy from politics, and politics from religion. The post-revolutionary era is one that allows us to imagine a poor person holding a high political position, and a highly rich person who lacks social or political status; it also allowed religious people to live in what looks like a secular state. The bracketing of property as a condition for entering politics—which meant the privatization of property—meant the democratization of politics and the entry of masses into politics, while the privatization of religion meant the secularization of the modern state.

The trick to establishing democracy and secularism has been achieved by introducing the distinction between the private and the public, assigning the private all those aspects that make us particular—including property, religion, and perhaps culture—leaving to the public an abstract formal domain where people meet each other as citizens within an imagined community of equals. It is this latter idea that made the modern nation a possibility.

Much of the work in critical tradition from G. W. F. Hegel to Karl Marx, Carl Schmitt to Michel Foucault,  Hannah Arendt to Bruno Latour, Duncan Kennedy to Catherine MacKinnon, questions this neat separation, and the purity of these categories. Between the moderns and the pre-moderns there are more commonalities and continuities than we imagined; there is too much myth in science and there is some rationality in myth; “is” and “ought” are not as distinguishable as we thought them to be; and while politics is separated formally from economy, the economy still controls politics indirectly.  The opposition between the rational, secular, and national to the irrational, mythical, and religious does not seem to hold anymore. That is what Talal Asad, Jose Casanova, John Milbank, and many others have been arguing for years.  Asad questions our ability to speak meaningfully about religion or the secular discourses and practices of power that have shaped and reshaped them continuously. Casanova, meanwhile, questions both the descriptive accuracy and desirability of the category of the secular. When it comes more specifically to the relation between religion and nationalism, one finds an increasing amount of literature that questions our ability to draw a line between religion and nationalism, and that in many cases both perform similar functions and use/deploy each other almost to the point of indistinguishability. The writings of Anthony D. Smith, Carlton Hayes, Carl Schmitt, Adrian Hasting, Saba Mahmood, Elizabeth Shakman Hurd, and Roger Friedland are only a few examples of thinkers who make this point.

Between the moderns and the pre-moderns there are more commonalities and continuities than we imagined; there is too much myth in science and there is some rationality in myth; “is” and “ought” are not as distinguishable as we thought them to be; and while politics is separated formally from economy, the economy still controls politics indirectly.

Still, no one claims that religion and nationalism in the 21st century are the same as those that were around in the 18th century. In addition, despite the mutual constitution of these concepts, we still experience a certain need to deploy the concepts of religion and nationalism despite the fact that we know that they penetrate, influence, deploy, and constitute each other and despite the fact that we are fully aware that they are socially constructed and do not occupy a fixed core. In this sense, alongside the continuity and commonality between the modern and the premodern, or the secular and the sacred, it is important not to lose track of discontinuities, ruptures, and distinctions.

Is it still meaningful to speak of religion, nationalism, and secularism given the ongoing shifting meanings of these concepts and given the ways that they have been deployed as part of the mechanism of power in the context of colonialism, antisemitism, imperialism, capitalism, and anti-Muslim racism?

What Comes after the Disintegration of Concepts?

One thing When Politics Are Sacralized does—perhaps even unintentionally—is problematize its own title by showing the endless varieties of the meaning of religion and its different political deployments in different regions and by different groups. The richness of the test cases that the book covers—Zionism, Palestinian nationalism, Northern Ireland, India, Saudi Arabia, Iran, and Serbia, among others—has a destabilizing effect that shows the endless variety of conceptions that lurk beneath the concepts and give them a concrete historical materiality. In doing so, the book offers a very important contribution. Still, the authors do deploy the terms. The terms survive the critiques somehow, despite the fact that they lose their core stable meaning.  Is there a way to deploy those terms in a non-essentialist, non-metaphysical sense? The deployment of a concept is metaphysical, in my view, when the author thinks that the mere deployment of the concept can replace the need for further arguments, data, information, and descriptions in a way that makes the concept trigger an endless series of casual and logical conclusions/inferences that are not necessarily mandated. Thus, for example, there are those who deploy the description “religious” for a certain group as a surrogate for arguing that the group is “irrational” when they did not accept a certain proposal or offer. The same happens when the deployment of the concept lumps under its wings too many varied concrete conceptions and practices, subsuming too many phenomena under one name and thus erasing differences.  Given this ongoing fear, the question is why simply not replace such loaded concepts with other less abstract and more concrete terms that have less metaphysical baggage?

I do not plan to offer a full answer to these questions here, but only to offer a few remarks as an initial response to them. My first remark questions the hope of finding a better vocabulary that is by definition less metaphysical. Karl Marx spent his life trying to escape from metaphysical German idealism, but it is far from clear whether the vocabulary that he deployed—the most obvious and simple among them is property—is any less metaphysical. Ask any legal scholar about the concept of property and they will dismiss the concept as being an utterly metaphysical one that has no core and must be disintegrated into a bundle of rights (a right to use, to transfer, to destroy, to rent, to control and manage, to mortgage, to bequeath, etc.). We are always being pulled into two directions in this regard: the more the level of abstraction is higher the more there is the risk of metaphysical thinking in a way that obscures rather than reveals what the object in question is. The issue is not simply obscuring things, but that abstract terms create a feeling of “false necessity” (to use Roberto Unger term). We start to draw conclusions that seem to us as necessary logical outcomes that flow from the abstract concepts themselves. This mode of arguing closes our imagination and fixes our thoughts, and we fall into dialectical illusions (to use Kant’s terminology this time). This entails confusing politics with logic, assuming that the realm of politics (which is the realm of freedom per excellence, as Arendt reminds us, and acts according to logical necessity).[1] This also entails the denial of our radical freedom and our political agency as it makes it appear as if these cannot be otherwise than they are, and that we are thus not the collective authors of the world that we inhabit.

The case of Zionism is revealing and allows a certain insight into the nature of the relation between religion, nationalism, and colonialism.

On the other hand, however, we have to speak in abstract terms in order to allow a conversation to take off and in order to conduct a comparative study, and to allow others to join in. For example, we might have different conceptions of what justice requires as a concept, but we are still able to recognize a conversation or a debate that tries to pin down the right conception of justice from one that is trying to pin down the right conception of art or love. The concept that hovers loosely above the conceptions allows the conversation to continue and makes it possible for differences to emerge and be discussed. Without this very loose “concept”—as a heuristic tool, not as a fixed essence—controversy becomes impossible, and instead we will talk past one another. I do not know how, when, and what level of abstraction might become mere ideology masquerading as universal truth, but that is always a risk. It is a risk that we must be fully aware of and learn to live with. It is true that our concept should hover as low as possible above the material world to avoid gross generalizations, but some level of abstraction is necessary.

But in these short comments, I would like to refer more concretely to the section of the book that deals with Zionism (as I will not be able to do justice to the richness of the book as a whole). The case of Zionism is revealing and allows a certain insight into the nature of the relation between religion, nationalism, and colonialism. In many other contexts, mainly European, one must dig deep to reveal the intimate relationship between these concepts. When I say “dig deep” I mean that one must go back to history to reveal the role of religion in the development of both nationalism and colonialism.[2] Second, in terms of geography, one must reconnect Europe to what seems to be disconnected from it—to Africa, Asia, the Americas. In Zionism, all of these are here and now in terms of time and space. But what is interesting in this section is the double movement that almost all the authors do offer. The critical move to interrogate liberal European societies is the one that usually aims to uncover the universalistic, seemingly neutral face of these countries in order to show the persistence of the particular, to question the myth of neutrality and neat separation, and the weaknesses of formalism. But in fact, that is what Zionism does all the time to Europe: it forces it to face its past in order to show that Zionism’s particularism, its deployment of religion and ethnicity, its demographic obsession, and even the colonial practices it performs, are common to it and to Europe. Zionism insisting to view itself as part of the same tradition becomes in itself a mode of critique of Europe. It reveals what Europe is trying to hide. 

Image from the first Zionist Congress in Basel, 1897. Image via Wikimedia Commons. Public domain.

The double movement that most critics of Zionism do is to first join the critique of Europe’s past and the secularization thesis. But here they then find themselves too close to Zionism in terms of the persistence of the public role of religion, the impossibility of complete separation of church and state, and the critique of the formalism of the neutral modern state, etc. This forces them to offer the second move of distinguishing Zionism as a special and unique case (this is most clear in Rouhana and Shalhoub-Kevorkian’s chapters but is also present in Yadgar’s and Raz-Krakotzkin’s as well). The first move suggests that Zionism is not that different from the European model and a sincere critique of Zionism requires a critique of the original European model, which means a critique of the whole idea of the nation-state and modern sovereignty.  The second move suggests, however, that despite commonalities, Zionism offers a unique case in modernity that renders the process of its secularization more problematic. It is more problematic mainly for two reasons. One is the audience, and the second is the mission. With regard to the audience, Judaism as a religion is not simply used in the service of nationalism, for Zionism’s nationalism is unthinkable without religion. It is true that Irish nationalism, for example, is saturated with Catholicism and the Irish-English divide maps onto the Protestant-Catholic divide. Still, we can imagine Catholicism without the Irish people and Irish nationalism devoid of religious discourse. Religion is a marker, not constitutive. In Zionism, the audience of the Jewish Rabbi and the audience of Ben-Gurion or Herzl (as national figures) are almost one and the same. They almost converge. But even if they do not fully converge (and they do not) as the definition of Jew in the law of return teaches us,[3] still the issue is that there is no way to define the nationality of the Jew without resorting to the religious definition of the Jew. Thus religion is a decisive factor as to who belongs to the tribe of the nation and the Rabbis are at the end of the day the gatekeepers of the nation. The gate might be narrow or wide, but the keys are held by the religious establishment. The second element relates to the message itself: Zionism writ large is an old religious desire transferred to the realm of earthy politics. At its core, Zionism is not the political being sacralized, but the religious being politicized. Zionists took upon their shoulder a mission that presumably was assigned to God himself and claim to accomplish it. The vocabulary of Zionism is borrowed completely from the religious myth: return the redemption of land, a promised land, and so on. Religious discourse lies at the heart of Zionism as its moving power, not mere servant, and as such, it is explosive, as Gershom Scholem anticipated a century ago.[4]

In this regard, even if we accept for a moment the European model, acknowledging nationalism and colonialism as constitutive of this project, and accepting the limits of the European secular project and the claims to the neutrality of the secular state, still Zionism scores badly on that model. If one compares present-day Israel to present-day France or Britain one discovers that the role of religion in public and political life is different in substantial ways. One need not step outside the modern model to criticize Zionism, and one can accept some level of identity politics and national discourse, but still offer a genuine critique of Zionism. I must say that this double movement seems to me necessary in order to capture the complexity of Zionism and the complexity of modernity as well.

[1] This cuts through and through all of Arendt’s writings. See mainly chapter 5 from The Human Condition that discusses “action” as being distinguished from labor and work, and escapes the logic of necessity and fabrication as the site of human freedom. See as well Arendt’s skepticism of the French revolution given that it succumbed to the temptation to meet the necessities of supplying the needs of the poor and as such it subdues itself to the realm of necessity. For Arendt, politics should remain the realm of freedom, not a necessity. See also, Arendt On Revolution, 61. Arendt most clearly expresses this approach in her essay, “What is Freedom.” She ends the essay with these words “ In the realm of human affairs, we know the author of ‘miracles.’ It is men who perform them—men who because they have received the twofold gift of freedom and action can establish a reality of their own” (Between Past and Future, 171).

[2] On the nature of Zionism as a movement that reveals the nature of modernity writ large, not as an exception to it, albeit in a particular manner see my paper, “Notes on the Value of Theory: Readings in the Law of Return- a polemic.”

[3]  According to the Israeli law of return, and for the purposes of the right of Jews to immigrate to Israel and to acquire Israeli citizenship, they do not have to be proved Jewish in the religious sense. Rather it is enough that their spouse or one of their parents or grandparents is a Jew according to the Jewish definition.

[4] As he wrote in his letter to Franz Rosenzwieg in 1926, “This country is a volcano! It harbors the language! One speaks here of many matters that may make us fail. More than anything else we are concerned today about the Arab. But much more sinister than the Arab problem is another threat, a threat which the Zionist enterprise unavoidably has had to face: the “actualization” of Hebrew. Must not the conundrum of a holy language break open again now, when the language is to be handed down to our children? Granted, one does not know how it will all turn out. Many believe that the language has been secularized, and the apocalyptic thorn has been pulled out. But this is not true at all. The secularization of the language is only a facon de parler, a phrase! It is impossible to empty out words which are filled to the breaking point.” Quoted in William Cutter, “Ghostly Hebrew, Ghastly Speech: Scholem to Rosenzweig,” 417.

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Raef Zreik
Raef Zreik holds an LLB and LLM from Hebrew University, an LLM from Columbia University, and an SJD from Harvard Law School. His dissertation deals with Kant’s philosophy of right. He is an associate professor of Jurisprudence at Ono academic College, Israel and senior researcher at the Jerusalem Van Leer Institute. His main fields of research include legal and political philosophy. Recent publications include “Historical Justice: On First Order and Second Order Arguments for Justice," Theoretical Inquiries in Law (2020): 491–529; “The Ethics of the Intellectual: Rereading Edward Said,” Philosophy and Social Criticism 47.1 (2021): 130–48; “On the Political Theology of Zionism,” forthcoming in Political Theology; “Kant on the Future,” forthcoming in Iyyun, and he just finished a book titled Kant’s Struggle for Autonomy: On the Structure of Practical Reason (forthcoming, Lexington Books).
Theorizing Modernities article

Sacred States: Beyond the Secular-Religious Dialectic


Painting of Jerusalem, Israel, by Miner Kilbourne Kellogg. Image via Wikimedia Commons. Public domain.

In an episode of the Israeli television drama Shtisel, set in Jerusalem’s Geula neighborhood, the show’s main character, school principal Shulem Shtisel, forbids his yeshiva students from going outside to watch a traditional flyover during an Israeli Independence Day military parade. His son Akiva, also a teacher at the school and facing protests from his class, allows his 10 year-olds to peek out the window to watch the flyover on the sly. The show emphasizes the disagreement within the Haredi community about the celebration; one elderly Jewish woman chastises a lifelong friend for expressing interest in it. The political entailments of their religious commitments remain subject to debate. As Ruth Margalit notes in a review for the The New Yorker, in watching this episode, “Israel appears like the contrails of those Air Force planes: blurry, ephemeral.” If only.

I was reminded of this scene in reading Nadera Shalhoub-Kevokian’s damning account from a different perspective of Jerusalem Day, another Israeli national holiday celebrating the “reunification” of Jerusalem, in her chapter “Sacralized Politics: The Case of Occupied East Jerusalem,” in a new volume that she co-edited with Nadim R. Rouhana, When Politics are Sacralized: Comparative Perspectives on Religious Claims and Nationalism. Jerusalem Day is also noisy, even violent, with large Zionist parades held in the Old City in what Shalhoub-Kevolkian rightly portrays as an affront to Palestinian self-determination. In both the television show and Shalhoub-Kevolkian’s real-life experience, and without suggesting any equivalency between the two, the State of Israel is perceived as having illegitimately usurped power and autonomy from the protagonists, threatening their ways of life, and perhaps their very existence, all in the name of a particular form of Jewish nationalism.

The sacralization of the Israeli state is especially noxious to the two prominent Palestinian editors of this volume, and understandably so. Noting that most discussions of religion in politics have focused on non-state actors, their collection ably turns the tables to examine and critique the sacralization of the state and its role in perpetuating settler colonial violence in Israel and beyond. To this end, the editors thoughtfully juxtapose case studies that are rarely considered side-by-side, including Buddhist nationalism in Sri Lanka, Zionism in Israel/Palestine, competing nationalisms in Northern Ireland, and Hindutva in India—even as Zionism gets the lion’s share of attention. I was eager to dive in.

The introduction describes the volume as an “effort to contribute to highlighting the dangerous impact of sacralization on national and international politics” (5). Religious claims, the editors suggest, “confer sacredness.” Violence ensues. Discussing various modes of sacralization, they suggest that, “Ethnic and religious nationalism… can play the destructive role of promoting an ethnically exclusive state, and the religious claims can play a double purpose—not only to increase the extent of exclusivity but also to provide legitimation for such exclusion (usually translated into political domination) and means of violence. These means can take extreme forms, precisely because of the religious legitimation” (emphasis mine, 9). A few pages later we encounter a similar reference to “religiously based legitimations that are by definition conflict instigating” (14). Their aversion to politicized religion leads the editors to conclude that “religious concerns” and “religiously-based justifications” are necessarily “particularly venomous” (15).

As I interpret this account, the problem with Israeli Jewish nationalism—and perhaps other nationalisms as well—is that it is violent because it is insufficiently secular. Religiously based justifications are “particularly venomous.” Yet would the challenge posed by (settler) state violence be resolved if nationalism were freed of religionism, or in this case, “Israeli Jewish nationalism from religionism” (17)? In her chapter, Shalhoub-Kevokian convincingly exposes “the various modalities of violence apparent in the ongoing Judaization of Jerusalem” (19). It is an important discussion and her account of the cruelty of the Price Tag movement is horrifying and effective. Yet I was left wondering whether one effect of attributing Israeli state violence in Jerusalem to Judaization may be to reduce Judaism to the violent form that it takes in this context while subordinating other factors that contribute to the violence. Might it not risk handing over too much power to the Israeli government’s interpretation of Judaism? Might it make sense for Palestinians and their allies to consider opposing the Israelization, or the colonization of Jerusalem, in whatever mode it presents itself, including but not limited to the expressions of Judaism/Zionism that are so tirelessly mobilized in its defense? In short: if the problems we face are power, greed, territoriality, and human aspirations for total mastery and control, then is purifying politics of religion the solution? Might it not exacerbate the situation by handing the floor to the most extreme voices who claim to speak in its name?

The urge to purify politics of (bad, violent, and exclusive) religion is an expression of a modernist tendency to seek to stabilize and master religion as an epistemological category. This is evident in the introduction, in which the category of religion is asked to do some heavy-lifting. This approach is ably critiqued most recently by Brent Crosson in his book Experiments with Power: Obeah and the Remaking of Religion in Trinidad. Crosson explains that liberal secularism has long identified “modern” or “good” religion by its alleged lack of entanglement with either supernatural power (evil/superstition, magic, and witchcraft) or the state:

The idea that good religion (or good governance) can be separated from coercive force is the foundation for the ideals of liberal secularism. Rather than simply leading to a reality in which church and state are separate and political power is a matter of consent, this ideal masks and distorts empirical realities of power. Religious movements, state violence, and security interventions are entangled in contemporary nation-states…” (44)

Despite such critiques, many social scientists are captivated by religion’s purported epistemological coherence and convinced by the need (for the state to) to contain or evict bad religion, a conviction that threads through the introduction to this important book. Critical secularist discourse, even if undertaken with the objective of challenging the violence of settler colonialism, as in this volume, risks reproducing particular modern categories of the religious and the political. It elides the possibility that, to varying degrees, all forms of politics embody and express what moderns call the “religious” dimensions of human experience. There is no superhuman field that can be infiltrated or distorted beyond recognition by religion or the sacred. In this instance, broadening the interpretive frame might allow for the identification of alternative voices, actors, and histories that embody dissenting forms of religion-politics and the empowerment of new collective imaginaries that reach beyond the secular-religious dialectic. The challenge, then, is to step away from the secular-religious dialectic as a viable interpretive framework in the study of settler colonial violence.

Critical secularist discourse, even if undertaken with the objective of challenging the violence of settler colonialism, as in this volume, risks reproducing particular modern categories of the religious and the political

A number of contributors to the volume take up this challenge. In his chapter, “Religion and Nationalism in the Jewish and Zionist Context,” Amnon Raz-Krakotzkin suggests that in the Israeli context what is known as “secularization” is the “articulation of messianic imagination…as a political-national narrative in the modern sense of the word” (34–35). “The centrality of the political theological aspect in the formation and definition of the State of Israel,” he continues, “is undeniable, and consequently any attempt to separate religion from the state is impossible” (35). I agree. There is no way to separate “religion” and “state” in Israel, or anywhere else.

Liam O’Dowd’s chapter, “Does Religion Still Matter? Comparative Lessons from the Ethno-national Conflict in Northern Ireland,” also resists the modernist framing by challenging the idea that religion ever left the domain of the political in the first place. As O’Dowd underscores, and in line with other contributors to the volume, “the links between religious and nationalist antagonisms first developed in the heartlands of Western imperialism” (358).

In his call for “transcending a simplistic secularist epistemology” (94), Yaacov Yadger’s “Zionist Theopolitics and Jewish Tradition” likewise resists the siren-like temptation of the modern secular-religious dialectic. Instead, he asks, “How does the Israeli nation-state’s theopolitics—constituted, as it is (symbolically, at least), on an ‘invented’ national tradition—approach Jewish traditions that preceded it and continue to live alongside it?” For Yadger, “the ‘problem’ with those Jewish traditions is that they do not fit easily, if ever, into the commonly used categorical frameworks such as ‘nation,’ ‘ethnicity,’ ‘race,’ and, perhaps most importantly, ‘religion,’ which originate in modern Western discourse” (101). In this reading Zionism is understood as a counterreaction to the transformation of Judaism into a “religion,” which itself “has to do with the modern ideological innovation and practical transformation that originated in Europe, mostly in Germany, from the eighteenth century onward, which allegedly sought to reinterpret Jewish traditions so as to render them applicable to the allegedly universal (and, again, essentially European Protestant) category of religion, in itself a contemporaneous invention” (102). One tragic, and paradoxical, result of this history is that Jewish Israeli secularism is unable to conduct meaningful dialogue with the Jewish traditions from which it emerged (107). Zionism, at least in its current, dominant Israeli instantiation, is deaf to dissenting Judaisms. As Raz-Krakotzkin suggests along similar lines, also in reference to Israel, it “denies important aspects of even the country’s Jewish past” (47).

This volume makes a noteworthy contribution to the long and challenging process of re-centering the histories and experiences of those who have been written out of history, and the present, by modern efforts to purify the nation-state in the name of something bigger. It deserves close reading and critical engagement, including, perhaps, through an insistence on questioning what Crosson refers to as “the indifference of the secular” (192). As historians such as Jonathan Sheehan remind us, attempts to adjudicate the lines between piety and profanity, sacrifice and murder, and suicide and self-martyrdom have long been, and will likely remain, deeply contested sites of power, violence, and sacrality.

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Elizabeth Shakman Hurd
Elizabeth Shakman Hurd is Professor and Chair of Religious Studies and Professor of Political Science at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois. She studies the public and political careers of religion in U.S. foreign and immigration policy, the international politics of secularism and religious freedom, American borders, and US actions in and representations of the Middle East. She is the author of Heaven Has a Wall: Religion, Borders, and the Global United States (University of Chicago Press, 2025), Beyond Religious Freedom: The New Global Politics of Religion (Princeton University Press, 2015), The Politics of Secularism in International Relations (Princeton University Press, 2008), and four co-edited volumes on religion and politics, including, most recently, At Home and Abroad: The Politics of American Religion (Columbia University Press, 2021). At Northwestern, Hurd co-directs the Global Religion & Politics Research Group and is a core faculty member in the MENA Studies program.
Theorizing Modernities article

Northern Ireland’s Troubled Relationship with Religion: Structures, Practices, and Definitions


Banner,July 12, 2021 Orange Parades, crossing Donegall Square South, Belfast, Northern Ireland (Ballysillan Loyal Orange Lodge 1891). Via Wikimedia Commons. CC BY-SA 4.0.

When Politics are Sacralized: Comparative Perspectives on Religious Claims and Nationalism addresses urgent concerns about the relationship between religion, nationalism, and violence. The use of the terms religious claims and sacralize in the book’s title prompt readers to move beyond taken-for-granted assumptions that religion is inherently violent or that religion in and of itself causes conflict or makes conflict more deadly.

Such assertions have been put forward in the academic literature as well as in the public sphere, especially in discussions about Israel/Palestine, the case study that comprises the backbone of the book. After Rouhana and Shalhoub-Kevorkian’s concise introduction, which includes a useful three-mode framework for understanding sacralized politics, the first five chapters delve into the case of Israel, while Khaled Hroub’s final chapter addresses the relationship between Palestinian nationalism and religion.

The focus on Israel allows the editors (and contributors) to argue convincingly for scholarship that pays close attention to the colonial roots of sacralized politics. Settler-colonial theory is at the heart of the book. But the value of comparative volumes such as this one lies in their ability to bring together different examples, identify commonalities and divergences, and impart lessons that can be learned about and applied across various cases.

The Trouble with Religion and Colonialism in Northern Ireland

The only other case that is addressed in more than one chapter is Northern Ireland, which is one of the world’s most-studied cases of religion and peacebuilding. It featured in R. Scott Appleby’s field-shaping The Ambivalence of the Sacred as a site “saturated” with effective faith-based peacebuilders. It also was the empirical laboratory for John Brewer’s theoretical framework that sought to explain faith-based contributions to peacebuilding.

The value of comparative volumes such as this one lies in their ability to bring together different examples, identify commonalities and divergences, and impart lessons that can be learned about and applied across various cases.

Apart from the work of scholars specializing in religion (myself included), however, scholars studying Northern Ireland’s Troubles (circa 1968–1998) have downplayed the role of religion, with John McGarry and Brendan O’Leary arguing strongly for religion’s insignificance. Their description of religion as an “ethnic marker” has been widely accepted. Such readings have been contested by Steve Bruce in his work on the impact of preacher-politician Reverend Ian Paisley and by Claire Mitchell in her emphasis on the social significance of religion.

Similarly, the extent that colonialism is a constituent cause of Northern Ireland’s twentieth-century violence has often been brushed aside, particularly by those advocating a “two communities” approach to understanding the conflict. This approach emphasizes internal differences between Protestant-Unionist-Loyalist (PUL) and Catholic-Nationalist-Republican (CNR) communities and underplays the wider role of the British state, particularly as a historic colonial power.  Moreover, PUL understandings of the violence are often framed in terms of terrorist violence and state responses to it, in direct opposition to settler-colonial interpretations of conflict. This volume’s foregrounding of settler colonialism helps us understand not only its explanatory power, but also contestation and resistance to it across different contexts.

At first glance, the tendency to side-step the religious and colonial aspects makes the Northern Ireland case sit uneasily in the volume. The titles of the two chapters reflect this: David Lloyd writes on “Protestantism and Settler Identity: The Ambiguous Case of Northern Ireland” (emphasis mine), while Liam O’Dowd’s chapter is titled “Does Religion Still Matter?”

Settler Colonialism and Religious Claims

Lloyd argues that a settler-colonial framework helps explain how Protestantism/Unionism/Loyalism dominated Northern Ireland from its creation in 1921. Unionist elites structured politics and society to protect their interests and religious claims were constructed to justify division (and superiority). This dovetails with other chapters in the volume, which emphasize how religious claims are used to legitimate already powerful political structures.

Lloyd’s chapter contains a striking photograph of a flag incorporating the Star of David with traditional Loyalist symbols: the red hand of Ulster and the British crown. There is another photograph of a mural proclaiming Catholic-Nationalist-Republican solidarity with Palestine. Of course, these images cannot be understood as popular endorsements of settler-colonial theory. But they do demonstrate how, on the streets of Northern Ireland, Loyalists identify with an Israel that they perceive as under attack by terrorists, while Republicans identify with Palestinians whose land has been occupied.

Lloyd contrasts Northern Ireland with the Republic of Ireland, which he characterizes as a post-colonial society in which Catholic and Protestant identities have lost their salience. I agree with Lloyd on this point to a certain extent, although he does not fully acknowledge that Protestants experienced real and structural violence in the early years of the Irish state, prompting the migration of some Protestants across the border. Nonetheless, this should not detract from Lloyd’s wider point that in Northern Ireland political and social structures have manufactured colonial mentalities.

On the streets of Northern Ireland, Loyalists identify with an Israel that they perceive as under attack by terrorists, while Republicans identify with Palestinians whose land has been occupied.

There is an important lesson in Lloyd’s focus on structures: when structures change, identities and ideologies may follow and also change. More than two decades after Northern Ireland’s peace agreement this process has been halting and slow. But the dramatically reduced levels of violence and increases in those who identify as neither unionist nor nationalist nevertheless provide some hope for other violent contexts—especially if powerful external actors (like the British, Irish, and American governments, in the Northern Ireland case) incentivize structural change.

How Religion Still Matters

If Lloyd’s concerns are with structural changes in Northern Ireland, O’Dowd focuses more on drawing on the Northern Ireland case to critique the secular-religious dichotomy that has been prominent in global debates. He argues that a fuller understanding of the relationship between religion, nationalism, and violence can be gained by understanding religion “primarily as a category of practice (as vernacular) rather than as a category of belief.”  O’Dowd’s conceptualization of vernacular practice is not rooted simply or solely in activities like churchgoing or other forms of religious observance. Rather, it is grounded in an urban geography of conflicted cities which contain religious sites that are important for place-making and marking territorial segregation.

In Belfast, such sites include church buildings, which remain focal points for marking territory in a still largely segregated city; memorial gardens and plaques for the Troubles’ dead (which are often in or near church buildings); the routes of Orange Order parades, understood as mechanisms for marking, maintaining, or claiming territory; and funerals and the memory of funerals, including those for members of paramilitaries. As such, vernacular religious practice helps keep the memory of violence alive in often divisive ways.

These observations resonate with my own research for Considering Grace: Presbyterians and the Troubles. While the book focused on the experiences of churchgoing Presbyterians, the importance of funeral practices and church-based memorialization for the wider PUL community shone through.

The concept of vernacular religion expands the category of religion to many who would not identify as religious or engage in conventional religious observance. For O’Dowd, this is how religion still matters—even as Northern Ireland becomes more “secular” in terms of adherence to Christian beliefs and practices.

But What is Religion?

O’Dowd’s contribution is valuable because it goes against the main thrust of many of the other chapters in the book: it is not describing how religious claims are used to justify state power. Hroub’s chapter also goes against the grain, concentrating on the lack of religious claims within Palestinian nationalism. These chapters provide a complementary perspective, inviting readers beyond the focus on religious claims to ask: What exactly is religion? In particular, O’Dowd invites readers to look beyond the religious-secular dualism and in doing so challenges the way that (primarily) western scholars have framed debates about religion and nationalism.

Likewise, my work on Northern Ireland resists the reduction of religion to religious claims and instead emphasizes how religion is embedded in everyday practices and assumptions about one’s own religious community. These practices and assumptions can be reinterpreted to drive transformation. For example, during the Troubles grassroots leaders in the social action organization Evangelical Contribution on Northern Ireland (ECONI) challenged assumptions about their own religious community, and disputed religious claims made by prominent politicians like the Reverend Ian Paisley.

Ultimately, O’Dowd’s contribution supports the book’s assumption that religious claims lie behind sacralized politics. But the question, “What is religion?” remains open throughout the volume, inviting further research.

Future Debates

My more recent research takes up that invitation, continuing to resonate with the “everyday” turn in the study of religion. It focuses on areas such as the role of prayer amongst faith-based peacebuilders and the role of clergy during periods of intense violence. For the late Fr Gerry Reynolds, the practice of prayer was intertwined with his peacebuilding activism, which was in part motivated by repudiating oppositional aspects of Catholic nationalist identity. My study of Presbyterians during the Troubles argued that reducing religion to high-level religious claims has meant that one of clergy’s primary roles in the aftermath of violence has been overlooked: acting as “first responders” who provide pastoral support for victims through prayer and presence. Many of these faith-based peacebuilders and “first responders” resist what this book describes as sacralized politics; and for them, religion is not “vernacular,” it is intense and personal.

To me, such distinctions lie at the heart of future debates in this field. This volume provides a great service in prompting us to begin thinking through them.

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Gladys Ganiel
Gladys Ganiel is Professor in Sociology at Queen’s University Belfast. Her
specializations are religion and conflict in Northern Ireland, religion on the island of Ireland, evangelicalism, and the emerging church. She has published six authored/co-authored books and more than 50 articles and chapters, including The Deconstructed Church: Understanding Emerging Christianity (Oxford 2014), co-authored with Gerardo Marti, Transforming Post-Catholic Ireland (Oxford 2016), and Evangelicalism and Conflict in Northern Ireland (Palgrave 2008). She is co-editor of the Oxford Handbook of Religion in Modern Ireland (Oxford 2024).  She is currently researching “Religion in Societies Emerging from Covid-19,” a Trans-Atlantic Platform partnership with Montreal, Bremen, and Warsaw, funded by the AHRC.
Theorizing Modernities article

Introduction to Symposium on When Politics are Sacralized


In the postsecular moment that the humanities now finds itself in, it is tempting to regard the questioning of the role of religion in politics as one that is old hat. Religion has always been political postsecular critics of liberalism and its secular framework have argued. In this instance, the postsecular represents the demystification of secular reason as neutral with regard to religion and invites renewed inquiry into the theological roots of secularity. Given this claim, our duty as scholars is to reveal the entanglements of religion with the state rather than contest them. And yet, without necessarily questioning the analytic truth of the co-constructed nature of religion and politics, When Politics are Sacralized: Comparative Perspectives on Religious Claims and Nationalism, edited by Nadim N. Rouhana and Nadera Shalhoub-Kervorkian, reminds us that the concepts of the secular and sacred are mobilized in ways that often have devastating real world political and social consequences. More specifically, in this wide-ranging volume, Rouhana and Shaloub-Kervorkian show that religion has served states across the world in legitimating claims to sovereignty in order to justify oppressive policies.

Whether it is Zionist claims to an exclusively Israeli Jewish state, Hindutva claims to an exclusively Indian Hindu state, or Sinhalese Buddhist claims to an exclusively Buddhist Sri Lankan state, in various settings political leaders in ostensibly secular states have drawn on religious claims to shore up their authority and suppress dissent. In addition to these examples, others discussed in the book include Northern Ireland, Saudi Arabia, Serbia, and Palestine. The risk in bringing so many different examples together under one volume is that any generalizable results will be lost in the details. However, by laying out a framework within which these essays operate in their introduction, the co-editors persuasively show how nationalism, religion, and the state have been forged in the fires of western modernity and spread around the world.

The contributors to the symposium on this important book toggle between providing their own examples of the sacralization of political claims and the wider theoretical claims with which the book asks us to reckon. Gladys Ganiel draws on her research in Northern Ireland to show the importance of analyzing political and social structures in changing political and social realities. She contends that future work on religion should also focus on the everyday, intimate experiences of religion. Joram Tarusarira, meanwhile, compares the cases in the book with that of Zimbabwe, especially in the religious rhetoric surrounding former President Robert Mugabe and the churches that shored up his authority. His claim, in the end, is theologically normative (and echoes the prophetic strain in Christianity): When Christians become more invested in shoring up political power, they risk forgetting their mission to challenge authority.

Elizabeth Shakman Hurd and Raef Zreik move in more theoretical directions. Hurd engages with the risk inherent in the co-editors contention that secularization would lead to more peaceful societies. Unlike the postsecular critics mentioned up front in this essay, however, Hurd is keen to show that unravelling the theological roots of the secular is not simply an academic exercise, but instead is one that allows us to address substantial issues of inequality more directly. It does so by drawing our attention to different modes of religious interpretation that might otherwise be obscured if we were to assume that all religion is poisonous. Raef Zreik wrestles with the need for conceptual knowledge but also the need to tie conceptual knowledge to material contexts. He traces the desire for abstraction back to Immanuel Kant and follows it through to other major figures and trends in US and European philosophy. In doing so, Zreik asks us to reckon with the deeper theoretical stakes of comparative work like that carried out by the contributors to this book.

Given the genealogical turn that has no doubt also influenced the postsecular turn, comparative studies are often seen as inherently risky. Do they not obscure the particularities of a situation in order to advance a generalizable thesis? What Rouhana and Shaloub-Kervorkian, along with the contributors to this edited volume and symposium show, is that it is possible to engage in comparative work that is attentive to history, social and political complexity, and diversity without losing track of the more abstract concepts that are necessary to compare cross-culturally. In doing so, they remind us that we cannot restrain our work to one context. This is because even though modernity, secularization, and nationalism may have roots in the west, their effects have extended far beyond that origin.

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Joshua S. Lupo
Joshua S. Lupo is the Assistant Director of the Contending Modernities research initiative. In this role, he serves as the editor and writer for the Contending Modernities Blog and the classroom coordinator for the Madrasa Discourses program. He has published articles and reviews in Sophia, Soundings, Critical Muslim, Reading Religion, and Religious Studies Review. With CM Co-Director Atalia Omer, he is the co-editor of Broken Solidarities: Feminism, Race, and Transnationalism (Notre Dame Press, 2022) and Religion, Populism, and Modernity: Confronting White Christian Nationalism and Racism  (Notre Dame Press, 2023). His current book project is titled After Essentialism: A Critical Phenomenology for the Study of Religion.
Theorizing Modernities article

Why is the Jewish Question Different from All Similar Questions?


Miniature showing the expulsion of Jews following the Edict of Expulsion by Edward I of England (July 18, 1290). Marginal Illustration from the Rochester Chronicle (British Library, Cotton Nero D. II.), folio 183v. Via Wikimedia Commons. Public Domain.

This essay is based on a talk given during the “Antisemitism, Anti-Zionism, and the Critique of Israel: Towards a Constructive Debate” conference held at University of Zurich from June 29–30, 2022.

To confront the relationship between antisemitism, anti-Zionism, and the critique of Israel is a daunting challenge. In light of this monumental task, a remark from the Talmud comes to mind. Rabbi Tarfon said, “The day is short, the task is great. You are not obliged to complete the task, but neither are you free to give it up” (Bab. Tal., Ninth Tractate Avot, 2:20–21). This sums up my situation perfectly. My space is limited and the task is great. I could not possibly complete it, but neither am I capable of giving it up. Far from giving it up, the question of the Jewish Question is now at the center of my work on antisemitism, anti-Zionism, and the critique of Israel.

This post is divided into two parts. In part I, “Asking the Jewish Question,” I argue for one reading of the Question. I call it, for a reason that I hope becomes clear, “the antithesis reading.” In Part II, “Questioning the Zionist Answer,” I concentrate on an alternative reading, “the national reading,” which I see as underlying political Zionism in all its different forms. (In this essay, whenever I refer to Zionism I mean political Zionism and not the cultural Zionism associated, in the first place, with Ahad Ha’am.) There are many angles of approach to questioning Zionism. In Part II, I refer only to “the postcolonial critique” advanced by the Left —but I barely scratch the surface. (Barely scratching the surface is a good way to describe my essay as a whole.) I argue that, on the one hand, Jews who react against anti-Zionism (or come to the defense of Israel) tend to slip unawares between one reading of the Jewish Question and the other. On the other hand, the Left (including a section of the Jewish Left) tends to be too quick to dismiss their reaction when giving a postcolonial critique of Zionism and Israel. The combination of these two tendencies generates impassioned confusion—confusion that is not merely intellectual—on both sides. The analysis points to self-critique—on both sides—as a condition for the possibility of constructive debate.

I. Asking the Jewish Question

The so-called “Jewish Question” is a question in the sense of being a problem that needs to be solved. But who set the problem? For whom—in whose eyes—is there a problem about the Jews, the Jews as Jews? I suppose the first person who saw the Jews as a problem was Moses, who, time and again, complained to God about them; or maybe it was God who first saw the Jews as problematic. I don’t know. In any case, the problem they saw is not exactly the problem to which the so-called “Jewish Question” refers. The “Jewish Problem” is set by Europe: it is a question Europe asks itself about the Jews.

The term “the Jewish Question” became current in the 19th century. This was, says Holly Case in her book of the same name, “the age of questions,” by which she means questions with the form “the X question.” The X questions were a motley lot, but, by and large, they could be grouped under three headings: “social,” “religious,” or “national.” The Jewish Question, rather like the Jews themselves, had no fixed abode: it could be housed under any one of these headings. I shall focus on the view that, au fond, it was a national question, keeping company with such questions as the Armenian, Macedonian, Irish, Belgian, Kurdish, and so on. I do so because the national take on the Jewish Question is the one that is especially relevant to our conference, “Antisemitism, Anti-Zionism, and the Critique of Israel: Towards a Constructive Debate.” From Herzl to the present day, the Jewish Question has been construed in political Zionism as a national question; and Zionism lies at the heart of the current debate about Israel and antisemitism.

The “Jewish Problem” is set by Europe: it is a question Europe asks itself about the Jews.

The national take, however, is a mis-take. The Jews were not another case of a European nation whose future on the political map was the subject of debate. Rather, whether the Jews collectively are a nation in the modern (European) sense was up for debate: it was an integral part of the Jewish Question. Nor was there anything novel about querying their collective status: the status of the Jews was seen as problematic for a thousand years or more before the political formations that were the subject of the National Question in the 19th century came into being. And, while there were other groups in this period whose status as nations was up for debate, the case of the Jews was radically different. How so? The answer to this question gets to the core of the Jewish question.

I noted earlier that the Jewish Question is a question Europe asks itself about the Jews. But, although ostensibly about the Jews, ultimately it is about Europe: it is about Europe via the question of the Jews. It always has been, ever since antiquity and the days of the original European Union (as it were), the one whose capital city was Rome. Anti-Jewish animus is older than the Roman Empire, of course. But the story I have in mind begins with the conversion to Christianity of Flavius Valerius Constantinus, otherwise known as Constantine the Great, Emperor of Rome. Constantine’s conversion on his deathbed gave birth, in a way, to the question that came to be called “Jewish.” From this point on, Europe has used the Jews to define itself. The question, which we might rename “the European Question,” was this: What is Europe? Answer: not Jewish. Down the centuries, as Europe’s idea of itself changed, this “not” persisted, though it took different forms.

Granted, in the “New Europe” that emerged after the shock and tumult of the Shoah and the Second World War, the role of Jews collectively has, to some extent, been inverted. We are now liable to function for Europe (as I have discussed elsewhere) more as an admired model than as a despised foil, with consequences for Western European policies towards the State of Israel. Furthermore, a thread of philosemitism runs through Europe’s history. Neither of these points, however, contradicts the account I am giving here of the negative role played by Jews down the centuries in Europe’s self-definition.

Clipping from The Jewish Chronicle of piece by Theodor Herzl entitled “A ‘Solution of the Jewish Question.'” January 17, 1896. Via Wikimedia Commons. Public Domain.

Thus, the Jewish Question existed as an issue for Europe avant la lettre. Seen as being in Europe but not of Europe, the Jews were the original “internal Other,” the inner alien to the European self, the Them inside the Us. First, in antiquity, Judaism was the foil against which Europe defined itself as Christian. Then, in the eighteenth century, the Jews were, as Adam Sutcliffe puts it in his book Judaism and the Enlightenment, “the Enlightenment’s primary unassimilable Other,” but no longer as the immovable object to Christianity ‘s irresistible force (254). Esther Romeyn explains: “For the Enlightenment, with its investment in universalism and civilization, the Jew was a symbol of particularism, a backward-looking, pre-modern tribal culture of outmoded customs and religious tutelage” (92). In the following century, the symbol flipped. Romeyn again (partly quoting Sarah Hammerschlag): “For a nationalism based on roots, the distinctiveness of cultures, and allegiance to a shared past, the Jew was an uprooted nomad or a suspect ‘cosmopolitan’ aligned with ‘abstract reason rather than roots and tradition’” (92; Hammerschlag, 7, 20). Europe now saw itself as a patchwork quilt of ethnic nationalities and the question arose: “How do the Jews fit in? Do they fit in? If they do not, what is to be done with them or with their Jewishness?” This was the Jewish Question in the 19th century, a new variation on a very old European theme: the theme of the anomalous Jew; or, more precisely, the antithetical Jew.

In short, the National Question was about ethnic difference and how Europe should deal with it. The Jewish Question was about the alien within—so deep within as to be internal to Europe’s idea of itself. Other groups and peoples, such as Arabs and Africans, have played the part of Europe’s external Others; this is written into the script of European imperialism and colonialism. They too have provided a reference point for Europe to define itself by way of what it is not. But Jews as Jews are not part of the colonial script. As Jews, we have been, ab initio, “insider outsiders,” a people who, in any given era, are the negative—the internal negative—to Europe’s positive: belonging in Europe by not belonging. Certainly, the Jewish Question, as it has been asked in different European places at different times, has features in common with other “X questions.” Moreover, the Jewish Question is not unique in being unique! Each “X question” is unique or singular in its own distinctive way. But the singularity of the Jewish case is such that it escapes the boxes in which other “X questions” are placed. Being seen as antithetical to Europe, like the alien race in the 1960 horror film Village of the Damned: this is what underlies the questionableness of “the Jews.” It is why (to allude to the title of my paper) the Jewish Question is different from all similar questions. I call this reading of the Jewish Question “the antithesis reading.” Whether it adequately describes the Jewish space in the European imagination, the salient point is this: this is how the Question sits in Jewish collective memory, continually working in the background of the Zionist answer to the Question.

II. Questioning the Zionist Answer

The mass of Jews, if only subliminally, bring collective memory to their embrace of Zionism and the State of Israel. They keep slipping, in the process, between two different readings of the Jewish Question, eliding the one with the other: the one I have just given and the one that Theodor Herzl gives in Der Judenstaat. Herzl’s (mis)reading has become a staple of the State of Israel as it defines itself (and, simultaneously, defines the Jewish people). In Der Judenstaat, he fastens onto the category of “nation.” He writes: “I think the Jewish question is no more a social than a religious one, notwithstanding that it sometimes takes these and other forms. It is a national question …” (15). The subtitle of Der Judenstaat calls his political proposal, a state of the Jews, “An Attempt at a Modern Solution of the Jewish Question”; he means the national question. The indefinite article (“a Modern Solution”) is misleading. Herzl wrote to Bismarck: “I believe I have found the solution to the Jewish Question. Not a solution, but the solution, the only one” (245). Several times (four to be precise) the text refers to “the National Idea,” which, as Herzl envisages it, would be the ruling principle in the Jewish state and, as I read him, in the rest of the Jewish world too (see Der Judenstaat, 49, 50, 54 and 70). The latter idea, if not explicit, is coiled up inside Herzl’s text. I call his reading of the Jewish Question “the national reading.”

Zionism, both as a movement and as an ideology, has changed a lot since Herzl wrote his foundational pamphlet. It has developed two political wings (left and right); it has both secular and religious varieties; and it has produced a state: the State of Israel. But, fundamentally, Herzl’s take on the Jewish Question—figuring it as a national question, putting “the National Idea” at the heart of Jewish identity—has persisted to the present day. This is reflected in the Nation-State Bill (or Nationality Bill), which, upon being passed in the Knesset in 2018, became a Basic Law: Israel as the nation-state of the Jewish People. The law is “basic,” not only for the constitution of the Jewish state but also for the Zionist goal of reconstituting the Jewish people as “a nation, like all other nations” with a state of its own, as Israel’s 1948 Declaration of Independence puts it. This means reconstituting Judaism itself.[1]

Why do so many rank and file Jews across the globe appear to accept this reconstitution of their identity? Why did Britain’s current Chief Rabbi, Ephraim Mirvis, call Zionism “one of the axioms of Jewish belief”? How could he write: “Open a Jewish daily prayer book [siddur] used in any part of the world and Zionism will leap out at you.” Zionism, noch, not Zion. When exactly did Judaism convert to the creed of “the National idea”? in January 2009, when Operation Cast Lead was in full swing in Gaza, why was London’s Trafalgar Square awash with Israeli flags held aloft by British Jews? I witnessed this for myself. I was part of a small Jewish counter-demonstration that was spat at and jeered by some of the people—fellow Jews—in the official rally. How did people who are otherwise decent, people who uphold human rights, suddenly become ardent fans of forced evictions, house demolitions, and military violence against unarmed civilians? No doubt, there are zealots who would tick this box in the name of “the Jewish nation-state.” But zealotry is not what moves the mass of Jews to flock to the flag. If they identify with Israel (or defend it at all costs), it is not because they are persuaded intellectually by the “National Idea” (which is what underlies Herzl’s “national reading” of the Jewish Question), but because they feel viscerally the unbearable burden of the Question (which underlies the “antithesis reading”). When they wave the Israeli flag, it is certainly a gesture of defiance, and possibly hostility, aimed at Palestinians; but, at bottom, it is aimed at Europe—not just at the centuries of exclusion and oppression, but at the sheer chutzpah of Europe’s asking “the Jewish Question”—a question to which there is no right answer, because there is no right answer to the wrong question.[2]

But we Jews, understandably, are hungry for an answer that will put an end to the price we have paid for the nature of our difference. Political Zionism might appear to provide the answer. Paradoxically, the Zionist answer consists in taking Jews out of Europe to the Middle East in order to be included in the European dispensation. (Or you could say: normalizing by conforming to the European norm; it’s as if, by leaving, we’ve arrived.) Leading Zionist figures, from Herzl to Nordau to Ben-Gurion to Barak to Netanyahu, have placed “the Jewish state” in Europe, or see it as an extension of Europe.  As Herzl wrote, “We should there form a portion of the rampart of Europe against Asia” (30).  More recently Benjamin Netanyahu was quoted saying, “We are a part of the European culture. Europe ends in Israel. East of Israel, there is no more Europe.” So, the concept of the Jewish people becomes ethno-national—just like the real European thing; newcomers, who are largely from Europe, create a home for themselves by dispossessing the people who previously inhabited the land—just like a European colony; they turn their home into a state, just like certain former European colonies (such as the “White” dominions of Canada and Australia). Then there is the way their state—Israel—conducts itself in what is generally regarded as part of the Global South. It subjugates, à la Europe, the previous inhabitants of the land; it systematically discriminates against them; it expands its territory via settlers—a classic European practice; and it enters the Eurovision song contest. In all these respects (except perhaps the song contest), Israel courts a postcolonial critique. The Left are happy to oblige. In a way, the postcolonial critique is the ultimate compliment, the capstone on Zionism’s European solution of Europe’s Jewish Problem.

This prompts a surprising question, one that might seem ludicrous or at least redundant, but follows logically from the argument so far. It is this: Since political Zionism locates the state of Israel in Europe, and since Israel conducts itself in the manner of a European colonizing power, what is so objectionable to the generality of Jews—those who close ranks around Zionism and the state of Israel—about a critique that precisely treats Israel as a European state? The answer is that there is a piece missing from the stock postcolonial discourse, a discourse that folds Zionism completely, without remainder, into the history of European hegemony over the Global South, as if this were the whole story. But it is not; and the piece that is missing is, for most Jews, including quite a few of us who are not part of the Jewish mainstream regarding Zionism and Israel, the centerpiece. Put it this way: For Jews in the shtetls of Eastern Europe in the late 1800s and early 1900s (like my grandparents), the burning question was not “How can we extend the reach of Europe?” but “How can we escape it?” That was the Jewish Jewish Question. Like Europe’s Jewish Question, it too was not new; and it was renewed with a vengeance after the walls of Europe closed in during the first half of the last century, culminating in the ultimate crushing experience: genocide. Among the Jewish answers to the Jewish Jewish Question was migration to Palestine. But, by and large, the Jews who moved to Palestine after the Shoah were not so much emigrants as (literally or in effect) refugees. This does not, for a moment, justify the dispossession of the Palestinians, let alone the grievous injustices inflicted upon them by the State of Israel from its creation in 1948 to the present day. But it does put a massive dent into the story told in the postcolonial critique. We need another, more nuanced and inclusive, story.

For Jews in the shtetls of Eastern Europe in the late 1800s and early 1900s (like my grandparents), the burning question was not ‘How can we extend the reach of Europe?’ but ‘How can we escape it?’

In a sense, both the “national reading” of the Jewish Question, which Zionism assumes and Israel embodies, and the postcolonial critique of Israel and Zionism, are culpable in the same way: both take an existing European paradigm and apply it to the Jewish case, without so much as a mutatis mutandis. Neither passes muster. Moreover, the omission of what is, for most Jews, the centerpiece of the story behind Zionism and the creation of Israel erases a crucial feature of Jewish historical experience and collective memory. Not only does this erasure vitiate the postcolonial critique, it also feeds the suspicion that many Jews harbor that the critique is malign. It has a familiar ring. They feel, in their guts, that it is another slander against the Jews, a new expression of an old animus—antisemitism by any other name. To put it mildly, this is an exaggeration. The Left, in turn, are skeptical about this reaction. It has a familiar ring. They feel, in their guts, that it is disingenuous, a cynical ploy to suppress criticism of Israel. This too, to put it mildly, is an exaggeration. The more one side reacts to the other side, the more the other side reacts to them. This is not a debate. It is a bout, a wrestling bout, where the two antagonists are locked in a clinch, as inseparable as lovers.

The analysis in this essay suggests that each of the adversaries is in the grip of certain states of mind, connected to particular blind spots. In one case, it is confusion about the meaning of the Question that Europe has persisted in asking about the Jews, plus obliviousness to the injustices done to Palestinians by the Jewish “nation-state.” In the other case, it is confusion over the limits of a postcolonial critique, plus obliviousness to what it is that leads so many Jews to react understandably and, to an extent, legitimately, against that critique. The upshot, on the one side, is demonization of the Left; on the other side, demonization of Zionism. Accordingly, the question each side needs to ask is not “How can I break the hold of the other?,” but “How can I break my hold on the other?” “How,” that is to say, “can I loosen the grip that certain confused ideas and powerful passions have over me?” In short, if a futile bout is to turn into a constructive debate, what is needed is self-critique. This is not asking too much of ourselves. But the task is great, and life is short.

[1] The best treatment that I have seen of a cluster of questions surrounding Jewish identity, Zionism, and the state of Israel is in the work of Yaacov Yadgar, Professor of Israel Studies, University of Oxford. See especially his two books: Sovereign Jews: Israel, Zionism, and Judaism and Israel’s Jewish Identity Crisis: State and Politics in the Middle East.

[2] My current work in this area is focused on developing the idea of unasking the Jewish Question.

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Brian Klug
Brian Klug is Hon. Fellow in Social Philosophy at Campion Hall, University of Oxford; Hon. Fellow of the Parkes Institute for the Study of Jewish/non-Jewish Relations, University of Southampton; and Fellow of the College of Arts & Sciences, St Xavier University, Chicago. He is an Associate Editor of Patterns of Prejudice and a member of the Boards for “Negotiating Jewish Identity: Jewish Life in 21st Century Norway” (The Norwegian Center for Holocaust and Minority Studies), Islamophobia Studies Yearbook, and ReOrient: The Journal of Critical Muslim Studies. His books include A Time to Speak Out: Independent Jewish Voices on Israel, Zionism and Jewish Identity (2008, co-editor); Offence: the Jewish Case (2009); Being Jewish and Doing Justice: Bringing Argument to Life (2011); and Words of Fire: Selected Essays of Ahad Ha’am (2015, editor). He took part in The Vienna Conversations (Bruno Kreisky Forum) and was one of the drafters of the Jerusalem Declaration on Antisemitism (2021).
Global Currents article

Religion, Politics, and Trump’s Christian Nationalism


“One Nation Under God Indivisible” poster from Stop the Steal rally in Raleigh, NC on January 6, 2021. Photo Credit: Flickr user Anthony Crider. CC BY 2.0.

A key paradox at the heart of American politics is that the United States is a deeply religious society with a secular institutional framework. This anomaly is rooted in a compromise embodied in the Constitution over the proper relationship between religion and state. Like most contentious issues, however, this debate remains a source of conflict. Moreover, those advocating a theocratic vision for the country have gained ground in recent years. The strength of this vision—and of the religious right—however, has less to do with an increased religiosity among Americans than with the conscious manipulation of conservative religion for partisan gain. Conservative donors, strategists, and politicians have long used religion and race to persuade working class Whites to vote along cultural lines, not class lines. While the intent may have been to elect pro-business Republicans (and to enable a hawkish foreign policy), the effect has been to normalize a right-wing vision of Christian nationalism. More to the point, the instrumental use of conservative religion has empowered a culture war dynamic that has taken on a life of its own and, in the process, transformed the Republican Party and facilitated the rise of Donald Trump.

Religion and American Politics

A key debate at the founding of this country was whether or not there should be an established church. Early Puritans (and their heirs) assumed that political unity required a high degree of religious uniformity and, thus, supported a close affiliation of religious authority and political power. From this view, the regulation of religious thought and practice was seen as a legitimate function of government. On the other hand, dissenting Puritans (such as Roger Williams), Enlightenment thinkers, and others advocated tolerance in matters of religion and belief. These individuals were critical of established churches and saw in the separation of church and state a means of protecting both politics from religion and religion from politics.

There was also the fact of religious diversity. The early American republic was characterized by a plurality of Christian denominations, so the question of establishment raised a related issue: Whose church? The framers of the Constitution found a compromise on the matter, which is embodied in the First Amendment: “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.”

Despite this formal separation of church and state, American nationalism has always been intertwined with Protestant Christianity. Protestantism (and, later, the Judeo-Christian tradition more generally) provides the myths, symbols, and images of American national identity and has long provided a vernacular for American politics. The manner in which religion informs the country’s political life, however, has varied significantly over time. In the mid-twentieth century, modernist religious thought influenced the ecumenical secularism of the Kennedy/Johnson era, a trend which is captured in Robert Bellah’s notion of American civil religion. This interpretation of the American project was thoroughly religious, but it was also non-sectarian and at least theoretically inclusive (even if the historical circumstances were less so). During that same period, there was also an exclusive vision of religious nationalism that conflated conservative Christianity with a commitment to free market economics, segregation, and a deep anti-communist sensibility. This vision of religion and state—what Bellah referred to as the “American legion type of ideology that fuses God, country and flag” —was evident within the Christian Anti-Communist Crusade, the John Birch Society, and preached by evangelists such as Billy Hargis among others.

At issue in these competing visions of American nationalism were differences of both religious interpretation and political life. Modernist readings of the Christian tradition informed the ecumenical secularism of the mid-20th century, while a “literal” or fundamentalist interpretation informed the more exclusive notion of religious nationalism. Both provided a religious interpretation of the American experience, but in sharply contrasting terms. Politically, the question was whether the country ought to embrace an inclusive conception of American society—one tolerant of diverse communities and religions—or whether America was in fact a Christian nation that ought to privilege the ethnic motifs and religious beliefs of the dominant community. In short, should the state support an open or a closed vision of American society?  While secularism as neutrality was admittedly an unrealized ideal, it did provide the moral and conceptual framework for an inclusive, civic nationalism, and provided an opening for the civil and women’s rights movements of the 1960s. Significantly, such efforts to create a more inclusive society helped to fuel the conservative counter-revolution of the 1970s and 1980s.

While secularism as neutrality was admittedly an unrealized ideal, it did provide the moral and conceptual framework for an inclusive, civic nationalism, and provided an opening for the civil and women’s rights movements of the 1960s.

These debates over both religion and politics informed the Culture Wars of the 1990s and have grown more intense over time. On the one hand, there is a genuine feeling among conservative Christians today that traditional values are under threat from an amoral secular culture that has ostensibly banned religion from the public square. Central to this argument is an assumption that secularism is invariably hostile to religion, never neutral. Moreover, it is the perceived demise of traditional values—and an assumption that religion has lost its influence in public life—that is argued to be the source of contemporary social problems. As former Attorney General William Barr noted in a 2019 speech, drug abuse, broken families, depression, and any number of other social pathologies are “the bitter results of the new secular age.” By banning prayer in school, legalizing abortion, and normalizing alternative lifestyles, American society had—according to Barr—allowed moral relativism to undermine the country’s traditional sense of moral order. The solution, according to Barr and others, is a more central role for religion in government and public life.

Opponents of this view argue that religious conservatives are trying to use the coercive power of the state to promote their vision of religion at the expense of all others. In the process, such activists are threatening democracy. The state promotion of conservative Christianity will necessarily infringe on individual rights and sanction policies that are inherently discriminatory. Central to this alternative perspective is a belief that the societal ills of which Barr and others speak are the byproduct of an unregulated market economy, not the loss of religion. Hence, insofar as there is a role for government here, it should focus on supporting education, providing healthcare, and ensuring the equal treatment of all citizens. Government should not be mandating prayer in public schools or limiting a people’s right to control their own body. The 2022 Supreme Court decisions striking down Roe v. Wade and expanding the use of public funds for parochial schools are indicative of where this debate stands today.

Positive Polarization

These are important issues and debates with deeply held views by people on all sides. However, America’s culture wars consume a disproportionate amount of attention in political discourse, particularly given the diminishing religiosity of the population. To understand the continued salience of these issues—and the outsized influence of right-wing religious organizations in American politics—one needs to look at the way in which the Republican Party has used conservative religion as a basis of populist mobilization. A key figure in this trend was Richard Nixon, who consciously used race, religion, and culture to appeal to White, working-class voters. Commonly referred to as the Southern Strategy, the intent of such appeals was to politicize divisive social issues in order to polarize society along cultural, not class, lines. Republican Party strategists believed that this type of “positive polarization” would diminish the salience of economic issues as a basis for voting and split the Democratic coalition that had dominated the country since the 1930s and 1940s.

In pursuing this strategy, Nixon (and later Republicans) readily conflated an evangelical reading of Protestant Christianity with conservative policy priorities, such as tax cuts, free market economic policies, and an assertive foreign policy. They also used racial “dog whistles” to court Southern Democrats and used the fear of communism to smear liberals, Keynesian economic policies, the media, and the educated elite. This type of rhetoric was meant to appeal to conservative Catholics (especially in the Northeast) as well as conservative Protestants by providing a priestly affirmation for traditional patterns of social order.  The Nixon strategy also treated the far right as a constituency to be courted, not shunned. In doing so, the instrumental manipulation of conservative religion helped to normalize the ideas of right-wing extremism and provided them a home within the Republican Party.

Richard Nixon, U.S. Republican nominee for President, smiles while standing on his motorcade car and giving a “victory” sign during a ticker-tape parade northbound on S. LaSalle St. at W. Monroe St. in the Chicago Loop, September 4, 1968. Photo credit: Flickr user GPA Photo Archive. CC BY-NC 2.0.

The basic contours of Nixon’s Southern Strategy have informed Republican campaigns at all levels for the past fifty years. Ronald Reagan’s conservative revolution was premised on the same kind of right-wing populism, appeals to conservative Christianity, and racial dog whistles, as Nixon. George H. W. Bush’s 1988 campaign (and Pat Buchanan’s 1992 bid for the presidency) similarly used race, religion and culture to draw sharp distinctions between Republicans and their opponents. The election of George W. Bush—and the events of 9/11—had a profound impact on this dynamic and greatly strengthened the forces of an exclusive religious nationalism. The invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq were clothed in a religious rhetoric that fused conservative Christianity with American militarism and support for the “war on terror” became a litmus test for American patriotism.

Significantly, there were two enemies during the George W. Bush era: those within and those without. On the one hand, there were the forces of so-called “Islamofacism” which were said to represent a civilizational threat akin to fascism and communism. On the other hand, there were the internal enemies—liberals, secularists, and critics—who were characterized as insufficiently patriotic and not serious about national security. In this way, the Bush Administration (and the Bush campaigns) used the war on terror as a culture war issue to further polarize the American electorate. Liberal policies and politicians were subsequently denigrated as culturally inauthentic and Democrats as hostile to “traditional values.”

While the election of Barack Obama seemed to indicate that America had turned a corner and returned to the ecumenical secularism of an earlier era, this proved illusory. Obama’s election generated its own conservative backlash and spawned a range of conspiracy theories about the pending “Islamization” of the West and a “stealth jihad” facilitated by the political left. In this context, activists on the right conflated the threat of terrorism with anti-minority and anti-immigration sentiments and identified multi-culturalism as a key threat to the unity of the nation. Donald Trump rode this anti-Obama backlash all the way to the White House.

Trump’s Christian Nationalism

This context helps to explain the Trump phenomenon. In many respects, Trump was the culmination of the Southern Strategy and the party’s emphasis on culture war politics. Trump was a lead voice in the “Birther” movement that was premised upon the lie that Obama was not actually born in the United States and that he was secretly a Muslim. Trump’s right-wing populism also fused American militarism with an amorphous appeal to “traditional values.” Where Trump differed from earlier Republicans was in his overt xenophobia and racism. While racist appeals had long been implicit in the strategies of positive polarization, they were explicit in the Trump era. It was also clear that Trump was far more in tune with the right-wing base than the Republican party leadership, indicating that the party had lost control of the forces which it had helped to unleash.

One perplexing part of this story was Trump himself. How is it that he would become a standard bearer of the Christian right when his misogyny, materialism, and “hatred for the other,” stood in such sharp contrast to the essence of Jesus’ teachings? As former Bush speech writer Michael Gerson noted, Trump’s ethos “smack[s] more of Nietzsche than of Christ.” And, yet, Trump had the overwhelming support of White evangelical Protestants, winning a greater percentage of that demographic in 2016 than either Reagan or Bush. White, conservative Catholics were similarly supportive and gave Trump an edge in key swing states in 2020.

There are a number of possible explanations for this anomaly, but a key issue can be found in the aforementioned conflict over competing visions of the nation. Although Trump—a thrice married casino owner who pays off his adulterous lovers—may not be an exemplary Christian, he is nonetheless seen as an aggressive leader in America’s culture war. According to individuals like William Barr or Franklin Graham (among others), Christians are an oppressed—and persecuted—population within an increasingly secular society. The country, in short, is in a state of civil war and Trump is seen as the strong man who is uniquely able to stand up to the “liberal elite.”

Although Trump—a thrice married casino owner who pays off his adulterous lovers—may not be an exemplary Christian, he is nonetheless seen as an aggressive leader in America’s culture war.

Hence, the call to “take back our country” refers to the idea that conservative Christians (Catholics and Protestants) need to take control of the pillars of American society—government, media, education, and the law—and use that control to end the separation of church and state and reshape civil society in a manner consistent with their interpretation of the Christian tradition. This vision of society, moreover, is one that reaffirms traditional patterns of social hierarchy and racial privilege. For all his faults, Trump was seen as able to deliver on this promise. In short, it was not a Christian ethic that drew conservative Christians to Donald Trump, but rather a sense of political tribalism and a base transactionalism. In exchange for their political support, Trump was willing to pass laws and appoint judges that would privilege their conservative, “Christian worldview,” and that would roll back legal protections ensuring racial, gender, and marriage equality.

Another reason why Trump became the standard bearer in America’s culture wars is that he stood for nothing else. The entire point of politicizing issues like abortion, bathroom usage, and/or trans athletes is to distract the American electorate from the ill effect of economic policies that have contributed to the country’s deindustrialization and concentrated the nation’s wealth in the hands of a few. Trump’s culture war politics, in short, were primarily about firing up the base and distracting the press and the public from the lack of an agenda beyond tax cuts, conservative judges, and self-enrichment. Disinformation and slander—from QAnon to the Big Lie—were an essential part of this strategy because they helped to create an image of Democrats as craven and hostile to the interests of working people.

Finally, the reason that Trump’s culture war politics plays so well is that Republican party operatives and conservative activists and media have been successful in pushing these narratives for over 50 years. In short, there was fertile ground for Trump’s scorched earth politics. The Republican Party’s politicization of religion successfully created a basis of popular support for itself, but the price has been high. The strategy of positive polarization has fueled the country’s divisive politics and talk of civil war and violence on the campaign trail is now shockingly common. The country also has a deeply politicized judiciary, where “renegotiating the boundaries between church and state is the [Supreme] Court’s current project.” America’s culture wars have also affected popular perceptions of Christianity. As one former Bush Administration official lamented, “the name ‘Jesus’ doesn’t bring to mind the things he said he wanted associated with his followers—love for one another; love for the poor, sick and imprisoned; self-denial; and devotion to God. It is associated with anti-abortion activities, opposition to gay rights, the Republican Party, and tax cuts.” For those who embrace Christ’s teachings on love, forgiveness, and social justice—and who are uneasy about the use of Christianity to glorify the pursuit of wealth and power—these trends will be deeply troubling.

This post is based on a presentation given at Valparaiso University in April of 2022.

2 Comments on Religion, Politics, and Trump’s Christian Nationalism Array
Scott Hibbard
Scott Hibbard is an Associate Professor and Chair of the Department of Political Science at DePaul University.  He has a Ph.D. from Johns Hopkins University, and advanced degrees from the London School of Economics and Political Science, and Georgetown University.  He is the author of Religious Politics and Secular States: Egypt, India and the United States (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2010), and co-author (with David Little) of Islamic Activism and U.S. Foreign Policy (U.S. Institute of Peace Press, 1997).
Theorizing Modernities article

A Conversation with Shaul Magid and Friends on Meir Kahane and Political Theology


In conjunction with the publication of the Journal of Religious Ethics’ special issue on Shaul Magid’s Meir Khanane: The Public Life and Political Thought of an American Jewish Radical, Contending Modernities has partnered with the Kroc Cast Podcast to bring our audience a conversation on Magid’s book that includes leading scholars in Jewish studies and religious studies. Hosted by CM Co-Director and contributor to the special issue, Atalia Omer, this conversation features a wide-ranging discussion of the impact of Kahane’s life and work on political life in the US and Israel/Palestine. The panel includes Susannah Heschel, Robert Orsi, Yaniv Feller, Emily Filler, and Shaul Magid. Among the topics discussed are the challenges the book poses to how we think about the canon of modern Jewish thought, the critique of liberalism that Kahane posed, the continuing impact of Kahane’s thought on Israeli politics, and the way one’s own positionality is likely to impact the way one approaches the book. On the latter point, Omer draws special attention to the lack of surprise at Kahane’s more extremist and racist claims among Palestinians.

As Magid notes in his comments, the book is not a traditional intellectual biography, but is instead a book that uses the figure of Kahane as a lens through which to address what many would prefer to leave unaddressed, namely the racist and nationalist underside of Zionism. Given the European colonial origins of modern Zionism, Magid’s book and this discussion are in keeping with the Contending Modernities’ aim to draw attention to how coloniality and modernity, especially in their religious elements, continue to perpetuate racism, misogyny, and xenophobia today. We hope that after listening to the podcast, readers will take the time to explore each of the contributors’ response to the book in the Journal of Religious Ethics as well as the book itself.

 

 

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Joshua S. Lupo
Joshua S. Lupo is the Assistant Director of the Contending Modernities research initiative. In this role, he serves as the editor and writer for the Contending Modernities Blog and the classroom coordinator for the Madrasa Discourses program. He has published articles and reviews in Sophia, Soundings, Critical Muslim, Reading Religion, and Religious Studies Review. With CM Co-Director Atalia Omer, he is the co-editor of Broken Solidarities: Feminism, Race, and Transnationalism (Notre Dame Press, 2022) and Religion, Populism, and Modernity: Confronting White Christian Nationalism and Racism  (Notre Dame Press, 2023). His current book project is titled After Essentialism: A Critical Phenomenology for the Study of Religion.
Global Currents article
Meghan J. Clark
Meghan J. Clark is Associate Professor of Moral Theology in the Department of Theology and Religious Studies, St. John’s University in New York. She earned her Ph.D. in Theological Ethics from Boston College. Her research focuses on Catholic social thought, global development, human rights, peace, and justice. She is author of The Vision of Catholic Social Thought: The Virtue of Solidarity and the Praxis of Human Rights (Fortress Press, 2014). In 2015, she was a Fulbright Scholar at Hekima University College, Nairobi, Kenya. In 2018, she was a Visiting Residential Research Fellow at the Centre for Catholic Studies at the University of Durham, UK. In 2017-2018, she was awarded a Vincentian Studies Grant to conduct fieldwork research with the Daughters of Charity in Kenya, Ethiopia, and Tanzania. From 2010-2013, she served as a Consultant to the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops Committee on Domestic Justice. Her research has been published in Theolgoical Studies, Journal of Catholic Social Thought, Journal of Moral Theology, Heythrop Journal, among others.