Emerging Trends in The Social and Behavioral Sciences

Religion and Nationalism

Item

Title

Religion and Nationalism

Author

Omer, Atalia

Research Area

Social Institutions

Topic

Religious Institutions

Abstract

This essay examines the relations between religion and nationalism by highlighting the existing scholarly approaches as well as the ways in which they might be further expanded into deeper engagements with the legacies of colonialism and race. The argument is that cross‐fertilizing the religion and nationalist literature with critical race theories and the study of coloniality will provide explanatory frames and analytic tools to interpret the waves of right‐wing populist nationalisms in Euro‐America in the twenty‐first century. In particular, the ways in which appeals to Christianity, Judeo‐Christianity, or “civilizational” values participate in patterns of exclusion and inclusion through the mechanisms of sexual politics and human rights' instruments are studied as an opportunity to interrogate the interrelation between anti‐Semitism and anti‐Muslim rhetoric to the histories of colonialism and how they have undergirded the patterns of interactions between religion and the production, reproduction, and subversion of political national identities.

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Religion and Nationalism
ATALIA OMER

Abstract

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This essay examines the relations between religion and nationalism by highlighting
the existing scholarly approaches as well as the ways in which they might be further
expanded into deeper engagements with the legacies of colonialism and race. The
argument is that cross-fertilizing the religion and nationalist literature with critical
race theories and the study of coloniality will provide explanatory frames and analytic tools to interpret the waves of right-wing populist nationalisms in Euro-America
in the twenty-first century. In particular, the ways in which appeals to Christianity,
Judeo-Christianity, or “civilizational” values participate in patterns of exclusion and
inclusion through the mechanisms of sexual politics and human rights’ instruments
are studied as an opportunity to interrogate the interrelation between anti-Semitism
and anti-Muslim rhetoric to the histories of colonialism and how they have undergirded the patterns of interactions between religion and the production, reproduction, and subversion of political national identities.

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WHY RELIGION?
At the sight of electoral victories earned by explicitly xenophobic and
Islamophobic political parties in the first few decades of the twenty-first
century, even casual observes can recognize that right-wing populism is
on the rise in Europe and North America (Marzouki, McDonnell, & Roy,
2016). In this essay, I examine why this phenomenon presses upon us the
importance of investigating the relation between religion and nationalism.
I ask why anti-Semitism is still in circulation in the rhetoric of populist
nationalisms, and how and why this hatred interacts with Islamophobia, as
a different side of the same coin. Both anti-Jewish and anti-Muslim sentiments relate in complex ways to the elucidation of the self-representation of
Euro-American nationalisms as white and Christian. In some instances, this
self-representation intersects with sexual conservatism. In other instances,
it intersects with appeals to sexual liberation as a mark of a civilizational
identity, with certain targeted groups marked as prohibitive in their traditional conservatism. This reference to sexual politics conveys one entry point
Emerging Trends in the Social and Behavioral Sciences.
Robert A. Scott and Marlis Buchmann (General Editors) with Stephen Kosslyn (Consulting Editor).
© 2018 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. ISBN 978-1-118-90077-2.

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EMERGING TRENDS IN THE SOCIAL AND BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES

where religion’s relevance to nation and nationalism becomes evident as a
site that also demands that we will engage with the question of modernity
as a political, cultural, colonial, and intellectual project.
Contemporary nationalist populism, therefore, echoes the early modern
construction of nations as a project of cultural homogenization. Populists
claim to speak in the name of the “people” and against “elites” as well
as the supposed “others” within (Brubaker, 2017, p. 1192). This dualism
is characteristic of right-wing populisms’ (Canovan, 1981; Marzouki et al.,
2016) intent on reclaiming a perceived golden age when “the people” or the
“virtuous community” were not contaminated and corrupted by “others”
and “elites.” Euro-American populist currents exhibit such patterns, which
employ religious symbols as constitutive elements in drawing the boundaries of the threatened “virtuous community” and in defining those that
need to be excluded, expelled, disappeared, and eliminated for a redemptive
path to open up.
The exclusionary populist nationalist moment in the West exhibits a great
country-by-country variation. However, in each instance, Muslims are
constructed as the other of Europe. Roy (2016) puts it bluntly: “most of
these [populist] parties are Christian largely to the extent that they reject
Islam” (p. 186). They posit the supposed threat of Islam (the loss of “our
ways of life”) as a mobilizing card that enables curious conversions between
conservative Christian and secular (anti-religious/anticlerical) secularists
(Roy, 2016, p. 188). At the same time, Roy (2016) identifies a paradoxical
relation between the increased secularization of European contexts and
the amplification and traction of populist cries to reclaim Europe’s “Christian roots,” even if they mean little, if nothing at all, in terms of dogmas
or content beyond belonging to particular modes of imagining nation
(pp. 192–193). Roy interprets the amplified role of “religion” in nationalist
populism in terms of secularism rather than as a sign of greater religiosity
qua depth in tradition. Populist invocation of religion as belonging (nation
construction or reclaiming) conveys secularity, unfolding through the
language and mechanisms of human rights. The latter—whether through
the European Court of Human Rights’ granting permission to display
crucifixes in classrooms in Italy or through a German court upholding a
decision of a school in Baden-Württemberg to ban girls from wearing of head
scarves—are pivotal in reducing Christianity to “culture” and “heritage”
(see also Zubrzycki, 2016, Chapter 5). Accordingly, such legal discourses and
mechanisms frame Christianity as an indigenous European culture, merely
“a collective historical and cultural fact” contrasted with “alien” elements
that are interpreted not as “cultural,” but rather as religiously other (Roy,
2016, p. 193). Roy’s focus on legal technologies of exclusion resonates with a
body of work (Mahmood, 2015; Hurd 2017) that highlights the infrastructure

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of the modern secular state’s centrality in defining and redefining religion, a
process that needs to be understood in terms of power.
I likewise approach this discussion by examining the concept of coloniality.
Following Quijano (2000), “coloniality” refers to the production of “race”
as instrumental for and constitutive of the Eurocentric expansion of global
capitalism and colonialism and denotes the “historical reidentification”
of non-European geographies and populations (p. 540). The modern
nation-state, accordingly, involves a process and histories of homogenization based on racial classification, genocide, and slavery and needs to be
examined through this critical decolonizing lens, which is often not in
conversation with the nationalism literature. The latter remains embedded
within Eurocentric, capitalist, and political liberal intellectual coloniality.
But this intellectual oversight is now challenged.
Nationalist, populist, and xenophobic rhetoric in Europe (viewed broadly
as the Eurocentric colonial project) comes at a moment when the streets of its
urban centers are confronted with their colonial pasts in the form of increasingly diverse, multiracial, multicultural, multireligious, and multinational
demographics. The globality of the local landscape illuminates the relevance
of diaspora studies to the analysis of nationalism and nation as a normative,
geographic, and religioculturalist orientation (Brubaker, 2005; Tölöyan 1996),
also observing patterns of securitizing, racializing, and minoritizing nonwhite and non-Christian communities (Kurien, 2004). An emphasis on the
diasporic as the condition for transnational hybridity and fluidity, rather than
homogeneity and purity (Gilroy, 1992, 1997), is in tension with the biopolitical
drive for segregation, differentiation, and elimination pivotal for the story of
European modernity, its effects bearing striking conceptual similarities from
a global analysis of domination, oppression, displacement, and elimination
of indigenous populations and nonwhites.
Similarly, segregating religion and race as two distinct sites of analysis
in the study of nationalism is myopic and contributes to the veiling of the
need to scrutinize coloniality as integral to the analysis. David Chidester’s
Empire of Religion (2014) reveals the centrality of race to the construction of
religion in the British colonial context of the nineteenth and early twentieth
centuries, which persistently preoccupied itself with the deployment of
power/knowledge for differentiating civilized from uncivilized populations
(Chidester, 1996). Notably, Chidester’s contribution illuminates that the
manifestation of civilization discourses in contemporary Euro-America,
however, needs to be situated within a deeper colonial history that likewise
demands desegregating the conceptual boundaries between race and
religion. In addition to challenging liberal mythologies (Cavanaugh, 2009)
about the privatization and territorialization of religion as pivotal to the
emergence of modernity qua toleration encapsulated in the institution of

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the modern nation-state, critiques of modernist approaches to “religion”
need to be emboldened by the tools of critical race theory and a global
and transnational engagement with coloniality. Centering coloniality is
necessarily an intersectional undertaking, which presents religion, race, and
gender as key constitutive sites for critical analysis, and also for constructive
conflict transformation and emancipatory schemes.
Before returning to the constructive possibilities I identify in putting
the nationalism and religion literature in conversation with comparative
transnational race theory and its focus on decolonization, I briefly highlight
some key currents in the study of religion and nationalism.
RELIGION AND NATIONALISM: A SCHEMATIC REVIEW

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Some scholars have emphasized the ancient roots of contemporary religious
nationalism in biblical narratives of chosenness (Smith, 2003). Others have
critiqued such narratives as insufficiently attentive to modern processes,
institutions, and history and as overly beholden to nationalist rhetoric as
evidence for the anachronistic endurance of nations (Marx, 2003). For the
most part, however, the “nation” has been coextensive with Eurocentric
narratives of modernity, telling a story about shifting authority structures
away from religious institutions (Anderson, 1991; Little, 2015). Earlier
contributions to the study of religion and nationalism, therefore, underscored its instrumental role in constructing modernity and its political unit
of the nation-state. Others zoomed in on nationalism as amounting to a
selective retrieval and reinterpretation of cultural and religious symbols
and resources in imagining national mythologies as forms of substitute
religions. Concerns with power and colonialism were mostly articulated in
the relatively segregated sectors of feminist and postcolonial questioning
about who is doing the imagining in Anderson’s famous conception of the
nation (1991) as an imagined community (Chatterjee, 1991; Yuval Davis,
1993). Their relative segregation explains why authoritative accounts of the
literature normally exclude them.
Brubaker, for instance, concludes that scholarship on religion and nationalism effectively challenges unreconstructed approaches to the study of
secular modernity by illuminating “the religious matrix of the category of the
secular itself” (Brubaker, 2012, p. 15). This intervention’s importance aside,
Brubaker’s review reflects on a specifically Eurocentric history embedded
within particular theological and philosophical developments within European Christian history (Hurd, 2008). These developments inform universal
projection and participation in consolidating a global hegemony (Lynch,
2015), but the interweaving of nation making and coloniality is bracketed
and, with it, a consideration of the role of race both in the construction of

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“religion” as a comparative category of analysis and in the very project of
western colonialism.
But with the so-called postsecular age, which denotes a broad recognition of
the enduring public relevance (rather than ultimate irrelevance) of religion,
some of those engaged in the nationalism literature devoted a substantial
attention to the interlinking of religion, nationalism, and violence or explicit
and obvious violent interpretations of national identities. One site of research
examines the cultural, historical, symbolic, and religious building blocks of
ethnoreligious nationalism on a case-by-case basis, underscoring contextuality, institutional frameworks, and political conditions and opportunities
(Little & Swearer, 2006; Sells, 1998).
Another site began to situate the “nation” within a deeper analysis of the
colonial project and its construction of “religion” as the binary other of the
“secular” and “political” fields (Asad, 1999, 2003) and to consider the mutual
construction of religiocultural conceptions of nationalism in both the colonial
metropole and the colonies (van der Veer, 2001). The focus on the epistemological violence of liberal secularism and the political project of the modern
nation-state led to a blossoming of scholarship devoted to exposing the dominant liberal grammar that underpins the legal deployment of the language
of rights in Euro-America (Sullivan, Hurd, Mahmood, & Danchin, 2015). The
other scholarly focus on the religiocultural content of explicit ethnoreligious
manifestations of nationalism contributed to a subfield of religion and vio˘
lence (Juergensmeyer, Jerryson, & Kitts, 2013; Gorski & Türkmen-Dervi¸soglu,
2013) as well as, inversely, to scholarship and practice in religion and peacebuilding (Omer, Appleby, & Little, 2015). Other subfields, as noted, engage
the “nation” from a feminist angle (which does not always integrate “religion” because of feminist traditions’ contested approaches to religious traditions as they relate to or constrain their political emancipatory projects) and
others focus specifically on religious and nationalism in the Global South and
on postcolonial challenges to modernist theories of nationalism.
Modernist theories of nationalism are, as noted, profoundly challenged
in the Global North where religion is pivotal in constructing exclusionary boundaries. Indeed, the emergence of nationalist populisms in
Euro-America betrays a rhetorical spectrum (Brubaker, 2016; Marzouki
et al., 2016). It ranges from a Huntingtonian celebration of “Judeo-Christian”
civilizational values and/or Christianity qua cultural heritage as the ground
for conceptions of social and economic progress (including sexual and
gender fluidity) and liberalism to explicit appeals to Christianity, critiques
of social progressivism (especially along sexual and gender emancipatory
practices and policies) for enacting national boundaries. The latter explicit
invocation of (white) Christianity converges with and draws upon classical
anti-Semitic tropes and ingrained structures of racialization. The former

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appeals to “civilizational identity” and “heritage,” in distinction, employ
philosemitic (manifesting in an unqualified support of Israel) rhetoric but
are likely embedded in coloniality and racialization. Indeed, both varieties
are ultimately anti-Semitic and likewise capitalize on Islamophobia and
anti-Muslim orientalist underpinnings. The current moment of populist
nationalism, therefore, exposes the need for a transnational and global
comprehensive analysis of the interrelations between anti-Muslim and
anti-Jewish frames and how they relate to the discursive practices of nationalism globally and to deeper questions about religion, race, and modernity
qua coloniality. Those studies that move in this direction and draw upon
or interact productively with critical theoretical tools constitute intriguing
research trajectories.
AVENUES FOR FURTHER RESEARCH

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The study of religion and nationalism, as the review above illustrates, has
shifted significantly away from simplistic applications of an unreconstructed
secularism thesis and modernist paradigms of progress. Indeed, one of the
most promising aforementioned scholarly directions disengages from
the conceptual boundaries imposed by the actual geopolitical borders of
nation-states. I indicated that the first way in which these boundaries are
challenged is through the study of diasporas as sites for negotiating and
contesting the meanings of identity and nation. The study of the African
diaspora as encompassing those dislocated due to modernity’s patterns
of transatlantic slave trades and genocidal practices and as, subsequently,
engaging in a decolonizing intellectual mode of struggle remains mostly
within the purview of cultural studies (Iton, 2010).
The study of nationalism and religion is not conversant with cultural
and comparative racial studies and their turn to decolonization. Even
increasingly sophisticated schematic accounts of scholarship on religion and
nationalism, as exemplified in Brubaker’s account, bracket the analysis of
coloniality. From the perspective of the Global South, any engagement with
the modern nation-state—the political mechanism of Eurocentric modernity,
exploitative capitalism, and hegemony—is incomplete without also grappling intersectionally with the condition of coloniality. This grappling entails
decolonizing the very categories of nation, religion, and race, as Chidester
does in his study of religion, but also is prevalent in the transnational and
global study of circuits of racialization and Euro-American colonization
(Lubin, 2014).
What is at stake in the turn to the decolonial is the interrogation of
European modernity, secularity, and their embeddedness within Christian
history, philosophy, theology, and imaginations. As we will see in the

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following discussion, appeals to Christianity as a threshold for belonging
as well as a mechanism for the control of traditional gender norms and
women’s bodies are as secular and modern as the invocation of Christianity
as “heritage” and “culture” functioning subsequently, through progressive
sexual politics, as tools of exclusion. This is consistent with Roy’s interpretation (2016) of the patterns of reducing religion (read Christianity) to
(European) culture, a process reliant upon cultivating an Islamophobia that
intersects in various ways with anti-Semitism. Interrogating the nature of
these intersections tells not only specific stories about Muslims and Jews,
but also relates a broader narrative about the centrality of the “nation” to
narratives of religion and modernity.
Accordingly, a second promising scholarly avenue to which I previously alluded explores the global, transnational, and local circulations
of anti-Muslims and anti-Jewish tropes and narratives, focusing on how
they relate to the construction of exclusionary populist nationalist ideologies and practices. To deepen the analysis of the empirical reemergence
of anti-Semitism and its relation to contemporary manifestations of
anti-Muslim sentiments, the nationalism scholarship needs to be in conversation not only with critical approaches to the emergence of religion as
a comparative category whose legacy is entangled with coloniality (e.g.,
Chidester), but also with critical theory that specifically addresses the
Christian underpinnings of Eurocentric secular modernity because these
scaffolds are now exposed in populist patterns framed within the discursive
sites of nation-states.
The work of Gil Anidjar is especially relevant for this philosophical and
semiotic investigation. In his Blood: A Critique of Christianity (2014), Anidjar
shows that Christianity has persisted and metamorphosed into, rather than
been superseded by, modern conceptions of the secular. Indeed, on his
account (Anidjar, 2014, p. 257), the political organization of the modern
nation-state—as is the modern project of scientific racism—can be analyzed
using blood as a category to interpret modern nationalism, capitalism,
and law.
As a historical category of analysis, “blood” has its roots in medieval
Christianity and in a trajectory that rewrites Christianity as a biological
boundary. This rewriting especially manifested in the Iberian limpieza de
sangra (blood purity or cleanliness) as a tool employed to differentiate “real”
Christians from (Jewish and Muslim) converted Christians in the process of
the Inquisition (Anidjar, 2014, p. 65) itself interpreted as a mechanism for
constructing a prototype of the modern (Spanish) nation (Marx, 2003). Consequently, Anidjar (2014) argues that “the pervasive distinction of (modern)
nation and (medieval) religion is not only regrettable and inaccurate but also
answers to (and complies with) disciplinary and governing mechanisms

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and to long-standing biases, which continue to affect and even structure
our historical understanding, our understanding of the present” (p. 65). He
challenges conventional modernist narratives that posit a radical break with
medieval Christian conceptions of the body politic. Indeed, the limpieza,
according to Anidjar (2014), can only make sense within a deeper contextualization of “a theological-political history” (p. 65). The latter “produced the
necessary (if, perhaps, not sufficient) conditions of what we call nationalism
(or racism) (Anidjar, 2014).” While variations and distinctions of religion,
race, and nation exist, for Anidjar (2014), a critical analysis of Christian
Europe exposes them as “co-constitutive and contemporaneous” (p. 65).
Hence, any secularist, binary view of the political, social, cultural, and legal
organizations of western modernity, as emancipated from religion and thus
generative of an industry of commentaries on the supposed “resurgence”
of religion, whether as “culture” or as explicit “religion,” is distorted by an
illusion that needs to be demystified.
Further, the contemporary moment of right-wing, nationalist populism and
its reliance, across Euro-America, on Islamophobia, or othering of Muslims
who are viewed as “non-belonging” and as “foreign infiltrators” intent on
Islamicization, is not alien, but rather entirely consistent with the limpieza
at the heart of modern nationalist discourse. In order to obtain more robust
analytic purchase on the relation between religion and nation, therefore, a
discursive critique of the metamorphosis of Christianity in the production of
modernity becomes a generative site of scholarship. Such a discursive critique can connect fruitfully with those threads within the social scientific
(Zubrzycki, 2006) and humanistic (Hanebrink, 2008) nationalism literature
that have taken religion seriously, tracing its elastic links to imagining and
producing nation.
Zubrzycki’s works (2006; 2016) contribute significantly to the potential of
the critical turn to enrich the substantive sociological study of the religiocultural textures of nationalism (examining not only ideological claims, but also
social, symbolic, and semiotic mechanisms for imagining and reimagining
nation). The critical turn also contributes to the global critical engagement
with the enduring hold of anti-Semitism and its interplay with anti-Muslim
sentiments in multiple contexts of modern nationalisms. As noted, the latter focus on this interplay is critical for explaining religion’s relevance to
nation within a deeper engagement with the analysis of modernity as we
sought to do here. Zubrzycki’s The Crosses of Auschwitz (2006) examines the
complex ways in which the multivalent legacy of anti-Semitism and its treasury of tropes play into nation construction and reconstruction, in this case,
post-Communist Poland’s relation to Roman Catholicism.
Anti-Jewish motifs, with deep historical, theological, and popular roots,
indeed, are enduringly relevant for the construction of national thresholds

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and boundaries, which are concurrently articulated using anti-Muslim
rhetoric. This point speaks to my earlier stress upon the importance of thinking integratively about anti-Jewish and anti-Muslim legacies of European
modernity as pivotal for expanding the scope of scholarship on religion and
nation.
Anidjar’s earlier work The Jew, the Arab: A History of the Enemy (2003) provides important resources for contextualizing the discussion of religion and
nation as it plays out in terms of anti-Semitism and Islamophobia. Anidjar
traces the construction of the Jew and the Arab as enemies as having an
unsurprisingly highly modernist Christian and European genealogy. Further,
he shows how the very construction of Europe as a political, cultural, and
intellectual project involved a process of differentiating it from both Jew and
Arab. He, therefore, links innovatively, and in ways that anticipate his argument in Blood, the “Jewish problem” and the “Muslim problem,” effectively
situating them both in Europe as a set of discursive practices; philosophical reworkings of the relations between Judaism, Christianity, and Islam;
and ideological formations from the hold of which “geographies of liberation” seek to emancipate (Lubin, 2014). Sociological analyses of populist
nationalisms that are not conversant with such critiques of modernity as they
relate to the discourses of nationalism remain diminished in their interpretive
scope.
Nevertheless, Brubaker’s aforementioned analysis of the populist–nationalist currents in Europe and the United States opens up the examination to
discursive scholarly investigation and thus offers promising trajectories
for research. Brubaker traces how exclusionary nationalist claims around
supposedly threatened ways of life are articulated not in nationalist, but
rather in civilizational, terms. He calls this “civilizationalism,” the outcome
of the dominance of the “clash of civilizations” (Huntington, 1993) approach
in policy circles and public imaginations since the collapse of the Soviet
Union (for a critique, see, e.g., Said, 2001), but nonetheless—and here
there are potential cross-fertilizations with the critique of coloniality—a
discourse with roots in the history of western Christian colonialism. Civilizationalism, Brubaker (2017) continues, relies on and is co-extensive with
“identitarian ‘Christianism,’ a secularist posture, a philosemitic stance and
an ostensibly liberal defence of gender equality, gay rights, and freedom
of speech” (p. 1193). The nationalist populist moment, accordingly, is
marked by the convergence of “identitarian Christianism with secularist
and liberal rhetoric” (Brubaker, 2017, p. 1194), or what Judith Butler examines too in terms of sexual politics (Puar, 2007; Puar, 2013; Butler, 2016,
pp. 101–136).
Pim Fortuyn, in the Netherlands, was the prototype case of sexual politics
(Buruma, 2006), but other political entrepreneurs, such as the Dutch Geert

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Wilders, have likewise performed this genre successfully, especially in
west and north European countries. In addition to Roy’s focus on legal
mechanisms and human rights instruments, sexual politics constitutes
a key mechanism in the construction of Christianism as a secular and
liberal cultural civilizational identity contrasted with Islam (Brubaker, 2017,
p. 1200; Scott, 2010; Farris, 2017). Other populist manifestations in eastern
Europe (Hungry, Poland) and the United States (the Trump era) convey
different relations to gay and trans rights as well as economic and social
liberalism.
Roger Friedland is a forerunner in identifying sexual politics as a critical
site for the examination of religion and nationalism. “Religious nationalism,
unlike the capitalist market or the democratic state, has the organization
of sexuality at its center,” he wrote (Friedland, 2001, p. 134). Friedland,
therefore, analyzes religious nationalism as inhabiting a distinct ontology
of power that is seeking to challenge the logic of the capitalist market and
its reliance on an abstract conception of the individual consumer citizen
by stressing the need to recover the family as the basic unit of society.
The fact that sexual politics, control of the family, and traditional gender
norms are featured on the spectrum of populist nationalisms stresses
the need to more systematically integrate the scholarship on gender and
nationalism into the study of religion and nationalism. Indeed, white
ethnoreligious nationalism in the United States converges with capitalism
as well as social conservatism. As in the case of progressive sexual politics,
this conservative employment of the genre is Islamophobic and works
out its logic over women’s bodies (and by extension over gender fluidity
and sexual identities), whether through veiling or unveiling them. Sexual
politics, therefore, is characteristic of exclusionary nationalist populism,
which traffics in secularist allusions to tradition qua civilizational identity or
through explicit, though narrow and conservative, assertions of religiosity
as demarcating the authentic nation (in the case of the United States as
white and Christian). Race and religion operate concurrently and are
coextensive with the construction of nation (as both white and Christian
or “Judeo-Christian”). Sexual politics, with its long historical legacy within
the discourses of orientalism and colonialism, constitutes a multivalent
mechanism for populist trends. The nationalism literature needs to account
for this dual complexity and work together with decolonizing trends in
scholarship.
Certainly, sociological studies such as Brubaker’s employ the language
of paradox to account for the diminished conceptions of tradition articulated through words such as “culture” and “heritage,” and also through
explicitly religious interpretations of Euro-American nationalism. However,
approaching such analyses differently and through a broader semiotic

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outlook suggests that the manifestations of anti-Semitic and Islamophobic
practices and ideologies are highly consistent with conclusions emerging
from the critiques of Eurocentric modernity. An enhanced de-siloing of
such scholarships can fruitfully advance the conversation. Brubaker’s
account of civilizationalism and Christianism not only hints at potential
cross-fertilization with the critical study of Christian modernity, including
its relevance to the study of race and coloniality as in the subaltern critical
study of geography through the lens of critical race theory, but also illuminates the complex interlinking of Islamophobia and anti-Semitism and a
need to examine comparatively the mechanisms and hermeneutics of sexual
politics and boundary making as symbolic sites for renegotiating nation and
religion.

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religious freedom. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.
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Zubrzycki, G. (2006). The crosses of Auschwitz: Nationalism and religion in
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Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.

Atalia Omer is an associate professor of religion, conflict, and peace studies
at the Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies and the Keough School
of Global Affairs at the University of Notre Dame. Her research focuses on
religion, violence, and peacebuilding as well as theories and methods in the
study of religion. She is a 2017 Andrew Carnegie Fellow and the author of
When Peace Is Not Enough: How the Israeli Peace Camp Thinks about Religion,
Nationalism, and Justice (University of Chicago Press, 2013) and Days of Awe:
Reimagining Jewishness in Solidarity with Palestinians (University of Chicago
Press, forthcoming). She is also a coeditor of The Oxford Handbook of Religion,
Conflict, and Peacebuilding (Oxford University Press, 2015) and a coauthor
(with Jason A. Springs) of Religious Nationalism: A Reference Handbook
(ABC-CLIO, 2013). Omer has published articles in various peer-reviewed
journals including the Journal of the American Academy of Religion, The
Journal of Religious Ethics, Soundings, The Journal of Political Theology, The

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Study of Nationalism and Ethnicity, and The International Journal of Peace
Studies.
RELATED ESSAYS

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Domestic Institutions and International Conflict (Political Science), Giacomo
Chiozza
Electoral Authoritarianism (Political Science), Andreas Schedler
News Framing Effects and Emotions (Political Science), Andreas R. T. Schuck
and Alina Feinholdt
Participatory Governance (Political Science), Stephanie L. McNulty and Brian
Wampler
Political Psychology and International Conflict (Sociology), Rose McDermott
Public Opinion and International Conflict (Political Science), Adam J. Berinsky
Terror Management Theory (Psychology), Alisabeth Ayars et al.
Atheism, Agnosticism, and Irreligion (Sociology), Buster G. Smith and Joseph
O. Baker
Mysticism (Sociology), Barry Markovsky and Jake Frederick
The Sociology of Religious Experience (Sociology), Douglas Porpora
Lived Religion (Sociology), Nancy T. Ammerman
Gender, Religion, and State in the Middle East (Sociology), Mounira M. Charrad and Amina Zarrugh
Religion (Anthropology), Benjamin Grant Purzycki et al.
Institutional Change in American Religion (Sociology), Casey Clevenger and
Wendy Cadge
Niche Construction: Implications for Human Sciences (Anthropology), Kevin
N. Laland and Michael O’Brien
Complex Religion: Toward a Better Understanding of the Ways in which
Religion Intersects with Inequality (Sociology), Melissa J. Wilde and Patricia
Tevington
Introduction to the Corporate Governance of Religion (Sociology), Katja Rost
The Politics of Secularism in the United States (Political Science), David E.
Campbell and Geoffrey C. Layman

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ATALIA OMER

Abstract

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This essay examines the relations between religion and nationalism by highlighting
the existing scholarly approaches as well as the ways in which they might be further
expanded into deeper engagements with the legacies of colonialism and race. The
argument is that cross-fertilizing the religion and nationalist literature with critical
race theories and the study of coloniality will provide explanatory frames and analytic tools to interpret the waves of right-wing populist nationalisms in Euro-America
in the twenty-first century. In particular, the ways in which appeals to Christianity,
Judeo-Christianity, or “civilizational” values participate in patterns of exclusion and
inclusion through the mechanisms of sexual politics and human rights’ instruments
are studied as an opportunity to interrogate the interrelation between anti-Semitism
and anti-Muslim rhetoric to the histories of colonialism and how they have undergirded the patterns of interactions between religion and the production, reproduction, and subversion of political national identities.

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WHY RELIGION?
At the sight of electoral victories earned by explicitly xenophobic and
Islamophobic political parties in the first few decades of the twenty-first
century, even casual observes can recognize that right-wing populism is
on the rise in Europe and North America (Marzouki, McDonnell, & Roy,
2016). In this essay, I examine why this phenomenon presses upon us the
importance of investigating the relation between religion and nationalism.
I ask why anti-Semitism is still in circulation in the rhetoric of populist
nationalisms, and how and why this hatred interacts with Islamophobia, as
a different side of the same coin. Both anti-Jewish and anti-Muslim sentiments relate in complex ways to the elucidation of the self-representation of
Euro-American nationalisms as white and Christian. In some instances, this
self-representation intersects with sexual conservatism. In other instances,
it intersects with appeals to sexual liberation as a mark of a civilizational
identity, with certain targeted groups marked as prohibitive in their traditional conservatism. This reference to sexual politics conveys one entry point
Emerging Trends in the Social and Behavioral Sciences.
Robert A. Scott and Marlis Buchmann (General Editors) with Stephen Kosslyn (Consulting Editor).
© 2018 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. ISBN 978-1-118-90077-2.

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where religion’s relevance to nation and nationalism becomes evident as a
site that also demands that we will engage with the question of modernity
as a political, cultural, colonial, and intellectual project.
Contemporary nationalist populism, therefore, echoes the early modern
construction of nations as a project of cultural homogenization. Populists
claim to speak in the name of the “people” and against “elites” as well
as the supposed “others” within (Brubaker, 2017, p. 1192). This dualism
is characteristic of right-wing populisms’ (Canovan, 1981; Marzouki et al.,
2016) intent on reclaiming a perceived golden age when “the people” or the
“virtuous community” were not contaminated and corrupted by “others”
and “elites.” Euro-American populist currents exhibit such patterns, which
employ religious symbols as constitutive elements in drawing the boundaries of the threatened “virtuous community” and in defining those that
need to be excluded, expelled, disappeared, and eliminated for a redemptive
path to open up.
The exclusionary populist nationalist moment in the West exhibits a great
country-by-country variation. However, in each instance, Muslims are
constructed as the other of Europe. Roy (2016) puts it bluntly: “most of
these [populist] parties are Christian largely to the extent that they reject
Islam” (p. 186). They posit the supposed threat of Islam (the loss of “our
ways of life”) as a mobilizing card that enables curious conversions between
conservative Christian and secular (anti-religious/anticlerical) secularists
(Roy, 2016, p. 188). At the same time, Roy (2016) identifies a paradoxical
relation between the increased secularization of European contexts and
the amplification and traction of populist cries to reclaim Europe’s “Christian roots,” even if they mean little, if nothing at all, in terms of dogmas
or content beyond belonging to particular modes of imagining nation
(pp. 192–193). Roy interprets the amplified role of “religion” in nationalist
populism in terms of secularism rather than as a sign of greater religiosity
qua depth in tradition. Populist invocation of religion as belonging (nation
construction or reclaiming) conveys secularity, unfolding through the
language and mechanisms of human rights. The latter—whether through
the European Court of Human Rights’ granting permission to display
crucifixes in classrooms in Italy or through a German court upholding a
decision of a school in Baden-Württemberg to ban girls from wearing of head
scarves—are pivotal in reducing Christianity to “culture” and “heritage”
(see also Zubrzycki, 2016, Chapter 5). Accordingly, such legal discourses and
mechanisms frame Christianity as an indigenous European culture, merely
“a collective historical and cultural fact” contrasted with “alien” elements
that are interpreted not as “cultural,” but rather as religiously other (Roy,
2016, p. 193). Roy’s focus on legal technologies of exclusion resonates with a
body of work (Mahmood, 2015; Hurd 2017) that highlights the infrastructure

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of the modern secular state’s centrality in defining and redefining religion, a
process that needs to be understood in terms of power.
I likewise approach this discussion by examining the concept of coloniality.
Following Quijano (2000), “coloniality” refers to the production of “race”
as instrumental for and constitutive of the Eurocentric expansion of global
capitalism and colonialism and denotes the “historical reidentification”
of non-European geographies and populations (p. 540). The modern
nation-state, accordingly, involves a process and histories of homogenization based on racial classification, genocide, and slavery and needs to be
examined through this critical decolonizing lens, which is often not in
conversation with the nationalism literature. The latter remains embedded
within Eurocentric, capitalist, and political liberal intellectual coloniality.
But this intellectual oversight is now challenged.
Nationalist, populist, and xenophobic rhetoric in Europe (viewed broadly
as the Eurocentric colonial project) comes at a moment when the streets of its
urban centers are confronted with their colonial pasts in the form of increasingly diverse, multiracial, multicultural, multireligious, and multinational
demographics. The globality of the local landscape illuminates the relevance
of diaspora studies to the analysis of nationalism and nation as a normative,
geographic, and religioculturalist orientation (Brubaker, 2005; Tölöyan 1996),
also observing patterns of securitizing, racializing, and minoritizing nonwhite and non-Christian communities (Kurien, 2004). An emphasis on the
diasporic as the condition for transnational hybridity and fluidity, rather than
homogeneity and purity (Gilroy, 1992, 1997), is in tension with the biopolitical
drive for segregation, differentiation, and elimination pivotal for the story of
European modernity, its effects bearing striking conceptual similarities from
a global analysis of domination, oppression, displacement, and elimination
of indigenous populations and nonwhites.
Similarly, segregating religion and race as two distinct sites of analysis
in the study of nationalism is myopic and contributes to the veiling of the
need to scrutinize coloniality as integral to the analysis. David Chidester’s
Empire of Religion (2014) reveals the centrality of race to the construction of
religion in the British colonial context of the nineteenth and early twentieth
centuries, which persistently preoccupied itself with the deployment of
power/knowledge for differentiating civilized from uncivilized populations
(Chidester, 1996). Notably, Chidester’s contribution illuminates that the
manifestation of civilization discourses in contemporary Euro-America,
however, needs to be situated within a deeper colonial history that likewise
demands desegregating the conceptual boundaries between race and
religion. In addition to challenging liberal mythologies (Cavanaugh, 2009)
about the privatization and territorialization of religion as pivotal to the
emergence of modernity qua toleration encapsulated in the institution of

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the modern nation-state, critiques of modernist approaches to “religion”
need to be emboldened by the tools of critical race theory and a global
and transnational engagement with coloniality. Centering coloniality is
necessarily an intersectional undertaking, which presents religion, race, and
gender as key constitutive sites for critical analysis, and also for constructive
conflict transformation and emancipatory schemes.
Before returning to the constructive possibilities I identify in putting
the nationalism and religion literature in conversation with comparative
transnational race theory and its focus on decolonization, I briefly highlight
some key currents in the study of religion and nationalism.
RELIGION AND NATIONALISM: A SCHEMATIC REVIEW

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Some scholars have emphasized the ancient roots of contemporary religious
nationalism in biblical narratives of chosenness (Smith, 2003). Others have
critiqued such narratives as insufficiently attentive to modern processes,
institutions, and history and as overly beholden to nationalist rhetoric as
evidence for the anachronistic endurance of nations (Marx, 2003). For the
most part, however, the “nation” has been coextensive with Eurocentric
narratives of modernity, telling a story about shifting authority structures
away from religious institutions (Anderson, 1991; Little, 2015). Earlier
contributions to the study of religion and nationalism, therefore, underscored its instrumental role in constructing modernity and its political unit
of the nation-state. Others zoomed in on nationalism as amounting to a
selective retrieval and reinterpretation of cultural and religious symbols
and resources in imagining national mythologies as forms of substitute
religions. Concerns with power and colonialism were mostly articulated in
the relatively segregated sectors of feminist and postcolonial questioning
about who is doing the imagining in Anderson’s famous conception of the
nation (1991) as an imagined community (Chatterjee, 1991; Yuval Davis,
1993). Their relative segregation explains why authoritative accounts of the
literature normally exclude them.
Brubaker, for instance, concludes that scholarship on religion and nationalism effectively challenges unreconstructed approaches to the study of
secular modernity by illuminating “the religious matrix of the category of the
secular itself” (Brubaker, 2012, p. 15). This intervention’s importance aside,
Brubaker’s review reflects on a specifically Eurocentric history embedded
within particular theological and philosophical developments within European Christian history (Hurd, 2008). These developments inform universal
projection and participation in consolidating a global hegemony (Lynch,
2015), but the interweaving of nation making and coloniality is bracketed
and, with it, a consideration of the role of race both in the construction of

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“religion” as a comparative category of analysis and in the very project of
western colonialism.
But with the so-called postsecular age, which denotes a broad recognition of
the enduring public relevance (rather than ultimate irrelevance) of religion,
some of those engaged in the nationalism literature devoted a substantial
attention to the interlinking of religion, nationalism, and violence or explicit
and obvious violent interpretations of national identities. One site of research
examines the cultural, historical, symbolic, and religious building blocks of
ethnoreligious nationalism on a case-by-case basis, underscoring contextuality, institutional frameworks, and political conditions and opportunities
(Little & Swearer, 2006; Sells, 1998).
Another site began to situate the “nation” within a deeper analysis of the
colonial project and its construction of “religion” as the binary other of the
“secular” and “political” fields (Asad, 1999, 2003) and to consider the mutual
construction of religiocultural conceptions of nationalism in both the colonial
metropole and the colonies (van der Veer, 2001). The focus on the epistemological violence of liberal secularism and the political project of the modern
nation-state led to a blossoming of scholarship devoted to exposing the dominant liberal grammar that underpins the legal deployment of the language
of rights in Euro-America (Sullivan, Hurd, Mahmood, & Danchin, 2015). The
other scholarly focus on the religiocultural content of explicit ethnoreligious
manifestations of nationalism contributed to a subfield of religion and vio˘
lence (Juergensmeyer, Jerryson, & Kitts, 2013; Gorski & Türkmen-Dervi¸soglu,
2013) as well as, inversely, to scholarship and practice in religion and peacebuilding (Omer, Appleby, & Little, 2015). Other subfields, as noted, engage
the “nation” from a feminist angle (which does not always integrate “religion” because of feminist traditions’ contested approaches to religious traditions as they relate to or constrain their political emancipatory projects) and
others focus specifically on religious and nationalism in the Global South and
on postcolonial challenges to modernist theories of nationalism.
Modernist theories of nationalism are, as noted, profoundly challenged
in the Global North where religion is pivotal in constructing exclusionary boundaries. Indeed, the emergence of nationalist populisms in
Euro-America betrays a rhetorical spectrum (Brubaker, 2016; Marzouki
et al., 2016). It ranges from a Huntingtonian celebration of “Judeo-Christian”
civilizational values and/or Christianity qua cultural heritage as the ground
for conceptions of social and economic progress (including sexual and
gender fluidity) and liberalism to explicit appeals to Christianity, critiques
of social progressivism (especially along sexual and gender emancipatory
practices and policies) for enacting national boundaries. The latter explicit
invocation of (white) Christianity converges with and draws upon classical
anti-Semitic tropes and ingrained structures of racialization. The former

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appeals to “civilizational identity” and “heritage,” in distinction, employ
philosemitic (manifesting in an unqualified support of Israel) rhetoric but
are likely embedded in coloniality and racialization. Indeed, both varieties
are ultimately anti-Semitic and likewise capitalize on Islamophobia and
anti-Muslim orientalist underpinnings. The current moment of populist
nationalism, therefore, exposes the need for a transnational and global
comprehensive analysis of the interrelations between anti-Muslim and
anti-Jewish frames and how they relate to the discursive practices of nationalism globally and to deeper questions about religion, race, and modernity
qua coloniality. Those studies that move in this direction and draw upon
or interact productively with critical theoretical tools constitute intriguing
research trajectories.
AVENUES FOR FURTHER RESEARCH

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The study of religion and nationalism, as the review above illustrates, has
shifted significantly away from simplistic applications of an unreconstructed
secularism thesis and modernist paradigms of progress. Indeed, one of the
most promising aforementioned scholarly directions disengages from
the conceptual boundaries imposed by the actual geopolitical borders of
nation-states. I indicated that the first way in which these boundaries are
challenged is through the study of diasporas as sites for negotiating and
contesting the meanings of identity and nation. The study of the African
diaspora as encompassing those dislocated due to modernity’s patterns
of transatlantic slave trades and genocidal practices and as, subsequently,
engaging in a decolonizing intellectual mode of struggle remains mostly
within the purview of cultural studies (Iton, 2010).
The study of nationalism and religion is not conversant with cultural
and comparative racial studies and their turn to decolonization. Even
increasingly sophisticated schematic accounts of scholarship on religion and
nationalism, as exemplified in Brubaker’s account, bracket the analysis of
coloniality. From the perspective of the Global South, any engagement with
the modern nation-state—the political mechanism of Eurocentric modernity,
exploitative capitalism, and hegemony—is incomplete without also grappling intersectionally with the condition of coloniality. This grappling entails
decolonizing the very categories of nation, religion, and race, as Chidester
does in his study of religion, but also is prevalent in the transnational and
global study of circuits of racialization and Euro-American colonization
(Lubin, 2014).
What is at stake in the turn to the decolonial is the interrogation of
European modernity, secularity, and their embeddedness within Christian
history, philosophy, theology, and imaginations. As we will see in the

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following discussion, appeals to Christianity as a threshold for belonging
as well as a mechanism for the control of traditional gender norms and
women’s bodies are as secular and modern as the invocation of Christianity
as “heritage” and “culture” functioning subsequently, through progressive
sexual politics, as tools of exclusion. This is consistent with Roy’s interpretation (2016) of the patterns of reducing religion (read Christianity) to
(European) culture, a process reliant upon cultivating an Islamophobia that
intersects in various ways with anti-Semitism. Interrogating the nature of
these intersections tells not only specific stories about Muslims and Jews,
but also relates a broader narrative about the centrality of the “nation” to
narratives of religion and modernity.
Accordingly, a second promising scholarly avenue to which I previously alluded explores the global, transnational, and local circulations
of anti-Muslims and anti-Jewish tropes and narratives, focusing on how
they relate to the construction of exclusionary populist nationalist ideologies and practices. To deepen the analysis of the empirical reemergence
of anti-Semitism and its relation to contemporary manifestations of
anti-Muslim sentiments, the nationalism scholarship needs to be in conversation not only with critical approaches to the emergence of religion as
a comparative category whose legacy is entangled with coloniality (e.g.,
Chidester), but also with critical theory that specifically addresses the
Christian underpinnings of Eurocentric secular modernity because these
scaffolds are now exposed in populist patterns framed within the discursive
sites of nation-states.
The work of Gil Anidjar is especially relevant for this philosophical and
semiotic investigation. In his Blood: A Critique of Christianity (2014), Anidjar
shows that Christianity has persisted and metamorphosed into, rather than
been superseded by, modern conceptions of the secular. Indeed, on his
account (Anidjar, 2014, p. 257), the political organization of the modern
nation-state—as is the modern project of scientific racism—can be analyzed
using blood as a category to interpret modern nationalism, capitalism,
and law.
As a historical category of analysis, “blood” has its roots in medieval
Christianity and in a trajectory that rewrites Christianity as a biological
boundary. This rewriting especially manifested in the Iberian limpieza de
sangra (blood purity or cleanliness) as a tool employed to differentiate “real”
Christians from (Jewish and Muslim) converted Christians in the process of
the Inquisition (Anidjar, 2014, p. 65) itself interpreted as a mechanism for
constructing a prototype of the modern (Spanish) nation (Marx, 2003). Consequently, Anidjar (2014) argues that “the pervasive distinction of (modern)
nation and (medieval) religion is not only regrettable and inaccurate but also
answers to (and complies with) disciplinary and governing mechanisms

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and to long-standing biases, which continue to affect and even structure
our historical understanding, our understanding of the present” (p. 65). He
challenges conventional modernist narratives that posit a radical break with
medieval Christian conceptions of the body politic. Indeed, the limpieza,
according to Anidjar (2014), can only make sense within a deeper contextualization of “a theological-political history” (p. 65). The latter “produced the
necessary (if, perhaps, not sufficient) conditions of what we call nationalism
(or racism) (Anidjar, 2014).” While variations and distinctions of religion,
race, and nation exist, for Anidjar (2014), a critical analysis of Christian
Europe exposes them as “co-constitutive and contemporaneous” (p. 65).
Hence, any secularist, binary view of the political, social, cultural, and legal
organizations of western modernity, as emancipated from religion and thus
generative of an industry of commentaries on the supposed “resurgence”
of religion, whether as “culture” or as explicit “religion,” is distorted by an
illusion that needs to be demystified.
Further, the contemporary moment of right-wing, nationalist populism and
its reliance, across Euro-America, on Islamophobia, or othering of Muslims
who are viewed as “non-belonging” and as “foreign infiltrators” intent on
Islamicization, is not alien, but rather entirely consistent with the limpieza
at the heart of modern nationalist discourse. In order to obtain more robust
analytic purchase on the relation between religion and nation, therefore, a
discursive critique of the metamorphosis of Christianity in the production of
modernity becomes a generative site of scholarship. Such a discursive critique can connect fruitfully with those threads within the social scientific
(Zubrzycki, 2006) and humanistic (Hanebrink, 2008) nationalism literature
that have taken religion seriously, tracing its elastic links to imagining and
producing nation.
Zubrzycki’s works (2006; 2016) contribute significantly to the potential of
the critical turn to enrich the substantive sociological study of the religiocultural textures of nationalism (examining not only ideological claims, but also
social, symbolic, and semiotic mechanisms for imagining and reimagining
nation). The critical turn also contributes to the global critical engagement
with the enduring hold of anti-Semitism and its interplay with anti-Muslim
sentiments in multiple contexts of modern nationalisms. As noted, the latter focus on this interplay is critical for explaining religion’s relevance to
nation within a deeper engagement with the analysis of modernity as we
sought to do here. Zubrzycki’s The Crosses of Auschwitz (2006) examines the
complex ways in which the multivalent legacy of anti-Semitism and its treasury of tropes play into nation construction and reconstruction, in this case,
post-Communist Poland’s relation to Roman Catholicism.
Anti-Jewish motifs, with deep historical, theological, and popular roots,
indeed, are enduringly relevant for the construction of national thresholds

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and boundaries, which are concurrently articulated using anti-Muslim
rhetoric. This point speaks to my earlier stress upon the importance of thinking integratively about anti-Jewish and anti-Muslim legacies of European
modernity as pivotal for expanding the scope of scholarship on religion and
nation.
Anidjar’s earlier work The Jew, the Arab: A History of the Enemy (2003) provides important resources for contextualizing the discussion of religion and
nation as it plays out in terms of anti-Semitism and Islamophobia. Anidjar
traces the construction of the Jew and the Arab as enemies as having an
unsurprisingly highly modernist Christian and European genealogy. Further,
he shows how the very construction of Europe as a political, cultural, and
intellectual project involved a process of differentiating it from both Jew and
Arab. He, therefore, links innovatively, and in ways that anticipate his argument in Blood, the “Jewish problem” and the “Muslim problem,” effectively
situating them both in Europe as a set of discursive practices; philosophical reworkings of the relations between Judaism, Christianity, and Islam;
and ideological formations from the hold of which “geographies of liberation” seek to emancipate (Lubin, 2014). Sociological analyses of populist
nationalisms that are not conversant with such critiques of modernity as they
relate to the discourses of nationalism remain diminished in their interpretive
scope.
Nevertheless, Brubaker’s aforementioned analysis of the populist–nationalist currents in Europe and the United States opens up the examination to
discursive scholarly investigation and thus offers promising trajectories
for research. Brubaker traces how exclusionary nationalist claims around
supposedly threatened ways of life are articulated not in nationalist, but
rather in civilizational, terms. He calls this “civilizationalism,” the outcome
of the dominance of the “clash of civilizations” (Huntington, 1993) approach
in policy circles and public imaginations since the collapse of the Soviet
Union (for a critique, see, e.g., Said, 2001), but nonetheless—and here
there are potential cross-fertilizations with the critique of coloniality—a
discourse with roots in the history of western Christian colonialism. Civilizationalism, Brubaker (2017) continues, relies on and is co-extensive with
“identitarian ‘Christianism,’ a secularist posture, a philosemitic stance and
an ostensibly liberal defence of gender equality, gay rights, and freedom
of speech” (p. 1193). The nationalist populist moment, accordingly, is
marked by the convergence of “identitarian Christianism with secularist
and liberal rhetoric” (Brubaker, 2017, p. 1194), or what Judith Butler examines too in terms of sexual politics (Puar, 2007; Puar, 2013; Butler, 2016,
pp. 101–136).
Pim Fortuyn, in the Netherlands, was the prototype case of sexual politics
(Buruma, 2006), but other political entrepreneurs, such as the Dutch Geert

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Wilders, have likewise performed this genre successfully, especially in
west and north European countries. In addition to Roy’s focus on legal
mechanisms and human rights instruments, sexual politics constitutes
a key mechanism in the construction of Christianism as a secular and
liberal cultural civilizational identity contrasted with Islam (Brubaker, 2017,
p. 1200; Scott, 2010; Farris, 2017). Other populist manifestations in eastern
Europe (Hungry, Poland) and the United States (the Trump era) convey
different relations to gay and trans rights as well as economic and social
liberalism.
Roger Friedland is a forerunner in identifying sexual politics as a critical
site for the examination of religion and nationalism. “Religious nationalism,
unlike the capitalist market or the democratic state, has the organization
of sexuality at its center,” he wrote (Friedland, 2001, p. 134). Friedland,
therefore, analyzes religious nationalism as inhabiting a distinct ontology
of power that is seeking to challenge the logic of the capitalist market and
its reliance on an abstract conception of the individual consumer citizen
by stressing the need to recover the family as the basic unit of society.
The fact that sexual politics, control of the family, and traditional gender
norms are featured on the spectrum of populist nationalisms stresses
the need to more systematically integrate the scholarship on gender and
nationalism into the study of religion and nationalism. Indeed, white
ethnoreligious nationalism in the United States converges with capitalism
as well as social conservatism. As in the case of progressive sexual politics,
this conservative employment of the genre is Islamophobic and works
out its logic over women’s bodies (and by extension over gender fluidity
and sexual identities), whether through veiling or unveiling them. Sexual
politics, therefore, is characteristic of exclusionary nationalist populism,
which traffics in secularist allusions to tradition qua civilizational identity or
through explicit, though narrow and conservative, assertions of religiosity
as demarcating the authentic nation (in the case of the United States as
white and Christian). Race and religion operate concurrently and are
coextensive with the construction of nation (as both white and Christian
or “Judeo-Christian”). Sexual politics, with its long historical legacy within
the discourses of orientalism and colonialism, constitutes a multivalent
mechanism for populist trends. The nationalism literature needs to account
for this dual complexity and work together with decolonizing trends in
scholarship.
Certainly, sociological studies such as Brubaker’s employ the language
of paradox to account for the diminished conceptions of tradition articulated through words such as “culture” and “heritage,” and also through
explicitly religious interpretations of Euro-American nationalism. However,
approaching such analyses differently and through a broader semiotic

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outlook suggests that the manifestations of anti-Semitic and Islamophobic
practices and ideologies are highly consistent with conclusions emerging
from the critiques of Eurocentric modernity. An enhanced de-siloing of
such scholarships can fruitfully advance the conversation. Brubaker’s
account of civilizationalism and Christianism not only hints at potential
cross-fertilization with the critical study of Christian modernity, including
its relevance to the study of race and coloniality as in the subaltern critical
study of geography through the lens of critical race theory, but also illuminates the complex interlinking of Islamophobia and anti-Semitism and a
need to examine comparatively the mechanisms and hermeneutics of sexual
politics and boundary making as symbolic sites for renegotiating nation and
religion.

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Atalia Omer is an associate professor of religion, conflict, and peace studies
at the Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies and the Keough School
of Global Affairs at the University of Notre Dame. Her research focuses on
religion, violence, and peacebuilding as well as theories and methods in the
study of religion. She is a 2017 Andrew Carnegie Fellow and the author of
When Peace Is Not Enough: How the Israeli Peace Camp Thinks about Religion,
Nationalism, and Justice (University of Chicago Press, 2013) and Days of Awe:
Reimagining Jewishness in Solidarity with Palestinians (University of Chicago
Press, forthcoming). She is also a coeditor of The Oxford Handbook of Religion,
Conflict, and Peacebuilding (Oxford University Press, 2015) and a coauthor
(with Jason A. Springs) of Religious Nationalism: A Reference Handbook
(ABC-CLIO, 2013). Omer has published articles in various peer-reviewed
journals including the Journal of the American Academy of Religion, The
Journal of Religious Ethics, Soundings, The Journal of Political Theology, The

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Study of Nationalism and Ethnicity, and The International Journal of Peace
Studies.
RELATED ESSAYS

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Domestic Institutions and International Conflict (Political Science), Giacomo
Chiozza
Electoral Authoritarianism (Political Science), Andreas Schedler
News Framing Effects and Emotions (Political Science), Andreas R. T. Schuck
and Alina Feinholdt
Participatory Governance (Political Science), Stephanie L. McNulty and Brian
Wampler
Political Psychology and International Conflict (Sociology), Rose McDermott
Public Opinion and International Conflict (Political Science), Adam J. Berinsky
Terror Management Theory (Psychology), Alisabeth Ayars et al.
Atheism, Agnosticism, and Irreligion (Sociology), Buster G. Smith and Joseph
O. Baker
Mysticism (Sociology), Barry Markovsky and Jake Frederick
The Sociology of Religious Experience (Sociology), Douglas Porpora
Lived Religion (Sociology), Nancy T. Ammerman
Gender, Religion, and State in the Middle East (Sociology), Mounira M. Charrad and Amina Zarrugh
Religion (Anthropology), Benjamin Grant Purzycki et al.
Institutional Change in American Religion (Sociology), Casey Clevenger and
Wendy Cadge
Niche Construction: Implications for Human Sciences (Anthropology), Kevin
N. Laland and Michael O’Brien
Complex Religion: Toward a Better Understanding of the Ways in which
Religion Intersects with Inequality (Sociology), Melissa J. Wilde and Patricia
Tevington
Introduction to the Corporate Governance of Religion (Sociology), Katja Rost
The Politics of Secularism in the United States (Political Science), David E.
Campbell and Geoffrey C. Layman

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ATALIA OMER

Abstract

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This essay examines the relations between religion and nationalism by highlighting
the existing scholarly approaches as well as the ways in which they might be further
expanded into deeper engagements with the legacies of colonialism and race. The
argument is that cross-fertilizing the religion and nationalist literature with critical
race theories and the study of coloniality will provide explanatory frames and analytic tools to interpret the waves of right-wing populist nationalisms in Euro-America
in the twenty-first century. In particular, the ways in which appeals to Christianity,
Judeo-Christianity, or “civilizational” values participate in patterns of exclusion and
inclusion through the mechanisms of sexual politics and human rights’ instruments
are studied as an opportunity to interrogate the interrelation between anti-Semitism
and anti-Muslim rhetoric to the histories of colonialism and how they have undergirded the patterns of interactions between religion and the production, reproduction, and subversion of political national identities.

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WHY RELIGION?
At the sight of electoral victories earned by explicitly xenophobic and
Islamophobic political parties in the first few decades of the twenty-first
century, even casual observes can recognize that right-wing populism is
on the rise in Europe and North America (Marzouki, McDonnell, & Roy,
2016). In this essay, I examine why this phenomenon presses upon us the
importance of investigating the relation between religion and nationalism.
I ask why anti-Semitism is still in circulation in the rhetoric of populist
nationalisms, and how and why this hatred interacts with Islamophobia, as
a different side of the same coin. Both anti-Jewish and anti-Muslim sentiments relate in complex ways to the elucidation of the self-representation of
Euro-American nationalisms as white and Christian. In some instances, this
self-representation intersects with sexual conservatism. In other instances,
it intersects with appeals to sexual liberation as a mark of a civilizational
identity, with certain targeted groups marked as prohibitive in their traditional conservatism. This reference to sexual politics conveys one entry point
Emerging Trends in the Social and Behavioral Sciences.
Robert A. Scott and Marlis Buchmann (General Editors) with Stephen Kosslyn (Consulting Editor).
© 2018 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. ISBN 978-1-118-90077-2.

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where religion’s relevance to nation and nationalism becomes evident as a
site that also demands that we will engage with the question of modernity
as a political, cultural, colonial, and intellectual project.
Contemporary nationalist populism, therefore, echoes the early modern
construction of nations as a project of cultural homogenization. Populists
claim to speak in the name of the “people” and against “elites” as well
as the supposed “others” within (Brubaker, 2017, p. 1192). This dualism
is characteristic of right-wing populisms’ (Canovan, 1981; Marzouki et al.,
2016) intent on reclaiming a perceived golden age when “the people” or the
“virtuous community” were not contaminated and corrupted by “others”
and “elites.” Euro-American populist currents exhibit such patterns, which
employ religious symbols as constitutive elements in drawing the boundaries of the threatened “virtuous community” and in defining those that
need to be excluded, expelled, disappeared, and eliminated for a redemptive
path to open up.
The exclusionary populist nationalist moment in the West exhibits a great
country-by-country variation. However, in each instance, Muslims are
constructed as the other of Europe. Roy (2016) puts it bluntly: “most of
these [populist] parties are Christian largely to the extent that they reject
Islam” (p. 186). They posit the supposed threat of Islam (the loss of “our
ways of life”) as a mobilizing card that enables curious conversions between
conservative Christian and secular (anti-religious/anticlerical) secularists
(Roy, 2016, p. 188). At the same time, Roy (2016) identifies a paradoxical
relation between the increased secularization of European contexts and
the amplification and traction of populist cries to reclaim Europe’s “Christian roots,” even if they mean little, if nothing at all, in terms of dogmas
or content beyond belonging to particular modes of imagining nation
(pp. 192–193). Roy interprets the amplified role of “religion” in nationalist
populism in terms of secularism rather than as a sign of greater religiosity
qua depth in tradition. Populist invocation of religion as belonging (nation
construction or reclaiming) conveys secularity, unfolding through the
language and mechanisms of human rights. The latter—whether through
the European Court of Human Rights’ granting permission to display
crucifixes in classrooms in Italy or through a German court upholding a
decision of a school in Baden-Württemberg to ban girls from wearing of head
scarves—are pivotal in reducing Christianity to “culture” and “heritage”
(see also Zubrzycki, 2016, Chapter 5). Accordingly, such legal discourses and
mechanisms frame Christianity as an indigenous European culture, merely
“a collective historical and cultural fact” contrasted with “alien” elements
that are interpreted not as “cultural,” but rather as religiously other (Roy,
2016, p. 193). Roy’s focus on legal technologies of exclusion resonates with a
body of work (Mahmood, 2015; Hurd 2017) that highlights the infrastructure

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of the modern secular state’s centrality in defining and redefining religion, a
process that needs to be understood in terms of power.
I likewise approach this discussion by examining the concept of coloniality.
Following Quijano (2000), “coloniality” refers to the production of “race”
as instrumental for and constitutive of the Eurocentric expansion of global
capitalism and colonialism and denotes the “historical reidentification”
of non-European geographies and populations (p. 540). The modern
nation-state, accordingly, involves a process and histories of homogenization based on racial classification, genocide, and slavery and needs to be
examined through this critical decolonizing lens, which is often not in
conversation with the nationalism literature. The latter remains embedded
within Eurocentric, capitalist, and political liberal intellectual coloniality.
But this intellectual oversight is now challenged.
Nationalist, populist, and xenophobic rhetoric in Europe (viewed broadly
as the Eurocentric colonial project) comes at a moment when the streets of its
urban centers are confronted with their colonial pasts in the form of increasingly diverse, multiracial, multicultural, multireligious, and multinational
demographics. The globality of the local landscape illuminates the relevance
of diaspora studies to the analysis of nationalism and nation as a normative,
geographic, and religioculturalist orientation (Brubaker, 2005; Tölöyan 1996),
also observing patterns of securitizing, racializing, and minoritizing nonwhite and non-Christian communities (Kurien, 2004). An emphasis on the
diasporic as the condition for transnational hybridity and fluidity, rather than
homogeneity and purity (Gilroy, 1992, 1997), is in tension with the biopolitical
drive for segregation, differentiation, and elimination pivotal for the story of
European modernity, its effects bearing striking conceptual similarities from
a global analysis of domination, oppression, displacement, and elimination
of indigenous populations and nonwhites.
Similarly, segregating religion and race as two distinct sites of analysis
in the study of nationalism is myopic and contributes to the veiling of the
need to scrutinize coloniality as integral to the analysis. David Chidester’s
Empire of Religion (2014) reveals the centrality of race to the construction of
religion in the British colonial context of the nineteenth and early twentieth
centuries, which persistently preoccupied itself with the deployment of
power/knowledge for differentiating civilized from uncivilized populations
(Chidester, 1996). Notably, Chidester’s contribution illuminates that the
manifestation of civilization discourses in contemporary Euro-America,
however, needs to be situated within a deeper colonial history that likewise
demands desegregating the conceptual boundaries between race and
religion. In addition to challenging liberal mythologies (Cavanaugh, 2009)
about the privatization and territorialization of religion as pivotal to the
emergence of modernity qua toleration encapsulated in the institution of

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the modern nation-state, critiques of modernist approaches to “religion”
need to be emboldened by the tools of critical race theory and a global
and transnational engagement with coloniality. Centering coloniality is
necessarily an intersectional undertaking, which presents religion, race, and
gender as key constitutive sites for critical analysis, and also for constructive
conflict transformation and emancipatory schemes.
Before returning to the constructive possibilities I identify in putting
the nationalism and religion literature in conversation with comparative
transnational race theory and its focus on decolonization, I briefly highlight
some key currents in the study of religion and nationalism.
RELIGION AND NATIONALISM: A SCHEMATIC REVIEW

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Some scholars have emphasized the ancient roots of contemporary religious
nationalism in biblical narratives of chosenness (Smith, 2003). Others have
critiqued such narratives as insufficiently attentive to modern processes,
institutions, and history and as overly beholden to nationalist rhetoric as
evidence for the anachronistic endurance of nations (Marx, 2003). For the
most part, however, the “nation” has been coextensive with Eurocentric
narratives of modernity, telling a story about shifting authority structures
away from religious institutions (Anderson, 1991; Little, 2015). Earlier
contributions to the study of religion and nationalism, therefore, underscored its instrumental role in constructing modernity and its political unit
of the nation-state. Others zoomed in on nationalism as amounting to a
selective retrieval and reinterpretation of cultural and religious symbols
and resources in imagining national mythologies as forms of substitute
religions. Concerns with power and colonialism were mostly articulated in
the relatively segregated sectors of feminist and postcolonial questioning
about who is doing the imagining in Anderson’s famous conception of the
nation (1991) as an imagined community (Chatterjee, 1991; Yuval Davis,
1993). Their relative segregation explains why authoritative accounts of the
literature normally exclude them.
Brubaker, for instance, concludes that scholarship on religion and nationalism effectively challenges unreconstructed approaches to the study of
secular modernity by illuminating “the religious matrix of the category of the
secular itself” (Brubaker, 2012, p. 15). This intervention’s importance aside,
Brubaker’s review reflects on a specifically Eurocentric history embedded
within particular theological and philosophical developments within European Christian history (Hurd, 2008). These developments inform universal
projection and participation in consolidating a global hegemony (Lynch,
2015), but the interweaving of nation making and coloniality is bracketed
and, with it, a consideration of the role of race both in the construction of

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“religion” as a comparative category of analysis and in the very project of
western colonialism.
But with the so-called postsecular age, which denotes a broad recognition of
the enduring public relevance (rather than ultimate irrelevance) of religion,
some of those engaged in the nationalism literature devoted a substantial
attention to the interlinking of religion, nationalism, and violence or explicit
and obvious violent interpretations of national identities. One site of research
examines the cultural, historical, symbolic, and religious building blocks of
ethnoreligious nationalism on a case-by-case basis, underscoring contextuality, institutional frameworks, and political conditions and opportunities
(Little & Swearer, 2006; Sells, 1998).
Another site began to situate the “nation” within a deeper analysis of the
colonial project and its construction of “religion” as the binary other of the
“secular” and “political” fields (Asad, 1999, 2003) and to consider the mutual
construction of religiocultural conceptions of nationalism in both the colonial
metropole and the colonies (van der Veer, 2001). The focus on the epistemological violence of liberal secularism and the political project of the modern
nation-state led to a blossoming of scholarship devoted to exposing the dominant liberal grammar that underpins the legal deployment of the language
of rights in Euro-America (Sullivan, Hurd, Mahmood, & Danchin, 2015). The
other scholarly focus on the religiocultural content of explicit ethnoreligious
manifestations of nationalism contributed to a subfield of religion and violence (Juergensmeyer, Jerryson, & Kitts, 2013; Gorski & Türkmen-Dervişoğlu,
2013) as well as, inversely, to scholarship and practice in religion and peacebuilding (Omer, Appleby, & Little, 2015). Other subfields, as noted, engage
the “nation” from a feminist angle (which does not always integrate “religion” because of feminist traditions’ contested approaches to religious traditions as they relate to or constrain their political emancipatory projects) and
others focus specifically on religious and nationalism in the Global South and
on postcolonial challenges to modernist theories of nationalism.
Modernist theories of nationalism are, as noted, profoundly challenged
in the Global North where religion is pivotal in constructing exclusionary boundaries. Indeed, the emergence of nationalist populisms in
Euro-America betrays a rhetorical spectrum (Brubaker, 2016; Marzouki
et al., 2016). It ranges from a Huntingtonian celebration of “Judeo-Christian”
civilizational values and/or Christianity qua cultural heritage as the ground
for conceptions of social and economic progress (including sexual and
gender fluidity) and liberalism to explicit appeals to Christianity, critiques
of social progressivism (especially along sexual and gender emancipatory
practices and policies) for enacting national boundaries. The latter explicit
invocation of (white) Christianity converges with and draws upon classical
anti-Semitic tropes and ingrained structures of racialization. The former

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appeals to “civilizational identity” and “heritage,” in distinction, employ
philosemitic (manifesting in an unqualified support of Israel) rhetoric but
are likely embedded in coloniality and racialization. Indeed, both varieties
are ultimately anti-Semitic and likewise capitalize on Islamophobia and
anti-Muslim orientalist underpinnings. The current moment of populist
nationalism, therefore, exposes the need for a transnational and global
comprehensive analysis of the interrelations between anti-Muslim and
anti-Jewish frames and how they relate to the discursive practices of nationalism globally and to deeper questions about religion, race, and modernity
qua coloniality. Those studies that move in this direction and draw upon
or interact productively with critical theoretical tools constitute intriguing
research trajectories.
AVENUES FOR FURTHER RESEARCH

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The study of religion and nationalism, as the review above illustrates, has
shifted significantly away from simplistic applications of an unreconstructed
secularism thesis and modernist paradigms of progress. Indeed, one of the
most promising aforementioned scholarly directions disengages from
the conceptual boundaries imposed by the actual geopolitical borders of
nation-states. I indicated that the first way in which these boundaries are
challenged is through the study of diasporas as sites for negotiating and
contesting the meanings of identity and nation. The study of the African
diaspora as encompassing those dislocated due to modernity’s patterns
of transatlantic slave trades and genocidal practices and as, subsequently,
engaging in a decolonizing intellectual mode of struggle remains mostly
within the purview of cultural studies (Iton, 2010).
The study of nationalism and religion is not conversant with cultural
and comparative racial studies and their turn to decolonization. Even
increasingly sophisticated schematic accounts of scholarship on religion and
nationalism, as exemplified in Brubaker’s account, bracket the analysis of
coloniality. From the perspective of the Global South, any engagement with
the modern nation-state—the political mechanism of Eurocentric modernity,
exploitative capitalism, and hegemony—is incomplete without also grappling intersectionally with the condition of coloniality. This grappling entails
decolonizing the very categories of nation, religion, and race, as Chidester
does in his study of religion, but also is prevalent in the transnational and
global study of circuits of racialization and Euro-American colonization
(Lubin, 2014).
What is at stake in the turn to the decolonial is the interrogation of
European modernity, secularity, and their embeddedness within Christian
history, philosophy, theology, and imaginations. As we will see in the

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following discussion, appeals to Christianity as a threshold for belonging
as well as a mechanism for the control of traditional gender norms and
women’s bodies are as secular and modern as the invocation of Christianity
as “heritage” and “culture” functioning subsequently, through progressive
sexual politics, as tools of exclusion. This is consistent with Roy’s interpretation (2016) of the patterns of reducing religion (read Christianity) to
(European) culture, a process reliant upon cultivating an Islamophobia that
intersects in various ways with anti-Semitism. Interrogating the nature of
these intersections tells not only specific stories about Muslims and Jews,
but also relates a broader narrative about the centrality of the “nation” to
narratives of religion and modernity.
Accordingly, a second promising scholarly avenue to which I previously alluded explores the global, transnational, and local circulations
of anti-Muslims and anti-Jewish tropes and narratives, focusing on how
they relate to the construction of exclusionary populist nationalist ideologies and practices. To deepen the analysis of the empirical reemergence
of anti-Semitism and its relation to contemporary manifestations of
anti-Muslim sentiments, the nationalism scholarship needs to be in conversation not only with critical approaches to the emergence of religion as
a comparative category whose legacy is entangled with coloniality (e.g.,
Chidester), but also with critical theory that specifically addresses the
Christian underpinnings of Eurocentric secular modernity because these
scaffolds are now exposed in populist patterns framed within the discursive
sites of nation-states.
The work of Gil Anidjar is especially relevant for this philosophical and
semiotic investigation. In his Blood: A Critique of Christianity (2014), Anidjar
shows that Christianity has persisted and metamorphosed into, rather than
been superseded by, modern conceptions of the secular. Indeed, on his
account (Anidjar, 2014, p. 257), the political organization of the modern
nation-state—as is the modern project of scientific racism—can be analyzed
using blood as a category to interpret modern nationalism, capitalism,
and law.
As a historical category of analysis, “blood” has its roots in medieval
Christianity and in a trajectory that rewrites Christianity as a biological
boundary. This rewriting especially manifested in the Iberian limpieza de
sangra (blood purity or cleanliness) as a tool employed to differentiate “real”
Christians from (Jewish and Muslim) converted Christians in the process of
the Inquisition (Anidjar, 2014, p. 65) itself interpreted as a mechanism for
constructing a prototype of the modern (Spanish) nation (Marx, 2003). Consequently, Anidjar (2014) argues that “the pervasive distinction of (modern)
nation and (medieval) religion is not only regrettable and inaccurate but also
answers to (and complies with) disciplinary and governing mechanisms

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and to long-standing biases, which continue to affect and even structure
our historical understanding, our understanding of the present” (p. 65). He
challenges conventional modernist narratives that posit a radical break with
medieval Christian conceptions of the body politic. Indeed, the limpieza,
according to Anidjar (2014), can only make sense within a deeper contextualization of “a theological-political history” (p. 65). The latter “produced the
necessary (if, perhaps, not sufficient) conditions of what we call nationalism
(or racism) (Anidjar, 2014).” While variations and distinctions of religion,
race, and nation exist, for Anidjar (2014), a critical analysis of Christian
Europe exposes them as “co-constitutive and contemporaneous” (p. 65).
Hence, any secularist, binary view of the political, social, cultural, and legal
organizations of western modernity, as emancipated from religion and thus
generative of an industry of commentaries on the supposed “resurgence”
of religion, whether as “culture” or as explicit “religion,” is distorted by an
illusion that needs to be demystified.
Further, the contemporary moment of right-wing, nationalist populism and
its reliance, across Euro-America, on Islamophobia, or othering of Muslims
who are viewed as “non-belonging” and as “foreign infiltrators” intent on
Islamicization, is not alien, but rather entirely consistent with the limpieza
at the heart of modern nationalist discourse. In order to obtain more robust
analytic purchase on the relation between religion and nation, therefore, a
discursive critique of the metamorphosis of Christianity in the production of
modernity becomes a generative site of scholarship. Such a discursive critique can connect fruitfully with those threads within the social scientific
(Zubrzycki, 2006) and humanistic (Hanebrink, 2008) nationalism literature
that have taken religion seriously, tracing its elastic links to imagining and
producing nation.
Zubrzycki’s works (2006; 2016) contribute significantly to the potential of
the critical turn to enrich the substantive sociological study of the religiocultural textures of nationalism (examining not only ideological claims, but also
social, symbolic, and semiotic mechanisms for imagining and reimagining
nation). The critical turn also contributes to the global critical engagement
with the enduring hold of anti-Semitism and its interplay with anti-Muslim
sentiments in multiple contexts of modern nationalisms. As noted, the latter focus on this interplay is critical for explaining religion’s relevance to
nation within a deeper engagement with the analysis of modernity as we
sought to do here. Zubrzycki’s The Crosses of Auschwitz (2006) examines the
complex ways in which the multivalent legacy of anti-Semitism and its treasury of tropes play into nation construction and reconstruction, in this case,
post-Communist Poland’s relation to Roman Catholicism.
Anti-Jewish motifs, with deep historical, theological, and popular roots,
indeed, are enduringly relevant for the construction of national thresholds

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and boundaries, which are concurrently articulated using anti-Muslim
rhetoric. This point speaks to my earlier stress upon the importance of thinking integratively about anti-Jewish and anti-Muslim legacies of European
modernity as pivotal for expanding the scope of scholarship on religion and
nation.
Anidjar’s earlier work The Jew, the Arab: A History of the Enemy (2003) provides important resources for contextualizing the discussion of religion and
nation as it plays out in terms of anti-Semitism and Islamophobia. Anidjar
traces the construction of the Jew and the Arab as enemies as having an
unsurprisingly highly modernist Christian and European genealogy. Further,
he shows how the very construction of Europe as a political, cultural, and
intellectual project involved a process of differentiating it from both Jew and
Arab. He, therefore, links innovatively, and in ways that anticipate his argument in Blood, the “Jewish problem” and the “Muslim problem,” effectively
situating them both in Europe as a set of discursive practices; philosophical reworkings of the relations between Judaism, Christianity, and Islam;
and ideological formations from the hold of which “geographies of liberation” seek to emancipate (Lubin, 2014). Sociological analyses of populist
nationalisms that are not conversant with such critiques of modernity as they
relate to the discourses of nationalism remain diminished in their interpretive
scope.
Nevertheless, Brubaker’s aforementioned analysis of the populist–nationalist currents in Europe and the United States opens up the examination to
discursive scholarly investigation and thus offers promising trajectories
for research. Brubaker traces how exclusionary nationalist claims around
supposedly threatened ways of life are articulated not in nationalist, but
rather in civilizational, terms. He calls this “civilizationalism,” the outcome
of the dominance of the “clash of civilizations” (Huntington, 1993) approach
in policy circles and public imaginations since the collapse of the Soviet
Union (for a critique, see, e.g., Said, 2001), but nonetheless—and here
there are potential cross-fertilizations with the critique of coloniality—a
discourse with roots in the history of western Christian colonialism. Civilizationalism, Brubaker (2017) continues, relies on and is co-extensive with
“identitarian ‘Christianism,’ a secularist posture, a philosemitic stance and
an ostensibly liberal defence of gender equality, gay rights, and freedom
of speech” (p. 1193). The nationalist populist moment, accordingly, is
marked by the convergence of “identitarian Christianism with secularist
and liberal rhetoric” (Brubaker, 2017, p. 1194), or what Judith Butler examines too in terms of sexual politics (Puar, 2007; Puar, 2013; Butler, 2016,
pp. 101–136).
Pim Fortuyn, in the Netherlands, was the prototype case of sexual politics
(Buruma, 2006), but other political entrepreneurs, such as the Dutch Geert

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Wilders, have likewise performed this genre successfully, especially in
west and north European countries. In addition to Roy’s focus on legal
mechanisms and human rights instruments, sexual politics constitutes
a key mechanism in the construction of Christianism as a secular and
liberal cultural civilizational identity contrasted with Islam (Brubaker, 2017,
p. 1200; Scott, 2010; Farris, 2017). Other populist manifestations in eastern
Europe (Hungry, Poland) and the United States (the Trump era) convey
different relations to gay and trans rights as well as economic and social
liberalism.
Roger Friedland is a forerunner in identifying sexual politics as a critical
site for the examination of religion and nationalism. “Religious nationalism,
unlike the capitalist market or the democratic state, has the organization
of sexuality at its center,” he wrote (Friedland, 2001, p. 134). Friedland,
therefore, analyzes religious nationalism as inhabiting a distinct ontology
of power that is seeking to challenge the logic of the capitalist market and
its reliance on an abstract conception of the individual consumer citizen
by stressing the need to recover the family as the basic unit of society.
The fact that sexual politics, control of the family, and traditional gender
norms are featured on the spectrum of populist nationalisms stresses
the need to more systematically integrate the scholarship on gender and
nationalism into the study of religion and nationalism. Indeed, white
ethnoreligious nationalism in the United States converges with capitalism
as well as social conservatism. As in the case of progressive sexual politics,
this conservative employment of the genre is Islamophobic and works
out its logic over women’s bodies (and by extension over gender fluidity
and sexual identities), whether through veiling or unveiling them. Sexual
politics, therefore, is characteristic of exclusionary nationalist populism,
which traffics in secularist allusions to tradition qua civilizational identity or
through explicit, though narrow and conservative, assertions of religiosity
as demarcating the authentic nation (in the case of the United States as
white and Christian). Race and religion operate concurrently and are
coextensive with the construction of nation (as both white and Christian
or “Judeo-Christian”). Sexual politics, with its long historical legacy within
the discourses of orientalism and colonialism, constitutes a multivalent
mechanism for populist trends. The nationalism literature needs to account
for this dual complexity and work together with decolonizing trends in
scholarship.
Certainly, sociological studies such as Brubaker’s employ the language
of paradox to account for the diminished conceptions of tradition articulated through words such as “culture” and “heritage,” and also through
explicitly religious interpretations of Euro-American nationalism. However,
approaching such analyses differently and through a broader semiotic

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outlook suggests that the manifestations of anti-Semitic and Islamophobic
practices and ideologies are highly consistent with conclusions emerging
from the critiques of Eurocentric modernity. An enhanced de-siloing of
such scholarships can fruitfully advance the conversation. Brubaker’s
account of civilizationalism and Christianism not only hints at potential
cross-fertilization with the critical study of Christian modernity, including
its relevance to the study of race and coloniality as in the subaltern critical
study of geography through the lens of critical race theory, but also illuminates the complex interlinking of Islamophobia and anti-Semitism and a
need to examine comparatively the mechanisms and hermeneutics of sexual
politics and boundary making as symbolic sites for renegotiating nation and
religion.

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Atalia Omer is an associate professor of religion, conflict, and peace studies
at the Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies and the Keough School
of Global Affairs at the University of Notre Dame. Her research focuses on
religion, violence, and peacebuilding as well as theories and methods in the
study of religion. She is a 2017 Andrew Carnegie Fellow and the author of
When Peace Is Not Enough: How the Israeli Peace Camp Thinks about Religion,
Nationalism, and Justice (University of Chicago Press, 2013) and Days of Awe:
Reimagining Jewishness in Solidarity with Palestinians (University of Chicago
Press, forthcoming). She is also a coeditor of The Oxford Handbook of Religion,
Conflict, and Peacebuilding (Oxford University Press, 2015) and a coauthor
(with Jason A. Springs) of Religious Nationalism: A Reference Handbook
(ABC-CLIO, 2013). Omer has published articles in various peer-reviewed
journals including the Journal of the American Academy of Religion, The
Journal of Religious Ethics, Soundings, The Journal of Political Theology, The

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Study of Nationalism and Ethnicity, and The International Journal of Peace
Studies.
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