The Easter church bombings in Sri Lanka, which themselves followed the mosque shootings in New Zealand, are tragic reminders of how raw and active religion is in national politics around the world today. These acts were not terrorism against a ruling elite or ethos, but were targeted at a small religious minority in the country. Given that the focus of scholarly attention has been trained on how states treat religious minorities through their regulation, it is important to consider both how these regimes are established in the first place and the degree of entanglement religion has with nations in the form of nationalism. From my own point of view, I took on this review in the hopes of understanding how the US case compares to other countries. Given the strident rise of Christian nationalism in the United States, abetted by Trump, I hoped to gain perspective on this process growing from what I thought was a relatively stable and pluralistic civil religion.
Christopher Soper and Joel Fetzer have been doing high-level comparative religion and politics work for many years now (this is their second book in the Cambridge Religion and Social Theory series), so it is not surprising that the ambition of this project is significant. They aimed to write the first comparative study of the origins and development of three models of religion and nationalism: religious nationalism, civil-religious nationalism, and secular nationalism. They have done that.
A focus on origins signals that this is a work of historical institutionalism, where they trace the forces at play at the time of the nation’s founding and follow them to the present. Their central argument is that “patterns established at the time of state formation continue to be of crucial importance to contemporary understandings of religion and nationalism, and that those divisions are reflected in popular attitudes toward the state” (p. 74). As such, they pick cases that cover a 3 x 2 matrix: (origin) each of the three models on one axis, and (duration) stability versus instability on the other axis. That careful case selection helps them gain leverage on the forces that emerge in society to challenge nationalist ideas and arrangements.
This is a deeply researched volume, with an amount of country-level detail that belies the book’s length. I learned a tremendous amount from each chapter (and not just because I am not a comparativist). Each chapter follows a similar scheme that first details the history of the founding and then the subsequent development. This often takes the path of following party debates and regime changes, as well as cataloging societal shifts and group relations. But the cases also take up modern data from multiple levels, such as the elite level in religious magazines and public opinion data that are widely available. This results in considerable evidence on which to back their claims and also a serious amount of nuance to process. These country cases invite prolonged consideration. Soper and Fetzer are to be commended for sinking so much effort into diverse cases from across the world.
It was, however, a bit frustrating that different aspects of the argument are all labeled “nationalism”: for example, institutional arrangements are referred to as creating nationalism (“variant ideas among the delegates about the kind of nationalism they were creating,” p. 194), but so is the ideology of groups about who belongs in the nation. In their argument, institutional arrangements are effectively in lockstep with the ideologies that govern society, so this labeling is consistent with that approach. However, it may invite a stronger association than if they had labeled the variables separately and let their data work to establish that connection.
The country cases engage Israel (unstable civil religion), Uruguay (stable secular), India (unstable secular), Greece (stable religious), and Malaysia (unstable religious), while the United States occupies their stable civil-religious nationalism cell. This line follows a long tradition of argument in the United States that its twin pillars of church–state separation have been able to incorporate all believers. Therefore, while embracing none in particular and extending rights gradually to all, the nation can gain widespread loyalty. That is not wrong, and loyalty to the United States is widespread among minorities, but the United States did not start out this way. Differing factions (think Madison compared to Washington) understood the link of religion to the state quite differently. Some states still had established churches for several decades. By the time the federal government had the capacity to enforce the First Amendment, the politics of backlash against an inclusive civil religious model had begun to grow. Soper and Fetzer admit to some of this as they introduce the cases (p. 26), but the US chapter goes to pains to reinforce its “stable” label, mostly by claiming that religious nationalist sentiments have not yet prevailed.
The more important problem with the argument is that assessing religious connections to nationalism does not stress-test the categorical claim. They summarize the US case by arguing that “it is hard to make a religious nationalist claim in the United States because the First Amendment guarantees religious free exercise rights for all” (p. 226). But Christian nationalist claims have been made for decades by elites and have gained traction in recent years, especially in the current administration. We know this because of a number of articles (not cited) that have documented the extent of Christian nationalist sentiment, its connection to the limits of citizenship, and even its deep roots in the party system, policy issue stances, and vote selections. Simply put, large portions of the electorate believe that America is a Christian nation and adopt political positions and back politicians to enact it (or prevent its further erosion).
That pattern is not only very difficult to square with a “stable civil religion” tag but it also raises the question about what “stability” and the models of religious nationalism actually mean. Does it mean the ideology does not change or that the institutions do not change? In the United States, Soper and Fetzer appear to hang their hat on the First Amendment (that institutions did not change means stability), whereas in the case of Israel they highlight the factions challenging their civil-religious model. The robustness of the categorization is arguably in doubt given how easy it is to substitute the United States for Israel in this statement: “instability in Israel’s model arises from political pressures from different quarters toward either religious nationalism or secular nationalism” (p. 74).
That key measurement issue is not the only concern. There is very little discussion of how nationalism should be measured in opinion data, nor is there any discussion about how models of religious nationalism should be measured. Put another way, whether measures of religion correlate with support of the state or dislike of nearby rival states does not necessarily illuminate which model of religious nationalism they support. I saw no measures of ascriptive nationalism, which would seem necessary to complete the argument. These data are available in the United States, though I am not sure where else.
In the end, Soper and Fetzer are right that there is no one model of religion and nationalism: how religion orients itself toward the state depends on a variety of considerations that together look like pluralism. None of the models is inherently stable; all of these more or less open democratic states face the prospect of changing electorates and new popular models of nationalism that do not mesh with their institutional arrangements. One productive way forward is to engage with religious regulation measures systematically gathered from the world’s countries to see how states cope with changing constituencies and how that, in turn, affects commitment to models of nationalism in the country. Though this thoughtful book stands on its own, of course, it will also fuel any effort to expand inquiry to other cases.
