A-Infos (en) Italy, FAI, Umanita Nova #11-25: The throne and the altar. Role and function of religious nationalism (ca, de, it, pt, tr)[machine translation]

The perception of national identity has changed in recent decades. The 
phenomenon is quite evident for many of those who have been involved in 
migratory flows, both on a continental scale and on a regional 
dimension: the concept of nationality is not identified in the territory 
of origin, but coincides with that of a community of cultural sharing. 
In this context, aggregations are born and develop that refer to culture 
and often, indeed preferably, to religion. Religion offers individuals 
the advantage of becoming part of an organized group that carries shared 
values. This explains, at least in part, the great fascination that 
fundamentalism, of any tendency, exerts on an ever-growing mass of 
people. A nation or, better yet, its ruling classes, are not always 
politically recognized as representative, indeed they are often 
perceived as enemies, while religion often appears as the most 
legitimate institution, the only one capable of offering valid and 
alternative and above all egalitarian, community-based models of 
behavior. The message that we are all children of the same god is a 
powerful egalitarian appeal, capable of realizing the myth of the 
"community nation", a nation without territory but with a single faith.

Religion with its organizational form offers a social cosmos, a network 
of sacred places and ritual spaces, but also of community centers, 
associations, schools, hospitals and charitable institutions. And this 
is a very concrete aspect.

Religious nationalism goes beyond the borders of a territory, it takes 
the form of a clash of civilizations, with the formation of large 
aggregations that refer, in the construction of their own identity, not 
to the national state, but to culture and religion.

Religion has in fact offered a strong glue to collective identity, 
especially in the South of the world, especially since it has allowed 
communities to reconsolidate against the cultural offensive of Western 
capitalism, identified with atheism. For example, Hasan al-Banna, 
founder of the Muslim Brotherhood, identified in capitalism imported by 
Westerners the "destruction of Islam" thanks to the imposition of a 
"materialistic life, with its corrupting traits and its deadly germs". 
Religious nationalism extends the institutional logic of religion and 
can appear to be the unifying element in the face of the fragmentation 
of traditional national affiliations, recomposing and redrawing borders 
and territories that correspond to the geography of the spread of 
communities of believers. Bell towers, minarets or synagogues mark the 
"limes" of new nationalities in which religion offers a strong glue to 
collective identity. All this helps to explain the importance that 
sacred places have assumed in the collective imagination, from the point 
of view of religious nationalism. It is no coincidence that the 
Israeli-Palestinian conflict has its traditional focus in the Esplanade 
of the Mosques in Jerusalem, and in fact the city is also a Gordian knot 
of religious nationalism. If we must indicate the true border between 
the Zionist state and the Palestinian community, rather than the Gaza 
Strip, we must indicate it in the few hundred meters of the esplanade of 
the mosques of East Jerusalem, and the Wailing Wall, where a conflict is 
being played out that wants to be defined as political, but which has 
its roots in something that for centuries has marked a deep furrow 
between civilizations.

The role of sacred places as an element of nationalism is evident. Let 
us think, for example, of the Golden Temple of Amritsar, where the Sikh 
nationalists, wanting to re-establish their kingdom in Punjab, installed 
a provisional government, which was then stormed by Indian troops in 
1984 with more than 2,000 deaths. In India, Hindu nationalists won the 
elections in 1992 with the promise of destroying the Babri mosque in 
Ayodhya, which according to them was built on the sacred site of Ram 
Janmabhoomi, the birthplace of King Rama, the first mythical sovereign 
who unified India.

It should also not be overlooked that religion often takes a specific 
form of ethno-cultural nationalism, which also involves the killing or 
expulsion of different communities, the creation of masses that respond 
to unique and charismatic leaders, the illusion of creating a single 
community in which there are no differences, all standardized in the 
same religion. A clear example of this is the massacres and violence 
carried out by ISIS against the Shiite, Yazidi, Christian communities or 
the ethnic cleansing of the Syrian Alawite minorities: these are 
operations that respond to the same reasons that led to the massacre of 
Muslims in Bosnia, that is, to eliminate from the territories of the 
nation all those who do not share the same religious ethno-cultural 
identity.

Religious nationalism as a unifying element is also capable of producing 
transformations that can lead to the creation of a confessional state. 
An example of this is the myth of the great Israel, born as a secular 
nation, which has transformed into a confessional state; the same is 
true for the Palestinians who have moved to positions of religious 
fundamentalism. But this is also happening in India, where the 
nationalism of Gandhi and Nehru and their secular conception of the 
state has been replaced, at least in part, by a religious vision 
sanctioned by the rise to power of Hindu parties. A precursor of this 
trend was Iran, where Khomeinism meant the return to a theocratic 
conception of the state, in which there is no talk of citizenship, but 
of religious belonging, in which the application of Koranic laws 
dictates norms of coexistence and replaces civil law.

Religious nationalisms developed when economies became less and less 
national, conditioned by global financial and business networks, 
incapable of implementing economic and social policies in full 
independence, and when even currencies escaped state control. The 
widespread feeling of anti-politics that our societies experience is 
also strongly linked to the belief that national politics is helpless in 
the face of major global interests.

Religious nationalism was the "solution", in particular, for those 
countries that came from the dissolution of imperial units or colonial 
dominions and that found themselves with a national model that had 
little to do with their tribal or community-based societies, in which 
different ethnic groups, religions and cultures coexisted. Religion then 
offered a strong glue to collective identity and thus cemented the 
nation, making the territorial border coincide no longer with 
citizenship or ethnicity, but with the common religious faith. In this 
way, the characteristics of nationalism are re-proposed, through the 
work of defining the us in opposition to the other. If Pan-Germanism and 
Pan-Slavism defined belonging in terms of blood and ethnicity, religious 
nationalisms do so through the division between the sacred and the 
profane, between good and evil. In this way they define the borders that 
separate one from the other, the faithful from the unbelievers, Muslims 
from Christians and so on. It does not matter that we all live together 
on the same territory and that we can commonly work for the good of our 
community. And so ISIS, while aiming to create a state with its own 
borders, institutions and symbols of recognition, tried to absorb people 
and citizens of other countries into a common political plan and a 
common belonging that went beyond borders and was global, since from 
America to Africa, from Europe to Asia, wherever there were Sunnis, 
there was the call of the prophet and the invitation to action for the 
common homeland. Likewise, Osama Bin Laden operated in "global" terms, 
he imagined a global Jihad directed against every type of infidel.

In short, religion creates transversal links, contributing to the 
affirmation of national identity as religious identity.

On the other hand, throughout history there has always been a profound 
exchange between nation and religion: Spanish National Catholicism is 
the most striking example and the Francoist counter-revolution makes a 
paradigm of the politicization of the sacred and at the same time of the 
sacralization of politics. The indiscriminate and ambivalent use, by 
Franco and the Church, of sacred places and liturgies to "sanctify" the 
Falangist hierarchs and, vice versa, the elevation to "martyrs" of the 
religious executed by the militiamen, are not only the epilogue of a 
three-year revolutionary period and a counter-revolution, but the end of 
a long historical journey that had begun at the time of the first 
Crusade, or the unification of Spain with the expulsion of the Moors 
from the Iberian peninsula, and the political unity obtained under the 
sign of the cross, as well as the conquest of the empire of the "new 
Indies". Then the altar was forever welded to the throne, making the 
Spanish empire the champion of national Catholicism which, with the 
intertwining of dynasties and the presence of the Catholic Church, 
governed a good part of Europe for about three centuries.

Daniele Ratti

https://umanitanova.org/il-trono-e-laltare-ruolo-e-funzione-del-nazionalismo-religioso/
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