Religion and Nationalism
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.