Sacred Communities: Religion and Nationalism as Competing Global Cosmologies

Nationalism is conventionally understood to be a modern political ideology. It is seen as a secular phenomenon associated with the replacement of theocratic rule with the sovereign state. For many social theorists, nationalism replaced religion; it became the "civil religion" of the nation (Bellah 1980). However, in recent years, the rise of religious nationalism, not only in the Global South and Middle East and North Africa (MENA) but also in the West itself, has questioned the secular narrative of the nation. Nations are increasingly "imagined" (Anderson 1991) not only as political but as "sacred" communities making the distinction between "religion" and "nationalism" problematic (Smith 1999). However, the transnational appeal of global religions challenges the limited territorial basis of the nation. Given the importance of the "sacred" to both religion and nationalism, this panel will pose the question of whether both may be seen as competing, and/or complementary, political cosmologies rather than ideologies? A cosmology here refers to a set of normative statements about the origins of the cosmos and our place in it (Blaney and Tickner 2017, Kurki 2020, Behr and Shani 2022, Shani and Behera 2022). It differs from ideology in that it encompasses the "sacred" as well as the "profane" (Eliade 1959). Papers examining the relationship between religion and nationalism from a cosmological perspective using empirical case studies are welcome and may form the basis of an edited volume for a potential IPSA Book Series on Religion and Politics.