Should nationalism be understood as secularized religion?

Is nationalism, with its affirmation of collective solidarity, already a religion of the nation-state? Is that how religious spokespersons can derive their authority in the public sphere, by invoking the national community as though it were also a religious one? There is certainly a long and inter­esting tradition that suggests nationalism is a religion.

Julian Huxley, writing in 1940, maintained that “humanist religion”

5. C. J. H. Hayes, Essays on Nationalism, New York, 1926, cited in John Wolffe, God and Greater Britain: Religion and National Lift in Britain and Ireland, 1843—1945, London and New York: Routledge, 1994, p. 16. was destined to replace traditional theological religion, and that social movements of a religious nature like Nazism and Communism were evi­dence of this supersession. Their cruel and repulsive character, he went on to suggest;* merely reflected their youthfulness in relation to evolutionary development: “Just as many of these early manifestations of theistic reli­gion were crude and horrible... so these early humanist and social reli­gions are crude and horrible.”⁶ Although Huxley doesn’t address the ques­tion of nationalism directly, the idea of nationalism as the highest stage of religion conceived within an evolutionary framework is not hard to discern in his text.

More recently, Margaret Jacob has made an argument about the his­torical connection between secular rituals and the formation of modern po­litical values. She describes how a new pattern of sentiments, beliefs, and ceremonial activities—a “new religiosity”—came to be associated with eighteenth-century Freemasonry, and how it contributed to the emergence of liberal society.⁷ “Reason” and “civil society,” she proposes, were thus sacralized in the life of early West European nations—and (in her view) a good thing too.

Among anthropologists, Clifford Geertz is famous for having iden­tified the centrality of sacred symbols springing from religious impulses to all forms of political life, nationalist as well as prenationalist, in societies both modern and premodern. The symbolic activities that take place in the center, Geertz suggests, give it “its aura of being not merely important but in some odd fashion connected with the way the world is built.” This is why “The gravity of high politics and the solemnity of high worship” are akin.⁸ Since Geertz there has been a spate of writing by anthropolo­gists that describe “the deification” of the supreme leader, the promotion of national “icons” and “pilgrimage sites,” the solemnity of state “ritual,” and so on.

6. Julian Huxley, Religion without Revelation, abridged edition, London: Watts and Co., 1941, p. viii.

7. See Margaret C. Jacob, Living the Enlightenment: Freemasonry and Politics in Eighteenth-Century Europe, New York: Oxford University Press, 1992, and espe­cially her “Private Beliefs in Public Temples: The New Religiosity of the Eigh­teenth Century,” Social Research, vol. 59, no. 1,1992.

8. Clifford Geertz, Local Knowledge: Further Essays in Interpretive Anthropol­ogy, New York: Basic Books, 1983, p. 124. See also Robert Bellah, “Civil Religion in America,” in Beyond Belief. Essays on Religion in a Post-Traditional World, New York: Harper and Row, 1970.

However, I am not persuaded that because national political life de­pends on ceremonial and on symbols of the sacred, it should be repre­sented as a kind of religion—that it is enough to point to certain parallels with what we intuitively recognize as religion. One problem with this po­sition is that it takes as unproblematic the entire business of defining reli­gion. It does not ask why particular elements of “religion” as a concept should be picked out as definitive, and therefore fails to consider the dis­cursive roles they play in different situations.

Of course notions of sacredness, spirituality, and communal solidar­ity are invoked in a variety of ways to claim authority in national politics (sovereignty, the law, national glories and sufferings, the rights of the citi­zen, and so forth). Critics often point to the words in which these notions are conveyed as signs of “religion.” But this evidence is not decisive. I sug­gest that we need to attend more closely to the historical grammar of con­cepts and not to what we take as signs of an essential phenomenon. In the first chapter I tried to do this—albeit far too briefly—by looking at “the sacred,” “myth,” and “the supernatural.”

A writer who appears to do the same is Carl Schmitt. Schmitt argues that many theological and political concepts share a common structure. “All significant concepts of the modern theory of the state are secularized theological concepts,” he writes, “not only because of their historical de­velopment—in which they were transferred from theology to the theory of the state, whereby, for example, the omnipotent God became the omnipo­tent lawgiver—but also because of their systematic structure, the recogni­tion of which is necessary for a sociological consideration of these concepts. The exception in jurisprudence is analogous to the miracle in theology. Only by being aware of this analogy can we appreciate the manner in which the philosophical ideas of the state developed in the last centuries.”⁹ Although Schmitt s thesis about the secularization of religious concepts is not about nationalism as such, it does have implications for the way we see it. For if we accept that religious ideas can be "secularized,” that secularized concepts retain a religious essence, we might be induced to accept that na­tionalism has a religious origin.

However, my view is that we should focus on the differential results rather than on the corresponding forms in the process referred to as "secu-

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larization.” For example, when it is pointed out that in the latter part of the nineteenth century Tractarianism in England and Ultramontanism in France (and in Europe generally) helped to break the post-Reformation alliance between church and state,¹⁰ and that this was done by deploying religious arguments aimed at securing the freedom of Christ’s church from the constraints, of an earthly power, we should regard this develop­ment as significant not because of the essentialized (“religious”) agency by which it was initiated, but because of the difference the outcome yielded. That outcome not only included the development of different moral and political disciplines, such as those that Foucault identified as governmen- tality.¹¹ It involved a redefinition of the essence of “religion” as well as of “national politics.”

By way of contrast: in later eighteenth-century England, supporters of the established church regarded it as a representative institution reflect­ing popular sentiment and public opinion. It would not be right to say that religion was then being used for political purposes or influencing state pol­icy. The established church, which was an integral part of the state, made the coherence and continuity of the English national community possible. We should not say that the English nation was shaped or influenced by reli­gion: we should see the established church (called “Anglican” only in the nineteenth century) as its necessary condition. Nor, given that it was a nec­essary condition of the nation-state, should we speak of the social location of religion in the eighteenth century being different from the one it came to occupy in the late nineteenth and beyond. Rather, the very essence of religion was differently defined, that’s to say, in each of the two historical moments different conditions of “religion’s” existence were in play. What

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n. Stricdy speaking, Foucault doesn’t think of discipline as being intrinsic to govemmentality but only as something “in tension with it.” That’s why he speaks of “a triangle, sovereignty-discipline-government, which has as its primary target the population and as its essential mechanism the apparatus of security” (see ‘‘Govemmentality,” in The Foucault Effect, ed. G. Burchell, C. Gordon, and P. Miller, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991). I’m not persuaded, however, that discipline can be conceptually separated from govemmentality, whose raison- d’Stre is the management of target populations within nation societies.

Secularism, Nation-State, Religion 191 we now retrospectively call the social, that all-inclusive secular space that we distinguish conceptually from variables like “religion,” “state,” “national economy,” and so forth, and on which the latter can be constructed, re­formed, andplotted, didn’t exist prior to the nineteenth century.¹² Yet it was precisely the emergence of society is an organizable secular space that made it possible for the state to oversee and facilitate an original task by redefin­ing religions competence: the unceasing material and moral transforma­tion of its entire national population regardless of their diverse “religious” allegiances. In short, it is not enough to point to the structural analogies between premodern theological concepts and those deployed in secular constitutional discourse, as Schmitt does, because the practices these con­cepts facilitate and organize differ according to the historical formations in which they occur.¹³

I am arguing that “the secular” should not be thought of as the space in which real human life gradually emancipates itself from the controlling power of “religion” and thus achieves the latter’s relocation.¹⁴ It is this as­sumption that allows us to chink of religion as “infecting” the secular do­main or as replicating within it the structure of theological concepts. The concept of “the secular” today is part of a doctrine called secularism.

12. Mary Poovey notes that “By 1776, the phrase body politic had begun to compete with another metaphor, the great body ofthe people..,. By the early nine­teenth century, both of these phrases were joined by the image of the social body” (Making A Social Body: British Cultural Formation, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995, p. 7). See also the second chapter, “The Production of Abstract Space.”

13. Hans Blumenberg criticizes Schmitt for not taking into account the

way theological metaphors are selected and used within particular historical con­texts, and therefore for mistaking analogies far transformations. See The Legitimacy of the Modern Age, Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1983 (original, 1973-1976), part I, chapter 8. This point—as also his more extensive critique of Karl Lowith’s the­sis about the essentially Christian character of the secular idea of progress—is well taken. But I find Blumenberg’s delineation and defense of “secularism” rooted firmly as it is in a conventional history-of-ideas approach unconvincing. His relative neglect of practice is also remarkable given the nature of Iriis criticism of Schmitt. ^J

14. For an illuminating discussion of this point, see John Milbank’s Theol­ogy and Social Theory, Oxford: Blackwell, 1990.

world. In the context of early modern Europe these problems were per­ceived as the need to control the increasingly mobile poor in city and countryside, to govern mutually hostile Christian sects within a sovereign territory, and to regulate the commercial, military, and colonizing expan­sion of Europe overseas.¹⁵

The genealogy of secularism has to be traced through the concept of the secular—in part to the Renaissance doctrine of humanism, in part to the Enlightenment concept of nature, and in part to Hegel’s philosophy of history. It will be recalled that Hegel—an early secularization theorist— saw the movement of world history culminating in the Truth and Freedom of what he called “the modern period.” Like later secularists, he held that from the Reformation to Enlightenment and Revolution, there emerged at last a harmony between die objective and subjective conditions of human life resulting from “the painful struggles of History,” a harmony based on “the recognition of the Secular as capable of being an embodiment of Truth; whereas it had been formerly regarded as evil only, as incapable of Good—the latter being essentially ultramundane.”¹⁶ '

In fact the historical process of secularization effects a remarkable ideological inversion, though not quite in the way that Hegel claimed in the sentence just cited. For at one time “the secular” was part of a theolog­ical discourse (saeculum). “Secularization” (saecularisatio) at first denoted a legal transition from monastic life (regularis) to the life of canons (saecu- laris)—:md then, after the Reformation, it signified the transfer of ecclesi­astical real property to laypersons, that is, to the “freeing” of property from church hands into the hands of private owners, and thence into market cir­culation.¹⁷ In the discourse of modernity “the secular” presents itself as the ground from which theological discourse was generated (as a form of false consciousness) and from which it gradually emancipated itself in its march to freedom. On that ground humans appear as the self-conscious makers of History (in which calendrical time provides a measure and direction for

15. Cf. James Tully, “Governing Conduct,” in E. Leites, ed., Conscience and Casuistry in Early Modern Europe, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, r988. This work is an attempt to apply a Foucauldian perspective to the intellectual his­tory of early modern Europe.

16. G. W F. Hegel, The Philosophy of History, trans. J. Sibree, Buffalo, NY: Prometheus Books, 1991, p. 422.

17. See “Säkularisation, Säkularisierung,” in Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe, ed. O. Brunner, W. Conze, and R. Koselleck, Stuttgart: E. Klett, 1972-1997, vol. V, pp. 789-830.

Secularism, Nation-State, Religion 193 human events), and as the unshakable foundation of universally valid knowledge about nature and society. The human as agent is now responsi­ble—answerable—not only for acts he or she has performed (or refrained from performing). Responsibility is now held for events he or she was un­aware of—or falsely conscious of. The domain in which acts of God (acci­dents) occur without human responsibility is increasingly restricted. Chance is now considered to be tamable. The world is disenchanted.

The interesting thing about this view is that although religion is re­garded as alien to the secular, the latter is also seen to have generated reli­gion. Historians of progress relate that in the premodern past secular life created superstitious and oppressive religion, and in the modern present secularism has produced enlightened and tolerant religion. Thus the insis­tence on a sharp separation between the religious and the secular goes with the paradoxical claim that the latter continually produces the former.

Nationalism, with its vision of a universe of national societies (the state being thought of as necessary to their foil articulation) in which indi­vidual humans live their worldly existence requires the concept of the sec­ular to make sense. The loyalty that the individual nationalist owes is di­rectly and exclusively to the nation. Even when the nation is said to be. “under God,” it has its being only in “this world”—a special kind of world. The men and women of each national society make and own their history. “Nature” and “culture” (that famous duality accompanying the rise of na­tionalism) together form the conditions in which the nation uses and en­joys the world. Mankind dominates nature and each person fashions his or her individuality in the freedom regulated by the nation-state.

One should not take this to mean that the worldliness of the secular members of modern nations is an expression of the truth revealed through the human senses, since senses themselves have a history. However un­worldly medieval Christian monks and nuns may have been, they too lived in the world (where else?), but they lived differently in it from laypersons. Allegiance demanded of them was solely to Christ and through him to other Christians. Benedict Anderson quite righdy represents the worldli­ness of secular nationalism as a specific ideological construct (no less ideo­logical than the one it replaces) that includes in the present an imagined realm of the nation as a community with a “worldly past.” And he makes an important point when he draws our attention to the fact that national­ism employs highly abstract concepts of time and space to tell a particular story—even though that story is presented as conunbnsensical, that is, as

accessible to all in the nation—a story about the nation as a natural and self-evident unity whose members share a common experience. This con­struct is no less real for being ideological; it articulates a world of actual ob­jects and subjects within which the secular nationalist lives. "What needs to be emphasized beyond Andersons famous thesis is that the complex me­dieval Christian universe, with its interlinked times (eternity and its mov­ing image, and the irruptions of the former into the latter: Creation, Fall, Christ s life and death, Judgment Day) and hierarchy of spaces (the heav­ens, the earth, purgatory, hell), is broken down by the modern doctrine of secularism into a duality: a world of self-authenticating things in which we really live as social beings and a religious world that exists only in our imagination.

To insist that nationalism should be seen as religion, or even as hav­ing been “shaped” by religion is, in my view, to miss the nature and conse­quence of the revolution brought about by modern doctrines and practices of the secular in the structure of collective representations. Of course mod­ern nationalism draws on preexisting languages and practices—including those that we call, anachronistically, “religious.” How could it be other­wise? Yet it doesn’t follow from this that religion forms nationalism.

We should not accept the mechanical idea of causality always and without question. Thus if we take cause to be about the way an event is “felt” in subsequent events, we will tend to look for the continuity of reli­gious causes in nonreligious effects. But searching in this way for the ori­gin of elements or for the “influence” of events on one another is, I would submit, of limited value here: what requires explaining (how nationalism contains a religious influence) is being used innocently as the means of ex­planation (religion as at once both cause and effect). If instead we were to attend to an older sense of cause (cause is diat which answers to the ques­tion “Why?”) we would ask about the reformation of historical elements in order to understand why their meaning is no longer what it was. After all, religion consists not only of particular ideas, attitudes, and practices, but of followers. To discover how these followers instantiate, repeat, alter, adapt, argue over, and diversify them (to trace their tradition) must surely be a major task. And so too with secularism. We have to discover what people do with and to ideas and practices before we can understand what is involved in the secularization of theological concepts in different times and places.