Smart Grrl Summer: What is religious nationalism? Why should we care?

Transcript for the second Smart Grrl Summer episode:

PDF transcript & digital transcript!

Shownotes:

Smart Grrl Summer is the project of killjoys. So, of course we’re covering religious nationalism. OF COURSE WE ARE.

Some new keywords this time! Find them in our glossary. They were:

• nationalism, religious nationalism

The 101:

Ilyse & Megan start out by defining nationalism. Keeping in mind that people have written many, many books on just this one idea, we offered just two simplified, teachable ways to think about nationalism.

Ilyse’s go:

• nationalism is an ideology—a system of ideas, especially that shapes worldviews. Specifically, nationalism is a kind of ideology that suggests people are a nation, and that nation ought to be sovereign (that is, this group of people are one thing and in charge of their own, one thing—able to rule themselves for themselves).

Megan’s:

• nationalism conflates national belonging, or the right to be seen and protected as a “real” member of a nation, with race/ethnicity and/or religion. So anyone outside that “real” (again: note the scare quotes) race/ethnicity/religion can’t be a “real” member of that nation—and should be seen as a threat to the nation if they argue for inclusion.

They build on this, though, and suggest that nation in nationalism complicates things: nationalism = group belonging, which is not necessarily tied to nation-states or countries. So nationalism can exist without a state but nationalism can exist within established states! We talked about Kurds (no state, but could be described as a nation) and the U.S. here.

Then Ilyse & Megan discuss religious nationalism, which, again, has had conservatively eleven billion books written about it and yet our hosts think to define it in one episode.

Basically, KI101 says that religious nationalism is nationalism wherein religion and religious identity are primary factors in the idea of the nation. Seems simple. It is not, dear nerds.

Here’s the working cluster of ideas:

• religious nationalism can look like a litmus test for who gets to be a citizen (as in, barring particular religious groups or ethnic groups affiliated with one religion); on the flip, it could be an issue of the “default” religion of a nation or the legal religion of a nation (as in, one particular religious group is solely granted primacy within a nation-state). 

• religious nationalism can look like prioritizing religion in such a way that excludes particular religions (or only includes particular religion/s). This is true even in nation-states that purport multi-religious identities or values.

  • Ilyse, of course, brought it right back to calendars. That woman and her calendars.  

• religious nationalism can also look like the ways that non-religious folks are barred from particular practices in public; the ways that racialization happens around inherent identities being assumed to be religious; and the ways that oaths, songs, and patriotic behaviors map onto and into religious spaces.

  • Examples include: swearing on Bibles, saying “In God We Trust,” National Prayer Breakfast, country flags in places of worship. 

• religious nationalism CAN ALSO look like the ways that a state defends its sovereignty against supposed religious, extra-state threats—even if those threats are not real.

  • Example: the so-called anti-Shariah laws that have swept the US: these are laws folks are trying to pass barring Muslims from establishing their religious laws as “US laws” with the idea that the very presence of Islamic religious laws = a threat to the US (for the record, there is no evidence that Muslims in the US are trying to pass any interpretation of Shariah into local, state, federal US law).

There’s more of course! Nationalism & religious nationalism are whole sets of fields within of religious studies, political science, philosophy, anthropology, ethnic studies, etc., research! But the take home message is:

• religious nationalism always casts some people as “good” citizens, and some people as literally so antithetical to the state as to be cast from it.

This can and has been the language of genocide, persecution, discrimination, bigotry. Religious nationalism has high stakes.

Primary Sources:

Ilyse talked about heckling the fellow college student trying to get her to go on Birthright (the “free” trip to Israel for Jewish American young adults) by rapid fire spitting questions about her adoption at her. Ilyse was and remains that girl.

Megan talked about her class, “Election!” and how religious nationalism in the US positions Muslims as not American, but this characterization isn’t limited to Republicans or conservatives, as is the issue with nationalisms: they are ubiquitous. She urged us to vote, protest, riot, and read.

Your homework:

It’s summertime! We’re keeping the actual assignments light—but we’re also putting all the sources Megan listed here, too.

Things Ilyse Talked About in this Episode:

We offered a lot of examples for religious nationalism (and, we assure you, barely scratched the surface):

1. India’s vehement anti-Muslim government which itself includes anti-Muslim pogroms and bone-chilling lockdown of Kashmir;

2. China’s ethnic cleansing and concentration camps for Uyghurs;

3. the forced statelessness of the Rohingya, a religio-ethnic group located in Myanmar/Burma;

4. France’s ongoing restrictions of Muslims, including how face coverings are mandatory for COVID19 reasons but also illegal for Islam/racism reasons;

5. U.S. white Christian nationalism (there’s almost too much to pull here; our favorite scholar on this particular set of issues & friend of the pod is Kelly J. Baker—more below for homework).

Additionally, Ilyse spent time on both Zionism and South Asia’s Partition/Independence—in part, because these movements that became states happened within a year of each other (1947 and 1948) and in part because these are really clear examples of the roles of race, religion, imperialism & their anticolonial movements, and nation.

Zionism is, as Megan said, the “third rail” in religious studies. However, there’s no denying that it is a particularly illustrative example of religious nationalism because it begins as an idea for a nation before there was a nation-state or land; and then becomes grounded within a nation-state.

Here are a few resources Ilyse recommends about Zionism as it functions within frameworks of religious nationalism:

• Joseph Massad’s book, The Persistence of the Palestinian Question: Essays on Zionism & the Palestinian Question (2006)

• Ilan Pappe’s A History of Modern Palestine: One Land, Two Peoples (2003)

• Judith Butler’s Parting Ways: Jewishness and the Critique of Zionism (2013)

• Martin Land and Jonathan Boyarin, “"The State Between Race and Religion: A Conversation," in Vincent Lloyd, ed., Race and Political Theology. Stanford University Press, 2011, 213–233

• Daniel Boyarin, Border Lines: The Partition of Judaeo-Christianity (2006)

Megan also has two video sources that work well in (college) classrooms to introduce Zionism, Palestine/Israel, and religious nationalism:

• “Israeli Palestinian Conflict 101,” via Jewish Voices for Peace

• “The Israel-Palestine Conflict: A brief, simply history,” via Vox

Ilyse also talked, really briefly, about South Asia’s partition and independence as a place we can see religious nationalism, with the emphasis here on how India came to be understood as Hindu and Pakistan as Muslim. This is, of course, the subject of so much work.

Here are a few explainers Ilyse recommends about South Asia and religious nationalism (see Ilyse’s homework for more in-depth, scholarly sources!):

• Milan Vaishnav, “Religious Nationalism and India’s Future” (2019)

• Ketan Alder, “Explainer: What are the Origins of Today’s Hindu Nationalism?” (2016)

• Kapil Komireddi, “The Kashmir Crisis Isn’t About Territory: It’s About a Hindu Victory over Islam,” (2019)

• Sohaib I. Khan, “Imaginging Pakistan: Religion at the Origins of Nationalism” (2017)

Some other pieces that we referenced in passing but didn’t actually assign:

• Megan’s new article on masking, race, and Islam in the Journal of the American Academy of Religion.

• Megan’s and Ilyse’s books, which both talk about (albeit in different ways and locations) why definitions of belonging matter when we talk about religion.

Actual Homework We Assigned (Some For Funsies):

Megan:

• Mentioned how Ugandan Jews were barred citizenship in Israel.

• Hasan Minhaj’s Patriot Act gives us both life. Watch all of it? The episode on the Indian elections, the BJP, and US complicity in stoking anti-Muslim attitudes is biting and great.

• Megan’s religion and politics class is called “Election!” (Because we think about elections and because America thinks it’s specially chosen by God to lead the world, that is, it is an “elect” nation, get it?) Here’s that whole syllabus!

• Kelly J. Baker’s Gospel According to the Klan, for helping me understand how freaking mainstream white supremacist Christian nationalism is. She’s got some great op-eds on this, too:

  • “White Collar Supremacy” (2016)

  • “The Artifacts of White Supremacy” (2017)

  • “The Gender Politics of White Supremacy” (2018)

• It’s summer, so TV: Broad City’s Birthright double-episode is streaming on Hulu, gives Megan a lot of Ilyse vibes, and guest stars Seth Green, Megan’s long-time celebrity love.

Ilyse:

1. Peter van der Veer’s Religious Nationalism: Hindus and Muslims in India is an oldie-but-goodie. 

2. Sumathi Ramaswamy’s The Goddess and the Nation is mandatory reading on gender, nationalism, religion, and India.

3. On Nationalism, a book of three medium-length (really teachable) essays by leading Indian scholars, including legend (& a scholar at which Ilyse fangirls incessantly) Romila Thapar, along with A. G. Noorani & Sadanand Menon.

4. Gotta shout out Ilyse’s UVM bud Tom Borchert, whose work on Thai Buddhism, nationalism and identity is really smart. His book, Educating Monks, is great & puts monk education within national/transnational frameworks, and this overview piece about Buddhism and nationalism is worth your time.

5. Something fun? About nationalism? Oy vey, says Ilyse. But… she suggests My Name is Khan (2010) and Mr and Mrs Iyer (2002). Both are Bollywood movies that explore race, racism, nationalism, identity. The former is set in the US. The latter is a stone cold bummer (CW: religio-racial violence) but deeply moving and poignant. (Lots of Bollywood has intense, obvious Hindutva/Hindu nationalism going on. For more on that, see this article or this one short journalistic video or this essay. Or just tweet at Ilyse.)

Now, reapply that sunblock & go outside! It’s summer!