https://orcid.org/0000-0001-9954-3723
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ABSTRACT
Scholars in various academic disciplines have pointed out how national religious heritage is increasingly appropriated by the far right, to construct a false binary between secular Christian European states on the one hand, and Islam on the other. This article contributes to this literature by examining how these political developments, often deemed “illiberal”, are enabled by “liberal” uses of religious heritage. Using the lens of what Étienne Balibar calls “fictive ethnicity”, the article examines how both liberal and illiberal uses of religious heritage in Western Europe construct a historic nation to which only dominant groups can lay claim, which contributes to the symbolic and material marginalisation of minorities. This has repercussions for analyses of socio-political exclusion and for liberal nationalist theory: addressing contemporary inequalities requires not only limiting explicitly exclusionary forms of nationalism, but also actively unsettling the widespread ontology of homogeneity underpinning national fictive ethnicities.
Acknowledgements
Earlier versions of this paper were presented at the workshops held in preparation for this special issue (organised by Mariëtta van der Tol and Elisabeth Becker), and at the Race Religion Research Group at Radboud University Nijmegen. I am very grateful for the comments of participants in these sessions, and for the feedback I received from Mariska Jung, Nadia Kiwan, Marianne Moyaert, Anya Topolski, and the anonymous reviewers.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
1 In their analysis of contemporary racism in the United States, France and the United Kingdom, Mondon and Winter (Citation2020) show how “liberal” and “illiberal” discourses of racism reinforce each other. This article contributes to this literature by investigating how the increasingly popular discourse on national religious heritage not only parallels the interdependence of liberalism and illiberalism in contemporary racism, but also intersects with it.
2 Using the term “religious minority” warrants certain caveats. Religious individuals or communities can draw on various kinds of identification and religion is a “multidimensional activity”, which can include “scripture, doctrine, worship, organisation, codes of living, community, art” and other aspects (Modood Citation2019, 5). Moreover, the identity of religious groups can also be attributed by societal or governmental discourses, and can intersect with racialisation (Topolski Citation2018).
3 My analysis is limited to the Western European context, particularly The Netherlands, Belgium, Germany, Switzerland, France, the United Kingdom and, albeit to a lesser extent, Spain and Denmark. The dynamics surrounding national culture will play out differently in Central or Eastern Europe, where we see other patterns of secularisation, nation-building and institutional arrangements between church and state.
4 Unlike earlier forms of community, the nation transcends earlier loyalties to lineage based on, for example, clan or neighbourhood community, by transposing kinship to a larger community connected to the state (Balibar Citation1991c, 100).
5 For an analysis of how philology played a central role in the constitution of racial taxonomies in the 19th century, see for example Olender (Citation1992), Masuzawa (Citation2005), Topolski (Citation2018) and Moyaert (Citation2024). This scholarship also shows the close intertwinement of comparative theology and religious categorisation with this process.
6 The template for the nation as a community of oneness was itself based on the Christian understanding of a corpus christianum (Van der Tol Citation2020, 74–75; see also Gorski Citation2000).
7 This understanding of multiple “religions” only comes into existence during this period (Topolski Citation2018, 62).
8 Non-Christian religions were also associated with darkness of skin (Meer Citation2013).
9 The idea that religious discrimination is not a serious problem, unlike racism, is itself a problematic product of secular hegemony (cf. Meer and Modood Citation2009).
10 The discourse of national religious heritage I outline here is dominant in Western Europe. However, it has also been met with resistance, both from religious and non-religious actors (Becker Citation2024; Beekers Citation2021; Cremer Citation2023).
11 Christian religious groups and national churches are attributed an important role in the protection of such heritage (Burchardt Citation2020, 169–170), although secular “national culture” at times also curtails practices by Christian faith groups and organisations (Beekers Citation2021). This holds even more strongly for historically marginalised forms of Christianity.
12 Spain is partially the exception, as Protestant, Jewish and Muslim minorities were legally recognised in 1992 as part of historical restorative justice. However, as Astor, Burchardt, and Griera (Citation2017, 134) point out, this recognition is merely symbolic and “few measures were taken during subsequent years to ensure the legal and budgetary instruments necessary for successfully implementing the provisions included in the agreements”. As a result, heritage discourses in Spain ultimately preserve Catholicism’s hegemonic position (Astor, Burchardt, and Griera Citation2017, 140).
13 Note that racialisation can be found in both liberal and illiberal discourses.
14 See Bardon (Citation2022) for an operationalisation of how this criterion can be applied in practice.
15 See Tinsley (Citation2019) for a critique of a binary understanding between ethnic and civic nationalism.
16 Such an approach raises the question how a just and inclusive deliberative process can be achieved in this context. This warrants further research.