Here are excerpts from Liah Greenfeld’s essay on nationalism and religion published in this 2006 collection:
* Both essentially secular nationalism and the transcendental religions are ways to interpret – that is, invest with meaning – otherwise meaningless reality, providing prisms through which it is to be perceived and seen as ordered. Both nationalism and religion are order-creating cultural systems.
* No human group of any duration and no human being, unless severely disabled or as yet undeveloped mentally (as in early infancy), exists without an identity; having an identity appears to be a psychological imperative and thus a sociological constant. But if the development of some identity is inevitable, the emergence and ascendancy of a particular kind of identity – for example, of a national versus a religious identity – is always, at root, a matter of historical contingency. There is nothing in human nature, and therefore in society in general, which makes any specific identity necessary.
* An identity defines a person’s – and a group’s – position in the social world; it carries the set of expectations that its bearer, whether an individual or a collectivity, can legitimately have, orienting the actions of the bearer by defining what can be legitimately expected of the latter. The least specialized type of identity, the one believed to define the bearer’s very essence, shapes behavior in a wide variety of social contexts and reflects, by containing in microcosm, the image of social order or the social consciousness4 of the given society. In the modern world, national identity, much more than any other, has been such a generalized identity. Its framework, nationalism, thus has been also the framework of the modern social consciousness. It was religion, by contrast, that formed the framework of social consciousness in the premodern world; nationalism has replaced religion as the main cultural mechanism of social integration. But though on this (sociologically crucial) level religion and nationalism are functionally equivalent, they differ in virtually all other important respects and inattention to these differences obscures the nature of nationalism.
For example, since the transcendental religions to which nationalism is sometimes compared held out the promise of eternal life, it is maintained that nationalism, for all its this-worldly orientation, must proffer similar guarantees; otherwise, why would people die for their nations?
* Most of the experiences that drive people to distraction – making them curse the day they were born and wish they were dead, or turning them into suicides, murderers, or revolutionaries – has to do with people’s relations with others. The nature of most suffering is social, not physical; it is caused by rejection, humiliation, betrayal, shame, and social disorientation – that is the proverbial anomie – not by aging or mortality. If people’s actions are any indication of their obsessions, they are, on the
whole, far more preoccupied with injustice than with death. It is the ability of religions (and nationalisms) to justify otherwise distressing social arrangements, to create a sense of a just social order, and to make social suffering sufferable,7 that explains their endurance over time.* The perception of the mundane as meaningful in its own right implies its sacralization. With nationalism, the heavens, so to speak, descend to earth; this world, the world of empirical reality and social relations, becomes the sphere of the sacred. Unlike the need for immortality, the need for meaning is universal; proximity to the perceived sources of ultimate meaning takes our breath away. Nationalism provides countless opportunities for such perception in the routines of quotidian activity, business, parenting, and neighborly association, which to the religious mentality are the very strongholds of the profane. It was this uniquely modern sacralization of the secular through the experience of national identity that moved Durkheim to declare that God is society…
* The perception of this world as ultimately meaningful – its investment with the creative powers and authority that the great religions were willing to recognize only in the mysterious beyond – makes our everyday existence, contrary to the Romantic deprecation of modernity as soulless and materialistic, far more intensely spiritual than that of any of the prenational social formations. Within the framework of nationalism, society is saturated with spirituality…
* It is no coincidence that the age of nationalism is also the age of science. The nationalist enchantment of the world is reflected in the apotheosis of the means of knowing the world. Science is expected to penetrate the world’s mysteries, harness its powers, and uncover its meaning. It is forced to take the place of theology. But society is God
(pace Durkheim) only if we make it so; the meaning of the world is not simply there to be uncovered.* nationalism replaced religion as the order creating system, substituting the social and political relations between men for the bond between man and God as that which gives meaning to life…
* Because most religious nationalisms are ethnic nationalisms, the fanaticism, the abnegation of self (one’s own as well as others’) for the sake of the community, which we associate with religious nationalism, are more often than not predicated on the essential worldliness of this complex of sentiments…
