Religious and Civic Nationalism: A Response to Mehmet Aydin

Prefatory Note I am grateful to Mehmet Aydin for a thoughtful and stimulating paper bearing, among other things, on the problem of Since I, too, have for some years worried about this subject, I shall take this opportunity to expand on it a bit, believing, as I do, that the phenomenon of is of particular salience to the situation in Macedonia. I have been called upon to provide a Christian Response to Aydin's essay, which I shall do, but not before offering a few scientific comments on the subject. That is a way, in part, of putting my later, more confessional observations in perspective. Some General Thoughts on Nationalism We may understand by the impulse of an group to claim the right to participate in the government of a given territory. Religious nationalism may mean the impulse of the group in question to invoke a warrant for its claim to such a right. In the literature, is divided into two basic types: ethnic and civic. Ethnic nationalism signifies a claim on the part of the group in question to preeminent, or perhaps exclusive, political control. By contrast, nationalism signifies a willingness on the part of the group in question to share power with other groups according to ethnically impartial, inclusive legal and political standards (typically associated with the ideas of rule of law, human rights, etc.). Although it might be defined differently, religious nationalism tends to be understood in the literature as a version of Religion is typically read as providing a warrant for dominance or what has been called role, Having studied in some depth several cases of I find this terminology to be useful, at least up to a point. For a variety of reasons, states around the world continue to experience, with varying degrees of intensity and hostility, tensions between ethnic and In many of the most notable examples of violent conflict, such as Bosnia, Sudan, Sri Lanka, and Israel-Palestine, there is, as a matter of fact, a strong disposition toward religious nationalism, in the sense of providing explicit warrants for ethnocratic rule. In these (and other) cases, it seems clear that violence can best be reduced, and a stable peace achieved, by moving the society away from ethnic and toward nationalism. That will mean adopting peace agreements with a strong component of ethnically and religiously impartial and inclusive laws and policies that involve constitutional guarantees of equal rights, nondiscrimination, tolerance, protection of minorities, etc. Interestingly, there is some recent empirical confirmation of the ameliorative effect of the norms of civic In his book, Peoples versus States. Minorities at Risk in the New Century, Ted Robert Gurr wrote: The breakup of the international system into warring statelets, which many feared in the early 1990s, has been checked by more effective international and domestic strategies for managing ethnopolitical conflict. Relations between [ethnic groups] and states in heterogeneous societies changed in the 1990s in ways that suggest that a new regime governing minority-majority relations is under construction.... A global shift from warfare to the politics of accommodation is amply documented in previous chapters In the late 1990s the most common political strategy among the 275 ethnopolitical groups surveyed in the Minorities at Risk study was not rebellion; it was symbolic and organizational politics ... Equally important, the number of groups using armed violence has been declining after decades of increase. (1) Gurr continued: By mid-decade a worldwide shift in strategies of ethnopolitical Action was taking place. …