Chapter 7
In common with Anthony Smith and Adrian Hastings I regard national self-awareness as having a longer history than the strictly modernist approach might allow. Unlike the modernist school in studies of nationalism, associated in particular with Ernest Gellner, I see the English nation, including the political nation, as long pre-dating industrialisation.1 From the outset I need to make my position clear on this controversial issue in the study of nationalism.
My interest in nationalism began with my work on pacifism, given that Christian and secular pacifists alike blamed nationalism for encouraging violence. Nationalism played a crucial role in my general theory of secularisation. To devise a theory of secularisation I had to place the role of nationalism alongside the role of the Enlightenment and the role of revolutionary political ideology. In the general theory I integrated broadly accepted empirical tendencies in belief and practice in modern societies with wide variations due to different historical experiences and types of Christianity, especially the difference between Protestantism and Catholicism. The vitality of religion in industrialised modernity depended to an important degree on whether it acted as a benign midwife at the birth of the nation, as in Poland and Ireland, or a malign fairy, as in France and Italy. The same was true of the Enlightenment. Religious vitality depended in part on whether Christianity and the different versions of the Enlightenment were partially aligned – as in England, Scotland, the USA, Canada, Switzerland and Germany – or at war, as in France and Italy. The same was true of revolutionary political ideology. A great deal depended on whether there were non-revolutionary potentials for change – as in England, North America and Germany – or whether there was outright war between clerical reaction and revolutionary change, as in much of southern Catholic Europe.
I focussed in particular on the morphological similarities between Christianity and nationalism, Christianity and Enlightenment, Christianity and revolutionary ideology. I canvassed the Romantic messianism analysed by Jacob Talmon and (latterly) charismatic leadership and Founding Fatherhood.2 I was interested in the clash between the children of darkness and the children of light, and a shared inheritance of forerunners, martyrs and heroes, vanguards and avant-gardes, ages and stages, rituals and icons, holy lands and universal cities, realised eschatology and canonical texts. Above all I was interested in the different outcomes in the relationship of religion with nationalism, religion with Enlightenment, religion with revolutionary political ideology.
What were these different outcomes? Nationalism has remained pervasive in the USA, in non-revolutionary England, in secularist France, in Soviet Russia and now in post-communist Russia; but the outcomes for religion turned out to be strikingly different. In the USA the secularisation of the state and pluralism, taken together, secured the autonomy and vitality of religion. In England and Northern Protestant Europe religious establishment has resulted in a passive religiosity that in practice could easily succumb to passive secularity. In France a revolutionary secularism tried to confine religion to the private sphere; and in Russia, China, Ethiopia and Turkey revolutionary secularism launched major assaults on religion, mostly unsuccessful.
If secularisation had triumphed unequivocally my argument here would be otiose. If the Enlightenment had triumphed then we would already be safely lodged in an Age of Reason. If religion had morphed into nationalism without significant remainder I would only be discussing a transition. If religion could be comprehensively understood as an alienated sign of the human aspiration for a new earth and a new man then religion would have emptied out into ever-glorious political revolution: 1989 said ‘Goodbye to All That’. The revolutions my Marxist colleagues expected did not happen, while those none of us expected did; hence a little book I wrote entitled Forbidden Revolutions comparing the forbidden Evangelical revolution in the Global South, notably Latin America, with the forbidden revolutions of 1989.3
For my part I was, first of all, dubious about secularisation as a homogeneous process leading inexorably to a future presaged by France or Sweden, and much later I have been equally dubious about claims that ‘God is back’ merely because religion is back as a social problem.4 Religion never went away and it was never privatised. Only the historically exceptional French model of privatisation led us to think religion excluded from the public square. Throughout the post-war period the major force in European politics was Christian Democracy. What has occurred is the triumph of personal choice in Western Europe, Canada and the USA. In Western Europe and Canada that means passive dissociation from religion, whereas in the USA it means active association with religion, except where social capital had been eroded in the way identified by David Putnam in Bowling Alone.5
I come now to my promised contrast between collective identity and individual choice. For the West at least that is a crucial dialectic and one that reaches back, as Adam Seligman maintained in Modernity’s Wager, to the emergence of religion as choice and inwardness in a sequence running from Jeremiah to Jesus, Paul and Augustine, and to Early Christianity as a voluntary association in its three formative centuries.6 My task now is to trace how that dialectic has worked out between the two autonomous powers of religion and nationalism in three revolutionary transformations. The revolutions of 1989 look like evidence for the resilience of ethno-religion as a vehicle of collective identity. Evangelical Christianity in the Global South looks like a primary expression of personal choice in collision with nationalism, including nationalist religion, in Latin America, Africa and Asia. As for the revolutions in the Arab World, some see them as nationalism in another guise, while others regard them as Islam taking over from nationalism as a primary vehicle of collective identity.
This problematic pushes me to trace the mingling of motifs in Christianity and nascent nationalism over the last half millennium without Christianity being straightforwardly taken over and secularised by nationalism. That requires some engagement with the role of elites in promoting nationalism, and it has particular relevance to the ethno-religious transformations beginning in 1989. Then I have to trace the emergence of the voluntary principle of personal choice and lay participation in Evangelicalism. That requires some engagement with cultural revolution from the bottom up and it has particular relevance to Latin American transformations that have now spread to sub-Saharan Africa and Asia.
Finally: how far have these shifts occurred in Islam? I have to draw out the difference between ethno-religion after 1989 in post-Soviet Eurasia as it struggled against a foreign secular ideology and Islamic movements in the Arab world struggling against oppressive nationalist movements that imposed western secularism and colluded with western interests. Cairo is not Prague. I have to draw out the difference between the chosen religious faith of Christians in the two-thirds world and what may be the emerging element of choice in the Arab world. That includes the very conscious embrace of some form of Islamism and of a semi-secular self-determination among the vast swathes of alienated young people. Olivier Roy even suggests that Islam might follow Christianity in gradually hiving off from the broader culture and becoming a highly personal faith, leaving passive secularity to occupy the space of the sacred.7
The Transformations of 1989
As a prelude to thinking about the events of 1989 I emphasise the mutuality of religion and nationalism over several centuries, not the nineteenth-century mutation of religion into nationalism. Consider John Wycliffe. Wycliffe was a progenitor of the Reformation who sought in 1384 to put an English Bible before the English people so that they might hear the Word and judge for themselves. The choice was between Edward of England and Urban of Rome. Consider John Milton. In his Areopagitica published in 1644 Milton envisaged a noble and puissant English nation, and he understood the role of print in creating the unified cultural construct of the nation. He also lived at a time when Protestant faith in the perspicuity of Scripture led to any number of jostling interpretations of Scripture. An open Bible meant pluralism and faith as personal choice.
Consider George Friedrich Handel, also discussed by Linda Colley in relation to English nationalism.8 Handel’s Italian operas were attacked because Italy was associated with the foppish world of Baroque and Catholic autocracy, and admired because Protestant England was a New Rome where Ciceronian civic humanism celebrated the triumph of duty over love. Handel’s English oratorios celebrated a collective religiosity on the Judaic model where England played the typical Protestant role of a New Israel following a tradition exemplified by Milton in Samson Agonistes. Yet through Messiah Handel became central to the voluntary faith of Evangelicalism as that provided the collective identity of Victorian England. According to John Osborne he gave England its lay religiosity.9
This dialectic of the collective (whether religious or nationalist or ethno-religious) and personal religious inwardness can be traced throughout European history. In the fifteenth century there was an association between the proto-Protestant Hussite movement and incipient Czech nationalism which still survives in the mythology of Czech nationalism. In Hungary, a country that fits very well Ernest Gellner’s model of linguistic homogenisation as a criterion for membership in the nation, the national myth was associated with Protestantism.10 In Germany Luther is celebrated both as an icon of the individual standing up to Pope and emperor and as an icon of the Germanic nation and language. In Norway the Pietist preacher Hauge and the Haugean movement were instrumental in tending Norwegian consciousness (as well as industrialisation). In Denmark Grundtvig played a similar role, which is one reason he was targeted by Kierkegaard in the name of existential choice.
The events of 1989 did not straightforwardly herald the arrival of democracy, as recent trends in Hungary, Romania, Moldova and Ukraine indicate. As communism and the Soviet Empire broke up, the roles played by religious nationalism and cultural nationalism varied considerably from country to country, though there was clearly a moment from Lithuania to Ukraine where the movement for national liberation processed into the public arena behind the banners of religion. After that, religion was partly compromised by entering into politics or seeking old positions of power and wealth, as in Russia.
The power of ethno-religion was particularly clear in Serbia, Poland and Romania. In Poland the influence of the Pope and of Solidarity was obviously significant, and it was also significant far beyond the borders of Poland. In Serbia the Church adopted a hyper-nationalistic attitude based on the role of Serbia as a victim nation and the threat to the sacred pilgrimage sites of Kosovo. In Romania the initial thrust of revolt was led by a Hungarian Protestant pastor. But religion was also influential in Ukraine, Slovakia, Croatia, East Germany and Lithuania. In Ukraine Uniate Catholics and Ukrainian Orthodox looked to the West and provided the core of the movement for national independence, while the Orthodox of the Moscow Patriarchate looked more to Russia. East Germany is especially interesting because the old association of Lutheranism with nationalism had been discredited by the Nazi period and the Lutheran Church severely weakened by planned secularisation. Nevertheless it provided the sacred space out of which vast crowds of people sallied forth to confront and overthrow the regime. Religion also assisted in the mobilisation of minority groups and submerged nations: Bulgarians and Germans inside Russia as well Georgia and Armenia; and the various Muslim nationalities of the Caucasus, and Muslims in Bosnia and Bulgaria. Pentecostalism even found a response among the Roma as part of a revision of their despised identity, though Pentecostalism more generally transcended frontiers and in Ukraine encouraged migration.
But in Estonia and Czech Lands religion had associations with German cultural superiority which meant that religion could be severely weakened under communist pressure and the potential for change carried therefore by culture, liberalism and nationalism. In Slovenia language was more important than religion, and in Bulgaria religion took the form of attachment to the land as well as Orthodoxy.11 In Hungary there were various foci of revolt: some more nationalist, historical and linguistic; some more associated with Catholicism. The revival of paganism by intellectuals in the Baltic as the authentic pre-Christian religion of the folk has as much to do with cultural nationalism as religion; and cultural nationalism lies behind the deposition of Lenin in favour of Tamerlane (Timur the Lame) in Uzbekistan and Genghis Khan in Mongolia.12
Yet there was also much evidence for the transnational status and autonomy of religion in, for example, foci of protest at both a compromised official Church and the state: for instance, Father Alexander Men in Moscow, and Tomas Halik and other associates of Vaclav Havel in Prague. There were transnational charismatic movements of many different kinds to be found among the Transylvanian Calvinists and Baptists, the Lord’s Army in Romania, the monasteries of the Ukrainian Uniates and a remarkably successful Pentecostal mega-church in Kiev led by a Nigerian. Ecumenical agencies sought to offer a ministry of reconciliation as they did in Europe after the Second World War.
The Global Evangelical/Pentecostal Transformation
Turning to the global expansion of Evangelical Christianity, I need to outline how choice was fostered under the aegis of Evangelicalism, even though temporarily checked after the Reformation by the creation of the Church-state, and then the Church-nation, and the capacity of Evangelicalism to become the accepted faith of the majority. Earlier I outlined the reciprocal relation between religion and nationalism in English and European history in figures like Wycliffe and Hus, Luther and Milton. There is a complicated dance here between Protestantism as a faith based on choice and nationalism as an ideology based on birthright identity because once a religion based on choice becomes the faith of a majority – as it did in Pietist Scandinavia, New England, Northern Ireland and Victorian Britain – it confers birthright identity.13 Nevertheless a faith which expects a crisis of conversion to be resolved by mature commitment is in a profound sense a ‘religion of choice’; and its astonishing expansion all over the two-thirds world represents the global expansion of an egalitarianism of the spirit lighting on whom it will, vigorous popular leadership, lay organisation, self-education, personal commitment, individualisation and interiority.
History so far has been a story of birthright identities, so the dramatic global expansion of options, inwardness and active commitment over the last half century represents a major revolutionary transformation. Arguably the popularity of spirituality in the contemporary West at the expense of institutional forms and external formulae further extends the inwardness of the spirit anticipated by Troeltsch as the modern form of Christianity.14 There is a major difference between western spirituality and religions of the spirit elsewhere because western spirituality often dispenses with any long-term denominational commitment, whereas in the developing world conversion and change of life entail corporate discipline and mutual support. Of course, one should never forget that the Church-state order remains a presence throughout many of the sometime imperial territories of the developing world, above all in the massive emplacements of the Catholic Church in Latin America but also within the ex-territories of the British and French empires.
The subversion of the state churches of the Reformation began with the inwardness of Pietism associated with places like Herrnhut and Halle. It continued apace when Evangelical Revivals and Awakenings, notably Methodism, broke away from the state Church in Britain and eventually contributed mightily to the universal voluntarism of the United State. This meant that for Americans voluntary religion became just as much an inheritance by birth as it was in Victorian England, and that American Evangelicalism forged a strong tie with American nationalism. This historical process whereby voluntarism stepped westward from Germany to England and then from England to America came to fruition in Los Angeles in 1906 when white and black revivalism fused in Pentecostalism to create a faith capable of crossing any number of cultural species barriers, from Brazil to the Philippines and from Ghana to South Korea.15 Of course, nothing prevents Evangelicalism from forging intermittent alliances with nationalism virtually anywhere in the developing world, from South Korea to Tanzania.
Nationalism, like Enlightenment and like radical political revolution, was fostered by elites. The Evangelical transformation comes from below and is so peaceful most people have no idea how fast it moves. In Brazil, for example, there are now some 40 million Protestants, a three-fold increase in 30 years. By comparison, the parallel movement of the Catholic base communities was under the aegis of a hegemonic Church, and was therefore both more sophisticated and less popular. Pentecostalism was propagated by buccaneering religious entrepreneurs like Aimee McPherson, drawn from what I call a ‘buried intelligentsia’. Its leaders trained on the job and spoke the language of the people to the people. At the same time versions of Pentecostal and charismatic Christianity also appealed to large sectors of the rapidly expanding middle classes all over South and Central America, many of them organised in mega-churches and inclined to prosperity theology. In Guatemala, for example, Pentecostal and Evangelical Christianity together number over 25 per cent of the population and appeal equally to the large Mayan minority and to the middle classes of Guatemala City.
Popular Pentecostalism is often dismissed as inauthentic by cultural elites when compared with spiritist movements like Candomblé or revivals of pre-Columbian practices.16 That fits very well with a long tradition among intellectuals of romantically idealising the culture of the folk. Béla Bartók would not have been interested in collecting Evangelical choruses and turning them into quartets: Gypsies yes, Pentecostals no; and definitely not today’s Pentecostal gypsies. Pentecostals can be derided as American imports, but in their own eyes they had gone over the head of contemptuous local hierarchies to enjoy a transnational modernity for which America often acts as a universal lode-star, especially though modern communications. Pentecostals are as much a consequence of the communications revolution as the young protesters of Tahrir Square, and they are conspicuous virtuosi in the use of contemporary media. They are global and local, rapidly indigenising and easily linking up with global modernisation. They represent a clash between a global voluntarism and various forms of cultural nationalism, including the kind of established Catholicism that understands itself as part of the national tradition. It is too often forgotten how much of the Catholic Church maintains its alliance with social paternalism and with the social elite, in particular through the role played by the newer religious orders in elite education.17
Pentecostals are not only criticised for pre-empting the natural constituency of the base communities but for helping to erode the authentic cultural integrity of indigenous peoples like the Maya and the Aymara. For their part Pentecostals believed they had given up semi-paganism for the authentic world of the New Testament: speaking in tongues, exorcism and divine healing. From a rather different viewpoint Pentecostals in Latin America are criticised as reviving ancient spirit cults in modern guise. And the argument is not without force because Pentecostalism is both very ancient and very modern. That is as true of Africa and Asia as of Latin America. There are many contexts in Africa, for example Uganda and Zimbabwe, and in Asia, for example South Korea, where the Pentecostal fusion of ancient and modern spiritism seems more attractively authentic than the sober worship of the mainstream churches. The Catholic Church and the other mainstream churches in Africa act as non-governmental organisations (NGOs) and as major agents of modernisation and cultural modification. They have challenged the corrupt political elites. Pentecostalism resonates with the enchanted spirituality of Africa. It reinforces and incorporates tradition as well as creating a rupture with the past through conversion.18 No wonder it succeeded. Indeed its success was so great from Accra to Manila that it helped stimulate major charismatic manifestations in nearly all the mainstream churches. An expanded definition of the charismatic phenomenon even allows some sources to claim a global constituency of over half a billion people.
When Pentecostalism spread to sub-Saharan Africa it became part of a very rapidly expanding post-colonial Christianity reaching some 400 million people. Sub-Saharan Africa mostly lacks anything like the established majority church of Latin America, apart from the ancient churches in Ethiopia and Eritrea. Instead there is the shadowy presence of what were once established churches as in Europe, like the Catholics, Anglicans and Lutherans, alongside numerous Protestant denominations and African Initiated Churches or AICs. Choice is the norm. Pentecostals are very competitive and face vigorous competitors, including revivals of traditional religion actively constructed by nationalist post-colonial elites.
Post-colonial nationalism is a powerful force and the mainstream churches attempt to accommodate it with a conscious acculturation. In the immediate post-colonial period attention was focussed on the AICs as authentic expressions of African culture rather than on Pentecostal churches. At the same time Pentecostal churches share cultural genes with AICs, and can emerge in parallel with African nationalism and deploy the rhetoric of black power: Ezekiel Guti’s transnational Pentecostal Church, the Zimbabwe Assemblies of God Africa, had its origins in the same part of Harare as Zimbabwean nationalism and has formed intermittent alliances both with Mugabe and the Movement for Democratic Change (MDC).19
Pentecostal churches adapted as rapidly to Africa as they had done to Latin America. Sometimes Evangelical and charismatic churches saw themselves as the authentic carriers of the national tradition so that in Tanzania, for example, political leaders went so far as to declare it a Christian country, in spite of a considerable Muslim minority. For some observers Pentecostals adapted all too well to an African interest in the goods associated with the gods and developed a neo-Pentecostal prosperity gospel that drew more on the Hebrew Scriptures than the New Testament. They were Afro-Jewish. The prosperity gospel was often promoted in transnational mega-churches appealing to the middle class and providing a complete alternative social environment, complete with banks, educational and medical facilities.
When Pentecostalism and the charismatic revival arrived in Asia it faced non-Christian establishments fortified in their resistance by nationalist movements that had fought for independence and against colonialism. Pentecostalism and charismatic Christianity found three social niches very like those in Latin America and Africa: the minority ethnic group, for example groups in the interior of the Philippines and Borneo and the Chinese diaspora in Malaysia, Singapore and Indonesia; the poor, for example semi-literate women in China during the Cultural Revolution; and the new middle class of business people and specialists in communications technology in China and the Chinese diaspora alike. There seems to be an elective affinity between Protestant Christianity and Chinese culture.
How fast Pentecostalism and Christianity more generally spread has depended on whether the local nationalism was receptive or hostile. In mainland China, Taiwan and Japan nationalism defined Christianity as a foreign import and tried to inhibit its growth, so that Christianity has only affected some 4 per cent in China and Taiwan, and 2 per cent in Japan. Nevertheless there has been rapid growth recently in China so that the Evangelical community in Wenzhou, a coastal city in a geographical enclave, numbers some 15 per cent of a population of 6 million.20 It ought to come as no surprise that these Chinese Evangelicals listen to Handel’s Messiah. In South Korea, by contrast, Christianity affects some 25 per cent of the population, while in Singapore it affects some 15 per cent; and in both contexts there are large numbers of neo-Pentecostals attached to modern mega-churches. Mega-churches like New Creation and City Harvest in Singapore boast over 20,000 members, while some mega-churches in South Korea claim memberships in six figures.
Pentecostalism expands in India and even in Burma, but it encounters a strong current of ethno-religious nationalism directed at both Muslims and Christians, and at religious difference in ethnic minorities. The Philippines is a special case because there is a majority Catholic Church together with American cultural influence and the use of English. English is a major carrier of Pentecostal faith, and charismatic movements have expanded as much inside the Catholic Church, especially in the middle class, as outside it.21 Nationalist feeling throughout Asia encourages a revival of indigenous religious traditions such as Confucianism, Buddhism and Daoism. Confucianism experiences a revival among the Chinese intelligentsia, and there are major Buddhist revivals in mainland China, South Korea, Singapore and Taiwan. Moreover, there are major sectors of people who are merely secular in South Korea and Singapore; and in China itself, of course, the ruling Communist Party and its cadres are ideologically secularist.
Religion and Nationalism, Choice and Collective Identity in the Arab Spring
When we come to the Arab Spring we can dismiss western media approaches featuring good guys struggling with bad guys to establish democracy. Cairo is not Prague, and is not likely to be in the future. Instead I turn to some theses of Olivier Roy that bear on collective identity and choice.22 Roy insists that the initial demonstrators in Tahrir Square were neither nationalists nor Islamists, but members of a demographically multitudinous new generation of sceptical and individualistic young people in the big cities with access to the internet. This generation disdains charismatic leaders and the patriarchal and clientelistic model of political relations. The Arab–Israeli conflict is not central, and they are not fanatical partisans of a supranational cause.
Yet in the Tunisian and Egyptian elections Islamist parties expressing religious values shared by the popular majority triumphed as the only ‘credible parties of government’. Islamist parties have no more affection for democracy than the Egyptian army, and they deplore western values, pluralism, secularism and individualism. They affirm religion as central to national identity, and reject the kind of secularism promoted by earlier Arab nationalists.
These parties will succumb to internal individualisation and to demands for democratic debate, which means we are deluded in imagining democracy has to be associated with secularisation. The Islamists of Tunisia or even the Salafists of Egypt could become reluctant agents of a political secularisation, not the secularisation of society. For Roy, collective identity and faith are very different. Islam cannot be reconstructed as political ideology, and any attempt to restore Islamic norms by legal regulation is doomed. In part this is because Salafists declare that only a strict personal return to faith could serve as the basis of an Islamic society.
So, even among ‘fundamentalists’ we find personal choice, conviction and increasing diversity, separated from inherited tradition, traditional authorities and culture. Religious institutions hive off from the state, and there is scant agreement as to what in Islam is non-negotiable. Maybe in time the individual right to choose in religious matters will be accepted, though the response to the emergence of Evangelical churches in Morocco and Algeria does not suggest the transition will be easy. One major option is the Turkish model of a modern political party trying to attract voters beyond the faithful, and adopting vaguely conservative causes like the family, property, honesty and the work ethic. As for uprooted global jihadists dreaming of a supra-national umma, they are now confined to the peripheries of the Arab world in Somalia, Yemen and the Sahel. The conflict that matters is not between the West and Islamic terror, but between the conservative Sunni world and the ‘Shia Crescent’, between Saudi Arabia and Iran. If Yoel Guzansky and Benedetta Berti are right, the initial thrust to democratisation has deepened old religious differences in a way dramatised for the whole region by unrest among the Shiite minority of Saudi Arabia and the Shiite majority of Bahrain.23 At the same time, parliaments are not mosques. Religion turns into an horizon of meaning rather than specific norms, and Muslim conservatives resemble conservative Evangelicals in their defence of shared values. For Roy the separation of religion as personal faith from culture involves the embrace of ‘holy ignorance’, and this he sees as analogous to the spread of Pentecostalism within Christianity.24
The emergence of numerous individualistic young people sceptical of both the older kind of Arab nationalism and contemporary Islamism, but accepting Islam as their collective identity, raises interesting questions. According to Tarik Ahmed Elseewi there has been a transition from the ‘imagined community’ of Arab nationalism to a subjective imagination derived from innumerable nodes of transnational contact, including migrant bodies and migrating messages.25 Of course, there are also those who point to polls of Egyptian opinion showing that whatever the electoral success of Islamists, in practice nationalism trumps religion. But if Elseewi is right these are the same developments that fostered the imagined transnational community of Pentecostalism. They are like and unlike, and the new subjective imagination should not be identified with the deepened religious consciousness illustrated by François Burgat in his The Islamic Movement in North Africa through numerous personal biographies.26
In several contemporary Muslim contexts, for example Turkey, Malaysia and Indonesia, religion and associated parties articulate broad values in the public square that may be widely shared outside the faithful. In its most benign version the public sphere could become passively secular according to Lily Rahim. It could even echo constitutional arrangements in Northern Europe where the sacred is accepted as a public presence, subject to negotiation, provided society is not subject to religious regulation.27 This suits a faith like Christianity, especially Pentecostalism, based on the spirit rather than the letter of the law, but can be made compatible with Islam. Whatever the distinctly alarming portents of the moment, perhaps in the longer perspective we might recollect José Casanova’s comparison between nineteenth-century discourse about Catholicism as inherently illiberal and disloyal to the nation state and contemporary discourse about Islam.28
Conclusion
In conclusion, religion in the Arab world has not morphed into nationalism; nor has culture been secularised. Instead we may have some differentiation of politics and religion, though the omens in Egypt at the time of writing in December 2012 were dubious, and some embrace of choice in matters of faith, with Islam as the primary marker of collective identity. In Eastern Europe by comparison ethno-religion played a crucial role in the demise of a foreign secularist political ideology, for example in Poland. Where religion had failed to play a positive role in the emergence of the nation, as in Slovenia, Estonia and the Czech Republic, culture and language took its place. Yet even where religion succumbed to planned secularisation, as in East Germany, the churches provided symbolic space for political mobilisation.
In Eastern Europe and post-Soviet Eurasia collective religious belonging reflects history and ethnicity. As ever, the appeal to authenticity is a potent weapon in the hands of intellectual and political elites. In post-Soviet Eurasia the religion of the majority is recognised by the state and majority religions often collude with political power. Though relatively few may be regularly involved in religious practice or pilgrimage, as in Russia, the majority accept religion as a marker and personal choice is exercised in the interstices, often in Evangelical and Pentecostal denominations. Religion carries national identity under threat: after all, religion almost always fulfils other roles than what we today label purely religious. The Muslim Brotherhood earns social credit and loyalty through its role in providing services in the voluntary sector, just as Protestant denominations earn social credit in Anglo-American societies and the Catholic and other mainstream churches earn credit throughout sub-Saharan Africa.
When we come to the developing world things vary across the continents. In Latin America much of the Catholic Church remains aligned with national elites, and the expansive voluntary sector of Evangelical Protestants is attacked as an inauthentic import inimical to historic national traditions. In Africa shadow establishments perform a vital role as NGOs in failed states and in a context of vigorous religious competition, in particular Pentecostalism. As in Latin America, Pentecostalism encounters nationalist criticism as an intrusion of transnational modernity. In Asia all forms of Christianity, including Pentecostalism, face pressure from religious establishments associated with nationalism, anti-colonialism and independence. Success depends on their ability to pick up sources of disaffection among the excluded or among marginal ethnicities: South Korea is a marginal nation whose nationalism has been carried by Christianity. The extraordinary expansion of Evangelical and charismatic Christianity throughout the Global South not only represents religion as choice but as modernisation, notwithstanding evident recourse to magical thinking. Magical thinking is both self-delusion and a way of imagining what is possible.29 Assisted by modern communications, it reinforces confidence and the will to act. As for revolutionary political ideology, it has collapsed nearly everywhere outside North Korea, overtaken by a corrupt nationalist state capitalism in China and a corrupt nationalist state–Church alliance in Russia.
I have traced the incursions of personal choice into the powerful bastions of collective identity in three transformations and their implications for nationalism. There remains the question of the advance of personal choice understood as the embrace of mere secularity, not the kind of assertive secularism confining religion to the private sphere still influential in France, Turkey and China. From Sweden to the Congo the strength of religion is negatively correlated with existential security, according to Norris and Inglehart, and with individualisation according to Bruce.30 All the Americas remain believing, apart from planned secularisation in Uruguay and Cuba. In Brazil 97 per cent believe in God, and even in Canada 80 per cent believe. Africa, India and Central Asia are throughout religious.
The billion or more secular people are found above all in Protestant Northern Europe, plus France, and in the Protestant British Commonwealth – all places where educational and media elites have sponsored secularisation – and in Israel. There are also countries like South Korea and Singapore where Protestantism has established a serious presence and there has also been a palpable secularisation. Japan is a special case. It is a secular country, resistant to Protestantism on nationalist grounds as a foreign import, though much influenced by it, and otherwise inclined to Buddhist new religions and rites performed simply as folk practice. Finally, there are those parts of Eastern Europe, China and Vietnam where planned secularisation has been successfully imposed. Wherever secularity advances the rate of reproduction declines, with obvious consequences.
Maybe those thinkers (Ernest Gellner, for example) are right who regard Protestantism, particularly its opening onto individual religious choice, as the modern religion. If so we can ask whether the vast contemporary expansion of Evangelical Christianity presages the advent of choice as fragmentation and secularisation. We can enquire whether the inundation of Catholic monopoly in Brazil by enthusiastic Protestantism prefigures the expansion of a passive secularity. In 1904 Wales experienced an Evangelical revival that with other global movements fed into the Pentecostal explosion in Los Angeles in 1906. It was part of the modernisation of Wales, and its spread was greatly assisted by reports in the newspapers. The splendid Baptist chapel in Bethesda was a centre of the revival and has recently been turned into flats. The area is Welsh-speaking and is now represented by a Welsh Nationalist MP. As elsewhere in Western Europe, and Québec, religion in Wales has been displaced by cultural nationalism, leaving a deposit of passive secularity and a love of singing. When I was in the Yucatan I noticed that the new Protestant chapels often looked like replicas of chapels in Wales. Perhaps Bethesda is a harbinger of things to come elsewhere. If so, then maybe Durkheim was right to link religion so closely with totems and the expression of a collective consciousness rather than with individual experience.
Any serious sociological imagination needs to take such views into account. I take a more dialectic view of the tension between religion as collective manifestation and religion as individual experience, and do not see the advent of Evangelical Protestantism and individual choice as presaging the end of socially significant faith.
1 Anthony Smith, Nationalism (Cambridge: Polity, 2001); The Antiquity of Nations (Cambridge: Polity, 2004). Adrian Hastings, The Construction of Nationhood: Ethnicity, Religion and Nationalism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997). Ernest Gellner, Nations and Nationalism (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1983).
2 Jacob Talmon, Political Messianism: The Romantic Phase (London: Secker and Warburg, 1960); Chapter 8 in this book, published originally as David Martin, ‘Charisma and Founding Fatherhood’, in Vivian Ibrahim and Margit Wunsch (eds), Political Leadership, Nations and Charisma (New York: Routledge, 2012, pp. 40–51).
3 David Martin, Forbidden Revolutions: Pentecostalism in Latin America and Catholicism in Eastern Europe (London: SPCK, 1996).
4 Micklethwait and Wooldridge, God is Back.
5 David Putnam, Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community (New York: Simon and Shuster, 2000).
6 Adam Seligman, Modernity’s Wager: Authority, the Self, and Transcendence (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000).
7 Roy, ‘The Transformation of the Arab World’.
8 Linda Colley, Britons: Forging the Nation 1701–1837 (London: Pimlico, 1992, pp. 31–3): David Martin, ‘The Sociology of Religion and Handel’s Reception’, in Elisabeth Arweck and William Keenan (eds), Materializing Religion: Expression, Performance and Ritual (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006, pp. 161–74); and David Martin, ‘The Handel Revolution’, Books and Culture (March/April 2011). Those interested in Handel’s reception should consult the scholarly work of Thomas McGeary and Ilias Chrissochoidis.
9 John Osborne, God Rot Tunbridge Wells (DVD for the third centenary of Handel’s birth in 1985).
10 Daniele Conversi, ‘Homogenisation, Nationalism and War: Should we Still Read Ernest Gellner?’ Nations and Nationalism (2007, 13: 3, pp. 371–94).
11 Chris Hann and Hermann Goetz (eds), Eastern Christians in Anthropological Perspective (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2010); Jakelić, Collectivistic Religions. This excellent volume by Jakelić stresses the resilience of automatic and collective belonging.
12 Ališauskienė and Schröder, Religious Diversity in Post-Soviet Society.
13 Pentecostalism is a sung creed and owes much to the spontaneous ‘singing in the spirit’ characteristic of the Welsh Revival of 1904–05. The hymns of the revival were mainly sung in Welsh and were part of an implicit revival of Welsh consciousness, according to James Deaville and Katherine Stopa in a chapter on the Welsh Revival contributed to Martin Clarke (ed.), Music and Theology in Nineteenth-Century Britain (Farnham: Ashgate, 2012, pp. 117–32).
14 Ernst Troeltsch, Kritische Gesamtausgabe Band 17 (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2006, pp. 176–87).
15 David Martin, Pentecostalism: The World Their Parish (Oxford: Blackwell, 2006).
16 David Lehmann, Struggle for the Spirit: Religious Transformation and Popular Culture in Brazil and Latin America (Cambridge: Polity, 1996).
17 María Angélica Thumala, Riqueza y Piedad: el Catolicismo de la Elite Económica Chilena (Santiago: Debate, 2007).
18 Birgit Meyer, Translating the Devil: Religion and Modernity among the Ewe in Ghana (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1999).
19 David Maxwell, African Gifts of the Spirit: Pentecostalism and the Rise of a Transnational Religious Movement (Oxford: Currey, 2006).
20 Nanlai Cao, Constructing China’s Jerusalem: Christians, Power and Place in Contemporary Wenzhou (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2010).
21 Kathleen Wiegele, Investing in Miracles: El Shaddai and the Transformation of Popular Catholic Culture in the Philippines (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2005).
22 Roy, ‘The Transformation of the Arab World’.
23 Yoel Guzansky and Benedetta Berti, ‘Is the New Middle East Stuck in its Sectarian Past? The Unspoken Dimension of the “Arab Spring”’, Orbis (Winter 2013, 57: 1, pp. 135–51).
24 Olivier Roy, Holy Ignorance: When Religion and Culture Part Ways (New York: Columbia University Press, 2010).
25 Tariq Ahmed Elseewi, ‘A Revolution of the Imagination’, International Journal of Communication (2011, Feature 1197–206).
26 François Burgat, The Islamic Movement in North Africa (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1997).
27 Lily Rahim, ‘Towards a Post-Islamist Secular Democracy in the Muslim World’ (www.Sidney.edu.au/arts/government_international_relations/downloads/documents/1_3_Rahim_papers), a paper for the Contemporary Challenge of Politics Research Workshop, 31 October 2011 (University of Sydney, NSW, Australia).
28 José Casanova, ‘The Politics of Nativism: Islam in Europe, Catholicism in the United States’, Philosophy and Social Criticism (May/June 2012, 38, pp. 485–95).
29 Paul Gifford, personal communication regarding a forthcoming book contrasting Catholicism and Pentecostalism in Africa.
30 Norris and Inglehart, Sacred and Secular; Bruce, Secularization.