Does Religiosity Increase or Decrease Nationalism? A Comparative Analysis

• In Event: Reexamining Minority Religious Rites in the Context of Crises (Virtual Session)

Abstract

Do religious observance and nationalism motivate and intensify each other, or do nationalism and religious observance moderate and even suppress each other? Does nationalism replace religion in a zero-sum relationship, or does nationalism reinforce religiosity in a symbiotic relationship? In this paper, I first investigate the question of whether higher religious observance is correlated with higher nationalism. I formulate a number of hypotheses, inspired by the extant literature and some historical case study narrative, as to why and how nationalism is expected to suppress or reinforce religiosity. Religiosity is conceptualized and operationalized in terms of the “three Bs” as is common in comparative studies of religiosity: (religious) belief, belonging, and behavior. The emphasis on the third dimension of religiosity, namely religious “behavior,” as measured in terms of the frequency of religious observance, as it interacts with levels of nationalism. This paper is an attempt to provide a comparative empirical baseline and a cross-national congruence test of the claim(s) that nationalism and religious observance are directly or inversely correlated. The three data sets that I utilize are International Social Survey Programme (ISSP), Regimes of Ethnicity, and World Values Survey (WVS), focusing on all the geographically European countries (including partially geographically European countries such as Russia and Turkey), as well as some non-European cases that represent distinct typologies of national-religious configurations such as Japan, India, Israel, Mexico, Pakistan, and the United States. First, I ask whether higher national pride is congruent with higher or lower religiosity in comparative perspective. Second, I ask whether there is a different pattern in the relationship between national pride and religiosity among predominantly Catholic, Orthodox, Protestant, and Muslim societies and/or individuals. Third, I ask whether different varieties of nationalism and different regimes of ethnicity (Akturk 2012) have different effects on religiosity. Fourth and finally, I ask whether different national-religious configurations (Akturk 2022) correspond to different levels of religiosity. This paper provides a preliminary answer and an empirical baseline in answering a major question at the intersection of nationalism and religion.

Aktürk, Şener. 2012. Regimes of Ethnicity and Nationhood in Germany, Russia, and Turkey. New York: Cambridge University Press.

Aktürk, Şener. 2022. “Nationalism and Religion in Comparative Perspective: A New Typology of National-Religious Configurations.” Nationalities Papers, Vol.50, No.2.

Author

• Sener Akturk, Koç University