(iPoster) Secularization through Nativist Backlash: The Deçan Movement in Kosovo

• In Event: Poster Sessions: Religion and Politics & Politics of Communist and Former Communist Countries (Post-Soviet)
  In Poster Session: Poster Session: Religion and Politics

Abstract

Why do efforts to revitalize religion sometimes generate secular backlash? Since the late 1990s, Kosovo has experienced an influx of transnational Islamic actors, including foreign governments, NGOs, clerics, and educational organizations, whose interventions have at times conflicted with established local religious practices (Gola and Selica 2017). These initiatives have not been unilaterally embraced by local populations and have also caused reactions that can be understood as forms of secularist nativism—discourses that mobilize secularism as a marker of in-group membership and cultural authenticity (Guia 2016; Kešić and Duyvendak 2020). Building on the nativism literature and drawing on insights cultural identity theory (Tajfel and Turner 1979; Turner 1987; Ellemers 1993), this paper argues that nativist boundary-making can operate as a mechanism driving secularization at the individual level, transforming the majority religion from a taken-for-granted component of national identity into a contested social category. In doing so, the paper shifts scholarly attention away from linear, Western Europe–oriented secularization accounts (Wilson 1966/2016; Berger 1967; Norris and Inglehart 2004; Voas 2009) and toward inter-group cultural conflict as a source of religious exit.

This argument is developed through a case study of Kosovo’s Deçan Movement (Lëvizja e Deçanit). The Deçan movement operates as a visible activist network that intervenes in public debates over religion and national identity, explicitly promoting religious exit and cultural realignment in opposition to transnational Islamic influence (Higgins and Mejdini 2025). Movement activists have publicly urged individuals to abandon Islam and adopt either explicit secularism or, in some cases, Catholicism (Lëvizja e Deçanit 2024). These appeals are framed as acts of “cultural self-defense” against what activists portray as an externally imposed “extremist” threat.

Drawing on semi-structured interviews with movement activists, process tracing, and qualitative content analysis of movement speeches, public statements, and written texts, the analysis identifies three mechanisms linking foreign religious penetration to secularization: (1) Religious identity is socially recoded as out-group rather than in-group, severing its association with national belonging, (2) Association with negative stereotypes produces reputational degradation, undermining the legitimacy of religious authority and incentivizing religious deidentification, (3) Perceived social and symbolic threat activates either (a) secular self-identification, transforming latent nonbelief into an assertive, boundary-defining secular group identity, or (b) defection to socially viable alternative religious groups—most notably Catholicism in the Kosovo case.

The findings show that the emergence of Kosovo’s Deçan Movement highlights these mechanisms and represents a form of secularist nativism. In this process, Islam is actively reclassified as foreign, extreme, and socially destabilizing, while secularism is reimagined as an indigenous, European, and historically authentic alternative. This dynamic illustrates a central feature of secularization through nativist backlash: when transnational religious actors come to dominate the public representation of religion, religious identity undergoes reputational decline, raising the social costs of continued group identification.

By theorizing nativist backlash as a process of non-linear secularization, this study contributes to recent debates on backlash mechanisms (Braunstein 2022) and departs from classical secularization accounts centered on economic development or generational replacement. It reframes religious exit and secularization as political and cultural responses to religious actors, rather than outcomes of impersonal structural forces.

Author

• Sinan Kircova, University of Southern California