At least since Max Weber linked Protestantism with the spirit of capitalism and used religion to explain the divergent histories of northern (Protestant) and southern (Catholic and Orthodox) Europe a century ago, observers of religion, culture, and nationalism have rather automatically linked national identities with traditional religious identities, usually assuming the former to be subservient to the latter. Two world wars after Weber's seminal work, Peter Berger and others furthered the argument, proposing that modernity, in all of its myriad forms, undercut the institutional and ideological power of religion, compelling everyone toward an individualism in religion that rendered heresy, no longer a sin but a virtual imperative. Religion in general, and Christianity in particular, had moved in the early modern era from the universal to the national. In the twentieth century it was becoming a purely personal matter if not simply a matter of taste, preference, and, ultimately, irrelevance.
Slavica Jakelić argues differently. The modernity experienced in Britain, France and Germany was not the same as that experienced elsewhere. Though her attention is focused on the periphery of Europe (the Balkans, as well as Poland and Ireland) her argument has broad implications for religious studies well beyond these regions. A definition of religion that conflates religion with belief might work well in Protestant countries but is meaningless in societies where religion serves as the focus of a people's identity (as it does in Bosnia, Croatia, Slovenia, Greece, Ireland, and Poland). In such places, one does not choose to be Catholic, Orthodox, or Muslim any more than one chooses to be Bosnian, Croatian, Irish, or Polish. Nor is religious identity necessarily consistent with belief or ritual observance. One can be militantly Catholic or Orthodox while holding only the most minimal communion with the Church and the deepest skepticism of its teachings. Rather, one is born into these religious communities just as surely as one is born into a national community, and participation in one is often inseparable from participation in the other. For these religious communities Jakelić has coined the phrase “collectivistic religions.” Such religious identities are ascribed to members of the historical community rather than being chosen by them, and to choose differently—to convert to Islam or to a Protestant denomination, for example—would be seen by the rest of the community, and likely by oneself, as a betrayal of the nation.
Theories of modernity, and the example of Western Europe, would suggest that as these peripheral European societies become increasingly integrated into a secularized Europe (and into a European Union which insists on religious freedom for membership) then collectivistic religious identities would weaken. This weakening has not happened in the places Jakelić has studied, except in Slovenia where, for a variety of reasons and in spite of its numerical predominance, the Roman Catholic Church has been unable to exert the kind of influence it has enjoyed in post-communist Croatia and Poland. Collectivistic religion, Jakelić argues, is not a remnant of the past but, like fundamentalism and other belief oriented Christianities, a product of modernity—a cultural adaptation to social change. It has not been studied as such because, until now, no effective theoretical model has existed to analyze it. Jakelić has provided just such a model.
One of the crucial components of a collectivistic religious community is an identifiable Other against which the religious/national community can collect and identify itself. During the centuries of Ottoman rule, Islam provided a convenient Other for the development of a Serbian Orthodox identity, just as Russian Orthodoxy and latterly communism, provided an opposing Other against which Polish Catholics could find an identity. British Protestants served a similar role in the formation of an Irish Catholic identity. In Slovenia, by contrast, no such readily identifiable Other was on hand, either in the early modern era or in the late twentieth century. This permitted post-communist Slovenia to develop into a secular liberal democracy where, though most Slovenes are Catholic, the Church is unable to exert much influence on government or society at large.
Jakelić begins her introduction with a simple statement (the only simple statement one encounters for the next two hundred pages), “This is a book about religion and belonging.” Whether defined by as a shared set of beliefs, a historical community, or both, a religious community remains something to which one belongs. To be born into a collectivistic religious community can provide a sense of shared community that is increasingly rare in secular society, and highly valued in religiously collectivistic ones. But belonging comes at a high cost: personal freedom.
As a sociologist of religion, Jakelić focuses on the community. The place of individual decision-making, individual freedom, individual needs and longings, receives scant attention until the closing pages of the book. It is precisely here, where the solitary soul struggles between communal belonging and individual striving after meaning, that Jakelić leaves us, not with an answer but with a closing question, “Why, when it comes to religion, do so many people feel as if they have no choices to make?”
Why indeed? A groundbreaking monograph like this will surely give birth to scores of answers. Collectivistic religious communities will continue to influence society and politics in Europe for the foreseeable future, but they will also find themselves in competition with ideologies subversive to any sort of collective identity, including the collectivity of religion and nation: consumerism, nationalism, and football, but most forcibly, individualism. Jakelić makes no predictions for the future of collectivistic Christianities in Europe. She does, however, provide a theoretical model of analysis which should become part of the standard toolkit of anyone who seeks to understand religion, identity, and social change in the twenty-first century.
