The dominant theories of nationalism have been humanistic – that is, oriented to a philosophically informed historical sociology. This holds even for theories influenced by poststructuralism or postcolonialism, which claim to take leave of “Western humanism.” Soper and Fetzer offer instead a quantitative paradigm for the study of religion and nationalism that yields significant comparative insight and seems to avoid many of the impasses haunting the standoff of modernists, ethnosymbolists, and postmodernists.

Their model consists of a typology of three distinct patterns for relating religion and nationalism and a limited range of contingent variables that will predict what type of nationalism will emerge at origin and under what circumstances and in what direction given types are liable to change. The conceptual framework is quite spartan, laid out in a single chapter and followed by three pairs of thickly detailed case studies examining one stable and one unstable instance of each type. The formalistic combination of types and variables aims to overcome the weakness of other theories of nationalism – that “they presume the monopolizing dominance of one of the three nationalism models” (p. 11). These models are defined by ideological and institutional links between religion and nation, situated along a spectrum from strong to weak. Religious nationalism (RN) makes official a religious interpretation of national identity bound to an established church or “multiple religion-state contacts (to a particular group)” (p. 11). Civil-religious nationalism (CRN) maintains a broad support for religion in general, including, perhaps, a vaguely religious image of national identity, but it formalizes no ties to a specific religion and takes the institutional form of “benign separation or pluralistic accommodation” (p. 11). Finally, secular nationalism (SN) separates religion from both national identity and institutions.

By capturing a wider range of possibilities and linking them to predictive variables, Soper and Fetzer unload a tacit normative element distorting many theories of nationalism, and they are careful to acknowledge the heuristic and incomplete nature of their own models. The variables shaping the emergence of a given nationalist type include (1) whether the dominant religious group contests or consents to the nationalist project, (2) the constitutional role of religion in the new nation, (3) demographics, and (4) the overall social and political strength of religion. The factors accounting for change differ little, since “how the losers in the initial battle over the nationalist narrative respond to their defeat, demographic changes over time, and how political actors challenge or coopt religious groups” largely correspond to variables (1), (3), and (4) respectively (p. 20). They mention but do not isolate as distinct variables the role of political and religious elites as well as the prevalence of internal and external threats. The coordination of these variables to types, they argue, leads to empirically testable predictive theorems to be substantiated by case studies.

The economy and applicability of this theory is impressive, and it may well signal yet another competing paradigm for the study of nationalism, but the quantitative model presented here faces at least three significant challenges. The first is its uniformly quantitative approach. Decisive for Soper and Fetzer is the degree rather than the character of linkages between religious and national identities and institutions, but the number of ideological and institutional “contacts” is generally an expression of political principles, especially those of political secularism. Only by discriminating between more individualistic or collectivistic forms of nationalism – and in the latter, between civic and ethnic forms – can we tell the difference between, for example, French and Soviet models of SN or democratic and extremist versions of RN, let alone make sense of movements such as ISIS and Nazism. Any theory of nationalism claiming predictive power will certainly have to account for the range of “aggressive” forms, and quantitative measures alone are insufficient (p. 16). The broad literature on secularism in recent social theory also suggests that the nature of the religion in play is far more consequential than Soper and Fetzer allow. Second, the construction of the quantitative variables appears narrow or redundant, nearly reducible to demographics (3). For example, the constitutional status of religion (2) is definitional, not predictive, and the social and political strength of a religion (4) will usually be a function of demographics (3), which also determine the efficacy of contest and consent (1). So religious uniformity is the main predictor of RN, but without exploring the slippage between social and political capital that is mediated by political principles, it is hard to explain why a religiously near-uniform nation such as Turkey could embrace (impose) SN. Similarly, these metrics cannot clarify why Nehru’s SN won out over Gandhi’s CRN in India or why the Bolsheviks succeeded in Russia. A number of other variables come into view here – not just the values and relative power of elites, but economic issues or class conflict, colonialist histories, and perhaps something akin to Gellner’s “time zones” – all of which point to a third set of challenges concerning their case studies. The selection is balanced, but the absence of Islamic or communist modes of nationalism almost certainly obscures relevant tendencies, and if Israel is not a compelling example of CRN, one may wonder why the type is so rare. The authors also neglect important transnational patterns, particularly the tension between cosmopolitan elites and populist backlashes, as well as the economic forces of globalization, which have a common and lengthy modern genealogy.

Many of these questions are in fact addressed in the case studies, and a more careful reading would explain how Soper and Fetzer might abstract from their empirical analyses to further variables and more cogent predictive theorems. A critical reconstruction of their argument would also outline how such theorems require a reconciliation of quantitative and humanistic paradigms in a theory of social evolution guided not only by the constraints of possible models and variables but also the historically deeper “institutional and symbolic path dependencies” partially screened out by the quantitative model (p. 14). The theoretical framework will need not only expansion but thorough renovation to incorporate themes that have long determined the study of nationalism, particularly its European origins and the normative questions raised by the possibility of a post-national constellation. Such prospects aside, this is an excellent book – precise, detailed, and remarkably original. It should receive a broad readership.