1. Introduction
In recent times, religious nationalism has emerged as a major basis for identity and mobilization in many countries in Asia. Be it Islamic nationalists protesting Ahok’s alleged blasphemous statements in Indonesia,Footnote 1 Buddhist monks rallying against perceived Muslim invasion in Myanmar,Footnote 2 or Hindu nationalists attacking asserted encroachment by religious minorities in India,Footnote 3 there appears to be a growing complex and intimate intertwining of religion and nationalism, which has given rise to political divisiveness and even violence in some instances. While modern nationalism was previously often thought to be an inherently secular phenomenon,Footnote 4 this belief is no longer defensible in the face of movements across the world, including in Asia, which depend on the comingling of religion and nationalism.Footnote 5 This phenomenon requires close study, not least since the religious-nationalist movements we are witnessing today are not rooted in any one religious tradition or limited to any particular sociopolitical system.
As has been observed, there is no “simple or straightforward pattern” in terms of how religion interacts with nationalism.Footnote 6 At certain moments in history, it has seemed that religion was closely associated with nationalism, while, at other points, nationalism has been defined in opposition to religion. Between coalescing reinforcement and conflictual opposition lies a whole spectrum of relationships between religion and nationalism. Thus, it has been argued that religion can influence nationalism to varying degreesFootnote 7 and that there could even be different models of religious nationalism.
The rise of religious nationalism has been associated with outbreaks of violence, including in Asia.Footnote 8 Indeed, there has been increased attention on the relationship between religion, nationalism, and violence in recent times due to a dramatic upsurge in religious-based violence.Footnote 9 In this Special Issue, however, we want to examine the impact of religious nationalism on the religious liberties of individuals and groups, even where that does not rise to the level of outright violence. The articles in this issue focus instead on the question of how the phenomenon impacts the protection and promotion of religious freedom in these countries. In other words, we are looking specifically at the connections between religious nationalism and religious freedom in various Asian states. The aim is to show that religious nationalism has a far more extensive and deeper impact than violence against groups. Religious nationalism has deleterious effects on freedom of thought, conscience, and religion that take many forms. Violence is often the culmination of increasing constriction of liberties for religious groups, particularly religious minorities (including minorities within majorities), and the impact of religious nationalism must be identified and critiqued from an earlier stage of its development.
As a group, these articles provide evidence that, as religious nationalists employ narratives that speak of resurgence, perpetuation, or defence of religious identity as vital for the preservation of the nation, the spread of religious nationalism has led to a constricting of freedoms for religious minorities as well as for minorities within majorities. It has also resulted in a more hostile environment for advocates of religious freedom for all, as they can be demonized as not only anti-religion, but also anti-nation. Thus, proposals advocating the freedom to choose one’s religion are sometimes resisted as a betrayal of the “nation,” if extended to the religious majority. Granting equal rights to non-majority religious groups or dissenters within the majority religion can also be characterized as undermining the “nation.” Such proclivities or strategies contribute to difficulties in advancing the promotion and protection of religious freedom in the region. Thus, this issue’s focus on religious freedom builds upon existing scholarship on the causes and components in religious nationalism and its impact on violence and security, and provides an intervening perspective of law, including constitutional law. As we describe more fully in the conclusion, these essays shine a light on a number of important emerging issues that deserve further scholarly elucidation, including important questions involving religion and politics, religion understood as status rather than as a human right, the capture of various religious traditions by extremists or zealots, and the fraught relationship between religion and citizenship.
2. Religious nationalism: a global phenomenon
Nationalism is a complex concept that has been “notoriously difficult to define”Footnote 10 and accordingly could be said to be susceptible to many conceptions. There is a vast and expanding literature on nationalism. Seminal work by earlier theorists conceptualized nationalism as historically and culturally constructed. Hans Kohn, in his groundbreaking study, argued that nationalism is a “state of mind”—a form of “group consciousness” that is the “product of historical, social, and intellectual conditions.”Footnote 11 Accordingly, nationalism may take on concrete expressions that carry different meanings for different peoples at different ages.Footnote 12
At one end of the spectrum, nationalism might represent nothing more remarkable than the observation that global politics is and will remain in large measure a domain of nation-states. Nationalism on this conception is often juxtaposed to globalism or global cosmopolitanism, which tends to portray citizens whose lives are centred on a community of “global elites”, who travel easily and often, and adopt internationalist mindsets as being hostile to the parochialism of place. The contrast between the “patriot”Footnote 13 and the “citizen of the world”Footnote 14 is often complicated by elite-vs.-populist narratives in politics. The concurrent rise of nationalism and cosmopolitanism in global politics is seen at times as a “paradox of modernity”Footnote 15 and at other times as complementary projects.Footnote 16
It is important nonetheless to emphasize that not only is there a spectrum of nationalist views (from minimal to extreme)Footnote 17; there are also different forms of nationalism. The influential “Kohn’s Dichotomy”Footnote 18 differentiating the ethnic-cultural model of “Eastern” nationalism from the civic-liberal “Western” model underpins one major distinction in nationalism literature.Footnote 19 Ethnic nationalism emphasizes “blood and soil” as being at the heart of national identity.Footnote 20 Ethnonationalism draws sharp distinctions between “us” and “them,” with the “them” often being present among the us. Boundaries between who counts and does not count (as citizens or, in any event, as favoured citizens) are drawn on ethnic, cultural, biological, or religious lines. In practice, ethnic nationalism is highly discriminatory, carving out classes of citizens for second-class status and adopting negative attitudes towards immigrants, much less refugees. Twentieth-century history is littered with cautionary tales about the violence, purges, ethnic cleansings, and even genocides that are carried out in the name of ethnic purity.
In contrast, civic nationalism posits the view that nations are made up of shared legal or institutional traditions that create a kind of glue that holds the society together. Civic nationalism can be quite inclusive and pluralistic, since it is not based on religious or ethnic identity, but rather on the shared embrace of a set of civic values—such as democracy, constitutionalism, rule of law, and individual rights. Civic nationalism may prioritize “citizens” above others, but its conception of citizenship is not based on ethnic or religious identity, or exclusively upon place of birth. Civic nationalism has been depicted as “forward-looking” while “ethnocultural nationalism is seen as backward-looking” as its “vision of the community is located in myths of the past.”Footnote 21 However, civic nationalism can be fragile or unstable, and may deteriorate into forms of nationalism that are more discriminatory and exclusivist, such as those based on ethnicity and religion. Indeed, civic nationalists from RousseauFootnote 22 to BellahFootnote 23 find themselves pressured into adopting forms of ethnic or religious dimensions to their nationalisms, which become more “nationalistic” and less “civic” as the emphasis shifts to ethnic and religious roots of the national identity. This form of nationalism may manifest itself as something akin to a harmless or laudable patriotism, or it may slide into something much closer to an ethnic or religious permutation. Some critics further take the position that civic nationalism does not exist, taking the position that “[a]ll nationalism is ethnically predicated and those who employ the term nationalism to refer to civic identity or civic loyalty are confusing patriotism with nationalism.”Footnote 24
Beyond the ethnic-vs.-civic dichotomy, it has also become common in recent times to juxtapose religious from secular nationalism as competing ideologies of order.Footnote 25 Intertwined with secularization theories, secular nationalism sees the decline of religion as closely linked with modernization and sees religion as eventually confined to the private sphere and out of political life. Institutionally, secular nationalism posits the separation of church and state as well as the decline of religious power as natural and inevitable.Footnote 26 In fact, there was a tendency until recently to characterize modern nationalism as an inherently secular phenomenon.Footnote 27 As Smith points out, these modernist theories of nationalism “relegate religion and the sacred to the premodern past.”Footnote 28 Secular nationalism posits that loyalty to and identification with the “secular” nation superseded all other pre-existing commitments.Footnote 29
There have been more recent attempts to identify religious nationalism as a distinctive phenomenon, distinct not only from secular nationalism, but also from ethnic nationalism. On some accounts, religious nationalism has been subsumed under ethnic nationalism, especially in places where there are large religious majorities that map onto ethnic classifications, or where different religious groups living in one nation-state are divided largely along ethnic, racial, or linguistic lines. Religious nationalisms can share many of the excesses and threats of ethnic nationalism, often amplified by religious doctrines that weave narratives of superiority or grievance that are used to justify “othering” those who do not belong to the ethno/religious group.
The relationship between religion and nationalism is complex. It is not always clear whether religion is to be seen as distinct from nationalism. For instance, in Brubaker’s four approaches to understanding the relationship between religion and nationalism, religion and nationalism could be understood as an analogous phenomenon, and religion may also explain certain aspects of nationalism. Furthermore, Brubaker argues that religion could also be approached as a part of nationalism. In his account, therefore, it is only one approach to see religious nationalism as a distinctive form of nationalism.Footnote 30 Eastwood and Prevalakis’s four “classes of families of views” highlight the complexities of the relationship between religion and nationalism.Footnote 31 According to them, nationalism can be seen as a form of religion, as a replacement of religion, and/or as causing the displacement of religion. According to this, religious nationalism could be viewed as one subtype of nationalism.
In their recent work, Soper and Fetzer identify three models of nationalism according to different degrees of influence that religion has over nationalism. These are religious nationalism, secular nationalism, and civil-religious nationalism.Footnote 32 What is interesting in their taxonomy is that religion is seen as the variable, whether viewed in opposition (as in secular nationalism) or in conflation (as in religious nationalism). Civil-religious nationalism, in their taxonomy, stands in between whereby nationalism takes on a civil form but draws from religious concepts and could even be said to be dependent on religious forms. Employing the idea of civil religion, this civil-religious nationalism depends on a sense of solidarity and collective identity among people based on shared religious and political values.
We do not here attempt to adjudicate or resolve these conceptual and definitional varieties of understandings of the relationship between religion and nationalism. We also accept that there could be more than one form of religious nationalism. What we want to point out is that the literature accepts that there is a possible distinctive category called religious nationalism and that it may have historical, cultural, and even political roots. This religious nationalism may even have developed to counter another distinctive phenomenon, namely secular nationalism, whereby religious nationalism could be seen as a response from religious elites to the loss of social and political influence.Footnote 33 It may also be analyzed as a “failure of secular nationalism to bridge the gap between public values and the political community.”Footnote 34 Further, the tendency of civic nationalism to embrace religious dimensions might make it vulnerable to redirection or capture. Like all nationalisms, religious nationalisms pose challenges to pluralism and liberal constitutional democracy. These challenges, while perhaps not unique, are distinctive and distinctively problematic.
In practice, religious nationalism often manifests in a close political alliance between a religious group (usually a religion that enjoys majority status in a society) with political power, in particular a ruling political group. Religious nationalism in this broad sense is clearly on the ascendance in many parts of the world, as exemplified by the alliance between President Vladimir Putin and the Russian Orthodox Church in Russia,Footnote 35 in Hindu nationalism and the governing party in India,Footnote 36 with state-sanctioned Sunni Islam in Turkey, and certain ethnic Buddhist movements in Myanmar,Footnote 37 to name a few.
The articles in this Special Issue focus on religious nationalism, although echoes of the other permutations of nationalism also resonate throughout, especially ethnic nationalism. Thus, while the challenges of religious nationalism may not be strictly sui generis, they are nevertheless a kind of retronym that reminds us of a certain way of orienting nationalisms that have significant contemporary implications.
In the context of Asia, we found most useful the work of Gorski and Türkmen-Dervişoğlu, arguing for the treatment of the religious field as potentially autonomous from the cultural-ethnic field.Footnote 38 They define religious nationalism as “a social movement that claims to speak in the name of the nation and that defines the nation in terms of religion.”Footnote 39 Religion is not merely an incidental feature of ethnicity, but predominates in this definition of religious nationalism. The nation is asserted to be “religiously based”Footnote 40 and religion is “central” to conceptions of belonging to the nation.Footnote 41 Gorski and Türkmen-Dervişoğlu’s work is also helpful because they define religious nationalism as more than the politicization of religion, which is how the phenomenon that we associate with religious nationalism here has been largely characterized in Asia. For some time now, the intertwining of religion with politics, particularly as politicians increasingly invoke religion to serve their political aims, has been studied and criticized as a distortion of religion by politics. This “politicization of religion” is seen as the instrumentalization of religion for political interests. While helpful, politicization of religion, as a concept, does not sufficiently capture the broader phenomenon that takes place beyond the speeches of politicians, but more generally in society. It also does not adequately, in our view, account for the mutually constitutive and interlinked phenomenon that emerges when politicians instrumentalize religion. Religious nationalism, in our view, better captures this phenomenon and draws attention to the formation of nationalism as both social and political.
Gorski and Türkmen-Dervişoğlu’s work characterizes these social and political movements as distinctive because they claim to speak on behalf of a nation and define the nation in religious terms. This also points to the broader impact of religious nationalism and accordingly the deleterious impact on religious liberties and other liberties. As religious nationalists seek to align and sharpen the boundaries of religious and political communities, this results in a very high level of political animosity to those outside of it.Footnote 42 Thus, a religious dissenter is also easily characterized as being a national traitor, and viceversa. This ideological commitment within religious nationalism undermines social and political approaches to pluralism, which have been crucial in many Asian states. As we show later, Asia is the most religiously pluralistic region in the world and pluralist approaches to constitutional government, including in the protection of constitutional rights, have generally been seen as necessary to ensure peaceful coexistence. However, increasing alignment of religious and national boundaries captured in this phenomenon of religious nationalism has the worrying capacity to neutralize the “cross-cutting cleavages” that could otherwise vitiate the centrifugal tendencies of pluralistic societies.Footnote 43 In the context of pluralistic Asia, religious nationalism is fundamentally anchored in a rejection of ethnic, religious, cultural, and even legal plurality. Accordingly, religious nationalism may need to be rethought and reconceptualized when discussing Asia.
3. Regional trends: Asia as a contested space for religious nationalism
The data show that Asia is the most religiously diverse region in the world. According to the Pew Research Centre’s 2010 religious-diversity survey, “half of the most religiously diverse countries are in Asia-Pacific region.”Footnote 44 The region has 24% Muslims, 25% Hindus, 12% Buddhists, 9% are adherents of folk religions, 7% Christians, and 21% unaffiliated among its population.Footnote 45 The distinctiveness of Asia can be starkly compared with the levels of religious diversity in other regions; Europe and North America have moderate levels of religious diversity, while the Latin America-Caribbean and Middle East-North Africa regions have low degrees of religious diversity.Footnote 46
There is also intra-regional diversity. Consider the religious demographics of the ten nations that comprise ASEAN, the Association of Southeast Asian Nations.Footnote 47 The Philippines has a Christian majority of over 90%.Footnote 48 Brunei (75.1%),Footnote 49 Indonesia (87.2%),Footnote 50 and Malaysia (63.7%)Footnote 51 each have sizable Muslim majorities and politics that are strongly influenced by Islamic factors. Cambodia (96.9%),Footnote 52 Laos (66%),Footnote 53 Burma (80.1%),Footnote 54 and Thailand (93.2%)Footnote 55 all have Buddhist majorities that wield considerable political influence. Vietnam is officially a secular state that nevertheless has dynamic religious activity, in the form of Buddhism, a variety of forms of Christianity, as well as a dynamic range of indigenous, syncretic, and newly created groups.Footnote 56 Moreover, in each of the ASEAN countries, groups that are a majority in some places are a minority elsewhere in ASEAN.Footnote 57 For the Member States of ASEAN, learning how to live with the religious pluralism that exists throughout the region and resisting the temptation of majorities in one place to create nationalist movements that discriminate against or even persecute other religious groups are significant challenges to the political, economic, and integration ambitions of ASEAN.Footnote 58 Religious divisions and hostilities could also impact interstate relations, including regional integration for ASEAN. Political and economic alliance within ASEAN could be undermined if religious nationalism leads to serious violations of religious liberties and other liberties. The treatment of the Rohingya Muslims in Myanmar created tension within the bloc, even in the face of ASEAN’s usual non-intervention principle.Footnote 59
The religious demographics and politics of South Asia are similarly complex. Of the eight countries in South Asia, four countries have Muslim supermajorities: Afghanistan (99.7%),Footnote 60 Bangladesh (89.8%),Footnote 61 Maldives (98.4%),Footnote 62 and Pakistan (96.4%).Footnote 63 Hinduism is the majority in two countries: Nepal (80.7%)Footnote 64 and India (79.5%).Footnote 65 Buddhism is the majority in two countries: Bhutan (74.7%)Footnote 66 and Sri Lanka (69.3%).Footnote 67 Religious identity and cleavages are dominant factors in politics in nearly all of these countries. Tensions based on groups that are a minority in one country (e.g. Muslims in India) and a majority in a neighbouring country (Muslims in Pakistan) lie at the heart of challenges facing these countries in their foreign relations and internal politics.
These demographic breakdowns do not begin to address the complexities of history, geography, and culture that often break along religious lines. Besides demographic patterns, the type and practice of religion/s in particular contexts are clearly factors in shaping the forms of religious nationalisms. Scott Hibbard’s work, for instance, suggests that how a given religious tradition is interpreted determines the possibility for “a politics of primordial compromise.”Footnote 68 Among his four conceptions of social order—inclusive religion, inclusive secularism, exclusive religion, and exclusive secularism—religious nationalism is necessarily grounded in an exclusive conception of religion.Footnote 69
Notably, religion has played a considerable role in the formation of nationalist movements in Asia. The national identities of various Asian countries, including India, Pakistan, and Sri Lanka, are “suffused with religious narrative and myth, symbolism, and ritual.”Footnote 70 Indeed, Peter van der Veer argues that religious nationalism in India builds on forms of religious identity and modes of religious communications that have themselves been in a constant process of transformation during both the colonial and post-colonial periods.Footnote 71 He argues that religious antagonism has been a constitutive part of nation-building in India.Footnote 72 The post-colonial context has furthermore fuelled the entanglement of religion with nationalism, with religious nationalism emerging as an anti-Western, anti-imperialist movement.Footnote 73 In some cases, religious nationalism emerged to buttress claims by “indigenous” groups to restore control over the nation, and to exclude and marginalize ethnic/religious groups that immigrated under colonial governments. The periodic labelling of Chinese and Indian Malaysians as pendatang (aliens),Footnote 74 the non-nationalization of Rohingyas in Myanmar, and the denationalization of Assam residents in India are just a few manifestations of the adverse consequences of rising religious nationalism in Asia.
Besides high levels of religious diversity, Asian countries also have varying degrees of democratic government and this is another important factor for the rise of religious nationalism. Indeed, one of the world’s seven absolute monarchies, Brunei, is located in Asia. According to the Economist Intelligence Unit’s 2018 Democracy Index, no country in Asia (not including Australasia) is a full democracy. A significant number of countries in Asia are labelled as flawed democracies (South Korea, Japan, Taiwan, India, Timor-Leste, Malaysia, Philippines, Mongolia, Indonesia, Singapore, Sri Lanka, Hong Kong, and Papua New Guinea), several are hybrid regimes (Fiji, Bangladesh, Bhutan, Nepal, Thailand, and Pakistan), and the rest are classified as authoritarian (Myanmar, Cambodia, China, Afghanistan, Laos, Vietnam, and North Korea).Footnote 75 Interestingly, there is no clear correlation between the level of democracy in a country and religious nationalism. Indeed, among the countries classified as “authoritarian,” only Myanmar has experienced a strong surge of religious-nationalist movement in recent times.
Where there may be a link between religious nationalism and democracy is perhaps where there is a transitional process. Indeed, scholars have identified democratization as correlated with religious nationalism.Footnote 76 After all, one intended feature of democratization is the opening-up of space for political activism. However, this could lead to less than liberal outcomes where religious actors and/or political actors became free from the constraints of authoritarian regimes to form political movements and mobilize the people on the basis of religion. Thus, as has been observed, the spread of democracy also reliably led to the rise of religious nationalism in various parts of the world,Footnote 77 including in Asia. It bears emphasizing that religious nationalism need not lead to autocratic politics,Footnote 78 but autocratic politics has at times found it necessary to buttress its legitimacy through religious nationalism.
4. Religious freedom: a freedom under threat?
The right to religious freedom is well established under international law and is included in most Constitutions in the world.Footnote 79 Indeed, the right is considered “the oldest of the internationally recognized human rights,” having been afforded treaty protection as early as the Peace of Westphalia in 1648.Footnote 80 Today, the right to freedom of thought, conscience, and religion—a wider formulation than religious freedom—is an integral part of international human rights; it is promised under the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, as well as the 1981 Declaration on the Elimination of All Forms of Intolerance and of Discrimination Based on Religion or Belief. These international documents have been said to embody universalism, freedom, and equality as fundamental features.Footnote 81 Over time, a consensus within international law as well as among many domestic jurisdictions has emerged as to the normative core of the right. Within this international consensus, the forum internum is largely considered inviolable and protects the freedom to have, adopt, maintain, or change religion or belief. While limits could be placed on the forum externum that involves the manifestation of one’s religion or belief in teaching, practice, worship, and observance, these limits are often viewed with restraint. Furthermore, other aspects that have been articulated as being part of the freedom of thought, conscience, and religion include non-coercion, nondiscrimination, rights of parents and guardians, and the corporation rights of religious communities.Footnote 82
Despite the established nature of this right, there remain serious gaps in the level of protection for religious freedom throughout the world. Reports by international organizations, government agencies, and non-governmental agencies point to continuing violations of religious freedom worldwide. Bielefeldt, the UN Special Rapporteur on Freedom of Religion or Belief, has called religious freedom a “human right under pressure.”Footnote 83 The nature and extent of threats to religious freedom, however, vary across countries and regions. In Europe, the commitment to the freedom of thought, conscience, and religion has been challenged by restrictive laws and policies, such as the French ban on the wearing of ostentatious religious symbols in public schools and the prohibition of the face veil in public spaces in several European states, which disproportionately affect the Muslim population there. In both Europe and the US, there are violations of religious-conscience claims, controversies arising from the rights of parents regarding the education of their children, growing conflict between religious freedom and nondiscrimination claims, as well as clashes between religious conscientious objections to general state laws. At the same time, there are increasing challenges to the presence of religion in the public sphere, such as public displays of religious symbols, seen as coercive to those who do not subscribe to the majority religion.Footnote 84 In the context of the US, Glendon points to “waning consensus on the importance of religious freedom,” as well as “open hostility to religion among opinion leaders in the media, the world of entertainment, and the academy.”Footnote 85
The register of discourse in Asia on the right to religious freedom is at a different level, though no less existential. The right to freedom of religion is included in constitutional texts of most countries in the region. The right to freedom of thought, conscience, and religion is also included in the ASEAN Human Rights Declaration, the only human rights document in the region. However, the way this freedom is understood varies widely among Asian states, and the scope and content of this right remain highly contested in many Asian jurisdictions.Footnote 86 Furthermore, a stronger emphasis on state or government interests within Asian jurisdictions means that there tends to be undervaluation and underprotection of religious freedom.Footnote 87
One persistent problem with regard to the protection of religious freedom has been selectivity. As Bielefeldt observes generally, “in some States only the followers of the monotheistic ‘religions of revelation’ receive recognition” while, in some other states, “‘traditional religions’ or ‘known religions’” are prioritized to the marginalization or exclusion of “less known, new or alternative communities.”Footnote 88 Religious nationalism potentially aggravates such differentiation between majority and minority religions. The rise of religious nationalism in the region has made religion and religious freedom a part of the political discourse on inter- and intra-group dynamics, resulting in the politicization of the freedom of religion itself. In proclaiming a unitary “national” identity based on a single religion, religious nationalism would strengthen efforts to characterize new or alternative religious strains within the majority religion as “deviant” or “heretic.” The freedom becomes embroiled in political contestation among majority–minority groups: majority groups, striving to assert their privileged status, would seek to impose laws that restrict the rights of minorities to profess, manifest, and practise their religion. While such restrictions have been justified as necessary to maintain intergroup harmony, their effect has been to ensure a priority of one religion over others. The politicization of the freedom of religion further manifests itself in the use of the term to advance and resist restrictions on religious-group rights whereby both the proponents and the opponents of discriminatory laws employ the language of religious freedom to advocate their respective positions.Footnote 89
Religious nationalism has serious implications for freedom of thought, conscience, and religion—for both those who belong to the aligned religious group, as well as those belonging to non-aligned groups, including the secular. Threats to non-aligned groups and individuals are more obvious. The empowerment of religious majorities, especially where they serve the purposes of religious nationalism, has resulted in the marginalization of religious and non-religious minorities. This often contributes to social and religious conflict.Footnote 90 There are also substantial threats to aligned groups and individuals in those groups; these relate to both the independence and the integrity of the aligned religion, as well as the rights of dissenters who belong to the aligned religious group. For instance, if a political movement is discredited, this can have negative repercussions for a religious group that is viewed as being too closely aligned with the discredited government. Observers have noted, for example, that the close relationship of the Catholic Church with Franco’s regime in Spain resulted in tremendous harm to the standing and integrity of the Catholic Church when the Franco regime was finally overthrown. Religious freedom, including the freedom not to believe or embrace any religion, tends to be at risk where there is mutual alignment between the state and religion.Footnote 91 At the most fundamental level, this is what this Special Issue is about: the implications of religious nationalism for religious freedom, as well as other related human rights such as freedom of speech, freedom of association, freedom of the press, and freedom of assembly.
5. Contributions to this Special Issue: an overview
In light of the weighty issues arising from the intersection of religious nationalism and religious freedom, the articles in this Special Issue seek to illuminate these issues by focusing on a region where religious nationalism appears to be gaining momentum—Asia. The issue starts with two articles that examine the relationship between religious nationalism and the construction of the nation.
Gilad Abiri’s article on “Intimate Rivals: The Freedom of Religious Nationalism” provides a dynamic view of the relationship between religious nationalism and state (secular) nationalism, seeing them as intimate rivals. Under some conditions, he argues, religious nationalism is able to coexist with secular state nationalism, as they are both able to present themselves as carriers of the authentic character of the nation-state. However, they are also rivals because they promote competing visions of society and politics, and ultimately diverge on the political identity of the state. In employing Israel and India as his primary case-studies, Abiri points to this dynamic coexistence and competition, which serves to validate religious majoritarian claims and undermine the liberties of religious and secular minorities. Thus, he argues that a rethinking of the nature and content of religious freedom may be needed in the face of religious nationalists’ discriminatory and exclusionary approaches to religious and secular minorities.
In comparison, Peter van der Veer’s contribution on “Minority Rights and Hindu Nationalism in India” examines the process of nationalization of religion that underpins political antagonism between Hindu and Muslims in India. This has allowed majoritarian mobilization within the democratic state that coalescences around religious antagonism. Such antagonism manifests in religious violence, which van der Veer sees as intimately connected with the freedom of conscience. Religious violence, it would seem, serves as a tool for Hindu nationalists to forcibly reconvert Muslims whom they see as forcibly converted Hindus. In order to highlight the importance of “majoritarian nationalism” as the controlling factor in the treatment of religious minorities, van der Veer examines nationalism in China, which may not be “religious” in nature, but which similarly underpins an antagonistic relationship with religious minorities. The comparative study with China is also introduced to highlight that such religious majoritarianism can manifest in similar ways in a non-democratic state. Accordingly, he posits that “democratic elections are not the core problem, but nationalism is.”
If there is one theme that ties the first two articles together with the third, it is an underlying critique of secularism. Jeffrey A. Redding’s “A Secular Failure: Sectarianism and Communalism in Shayara Bano v. Union of India” exposes the limitations of secular governance and the continuing salience of religious communalism in India. He presents a deep critique of secularism as such: insofar as secular governance serves to protect religious freedom and achieve social peace in a pluralistic society, it has failed to do so. The controversy as well as aftermath to the landmark Supreme Court case declaring a common Indian Muslim divorce practice (triple talaq) unconstitutional reflects this failure. Redding’s examination thus problematizes secularism in India as an effective constitutional framework through which to protect religious freedom. In identifying the clear sectarian lines in this particular case, Redding argues that the case reflects the failure of the secular project in India. Instead, religious sectarianism, flamed by nationalism, continues to divide the country, with deleterious consequences for religious minorities.
That India features prominently in these first three articles is perhaps not surprising, considering the sophistication with which Hindu nationalists in India have been able to accrete and aggregate power in recent years, with damaging impact on religious minorities. However, one crucial feature of this collection of articles is that they were selected to demonstrate that religious nationalism is not unique or especially conducive to any particular religion. In Abiri’s account, Zionist nationalism in Israel features as another paradigmatic case of religious nationalism. In the remaining articles, authors examine the impact of religious nationalism associated with two different religions—Islam and Buddhism.
Deasy Simandjuntak’s article shows a distinctive impact of Islamic activism on the understanding of citizenship in Indonesia. In her article on “Disciplining the Accepted and Amputating the Deviants: Religious Nationalism and Segregated Religious Citizenship in Indonesia,” Simandjuntak examines how Islamic conservative groups in Indonesia have employed the narrative of Islamic nationalism to discriminate against religious minorities. She shows that groups have mobilized around state-sanctioned religions, and used these religions as bases for inclusion and exclusion. This has resulted in differentiated experience of citizenship—what she calls “segregated citizenship” in which the values and interests of the majority religion are prioritized against those of the “accepted” minority religions and the “unaccepted” (or deemed “deviant”) minority groups. Her account further highlights the adverse impact of religious nationalism not only on religious minorities distinct from majorities, but also on minorities within majorities. Thus, there are “accepted” minorities and “unaccepted” minorities, the latter being minorities who do not subscribe to state-sanctioned religions. These are marginalized and excluded in such a way that their citizenship rights, including their religious-freedom rights, are severely limited. Religious minorities within majorities often face the most severe discrimination, as they are seen as direct threats to the coherence required in sustaining religious nationalism.
The precarious position of minorities within religious majorities is also manifest in Khemthong Tonsakulrungruang’s article on “The Revival of Buddhist Nationalism in Thailand and Its Adverse Impact on Religious Freedom.” In Tonsakulrungruang’s article, it is Buddhism that fuels religious-nationalist sentiments. He traces the rise of Buddhist nationalism as being driven by two important social-political interests—with Thai Buddhism seeking to revive its decreasing hegemony over Thai society and Thai political conservatives looking for reinforcing sources of legitimacy and collective identity at a time of democratic regression. The rise of Buddhist nationalism has resulted primarily in the suppression of alternative narratives within Buddhism and the “prosecution” of errant monks. Like Simandjuntak’s article, Tonsakulrungruang’s account demonstrates that minorities within religious majorities do at times face the most severe restrictions of their religious freedom.
Lastly, Nyi Nyi Kyaw’s article on “The Excuse of (Il)legality in Discriminating and Persecuting Religious Minorities: Anti-Mosque Legal Violence in Myanmar” examines the use of statecraft and legal language to target religious buildings and undermine religious freedom. His article shows how law and ideas of legality can be used by the state to support religious nationalists’ demands and legalize restrictions of liberties and ultimately religious violence against minorities. Kyaw’s contribution further highlights the difficult relationship between religious nationalism and democracy or, more specifically in the context of Myanmar, democratization after prolonged military rule. He examines the occurrence of interreligious violence post 2012 and the consequent emergence of anti-mosque extremism and vigilantism as an outcome of religious nationalism in Myanmar.
In all, there are at least four insights that one can draw from this collection of papers focused on Asia. The first is the need to critically examine the historical construction of the state and the persistent relevance of the idea of a “nation,” despite the pluralistic nature of many Asian societies. Myths of the nation may not have been explicitly adopted in founding speeches and official discourse, but such myths about the “true” nation that existed prior to colonization and state independence could feed into the social psyche and operate as background ideology underpinning the state. Van der Veer’s contribution clearly shows this in the context of India. Furthermore, Abiri’s contribution shows that religious nationalism can serve to reinforce secular state nationalism, even while undermining it.
Second, it is necessary to examine the points of rupture that have resulted in the (re)emergence of religious nationalism. Tonsakulrungruang’s article, for instance, points to one type of rupture that could result in nationalism’s rearing its head and that is when there is a political crisis. Religion in its nationalist form is then reinvigorated to serve the purpose of overcoming that crisis.
Third, the contributions here show that there is a complex and dynamic relationship between religious nationalisms and the plural state. Simandjuntak’s contribution highlights a key aspect of religious nationalism, which is state acquiescence, if not outright support. Whereas the state may, as Peter van der Veer argues, embody certain religious-nationalist ideologies, in many Asian states, one can see a distinct movement that operates outside the state, though with state support. Kyaw’s contribution points to this close relationship between the state and religious-nationalist movements, whereby the state acquiesced to the violence by refusing to step in to prevent it, but may also be engaged in violations of rights and participating in violence against religious minorities. In pointing to Menchik’s term “Godly nationalism,” Simandjuntak, in her contribution, points to how religious nationalists not only constitute “an imagined community bound by a common, orthodox theism;” they are also able to “mobilize[] through the state in co-operation with religious organizations in society.”
Lastly, the role of law is critical, but not value-neutral. While a commitment to the rule of law is generally put forward as key to ensuring against violence, it is not always clear that a strong adherence to law is always sufficient. The contributions by Kyaw, Tonsakulrungruang, and Redding all show that law can be exploited to implement and legitimate the marginalization of religious minorities.
In this regard, while we acknowledge the recent insights proffered by critical scholars of religious freedom, whom Philpott and Shah have called “the new critics of religious freedom,”Footnote 92 it appears that the idea of the right to religious freedom may still have traction in countries within Asia, especially among religious minorities who are struggling to frame their defences against majoritarian excesses underpinned by religious nationalism. The critique, which is wide-ranging, is intuitively right in that attempts to take a reductionist perspective on religion have adverse consequences on the “lived religion” of individuals and groups outside of the usual Catholic/Protestant frame.Footnote 93 There is also a strong critique that religious freedom may have become a projection of ideology and a tool for hegemonic control, especially by the modern West.Footnote 94 Religion risks being reified and seen as the source of difference and conflict, without providing due attention to interrelated sources of conflict. However, it would not be accurate to remove religion from the framework of analysis, even if it is difficult to remove indeterminacy from the category of religion. Indeed, even Hurd acknowledges that, in problematizing religion in religious-freedom discourse, she does not mean to say that religious or sectarian difference is irrelevant to politics. She clarifies that her point is
to suggest rather than an uncritical reliance on sectarian explanations of events, processes, and political outcomes effaces the broader context and eclipses other modes of sociality and relationality—religious secular, both, neither—that compete with, downplay, ignore, or subvert the rigid lines of sectarian difference defended by those most invested in them.Footnote 95
Thus, even as we use the frame of religious freedom to analyze some of the worst violations of liberties motivated by religious nationalism in these Asian states, we take the position that claims about religious freedom are by no means merely universalist tools of hegemony, but are also constitutive tools that serve to defend, even if ineffectively, against religious majoritarianism. In this regard, religious freedom may be politics, but it is politics that could matter on the ground.
6. Conclusion
In conclusion, context matters. We assembled this group of scholars working on various aspects of religious nationalism and religious freedom in a range of Asian jurisdictions in order to showcase the multiplicity and multidimensional of this critical intersection. In highlighting the various forms of religious nationalism and their varying impact on religious minorities (including minorities within majorities), this Special Issue is meant to provide context to the issues of religious nationalism while contributing to further conceptual development in this area. There was no attempt to prescribe a single definition of religious nationalism or a fixed understanding of religious freedom. The contextual approach here is aimed at showing that ideas function differently in different contexts. Much like Scheppele’s insight encapsulated in the idea of “constitutional ethnography,” the approach is to examine “the logics of particular contexts as a way of illuminating complex interrelationships among political, legal, historical, social, economic, and cultural elements.”Footnote 96
Thus, while we are partial to Gorski and Türkmen-Dervişoğlu’s conception of religious nationalism, which is broad enough to encompass much of the understanding of religious nationalism here, this does not detract from our position that religious nationalism manifests itself in a myriad of ways, with a range of deleterious effects on liberties. Our aim in this issue is to highlight this critical intersection, while presenting religious nationalism as a highly contextualized phenomenon, shaped by the history of nation-building, as well as the evolving social, political, and constitutional context. Thus, there is not one religious nationalism, but many religious nationalisms. As we see it, since law is embedded within this context, it often operates in conjunction with, and at times can be instrumentalized by, majoritarian claims made in the pursuit of religious nationalism. In this regard, a more robust understanding of the freedom of thought, conscience, and religion as a counter-majoritarian, minority-protecting right is even more necessary to stand counter to religious-nationalist provocations.
As we see it, these articles help to set a meaningful agenda for future research. Here, we will mention four avenues of inquiry that seem particularly important. The first is further research on the connections between religious nationalism and the state, and the implications of those relationships for constitutional democracy. There is always a temptation for those with political power or ambition to align themselves with powerful or demographically significant religious groups. There is a need for a better understanding of not only what is happening as an empirical matter, but whether there are strategies that can help to defuse or complicate these alliances. A second area of enquiry is further examination into the extent to which religion intersects with other identity markers and sources of difference. This will allow us to see how religion functions as a reinforcing cleavage and to what extent it could function as a cross-cutting cleavage. Religion in Asia, as a region with high levels of religiosity, is viewed as a matter of status, related not just to birth, but also to ethnicity and other markers of identity, as opposed to an individual human right. There will always be tensions between religion as status and religion as choice but, when religion is widely viewed as a matter of birth, this has significant implications for maintaining peaceful coexistence in pluralistic societies. A third avenue of further enquiry is to examine in greater detail the range of religious nationalists’ claims and to identify types of religious nationalisms. Religious-nationalist claims range from discrimination, exclusion, to forced conversions, to violence. This creates a set of problems that should be of real concern not just to those who are not religious, but also to those whose religions are being claimed or captured by groups or individuals who might be, or we hope will be, marginal. A fourth—and perhaps the most urgent—avenue of inquiry is the uses of religious nationalism to create models of citizenship that are designed to exclude those who belong to minority groups. Recent developments in Myanmar, India, and beyond have raised these issues from the realm of interesting academic inquiry to something more urgent. The relationship between religious nationalism and citizenship therefore merits close attention, as legal categories of formal citizenship and equal rights tend to fall foul of discriminatory practices that could undermine the very content of these categories.
Acknowledgements
The articles in this Special Issue were first presented at a conference on “The Law and Politics of Freedom of Religion in Asia” held on 12–14 December 2018 at the National University of Singapore Faculty of Law. Funding for the conference came from a Singapore Ministry of Education Academic Research Fund (R-241-000-166-115), with the support of the Centre for Asian Legal Studies and the BYU International Centre for Law and Religion Studies. We would like to thank reviewers of this Special Issue for their helpful comments and suggestions. We would also like to express our gratitude to Louis Lai, a graduating student at the National University of Singapore Faculty of Law, as well as Chery Yang, a graduate of the National University of Singapore and a J.D. candidate at Brigham Young University Law School for her research assistance and editorial help with this introduction.
Cases
Church of Holy Trinity v. United States, 143 U.S. 157, 471 (Supreme Court of the United States, 29 February 1892).
Marsh v. Chambers, 463 U.S. 783, 793 (Supreme Court of the United States, 5 July 1983).
United States v. Seeger, 380 U.S. 163, 189 (Supreme Court of the United States, 8 March 1965).
Van Orden v. Perry, 454 U.S. 677 (Supreme Court of the United States, 27 June 2005).
