Nilay Saiya has become a prophetic voice in warning about the dangers inherent in the marriage of politics and religion. His current book extends these concerns, focusing on the erosion of political secularism around the world and the violence associated with the narrow religious nationalism that has appeared in its wake.

The central thesis is that religious violence occurs not so much from the cries of oppressed minorities, but from the attempts of majority religious communities to solidify their power. Saiya builds his case by offering examples from the world’s major religious traditions, including Buddhist violence in Myanmar, the rise of Hindu nationalism in India, and Christian militancy in the United States. Though it is also true that some of the most vicious acts of violence in recent years have emerged from minority religious communities in movements such as Hamas, the Islamic State (ISIS), and al Qaeda, these are well described in other studies. Saiya implies that by obsessing over the terrorism of minority movements, we may be missing the larger danger of the violence inherent in religiously related dominant communities. The rise of religious nationalism is a dangerous development, and one that will likely persist long after the extremist movements have been extinguished or die away.

Religion has been a resource for politics throughout history, of course. So it is natural to ask why it has reemerged in the present day with such force. Saiya’s answer is what he calls the “global crisis of secularism.” The next question is why this is happening now.

The problems of political secularism might begin with the European Enlightenment. In an interesting book, the Berkeley sociologist John Lie examines what he calls Modern Peoplehood (2004), the concept of political society that the British sociologist, Anthony D. Smith, regarded as cultural nationalism. To accept Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s concept of the social contract, and to acknowledge John Locke’s idea of representative democracy, one had to adopt the notion that there were, in fact, identifiable and discrete political societies capable of entering into social contracts and providing the consent of the governed, secular nations that followed natural contours of culture and ethnicity. Religion was a part of those identities.

This definition probably worked for a while in Europe and Europeanized outposts such as Australia, New Zealand, and the United States, where Judeo-Christian religion and White ethnicity dominated. Smith’s definition seemed to fit other parts of the world, like China and India. But even in those regions, fissures and secessionist movements—often based on religious minorities—belied the unitary culture definition of nationalism.

The collapse of the Ottoman Empire and Europe’s colonial control in the twentieth century led to the rise of a host of new nationalisms and new challenges to secularism and the concept of cultural nationalism. Nations were formed in the Middle East by Britain and France by quickly drawing lines through the sand. Elsewhere, national boundaries were created almost as haphazardly, leading to the struggles for power and identity that have continued to the present day.

The notion of secular polities based on cultural nationalism was already on shaky grounds even before the end of the Cold War, when a new phenomenon—globalization—swept the world. The global era led to demographic fluidity. Waves of South Asians came to the United Kingdom, and thousands of Algerians to France. An easing of immigration laws and the need for low-cost labor brought a tide of Hispanic asylum seekers and temporary workers to the United States; Turkish immigrant laborers, many of them Kurds, fled to Germany and elsewhere in Europe. The internal conflict in Syria, Iraq, and Afghanistan brought even more refugees to the safe harbors of European and American societies.

Cultural nationalism was under siege. In the loss of a legitimizing concept for secular nations, autocratic regimes hardened the primacy of religion as a unifying and mobilizing ideology, even though by necessity the singular focus on one religion marginalized the others. This has led to a two-class citizenry in many authoritarian regimes, and in the worst instances, ethnic cleansing. The most brutal of these have occurred in Myanmar and Bhutan, and resulted in the ethnoreligious privileges given to the dominant culture in Turkey, Israel, Europe, and the United States.

Saiya has appropriately raised the alarm about this impending alliance between religion and political autocracy. He skillfully shows that when religious and state institutions are entwined, this not only undermines political secularism but also raises the likelihood of political violence. Some of this violence embraces whole categories of people in attempts at ethnic cleansing and alienation. In other instances, it endangers individuals, as it does to the victims of heresy laws in Pakistan and Indonesia.

When Saiya talks about the corrosive influence of religion in public life, we have a sense of what he means. He is largely talking about the privileges awarded to a particular ethnoreligious group. He is not talking about dogma or theology or any of the other things associated with the word “religion.” In narrowing his focus to ethnoreligious identities, Saiya largely avoids a wider discussion about what the relation of religion and violence actually is.

In using the phrase “religious violence,” Saiya does not mean that religion causes violence. Although occasionally in the media or popular writings religion is said to be inherently violent, no scholar in the field of religious studies would say such a thing. Part of the reason for this is that most scholars of religion understand that religion is not something that can do anything by itself. It is not an independent variable, in the terms of social scientists. As an artifact of culture and social identity, it has no essential agency to do anything on its own. A large number of scholars in the field are even hesitant to use the word “religion” as a noun, since it seems to give it more of an inherent existence than it deserves. Though Saiya is concerned about religion in public life, it is the privileges regarded to ethnoreligious groups that most concern him.

In the final section of the book, Saiya pleads for the return to multicultural societies that are protected by secular polities. He offers some examples of nations that have successfully done this, where the dominant religious tradition does not enforce its beliefs and practices on everyone else, and minority faiths are protected and revered. Naturally, his own country, Singapore, is mentioned as an example, and appropriately so. For Islam, he might have chosen Indonesia rather than Senegal, though in recent years Indonesia’s reputation for embodying a tolerant form of Islam has been tarnished by a rigid enforcement of conservative beliefs and the adoption of heresy laws. For Christianity, one immediately thinks of Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and northern European nations, though Saiya has chosen less well-known Botswana. It is indeed an exemplar of tolerance and goodwill toward diverse communities. But so are the others. And if Saiya wanted to look within his own Southeast Asian region, he might find an interesting example in the Philippines, where the government has allowed the creation of Bangsamoro, a semi-autonomous Muslim region within the Christian-dominated nation. It is a rare example of how a secular nation can embrace varied forms of religious diversity.

These examples underscore the main point of Saiya’s book, that we need not let the world slide into autocracies of religious nationalism unchecked. They harbor forms of violence and oppression that need to be challenged and controlled. Despite the global crisis of secularism, the goal of multicultural tolerance and acceptance of diverse cultures and traditions within an overarching political order of fairness is still within our grasp.