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Annu. Rev. Sociol. 2001. 27:125–52

Copyright °
c 2001 by Annual Reviews. All rights reserved

RELIGIOUS NATIONALISM AND THE PROBLEM

OF COLLECTIVE REPRESENTATION

Roger Friedland
Departments of Religious Studies and Sociology, University of California, Santa Barbara,
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Santa Barbara, California 93106-9430; e-mail: [email protected]

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Key Words institutional heterology, field, civil society

■ Abstract I first argue that religion partakes of the symbolic order of the nation-
state and that contemporary nationalisms are suffused with the religious. I then suggest
that religious nationalism calls into question the theoretical duality of the social and
the cultural, a divide variously identified with the material and the symbolic, class
and status, economy and civil society. Religious nationalism, I suggest, requires an
institutional approach to the project of collective representation. Religious nationalism
offers a particular ontology of power, an ontology revealed and affirmed through its
politicized practices and the central object of its political concern, practices that locate
collective solidarity in religious faith shared by embodied families, not in contract and
consent enacted by abstract individual citizens. Understanding the institutional basis
of religious nationalist discourse allows us to understand its affinities with socialist
politics. If religious nationalism derives from religion’s institutional heterology with
the capitalist market and the democratic state, then it suggests the limits of a social
theory that occludes that heterology. In the remainder of the paper, I argue that reli-
gious nationalism cannot be adequately understood either through Pierre Bourdieu’s
theory of habitus and field, nor through Jeffrey Alexander’s theory of civil society.
Bourdieu’s theory of fields imports the logic of dominant institutions and thereby
culturally homogenizes the institutional diversity of contemporary society, making the
stake of politics a culturally empty space of domination. Alexander’s theory of civil so-
ciety, while rich in cultural substance, identifies civil society with democratic political
culture and thereby makes unnecessarily restrictive assumptions about the institutional
sources of collective representation in modern society.

INTRODUCTION

Once again God walks in history. As a century organized around the fear of a god-
less state comes to a close, we wake to a new terror: states armed with powers of the
divine. We today confront the apparently premodern specter of religious national-
ism. The territoriality and the historicity of the nation-state are being transformed
into vessels of divine purpose, mechanisms by which to materialize a monist world.

0360-0572/01/0811-0125$14.00 125
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126 FRIEDLAND

Religious nationalism not only shatters the presumptions of geopolitics, it re-

veals the limits of sociological theory. Religious nationalism is a particular form
of collective representation. In this essay I first argue that religion partakes of the
symbolic order of the nation-state and that contemporary nationalisms are suffused
with the religious. I then suggest that religious nationalism calls into question the
theoretical duality of the social and the cultural, a divide variously identified with
the material and the symbolic, class and status, economy and civil society. Re-
ligious nationalism, I suggest, requires an institutional approach to the project
of collective representation. Religious nationalism offers a particular ontology of
power, an ontology revealed and affirmed through its politicized practices and the
Access provided by University of North Texas - Denton on 11/30/14. For personal use only.

central object of its political concern, practices that locate collective solidarity in
Annu. Rev. Sociol. 2001.27:125-152. Downloaded from www.annualreviews.org

religious faith shared by embodied families, not in contract and consent enacted
by abstract individual citizens. Understanding the institutional basis of religious
nationalist discourse allows us to understand its affinities with socialist politics.
If religious nationalism derives from religion’s institutional heterology with the
capitalist market and the democratic state, then it suggests the limits of a social
theory that occludes that heterology.
In the remainder of the paper, I argue that religious nationalism cannot be
adequately understood either through Pierre Bourdieu’s theory of habitus and field,
nor through Jeffrey Alexander’s theory of civil society. Bourdieu’s theory of fields
imports the logic of dominant institutions and thereby culturally homogenizes
the institutional diversity of contemporary society, making the stake of politics a
culturally empty space of domination. Alexander’s theory of civil society, while
rich in cultural substance, identifies civil society with democratic political culture
and thereby makes unnecessarily restrictive assumptions about the institutional
sources of collective representation in modern society.

RELIGION’S SOVEREIGN POWERS

Cleric, rabbi, sadhu, and mullah mount the rostrum, occupy the public place,
seeking to ordinate society according to a text originating outside of it. Reli-
gious nationalists make politics into a religious obligation. We are wont to view
the religious nationalist project as a retreat from modernity. The Enlightenment
philosophers made the separation of state authority from religion an essential con-
dition for freedom, for “mankind’s exit from its self-imposed maturity” as Kant
(1996) put it. In place of religion, the person and the polity would now assume
sacred status in the modern western world, nationalism donning the trappings of a
religion. These are modernity’s terms for the satanization of public religion. In the
resulting formation, which for so long seemed modernity’s necessary terminus,
religion was to set up shop in the interior of the believer’s soul, within the walls of
the family, not in the public square and the state house. Religion, whose transcen-
dence and absoluteness used to bolster the rule of state, to set states into conquest
and war, to spark civil wars, and to establish the ethical habits conditioning the
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RELIGIOUS NATIONALISM 127

accumulation of productive wealth, was sequestered, made safe and platitudinous.

We have come to equate secularity, the disengagement and differentiation of the
public sphere from religion, with modernity. This has led to its analytic neglect.
Habermas, for example, who wants to construct a clean divide between citizenship
and national identity, between the rights of man and the right to protect a particular
national culture, neglects religion’s role in establishing the cultural ground of that
citizenship (Weiss 1999).
That religious groups, here religious nationalists, would want to seize the state
is not unexpected. Both state and religion are models of authority, imaginations
of an ordering power, and understandings of how one should relate to those who
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control forces upon which one depends, but over which one does not exercise
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control. Riesebrodt (2000) characterizes the distinctiveness of religious practices

as those involving “superhuman or extraordinary personal or impersonal powers”
that control human life and to which one can gain access.
Whereas secularization involves the breakdown of a religious cosmology in
which all things, including the state, are subordinate to a divine order (Casanova
1994), religion can also be understood as immanent in the state itself. Derrida
(1998) has argued that the state, like all forms of authority, indeed, of collectivity,
depends on a faith that cannot be reduced to knowledge, on an unproducible and
unnamable “other,” an absolute, present-absent witness that guarantees all testi-
mony, all witness, all nomination. Faith, beyond reason and proof, thus undergirds
the performativity of authority, the saying so that makes it so.
God is a sovereign personality. It is difficult to recapture that understanding in
our world where the institutional separation of church and state has transformed
religion into a faith, a substance found in, and a regulatory principle operating
on, an interior territory, a secret housed inside individual bodies, a basis for being
good, sane, or secure. It is useful to look back at the moment when the modern
state was stripped of its religious meaning, when this new discursive formation
was put in place. Those who supported the ancien regime reacted as though it
were a threat both to state and to religion. When the French Revolution ushered in
the first European republic, its Catholic opponents understood the writings of the
philosophes as its moral mandate and foundational ontology (McMahon 2001).
Indeed, they understood la philosophie as Protestantism without God, leading
inexorably to heretical division, a fissiparous force that would naturally issue in
a chaos of sects. The two absolutisms were understood to be of a piece. It was
no wonder that these abstract ideas, breaking with religious faith and historical
experience, really illusionist’s tricks, conjointly indicted religion and absolutist
authority. The first European republic was understood as a usurpation of God’s
sovereignty.
Religions other than Christianity, which began as a stateless faith, have even
greater political claim. Hinduism, Judaism, and Islam—to take a few examples—
provide images and precepts for a society, indeed the foundations for a state,
and thus presume that religion can and should have a role in the regulation of
all of social life. They imagine political communities whose physical survival,
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128 FRIEDLAND

territorial control, and material prosperity are all contingent upon their
obedience to the revealed laws of God. The Torah, for instance, is understood as a
covenant between a people and a God, a people whose capacity to occupy eretz
yisrael, the Land of Israel, is dependent on following its laws (Friedland & Hecht
2000). The Qur’an, likewise, is not just about the relationship of the individual to
God, but about a politically organized community of believers, the umma, called
by their sovereign. The Qur’an spells out a political religion (Humphreys 1999).
The divine, as Durkheim (1995 [1912]) long ago pointed out, provides an
image of the governing principle of our collective body. For us moderns, the
house of state is our sacred place, our machinery for collective representation.
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Collective political claims are immanent in the divine, in a society’s imagination

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of supra-human powers and the practices that relate to them. We can see this, for
example, by examining how Protestant colonialists related to the Africans whose
lands they colonized. As Chidester (1996) has shown, the colonials who took
possession of South Africa insisted that the Africans—Zulu, Bechuana, Xhosa—
they confronted on the colonial frontiers had no religion so long as European rule of
these Africans was uncertain and the Africans were able to maintain their polities
and resist subjugation. Africans without religion, who were therefore considered
not fully human, childlike and superstitious, had no right to rule, no inherent
right to territorial possession. Once each African population was conquered and
sequestered, they could be granted a religion, a degenerated version of a religion
from elsewhere (hence without rights to possession), a fetishism, an animism, or
even a primitive “theism” from which the world’s monotheisms had moved on.
Denying a collectivity’s right to polity was of a piece with the original denial
of their possession of something recognized as a religion. Without God, African
territory could be understood as a blank, empty space.
Religion provides what Juergensmeyer (1993, 1999) calls a “language of ulti-
mate order.” Religious discourse is replete with martial metaphor, of battles and
enemies, of position and siege. Religions’ originary histories are filled with mili-
tary conquest whether, for example, of the ancient Jewish kings; of Muhammad’s
warriors and the tradition of jihad; of Lord Krishna’s sermon, the Bhagavad Gita,
delivered on a battlefield; of the final Sikh master, Guru Gobind Singh, comman-
der of a huge army facing the Mughal invaders in the Punjab in the sixteenth and
seventeenth centuries. Religion, a cosmology accomplished through violence, its
cosmic war vicariously experienced and domesticated by rite, is thus inherently a
natural competitor to the nationalism of the secular state. Juergensmeyer’s com-
parative hermeneutics of religious terrorism (1999) follows politicized faith into
the mayhem and pain imposed on innocent people. There are those who would
argue that such vile conjunctions of spirit and cruelty, of religious belief and polit-
ical violence, belie the religiosity of the terrorists, that religion is a mere wrapper.
Authority rests on a metaphysics, an ontology of order, a moral and categorical
system constituting the thinkable and actionable, and on an organization of vio-
lence that controls those who fail to think and act within its limits. Juergensmeyer
argues that the desacralization of the modern nation-state, the return of religion to
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RELIGIOUS NATIONALISM 129

the public sphere, and the explosion of religious terror are a linked set. Religious
terrorists are almost all religious nationalists, those seeking an alternative order on
which to ground state authority. Religious terrorism is only the most extreme form
of this general movement, this reclaiming of religion’s inherent political powers,
its final judgments.
Religious terrorism is not primarily an instrument to transform government
policy as much as it is a ritual drama designed to be noticed, typically targeted
at symbolically charged sites, usually public places—nodes in the exchange of
goods, the movement of people, sites of authority. Religious terrorism represents
a symbolic order more than it produces a profanely practical result. It is a theatre
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of war. While its religious opponents and the larger public declare terrorism to be
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antithetical to religion’s peaceful purposes, religion, Juergensmeyer argues, grav-

itates naturally to the language and the postures of war. For warfare is an occasion
for the display and adjudication of absolute, non-negotiable differences, for the
performance of the incommensurable divide Emile Durkheim located between the
sacred and the profane. War affords a distinctive moral architecture, an absolute
partitioning into good and evil mapped onto us and them, a narration of empower-
ment stitched into the nature of things. Terror signals the immorality of one’s foe,
a sign of the absoluteness, the essentialness, of the other’s evil. Terror is not here
normal politics by scandalous means but a declaration that normal politics are not
possible. It is perhaps the capacity for violence that ultimately marks the sacred,
the disordering element that stands as the exterior guarantor of order, of division
and partition. To violently broach the public sphere is to declare the absence of
state guarantee, a state without God being a profane state, a profanity demonstrated
by violence against the state.
Religious nationalism is not alien to the formation of the modern nation-state.
Even a cursory look suggests that the formation of many non-Western modern
national identities and nationalist movements was suffused with religious nar-
rative and myth, symbolism and ritual—Iran, Sri Lanka, India, Pakistan, Saudi
Arabia, Israel, and Palestine, to take just a few examples. Given religion’s cen-
trality to nation-formation, it is not surprising that religion is a ready reservoir for
nationalist critique. Within these cosmologies, secular nationalism is easily per-
ceived as a form of Christian political culture, one many now perceive as a failure.
Juergensmeyer (1993), who has heralded the birth of a “new cold war,” argues that
there has been a “loss of faith in secular nationalism,” such that many political
leaders in the world increasingly see the secularism of Western nationalism as the
reason for the moral failures of their own societies in the midst of modernization.
The emergence and form of the Western secular nation-state has itself every-
thing do with Christianity, and Protestantism in particular (Bendix 1978, Harrison
1998, McLoughlin 1978, Rokkan 1975, Tilly 1998). The American Revolution, for
example, was prepared by a diffuse transformation in Protestant belief, known as
“the Great Awakening” (1730–1760), that located the basis of religious authority
in personal faith, not in ordination, the profession of doctrine, or a church hier-
archy. This “new light,” an emotional, indeed physical knowing, as opposed to a
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130 FRIEDLAND

disembodied intellectual knowing, of God, was open to all, to those without formal
education, to the poor, even to women and slaves. This postmillennial religious
transformation, in fact, helped create the inter-colonial unity, the solidarity and
the democratic moral order that would forge the American nation-state (Heimert
1966, McLoughlin 1978, Walzer 1965). The French Revolution, which constituted
the nation without respect to, indeed in opposition to, religion, has been the world
historical exception.

RELIGIOUS NATIONALISM AND THE

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AUTONOMY OF CULTURE
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Religious nationalism as discourse and social movement is often understood as an

instance of culture’s autonomy as a source of identity and critique, an autonomy
manifested in the formation of politicized religious groups. It is a mistake to be-
gin an analysis of religious nationalism through the social groups composing it,
through the ascendant particularity of persons. From this vantage point, religious
nationalism becomes a movement to defend a particular form of group identity,
difference considered as attributes of persons, not unlike that of racial, gender,
sexual or linguistic groups who launch movements to affirm or defend their partic-
ularity before or from the society’s dominant group, here an instrument by which
religious people secure membership in the political community or recognition in
the public sphere.
Religious nationalism can be understood as one among the panoply of the ap-
parently new social movements, defending identity as opposed to pursuing interest,
a substitute or a stand-in for the redistributive material politics of class. Or it can be
understood as a cultural refraction, or mediation, of underlying social grievances.
These castings of politicized religion are both premised on distinguishing the social
as an instrumental distributional system of things from the cultural as an expressive
system of signs, on understanding the economy as a material institutional order,
the paragon of the social, while civil society is a symbolic institutional order, the
paragon of the cultural (see also Bonnell & Hunt 1999).
This duality of the social and the cultural suffuses interpretations of the rise of
politicized religion. Barber’s “Jihad vs. McWorld,” particularistic tribalism as a
reaction to universalistic globalism, is a good example (1992). The forces of glob-
alism all issue from an economic hardscape—transnational markets, dependencies
on foreign resources, technological revolution, and ecological process. In contrast,
those of “Jihad,” forces that fragment even modernity’s nation-states, are about the
soft stuff of symbol and myth. Religious nationalism has no political-economic
import; it is an end in itself.
Others see politicized religion as an expression or medium of material interest.
Lawrence (1998), for example, argues that it is brute matter, the stuff of existence,
distributed ever more inequitably in the world, that not only exercises most Mus-
lims but also explains Islamic politics. In the case of Islamic revivalism, as for
instance in the cases of the Wahhabis or the Fulani-Qadiris in Nigeria, Islam
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RELIGIOUS NATIONALISM 131

was “an emblem of protest” against the contraction of trade caused by European
mercantilism. The struggle between Asad’s Baath regime and the Muslim Brothers
in Syria was “not a religious struggle but a struggle for power in which religion
was used by both sides as a mask for deeper grievances and more palpable stakes”
(1998:73). The “real” reason, he argues, that Islamic traditionalists today exclude
women from the public sphere is the job shortage for men (1998:39). Islam is
here a medium through which other struggles find expression: group contests over
power and income, national resistance to marginality and powerlessness in the
world order.
In Foran’s historical sociological analysis of Iran, Shiite Islam mediates be-
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tween economic structure and oppositional, and particularly revolutionary, po-

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litical action. Foran politicized Wallerstein’s structuralist world systems theory

by showing the ways in which the strategic political actions of domestic groups
drawn from historically layered modes of production shape the development of
a dependent nation (Foran 1993). In Foran’s theory, the distinctive inequities and
hardships—like displacement of the artisans and the bazaar merchants—generated
by dependent development require a repressive personalistic state, the experience
of whose exclusion generated a series of “political cultures of opposition”—Islam,
republicanism, nationalism, Marxism, as well as their various syntheses. These op-
positional cultures are the basis upon which urban multi-class coalitions repeatedly
form as in the Constitutional revolution of 1905–1911, Mussadiq’s nationalization
of oil in the early 1950s, and the Islamic revolution of 1979. The distinctive quality
of the 1979 revolution, as opposed to earlier junctures, was the simultaneous mo-
bilization of both republican and Islamic discursive elements and the social bases
who carried them, both the ulama and the organized white- and blue-collar work-
ers. Foran argues that a social revolution can occur where there is a multi-class or
populist oppositional culture, conditions of economic decline, or a world-system
opening—generally an American failure to intervene decisively in the internal
politics of the country.
Political cultures mediate between “structural determinants of grievances” and
regime critique (Foran 1997a). Political culture, not ideology, is the medium
through which economic interests are given political form, through which ob-
jective economic conditions are lived and interpreted (Foran 1992). The question
is whether political culture mediates or constructs the revolutionary project. Given
the lack of class specificity in these oppositional political cultures, that it is the
particularism of the state, not economic conditions per se, that galvanizes opposi-
tional mobilization, that in the Boolean analyses Foran has conducted across many
nation-states, neither economic downturn nor dependent development discrimi-
nate between revolutionary and nonrevolutionary action (1997b), it is as arguable
that oppositional movements form not out of economics politically understood,
but out of politics itself. Foran here understands religion as autonomous cultural
materials, a frame deployed in reaction to societal conditions, subjective meanings
constructed in response to objective conditions.
Foran’s neo-Marxist insistence on culture’s autonomy from the economy as a
basis for agency is shared by Alexander’s post-Durkheimian school, which has
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132 FRIEDLAND

grounded the autonomy of the cultural in the linguistic order of signs and symbols,
in semiotic structure. Alexander and his students have looked on culture as a code or
language with its own internal logic, insisting on its autonomy from the materiality
of the social world (Alexander 1998, Alexander & Smith 1993, Kane 1991). As
for Foran, more is at stake in culture’s autonomy than just good social theory.
Alexander analytically distinguishes between three “environments of action”: the
social, the cultural, and the personality. The analytic autonomy of the cultural
realm enables generalizable significations—both typifications and inventions—
independent of the social conditions of their use. In Alexander’s view, culture’s
analytic, as opposed to its empirical, autonomy establishes a presuppositional
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warrant not only for its study but, as for Foran, for individual human freedom
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itself, for the formation of collective will. Autonomous, structured cultural codes
provide the tools through and by which actors can recode themselves and the world
and thereby create new worlds.
If Alexander grounds the autonomy of culture in semiotic order, he identifies
the social system with an order of distribution. Reviewing Touraine’s theorization
of new postindustrial social movements, Alexander describes Parsons’ distinc-
tion between values and norms, the latter involving “historically specific forms of
organization that focus, not on general values, but on the distribution of rewards
and sanctions” (1996). Alexander approves of how Touraine, unlike Parsons,
does not idealistically conflate “existing forms of social organization with the
cultural ideals that informed them.” It is the gap between value and norm, be-
tween the cultural and the social, between cultural ideals and social norms, in
which Alexander locates the possibility for reflexive agency and hence for social
movements.
In their work on public sphere crises, Alexander & Smith (1993) marry
Durkheim’s religious sociology to the dualities of structuralist linguistics, making
the dominant cultural codes into instances of the binary of sacred and profane—
honest, independent, and universal all lining up naturally with the sacred pole of
this duality. The analytic autonomy of the cultural code derives from its system-
atically structured homologies, its internal associations. The code’s referentiality,
its application to the social world—what, after all, is made to count as just or
democratic—is the contingent political domain where groups can seek to position
one another on different sides of the multiple binaries. In this approach politics is
cultural, but there is little politics of culture, that is, few struggles over the codes
themselves.
In analyzing social movements’ two moments, Alexander rests the social on the
cultural, distribution on value. “Vis a vis potential supporters, social movements
in civil societies must present themselves as typifying sacred values . . . as cultural
innovators who can create new norms and new institutions that will allow resources
to be channeled in different ways.” Because the code itself is not at stake, this
makes the telos of the social movement into a culturally contentless redistribution
of resources, not a transformation of culture. In that the ideals themselves are not
at stake, the material world stands outside as an objective landscape in which and
for which symbolic warfare periodically rages.
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RELIGIOUS NATIONALISM 133

This same identification of the social with an order of distribution characterizes

the work of Fraser, the Marxist political philosopher. Seeking to wend a way be-
tween the new politics and the old, class and identity, Fraser (2001) argues that we
need to distinguish analytically between the politics of redistribution rooted in the
social relations of class and a politics of recognition rooted in the cultural relations
of status. These politics are distinguished by the nature of the collectivities that
carry them—classes and status groups, respectively. Fraser proposes a “bivalent”
conception of justice drawing on both independent domains. For Fraser, “class is
an artifact of an unjust political economy, which creates, and exploits a proletariat.
The core injustice is exploitation, an especially deep form of maldistribution, as the
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proletariat shoulders an undue share of the system’s burdens, while being denied its
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fair share of the system’s rewards” (2001:7). By deriving class from distribution,
Fraser instrumentalizes the economy, making its politics into a conflictual problem
of group share. She thereby eviscerates the specificity of capitalism’s institutional
logic.
Exploitation does not, in Marxist theory and hence in much socialist ideology,
derive from maldistribution but from the cultural materiality of property relations
and the commodification of labor it makes possible. Marx’s theory of exploitation
is a cultural theory, a theory of valuation, the labor theory of value asserting a
specific regime of temporality through which value is produced, expanded, and
reproduced. Not only Marxists, but institutional theorists as well, have shown
that property is not an objective material condition but a legal performative, a
transrational substance known by how it is performed. Distributional conflicts drew
their transformative possibilities from their origin in capitalism’s contradictory
logic of production. The institutional specificity of capitalism does not afford a
culturally empty power contest between the dominant and the dominated but a
struggle over commodification, over the production of capital. In Marxist theory,
this is the source, the meaning, and the transformative end of distributional conflict.
In deculturalizing capitalism, making it about distribution, Fraser thereby emp-
ties working class interest of cultural meaning. Eyerman & Jamison (1991), for
example, have shown the ways in which successful social movements—from en-
vironmentalism to socialism—create new public spaces in which new identities,
new knowledges, and new organizational forms conjointly emerge. The socialist
movement, not unlike the new social movements, sought to create a collective
identity—the worker, the proletariat, a form of personhood that was sacralized,
and whose value and inviolability were integral to mobilization. Socialist working
class politics were premised on the assertion of an interested difference.

THE SOCIOLOGICAL FORCE OF LOVE: THE FAMILY

POLITICS OF RELIGIOUS NATIONALISM
The historicist division between old, class-based materialist and new, identity-
based cultural social movements cannot be sustained either theoretically or
historically. Religious nationalism is both cultural and social. It is cultural in its
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134 FRIEDLAND

promotion of a particular cosmology, a codex of values, a program of comport-

ment, a way of life. But it is social in that its agents seek control over material
resources, the machinery of state, territory, reproductive bodies, the law courts and
the police, the schools. Religious nationalism is about both values and things, the
one through the other. It is about both recognition of a new collective subjectivity
and the redistribution of resources.
Religious nationalisms are animated by a family drama; they all center their
fierce energies on the family, its erotic energies, its gendered order. This is because
the institutional logic of religion centers on the order of creation, locating human-
ness in the cosmos, replicating cosmology through ritual, a practical metaphysics
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that necessarily points before life and after death.1

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Because the family is an order of creation, not merely an order of production

or governance (Foucault 1990), religions all seek to stitch its transitions, its re-
lations, into religious rite and discourse, as a template through which their trans-
rational order is given concrete form. Modern religion has ceded its territories, its
soldiers, its courts and sovereign powers; but everywhere it has held fiercely to
birth and burial, marriage and divorce. Religious nationalism, unlike the capital-
ist market or the democratic state, has the organization of sexuality at its center.
Religious nationalists give primacy to the family, not to democracy or the market,
as the social space through which society should be conceived and composed.
Familial discourse, with its particularistic and sexual logic of love and loyalty, is
pervasive.
Comparing the United States and Iran, Riesebrodt (1993) has argued that
the defense of the patriarchal family is the core of fundamentalism (see also
Apostolidis 2000). The American “fundamentalist” embrace of the family is a
post–World War II phenomenon. As Bendroth (1993, 1999) has shown, during
the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries concern with the family was at the
center of mainline Protestantism, a preoccupation that earlier Christian fundamen-
talists understood as feminized and sentimental. The fundamentalists then viewed
the veneration of the family as a diversion from the redemptive tasks at hand. It
was only with the rise of middle class divorce that defense of the family became
the central issue for the Christian right and the primal medium through which
they sought to reconstruct the social order. The polemical series that today consti-
tutes American fundamentalist discourse is organized almost completely around
familial issues: divorce, birth control, abortion, feminism, homosexuality, and sex
education.
Algeria’s Islamic Salvation Front, which won national elections in 1991 but was
prevented from taking power, has made the elimination of female employment part
of its program. Since it was banned, fundamentalists have murdered hundreds of
Algerian women for wearing Western clothes, for not wearing a headscarf, for

1
Becker (1999) is quite right to reject Friedland & Alford’s (1991) position that the institu-
tional logic of religion, like science, is about truth.
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RELIGIOUS NATIONALISM 135

working side by side with men. The Islamic Salvation Front promises to impose
the death penalty on those who engage in sexual relations outside of marriage
(Afary 1997).
The very first national religious mobilization of the Iranian Islamic forces took
place in 1961 after Khomeini spoke at Qum on Ashura, the day of atonement,
attacking the Shah for having transformed the legal status of women, allowing
women into the army, the police, and the judiciary, giving them the vote, and over-
riding Islamic law such that divorce required mutual consent (Lawrence 1998,
Riesebrodt 1993). Iran’s 1979 Islamic Revolution forbade co-education, closed
down the childcare centers, and made the veil obligatory first in government of-
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fices and then in every public place. Women, of whatever age, had to obtain the
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permission of their fathers when they married for the first time (Nafisi 1999).
The Egyptian case suggests it was not the failures of secular nationalism that
led to Islamic entry into the public sphere so much as the modern nationalists’
commitments, incomplete as they were, to gender equality (Lawrence 1998). In
1952, Gamal Nasser, who had just come to power as a result of a coup by the Free
Officers, vowed to mobilize women as full participants in the project to modernize
the country. This decision led the Islamicists to break with him, eventuating in
their repression. In 1954, Nasser supplanted the shari’a courts with a unitary
secular state court, thereby expanding women’s legal recourse, the immediate
response to which was the first assassination attempt by the Muslim Brothers.
Sadat’s commitment to improving the legal, economic, and political status of
women likewise galvanized massive Islamic opposition.
If one looks at the political programs of Islamic movements, there is no con-
sistent economic policy nor form of government. The two pillars of contempo-
rary Islamic politics involve, on the one side, a restrictive regulation of sexuality,
eliminating it as a public presence and containing it within the family, and on
the other side, the promotion of a welfare state that enables families to survive
physically and to care for those—orphans and widows in particular as enjoined
in the Qur’an—who cannot rely on families for support (Humphreys 1999). Al-
though it might not be the kind we find compelling, Islamic politics is a politics of
love.
Some analysts argue that religious regimes, like that of Iran or Pakistan, be-
cause they have failed to reduce unemployment or redistribute wealth, center their
attention on familial relations, as though family politics were a substitute for, or
sideshow from, the real business of state (Moghadam 1993). It is also tempting to
interpret religious nationalism as sexist reaction, animated by interests in mascu-
line privilege. In accounting for the rise of Islamic fundamentalism in North Africa,
Mernissi (1992, 1987) has pointed to the rapidly increasing number of educated
and employed women who not only compete with men for limited employment op-
portunities, but are able to choose when they will marry and to exert more influence
within their families on account of the monies they bring home. For men, funda-
mentalism is then understood as a way to win back money and power; for potential
rulers, to reduce unemployment. Reisebrodt (1993) interprets the emergence of
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136 FRIEDLAND

fundamentalism in Iran and the United States as a defense of patriarchalism in a

world where women have encroached steadily on male prerogatives, an encroach-
ment whose weight falls forcefully on the father inside the family, particularly the
sexual regulation of his daughters.
The evidence indicates, however, that women, too, find fundamentalism com-
pelling. In the United States, for instance, both evangelicalism and fundamental-
ism draw disproportionately from women, not from men (Smith 1998). Women
are attracted by the primacy that religious nationalists give to the family, its
affirmation of male familial obligations as a religious duty, to the language of
love. Although it is resolutely patriarchal, the religious nationalist community
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also offers a mechanism of social control of men, which becomes increasingly im-
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portant as the eyes, the invitations, and the opprobrium that circulate in extended
families and long-lived neighborhoods attenuate with geographic migration, the
rising incidence of divorce, and the investment of social energy in friendship net-
works having nothing to do with kinship. Religious nationalists seek a return not
to the pre-modern familial structure, with its extended networks of kin loyalties,
but to the bourgeois nuclear family. As Abu-Lughod (1998) notes in the case of
Egyptian Islamicists, it is their idealization of a nuclear family grounded in love,
an imported Western middle class notion, which attracts so many Egyptian women
to the movement. Women turn to fundamentalism in hopes of finding men who
will be good fathers and good husbands, men who will provide for their fami-
lies, remain with their wives, and contain their sexuality within the family (Enloe
1989, Ong 1990). In the United States, while fundamentalist Christians typically
endorse the wife’s submission to her husband, they also sacralize women’s role
as mothers who have the time to care for and the will to discipline their children,
as well as the passion to keep their husbands. As Kintz (1997) discovered in her
sojourn among America’s fundamentalist women, the chance to occupy the sacred
status of motherhood was, for many, a refuge from the uncertainty and constant
threat of worthlessness they faced in the market. While men from the Christian
right dominate the leadership of the anti-abortion movement in the United States,
women have provided the bulk of its popular support. These women look to the
movement as an integral part of their affirmation of a sexuality domesticated by
monogamous marriage and gendered family roles (Luker 1984).
To make masculine interest the explanation of religious nationalism is to give
primacy to an attribute of persons rather than the practices around which its dis-
course is organized or the institutional site in which it originates. Not only does it
not distinguish religious nationalism from other social movements that are equally
masculinist, it misses religious nationalism’s distinct ontology of power, both its
derivation of authority from divine sources and its constitution of society as a
familial order. The elemental agents of religious nationalism are gendered and
fleshy men and women, not the abstract individuals ordered through exchange and
contract. Its space is the place of family, governed by relations of consubstantiality
and caring, not the external, instrumental space of geopolitics, the public sphere,
or the market. Religious nationalism is about home.
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RELIGIOUS NATIONALISM 137

Religious nationalism thus has a kinship with socialism. Socialist politics were
premised on the assertion of an interested difference, not just a redistribution of
income, power, or respect. Marx theorized that difference as a contest between use
value and exchange value, the former providing the cultural ground upon which
resistance to the regime of the latter must proceed. Use value speaks of a specific
institutional location; it refers to an individual’s membership in human families,
into which one is born and gives birth, has obligations not only to be fed but to feed
and to care. While working class politics are typically fought on a distributional
plane, as the share of wages versus the share of profits, they are animated by forces
outside the economy.
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The formation of the working class as a collective subject had to do not only
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with the extension of citizenship but with the defense of the family, not only with
the demand for a “living wage,” one that would support human life, but with
protecting the family against capitalism, to put children—upon which the early
stages of industrial capitalism massively depended, hence the fear of giving women
the vote—outside the labor force, to protect the time upon which domesticity
depended, to establish a wage upon which a family could survive not only when
its members worked but when they no longer could. The assertion of human need,
a term banished (as is power) both in the capitalist market and its theorization,
is a familial discourse. The family’s central institutional tendency involves the
materiality of love, which, like property, is known by how it is practiced, by the
conditions of access to fingers, nipples, milk, eggs and semen, mouths and eyes,
beds and bowls of hot cereal, to the warmth and work of bodies.
There is then a way in which the institutional sources of religious nationalism
parallel those of working class socialism, which had its own “fundamentalist”
forms. Just as working class socialist politics can be understood as an effort to
defend the family—its children, its time, its capacity to care—from the capitalist
economy, so religious nationalists seek to defend the materiality of the family,
not only its sexual codes but its capacity to cohere across time, from the logic of
the capitalist market, which has commodified sexuality, transformed love into a
consumption good, and made mothering materially impossible for an increasing
proportion of women. By investing it with transcendent status, religious national-
ists seek to restore the loving family, not the autonomous individual, as the ele-
mental unit of which the social is composed. If socialism works the institutional
logic of democracy and family against the capitalist market, religious nationalism
constructs its oppositional cosmology from the codes of religion and family.

THE INSTITUTIONAL LOGIC OF

COLLECTIVE REPRESENTATION
To interpret religious nationalism, we must specify the meaning of nationalism.
Nationalism is a state-centered form of collective subject formation, a form of
state representation, one grounding the identity and legitimacy of the state in a
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138 FRIEDLAND

population of individuals who inhabit a territory bounded by that state. The cultural
commonalities of that population do not, in themselves, constitute the basis for the
formation of a nation. Nationality is a contingent and contested claim, not a social
fact (Brubaker 2000, Smith 1991). Nationalism, the political processes organized
through the state in the name of the nation, creates the nation, not the reverse
(Calhoun 1998). Nationalism is a program for the co-constitution of the state and
the territorially bounded population in whose name it speaks.
Nationalism is not ideology. It is a discursive practice by which the territorial
identity of a state and the cultural identity of the people whose collective represen-
tation it claims are constituted as a singular institutional fact. The state is central in
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the process in that it is the direct relation between the state and individual through
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the organization of markets, armies, schools, and families that composes this
national identity (Rokkan 1975). The abstract citizen is then a prerequisite to
the formation of a culturally specific national subject. That abstract citizen is insti-
tutionally premised on an abstract collective subject, the nation-state, which relates
as an equivalent “actor” to other states, relations organized through a variety of
inter-state institutions (Giddens 1984).
Nationalism offers a form of representation—the joining of state, territoriality,
and culture. It has nothing to say about the content of representation, the identity
of that collective subject, or its values. Religion offers an institutionally specific
way to organize this modern form of collective representation, how a collectivity
represents itself to itself, the symbols, signs, and practices through which it is
and knows itself to be. Religious nationalism is only a viable option when the
collectivity has a religious basis in common. Thus, religious nationalism was
possible in India, Israel, Iran, Turkey, and the United States, in part, because of
the existence of a hegemonic religion—Hinduism, Judaism, Shiite Islam, Sunni
Islam, and Protestantism, respectively. Religious nationalism has not developed
very far in those countries, such as Iraq and Syria, which are divided between
Shi’ite and Sunni branches of Islam. Where it does develop among nonhegemonic
religious communities, it develops as a form of territorial separatism—the Sikhs
in the Punjab, Tamils in Sri Lanka.
Religious nationalism does not change the form of collective representation,
only its content, privileging a basis of identity and a criterion of judgment which
cannot not be chosen. The religious criterion of judgment is, like human rights,
racial purity, or technical rationality, beyond the reach of popular voice or the
compelling interests of the state. Religion, with its universal claims, is not in-
herently inconsistent with nationalism; religious nationalism is not, as Lawrence
(1998) argues, an oxymoron. Religious nationalists always center their ener-
gies on the nation-states in which they live. Even militant Islamicists, who have
a historic transnational territorial ambit, indeed a universal ideal, and the ac-
tual tradition of the caliphate upon which to draw, almost all seek to create an
Islamic order within the existent nation-states (Humphreys 1999). Extending the
institutional logic of religion does not necessarily mean a reversal of the differen-
tiation of religion and state, a theocratic installation. In his comparative analysis
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RELIGIOUS NATIONALISM 139

of Spain, the United States, Brazil, and Poland, Casanova (1994) has pointed out
that the de-privatization of religion, its entry into civil society, does not imply a
de-differentiation of religion and the state. Religious nationalism simply makes
religion the basis for the nation’s collective identity and the source of its ultimate
values and purpose on this earth. Religious nationalism fills existent state forms
with new cultural contents, new sources of authority; it does not displace them.
If nationalism does not provide a determinate basis of collective identity, neither
do particular forms of religion provide a determinate basis of politics. Religious
nationalism is a form of politicized religion, one in which religion is the basis
of political judgment and identity, indeed in which politics take on the quality
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of a religious obligation. Religious nationalism is sometimes called “fundamen-

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talist,” an identification of which I have also made use above. The term refers
back to those American Christians who proclaimed early in this century the in-
errancy of the Biblical text, the “fundamentals.” The term has now, of course,
taken on general analytic significance. Martin Marty, for example, in his world-
wide project to track the rise of “fundamentalism,” identifies it with its absolutism
and a Manichean world-view (Marty 1988). Arguing from early twentieth century
American fundamentalism and the Iranian Shi’ite movement in Iran from 1961–
1979, Riesebrodt argues that these fundamentalisms engage in a “traditionalistic
literalism” in that they cleave to a mythical ideal order as identified in the sacred
text or that they have “rationalistic, literalist-orthodox interpretations of religion”
(1993:15–17, 31).
Religious nationalists all read religious texts politically. While it is decidedly
textual, religious nationalism is not inherently more literalist in its application of
its sacred texts, nor more absolutist in its ontologies and moral imperatives, that
is, than its secular equivalents—socialism, democracy, nationalism, and modern
science, to take four examples—each of which produce their own sacred texts, their
own inviolable values. To speak of religion’s entry into the public sphere simply as
a form of “fundamentalism” is to deflect attention from the cultural specificity of its
institutional commitments. In the American Protestant context, for example, Roof
(1999) has recently studied the first post–World War II generation of Christians. He
distinguishes between those who cleave to an evangelicalism oriented toward the
spiritual needs of the self and those who are religiously drawn to fundamentalism
with its paternal and monarchical sovereign God who sets down strict moral codes.
While one might expect religious nationalists to derive overwhelmingly from the
second as opposed to the first community, the Christian right, those who believe that
America was founded as a Christian nation and should, by law, remain that way,
draws from both evangelicals and traditionally pre-millenarian fundamentalists. A
majority of both communities actively participate in conservative Christian politics
(Roof 1999, Smith 1998).
Some analysts seek to distance religious nationalism from this vexed category
of fundamentalism. Keddie has distinguished between two types of what she calls
“new religious politics,” one, the “fundamentalists,” who seek to make the gov-
ernment conform to religious dictates and the other, which she terms “religious
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140 FRIEDLAND

nationalism,” which is targeted against some minoritarian religious group and has
a communitarian and territorial logic at its core (1999). Keddie includes Gush
Emunim and the Hindu nationalists, for example, in this second grouping. Keddie
wants to distinguish the religious use of government authority from the religious
control of territory. Keddie writes: “Religionationalist movements usually do not
stress scripture or particular religious practices, while movements that want to
increase religion in government do.” This polarity will not hold. The territorial
practices of religious Zionist Gush Emunim in Israel and the Hindu nationalist
BJP and RSS in India are both understood and justified in terms of religious nar-
ratives (Friedland & Hecht 1998). Both make politicized use of ritual spaces and
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religious ritual practices as devices for mobilization. Every religious community,

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not just politicized ones, makes selective use of their textual tradition, tailor their
interpretations to the tasks at hand. It is not possible to distinguish politicized
religious movements from non-politicized ones based on the extent to which they
follow the “fundamentals,” themselves just a selective construction. The religious
difference between attempts by Hindus or Jews to control particular pieces of
contested territory and equivalent attempts by Muslims or American Christians,
whom she includes in the fundamentalist category, to control the territories they
already inhabit eludes me. Both of these “fundamentalists” seek to use state power
to control elements of territorial choreography—work hours, cinema, food con-
sumption, dress—basing their rights to do so in religious cosmology. Keddie’s
distinction is, I suspect, a crypto-Christian classification that makes individual
orthopraxis the basis of a textually inspired politics and collective organization the
basis of a territorially inspired politics.

RELIGIOUS NATIONALISM AS INSTITUTIONAL POLITICS

To understand religious nationalism we must begin not with groups but with an
institutional architecture of the social, not with cultural, but with institutional, au-
tonomy. An institutional approach not only necessarily creates an analytic space
for the subject, it refuses the dualities of social theory. Modern society is com-
posed of distinct, culturally laden institutional fields, each of which operates as
if it were organized around transrational substances—power, love, faith, property,
knowledge—ontologies whose reality is performed as much as revealed through
routinized procedures enacted by culturally specific agents whose agency and in-
terest are tied to those substances and the real relations which they make possible
and which conjure them into existence.
Institutions are at once social and cultural. They are transrational ways of or-
ganizing bodies and objects in space and time (Friedland & Alford 1991). And
they are themselves spaces and times, locations in which those bodies and objects
carry particular meanings. Institutions form both values, in the sense of stakes, and
the means by which such values are signified. Institutions constitute both ends and
means. Ends are known, made accountable and actionable, through the techniques,
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RELIGIOUS NATIONALISM 141

the procedures, through which they are produced and distributed. One “makes”
love through practices of kinship and its sensuous solidarities and exclusions;
democracy through electoral practices, regular plebiscites understood as demo-
cratic practices; profit through monetized networks of exchange between holders
of different properties, themselves known only through the rights regulating these
exchanges. Love, democratic representation, and profit are ontological substances,
constructed things, never truly had, but done.
The organizations of bodies and things in space and time become material sig-
nifiers for categories and values (see also Mohr & Duquenne 1997). This choreog-
raphy of practice is not properly speaking a form of social signage. The material
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practices through which those categories and values, as well as the subjects they
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imply—voting, democracy and citizen, for example—are symbolizations, in that

they have an inherent and nonarbitrary relation to the signified, democracy or rep-
resentation in this case. Institutional analysis, with its profusion of performatives,
requires us to move beyond the linguistic model in which the referent does not sig-
nify. Social practice is both referent and signifier; it is an ontological performance.
Institutions have logics that must be made material in order to signify.
Moral cartography is produced by the distribution of material practices. Re-
sources—guns or butter, bodies or things, territory or time—have little efficacy
independent of the institutional codes that are a condition of their deployment.
This is as true for the investment banker as it is for the mullah, each of whom
must neutralize the efficacy of resources freighted with other institutional mean-
ings. Things don’t matter without meaning. And meanings—symbols and signs,
narratives and metaphors—do not signify independently of their reference, and
the history of that reference, in material practices. Institutional theory is not about
the leftovers of rational action, the ways in which cultural conventions rush in
where means-ends relations are opaque. Rather, institutional logics constitute the
cosmology within which means are meaningful, where means-ends couplets make
sense, are thought appropriate, and become the naturalized, unthought conditions
of social action, performing the substance of the interests that are at stake within
them. Resources are referents that signify; materiality is always meaningful.
If resources are bound to institutions, useful because meaningful, then interests
in resources cannot be dissociated from the institutional conditions that establish
their value. There is no political economy that is not simultaneously a cultural
sociology, and vice versa. Every resource allocation is a process of signification,
in which the categories, instruments, and agencies through which some object is
produced or distributed are made real. Struggles over resources always contain
the possibility of struggle over discourse/classification because they expand the
materiality, the efficacy of those agents and languages that thereby organize those
resources.
Religion, then, is not just a doctrine, a set of myths, a culture; it is an institutional
space according to whose logic religious nationalists wish to remake the world.
Religion is a network of sacred sites and ritual spaces, as well as community centers,
associations, schools, hospitals, courts, and charities. In the face of failures, limits,
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142 FRIEDLAND

and retrenchments of the welfare state, for instance, religious communities seek
to fill the gap. Religious nationalist movements not only provide an alternative
welfare-state to their members, its services are offered and consumed as a condition
of and within a context of community, unlike the distant, bureaucratic, and often
officious state. Islamic, Jewish, and Hindu nationalists all built their movements
by offering things as simple as cooking oil and well-water, places to sleep and
learn, as community acts of care, not the governmental management of a social
problem. Religion offers a concrete cosmos within which an alternative vision of
the social can be imagined and prefigured.
Religious nationalism grows out of modernity’s institutional heterologies. Reli-
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gious nationalism extends the institutional logic of religion into the domain of the
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democratic nation-state, deriving authority from an absolute divine writ, not the
subjective aggregations of the demos; pushing toward redemption, not progress;
locating agency in a disciplined self bound to God, not a sacralized, self-interested
monad; constituting society not through the abstract, disembodied individual of the
market but through the erotic and gendered flesh of the family. Religious national-
ism posits an institutionally specific substance of the social, neither the procedures
of reason nor the play of self-interest, but rather the communal solidarities of faith.
Religious nationalism can be understood as a heterologous project to pro-
mote a particular logic of collective representation. Institutional logic and
collective representation are linked phenomena because groups form through par-
ticular institutional configurations and because institutions defend and extend
themselves through group conflicts. Groups know themselves through their in-
stitutional projects, and through those projects they reshape the logic of collective
representation, not just who is represented but the nature of the representation.
Social movements are not just about inclusion and exclusion, domination and sub-
ordination, of social groups. The empirical question is the extent to which groups
derive from and target particular institutional sites, and to which they draw on
different institutional languages, and their success in making those particular lan-
guages primary. The invocation of a particular institutional logic is a political act,
a performative claim that the institution to which it has most reference should have
primacy, and hence that the groups/agents who politically intervene from it should
have power.

RELIGIOUS NATIONALISM AND THE HOMOLOGOUS

WORLDS OF PIERRE BOURDIEU
Religious nationalism requires a cultural sociological approach. In this and the
following section, I examine the adequacy of Pierre Bourdieu’s theory of the field
and Jeffrey Alexander’s theory of civil society, for the project of understanding
contemporary religious nationalism.
Although I have been influenced by Pierre Bourdieu’s insistence on the ma-
teriality and embodied quality of categorical knowledge, religious nationalism is
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RELIGIOUS NATIONALISM 143

difficult to apprehend within his habitus/field theory. Bourdieu conceives of soci-

ety as a structure of domination, a structure for which one is prepared from birth
through the inculcation of knowledges that are predominantly acquired not by
design, but by living, a disciplining of the body through the choreography of life.
Bourdieu calls this knowledge habitus, a knowledge that goes without saying be-
cause it came without saying. Habitus, the foundation stone of Bourdieu’s theory, is
an embodied categorical structure that simultaneously structures the object world
and the subject’s orientation within that world. One’s position in the structure of
domination is given by the resources to which one has access—money, power,
cultural knowledge, technical expertise, social connections. Habitus translates this
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position into disposition. One knows one’s place, one’s chances, the moves and
Annu. Rev. Sociol. 2001.27:125-152. Downloaded from www.annualreviews.org

investments and their likely pay-offs.

Habitus is the tacit knowledge that is the condition of possibility of institutional
life. Bourdieu looks upon institutional “fields” as relatively autonomous games,
arenas each with its own gravitational logic, zones in which particular forms of
capital have efficacy in the pursuit of that which is at stake in the game (Bourdieu &
Wacquant 1992:97–101). Bourdieu derives the invariant laws of modernity’s mul-
tiple fields from their homologous logics (Bourdieu & Wacquant 1992). Habitus
binds unconsciously and efficiently because of the homologous distributions of
resources across distinct institutional fields. Each field is polarized between those
few who control its most important resources and those who have very few, if any,
of those resources.
Homology, however, depends on a cultural homogenization. In Bourdieu’s early
work, every resource—economic, social, cultural, information—became another
form of capital, every field another “market.” Bourdieu economized all realms of
social life in which one invests, develops credit, and reaps profits. Through the
concept of several capitals, Bourdieu sought to convert Weber’s distinct spheres
of class, status, and power to a common conceptual metric. Thus, for example, the
contest over control of legitimate violence—Weber’s criterion for state power—
became the “struggle to accumulate symbolic capital” (Bourdieu 1977:41, 60–
61), that is, the capacity to impose one’s categorical order on the social world, a
monopoly on the violence of legitimation. More recently, Bourdieu has become
indifferent in using the term power or capital (Bourdieu & Wacquant 1992:97).
Although Bourdieu has alerted us to the dangers of reproducing doxa by re-
lying on folk categories in the construction of our theoretical objects, he himself
imports the dominant fields—capitalism and the bureaucratic state—into the ana-
lytic categories—capital and power—by which we understand all fields. Bourdieu
thus reproduces the dominance of the dominant institutions. To homologize insti-
tutionally, Bourdieu reduces all field relations to the power binary of dominant and
dominated. It is only because Bourdieu has homogenized the principle of prac-
tice across fields—the binary of domination—that he can so easily homologize
groups across fields (Bourdieu 1990). The several capitals are ultimately con-
vertible in the “division in the labor of domination” (Bourdieu 1996, Bourdieu &
Wacquant 1992). Accumulation of capital is a trans-historical mode of reproducing
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144 FRIEDLAND

domination within a field, this “will to power” being the cultural content of interest
within every field. The “field of power” is the “gaming space” in which holders
of these diverse forms of power, the dominant groups within each field, struggle
over which will be the dominant form of power, the exchange rate between them,
and hence the “dominant principle of domination” (Bourdieu 1996). By making
economic practice a trans-institutional instrument in the service of domination,
Bourdieu makes the social into a general political economy, a significant theoreti-
cal achievement, but he thereby undercuts the transformative possibilities inherent
in classificatory systems, both in their singularity and their plurality. The cultural
constitution of groups is derived from this political economy, the stakes of the
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game are homogenized, and the group structure is homologized.

Annu. Rev. Sociol. 2001.27:125-152. Downloaded from www.annualreviews.org

Religious nationalism is a break in modern doxa, our common sense of things,

a failure in the modern state’s capacity to produce a habitus that makes submission
not into choice, but common sense, a natural attitude. Bourdieu writes that it is the
modern state:
. . . which possesses the means of imposition and inculcation of the durable
principles of vision and division that conform to its own structure, is the site
par excellence of the concentration of symbolic power. (1998:47)
Because he locates the origin of the dominant vision in the political victories
of dominant groups, whose domination rests on their constitution of the state,
the modern state becomes an instrument for the institution of categorical knowl-
edge, a monopoly medium for universalizing and naturalizing knowledge, a cog-
nitive machine that plays a particular role in the “division of labor of domination”
(Bourdieu 1998:58). Here, the substantive content of the universal is not of soci-
ological import.
Bourdieu’s theoretical apparatus does apply to religious nationalism in that it
is a classification struggle over the dominant principle of domination, a struggle
animated by a principle which could be defined by its distance from that of the lib-
eral capitalist state. Religious nationalism, like the modern state itself, originates
as a symbolic disordering out of the interested plays of agents who are particu-
larly positioned. The position of religious agents is important in explaining the
rise of religious nationalism. Specifically, religion’s institutional autonomy from
the state is a critical variable in accounting for the ability of its agents to promote
their state vision. Religious nationalism developed earliest in those places where
religion was not controlled by the state: in Iran, where the Sh’ite clergy, with their
tradition of the imam, a non-political religious authority, had been able to maintain
their autonomy from the Shahs; in Israel, where the rabbinate, although partially
incorporated within the state was not subordinate to it; in the United States where
the state was constitutionally prevented from controlling the religious domain;
and in India where the state did not regulate Hindu religious institutions. Religious
nationalism has not developed in those countries where religion is not allowed an
independent institutional space such as China, Japan, and Korea, all places where
the state actually controls religious finances and appointments (Rudolph 1997a).
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RELIGIOUS NATIONALISM 145

However, even states that have sought to control religious institutions have not nec-
essarily been able to prevent the politicization of religion as the cases of Turkey,
Algeria, and Egypt all make clear (Humphreys 1999).
One could also point to the distinctive social composition of religious nation-
alism’s carriers—its urban support, and specifically the way clerics marginalized
by the modernized institutes of religious training often play such a critical role,
making religious nationalism into a medium for distributional struggles for those
lacking in symbolic capital or political power (Arjomand 1995, Riesebrodt 1993).
Religious nationalism draws overwhelmingly from the middle class, precisely that
class to which political sociologists have always looked as a bastion of support for
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democracy. However, there is no consistent pattern of support within that vast and
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variegated urban middle class. The adherents of religious nationalism come from
declining sectors like the bazaar merchants, as well as from rising sectors like the
professionals and state bureaucrats (Lawrence 1998, Riesebrodt 1993, Humphreys
1992). In the United States, the Christian right, those who believe that America
was founded as a Christian nation and should, by law, remain that way, draws from
both evangelicals and traditionally premillenarian fundamentalists. A majority of
both communities actively participate in conservative Christian politics. American
evangelicals and fundamentalists are smack dab in the middle class, less likely to
be poor than the nonreligious (Hunter 1987, Roof 1999, Smith 1998). Indeed, a ma-
jority of the Christian right base communities report that their economic situation
has improved over the last decade (Smith 1998).
Islamic radicalism likewise appeals to the urban middle class, not to the poor,
the working class, or the rural peasantry. However, this still leaves a lot of social
space and there is no consistent pattern across the cases. In Pakistan, it appeals to
state employees and not to urban, under-employed young professionals. In Egypt
and Tunisia, in contrast, it appeals predominantly to upwardly mobile middle
classes, particularly the professionals. In Syria the merchants and landlords are
key (Lawrence 1998). The only thing these disparate groups have in common is
that they can read, which is no small thing.
Religious nationalism represents the return to text, to the fixity of signs, the
renarrativization of the nation in a cosmic context. It returns us to bodies and
souls, a zone to be defended against things on the one side and beasts on the other.
Religious nationalism is literally about reading, the collective plumbing of a text
for its timeless truths, as a basis for the narration of contemporary history. Islamic
fundamentalists look to the Quranic history of the community founded by Prophet
Muhammad in the seventh century as a template by which to gauge and goad the
present order. Their Jewish counterparts locate their foundation and telos in the
ancient Temple-centered kingdom that was the culmination of God’s territorial
promise to Abraham, Moses, and David documented in the Torah. Christian fun-
damentalists read the prophetic books of the Bible as a road-map by which they
interpret contemporary social realities. Hindu nationalists derive their reading of
the Indian state from the Hindi Ramayana, a narration of the foundational kingship
of Ram, the avatar of Vishnu.
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146 FRIEDLAND

Religious nationalists read these books and commentaries on them together.

This collective reading is the core of their communitas. The middle class is a class
of the word. It owes its life, its earnings, to its ability to read books, to words and
numbers that have a clear meaning and a certain use. That those who live off the
book should seek to live by the book as a foundation for a new social trust, is, as
Bourdieu might say, part of the middle class habitus, an unconscious disposition,
an autonomic routine. In the Islamic world, the newly educated youth read and
discuss a popular Islamic literature written in colloquial Arabic rather than the
classical Arabic of the traditional scholarly Islamic elites. Protestant evangelicals
and fundamentalists understand how God wants them to live by their reading of
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the Bible, not by what the Church teaches them (Smith 1998). Latin American
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Catholicism moved into Liberation Theory, not only because of the message of
social justice contained in Vatican Council II, but also because of the post-WWII
translation of the liturgy into local languages and the encouragement of lay Bible
reading (Levine & Stoll 1997). In a pattern that replicates Protestantism’s birth
process, this collective interpretation of words by the people themselves feeds a
diffuse associational network, a popular religious civil society, that is very difficult
for the state or organized religious hierarchies to control (Rudolph 1997b).
While Bourdieu’s schema captures part of its process, it misses the institutional
substances at stake that make those struggles possible. Religious nationalism does
not derive from the dominated groups within the dominant institutions—capitalism
and state, but from an alternative institutional space altogether. By stripping means
of their institutional meaning, by homogenizing the logic of practice as a gener-
alized political economy, Bourdieu eliminates the institutional zones upon which
alternative projects can be mounted. It is institutional heterology, not conflicts
over the distributions of several capitals so central in Bourdieu’s theory, nor an
unspeakable outside as in some poststructuralist accounts, that is the critical source
of human freedom.

RELIGIOUS NATIONALISM AND THE CIVIL CENTER

If religious nationalism is difficult to theorize within Pierre Bourdieu’s cultur-

ally homogenous instrumentalized world, it is no less easy within the sacralized,
normative world of Jeffrey Alexander. If that of Bourdieu is animated by instru-
mental, misrecognized struggles for power and capital mediated through the state,
in Alexander, these struggles are not only refracted but constituted through the
democratic culture of civil society, powered by struggles over membership and
recognition. If the meaning of Bourdieu’s universal is reduced to the bleak binary
logic of domination, categories driven by distribution, in Alexander, its meanings
are polysemous and efflorescent, moral dualities charged with sacrality (Alexander
1995).
Alexander, who pioneered the cultural sociological agenda and whose insis-
tence on cultural constitution I share, locates the cultural in a specific institutional
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RELIGIOUS NATIONALISM 147

field—civil society, a sphere separated from both the economy and the state, as
well as from religion, family, science, and primordial communities. Civil society is
roughly equivalent to the public sphere, a zone where individual rights are pro-
tected, political participation organized, and societal membership defined. He
writes:
Such an independent civil sphere can exist only insofar as the privacy of
individual interaction is protected, institutional independence is guaranteed
for the creation of law and public opinion, and normative symbolic patterns
make honesty, rationality, individual autonomy, cooperation and impersonal
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trust the basic criteria for membership in the binding community that defines
‘society’. (Alexander 1996:225)
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In contrast to Bourdieu’s “field of power” as modern society’s institutional center,

Alexander accords this role to civil society, the source of the symbols out of which
we define our collective identity and its terms of membership. Alexander derives the
possibility of modern social movements from “an imagined community” whose
content derives from this civil society’s codes—honesty, rationality, individual
autonomy, cooperation, and impersonal trust. It is these codes, this culture, of civil
society that defines the “criteria for membership in the binding community that
defines ‘society.’”
Civil society, and civil society alone, provides the platform for collective and
individual agency. Alexander writes:
. . . the most significant idioms, codes and narratives employed by strong so-
cial movements, new and old, positive and negative, are independent of their
structural position in particular spheres. Indeed, when one examines these
tropes, one can plainly see that it is their very distance from particular in-
stitutional arenas that allows them to offer social movements leverage, that
creates the possibility of an escape from immediate institutional demands,
that encourages the very exercise of agency vis a vis institutional constraints
that the very existence of a social movement implies. (1996:226)
Social movements pose their demands, derive their possibility from, and depend
for their success upon the “utopian notion of community” immanent in civil soci-
ety, “according to which rational actors spontaneously forge ties that are at once
self-regulating, solidaristic, and emancipatory, which are independent of market
rewards, religious faith, family love, state coercion and scientific truth” (1996:227,
229). Agency depends on difference from every other institutional domain.
Alexander makes civil society, which he equates with the universalistic rights
of democracy—not science, religion, economy, or family—into culture’s central
domain, the sacred’s modern locus. Here Alexander follows Talcott Parsons’ no-
tion of “societal community,” a zone of universalistic solidarity through which the
social system is integrated (Mouzelis 1999). To equate society with its universal-
istic, rational civil zone deprives us of the absolute unreason, the erotic, ecstatic,
kinetic “effervescence” of the social upon which Emile Durkheim insisted, an
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148 FRIEDLAND

unreason taken up in the 1930s by the College de Sociologie. Alexander also, by

fiat, negates the Marxist civil society tradition that understood civil society as a
bourgeois order standing outside the state. If Bourdieu capitalizes the social, elimi-
nating by concept the contradiction between institutional spheres, Alexander hives
off the capitalist economy altogether, reducing the place modern society is defined
to the public sphere and the content of its identity to democracy’s moral codes.
Alexander’s civil society is suffused with political substance, but devoid of eco-
nomic content, even though our categories of the person and his rights are histor-
ically suffused with property and its exchange. Alexander is, of course, correct to
argue that democratic civil society is the most important medium through which
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groups reach for power not only within the polity, but within other particular insti-
Annu. Rev. Sociol. 2001.27:125-152. Downloaded from www.annualreviews.org

tutional spheres. That, however, does not exhaust the sociological significance of
many social movements, nor is the civil society the only site through which society
is imagined, its values redistributed and/or reconstituted. While civil society may be
a critical locus of will formation, it is not the only source of its content. Alexander
mistakes a medium of political participation for the meaning of membership.
And he reduces the meaning of political participation to membership in the de-
mos, social movements being understood as media for groups carrying particular
“social problems” into the public arena. T. H. Marshall has been mated with Emile
Durkheim.
The problem was not that Parsons concretely conflated the cultural and the
social, as a problem of observability, but that he analytically separated them, failing
to articulate the cultural mediations by which production and distribution were
systematically linked, and that he assumes a unitary cultural order, not just in the
sense that differently positioned individuals have different interests in that order,
[the dominant distributional critique of Parsons (Alexander & Colomy 1990)], but
that different institutions, more than serving different systemic functions, produce
and distribute different potentially contradictory values.
Alexander has relocated the sacred to the public sphere, distilled its ideal voice,
the tropes of reasoned consensus. But each institutional sphere has its own sacrality,
a capacity to organize social life and the collectivity in its own language, linked to
its own techniques of production and distribution. Each provides its own distinctive
collective imaginary, its own universals which movements and organizations try to
socially concretize. Democracy’s institutional distinctiveness lies not in its univer-
sality, but in the sacrality with which it invests the person, the primacy it accords
the individual’s voice. Capitalist markets, bureaucratic states, domestic families,
scientific fields, religion—each generates a heterologous language, each produces
and distributes specific values—money, rationality, love, truth, faith. While there
are symmetries and interdependencies between institutional codes, there are also
critical gaps and contradictions, incommensurabilities that provide politics’ pas-
sionate energies, that afford the space for social movements like those of socialist
workers, ecologists, feminists, or religious nationalists. It is these contradictions—
not, as Alexander insists, the gap between value and norm that Talcott Parsons
left unproblematic between the cultural and the social—that are also critical in
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RELIGIOUS NATIONALISM 149

making space for agency. It is the contradiction between democracy and society’s
two dominant institutions—capitalism and the state—that gives civil society much
of its energizing power, and that between religion and the capitalist state that makes
religious nationalism possible and provides its hermeneutic codes.
Alexander assumes what needs to be treated as historically variable, that suc-
cessful social movements must convert their claims into the democratic language of
civil society. Religious nationalisms are strong social movements, yet they violate
civil society’s codes, counterposing transrational belief to rationality, the commu-
nal solidarities of faith to impersonal trust, the revealed text to a compact founded
on reasoned consent, involuntary subordination to divine dictates as opposed to
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individual autonomy. Religious nationalism, like socialism, indicates not only that
Annu. Rev. Sociol. 2001.27:125-152. Downloaded from www.annualreviews.org

civil society’s moral codes need not have primacy in the formation of success-
ful social movements, but that democracy cannot easily manage the heterologous
logics of rationality, scientific truth, allocative efficiency, familial need, or religious
faith.

CONCLUSION
Religious nationalism challenges the sociological imagination. It requires that we
think anew. It forces us to rethink the duality of social and cultural, to move away
from the group as the elemental constituent of social organization, to recognize the
heterology of institutions as the basis of politics and collective agency, and through
the institution to make the cultural content of power part of our understanding of
the politics of culture.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I would like to thank an anonymous reviewer for his comments and Karen Cook
for her editorial suggestions.

Visit the Annual Reviews home page at www.AnnualReviews.org

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 Annual Review of Sociology
Volume 27, 2001

CONTENTS
VIOLENCE AND THE LIFE COURSE: The Consequences of
Victimization for Personal and Social Development, Ross Macmillan
1
Rediscovery of the Family, the Neighborhood, and Culture, Mario Luis 23
CASES AND BIOGRAPHIES: An Essay on Routinization and the Nature
of Comparison, Carol A. Heimer 47
EDUCATION AND STRATIF ICATION IN DEVELOPING
COUNTRIES: A Review of Theories and Research, Claudia Buchmann,
Emily Hannum 77
THE GREAT AGRICULTURAL TRANSITION: Crisis, Change, and
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Social Consequences of Twentieth Century US Farming, Linda Lobao,

Katherine Meyer 103
Annu. Rev. Sociol. 2001.27:125-152. Downloaded from www.annualreviews.org

RELIGIOUS NATIONALISM AND THE PROBLEM OF

COLLECTIVE REPRESENTATION, Roger Friedland 125
SOCIOECONOMIC STATUS AND CLASS IN STUDIES OF
FERTILITY AND HEALTH IN DEVELOPING , Kenneth A. Bollen,
Jennifer L. Glanville, Guy Stecklov 153
SPORT AND SOCIETY, Robert E. Washington, David Karen 187
US SOCIAL POLICY IN COMPARATIVE AND HISTORICAL
PERSPECTIVE: Concepts, Images, Arguments, and Research Strategies,
Edwin Amenta, Chris Bonastia, Neal Caren 213
IS GLOBALIZATION CIVILIZING, DESTRUCTIVE OR FEEBLE? A
CRITIQUE OF FIVE KEY DEBATES IN THE SOCIAL SCIENCE
LITERATURE, Mauro F. Guillén 235
RELIGIOUS PLURALISM AND RELIGIOUS PARTICIPATION, Mark
Chaves, Philip S. Gorski 261
COLLECTIVE IDENTITY AND SOCIAL, Francesca Polletta, James
M. Jasper 283
SOCIAL IMPLICATIONS OF THE INTERNET, Paul DiMaggio, Eszter
Hargittai, W. Russell Neuman, John P. Robinson 307
THE SCALE OF JUSTICE: Observations on the Transformation of
Urban Law Practice, John P. Heinz, Robert L. Nelson, Edward O.
Laumann 337
CONCEPTUALIZING STIGMA, Bruce G. Link, Jo C. Phelan 363
SOCIOLOGICAL MINIATURISM: Seeing the Big Through the Small in
Social Psychology, John F. Stolte, Gary Alan Fine, Karen S. Cook
387
BIRDS OF A FEATHER: Homophily in Social Networks, Miller
McPherson, Lynn Smith-Lovin, James M Cook 415
EARLY TRADITIONS OF AFRICAN-AMERICAN SOCIOLOGICAL
THOUGHT, Alford A. Young Jr., Donald R. Deskins Jr. 445
HATE CRIME: An Emergent Research Agenda, Donald P. Green,
Laurence H. McFalls, Jennifer K. Smith 479