Abstract
The formation of religious nationalism has long been undertheorized in sociology. As Gregory Goalwin points out in Borders of Belief: Religious Nationalism and the Formation of Identity in Ireland and Turkey, when the issue has been examined, it is often through teleological perspectives that frame religious nationalist movements as backlashes against the failure of modernity to provide order and collective meaning, or an anachronism of a premodern world that will eventually disappear with the advent of modernization and secularization. Less scholarly effort has been made to understand “why religious identification becomes politically meaningful, and how . . . nationalists go about the process of group identity formation constructing national communities around religious identities”—key objectives of Goalwin’s analysis (p. 3).
Rather than a backlash to modernity, the author reveals how religious nationalism emerged through processes of modernization and state-building. Borders of Belief provides a rare comparative analysis of a case of Christian nationalism in Europe (Ireland) with a case of religious nationalism outside Europe, in Turkey, to highlight important theoretical lessons that cut across very different cultural and regional contexts. The comparison of two societies containing distinct religious factions and located in different regions makes the conclusions more generalizable than some previous work on the issue. Goalwin is well qualified to write this book, moreover, having previously published several peer-reviewed articles positioning him as a burgeoning expert on historical and comparative methodology.
The historical depth of the analysis is impressive, tracing the centuries-long developments of the two nations. It employs a “top-down” perspective emphasizing the roles of elites who led in the transition to national independence and resistance to imperialism amid rapidly changing political and economic conditions. Simultaneously, the analysis identifies patterns in how everyday citizens exercised collective agency from the “bottom up” in response to the same changing conditions, mobilizing religious identifications to an extent that could not be ignored by political elites or populist revolutionaries. The analysis is highly nuanced, also identifying how, in both societies, dominant forms of nationalism developed through contests between political nationalists, cultural nationalists, and religious nationalists for the imaginations of the masses, and why religious nationalists were most successful in framing the symbols and values that would come to constitute “the nation.”
After introducing his main arguments, theoretical framework, and methodology in the first chapter, the author dedicates two chapters to each case study. Chapter Two examines the gradual, top-down formation of the Irish nation; Chapter Three, in contrast, examines bottom-up dynamics of Irish religious nationalism amid shifts in social structures and demographic change (increase in the Catholic middle class) and mass tragedy (the Great Famine). For a long time, Irish Protestant elites led the Irish nationalist campaign for political independence from Britain. It was not until Daniel O’Connell sought the religious emancipation of Catholics through repeal of the oppressive anti-Catholic Irish Penal Laws that resistance to British imperialism took on a decisively religious form. The more secular cultural nationalism driven by the Gaelic Revival, initiated largely by Protestant elites, contributed to the solidification of boundaries between Irishness and Englishness and was inclusive across class and religion, to some extent.
However, the national divide was framed increasingly along English Protestant and Irish Catholic boundaries following the Great Famine, as the suffering of Catholics was witnessed in contradistinction to a Protestant population that “weathered the famine relatively well” (p. 150). “[T]he rise of the Catholic middle class, rising resentment over British failure to ameliorate the famine, and rising religiosity as a response to the tragedy of the famine led to a powerful role for Catholicism in the formation of new concepts of national identity” (p. 150). The execution by British forces of leaders of the 1916 Easter Rising in Dublin, who were all Catholic, and who used symbols of Catholicism to frame the national struggle, created martyrs who inspired a distinctly Catholic Irish nationalism. It was this Catholic representation of the Irish nation that would guide the constitution of the Irish Republic years later.
The section on Turkey follows a similar structure: Chapter Four analyzes the “official” Turkish nation sought by western-influenced secular elites amid the fall of the Ottoman empire and aggression of imperialist Christian powers (Britain, Greece, and others). Chapter Five focuses instead on “bottom-up” processes of everyday Turkish nationalists who, in the context of rising insecurity during World War One and the loss of Ottoman territory to Christian powers, sought a more exclusionary national identity that was culturally Turkish and religiously Muslim, ultimately influencing policies of “secular” leaders to exclude Christians and Jews from full citizenship. Like the chapters on Ireland, Goalwin’s highly nuanced analysis highlights the agencies of various actors and the interactions among them that shaped national identity in Turkey. (The analysis is so nuanced, that it is impossible to adequately envisage all the relevant factors incorporated in the analysis, considering the limited space available here.)
In addition, Goalwin discusses the ongoing relevance of religion in shaping nationalist thinking today in both societies, demonstrated in the political conflict between Catholics and Protestants that continues in Northern Ireland, and between secular and conservative Islamic segments of the Turkish population with respect to various social policies on dress, language, and religious symbols in public, and even control of the army. Importantly, the analysis also demonstrates the empirical applicability of the theoretical frameworks on nation formation advanced by scholars Andreas Wimmer, Rogers Brubaker, and Danièle Hervieu-Léger. All of Wimmer’s typologies of ethnic or national boundary-formation are demonstrated in at least one section of the analysis. Moreover, the “wide variety of different strategies that Irish and Turkish nationalists pursued confirms that national identity in these states . . . is contextual, processual, and dynamic in the way . . . Brubaker identified” (pp. 152–53). Finally, through his strategic employment of social identity complexity theory, Goalwin lends empirical weight to Hervieu-Léger’s view of religion as an “important reservoir of cultural symbols, beliefs, and attitudes” that provide legitimacy to the nation as an imagined “us,” representing a higher order, while excluding a larger number of identity groups as alternative national constructs (p. 155).
Certainly, not all the key observations made by the author are exactly “new” or “original.” Yet it is rarely (if ever) the case in well-done historical-comparative analyses that each dimension of the argument is “new,” due to the nature of the method. Furthermore, there is some redundancy in discussion of the role of elites in shaping the Irish nationalist struggle in Chapters Two and Three, as well as the agencies of secular political elites in Turkey in Chapters Four and Five. The author acknowledges this at the outset, however, and argues convincingly that some repetition in the discussion of such phenomena was necessary to provide a thorough analysis of the interplay between behaviors and discourses of elites and those of the masses which constitute processes of nation formation.
Overall, the author impressively reveals connections between several analytical categories and the similar processes underscoring religion’s influence on nation formation across very different societies and historical contexts. Those skeptical about the extent to which religion shapes national identity and political conflict would do well to read Borders of Belief. I would recommend the book to those interested in the interdisciplinary fields of nationalism, ethnic conflict, religious studies, and Irish or Turkish history.