Religion: Nationalism and Identity
like the Vo$ lkerschlachtdenkmal commemorating the
fallen at the battle of Leipzig in 1813. In Britain,
Lutyens’ Cenotaph in Whitehall embodied the grief
and pride of the nation; the annual Armistice Day
ceremonies there and across the land, to the strains of
Elgar and Chopin and the reveille bugle calls, evoke
the terrible sacrifices in two World Wars and the
collective resolve of the British in an atmosphere of
sombre reverence.
There are few modern nations that do not have their
memorials to the glorious dead, their ceremonies of
commemoration, and their shrines, icons, and symbols
of martyrdom and heroism. In this respect, as in the
other sacred ‘pillars,’ nations and their artistic repre-
sentations have taken over so much of the symbolism
and emotion of earlier religious traditions, and infused
their this-worldly beliefs in posterity and the judge-
ment of history with earlier sacred longings for
collective immortality.
In these ways, nations and their nationalisms have
emerged on a religious foundation and are infused
with many of their sacred motifs and properties—‘reli-
gion’ being understood here in its wider Durkheimian
sense as a collective bond of obligation in respect of
sacred things, continually rehearsed in ceremonies and
rituals. At the same time, individual historical expres-
sions of a nation’s identity may cleave closer to this
religious base, or depart from it to embrace a more
secular ideal and formulation. However, even in these
latter cases, the nation continues to draw upon some
of the sacred properties of earlier beliefs and practices
and so remains fundamentally a form of sacred
communion, uniting its members in a moral and
ideological community of intimate belonging and
collective moral destiny.
See also: Ethnic Cleansing, History of; Ethnic
Conflicts; Ethnicity, Sociology of; Identity in An-
thropology; Identity: Social; National Character;
Nationalism and Expressive Forms; Nationalism:
Contemporary Issues; Nationalism: General; Nation-
alism, Historical Aspects of: Africa; Nationalism,
Historical Aspects of: Arab World; Nationalism,
Historical Aspects of: East Asia; Nationalism, His-
torical Aspects of: South Asia; Nationalism, Histori-
cal Aspects of: The West; Nationalism, Sociology
of; Reformation and Confessionalization; Religious
Nationalism and the Secular State: Cultural Concerns;
Rokkan, Stein (1921–79)
Bibliography
Akenson D H 1992 God’s Peoples: Co
enant and Land in South
Africa, Israel and Ulster. Cornell University Press, Ithaca
Anderson B 1991 Imagined Communities: Reflections on the
Origin and Spread of Nationalism. Verso, London
Armstrong J A 1982 Nations before Nationalism. University of
North Carolina Press, Chapel Hill, NC
13090
Breuilly J 1993 Nationalism and the State, 2nd edn. Manchester
University Press, Manchester, UK
Connor W 1994 Ethnonationalism: The Quest for Understanding.
Princeton University Press, Princeton, NJ
Gellner E 1983 Nations and Nationalism. Blackwell, Oxford, UK
Hobsbawm E 1990 Nations and Nationalism since 1780. Cam-
bridge University Press, Cambridge, UK
Hobsbawm E, Ranger T (eds.) 1983 The In
ention of Tradition.
Cornell University Press, Ithaca, NY
Juergensmeyer M 1993 The New Cold War: Religious National-
ism Confronts the Secular State. University of California
Press, Berkeley, CA
Kapferer B 1988 Legends of People, Myths of State. Smithsonian
Institution Press, Washington, DC
Kedourie E 1960 Nationalism. Hutchinson, London
Kedourie E (ed.) 1971 Nationalism in Asia and Africa. World
Publishing Company, New York
Mosse G L 1975 The Nationalization of the Masses. Fertig, New
York
Nairn T 1977 The Break-up of Britain. New Left Books, London
O’Brien C C 1988 God-land. Harvard University Press, Cam-
bridge, MA
Schama S 1989 Citizens, 1st edn. Knopf, New York
Smith A D 1986 The Ethnic Origins of Nations. Blackwell,
Oxford, UK
Smith A D 1991 National Identity. University of Nevada Press,
Reno, NV
Smith A D 1998 Nationalism and Modernism. Routledge,
London
A. D. Smith
Religion: Peace, War, and Violence
The relation of religion to peace, war, and violence (or
nonviolence) is bound up in the various visions of right
relationships and harmony within human beings and
between collectivites, including nation-states and ulti-
mately global society. Within Eastern traditions, for
example, a Buddhist espousal of nonattachment and
rejection of anger implies a peaceable attitude, and a
Confucian or Taoist espousal of harmony implies
reluctance to engage in depradation and offensive war.
Within Hinduism a major strain, at least as interpreted
by Gandhians, recommends a nonviolent approach
and the kind of exemplary spiritual suasion embodied
in satyagraha.
In all the Abrahamic traditions there is a positive
evaluation of peace, so that ‘Peace be with you’ and
‘Grant us thy peace’ are written into the most sacred
parts of the Christian liturgy, while shalom and salaam
are peaceable greetings in Judaism and Islam re-
spectively. The Hebrew Scriptures themselves are
contradictory. There is a tradition of the trickster
deploying deception, such as befits ethnic underdogs,
and an ideology of legitimate subjugation. At the same
time there is a moral reserve about the taking of blood
and a positive evaluation of Israel’s helplessness (and

dependence on God). This mutates into Isaiah’s vision
of universal peace and of the righteous rule of God so
central to the teaching of Jesus.
In the teaching of Jesus there is a radical reversal of
values which includes a rejection of the negative
reciprocity embodied in ‘an eye for an eye’ and the
feud. The Kingdom of God inaugurates a peaceful
world empire of love in a harmonious universal city,
New Jerusalem, which has its foundation in the self-
offering of the Savior as he confronts the powers of
violence and injustice. Versions of this approach
characterize Christianity in the earliest centuries,
resulting in conscientious objection to military action,
reinforced by refusal to take an idolatrous oath and
expectation of a divine foreclosure of human history.
1. Christianity and War After Constantine
However, with Constantine’s embrace of Christianity
as guarantee of victory, the ‘City of God’ has to be
firmly distinguished from the ‘City of Man,’ though
many Christians came to see the empire as the divinely
ordained vehicle of the Christian religion and its
triumph. Christianity was now the faith of the ma-
jority, including the power holders and senators, not
the hope of a minority mostly without access to power.
It was implicated in the dynamics of power, even
though monks and small groups maintained a de-
votion to peaceable ideals. Among these small groups
were evangelical sects like the Waldensians and du-
alistic heretics like the Cathars. The church itself
iconographically still embodied its original tension
with ‘the world’ of power and violence, set over
against icons which celebrate the proximity of the
powers that be to the mandates of the Almighty. The
church also attempted to adjudicate disputes, and
even restrict weaponry, more particularly in the feudal
period. It sought to enforce a ‘truce of God,’ in part to
further its own geopolitical ends in confronting the
Holy Roman Emperor and reversing the advance of
Islam.
The movements of the late Middle Ages, eventually
erupting in the Reformation, disseminated the Chris-
tian repertoire of themes beyond effective ecclesiastical
supervision. There were intimations of collective
peaceability in the Lutheran and Calvinist reforma-
tions, though these were rapidly checked by the fusion
of reformed faith with the autonomy of monarchs and
with national sovereignty. There were similar intima-
tions of peace within the natural law traditions of
Catholicism. However, the espousal of peace was
inevitably a minority option, for example, among
Christian humanists such as the Swiss Conrad Grebel,
and the anarchopacifist wing of the Radical Reform-
ation, for example, among Anabaptists and Quakers.
These minorities came to represent a sectarian encap-
sulation of Christian radicalism over a wide range
Religion: Peace, War, and Violence
of issues, including corporal and capital punishment,
which leaked into the wider society over the next two
or three centuries. It was, for example, chiefly among
such groups that supporters emerged for the nascent
peace societies of the UK and the USA in the early
nineteenth century.
2. Proposals for Uni
ersal Peace
Ideas of universal peace burgeoned from the four-
teenth century on, partly on the model of an imperial
Pax Romana, centered on this or that universal
monarchy, but also based on projects for an in-
ternational order. These latter picked up the Christian
humanism of Erasmus in his Complaint of Peace (1517)
and the notions of natural law articulated by Grotius
in his De jure belli ac pacis (1625). One of the most
complex of these projects was the Abbe! Saint-Pierre’s
Projet pour rendre la Paix perpetuelle (1713). The
last two great peace plans of this period were Kant’s
Perpetual Peace (1795) and Bentham’s Plan for a
Uni
ersal and Perpetual Peace (1789).
Here one needs to distinguish types of approach and
indicate a partial secularization of the religious vision
of peaceable social and international order. A notable
secularization was embodied in Machiavelli’s state-
ment of Renaissance political realism in The Prince,
while from rather different viewpoints, Kant fused
rational with Christian motifs and Bentham appealed
to criteria of human happiness. This mixture of con-
tradictory religious and secular discourses developed
into the liberal internationalism of the nineteenth
century. According to this tradition, especially as
developed in the USA and the UK, there was a
potential harmony of interests through the recipro-
cities established by free trade.
A parallel fusion of religious and political discourses
also occurred in the democratic socialist tradition, by
contrast with the Marxist variant predominant on the
European continent which consigned religion to a
realm of fantastic hopes devoid of scientific under-
standing. For Marxist-inspired movements, as also for
anarchosyndicalism, violence was a midwife of a new
revolutionary order. Out of the currents of liberalism
and socialism emerged hopes of universal human
and\or working-class solidarity which were articu-
lated in theories of the social sources of war and the
structural alterations needed for peace. However, the
wars of 1914–18 and 1939–45 suggested these hopes
were chimerical and the theories at best flawed, though
capitalism was still widely blamed for international
disorder and imperialism.
Out of this iron period grew a new realism about the
role of national interest in the genesis of war, which
was articulated both in religious and in secular form.
The major realist theologian was Reinhold Niebuhr in
his Moral Man and Immoral Society (1934) and the
major exponent of secular realism was the American
13091
Religion: Peace, War, and Violence
Hans Morgenthau. At the same time there also
emerged fully fledged empirical enquiries into conflict,
including ‘peace research.’
3. Forms of the Peace Sentiment
Thus over the last two centuries or so the ‘peace
sentiment’ has been part of overlapping causes of a
humanitarian and internationalist kind, simultan-
eously fed by religious and enlightenment sources.
There causes have conjoined the gospels to reason,
commonsense, and the quest for human rights in a
radical critique of war and militarism. The nineteenth
century sociologist Herbert Spencer, for example, had
roots both in rational and evangelical nonconformity,
and identified the alliance of state, priest, and military
as a major nexus of conflict. A leftward leaning
liberalism attacked the nation state and established
religion in the name of a pacific internationalism. This
was often referred to as ‘pacificism,’ meaning it
presumed the onus of proof was on the proposers of
war and held that the interests of those who stood to
gain, for example, the armaments manufacturers, ran
contrary to the interests of the majority. Liberal
internationalists were not strict ‘pacifists’ however,
because there were times when one had to crusade for
liberal principles and for liberation—including that
other liberal principle, national liberation.
Other humane causes loosely associated with the
peace sentiment were reforms of penal practice, above
all corporal and capital punishment and a new attitude
towards the animal world, which might include veg-
etarianism, with its objection to meat, machismo, and
blood. To these causes might be conjoined a preference
for wholesome food to nourish wholesome bodies and
lifestyles. All of these had religious roots, even though
one cause need not strictly imply another, so that
cornflakes were an outcrop of Adventist teaching
without requiring pacifism, whereas the Quaker pro-
duction of chocolate was clearly linked to it by
association. Humanitarians opposed all kinds of
brutalization, including male violence in the home and
the army. A feminization of the psyche occurred, bred
in the Sunday School and in progressive education
alongside movements for factory reform and the
provision of life-enhancing leisure pursuits, preferably
in the context of ‘nature.’
The concept of individual conscience took off from
religious prescriptions like personal conversion and
witness and then mutated into a new sensitivity,
including sensitivity towards the effects on other
peoples of conquest, imperialism, and exploitation.
Thus alongside the nationalistic fervor infiltrating and
informing much mass religiosity there ran a counter-
point of moral and political conscientiousness. There
were movements for democratic scrutiny of foreign
policy and the sale of armaments, for the arbitration of
international disputes, the enforcement of interna-
13092
tional law, and eventually the League of Nations and
the United Nations. Alongside these ran mostly
nonviolent agitations for civil rights and\or national
liberation such as those led by Ghandi, Martin Luther
King, Nelson Mandela, and Archbishop Tutu.
Of course, given the schooling of populations in
patriotic sentiment, dissenting attitudes and conscien-
tiousness usually characterized only a minority in the
churches and even more so among people at large.
This was above all true in wartime, when dissent from
all war or from the claimed objectives of a particular
war, could be defined as cowardice or disobedience to
lawful authority. Yet conscientious objection still
made headway and, at least in the countries of the
North Atlantic, Protestant world governments re-
luctantly accepted that national claims to loyalty were
not absolute. This partial tolerance applied to the
‘historic peace churches,’ such as the Quakers and
Mennonites, but also included sizeable groups within
the larger Protestant denominations, and it just about
extended to secular objections rooted in socialism
or humanitarian ideals such as were promoted by
Leo Tolstoy.
The social ecology of the ‘peace sentiment’ over the
last quarter millennium is clear enough. It began in the
transatlantic world through a combination of religious
and rational liberal motifs—Manchester allied to
Boston—above all among Protestants, and by degrees
affected established churches and the Roman Catholic
Church. Given that the Roman Catholic Church was
rooted in more organic and communal forms of
society, especially in Latin Europe, its defence of the
rights of individual conscience was originally weaker.
Yet its transnational character always included a sense
of the law of nations as nourished by the traditional
concept of a just war, such as due proportion of means
to ends.
With the development of weapons of mass de-
struction most mainstream churches expressed reser-
vations about the doctrine of deterrence as it related to
the ‘just war.’ On the one hand there were religious
groups allied to secular middle-class radicalism in
campaigns against nuclear armament and colonial
involvements such as Vietnam, and on the other hand
there were specialist commissions into the contem-
porary nature of war and peacemaking. Thus the
Church of England produced a report The Church and
the Bomb (1982) and the Roman Catholic Church in
the USA published an extended critique in 1983.
In summary one may say that there has always been
a dialectic relation between the idea of an all-em-
bracing empire (the Roman Pax, Chinese imperial
civilization) and the vision of a transnational unity,
such as the Islamic ‘Ummah’ or the Christian
Oekumene. In times of religious establishment,
whether imperial, monarchical, or national, the former
will inevitably tend to colonize the latter, so that the
wider vision is maintained underground in liturgy,
iconography, and movements of protest. However, as

religious groups became separate from the state the
visionary repertoire gains more purchase, and is
increasingly reinforced by the interdependence of
global society. The resources on which the search for
peace may draw become increasingly international, so
that the message of the gospels, of Isaiah, and Micah
mingles with Eastern and especially Gandhian,
notions of nonviolent protest and moral suasion.
Indeed, as Western protest has drawn on Eastern
resources, so have Eastern movements been cross-
fertilized by Western ones, not only Christianity but
the works of Tolstoy and Thoreau.
See also: Appeasement: Political; Conscription, Policy
of; Ethnic Cleansing, History of; Ethnic Conflicts;
Genocide: Anthropological Aspects; Genocide: His-
torical Aspects; Internal Warfare: Civil War, Insur-
gency, and Regional Conflict; Liberalism and War;
Peace; Peace and Nonviolence: Anthropological
Aspects; Peace Movements; Political Protest and Civil
Disobedience; Religion, History of; Religion:
Nationalism and Identity; Religious Fundamentalism:
Cultural Concerns; Religious Nationalism and the
Secular State: Cultural Concerns; War: Causes and
Patterns
Bibliography
Bainton R H 1960 Christian Attitudes Toward War and Peace.
Hodder and Stoughton, London
Beales A C F 1931 The History of Peace. G. Bell, London
Brock P , Socknat T P (eds.) 1999 Challenge to Mars: Essays on
Pacifism from 1918 to 1945. University of Toronto Press,
Toronto
Burns J P (ed.) 1996 War and its Discontents: Pacifism and
Quietism in the Abrahamic Traditions. Georgetown University
Press, Washington, DC
Ceadel M 1987 Thinking About Peace and War. Oxford
University Press, Oxford, UK
Haleem H A (ed.) 1999 The Crescent and the Cross. Macmillan,
London
Martin D 1997 Does Christianity Cause War? Oxford University
Press, Oxford, UK
Mayer P (ed.) 1966 The Pacifist Conscience. Rupert Hart-Davis,
London
Niditch S 1993 War in the Hebrew Bible. Oxford University
Press, Oxford, UK
Sibley M Q, Jacob P E 1952 Conscription of Conscience: The
American State and the Conscientious Objector, 1940–1947.
Cornell University Press, Ithaca, NY
D. Martin
Copyright # 2001 Elsevier Science Ltd.
All rights reserved.
Religion, Phenomenology of
Phenomenology of religion is an academic approach
to analyze religion predominantly within religious
studies. It is documented in a series of monographs
International Encyclopedia of the Social & Behavioral Sciences
Religion, Phenomenology of
and handbooks, but it is also defined by a ‘scholarly
method’ that utilizes principles of phenomenological
philosophy. For the purpose of this paper, we shall
distinguish: (a) the descriptive phenomenology of
religion which refers to the classification and sys-
tematization of religious phenomena and the creation
of typologies which account for different types of
religion; and (b) the analytical phenomenology of
religion which, in addition to the goals of descriptive
phenomenology, is based on some explicit under-
standing of the philosophical background and
methods of phenomenology and hermeneutics devel-
oped in the tradition of Edmund Husserl, Wilhelm
Dilthey, Martin Heidegger, and Paul Ricoeur.
1. Historical De
elopment, Institutions, and
Representants
Whereas the notion of phenomenology had been
proposed by philosophers also preoccupied with reli-
gion, such as J. H. Lambert (1721–71), I. Kant
(1724–1804), and G. W. F. Hegel (1770–1831), the
contemporary notion of phenomenology of religion
refers to a specialized field within the academic study
of religion. The origins of this field go back to the
Belgian historian of religion P. D. Chantepie de La
Saussaye (1848–1920). Referring to Hegel’s work
(which includes the Phenomenology of Mind), he
divided the science of religion into the history of
religion and the philosophy of religion. With respect to
the latter, he wanted the phenomenology of religion to
not only avoid dogmatics, but to systematically order
the main groups of religious phenomena according to
the feature of the historical material. The most decisive
breakthrough in the field has been due to the work of
the Dutch professor of religious history, Gerardus Van
der Leeuw who, in 1924, suggested phenomenology of
religion to be a special method for the history of
religion. Since then, the phenomenology of religion
has produced, on the one hand, a series of ‘monu-
mental’ contributions which provide systematic over-
views on a broad variety of religions, or, on the other
hand, monographs on typically basic features of single
religious phenomena. Therefore, topics of the studies
include general issues, such as the distinction between
the ‘sacred,’ and the ‘profane,’ the ‘numinous’ or the
experience of power, and on the other hand comp-
arative studies on more specific religious phenomena,
such as prayer, piety, or religious ceremonies. In the
1950s, phenomenology of religion became increasingly
established in the academic studies of the history of
religions, so that it became institutionalized as a
specialized branch within Religionswissenschaft,
Comparative Religion or Religious Studies. Although
one should not ignore Britain (James 1938) and France
(the Rumanian scholar’s Eliade’s (1949) first impor-
tant book has been published in French), the main
centers of development have been The Netherlands,
13093
ISBN: 0-08-043076-7