The story of humanity can only be told through civilizations. In this context, the British sociologist Anthony D. Smith argued in his book Ethno-symbolism and Nationalism: A Cultural Approach that culture and politics play a complementary role in the creation of civilizational narratives around which nations and states are shaped. Myths, songs, popular history, and folklore have all contributed to the development of civilizational narratives. While these factors play a key role in providing a sense of civilizational unity and coherence, the politics surrounding these sociocultural forces can work to the exclusion of religious and ethnic minorities.
Political communities have always sorted individuals according to in-groups and out-groups—those whose presence in the community is fully welcomed and those who are merely tolerated, if even that. This is particularly evident in multiethnic and multicultural civilizational states that have a long historical lineage. While classical liberalism and democracy emerged hundreds of years ago to address these issues, the ability of different societies and civilizations to function with internal diversity remains a challenge in many nations.
Modern India, for example, is a state that claims to represent five thousand years of civilization on the Indian subcontinent. Over millennia, numerous ethno-religious and ethno-linguistic communities from different parts of the world migrated to and settled in India. The problem, however, began in 19th and 20th century India when religious identity became politically instrumentalized as a totem of belonging. Indian secularism is based on Mahatma Gandhi’s religious principle of Sarva Dharma Sambhava (all religions are equal); the Indian state remains, at least formally, equally removed from all faith systems and must accord equal respect to each. However, in contemporary India, religious identity is increasingly a marker of political power, legitimacy, and belonging, as the Modi regime pioneers an assertive form of religious and cultural nationalism portrayed as in defense of India’s oldest faith—Hinduism.
The instrumentalization of Hinduism provides a compelling example of the dangers of overt politicization of faith, especially as it pertains to the exclusion of other faiths. This is particularly true in the context of India’s national song Vande Mataram (An Ode to the Motherland). Written by the Indian novelist and poet Bankim Chandra Chatterjee in 1875 and published in his novel Anandamath in 1882, the poem provides a depiction of India through different anthropomorphic manifestations of the Goddess Shaktithat is determined to throw off the yoke of colonialism that was ravaging her spirit and undermining her sense of unity.
While Vande Mataram played a critical role in mobilizing disparate segments of the Indian population during the struggle for independence, its anthropomorphic structure invoking the deities of a particular faith limited its ability to unite non-Hindus as equal citizens. Keeping in mind t that many Indians practice Islam and Christianity, only the first two stanzas out of six were adopted as India’s national song (as distinct from the Indian national anthem, “Jana Gana Mana”) so as to affirm the secularism which undergirds India’s constitutional spirit. While the first two stanzas are relatively nonsectarian in nature, the latter four invoke Hindu goddesses such as Durga, Lakshmi, Shakti, and Saraswati.
Fast forward to the present, the Government of India under a new political regime has issued an official order making the rendition of all six stanzas of the national song mandatory in all government-run schools and in all government functions. Additionally, the order requires the audience to stand whenever the song is played. This decision is part of a broader effort to homogenize India’s cultural landscape at both the state and national levels despite India’s religious minorities’ discomfiture with the increasingly institutionalized use of a religiously anchored national symbol.
Yet, the use of religious symbolism to cement a distinct in-group/out-group dynamic is not limited to India. In Turkey, President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s decision to reconvert the famed cathedral Hagia Sophia to a mosque is an attempt to revive its Ottoman past. In that vein, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), which otherwise claims to be an atheistic entity, every year observes the celebration of the legendary progenitor of China’s people the Yellow Emperor with much pomp and vigor. This must be read as a part of the broader Chinese Communist Party’s agenda of promoting ‘national unity‘—showcasing how modern-day Chinese and Taiwanese people have descended from a common Han ancestor. Celebrations such as these need not contribute to the persecution of minorities, but given the CCP’s crackdown on both Uyghur Muslims in Xinjiang as well as Christians across China, it’s hard not to see a connection. In addition, the invocation of Persian-Islamic civilizational identity by Iran’s theocratic regime as a mark of opposition to Israel and the West reinforces a politically sacralized idea of national belonging.
These examples highlight the ways that religious-cultural symbols are utilized by civilizational states to promote a culturally consolidated idea of nationhood where one’s ascriptive identity is derived from one’s ethnic or religious origins, not a shared idea of citizenship anchored in civic nationalism.
This instrumentalization of religion for explicitly political purposes is precisely what the American theologian Reinhold Niebuhr warned of. In his book Moral Man and Immoral Society, Niebuhr argued that collective groups tend towards egoism, or that only the interests of the in-group are legitimate and must on some level be in tension with the interests of humanity more broadly. Collectivized groups can only function by establishing firm boundaries to delineate who belongs and who doesn’t. But in promoting collective egoism, communities end up indulging in moral absolutism. This extinguishes the ability of political communities to engage in critical self-evaluation, thus leading to injustice.
In another book, Does Civilization Need Religion?, Niebuhr argued that while civilizations need coherence which is derived from symbolic elements of a religion, what becomes problematic are the vices of human personality like pride, self-righteousness and social absolutism, thereby resulting in contingent historical identities being elevated to the status of canons of sacred truth anchored in infallibility. This infallibility is the beginning of the dehumanization that leads to grave moral crimes against “the other.”
What civilizational states ultimately need is introspection guided by the Niebuhrian values of humility, prudence, and humanism toward peaceful coexistence across groups. Attempts by civilizational states to compartmentalize human beings into rigid social categories will inevitably result in the undermining of the spiritually compelling sense of morality that undergirds all lasting civilizations.