Re: The Place of Religion in Nationalist Politics
Religion has always been at the basis of social identity. As the quote I posted above argued, it's largely useless to try to seperate ethnic and religious identities, cause they are so commonly linked. This is no accident, since religion often serves as the cultural basis of ethnicities, both religion and nationalism appeal to the same kinds of emotions for self-sacrifice for the greater good(in fact nationalist protrayls of heroic deeds is often based on religious notions of matyrdom); and both religions and nationalism clearly define insiders from outsiders. Religious devotion is often the source of emotions needed to drive nationalism forward.
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"Everything begins in mysticism and ends in politics."
--Charles Peguy
"Love for a man's own nation must not make a man into a wild animal, which tears down and provokes revenge; it must make him more noble, so that he can gain the respect and love of other nations for his nation. Therefore love toward your own nation is not contradictory to love for the whole of mankind; they complement each other. All of the nations are children of God."
--Cardinal Alojzije Stepinac, 1938
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