Saving Nation, Faith and Family. Yoram Hazony’s National Conservativism and Its Theo-Political Mission

Particularly pushed by the Edmund Burke Foundation and its president Yoram Hazony, the political movement of National Conservativism is largely based on specific concepts of nation, faith and family. Driven by the mission to overcome the violence of liberalism, identified with imperialism, national conservatives shape potent international and interreligious alliances for a religiously based system of independent national states. The article gives an outline of the main programmatic pillars of National Conservativism at the example of Yoram Hazony’s The Virtue of Nationalism, one of the current ideological key works of the movement. It will show how its political framework is based on a binary frame of liberalism (identified with imperialism) versus nationalism, the latter supported as the way forward towards protecting freedom, faith and family. The analytic part will focus on the use of religious motifs and the construction of a specific kind of Judaeo-Christianism as a means of exclusivist theo-political nationalism. It will be shown that Hazony’s nationalism is no way to overcome violence, but a political theory close to theo-political authoritarianism, based on abridged readings of Scripture, history and philosophy. It severely endangers the foundations of democracies, especially with regard to minority and women’s rights, and delegitimizes liberal democracy and religious traditions positively contributing to it.

Framing of Abortion and Church-State Relations in Russian Orthodox Online Portals

Over the past two decades, clerics in the Russian Orthodox Church have found a new outlet for morality policy discussions: news portals, blogs, and other sites that comprise a virtual public sphere of Russian Orthodox online media. One prominent issue discussed herein is abortion in Russia, a subject that has spawned debates about possible regulation and prevention measures. This article analyzes statements regarding abortion made by clerics and others serving in the Russian Orthodox Church via Russian Orthodox online portals. Using typologies for framing strategies established through research of morality policy and church-state relations in Russia, this analysis will show that rational-instrumental frames were employed more frequently than religiously based or procedural arguments, and frames expressing affinity and disillusionment with the state were utilized more often than those evoking church-state symphony or anti-government disestablishment. In addition, it will shed light on framing strategies between online portals with varying degrees of proximity to the Moscow Patriarchate.

Zum historischen Roman in Frankreich und Italien: Balzac, Flaubert und Manzoni

On the Historical Novel in France and Italy: Balzac, Flaubert, and Manzoni Created by Walter Scott, the historical novel owes its immense and persistent success to the fact that it foregrounds an impression linked to the rapid political, social, and economic change at the end of the 18th century: individual fate may be contingent on either the will of a god or the inscrutable lottery of genes; but it is certainly dependent on historical circumstances, as well as an individual’s ability to cope with them. – This essay discusses three prominent 19th-century paradigms of the genre. Focusing primarily on Le Père Goriot, L’Éducation sentimentale, and I promessi sposi, it argues that each of the texts encapsulates conceptualizations of history that remain dominant well unto the present day. Balzac offers a (religiously based) historical optimism. Flaubert’s radical pessimism is grounded in the belief that all historical change is nothing but a series of ultimately irrelevant surface phenomena. Manzoni’s moderate political scepticism suggests that a rigorously rational approach to the problems emerging as a result of historical events may not be able to make this world a better place but might still help to prevent major catastrophes.

Majoritarian Epistemology on Religious Symbols. A Religiously-Based Stereotyping Technique to “Package Others’ Religious Rights”

The paper will focus on a particular form of stereotyping technique which aims to narrow religious rights for non-Christian believers, moving from an exclusively Judeo-Christian epistemology on religious symbols that, no by chance, defines them as “ostensive”. According to this perspective, freedom of religion is eminently a heartfelt attitude, therefore the term “ostensiveness” is intended to emphasize not mandatory behaviors, which are conceived as a redundant way to live faith. Starting from its philosophical assumptions, the article deals with the stereotyping tools related to religion, functional to conceal the social complexity and to deny legal protection, through a legal and political concept like state neutrality. The piece seeks to show how the concept of religious right, when it cannot be declined as a majoritarian right, is rife with plural levels of intersecting stereotyping, concerning other categories of diversity like gender and ‘ethnicity’. This approach flatters each dimension and does not take into account coexisting identities within the same person, ignoring that intersectionality highlights the necessity of assessing religious diversity as fundamentally socially located. This stereotyping attitude can be traced back to the complex relationship between law and religion that provides a direct way to assess crucial issues like belonging, identity, community and authority. Law, as a cultural and non-neutral construct, regards religion as a valuable fact and worthy of legal protection since it is attributable to an individual phenomenon and as quintessentially private matter. Therefore, to assess identity or belonging in the fault lines of the interaction of law and religion means find an opportunity to legitimize targeting law related to religious diversity making it seems like a way to deal with religious ‘differences’ that cannot be assimilated. In this respect, we discuss about the radical secularist claims through a case-study, namely the “affaire Québécois” within the Canadian system, not only in a geographical sense, but in the theoretical field mapped out by religious pluralism as the focal point of the multiculturalist approach, on one hand, and the secularist revival, on the other hand.

Nationalism and Religion in Comparative Perspective: A New Typology of National-Religious Configurations

Does religion motivate and intensify nationalism, or does religion moderate and even suppress nationalism? Six kinds of relationships between nationalism and religion are critically reviewed: nationalism as a modern religion in competition with traditional religions; religious origins of the “Chosen People” as the mythomoteur of nationalism; religious exclusion as nation-building; religious influences on national policies; influence of religious observance on national identification; and religiously based “civilizations” transcending nationalisms. Western Christian experience with nationalism is not generalizable due to the institutional autonomy and supranational organization of the Catholic Church. Western European nationalisms were premised on religious sectarian homogeneity, and the homogenous “confessional state” served as the template of European nation-states. Furthermore, I argue that the late medieval eradication of Muslims and Jews across Western Europe prefigured sectarian and ethnonational purges of the following centuries. Finally, I argue that different configurations of religion and nationalism depend on two critical conditions: the degree to which the dominant religious tradition is doctrinally supraethnic and institutionally transnational, and the religious identity of the main adversary in the constitutive conflict that culminated in national statehood. The crises of Marxism and liberalism provide the context for the resurgence of religion and nationalism at present.

Social Identity of Non-Moslem Students In Muhammadiyah Universities

Education in Indonesia, especially higher education institutions, has a role to build interaction between religious adherents. How is this experience of tolerance in religiously based higher education institutions where the majority of students and staff are religious according to the institution. One of the largest religious-based higher education networks in Indonesia is the Muhammadiyah Universities or Perguruan Tinggi Muhammadiyah (PTM) network. Muhammadiyah as one of the largest Islamic organizations in Indonesia which has a network of higher education spread across various parts of Indonesia where students studying have diverse religious backgrounds. This study aimed to examine the dynamics of social identity in the experience of non-Moslem students at Muhammadiyah College. This research uses qualitative research methods using Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis (IPA). Six participants, Christian, Catholic, Hindu, and Buddhist from four Muhammadiyah College in the province of Central Java - Indonesia, were interviewed and analyzed to obtain core themes. The results of this study produced five superordinate themes, namely the influence of the environment, personal characteristics, perceptions of the religion adopted, experience as a Muhammadiyah College Student, and perceptions of Islam and Muhammadiyah. The conclusion of this study shows the psychological dynamics of non-Muslim students shape the perception of Islam itself as a religion, also Muhammadiyah as an Islamic organization.

The prosecution of Dawoodi Bohra women: some reasonable doubts

Muslim women of the Dawoodi Bohra community have recently been prosecuted because they customarily adhere to a religiously based gender-inclusive version of the Jewish Abrahamic circumcision tradition. In Dawoodi Bohra families it is not only boys but also girls who are circumcised. And it is mothers who typically control and arrange for the circumcision of their daughters. By most accounts the circumcision procedure for girls amounts to a nick, abrasion, piercing or small cut restricted to the female foreskin or prepuce (often referred to as ‘the clitoral hood’ or in some parts of Southeast Asia as the ‘clitoral veil’). From a strictly surgical point of view the custom is less invasive than a typical male circumcision as routinely and legally performed by Jews and Muslims. The question arises: if the practice is legal for the gander why should it be banned for the goose?<br /><br />Key messages<br /><ul><li>Wherever there is female circumcision there is male circumcision – the custom is gender-inclusive.</li><br /><li>The tradition of gender-inclusive Abrahamic circumcision has broad support among Dawoodi Bohra Muslim women.</li><br /><li>Female circumcision as practised by Dawoodi Bohra women is less invasive than male circumcision as legally practised by Muslims and Jews.</li><br /><li>Why should girls be excluded from the Abrahamic circumcision tradition? If it is legal for boys why shouldn’t it be legal for girls?</li><br /><li>Has the time come to rethink the expression ‘female genital mutilation’? Is it a ‘no brainer’ or has it made us ‘brain dead’?</li></ul>

Distractions and Defractions: Using Parental Rights to Fight Against the Educational Rights of Transgender, Nonbinary, and Gender Diverse Students

In recent years, conservative advocates have obscured their transphobia by framing their concerns as religiously-based parental rights claims. They have advocated for limitations on youth rights to gender identity self-determination. This article examines policy debates over transgender-inclusive practices in schools, including conservative demands for parental notification and limitations on healthcare access for transgender youth. I suggest that schools ought to be more concerned with children’s or students’ rights to help enable diverse students to flourish and become who they are in supportive schools. This shift would move schools away from the distractions of conservative parental rights claims and re-focus them instead on the needs of students.

Imagined Communities and Imaginary Plots: Nationalisms, Conspiracies, and Pandemics in the Longue Durée

The outbreaks of major pandemics have historically been associated with the proliferation of conspiracy theories. This article explores what role conspiratorial narratives have played in the development of different “imagined communities” in the premodern, modern, and contemporary worlds. I argue that premodern conspiratorial narratives were mostly focused on eschatological and theological images, aiming to blame and delegitimise the religious Other. In these imaginary plots, spread of disease was interpreted as an attack on one’s religious beliefs. The prevalence of religious conspiracies helped reinforce religiously based, yet temporary, “imagined communities.” With the rise of nation-states and the decline of empires and patrimonial kingdoms, the periodic outbursts of epidemics gradually attained more nationalist interpretations. Hence in the modern era, pandemics often triggered the growth of nationalist conspiracies. In these narratives the threatening Other was usually nationalised, and even traditional religious groups became reinterpreted as a threat to one’s national security. In recent times, new technologies and modes of communication have created space for the emergence of global conspiracy theories. The onset of Covid-19 has been associated with the dramatic expansion of such conspiracies. Some scholars have interpreted this as a reliable sign that nation-states and nationalisms have lost their dominance. However, this article shows that many global conspiracies in fact reinforce nationalist ideas and practices and, in this process, foster the perpetuation of national imagined communities.

God Insures those Who Pay? Formal Insurance and Religious Offerings in Ghana*

This article provides experimental support for the hypothesis that insurance can be a motive for religious donations. We randomize enrollment of members of a Pentecostal church in Ghana into a commercial funeral insurance policy. Then church members allocate money between themselves and a set of religious goods in a series of dictator games with significant stakes. Members enrolled in insurance give significantly less money to their own church compared with members who only receive information about the insurance. Enrollment also reduces giving toward other spiritual goods. We set up a model exploring different channels of religiously based insurance. The implications of the model and the results from the dictator games suggest that adherents perceive the church as a source of insurance and that this insurance is derived from beliefs in an interventionist God. Survey results suggest that material insurance from the church community is also important and we hypothesize that these two insurance channels exist in parallel.