Religious nationalism in 19th century Europe

Hugh McLeod in his article, "Christianity and nationalism in nineteenth-century Europe" (International Journal for the Study of the Christian Church, Vol. 15, No.1, 2015) discusses the 19th century European nationalisms, the relationship between Christianity and nationalisms and religious support for the First World War in all the European countries.

McLeod argues that nationalism was one of the most influential ideologies in 19th century Europe, along with socialism, liberalism and conservatism. Nationalism was sometimes allied with liberalism and at other times with conservatism. Socialists were also not devoid of nationalist sentiments. 

Mcleod distinguishes between three types of nationalisms in nineteenth-century Europe:

Nationalism 'from below': The nationalism of the subject peoples, living within the great European Empires, that asserted their right to more autonomy or independence

Unification nationalisms: The nationalism of the people, who belonged to the same culture but were divided into numerous small states, that sought to form a unified nation-state for these 

Nationalism ‘from above’: The nationalism propagated by the governments through the education

system, etc. in their own countries so that their people are ready to defend or attack and do not fall prey to nationalism 'from below.'

Mcleod explains, with examples, why nationalism and Christianity were so close and overlapping in 19th century Europe or, in other words, why religious nationalism was so popular at that time:

Many of the classic histories of nationalism see it as an essentially secular ideology – even as a ‘political religion’, substituting for a declining Christianity. The French Revolution does indeed demonstrate this possibility. But more often nationalists made free use of Christian symbols and concepts, and churches willingly embraced nationalist ideologies. 

Benedict Anderson famously defined the nation as an ‘Imagined Community’, whereby people felt an affinity with millions of others, whom they had never met and with whom they might have little in common, because they belonged to the same ‘nation’. But this ‘Imagined Community’ could not be created out of nothing. Its basic building blocks were shared language and/or shared historical memories. Even the language sometimes had a significant religious dimension, as is shown by the importance of translations of the Bible in the history of many languages. The historical memories nearly always had a significant religious dimension. The alliance between religion and nationalism was two-edged in its implications both for nationalism and for Christianity – as I shall argue. But it was uniquely potent as a means of inspiring both devotion to the nation and loyalty to the church. As regards the latter, it is well known that, in an era of increasing secularisation in many parts of Europe, loyalty to the church reached its highest levels in countries such as Ireland, where the links between religious and national identities were closest. Conversely, secularisation progressed much more rapidly where nationalism had a predominantly anti-church or anti-religious character....  

When nationalists pointed to shared experiences of oppression or of unity against external foes, these experiences were more often than not associated with religion. For example, in the eyes of Irish nationalists, the clearest example of British oppression was offered by the anti-Catholic Penal Laws ..... For English nationalists, on the other hand, the proudest moment in their national history was the defeat in 1588 of the Spanish Armada.... 

The national heroes whom they revered more often than not had an evident religious significance. The greatest figures in Spanish history were Ferdinand and Isabella, ‘The Catholic Monarchs’, who had not only united the nation, but had forced Muslims and Jews either to convert or to leave....  

Nationalists liked to celebrate distinctive national values and virtues, and very often these were seen as having religious roots. Thus nineteenth-century Britons frequently claimed that their political power, their economic success and their free institutions were all rooted in Protestantism. In a typical sermon of 1898, Dr Welldon, headmaster of Harrow School and later Bishop of Calcutta, claimed that ‘wherever there was a nation that was stationary and retrogressive it was Catholic, wherever there was a people that was progressive and Imperial it was Protestant’.... 

Nationalists celebrated the art, architecture, literature, music and folklore of their people, and very often these were shaped by specific religious traditions. A classic case is the French Catholic revival of the years around 1900, which was strongly coloured by nationalism.... An important part of this rediscovery was the realisation that French history and culture were so deeply imbued with Catholicism, that to be truly French it was necessary also to be Catholic. 

Nationalists also drew on ideas of national mission or chosenness. Many nineteenth century Britons believed that the British Empire had been providentially ordained to facilitate the spread of the pure Protestant gospel. Sometimes, as in France there were two rival versions of this national mission: one pointing to France’s historical identity as ‘The Eldest Daughter of the Church’, while the other focused on ‘Liberty, Equality, Fraternity’.... 

More commonly, as in Britain, explicitly religious and more secular understandings of national mission, rather than being in opposition to one another were mutually reinforcing, offering a repertoire of justifications for national pride and national power which could be drawn upon separately or in combination as the situation demanded. The historian of missions, Andrew Walls, highlights the immense popularity of the poetry of Rudyard Kipling, whose justification for British (and American) imperialism as ‘The White Man’s Burden’, though not explicitly Christian, drew on biblical language and examples in a way that both Christian and agnostic readers found inspiring.

Meanwhile priests and pastors were often strongly influenced by nationalist ideas and gave them influential support through sermons, through ‘national’ hymns, through the teaching in church schools, through Christian youth organisations. 

Anniversaries of notable battles, as well as royal birthdays and jubilees provided occasions for special services with patriotic sermons and sometimes the composition of new hymns with patriotic themes. For example Queen Victoria’s jubilees in 1887 and 1897 were marked by numerous special services at which imperial themes played a big role. The year 1913 saw the anniversary of the Prussian uprising against Napoleon and special services were held in many German churches.... Walls notes a new category of ‘national hymns’ entering British hymn-books in the 1880s, and observes that it was then that hymn-books began to include the national anthem. The Swedish historian Alf Tergel refers to the popularity in the early years of the twentieth century of hymns by J.A. Eklund, bishop of Karlstad. In ‘Our Fathers’ Church’ he recalled Sweden’s decisive role in the Thirty Years’ War, and then went on to appeal to ‘Christian youth’ to ‘battle for God’s glory in the North’..... 

In Britain Christian youth organisations with military trappings proliferated in the years 1880–1914. The prototype was the Boys’ Brigade (BB), founded by a Glasgow Presbyterian in 1883, and also popular in the English and Welsh Free Churches. This aimed to attract members through the wearing of uniforms and military ranks, and marches through the street banging drums and blowing bugles, and carrying dummy rifles....

Again in France there were rival Catholic and Republican youth organisations in these years, but both were imbued with the nationalist spirit.... For Catholics and republicans alike, politics and religion were closely bound together and could not be clearly separated, and neither could be separated from devotion to an idealised Catholic or Republican France.

There were many reasons for the strongly nationalist colouring of much European Christianity in the nineteenth century, but among these reasons we should remember that priests and pastors could not be entirely detached from their social environment. It would indeed be crudely reductionist to suppose that clergymen thought and behaved exactly like other members of their social class, but it would be equally unrealistic to suppose that they lived entirely within a clerical sub-culture. Protestant clergy, in particular, who had been educated at university with future doctors and lawyers, and who also married and had children, were especially likely to be influenced by their family and by those of their parishioners with whom they mixed socially. Furthermore, both Protestant and Catholic clergy were highly politicised in this period, and were influenced not only by their families but by the political circles in which they moved...

German Empire Standard (1871-1918) with motto, Gott mit uns (God with us)

Source: Wiki Commons

Of course, religion and nationalism did not always agree and there were tensions as Mcleod explains:

In spite of many affinities, the relationship was two-edged. Religious sentiments and symbols could nearly always be drawn upon by nationalist orators and organisers – but churches were institutions with their own doctrines and interests which could contradict the nationalist agenda. 

A striking example was the conflict between Italian nationalism and the papacy. Enthusiasts for Italian unification initially hoped that the pope might give his blessing to their cause. But it soon became clear that Pius IX was completely opposed.... In response to papal obstruction, a nationalist movement that had initially been strongly influenced by Catholicism took on a strongly anti-clerical dimension.  

The church might also be strongly committed to nationalist objectives, while condemning the methods that some nationalists used. Here the classic example would be the persistent tensions between the Irish Catholic Church and the revolutionary wing of Irish nationalism, from the Fenians in the 1860s to the Provisional IRA in our own times. 

Moreover the alliance between religion and nationalism, while extremely effective in countries that were more or less religiously homogeneous, could raise problems within religiously divided nations, where appeals to the religion of the majority risked alienating minorities. Indeed there is a fundamental tension between a religion such as Christianity, which claims to have a message for all of humankind and in which ‘there is neither Jew nor Greek’, and the claims by nationalists that everyone’s first loyalty should be to his or her own people. 

So in the later nineteenth century many nationalists were seeking new bases for national identity which were religiously neutral and which circumvented confessional differences.... Sometimes this meant a focus on language, or even on sport.... But most often the search for alternative bases for national identity meant recourse to the newly fashionable racial ideas, which gained intellectual authority from trends in anthropology and in Social Darwinism.... In Great Britain the dominant imperialism of the later nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was legitimated by belief in a national mission to bring civilisation and good government to less favoured regions of the world. This was often linked to Protestant Christianity and its plethora of overseas missions. But increasingly this religiously based concept of national mission was supplemented by, or even replaced by, claims for the racial superiority of the ‘Anglo-Saxon peoples’.... 

National churches were not surprisingly those readiest to identify with ‘the nation’. These national churches included most obviously the ‘people’s churches’ (Volkskirchen) of Germany and Scandinavia, the Churches of England and Scotland, the Greek Orthodox or Russian Orthodox Churches – but also the Catholic Churches of France and Spain which saw themselves as churches of the nation, or those of Ireland and Poland which claimed to speak for a nation as yet denied nationhood. Overt opposition to the nationalist agenda was most likely to come from minority churches, whether because of uncertainty as to how far they were really part of the national project – or whether the experience of being in a minority (and often of discrimination arising from this) tended to make such churches readier to question mainstream values and conventional wisdom. Thus in Germany the Catholic Church was more cautious than the Protestants in its support for militarism and imperialism....

McLeod's article demonstrates that religious nationalism was almost as popular in the 19th century Europe as it is now in Asia and North Africa.

Putin, wars, and Russian Orthodox Church

Mark Woods, the contributing editor of Christian Today, calls Russian Orthodox Church a tool in the hand of President Putin. In his article, How the Russian Orthodox Church is backing Vladimir Putin's new world order, focuses on growing Russian religious nationalism.

Thousands of miles away (in Russia), however, there's an ideological synergy between Church and State which is just as unhealthy. Under its leader Patriarch Kirill, the Russian Orthodox Church (ROC) has backed the aggressive expansionism of President Vladimir Putin, which has seen him extend Russian power into Crimea and eastern Ukraine. Kirill described Putin at a religious leaders' meeting in 2012 as "a miracle of God". It supported a government crackdown on "gay propaganda" in 2013. The ROC has made billions from trading concessions granted to it  by the government. It is increasingly asserting its position as the largest of the 14 self-governing Orthodox Churches and is using its political muscle in support of Putin's aims. It's no friend to evangelicals, especially in the Russian-occupied parts of Ukraine, seeing them as puppets of the West.

Wood is particularly critical of the role played by the current head of ROC, Patriarch Kirill. He mentions that Kirill has been accussed of being a KGB agent and his usage of ROC's special previliges in the 1990s to earns billions for the Church and himself. Kirill, however, denies any personal benefits from the past financial dealings.

Wood quotes Ukrainian academics, mainly from Ukrainian Catholic University, to details the closeness of the ROC and Russian state or the subordination of the  ROC to Putin agenda. The choice of experts is problematic and raises doubts about Wood's thesis.

Wood quotes Mykhailo Cherenkov, a Ukrainian Baptist and a Professor in Philosophy at Ukrainian Catholic University, as arguing that fall of communism left an ideological vacuum, which has been filled with Orthodoxy. t was the "new ideological binding agent" that Russia needed to survive:

It was Orthodoxy that served as the main ferment in the formation of a new Russian identity from the beginning of Putin's presidency. If, in Soviet times, the mark of the majority was political atheism, then now it is political Orthodoxy.

Being partiotic and Orthodox became synonyms and wars of the Russian state became holy wars. Cherenkov argued:

The goal of the 'Holy War' is not seizure of territory, or change of power, or defeat of opponents, but the victory of faith over all lack of faith and false teaching, of the only right picture of the world over all wrong ones, of truth over all untruths. If Rus is Holy, then her faith and truth are the only Orthodox ones.

Wood then quotes a more extreme view by Joshua Searle, a lecturer at Spurgeon's College and Visiting Professor at Ukrainian Catholic University. Searle contends that the ROC is not real Christian Church:

It needs to be made clear that the ROC hierarchy is essentially a political construct. The church structure is based not on gospel values of freedom, truth and enlightenment, but on fear, authoritarianism and the promotion of nationalism under the guise of religious zeal. This kind of fake patriotic religion deifies the State and gives divine sanction to a nation's imperialism.
The ROC can even invoke the name of "God" as an idol who has bestowed a special blessing and favour on Russia, which then allegedly gives 'Holy Russia' the right to invade and conquer neighbouring territories and subdue their peoples. Such a sham Christianity, which is a denial of Christ and the gospel, will always refuse to accept any higher power and will ruthlessly destroy any forms of genuine Christian faith that go beyond cultural or national identity.

George Soroka does not agrees with Wood as he sees not only harmony but also tension in the ROC-state relations in Russia. He has written a very insightful article on ROC's relations with the Russian state in Foreign Affairs. In his article, Putin's Patriarch: Does the Kremlin Control the Church?, Soroka explains that the ROC and the state in Russia do not have a dominant-submissive relationship. The widely-held perception that the Church is the handmaiden of the Russian state is not true. President Putin and Patriarch Kirill support each other most of the time and Putin is usually the more assertive partner but there are differences. 

Source: Foreign Affairs

The Church has prospered since the break-up of Soviet Union and more so under Putin as Soroka illustrates:

Meanwhile, the church has benefited from the close ties between its leadership and the government. In 2011, then President Dmitri Medvedev granted the patriarch a residence in the Kremlin. In late 2010, Russian legislators passed a long-awaited bill allowing the return of Church property seized by the Soviet Union, codifying and expediting a process that had been proceeding piecemeal since the 1990s. The Russian Orthodox Church and affiliated organizations have also been the country’s biggest recipients of presidential grants in recent years, receiving more than 256 million rubles in funding between 2013 and 2015.

And Putin has used the ROC despite the separation of church and state in the 1993 Constitution. Putin has used the Church's symbolic power to not only defeat his enemies both inside and outside Russia (Chechens, liberals, democrats, terrorists, etc.) but also to unify the new Russian state under a defensive, inward-looking nationalism.

Soroka concludes the article contending that the Kremlin and the ROC still have many differences so the real partnership is not between them but between the civil religion “Orthodoxy without Christ” and Putin’s rhetoric and defensive nationalism.

Symphonia, or harmonious, mutually respectful coexistence, represents the ideal of Church-State relations in Orthodox thought. Unfortunately, it has seldom been achieved, and post-communist Russia is no exception. Russia today is still in the process of exiting the ideological vacuum that resulted from the Soviet Union’s collapse. What is emerging in its stead remains inchoate, a selective culling of the past that mixes Orthodox imagery with Soviet triumphalism, interspersed with an increasingly inward-looking nationalism.
Yet this is not ultimately a coherent narrative; it will eventually crumble under the weight of its own historical contradictions. Putin’s conundrum is that he wants the Russian Orthodox Church to help legitimate the restored Russian state while eliding the abject persecution the church suffered under the Soviet regime, just like he wants to emphasize the Red Army’s victory over Nazi Germany in WWII without coming to terms with the horrific crimes of Stalin.

Where does this leave the church? It is not as an institution subordinate to the Kremlin, but neither does it stand on equal footing with the regime in Putin’s Russia. Moreover, despite recent internal efforts to quell dissent, the church still embodies diverse opinions and viewpoints. As a result, the real synergies are not between the church and the Kremlin but between a burgeoning civil religion that Chapnin terms “Orthodoxy without Christ” and Putin’s muscular brand of statist rhetoric. In a society where over 70 percent of citizens identify as Orthodox even though the percentage of active churchgoers is in the single digits, the cultural resonance of the church is as obvious as its doctrinal relevance is moot, making it ripe for political exploitation. In contemporary Russia, it is not the Orthodox Church but the jingoistic Orthodox atheist that is the regime’s greatest ally. 

Are governments supporting or controlling religion?

How do we know governments are controlling or supporting religion? Same laws and actions can be used for controlling religion as for supporting religion. For example, a government can give money to religious schools to impose curriculum of its choice (controlling religion) or to promote the majority religion (supporting religion). Similarly, a government can take control of religious endowments to make them more efficient and to use their funds for repair/maintenance of religious sites (supporting religion) or to dry the main source of funding for independent clerics, thus allow its (paid) clerics to dominate the religious discourse (controlling religion). Jonathan Fox, one of the leading scholars working on the state-religion relationships, argues that it is difficult to be definite about it as it is almost impossible to be certain of a government leader's motivations for a particular (in)action (See his talk on Political secularism, religion and the state).

In some cases, however, the primary motivator is not ambiguous. Because of their Marxist-Leninist ideology, anti-religious rhetoric of the leadership and repression of all religions in public sphere, one can safely assume that the Communist governments try to control religion. Consider the Soviet Union, for example. Lenin wrote against religion and called it a spiritual booze as well as opium (like Marx), probably because, in the early 20th century Russia, booze was much more popular than opium. (See Socialism and Religion: Lenin)

Religion is one of the forms of spiritual oppression which everywhere weighs down heavily upon the masses of the people, over burdened by their perpetual work for others, by want and isolation. Impotence of the exploited classes in their struggle against the exploiters just as inevitably gives rise to the belief in a better life after death as impotence of the savage in his battle with nature gives rise to belief in gods, devils, miracles, and the like. Those who toil and live in want all their lives are taught by religion to be submissive and patient while here on earth, and to take comfort in the hope of a heavenly reward. But those who live by the labour of others are taught by religion to practice charity while on earth, thus offering them a very cheap way of justifying their entire existence as exploiters and selling them at a moderate price tickets to well-being in heaven. Religion is opium for the people. Religion is a sort of spiritual booze,   in which the slaves of capital drown their human image, their demand for a life more or less worthy of man.

Moreover, there were anti-religious campaigns in the Soviet Union. These campaigns included damaging churches, murdering of priests and other acts of violence and suppression; these actions cannot be construed as supporting religion in any way  (See Russian orthodox church). 

By 1918 the government had nationalized all church property, including buildings. In the first five years of the Soviet Union (1922-26), twenty-eight Russian Orthodox bishops and more than 1,200 priests were executed, and many others were persecuted. Most seminaries were closed, and publication of most religious material was prohibited. The next quarter-century saw surges and declines in arrests, enforcement of laws against religious assembly and activities, and harassment of clergy. Antireligious campaigns were directed at all faiths; beginning in the 1920s, Buddhist and Shamanist places of worship in Buryatia, in the Baikal region, were destroyed, and their lamas and priests were arrested (a practice that continued until the 1970s). The League of the Militant Godless, established in 1925, directed a nationwide campaign against the Orthodox Church and all other organized religions. The extreme position of that organization eventually led even the Soviet government to disavow direct connection with its practices. In 1940 an estimated 30,000 religious communities of all denominations survived in all the Soviet Union, but only about 500 Russian Orthodox parishes were open at that time, compared with the estimated 54,000 that had existed before World War I.

Similarly, in case of many assertive or aggressive secular states with a strong anti-clericalism bent, like France and Turkey in the early 20th century, it is clear that the motivation is that of control, not the promotion of religion. Following is an excerpt of Ataturk's speech from the early days of the Turkish Republic:

Gentlemen and Great Nation! Know it well that the Turkish Republic cannot be a country of sheikhs, dervishes, disciples and lunatics. The correct road is the road of civilization.

And a paragraph about the de-Christianization campaign of early days of revolutionary France (See Religion, Society and Politics in France since 1789, page 1):

During the course of the year II much of France was subjected to a campaign of dechristianization, the aim of which was the eradication of Catholic religious practice, and Catholicism itself. The campaign, which was at its most intense in the winter and spring of 1793-94, but which began as early as the summer of 1793 in some regions, and continued after the fall of Robespierre in August 1794 in a few areas, comprised a number of different activities. These ranged from the removal of plate, statues and other fittings from the places of worship, the destruction of crosses, bells, shrines and other ‘external signs of worship’, the closure of churches, the enforced abdication and occasionally, the marriage of constitutional priests, the substitution of a Revolutionary calendar for the Gregorian one, the alteration of personal and place names which had any ecclesiastical connotations to more suitably Revolutionary ones, through to the promotion of new cults, notably those of Reason and one Supreme Being.

Perhaps one clue to solve this puzzle is the attitude and behavior of governing elite. If they show respect to religious symbols and try to demonstrate that they are not against religion, then they are supporting religion. The operative word here is 'demonstrate.' The elite in almost all countries will claim that they are not against religion; they are only against a particular 'subversive' version of it. However, if their behavior shows they are against religion, then most probably they are controlling religion, not supporting it.