Religions and Nationalisms: The State of the Field

With this exploratory panel, our aim is to gather a select group of six to seven scholars to reflect on the religious-nationalism phenomena and the normative and analytic stakes in their study. We want to ask: When considering the various phenomena included under a rubric of “religious nationalisms,” how do we approach, understand, and theorize the individual expressions of the religious nationalism phenomenology? What are the normative assumptions and analytic gains in the use of this notion and, further, in the still dominant distinctions we draw between ethnoreligious nationalisms and civic religion? What are the ways in which postcolonial and decolonial perspectives complicate the considerations of these categories and the realities that they purport to explain? What are some possible future trajectories in the study of religions and nationalisms, and what is the role that religious studies ought to play in those future trajectories?