The power of persuasion: Hindutva,Christianity, and the discourse of religion and culture in Northeast India

The paper will examine the intersection between Sangh Parivar activities, Christianity, and indigenous religions in relation to the state of Nagaland. I will argue that the discourse of ‘religion and culture’ is used strategically by Sangh Parivar activists to assimilate disparate tribal groups and to envision a Hindu nation. In particular, I will show how Sangh activists attempt to encapsulate Christianity within the larger territorial and civilisational space of Hindutva (Hinduness). In this process, the idea of Hindutva is visualised as a nationalist concept, not a theocratic or religious one [Cohen 2002 “Why Study Indian Buddhism?” In The Invention of Religion, edited by Derek Peterson and Darren Walholf. Rutgers: Rutgers University Press, 26]. I will argue that the boundaries between Hindutva as cultural nationalism and its religious underpinnings are usefully maintained in the context of Nagaland because they allow Sangh activists to reconstitute the limits of Christianity and incorporate it into Hindu civilisation on their own terms.     

Liberal Nationalism and Cosmopolitan Justice

Many liberals have argued that a cosmopolitan perspective on global justice follows from the basic liberal principles of justice. Yet, increasingly, it is also said that intrinsic to liberalism is a doctrine of nationalism. This raises a potential problem for the liberal defense of cosmopolitan justice as it is commonly believed that nationalism and cosmopolitanism are conflicting ideals. If this is correct, there appears to be a serious tension within liberal philosophy itself, between its cosmopolitan aspiration on the one hand, and its nationalist agenda on the other. I argue, however, that this alleged conflict between liberal nationalism and cosmopolitan liberalism disappears once we get clear on the scope and goals of cosmopolitan justice and the parameters of liberal nationalism. Liberal nationalism and cosmopolitan global justice, properly understood, are mutually compatible ideals.     

The Imagined Immunities of Defense Nationalism

This article examines the narratives, imaginaries, and subjectivities that underpin the far-right, ethnic nationalist “defense leagues” that have emerged in Australia (and across Europe) in the past decade. Referencing three, interrelated nationalist events in Australia—the Cronulla Riots, Cronulla Memorial Day, and the “race-riot” that occurred in Melbourne on January 5, 2019—I argue that defense leagues resist conceptualization through existing theories of nationalism and community, including those articulated by Anderson, Hage, and Esposito. Drawing on Lacanian psychoanalytic theory, I argue that unlike other nationalists, defense nationalists are not primarily concerned with realizing their avowed political projects (such as fortifying national borders, halting immigration, and preserving so-called national values). Instead, they are focused on constructing and enjoying themselves as the privileged national subjects who get to do the nation's defending. As I elaborate, the enjoyment they derive from defending the nation—which is approximate to the Lacanian concept of jouissance—means that paradoxically, that which threatens the nation legitimizes and fortifies the nationalist, because the more the nation is threatened, the more the nationalist's perceived role within it is secured. Ultimately, I argue this jouissance salvages a symbolic life within the nation that is always-already dead.     

The deliverance of the administrative state: deep state conspiracism,charismatic demonology,and the post-truth politics of American Christian nationalism

ABSTRACT

This article uses discourse analysis to explore the intersection of spiritual warfare demonology and Christian nationalism among Trump-supporting neo-charismatic evangelicals. Analysing public materials produced during and after the 2016 US presidential campaign, it demonstrates how demonologies operate discursively to categorise, comprehend, and contest understandings of American identity and destiny. Situating spiritual warfare demonology in relation to narratives of ‘post-truth politics’ as the destabilisation of neoliberal consensus reality, the article explores how charismatic evangelicals position Trump’s election as a divine assault on a demoniac status quo, epitomised in the conspiratorial figure of the ‘Deep State.’ Examining demonologies of the ‘state’ and ‘border’ as joint arenas of epistemic and societal contestation, the article shows how spiritual warfare discourses seek to (re)define sociocultural notions of truth and falsity and thereby (de)legitimise specific gendered, sexualised, and racialised forms of being and belonging.     

Remedial responsibilities beyond nations

David Miller's theory of nationalism and national responsibility offers the leading alternative ‘anticosmopolitan’ theory of global justice. His theory claims that ‘nations’ may be held responsible for the benefits and harms resulting from their collective decisions. Nations may be held remedially responsible to help nations in need even where the former lack causal or moral responsibility, for example. This article critically examines Miller's position that remedial responsibilities – the responsibilities of nations to remedy others in need – can and should only be satisfied by nations. I argue that the characteristics that define and justify a particular understanding of nationalism extend to further constructions of identity, such as religious affiliation and other connections. The problem with Miller's position is that it is overly narrow by focusing solely on our national identities as the characteristic most relevant for determining remedial responsibilities. It is possible and desirable to widen our focus, enriching our understanding of global justice and remedial responsibility. Moreover, this wider perspective is an extension, and not a break from, Miller's position. Our shared identities should have significance for considerations of global justice and they can help us to develop a more robust view of anticosmopolitanism.     

KILLING FOR THE HOMELAND: PATRIOTISM, NATIONALISM AND VIOLENCE

Political choices favoring one's country or one's nationality are wrong if they conflict with a principle of universal free acceptability, prohibiting choices that violate every set of rules to which any willing cooperator would want all to conform. Despite its universalism, this principle requires patriotic favoritism in political choices and permits individuals to assert nationalist interests in claims for state aid. But it deprives patriotism and nationalism of any distinctive role in establishing the legitimacy of wars and uprisings. These restrictions are appropriate even if stronger forms of patriotism and nationalism are psychologically indispensable for achieving social goals required for universal free acceptability.     

Multiculturalism,liberal fundamentalism and banal nationalism: Dilemmatic aspects of Dissolving the Diaspora

In this commentary I point to some inherent tensions within the article Dissolving the Diaspora. First, I suggest that the author may be in danger of underestimating the extent to which the values of the multiculturalism promoted in the article rely upon an acceptance of the incorrigible stats of culturally‐specific ideologies of liberalism. Second, I point to the way in which the author adopts a banal nationalist frame of reference whereby constructs such as ‘society’ and ‘polity’ and understood to be conterminous with ‘nation‐state’. I suggest that, in this respect, the author may be in danger of overlooking the ways in which the same liberal values which under pin an advocacy of multiculturalism might also be associated with utopian visions of transnational or cosmopolitan forms of solidarity and polity. Copyright © 2008 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Close Strangers

Nationalism is normally directed against closest neighbors. This simple fact -- The Hated Neighbor Truism -- has important consequences, mostly overlooked in moral debates on nationalism. First, it undercuts the defense of nationalism based on the (alleged) moral worth of proximity: since nationalists hate closest neighbors, they cannot consistently rely upon such defense. Second, it blocks the usual theoretical contrast of nationalism with cosmopolitanism: the main enemies of the nationalist are not indiscriminate cosmopolitans, but the neighbor-lovers, call them macro-regionalists. Finally, it suggests that the proper response to nationalism is a graded, region-sensitive moderate cosmopolitanism.     

Europe,the New Abyssinia: On the Role of the First Hijra in the Fiqh al-Aqalliyyāt al-Muslima Discourse

Since the mid-1980s, Muslim jurists and theologians have discussed the permissibility of mass-scale Muslim permanent voluntary settlement in majority non-Muslim countries and the unique challenges Muslim minorities face in secularizing Christian societies. Their efforts constitute a new field in Islamic jurisprudence, fiqh al-aqalliyyāt al-Muslima (the religious law of Muslim minorities). A number of participants in this field have introduced analogies between present realities and the first hijra – the migration to Christian Abyssinia (Ethiopia) with the blessing of the Prophet Muhammad. The objectives of this article are twofold: (a) to point to the roles of these analogies in fiqh al-aqalliyyāt al-Muslima discourse and (b) to demonstrate how Islamic jurists and theologians interpret similar or almost similar mythical narratives to support conflicting arguments. The article draws on a qualitative reading of several dozen religious decisions, treatises and sermons by jurists and theologians collected from mosques, Islamic centres and libraries in Europe, as well as from online resources.     

On the Psychological Function of Nationalistic “Whitelash”

A noticeable feature of the political discourse accompanying the rise of nationalism in white‐majority countries is that white people fare worse than other ethnic groups in their societies. However, it is unclear based on the extant literature why group‐based relative deprivation (GRD) would correlate with majority‐group nationalism. Here, we propose that the psychological function of nationalism for majority‐group members lies in its ability to assuage the negative feelings arising from GRD. Accordingly, in a New Zealand national probability sample (N = 15,607), we found that GRD among whites was negatively associated with well‐being. However, we also found an opposing indirect association mediated by nationalism. GRD was associated with higher nationalism, which was in turn associated with higher well‐being. These findings suggest that endorsing beliefs about national superiority is one way a nation’s dominant ethnic group can cope with the negative psychological consequences of perceiving that their group is deprived.     

Feasibility and Stability in Normative Political Philosophy: The Case of Liberal Nationalism

Arguments from stability for liberal nationalism rely on considerations about conditions for the feasibility or stability of liberal political ideals and factual claims about the circumstances under which these conditions are fulfilled in order to argue for nationalist conclusions. Such reliance on factual claims has been criticised by among others G. A. Cohen in other contexts as ideological reifications of social reality. In order to assess whether arguments from stability within liberal nationalism, especially as formulated by David Miller, are vulnerable to a comparable critique, the rationale for their reliance on factual claims is discussed on the basis of a number of concerns in John Rawls’s political liberalism. The concern with stability in liberal nationalism differs from stability in Rawls’s work, mainly because of the stronger non-ideal or ‘realist’ focus of the former. In so far as the ‘realism’ of arguments from stability for liberal nationalism is recognized, they are not vulnerable to the reification charge. But if the arguments are construed as realist, this at the same time makes for other tensions within liberal nationalism.     

Toward a liberal socialist cosmopolitan nationalism

I explicate and defend a form of liberal socialist nationalism. It is also a nationalism which is cosmopolitan. Explication and explanation are crucially in order here, for it is not unreasonable to believe that ‘cosmopolitan nationalism’ and ‘liberal socialist nationalism’ and even ‘liberal nationalism’ are oxymoronic. Against that I argue that there is a straightforward understanding of these concepts and their relations to each other that does not have inconsistencies or even paradoxes. Liberal socialism properly understood goes well with cosmopolitanism (both moral and institutional), and there are plausible and attractive forms of both liberalism and socialism that go together. Moreover, the only candidate for a nationalism that would survive careful reflective inquiry is a liberal nationalism: a nationalism which is neither ethnic nor civic. It is widely believed, however, that even a liberal nationalism is incompatible with cosmopolitanism. I contend in a series of arguments that in contexts where nationalism is rightly on the agenda the form that it should take is that of a liberal nationalism, and it is further argued that to be viable, nationalism requires cosmopolitanism.     

Liberalism,nationality and education

Yael Tamir's (1993) book Liberal Nationalism seeks to show that liberalism and nationalism are not incompatible political philosophies. Nationalism need not take the closed, authoritarian form it has so often taken; and liberalism is premised on certain national ideas, including national self-determination. This critical discussion of her account is broadly sympathetic to the compatibility thesis, but takes issue both with her notion of nationalism, with her account of a nation as a self-conscious cultural community, and with the sharp line she draws between civic and cultural concerns. Although her book does not deal with education, this paper concludes with remarks about what the role of nationality should be in education, in both a Tamirian and a non-Tamirian framework. The latter is applied to education in Britain.This paper takes the form of a discussion of some leading themes in Yael Tamir's (1993) book Liberal Nationalism and of their bearing on educational policy.     

‘Naturally More Vehement and Intense’: Vehemence in Calvin's Sermons on the Lord's Supper

This article focuses on the remarks of Conrad Badius – in the preface to his publication of Plusieurs sermons of Calvin's – about the ‘vehemence’ of sermons relating to the Lord's Supper. By comparing two of Badius's prefaces in editions of Calvin's sermons, it becomes clear that he chose his words intentionally. On examining here the rhetorical background of vehementia/véheménce, its use in the final part of Calvin's sermons is clarified. Some contemporary witnesses to Calvin's habit are cited. Moreover, in light of the role of vehemence in Calvin's preaching in general, it is shown that the context of the preparation for the sacrament and its celebration prompted Calvin to preach even more vigorously. The outcome is that Badius's comments on Calvin's preaching underline the vital importance of the Lord's Supper for the Reformer, a sacrament which required intensive and sanctifying preparation.     

Preaching as a Communicative Event: A Discourse Analysis of Sermons by Robert Rollock (1555-1599)

Abstract

In 1999, Mary Morrissey called for interdisciplinary collaboration in research into early modern sermons, based on a common interest in sermons as discourse. Interdisciplinarity, however, can develop only on the basis of a systematic analysis of sermons as communicative events. All discourse is situationally embedded; analysis seeks to establish how the linguistic makeup of a sermon is related to the preacher's objective of communicating in a way that was situated, appropriate, and meaningful to the hearers. It thus helps to explicate the relationship between the sermon as text and its social, historical, literary, and theological settings. This article presents a methodology for such analysis, using a simple framework that embodies both language and communication. Sermons by the Scottish theologian, Robert Rollock, form the corpus of the analysis. It identifies clear patterning of linguistic forms and communicative acts, which are then examined in the light of the preacher's theological, hermeneutical, and pastoral concerns.     

We didn't say that: Challenges in the Public Dissemination of a Research Finding with Controversial Implications

In the March 2014 issue of American Journal of Community Psychology, we published an article that examined the tension between two core values in the field of community psychology: promoting contextual conditions that foster respect for diversity and promoting contextual conditions that foster sense of community. We concluded that processes of social network formation could help explain why diversity and sense of community are seemingly incompatible goals. The study's findings initially disseminated through the usual academic channels, and later through mainstream media outlets. However, they also eventually appeared on blogs and discussion forums devoted to white nationalism. The findings were viewed there as having demonstrated the evils of diversity, and thus having vindicated the white nationalist agenda. As a result, we were forced to consider whether and how to set the record straight. In this first‐person narrative, we describe our study's journey from AJCP to white nationalist blogs, discussing how we ultimately responded to the situation, and concluding with some lessons learned.     

Nationalism and Immigration

Can states' immigration policies favor groups with whom they are culturally and historically tied? I shall answer this question here positively, but in a qualified manner. My arguments in support of this answer will be of distributive justice, presupposing a globalist rather than a localist approach to justice. They will be based on a version of liberal nationalism according to which individuals can have fundamental interests in their national culture, interests which are rooted in freedom, identity, and especially in ensuring the meaningfulness of their endeavor. The prevalent means for protecting these interests is the right to national self-determination. Many believe that this right should be conceived of as a right to a state. I shall show that this conception of self-determination implies purely nationalist immigration policies. I shall present reasons for rejecting such policies, reasons which together with other reasons form a strong case against the statist interpretation of the right to self-determination. They form a strong case in favor of understanding self-determination as a bundle of privileges to which nations are entitled within the states dominating their homelands. Some of these privileges have to do with immigration policies. I shall argue for three principles which should regulate these immigration privileges and discuss the relation between them and Israel's Law of Return.     

Individual aggression,national attachment,and the search for peace: Psychological perspectives

The primary question addressed is the role of affect related factors, particularly values, as possible mediators of individual differences in attitudes towards nuclear armament-disarmament issues. One such factor is value placed on children, those individuals who have greater affection for children or who are more supportive of devoting national resources toward meeting children's needs being more supportive of nuclear disarmament and a nuclear test moratorium. This relationship was found in a well-educated group of adults with a special interest in foreign affairs as well as in college student populations. A significant and strong relationship between the value placed on war as an instrument of foreign policy and a pronuclear armament stance was also found in each of these two samples. Measures of individual aggression, however, were minimally and inconsistently related to the attitude towards nuclear armament-disarmament and the attitude towards war measures. The possible role of patriotic and nationalistic values was also explored. Patriotism or love of and pride in one's country was shown to be functionally distinct from nationalism or the view that one's country is superior to and should be more powerful than other nations. Patriotism but not nationalism was found to be positively correlated with early paternal sattachment while nationalism but not patriotism, was found to be significantly related to pronuclear armament views. The findings from this series of studies indicate that the analysis of individual differences in nuclear armament-disarmament policy attitudes has heuristic usefulness and may be useful for social policy in this area.     

The Ghostly Other: Understanding Racism from Confucian and Enlightenment Models of Subjectivity

The overwhelming motif of nineteenth century anti-Semitic discourse is the metaphor of the Jew as a ghost. In all cultures, the ghost represents the antithesis of what is categorically human: it represents the other par excellence. By using the heuristic of the ghost to interpret how Enlightenment discourse has dealt with the other, this article will argue that the Enlightenment model of the self and its relation to others was a contributing factor to Modern Racism. Enlightenment discourse on subjectivity finds its counterpart in Confucian notions of subjectivity. By looking at how ghosts are understood within Confucian discourse and how they are evoked in popular literature, I argue that Confucian philosophy’s model of subjectivity contributed to the success of the Chinese empire’s assimilation project.