Territory and the divine: the intersection of religion and national identity

Abstract

Despite patterns of secularisation across Europe, religion continues to exert influence. Besides theological belief, religion is deeply integrated into daily life as a social institution and marker of who belongs in a community and who does not. Linear mixed effects analysis of the 2016 European Social Survey (ESS) demonstrates that secular individuals and those in minority religious groups have weaker national identity than individuals in the country’s historically majority religion. The effect of affiliation with the majority religion on national identity also holds for secular individuals who grew up in the majority religion. Overall influence of religious importance is waning, except among Muslims, which suggests that religion’s socio-political power lies in its social identities more than devout practice in the contemporary European context. The findings of this study further advance understandings of the ways that religion reinforces or conditions national identity in so-called ‘secularizing societies’.

Keywords:

• National identity
• religion
• social identity
• religious heritage
• inter-group relations

Acknowledgements

I extend a profound thank you to Gary Marks, Liesbet Hooghe, Pamela Johnston Conover, Milada A. Vachudova, Jacqueline Hagan and Eroll Kuhn for their insightful feedback in the development of this article. Participants in the Odom Institute’s 2019 Thomas M. Carsey Graduate Symposium and Sociology Migration Working Group at UNC-Chapel Hill also provided useful suggestions. Finally, I thank two anonymous reviewers and the editors at West European Politics for their constructive comments.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 Hassan, Jennifer. 2019, April 15. ‘With Notre Dame aflame, witness ‘Ave Maria’ in the streets of Paris’. The Washington Post. https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2019/04/15/with-notre-dame-aflame-witnesses-sing-ave-maria-streets-france/?utm_term=.f005410330af; Nossiter, Adam. 2019, April 16. ‘In aftermath of Notre-Dame fire, Macron urges unity in fragmented nation’. The New York Times. https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/16/world/europe/notre-dame-fire-investigation.html

2 See Malka et al. (2012) for an extensive literature review of the role of religion on conservative ideology and corresponding vote choice in the U.S. case.

3 See also Gorsuch and Aleshire (1974) for a review of earlier literature on this point.

4 See Whitehead and Perry (2020) for a discussion of these implications in the context of American Christian nationalism.

5 Mitchell (2006) argues that this labelling practice is one reason that some survey data in Northern Ireland masks the pervasive role of religion in intergroup relations in the region.

6 The 2016 ESS covers the following countries: Austria, Belgium, Switzerland, Czechia, Estonia, Spain, Finland, France, the United Kingdom, Hungary, Ireland, Iceland, Italy, Lithuania, the Netherlands, Poland, Portugal, the Russian Federation, Sweden and Slovenia. The survey also includes Israel, but I exclude it from analysis because the nature of its contemporary ethno-religious relations make it theoretically and empirically distinct from European nation-states.

7 The survey question asks specifically about the country in which the survey is fielded, which is not necessarily the respondent’s country of origin.

8 Self-assessed religious importance is measured on a 0–10 scale, while church attendance and prayer are measured on 1–7 scales, so I weight each measure so that the variance of each is comparable. I reverse the prayer scale so that its values are in the same direction as the other variables.

9 All models include the post-stratification weight developed by the ESS.

10 This model does not include country random effects in addition to denomination random effects due to rank deficiency.

11 The notion of a European Christian heritage is not fully historically accurate, since non-Christian religions have indeed dominated space within modern European borders, such as the Muslim empire of al-Andalus from 711 to 1492. However, it can be an effective tool of political rhetoric for populist nationalist parties.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Stephanie N. Shady

Stephanie N. Shady is a doctoral candidate in the Department of Political Science at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Her research focuses on national identity, religion and immigration attitudes, and political behaviour. [[email protected]]