Religious Nationalism Quotes
This Arab nationalist leader was actually a Christian Orthodox by religion. He also tried to make the Baath party a secular state and he was a strong advocate of free speech and democracy. When the Islamic fundamentalists became important in Mid East Politics, the Baath Iraq Government under Saddam Hussein claimed, with no evidence, that Aflaq converted to Islam on his deathbed, thus making his philosophy more acceptable to the vast majority of Arabs.
Bush was trying to obtain the Republican Presidential Nomination and that party had come under the influence of Protestant Evangelicals who could in effect veto any candidate in the Primary election. Bush, who was already suspect with the Evangelicals, chose to make this statement with the full knowledge that there is no Constitutional citizenship requirement to believe in a god and that a number of the leading founding patriots and founders had been atheists. However his tactics were successful and the following year he was the Republican nominee. Despite this statement, he never acted on it or made it a part of his administration’s principles. Politicians are often placed in these difficult positions where they are pressured into positions not to their liking in order to politically succeed. In this case, he never did more than make the disgraceful statement. He did not adopt any policy of take any action. However, this quotation is unique in American history as the only time an American president ever stated that American citizenship should not be recognized for religious reasons only.
From the latter part of the 20th century onward, religious nationalism was no longer a force for most religions and nations except Muslim countries. It was the only religion left where a large proportion of the adherents saw no distinction between the religion and the government. Nations that had separation of church and state were not conducive to the extreme fundamentalist form of Islam where the Secular Leader and the Religious leader was to be embodied as a single person. As a result Islamic religious nationalists argued for a Theocracy and at times fought for it with violent means. The secular government typically, to curtail the violence and prevent a religious takeover, often outlawed the extreme religious Islamic parties. While Aslan cites the Muslim Brotherhood failure in Egypt as a desirable outcome, the only way the other forces of Egyptian society could prevent the Islamists from taking over turning the country into a theocracy was to forcefully repress the extremists. The Turkish outcome was much better, but there was the threat of repression of the Justice and Development Party when it won a majority control of the government. There were explicit threats that if it tried to weaken the secular nature of the government as Ataturk had formulated it, the military would come “out of the barracks” and oust the government as they had done before. There were nations like China which persecuted religions such as certain forms of Christianity, but those religions were not fighting for religious nationalism. They only wished the freedom to practice their religion and had no program or theology that argued for Christianizing the government. The Tamil Hindus of Sri Lanka did not want a Hindu government and were perfectly free to practice their religion. The problem was that they felt that there was systemic social and economic discrimination against the Tamils and they fought for independence—not of a Hindu state, but of a secular, nondiscriminatory state of equal opportunity.
