Faith in Diversity Newsletter - 2.7.25 - Religious Nationalism Across the Globe
For citizens of the U.S, a lot is happening in our own backyard. Religion is playing its complex role as always. Just yesterday morning, President Trump announced he would counter “anti-Christian bias”. Meanwhile, Christian agencies across the nation are immediately threatened with closure due to cuts to immigrant, refugee, and other federally funded programs. Elon Musk receives a soft slap on the wrist for making Nazi gestures from the Anti-Defamation League, which treats with harshness Jews who protest Israel’s decimation of Gaza. As Trump nominates a Sikh, Harmeet Dhillon, to head up the Civil Rights Division of the Department of Justice, with promises of prosecuting “woke” companies, other Sikh-Americans worry about whether they are safe to criticize the politics of India, whose government has conducted assassinations of dissenters in North America.
So I should have plenty to write about in the near future! With that in mind, I did want to turn our religious radar out across the globe this week. Understanding how religious diversity works for our neighbors across the world can help us both complexify our understanding of other peoples and see common struggles.
One of the most common struggles I see around the globe is a crisis of religious and ethnic nationalisms imposed by authoritarian governments. In the past, it might have been more obvious for Americans to point to other countries rather than within. Enemies without epitomized the regressive forces of anti-religious Marxism, chief among them Russia and China. Yet, today, these same nations have rejected anti-religious Marxism and their iron fisted rulers have leaned into ethno-religious nationalisms which co-opt religious institutions and threaten religious freedom. Rather than seeing these as the flaws in other nations which make us better, Americans might see that we are facing a similar struggle.
When I teach about Chinese religion, we begin by talking about the “Three Teachings” which have woven tightly together over two millennia: Confucianism (known in Chinese as “Ruism”), Buddhism, and Taoism. However, in a January 2025 report, analyst John Osburg argues these have been supplanted by Protestant Christianity, Tibetan Buddhism, and New Age-inspired forms of spirituality, at least for middle class Chinese who are rejecting both the government’s moral authority and its attempt to co-opt historic religions.
Confucianism dates back several millennia. Though Confucius is central in the thought and devotion of this religious, philosophical, and cultural mixture, Chinese tradition refers to it as “Rujia”, or School of the Scholars. Confucius was a popular teacher who passed on the old teachings of the Five Classics with new interpretations. Though his influence at death was confined more to students than politics, eventually, through the furtherance of the tradition under future teachers like Mencius and Xunzi, the school of the scholars became the dominant cultural tradition of human-heartedness and propriety guiding political ideology in China for nearly two thousand years, until the rise of the Communist party in the 1900s.
Communist ideology in China rejected all religion, and saw Confucianism as backward and embarrassingly traditional. But by the end of the 20th century, the government turned the corner on religion, and began sanctioning, and attempting to co-opt, religions. Confucianism, Buddhism, and Taoism received special treatment as native traditions, while Christianity received mixed reactions, some much more repressive. And Islam has been brutally repressed as among the Uyghur people of the Xinjiang province.
In the midst of this major shift in government ideology, Orburg has found middle class Chinese rejecting the government’s prescribed religious ways and practices and embracing controversial forms of religion which offer them meaning in life. His research has focused on affluent urban Chinese, who were primarily raised secular and lost a meaning making system as Communist Utopianism faded from popular and government sentiment. They have replaced this not with the Christianities or Buddhisms sanctioned by the state, but by independent house churches and Tibetan Buddhist teachers (you may recall how China feels about one Tibetan Buddhist teacher known as the Dalai Lama!). This has led the state to respond, including the move of compiling a list humorously titled “Government Authorized Reincarnated Lamas”.
Orburg notes that after the decline of Communism’s rigid anti-religious party line, rural Chinese returned more robustly to traditional religious practices. The urban middle class, however, having been raised secular, lacked a tradition to fall back on and sought spiritual paths which may have been considered “outside” Chinese tradition. That being said, there are those who have made meaning by syncretically mixing Confucianism, Buddhism, and various therapeutic, Western New Age style spiritualities. The mixing is not new; Chinese people have never had much trouble with that.
Read Orburg’s report for a deeper and truly fascinating dive into currents of religious diversity among the Chinese people which defy the attempt of the state to forge religion and nationalism together.
It has now been 10 years that American geopolitical attention has been trained on another former Communist regime, Russia, and its expansionist war to reabsorb Ukraine. With the full invasion commencing in February 2022, deaths have piled up into the tens of thousands and many refugees have sought safe haven.
40 years ago, Russian advances were Soviet advances, in service to a secular Marxist ideal. Though Vladimir Putin was shaped in this era, he has fully embraced religious nationalism via the Russian Orthodox Church, centered in Moscow, which in turn has embraced his war on Ukraine and created a rift in global orthodoxy. The Ukrainian Orthodox Church, which previously labored under the jurisdiction of Moscow, has declared its independence. Even this distance may not be enough for Ukraine’s political leaders, who passed a controversial new law in August, banning religious organizations with ties to counties engaged in armed aggression against Ukraine. This could lead to the banning of congregations of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church and has raised warnings from human rights and religious freedom groups.
No one disputes that the Russian Orthodox Church is intimately involved in justifying Putin’s invasion among the Russian people. A student at Boston University found that icons of the church and even places of worship have been conscripted: a Cathedral to Russian Armed Forces blends nationalism and religion and even gives God glory for atheistic Soviet Russia’s victories. Even their weapons can receive the sacraments: “Priests also have blessed the country’s nuclear weapons”.
On the other side, Ukrainian President and war leader Volodymyr Zelenskyy is a Jew who lost family members in the Holocaust. Nonetheless, his critics, including Putin, accuse him of collaborating with Neo-Nazi forces in Ukraine. Putin says he has many Jewish friends who regard the Ukrainian president as a disgrace. For his part, Zelenskyy has appealed to the global Jewish population not to remain silent about the suffering of the Ukrainian people: “Nazism was born in silence.”
It is neither easy nor obvious how religion and government should interact with each other, which is why we continue to debate the topic and see its consequences. Sometimes those consequences are quite dire, and it seems we should at least be suspicious and critical when any government, our own included, flies an ethno-religious banner against its enemies, internal and abroad. If we have any faith in diversity and respect for diversity in our faiths, then we will have to choose to live differently, even against the might of nations.
We play many notes; perhaps we can learn even more how to play them together.
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Thank you for subscribing and see you next time! ~ Matt