Nationalism and religion; collective identity and choice: the 1989 revolutions, Evangelical Revolution in the Global South, revolution in the Arab World

David Martin on religion and nationalism: Navigator of contested territories

“…The relation of nationalism to religion is central to David's general theory of secularization, and his first stab at such a general theory was made – as we learn in footnote number 1 of his Ernest Gellner Nationalism Lecture – at a seminar attended by David and Ernest Gellner in 1968 when a presenter's failure to show up led Gellner to invite David “to invent a paper on the spot.” “With nothing to lose,” he writes, “I invented a general theory of secularization” (Martin, 2014a, 2014b, p. 15). David credits Gellner with seeing to it that his “notes towards a general theory of secularization” were published in the European Journal of Sociology the following year, and these notes of course were the foundations on which he built his General Theory eventually to be published in 1978.…”

“…2 2 There he writes “I have first to dispose of the secularization issue if my topic is to be other than merely historical” (Martin, 2014a, 2014b, p. 2), before proceeding to outline the basics of his approach to the relationship between religion and nationalism.…”

“…3 3 Although he does indicate that, with Anthony Smith and others, he regards national self‐awareness as “having a longer history than some modernist approaches might allow” (Martin, 2014a, 2014b, p. 1).…”

The Pentecostal Antirevolution: Reflections from Angola

“…This affects not only the individual lives of adherents and believers, but also wider social instances and identity configurations through a 'politics of conviction' (Comaroff 2009) more often than not based on ideologies of spiritual warfare and religious militancy. For instance, David Martin's sociological take on the emergence of Evangelicalism and Pentecostalism frames it as nothing short of an 'explosion ' (1990), paving the way for a progressive understanding of such movements as inherently revolutionary or at least 'rupturist' in their political, ideological, and societal stances (Cox 1995;Chesnut 1997;Meyer 1998;Harding 2000;Marshall 2009;O'Neill 2010;Martin 2014;Morier-Genoud 2014). Such literature was important in revealing a new political ethos in Christian experience that differs from the more classical political theology that framed Western political philosophy from a Christian framework (Agamben 2012).…”

David Martin symposium: Introduction

“…Although it is not until much later that Martin publishes a piece specifically on nationalism and religion—his N&N article Nationalism and Religion; Collective Identity and Choice: The 1989 Revolutions, Evangelical Revolution in the Global South, Revolution in the Arab World (Martin, 2014)—his secularisation theory makes a central contribution to the nationalism field. This is related to one particular constraint on secularisation, that is, the identification of religion with the nation.…”