When god walks in history - The institutional politics of religious nationalism

Religious nationalism represents an institutional project to transform the ontology of the social, to redefine the substance of collective representat ion, the principle of domination and the criteria for membership. Religious nationalism transforms the territorial nation-state into a vehicle in and by which to extend the materiality of its culturally specific categories, c odes, values and narratives. It thereby challenges social theories, like th at of Bourdieu, that deculturalize power, as well as those, like Alexander, that culturalize it in an institutionally restrictive manner. Religious na tionalism is not a retreat to the premodern, but an effort to bound and ene rgize the elemental modem moments, that of the self and the national-state. Religious nationalism represents the return to text, to the fixity of sign s, the renarrativization of the nation in a cosmic context. It returns us t o bodies and souls, a zone to be defended against things on the one side an d beasts on the other. It offers a way to secure morality against an increa singly post-humanist world. Its discourse of difference seeks to bound the nation. Religious nationalism restores the binaries of inside and outside, us and them, good and evil, man and woman and centers them in sacred space.