Religious nationalism and the problem of collective representation

I first argue that religion partakes of the symbolic order of the nation-st ate and that contemporary nationalisms are suffused with the religious. I t hen suggest that religious nationalism calls into question the theoretical duality of the social and the cultural, a divide variously identified with the material and the symbolic, class and status, economy and civil society. Religious nationalism, I suggest, requires an institutional approach to th e project of collective representation. Religious nationalism offers a part icular ontology of power, an ontology revealed and affirmed through its pol iticized practices and the central object of its political concern, practic es that locate collective solidarity in religious faith shared by embodied families, not in contract and consent enacted by abstract individual citize ns. Understanding the institutional basis of religious nationalist discours e allows us to understand its affinities with socialist politics. If religi ous nationalism derives from religion's institutional heterology with the c apitalist market and the democratic state, then it suggests the limits of a social theory that occludes that heterology. In the remainder of the paper , I argue that religious nationalism cannot be adequately understood either through Pierre Bourdieu's theory of habitus and field, nor through Jeffrey Alexander's theory of civil society. Bourdieu's theory of fields imports t he logic of dominant institutions and thereby culturally homogenizes the in stitutional diversity of contemporary society, making the stake of politics a culturally empty space of domination. Alexander's theory of civil societ y, while rich in cultural substance, identifies civil society with democrat ic political culture and thereby makes unnecessarily restrictive assumption s about the institutional sources of collective representation in modem soc iety.