The gods are once again at play in the public square. Around the globe, political claims are being advanced in the name of religion. Speaking in the Rose Garden on a spring day in 2024, President Trump declared that “we’re bringing religion back to our country, and it’s a big deal.” In the American political calendar, it was National Prayer Day and the most profane president in American history was announcing the establishment of the Religious Liberty Commission. Given the context and the identity of its members — who oddly include Dr. Phil and a former Miss America — it is reasonable to suspect that “religious liberty” does not mean the freedom to practice religion but the freedom to impose religion. Liberal criticisms of the politicization of religion, of the establishment of religion in the corridors of power, are bizarrely denounced as an attempt to suppress religion. This is all part of a global phenomenon — the remarriage of religion and politics. Their second marriage, you might say. For a while it seemed that the crosier had been successfully divorced from the sword and religion had been evicted from the halls of power. Secularism has spoken in triumphalist tones for a long time. In 1902, for example, William James surmised that “religion is probably only an anachronism.” Half a century later, the American sociologist C. W. Mills predicted that “in due course, the sacred shall disappear altogether except, possibly, in the private realm.” Such confident predictions were spectacularly wrong. Now the gods are back and they are carrying not only a crosier and a holy book, but also a flag and even a gun. Four buildings In December 1992, a horde of Hindu nationalists tore apart the Babri mosque in Ayodhya. This followed more than a decade of incitement by the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), targeting the 500-year-old mosque built on what Hindus regard as the birthplace of the god Ram. In the subsequent riots more than 2,000 people were killed. In 2024 the country’s president, Narendra Modi, who is also the leader of the BJP, consecrated a vast, flashy temple for Lord Ram on the site. His speech at the event had the theatrics of a religious sermon, but its content was unadulterated Hindu nationalism. The event, as Modi’s biographer summarized, marked “an era when the prime minister is the high priest of Hinduism, blurring all lines between religion and politics on the one hand and between religion and the Indian state on the other.” Religious nationalism doesn’t just blur these lines of separation, it rejects them categorically. The wedding of religion and nationalism is not a marriage of convenience, but a union of conviction. They are not distinct notions glued together merely by political expediency, though the political rewards of religion are not lost on the unifiers. For religious nationalists, religion is nationalist and nationalism is religious. It is a fusion rather than a conjunction. The magnificent Hagia Sophia in Istanbul is an epitome of Byzantine architecture and one of Turkey’s grandest landmarks. For Turkey’s Islamists, however, this is not enough. In 1934 the medieval building, which had previously served as a Byzantine church and after the Arab occupation was converted into a mosque, was given a new and nonreligious identity as a museum by decree of Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, the founder of modern Turkey and a devout secularizer. But Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s Islamist government has reversed Atatürk’s secularization of the space despite legal obstacles and widespread opposition. For Erdoğan, the religious reclamation of the building was “a resurrection,” replenishing the nation’s spirituality and its “spirit of conquest.” Erdoğan described it as “a symbol of the re-rising of our civilization’s sun.” Erdoğan went on to claim that the Islamic character of the building, its mosqueness, was the foundation of Turkish sovereignty. Converting Hagia Sophia into a mosque . . . is no less a right of the Republic of Turkey than its flag, its capital, its adhan [call to prayer], its language, its borders, and its eighty-one provinces. In other words, questioning Turkey’s Islamism is tantamount to challenging its borders — an assault on its sovereignty. Erdoğan emphatically claimed “the Turkish nation’s right to the Hagia Sophia,” as if such a collective right is denied when the structure serves as a national museum. To express Turkish greatness, the historic landmark must be imbued with religious significance. The ancient structure, with all its glory and its history, is not enough. It must function as a Muslim shrine. (Does French pride in the cathedral of Notre Dame rest on Sunday Mass?) “The resurrection of Hagia Sophia heralds the liberation of the al-Aqsa Mosque,” Erdoğan declared. The shrine atop the Temple Mount in Jerusalem is another hotbed of religious nationalism. For over a century, nationalist Muslims and Jews have been quarreling over the site, regarding it as the Archimedean point of political legitimacy, of national sovereignty. “He who rules the mountain rules the land,” say the Jewish zealots. In their twisted worldview it is not the mountain that matters, but the deity to which the mountain is enshrined: in the Jewish tradition, the binding of Isaac took place on that peak. (And as a historical matter, the First and Second Temples, the centers of ancient Judaism, stood there.) In the Islamic tradition, however, the Prophet ascended from the same summit to heaven. Religious nationalism is now at the heart of the incessant strife between Israelis and Palestinians, as territorial conflict is increasingly becoming a holy war. It is also the driving force behind the government’s anti-liberal constitutional overhaul that has been tearing Israel apart in recent years. And the increasingly regular anti-Palestinian pogroms on the West Bank are motivated by a profoundly religious chauvinism. In India, Turkey, and Israel, to choose three especially explosive examples, religious nationalism now dominates politics. The ruling coalitions in all three countries are firmly controlled by religious nationalist parties. But even where it is not organized in designated parties, the toxic cocktail of faith
There's nothing Artificial about our Intelligence