Elements of a Socio-History of the Relation Between Nation and Religion – the Case of Catholicism

The nation has been, simultaneously, a privileged tool of modernisation (that is of disenchantment) and of the political, and also a potential tool of perpetuation of a new type of enchantment (which is a privileged space for the refusal of modernity). Indeed, should the nation become an object of sacralisation, it is ancient politics, funded on transcendence, that is then maintained.

 One of the main actors involved in this perpetuation of enchantment has been the process of forced homogenisation aiming at producing ‘sameness’ in a fictional way.  If the nation was calling for a progress of differentiation, it was only imposed in the 19^th and 20^th centuries while (re)producing indifference, and resulting in violence.

 Today, the reality of pluralism makes this fiction of ‘sameness’ globally incredible. Should a space which can bring back the current evolutions carried by the acceleration of globalisation exist, the best option would be the one that carries the resistance against this process. In a situation that is characterised by the disqualification of the absolute and the passage of ‘sameness’ to plurality, there should be no surprise to the fact that we are witnessing some actions towards the reaffirmation of the absolute and of ‘sameness’.

To explore this problematic, this paper will draw on the paradoxical relations (and the successive reorganisation of these relations) maintained by the catholic church towards the nation.  In an orientation to follow the sign of the times (if not to transform it, at least to inhabit it), religion and the nation are both categories which share with intimacy the avatars of legitimacy, that is the rebuilding (and the partial over imposing) of complex dispositions to organise the religious. What is at play around religion and the nation can only make sense when dealing with the contemporary redeployment of these devices.