The worldwide exportation of the nation-state went hand in hand with the diffusion of the Western concept of religion, both of which are notably related to the expansion of the Westphalian order. Exploring the diffusion of the twin concepts of nation-state and religion intersects with two bodies of knowledge: nationalism and secularization. Combining them helps explain why and how religion and politics influence each other. Historical institutionalism and conceptual history are used to establish areas of politicization of religion in the qualitative phase of the research and to identify patterns in big data bases in the quantitative phase of the research. This approach is applied to the politicization of religion in Syria, Turkey, India, China and Russia.

The main domains of Indian politics intersecting with religion are communal riots, elections and secular laws. To respond to ‘why and how’ religion matters in Indian politics, the chapter analyses the national habitus shared by all political and religious elites which was conceived both as Hindu and secular, therefore clashing with the people’s identification at the local level where class, cultural and religious allegiances were at play. The redefinition of the local communities along religious lines introduced by the nation-state is a critical factor in the rise of riots and of the BJP. The rise of Hindu nationalism, the contestation of national history, the sacred sites, and the status of women are analysed as main sites of politicization.

The politicization of religion is the result of the competition over loyalties between the nation-state and religious groups. The state regulates the immanent and the transcendent. Allegiance to the state transcends the allegiance to God on the Chinese territory. The genealogy of this habitus is traced back to the Jesuit mission to China in the 16th century through the rise of the Communist Party and the current mode of regulation/repression of religion by the state, especially the Muslims in the Xinjiang province.

The genealogy of the key ideas, institutions and norms of what is religious and what is political in each national context sheds light on different types of relations between the religious and political sets of the three Bs: belief, behaving and belonging. The qualitative work on religion and politics in Syria, Turkey, India, China and Russia has revealed four arenas of politicization of religion: the belonging to the national and the belonging to the religious community line up; the association between national community and religious community is contested; national belonging supersedes religious communities; and the connection between national community and religious community is contested, as well as the actions of the state on the immanent axis. The patterns of politicization of religion for each of these cases were produced by data mining and Python programming applied to the EOS database of Georgetown University.

At the core of the politicization of Islam is the territorialization of Islamic belonging, which during the nation-building phase has manifested itself in ways previously unknown in the former Muslim Empires. This territorialization was combined with the elimination of religious and cultural diversity, leading to a specific form of religious nationalism called hegemonic. The genealogical investigation shows the conceptual and institutional changes that constitute the bedrock of the current manifestations of Political Islam from the last phase of the Ottoman Empire to the current national situations. Areas of politicization in Syria and Turkey are presented from the inception of the nation-state to today’s civil war in Syria and the role of Turkey. These areas cover the status of sharia in state law, the boundaries of the secular space, the status of political violence, and the influence of regional and transnational political and religious actors.

The methodological risks of defining religion a priori are discussed. The alternative is to study ideas, groups, and institutions that are defined, perceived or contested as religious. In any given case, the dimension of religion that is at stake is identified (specifically, one or all of the three Bs: belief, belonging or behaving) along with which specific interactions between the three are at play for both political and religious communities. The interaction between the two sets of three Bs, religious and political, can explain the politicization of religion and vice versa in specific contexts. From these findings, three trends emerge that cut across all the cases and would be worth further exploration: the loss of local autonomy of religious communities, the securitization of religion and the blurring of the national and international political division. In closing, the respective limits of variable-centered investigations and postcolonial studies are discussed.

There is an inherent disparity between the statist and the ideological conception of the nation (rossiiskii/sovetskii) and its ethno-cultural components (russkii). In these conditions, the Russian Orthodox Church competes with the state to regulate the immanent. These tensions emerged during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries with the westernization policies of Peter the Great (1682-1725) and subsequently Catherine the Great (1721-1725) and have continuously pervaded the political status of religion while going through substantial transformations from the Soviet Empire until now. In the current politics since the end of the Soviet Empire, tensions over the orthodox nature of the nation have resurfaced as the state rulers tend to instrumentalize the Russian Orthodox Church for domestic and international purposes.

The book explores how the diffusion of the nation-state outside the West was associated with the exportation of the immanent/transcendent and secular/religious divides embedded in the Western conception of religion. It contends that this diffusion is a significant factor in the politicization of religion.