Religion, Liberalism and the Nation in East Asia

Dear Colleagues,

You are invited to contribute to the Special Issue entitled “Religion, Liberalism and the Nation in East Asia.”

What is religion? This question is at the core of the construction of the constitutional nation-state, the quintessential modern form of hegemonic political power. Religious belief and conscience are said to constitute the interior core of the modern individual, and in turn, the claim to protect an individual citizen’s right to religious freedom (and other rights) legitimizes the political authority of the modern state vis-a-vis the citizenry. As the representative of the citizenry, however, the nation-state’s authority is a public one which necessitates the expulsion of religious belief and religious institutions from the public space of socio-political life. That is, the public, secular authority of the nation-state interdepends on the privatization of religion. At the same time, liberal democracy predicates on the legal homogenization of the multiplicity of individual citizens into uniform nationality through the cultivation of a shared sense of belonging to a nation, i.e., national identity. This is because the function of democracy requires an ideological basis, a shared commitment to the body politic, i.e., the nation-state. Universalistic liberal democracy operates in and for the exclusivist nation. Here, religious belief is protected by the state, but private religious belief succumbs to the demand for loyalty and commitment to the public nation-state, even though religious belief and nationalism are often difficult to distinguish from each other because of their shared use of rituals to express and project power.

The discourse of religion has profoundly shaped East Asian modernity. Since the mid-nineteenth century, pre-modern East Asian pursuits of human emancipation and fulfillment assisted by supra-natural beings as well as various forms of the self, community, and power have been reconfigured to establish religion, the liberty-bearing citizen, and the nation. Religion, liberty, and the nation constitute powerful political logics that all East Asian states, whether capitalist democracies or socialist party states, need resort to to articulate political authority and social agenda. The application of these powerful, universalistic ideas for the realization of modernity in East Asia, however, like anywhere else, has been marked by inconsistencies, fractures, and tensions. For example, religious belief assumes an interiority that qualifies a person as a modern autonomous individual. This is the essential notion of the private sphere against which the secular public sphere is articulated. However, a person never exists without personal or social relationships. Where the private sphere ends and the public sphere starts can never be easily defined. If religious belief itself cannot be clearly defined, how can it be protected by the state? This is not to mention that a non-citizen is excluded from having this protection by the state from the outset.

This Special Issue explores these fractures and inconsistencies in modern East Asian experience and seeks to contribute new perspectives for the critical examination of the distinctions of public vs. private, religious vs. secular, and state vs. society. The Special Issue also asks whether, and if so, how, the concept of religion has operated to block alternative inspirations and imaginations of forming society and the self. As such, this Special Issue sets out to explore possibilities that are lost in East Asia’s modernizing experience as well as new ones that may be yet to come.

Prof. Dr. Yijiang Zhong
Guest Editor

Manuscript Submission Information

Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 100 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for announcement on this website.

Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a double-blind peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Religions is an international peer-reviewed open access monthly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 1800 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.

• religion
• secularity
• liberty
• citizen
• public vs. private
• citizen
• nationalism
• civil society