Religion, Liberalism and the Nation in East Asia
A special issue of Religions (ISSN 2077-1444).
Deadline for manuscript submissions: 30 September 2024 | Viewed by 4513
Special Issue Editor
Special Issue Information
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
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Keywords
- religion
- secularity
- liberty
- citizen
- public vs. private
- citizen
- nationalism
- civil society
Planned Papers
The below list represents only planned manuscripts. Some of these manuscripts have not been received by the Editorial Office yet. Papers submitted to MDPI journals are subject to peer-review.
Title: Flexible Secularity and the Appropriation of Religion in South Korea
Abstract: Beyond the once dominant secularization thesis that anticipated the decline of religion in the modern world, the study of religion has been in recent years revisiting the secular as a critical factor that shapes religion and religions in modern global context. This article concerns how the religious sector was reformulated with special reference to the postcolonial transformation of secularity in the Republic of Korea. Religion as a modern category first appeared in Korea in the 19th century. The reorganization of East Asia after World War II resulted in the division of the Korean Peninsula. The geopolitical position of South Korea in the new world order conditioned the way in which the category of religion was selectively used for transcendent traditions or redemptive groups in the country in the latter 20th century. The new secular state became a positive trigger for religion and religions to have an expansive status, identity, and/or function in the Republic of Korea. In the post-colonial context, while freedom of religion was stipulated as a constitutionally guaranteed right, ‘religion’ took a distinctive socio-political location that was demarcated from those of other secular sectors or institutions. At the same time religion was largely expected to contribute to the formation of Korean modernity such as the modernization and democratization of the national community, the reunification of two Koreas, and the competition against the northern communists. Faced with various internal and external crises such as the Cold War, poverty, and dictatorship, religion was requested to play a role for the glory of the fatherland as a carrier of ‘national spirit’ (minjok chŏnggi). On the other hand, the positive discourse on religion was accompanied by a strong distrust of what was religious but not 'religion'. Various marginal or minority religious groups were widely deprived of the constitutional right to religious liberty as they were recognized as being ‘superstitious’, ‘pre-modern’, or ‘sagyo’ / ‘xiejiao’, obstacles to the revival of the nation. The formation of such religious modernity was greatly attributed to the transformation of secularity that was caused by the re-entry of Korea into the globalized East Asia. This article is focused on describing the porous formation of secularity and the consequential discursive and structural reformulation of religious diversity in South Korea from 1945 to the 1990s.