Religion and Public Life Fall Series Explores the Making of Modern Statecraft

Harvard Divinity School’s Religion and Public Life (RPL) program hosted the second lecture in its three-part series, “Scripture, Secularism, and Statecraft," with a talk by Professor Jocelyne Cesari, Chair of Religion and Politics at the University of Birmingham and Senior Fellow at Georgetown University's Berkley Center, titled “Political Theologies of the Nation: Religion, Citizenship, and the Making of Modern Statecraft." 

Cesari opened her talk with a provocation: “What if religion was never really private?” She argued that religion has historically been lived first and foremost as “a communal experience,” shaping “legal systems, sovereignty and authorities, gender role and social hierarchy, sacred space, and temporal rhythm,” she said.

Cesari traced the historical movement from sacred community to secular polity, reminding the audience that pre-modern societies were not organized around the public-private binary, but rather, around the distinction between the sacred and the profane. The Westphalian order of 1648, she explained, marked a gradual transformation toward “the beginning of secularization,” transferring to kings “the monopoly of legitimate violence” and inaugurating a system that “removed the capacity of the church to wage war.” This reorientation prioritized security over ethics and created the modern international order that still governs global politics.

The conversation then moved towards “the modern community par excellence.” Cesari asserted that the nation displaced but did not eradicate the religious community, while taking on its symbolic and moral functions. She argued that “it promises salvation, it demands sacrifice, and it operates on solidarity.” Crucially, the national community is characterized by “equality of membership,” “sovereignty of the people,” and “the myth of a shared origin, destiny, and suffering,” she said. These are the notable features that challenged hierarchical religious traditions, such as Catholicism. Cesari stressed that to undermine the communal authority of religion, modernity “recenters religion on the person,” making faith a private attribute.

Cesari concluded by highlighting the contemporary entanglement between religion, nation, and politics. “The sacred now is not only religious, but also national,” she said, observing that people will “die for a flag” or for “a national idea.” Religious liberty and citizenship, she said, are framed nationally, and challenging the primacy of the nation on religious grounds can make one “suspect as a citizen.” 

Cesari cautioned that when religion and politics fully converge, “everything becomes sacred,” which she called “the worst thing that can happen” to religion. In conclusion, she left the audience with a final question: “What kind of sacred order does modern politics assume, and who gets to define it?”