CMV: Nationalism is a more violent, prominent and problematic force today than religion
On reddit and some other parts of the internet, there has been (maybe not as big as once was) a significant anti-Theist movement. I understand and sympathise with it myself, though I know parts of it have links with the Far Right. In a world where religious countries like Saudi Arabia and Israel have such a global presence and evangelicals in the US, Catholics in Italy or Hindu nationalists in India increasingly shape policy in those places, I get the hostility at religion. Part of me feels, nevertheless, that this is treating a symptom and not a cause, religious or agnostic elites who exert power by means of faith.
The same is true of nationalism, but I feel nationalism is much more widespread and harder for elites and upper classes to think outside of. Czechia, parts of Germany, my home country the UK, have massive secular populations yet they still have big finance, self-interested landowners, media/press barons and a political class separate from their 'subjects' and 'civillians' alike. North Korea is the most extreme example, a violently atheist state with a bureaucratic-military caste and a hereditary dictatorship. In these countries (I am aware the UK is technically a religious state), religions are not the chief means used to ideologise.
Nationalism, however, is a constant in modern states, in religious and secular countries alike. North Korea posits itself as a workers' paradise against the imperialist nations and their stooges, the UK is a traditional country of green hills and thatch houses against some technocratic Europe, India is a supposedly Hindu country led by a strong man with over 3 millennium of history back to the Aryans, Israel are "God's chosen people" on land that was once supposedly more or less empty and before that where God spoke to Israeli forefathers. These are the narratives told, they do not have to be religious and they are everywhere. Every country has its mythologised image and history, not truly congruent with reality but popular enough that people in each country think they are unique, share identity, and sometimes that they are superior than all other countries. And these ideas run deeper than religion, they are in education, film and television, everdays chats.
Every country in Europe was the "first to ban slavery" yk...
In reality, a poor factory worker in China has more in common with a Perkins worker here in the UK or a Rust Belt labourer in Michigan, than they do with any Cabinet member, or bank exec or the factory owners, in any country. Even 'middling' professions or service workers like nurses or administration in the West are much closer to those blue collar workers than the ultra rich in any country. A Syrian immigrant worker in Germany and a non Immigrant worker there have much more in common than whoever is currently leading the FDP, or Krupp industrialists. Yet we hear always from the political class and the media, that we should cling to nationalism and fight against each other to stop wages sinking or losing culture, rather than they who themselves sink our wages while filling their pockets and poisoning our culture with consumerism or hate. Increasingly so as the Right rise, AfD, Reform or Restore, le Pen, Trump, or while the respectable liberal/conservative political class try to replicate them, think the CSU or Shabana Mahmood's anti immigration agendas and media presentations. No country will ever be pure enough in these people's ideas because no society has been or ever will be homogenous. Nationalism obfuscates, lies, exagerrates.
It feels like a bigger issue today then religion, maybe it was different before and they definitely blend into each other, yet I believe nationalism is almost widespread when religion is not. It exists in both right wing ethnonationalist forms and 'respectable' so-called civic forms, it is the most successful ideology of all. And it is near historian consensus that this ideology has existed only 2 centuries or so, in other words, it is finite.