ABSTRACT
It is now three decades since Walker Connor warned us that ‘ethnic strife is too often superficially discerned as principally predicated upon language, religion, customs, economic inequality, or some other tangible element’ (1972: 341), and more than two since he suggested that this warning has particular application in respect of studies of nationalism in Europe (1979: 40–41). That scholars have sought at least partial explanations of ethnonationalism in ‘objective’ factors of these kinds is hardly surprising, since this pursuit is part of the stock-in-trade of the social scientist; but, as Connor points out, our expectation of success must be realistic – and low. It is nevertheless the case that some relatively measurable human characteristics, such as language, have a powerful impact on ethnonational sentiment, and an enormous body of literature has engaged in further analysis of this relationship. 1 The object of the present contribution is to explore the significance for ethnonationalism of another factor, religion – one to which much less attention has been given in the literature.
