ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the implications of two perspectives for understanding of the relations between museums, nations, empires and religions as these have developed from the late eighteenth century to the present. It shows how, for the greater part, the alignments between museums and religions forged in the course of Western modernity are ones that have subordinated pastoral to governmental power by invoking religion as a form of moral supplement to secular practices of social governance. The chapter draws two perspectives in conducting a set of strategic probes that provides different points of historical and theoretical entry into questions concerning the action of museums in the context of their enduringly significant, but always mutable, entanglements across the relations between nations, empires, and religions. It concludes concerning the role of museums in the promotion of religious tolerance as a new historical form of governmentality.
