Religious Nationalism and the Politics of Majoritarianism in Contemporary Democracies

Religious nationalism has become one of the defining political forces of the era, fusing faith and nation into a single identity and redefining belonging around membership in a majority community. The movement is global and cuts across traditions. In India, Hindutva has moved from the margins to the center of state power, its ascendancy dramatized by the 2024 consecration of the Ram temple at Ayodhya on the site of a demolished mosque, an event that folded a religious project into the machinery of the state itself. In Myanmar and Sri Lanka, Buddhist nationalist movements have recast a faith associated with quietism into a vehicle for the exclusion and, in the Rohingya case, the annihilation of religious minorities. In the United States, Christian nationalism has grown into a potent electoral current redefining the nation's founding as a religious covenant. Turkey under Erdoğan has steadily dismantled the secular republican settlement, the 2020 reconversion of Hagia Sophia into a mosque serving as its emblem. What unites these otherwise disparate cases is a shared political grammar: the nation is imagined as the property of a religious majority, minorities are recast as outsiders or threats, and pluralism is reframed as betrayal. Religious nationalism proves especially potent within democracies, where it mobilizes numerical majorities through the ballot to legitimate the marginalization of minorities, turning the machinery of popular sovereignty against the norms of equal citizenship. The analytical challenges are to explain why these movements have surged simultaneously across such different contexts, whether they share common structural drivers or merely a family resemblance, how they capture and reshape state institutions once in power, and whether the majoritarian logic they unleash can be contained by democratic means or corrodes the very democracy that empowers it.