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Faith in Nation: Exclusionary Origins of Nationalism. By Anthony W. Marx. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003. xviii + 258 pp. $26.00 cloth.
The thesis and detailed arguments of this book will be of interest to readers of this journal because of their implications for such matters in the history of early modern Christianity as toleration, religious persecution, confessionalization, the relation of church and state, and the relation of religion to the early stages of western nationalism. In examining state building and nation building in the modern West (and the distinction between these is important to the argument) through an examination of Spain, France, and England, especially in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, Marx contends that western nationalism arose much earlier than the French Revolution and its aftermath, being born in the religious conflicts of the Reformation era, such conflicts being an intentional building block of state formation and nationalism. Nationalism was thus not born as a strategy of inclusion related to modernization, but out of the unifying force of excluding the other (one of the author's stated aims is to disconnect the rise of nationalism from modernization theory).
Convinced that nationalism is not a given but a social construction, Marx's argument begins with the conviction that in this era religion, while often disruptive, was nonetheless the most powerful cohesive force that could be used by elites to develop "a positive engagement with the state," (36) and that in these three countries religious antagonisms "were deployed to bolster state authority" (115) and the consolidation of a majority through exclusions. Confessionalism, if...