Established churches shape the way the space of a nation is understood.

What is it about?

This chapter explores the forms of belonging and community fostered by the relationship of national—or established—churches to national space and identity. In light of the rise of troubling forms of nationalism across Europe, it is suggested that those churches that identify national space as significant to their ecclesial identity can risk perpetuating forms of exclusion through their attempts to be ‘inclusive’. National political membership all too often ends up being conceptualised in one of two spatial modes: the ‘expanding container’ mode (with citizenship pictured in terms of admitting new members to the bounded political community) or a ‘despatialised’ mode (with national belonging construed in terms of the sharing of certain values). Having diagnosed why these two dominant attempts at inclusion fail to foster rich relations of national belonging, some parameters are established for a political community predicated on the ongoing participation of all members.

Featured Image

Why is it important?

There is currently widespread concern over the fragmentation of nationhood and political community in a whole range of different global contexts. As a result, a search is underway for stable forms of national identity capable of sustaining bonds of loyalty between fellow citizens, as well as between citizens and state institutions. Yet the visions of communal identity and inclusion offered in response all too often seem to perpetuate and even generate new forms of civic exclusion and marginalisation.