The People's Free School

Religion, Reaction, and Supremacy

12 min read

This theme studies five movements that turn a religious boundary into a claim on land and a rule about who belongs: American Christian nationalism, Zionism, Islamism, Hindutva, and Buddhist nationalism in Sri Lanka and Myanmar. It is the most charged material in this school, and it is here because leaving it out would mean leaving out the organizing force of the present century.

The claim is not that religion causes this. Most believers in all five traditions want nothing to do with any of it, and one of these movements was founded by an atheist. The claim is narrower and harder: each of these movements takes a modern political defeat and converts it into a sacred obligation. A people is beaten, colonized, hunted, or humiliated by forces it did not choose and cannot match. What follows is a politics that names the wound, promises the land, and marks somebody as the foreigner whose presence explains the wound. Religion here is not the belief. It is the border.

This is why Buddhism is in this theme, and why it may be the most important case in it. Buddhism is the tradition most Western readers file as constitutionally incapable of this, the one with no crusade in it. If the mechanism were doctrinal, Sri Lanka and Myanmar could not happen. They happened. No one can blame the sutras for Aluthgama or for Rakhine State, which is exactly why this case is the one that tests whether the theme’s claim is true or merely a way of disliking four movements someone already disliked.

Five answers, formed in parallel

These movements are roughly contemporaries. They took shape within about fifty years of each other, each out of its own defeat, and the useful way to read them is side by side rather than in a line.

Zionism organized out of European antisemitism: the Russian pogroms of 1881, Pinsker’s Auto-Emancipation in 1882, the Dreyfus affair in 1894, Herzl’s Der Judenstaat in 1896, the First Zionist Congress in 1897. Its condition was Europe’s refusal to let Jews live as Europeans.

Islamism begins from imperial defeat. Al-Afghani was answering European domination by the 1880s: his reply to Renan is 1883, and al-Urwa al-Wuthqa, edited from Paris against British power, is 1884. The Muslim Brotherhood was founded in March 1928, in Ismailia, a town built around the Suez Canal Company, by six canal workers, four years after the caliphate was abolished. The occupation was in the street outside.

Hindutva arrives in the same window. Savarkar coined the word in 1923; the RSS followed in 1925. Its condition was British rule, and beneath that an older fear of Muslim political power.

Buddhist nationalism is the case that should end any suspicion that this list was drawn up to suit someone’s politics. Anagarika Dharmapala lived from 1864 to 1933, which makes him almost exactly Herzl’s contemporary. He founded the Maha Bodhi Society in 1891, and in 1893 he carried Buddhism to the World’s Parliament of Religions in Chicago as a civilizational claim. His condition was British rule, missionary schools, and a Buddhism that colonial administration had demoted in its own country. He was already naming Muslims as the reason for Buddhism’s decline in India in the 1890s, a generation before Savarkar coined Hindutva. In Burma the same clock runs: the British abolished the monarchy in 1885 and with it the sangha’s patron, and the monks became the country’s first nationalists.

American Christian nationalism is the one whose dating needs care, because two things run at different speeds. As a mass electoral movement it is recent, a creature of the 1970s, and the theoretical lens takes up what it actually mobilized over. But American Christian Zionist theology is much older: William Blackstone petitioned President Harrison for a Jewish homeland in Palestine in 1891, five years before Herzl published. So on one clock it is the youngest of the five, and on another it was there before political Zionism was. Note the year Blackstone chose: 1891, the same year Dharmapala founded the Maha Bodhi Society and Ahad Ha’am went to Palestine and came back with a warning. Three of these formations are moving in a single year, on three continents, and none of them knows about the others.

What connects them is not a bloodline. They are five answers to the same condition, formed in the wreckage of empire and the arrival of the nation-state as the only recognized form of political life. And they read each other constantly, sideways. Savarkar welcomed the “Zionist dream” in his 1923 founding text, reasoning that a Jewish state would check Muslim power. Golwalkar admired Germany in 1939. American dispensationalists needed Israel for an end-times sequence in which Jews convert or die, and Israeli ministries cultivated those dispensationalists anyway. Modi and Netanyahu found each other. Dharmapala went to Chicago and came home with a Buddhism rebuilt on Protestant lines, which is why Gananath Obeyesekere named it Protestant Buddhism: the missionaries were beaten using their own equipment. The borrowing is real, continuous, and mutual, and it runs between peers rather than from parent to child.

The asymmetry that must not be flattened

Four of these are majoritarian movements: a dominant group defines the nation against a minority living inside it, and the minority has nowhere else to be. Zionism is not that, in origin. It was built by a hunted minority trying to escape exactly that arrangement, at a moment when Europe was proving that emancipation had failed and that the alternatives on offer were assimilation, pogrom, or exit. It became a majoritarian formation only by relocating, and by dispossessing the people already living where it went.

Both halves of that sentence are load-bearing. Drop the first and the theme erases Christian antisemitism, which is the condition that produced the Jewish question in the first place, and it starts sounding like the thing it is studying. Drop the second and the theme is not honest about what happened in 1948 to the people who were there.

So the comparison here is at the level of mechanism, and never at the level of moral equivalence. These movements are not the same size, do not hold the same power, and did not arrive by the same road. A room that leaves thinking they are interchangeable has learned the theme wrong.

Antisemitism, taken seriously, in both directions

This theme insists on two things at once, and a facilitator should say both out loud in the first session.

Antisemitism is real, lethal, and structurally distinct. It is not simply a prejudice against a minority; it is a conspiracy theory about hidden power, which is what makes it usable by movements that want to explain capitalism without touching capital. It runs from the deicide charge and the blood libel through Luther, through the Protocols, into “cultural Marxism,” George Soros, and the Great Replacement, and out the other side at Charlottesville and Pittsburgh. Any left that cannot see this is a danger, and there is material here that shows why.

And the charge of antisemitism is also used in bad faith to make criticism of a state unsayable. Both things are true, and the argument about where the line falls is live and unresolved among Jewish scholars themselves. This theme therefore carries the IHRA working definition and its two serious scholarly alternatives, the Jerusalem Declaration and the Nexus Document, and does not tell the room which is right.

The Jewish anti-Zionist and non-Zionist material here, the Bund, Dubnow, Ahad Ha’am, Butler, is not decoration. It is what makes this a school joining an argument that Jews have been having with each other for a hundred and thirty years, rather than a school importing a verdict about Jews. If that material gets cut for time, cut the theme instead.

How to use this theme

This folder organizes resources by lens. See the Pedagogy document for what the lenses do and why they are structured this way.

  • Experiential: What is your experience with this? What does the room already know?
  • Historical: How did this come to be?
  • Theoretical: How do we understand and analyze it?
  • Practical: What is happening on the ground and what are people doing about it?
  • Liberatory: What would it mean to overcome or transform this?

Anchor questions

  • What were you raised to believe about God, and about who was outside it? Who taught you, and what were they afraid of?
  • All five of these movements say they are defending something. What, and from whom, and is the threat real?
  • Savarkar was an atheist. What does that tell you about what Hindutva is for?
  • Buddhism is the religion the West calls peaceful. Sri Lanka’s constitution gives it the foremost place, and Myanmar’s monks blessed a genocide. What happens to the word “peaceful” now?
  • Burmese monks led the resistance to the British and later led the incitement against Muslims. Same institution, same method, different target. What changed?
  • A people is beaten by an empire it cannot fight. Why does the answer so often arrive in religious form?
  • American evangelicals are Israel’s most reliable political backers and their theology ends with Jews converting or dying. What kind of support is that?
  • Where is the line between criticizing a state and hating a people, and who gets to draw it?
  • What would it take, in each case, for the boundary to stop being the point?

Single-session entry point (2 hours). Do not start with the Middle East. Start experiential: what were people raised to believe, and who was outside it. Then take one document, Savarkar’s 1923 welcome of the Zionist dream, and ask what an atheist is doing endorsing a Jewish state to check Muslims. The theme opens itself. See the single-session template.

Nine-week study circle. Week 1 experiential and the ground rules. Week 2 the mechanism, and the five formations read side by side. Week 3 Christian antisemitism and the making of the Jewish question. Week 4 Zionism and its Jewish critics, Bund and Ahad Ha’am and Dubnow, before any argument about the present. Week 5 the Nakba and the Palestinians, in their own voices. Week 6 Islamism from al-Afghani to Qutb to Hamas, with 1967 as the hinge. Week 7 Hindutva and caste, the case where the boundary runs inside the majority too. Week 8 Buddhist nationalism, the case that decides whether this theme is describing a mechanism or just disliking four movements. Week 9 the liberatory lens: the traditions inside each faith that refuse this. See the six-week template and extend it.

Do not run this as a weekend intensive. It is too much, too fast, on material that will be personal to someone in the room.

A note before you run this

Somebody in the room is implicated, and somebody in the room is a target. That is not a hypothetical. If you run this theme in most of North America or Europe you will have Jewish participants, Muslim participants, or both, and people whose families are in Gaza or the West Bank or Kashmir or Gujarat right now. This is not a seminar topic for them.

Two things to think about:

Set the terms before the first document, not after the first argument. The distinction between a state, a people, a government, and a religion is the whole ballgame, and a room that has not agreed to hold those apart will not survive week five.

Do not ask anyone to represent their people. The Jewish participant is not there to answer for Israel. The Muslim participant is not there to answer for Hamas. Watch for the room turning to them, and stop it.

Status

First pass, and it may be a while before there is a second. It is the school’s hardest theme, and every claim in it was checked against the record before it was written down.

Known gaps, named. Rashid Rida is missing, and he is the bridge from Abduh to al-Banna; no verified free English text could be found. There is no legitimate free English Milestones or al-Banna: every route is an unlicensed upload or a jihadist devotional host, including one hosted on cia.gov because it was seized from bin Laden’s compound, and this school will not link any of them. Qutb is taught through Calvert and Kepel instead, and the refusal is part of the lesson. Golwalkar’s primary text is likewise not linked, since every host is a Sangh site. And the free tier here skews toward think tanks with lines, while the careful scholarship is mostly paywalled, which is its own comment.

Contributions welcome, and argued corrections more than anything.