Sexual and religious citizenship
The construction of the nation state assumes a series of borders and boundaries. The nation state is an ideological construct (Yuval-Davis, 1997), a means through which a given territory projects a certain image of itself, reflected through values that are conveyed, which has much impact on how bodies within that nation state are regulated. Although citizenship predates the notion of the nation state, the two have been intimately intertwined (Tonkiss and Bloom, 2015) and citizenship has come to denote the formalisation of one’s relationship to the nation state. However, the extent to which a nation state legitimates and recognises the bodies within its territories will vary. Some bodies will be subject to full exclusion - their bodies may be present within the nation state but their rights are minimal - to those who experience exclusion of some degree. Those with the most secure rights to citizenship have been white property-owning males. Meanwhile, children are deemed potential citizenship but are “not yet” considered full citizens, meaning that much power is given to the adults surrounding them. Women have historically been excluded from the key components of citizenship, even though they are crucial to the reproduction of the nation state (Richardson, 2018; Yuval-Davis, 1997). Queer people are only recently being awarded citizenship rights in Western contexts but these rights are patchy; the right to marry or raise children is still not given in many supposedly liberal and progressive locations. Indigenous communities have been routinely excluded citizenship by the nation states forged on their lands (Bloom, 2017). Meanwhile, asylum seekers continue to be precariously positioned to citizenship;
citizenship is often denied (Akin, 2017; Lewis, 2014). Citizenship itself is premised on exclusion - not everyone will be able to claim their status as a citizen within the borders that are imposed (Richardson, 2018).
How religion is implicated in citizenship inclusions and exclusions is complex and depends in part on the way that religious tradition itself is perceived. Religious traditions deemed to be threatening in some way will be subject to the greatest censure, whereas those embedded in established processes of history, tradition, and power will be given greater status (Turner, 2011). State mechanisms will be more distrustful of some groups, and will subject them to greater scrutiny. In many Western contexts, Christianity has been understood as the hallmark of citizenship, though this too has varied, such as how Catholics were denied rights to practise their faith in Protestant-dominant contexts. Some countries, such as England, have an established religious tradition (the Church of England), which has a complex interwoven relationship with state processes and mechanisms, having a role in parliamentary processes and educational provision. Given the global reach of British colonial endeavours historically, the Anglican Church generated influence across the world (McKinnon and Brittain, forthcoming). Certain religious traditions will be privileged over others. In other jurisdictions, there is an attempt to keep state and religious affairs separate, epitomised, for example, in France, where adherence to laïcité defines what it means to be a fully-fledged French citizen (see Davie, 2007).
In societies where religion constituted the state and the state constituted religion, religious organisations had much regulatory power - the classic example was the role that the Roman Catholic Church had in the medieval period, where even to be recognised as a citizen was constituted through church authorities. It may seem hard to locate examples of totalising institutions in a pluralistic, globalised contemporary world, but there are numerous examples where religions have a seemingly overarching hold over the norms of a society or a segment of a society, with this having an impact for how sexual lives are lived and regulated. In the Bible Belt in the United States, conservative Christian culture pervades every element of life, from shopping (godly messages on till receipts) to car stickers, to banners proclaiming Christian messages. Homosexual practices are vilified almost universally, with some churches and pastors also condemning a homosexual identity or even homosexual thoughts (Barton, 2012). Everyone is expected to be a Christian, cultivated through tight-knit communities where one’s social life revolves around the church. Drawing on Foucault, Barton calls this a panoptic prison; one monitors their behaviour because at any moment you could be being watched. Barton examines the impact this pervasive and encompassing culture has on her queer participants:
If these institutions - one’s family, school, church, peers, workplace and neighbours - are all adamantly in alignment that homosexuality is an abomination to God, a rejected gay youth may literally have nowhere to turn.
(2012, p. 83)
The negative consequences include depression and anxiety, family ostracism, and attempted suicides. When religion operates as a totalising system, as a sacred canopy, this accords it great power to direct the sexual lives of individuals. Those at the margins of citizenship, who are seen to transgress the normatives of citizenship, are the ones most impacted by such regulatory regimes. The religious tradition has become a total institution, in Goffman’s terms. We will now turn to various examples where the intersecting dynamics of state-religious control have impacted on various marginalised groups, including the regulation of gender, and queer sexualities, also impacting claims for asylum.
