State privacy rulings can constitute religious judgments about a faith’s essence.

Evidence

As a consequence of Greece having joined the European Union, the Greek state was required by the European charter of human rights to remove any information on religious affiliation, family status, nationality, and thumb print in the identity cards issued to citizens. Popular opposition apparently saw this as a threat to collective religious identity. “We’ve got to fight for our right to be Christian Orthodox Greeks,” one demonstrator put it. … The church, using the language of human rights to defend its authority, has charged that the new arrangement curtails the right of citizens to express their religious af- filiation publicly if they so desire. The government, in its turn, has responded by issuing a judgment about religious belief: “The introduction of new identity cards poses no threat to the Greek Orthodox faith.” This is a religious judgment not in the sense of drawing on Orthodox theology (because it clearly doesn’t do that) but in claiming to identify the essence of that faith. — Talal Asad, Formations of the Secular, 675 (#corroborates, via linked claim)

What stands at the center of our inquiry is the impact of the intertwining, particularly when religious claims and nationalism are fused to the extent that religious claims bestow sacredness on the state’s working of power. Examples include establishing the state’s identity; determining regime type, including governmentality and the questions of democracy and equality; codifying laws accordingly; defining the politics of state territoriality; endorsing particular perceptions of the “self” and the “other”; engaging in strategic and policy planning; and sanctioning state violence in the service of all of the above. — Nadim N. Rouhana and Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian, When Politics Are Sacralized, 67 (#complicates, via linked claim)

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: A state’s own legal-institutional move can be a religious judgment on a faith’s essence — Talal Asad, Formations of the Secular:…, 675; Secularism subsumes the religious under private reason by an act of categorization; Sacralizing religion extends state power across identity, law, and violence — Nadim N. Rouhana and Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian, When Politics Are Sacralized:…, 67

Broader Connections

• A state’s own legal-institutional move can be a religious judgment on a faith’s essence #corroborates (0.97) — Talal Asad, Formations of the Secular, 675
• Sacralizing religion extends state power across identity, law, and violence #complicates (0.74) — Nadim N. Rouhana and Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian, When Politics Are Sacralized, 67