This book discusses the historical record of the idea that language is associated with national identity, demonstrating that different applications of this idea have consistently produced certain types of results. Nationalist movements aimed at 'unification', based upon languages which vary greatly at the spoken level, e.g. German, Italian, Pan-Turkish and Arabic, have been associated with aggression, fascism and genocide, while those based upon relatively homogeneous spoken languages, e.g. Czech, Norwegian and Ukrainian, have resulted in national liberation and international stability. It is also shown that religion can be more important to national identity than language, but only for religious groups which were understood in premodern times to be national rather than universal or doctrinal, e.g. Jews, Armenians, Maronites, Serbs, Dutch and English; this is demonstrated with discussions of the Holocaust, the Armenian Genocide, the civil war in Lebanon and the breakup of Yugoslavia, the United Netherlands and the United Kingdom.

The monograph examines the theoretical and methodological basis of the study on the impact of the religious heritage of our ancestors on the understanding of national identity. The need to study the problems of pre-Islamic religions, ceremonies, holidays, the penetration of Islam in the life of our people and its impact on the understanding of national identity, the impact of religious heritage on national identity in Central Asia have been studied from a religious and philosophical point of view.

Sojourn is a Leitwort in the ancestral narratives of Genesis, repeatedly accentuated as an important descriptor of the patriarchs’ identity and experience. This study shows that despite its connotations of alienation, sojourn language in Genesis contributes to a strong communal identity for biblical Israel. An innovative application of Anthony D. Smith’s theory of ethnic myth utilizes the categories of ethnoscape, election, and communal ethics as analytical tools in the investigation of the Genesis sojourn texts. Close exegetical treatment reveals sojourn to strengthen Israel’s ethnic identity in ways that are varied and at times paradoxical. Its very complexity, however, makes it particularly useful as a resource for group identity at times when straightforward categories of territorial and social affiliation may fail.

The language of heritage permeates Scripture, encouraging Christians to approach church history like a family history. But the notion of ancestry also constrains the world’s Catholics and Protestants to trace their confessional descent from Europe, rendering them perpetual latecomers in the historical chain. "Ancestral Feeling" systematically diagnoses the postcolonial problems generated by an ancestral outlook. But, applying critical theories in cultural studies to the study of church history, the book experiments with ways that the Western Christian inheritance can awaken the memory of one’s own ancestors. Writing a personal reflection on her family’s history in British-ruled Hong Kong, Renie Chow Choy engages autobiographically with England’s ecclesiastical art, architecture, music, and literature, in order to affirm her attachment to a heritage normally associated with English national identity. For global and immigrant Christians brought into a relationship with English Christianity by colonialism but are bypassed by its history, this book makes a bold declaration: England’s Christian heritage is also our story.

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