UCL School of Slavonic and East European Studies, University College London, 7th Annual International Postgraduate Conference

Inclusion Exclusion

16-18th February 2006

Friday 17 February 4:30 – 6:00: Panel G2: Dividing Religion

Jacob Saunders (University of California, San Diego): ‘Do Polish popes go to Heaven?: the role of national exclusion in the formation of religious identity among Polish Baptists’

This paper proposes that the impact of the death of Pope John Paul II and the subsequent week of "national mourning" in Poland provides an opportunity to examine the way that minority religious identity is constructed and transformed through the experience of national exclusion. In this respect, I propose to view the "inclusive" narratives of the "national mourning" and the genesis of "Generation JPII" as they were read and received by Polish Baptists during this same period. In this way, narratives of "inclusion" for the majority of Polish society were transformed into narratives of "exclusion" by Polish Baptists. But this experience of "exclusion" can be seen not merely as one of alienation and marginality, but rather it reveals an attempt of a religious minority group to (re)define the terms of its "exclusion." And thus this paper argues that Polish Baptists transformed an experience of national exclusion into an ongoing process of religious subjectification, of inclusion into a community of believers.

Baptists rarely make any claims of identification with the nation or national history, nor do they attempt to write Protestantism into the grand narrative of Polish history. There is the tendency to disallow the association of the Polish nation with religion in any specific form or confession. To be more concrete, Polish Baptists take a messianic approach to the Polish nation. The Polish nation is viewed as dead, depraved, godless, blind and in fervent need of revival and spiritual regeneration. The (godless, non-religious) nation is seen as a site of transformation. Transformation is the language of the nation for Baptists because the nation is altogether "other," "foreign," "not ours." They can claim the nation as theirs through the language of transformation because in these narratives the nation is a subject they have an attachment to, and a responsibility for, but beyond which they do not identify themselves with. The language of complete transformation necessarily precludes the positive identification of the Baptist believer with the nation at the present time, and rather locates the consummation of believer and nation in the distant, transformed, and idealized future. The Polish nation is the site of subjectification that cannot operate on Baptists until they remake it according to their notions of what the nation is and should be. Or, to put it another way, it is the site of subjectification for prophets and messiahs. Such subjectification depends on creating the terms, and on transforming the experience, of "national exclusion." While the experience of the national mourning by Baptists was often full of emotions—anger, shock, and disillusionment—I suggest in this paper that the way this experience was domesticated by the community of believers transformed it into a familiar pattern of generating communal inclusion and identity through a shared experience of "national exclusion." In sum this paper deals with issues of minority relations, of narratives of national "inclusion" and "exclusion" in contemporary Poland, and especially with the social practices that make use of such narratives.

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