Nationalism, populism, religion, and the quest to reframe fundamental rights

The purpose of this article is to examine systematically how religious nationalism and religious populism mount a formidable challenge against liberal constitutionalism and one of its principal pillars, institutional secularism. As a consequence of the challenge in question, religious nationalism and religious populism seek to upend institutional secularism and to replace it where it suits their convenience by ideological secularism. Finally, the article will trace how religious nationalism and religious populism recast fundamental rights to conform with their anti-pluralist aims. This article will be divided into three parts. Part One will concentrate on how nationalism and populism can and have appropriated religion to erect an illiberal and anti-pluralist constitutional architecture and discourse. Part Two will examine how religious nationalism and religious populism undermines institutional secularism and how it seeks to replace it with, and make use of, ideological secularism to further its aims. And, Part Three will undertake a review of a sect number of salient cases and initiatives from many jurisdictions illustrating how human rights and fundamental constitutional rights may be reinterpreted to fall in line with the essential dictates of religious nationalism or those of religious populism.