Confession, Loyalty, and National Indifference: Perspectives from Imperial and Postimperial Borderlands

Berezhnaya, Liliya; Paert, Irina; Gibson, Catherine

Abstract

This is the introduction to the thematic forum "Confession, Loyalty, and National Indifference," which includes five articles that address the problem of emerging collective identity through the entanglement of complementing and conflicting forms of groupness: religious, political, and ethnic. The introductory essay conceptually frames these studies in terms of national indifference and confessional ambiguity, underscoring the role of religious collective identities in forging other forms of groupness–ethnocultural and political.