Religious Ethnocentrism: Grail Movement's Vision of the Central Role of German Nation in Religious History of Humankind
Abstract
"It is the vocation of the German Psyche to be the future leader and guider in spiritual as well as in mundane affairs."2 - Knowing that this sentence was pronounced and written by a German in 1928, the reader probably understands the statement as a manifestation of contemporary German nationalism. Yet, this is not the case.
Based on research of the Grail movement, this article proves that the religious doctrine, which contains this sentence and other similar utterances, can not be easily classified as "religious nationalism". The article describes and appraises the ethnocentric parts of doctrine of the Grail movement, a new religion, which originated in 1920s in Germany and whose headquarters was moved to Austria in the very year of 1928.
Using the example of this movement, the author suggests that the phenomenon of non-nationalistic ethnocentrism based on religious convictions is to be classified as "religious ethnocentrism" and differentiated from "religious nationalism".