WHA Annual Meeting: Korea 2026

With dominant global actors assertively holding forth neo-imperial ambitions, often draped in multilayered religious, indeed messianic symbology (take a recent Israeli billboard depicting Donald Trump as a returned Cyrus the Great), it is revealing to teach critical world histories of religion and empire. Across time and geographic space, transformational dynamics between religion and empire are signal for thinking deeply about these world-making forces, including self-reflection on our own normative perceptions surrounding matters like decolonization, and resurging empire. A foundation is built by considering how empire, as a seminal, enduring form of human governance, is inseparable from how we come to imagine the phenomenon and divine referents of religion–from ancient Near Eastern re-envisioning of transcendence and immanence, to the modern colonial mind’s pivotal role in constructing our notion of religion, in the first instance. Following a transit through such chronological turning points as the Axial Age (while of course asking why we might judge it to be so), and Ibn Khaldun’s universalist yet historically bound reading of pre-Islamic and Islamic empires’ rise and fall, we arrive at moments helping to frame our own world. Emblematic are modern Euro-American empires’ seeking to definitionally divide and rule religious communities, while variously superimposing their own civilizational proselytizing, and yet undergoing syncretic encounters with colonized religious practitioners’ own agency and resistance. Today, diverse worldwide forms of imperial messianism, emanating from across Eurasia together with the United States’ claimed anointing, underscore how the religion-empire nexus is fundamental to a world both eschewing and remaking globalism.