Religious Ethnocentrism: The Grail Movement’s Vision of the Central Role of the German Nation in the Religious History of Humankind

DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.7160/KS.2019.130201
Author: Zdeněk Vojtíšek
Address: Husitská teologická fakulta UK, Pacovská 4, 140 00 Praha 4
E-mail: zdenek.vojtisek@htf.cuni.cz
ORCID iD: orcid.org/0000-0001-9820-3495
Language: Czech
Issue: 2/2019
Page Range: 3-29
No. of Pages: 27
Keywords: Ethnocentricism; Germany; Grail movement; millennialism; nation; nationalism; new religious movements; religious ethnocentricism; religious nationalism.
Summary/Abstract: “It is the vocation of the German Psyche to be the future leader and guider in spiritual as well as in mundane affairs”. Knowing that this sentence was pronounced and written by a German in 1928, the reader is likely to understand the statement as a manifestation of contemporary German nationalism. However, this is not the case. Based on research of the Grail movement, this article shows that the religious doctrine contained in this sentence and other similar utterances cannot easily be classified as “religious nationalism”. The article describes and appraises the ethnocentric element of the doctrine of the Grail movement, a new religion that originated in the 1920s in Germany and whose headquarters moved to Austria in 1928. Using this movement as an example, the author proposes that the phenomenon of non-nationalistic ethnocentrism based on religious convictions should be classified as “religious ethnocentrism” and thus differentiated from “religious nationalism”.