Annoucing: JCREOR 7.1 on the Sources of Religious Nationalism

Special issues do not begin with a call for papers; they begin with a conversation in a seminar room that nobody wants to end. The Journal of the Council for Research on Religion (JCREOR) has just published Vol. 7 No. 1 (Spring 2026), Sources of Religious Nationalism, and I want to use this post to do three things: 1) trace the issue back to the panel and hallway conversations at Notre Dame where it took shape; 2) walk through the six essays and what each contributes to the question of what makes religious nationalism religious and national; and 3) point readers toward the three book reviews, which together survey some of the best recent work on Christian nationalism. The whole issue is open access, so every link below opens to a PDF.

Signs of the Times, South Bend, March 2025 #

In March 2025 the Institute for Social Concerns at the University of Notre Dame hosted its Catholic Social Tradition conference under the title Signs of the Times: Interdisciplinary Responses to Religious Nationalism (March 20–22, 2025). The keynotes were what encouraged me to apply and attend (Anthea Butler, Kristin Kobes Du Mez, Abdullahi A. An-Na'im, Hugh R. Page Jr.). At the conference, I heard so many wonderful papers that I decided to be brave and ask folks if they wanted to join me in doing a speical issue in a journal so our papers didn't just stay at the confernece. Mohammad Meerzaei (Middle Tennessee State University), Andrew R. Polk (Middle Tennessee State University), and I presented together on a panel called "Beginnings and Evolutions: Case Studies on the Lives of Religious Nationalism in Interactions Between 'Abrahamic' Religions." Meerzaei read on Henry Corbin and the making of "Iranian Islam"; Polk read on the mid-century presidential origins of American Christian nationalism; I read on the Doctrine of Christian Discovery as the legal codification of Christian hegemony.

Three papers from three fields (Islamic studies, American religious history, religion and law) with a shared question, namely, how a religious tradition gets conscripted into the work of nation-making. The conversation that followed convinced us that the question deserved a volume rather than a panel. Two more contributors to the issue were in the building that weekend. Patricia Tillman presented "Re-presentations of the Spanish Civil War as a Microcosm for Religious Nationalism's Construction of an Idealized Past," and Roger Baumann sat on the panel "Interrogating the Intersections of Christian Zionism and White Christian Nationalism from a Global Perspective." Brian Kaylor, co-author of Baptizing America (reviewed in the issue), presented on addressing Christian nationalism in mainline churches in the same session block as Tillman. In short, most of the issue was already in one building before anyone wrote an editorial note.

My deepest thanks and gratitude to Gerbern S. Oegema, Amanda Rosini, Elyse MacLeod, and Aaron Ricker at McGill for taking the proposal on, and to the anonymous reviewers who sharpened every essay.

What makes religious nationalism religious and national? #

The note on which the cord of this special issue is built is:

What makes religious nationalism religious and nationalism? For us, it is the central preoccupation with the mythic structures and frameworks of society. These myth-histories become totalizing and vital. The myths often matter more than the facts or the history. It is myths that help to weave a nation together and drape the coffin in the flag. The myths must be valorized and treated as sacred, along with the icons associated with them. To desecrate the myth and/or the icons is to desecrate the nation.

The preface takes borders as its worked example (the epigraphs come from Ilyse Morgenstein Fuerst and Megan Goodwin and from Los Tigres del Norte), and it moves from the One Dish One Spoon wampum to the Haskell Free Library and Opera House, a building the U.S.-Canadian border runs straight through. The point is iconological as much as political. Borders, flags, maps, and constellations are icons of the nation, and the nation defends them with the fervor one reserves for the sacred. Following Steven T. Newcomb (Shawnee/Lenape), the preface reads religious nationalism as one more expression of the framework of enslavement, exploitation, and extraction that Indigenous nations of Turtle Island and Abya Yala continue to organize against.

The six essays #

Muhammad Afdillah (UIN Sunan Ampel Surabaya), "Scriptural Nationalism in Print: Genre Partition and the Making of the Other in the Persatuan Islam's Risalah (2005–2025)." Afdillah opens the issue in Indonesia, and he opens it with a new term. Reading twenty years of the Persis magazine Risalah alongside the fatwas of its Dewan Hisbah, he proposes "scriptural nationalism," which he defines as "a form of national imagination in which scriptural reasoning provides the ethical grammar of citizenship." The methodological payoff is his notion of genre partition: the juristic council "consolidates doctrinal authority through juristic reasoning, while Risalah translates theological concepts into accessible discussions of national life." Nations, on this account, are constituted "through recurring acts of scriptural interpretation." I find the claim useful well beyond Indonesia; it describes a good deal of American Bible-and-flag print culture too.

Mohammad Meerzaei (Middle Tennessee State University), "Alternative Orientalism: Henry Corbin's 'Iranian Islam' as European Nostalgia." Meerzaei's essay is the one I heard first at Notre Dame, and it has only gotten sharper. Corbin (1903–1978) built "Iranian Islam" as a counternarrative to classical Orientalism, and Iranian nationalists celebrated the result. Meerzaei argues that the counternarrative "ultimately constitutes another Eurocentric account of the Orient. Instead of disparaging the 'Orient' to elevate the West, Corbin recast the Orient as the repository of an alternative future – a projection of the West's own lost past to which it might return." Nostalgia, in other words, is a form of possession.

Roger Baumann (Hope College), "'Remember What Amalek Did to You': The Political Power of Religious Narratives." Baumann draws on participant observation from a 2016 African American denominational delegation to Israel to trace how the biblical Amalek narrative travels on Christian Zionist tours. His central historical claim matters for anyone following the rhetoric since October 7, 2023: the deployment of "Biblical narratives of elimination and annihilation" to undergird state violence "is not an innovation post-October 7, but rather a longstanding feature of efforts to build global solidarities linking American Christians and the State of Israel." The essay is also a careful study of race, since the tours aim at bringing Black churches into a political project built largely by white evangelicals.

Patricia Tillman (University of Maryland Global Campus), "Christendom College, the Spanish Civil War, and Constructing the Past in Religious Conservatism." Tillman follows a group of American Catholics from the Christian Commonwealth Institute, a summer program held in Franco-era Spain, to the founding of Christendom College in 1977. The founders "viewed themselves as akin to the Medieval warriors of the Reconquista in Spain, or the military leaders of Franco's coup." Her opening observation deserves wide circulation: religious nationalists want "a sense of style and aesthetic from the past," and that style, "or a 'vibe' as internet culture would say, is sometimes more important than articulated intellectual connections with the past." (Tillman discloses that she is a Christendom alumna, which makes the essay a rare inside account.) Readers of my own work on the Doctrine of Christian Discovery will recognize the Reconquista as the laboratory where the doctrine was first tested.

Andrew R. Polk (Middle Tennessee State University), "We Still Don't Know What It Is: The Historical Origins of Christian Nationalism in America and its Intentional Ambiguities." Polk takes on the definitional mess directly. Scholars and journalists cannot agree on what Christian nationalism is, and Polk argues that the fog is a design feature: "the nebulous nature of Christian nationalism does not come from a lack of statistical data or the weaknesses of scholars' analytical tools, but is rather an intentional feature of the ideology built in by its proponents in the mid-twentieth century." The Roosevelt, Truman, and Eisenhower administrations promoted a civil religion to unite Americans behind policy, "subsumed race with religion," and "insisted that any critique of the nation only helped America's enemies." The ambiguity we now struggle to measure was the point.

Adam DJ Brett (American Indian Law ALliance, United Lutheran Seminary) and Betty Hill (Lyons) (American Indian Law Alliance), "The Establishment of Christian Hegemony through the Doctrine of Discovery." Betty and I close the issue with the long genealogy. We trace the Doctrine of Christian Discovery (DoCD) from the construction of Christian identity against the "proximal" and "distal" other (Jews, Muslims, pagans, and later Indigenous peoples) through the case studies of Ireland, Iberia, the Baltics, and the Canary Islands, and into the papal bulls Dum Diversas, Romanus Pontifex, and Inter Caetera. One linguistic shift carries much of the argument: the bulls move from "conversion" to "bringing them back to the faith," which reframes colonization as restoration rather than invasion. We read the 1513 Requerimiento as "both a ritual of possession and a theological performance of atonement and absolution." Working with Newcomb, Frantz Fanon, Audre Lorde, and Gil Anidjar, we argue that Christian dominion theology "is rooted in enslavement, exploitation, and extraction, and is structurally embedded in international law and modern governance." The essay began at the May 2023 Max Planck and Oslo Metropolitan workshops on Indigenous peoples and religious modes of othering, and it carries forward the work of the Doctrine of Discovery Project.

Three reviews, three recent books #

I pushed for a review section because the scholarship on Christian nationalism has grown faster than most readers can track, and because the Belmonts and Matthew Pierce each bring a vantage point the field needs, and I want to support emerging scholars who are working on their masters degrees, and the critical fresh perspective they bring.

Colene Belmont (Adams State University) reviews Pamela Cooper-White, The Psychology of Christian Nationalism: Why People Are Drawn in and How to Talk across the Divide (Fortress, 2022), pp. 138–140. Belmont reads the book as someone trained in psychology and pursuing counselling work, and her review doubles as a reading of the visual archive at uncivilreligion.org. Her gloss on the cross-and-rifle imagery is one of the best short statements of what icons do in this movement: "The cross, traditionally associated with vulnerability, suffering, and humility, is visually repurposed as a symbol of strength, entitlement, and conquest." She concludes that "psychological insight is not politically neutral."

Nethanial Belmont (University of Colorado) reviews M.W. Dougherty, Lost Tribes Found: Israelite Indians and Religious Nationalism in Early America (University of Oklahoma Press, 2021), pp. 141–143. Belmont admires the book and then presses it on two fronts: Dougherty's definition of nationhood "does not fully account for Indigenous understandings of nationhood as rooted in relationships to land and resistance to settler colonialism," and the claim that justifications for expansion shifted from religious to secular underestimates the Doctrine of Discovery, since "Johnson v. McIntosh (1823) ... is still the undisputed foundation for all United States property law."

Matthew J. Pierce (Queen's University) reviews Brian Kaylor and Beau Underwood, Baptizing America: How Mainline Protestants Helped Build Christian Nationalism (Chalice, 2022), pp. 144–145. Pierce credits the authors for dismantling the mainline myth that Christian nationalism "is something that happens elsewhere," then argues that their genealogy "does not trace the problem back far enough." A complete account "would likely trace the issue of Christian nationalism to the fifteenth-century papal bull that justified the colonization of Turtle Island in the first place." His second critique is one I share: the solutions stay inside the denominations, when "a positive, justice-seeking theological language is needed right now in the public sphere." Fix the problems, address the history, but do not withdraw.

Why the reviews belong beside the essays #

Read together, the reviews make the same argument the preface makes. Cooper-White explains why the icons work on the psyche; Dougherty and Kaylor and Underwood each get pushed, by their reviewers, back toward the Doctrine of Discovery as the lacuna in their genealogies. The issue's wager is that religious nationalism in "America" is not a twentieth-century aberration or an evangelical quirk. It is a mythic structure with a documented legal history, and the myth-history will keep taking precedence over the empirical one until we learn to read the icons.

The full issue is at creor-ejournal.library.mcgill.ca/issue/view/17. If you teach a course on religion and nationalism, Christian nationalism, or the Doctrine of Discovery, the whole thing is open access.