Digital Altars of the Nation: Christian Nationalism, Trumpist Populism and the Online Re-Making of American National Identity
Year: 2026
Type: preprint
Abstract: This article investigates how Christian nationalism and Trumpist populism converge in digital spaces to remake contemporary American national identity. Building on recent scholarship that conceptualizes Christian nationalism as a cultural framework fusing a particular vision of Christianity with American civic life, and on work on digital nationalism and digital religion, the study examines how social media platforms become “ digital altars of the nation ,” where rituals of belonging, sacrifice, and exclusion are enacted in real time. Methodologically, the article adopts a mixed-methods, discourse-focused design. It combines (1) a secondary quantitative synthesis of existing content-analytic and semantic network studies of the #MAGA and related hashtag ecologies with (2) an illustrative critical discourse analysis of publicly archived posts, tweets, and memes that explicitly intertwine Trump, “Make America Great Again,” and Christian nationalist narratives. The analysis identifies three dominant discourse formations: sacralized sovereignty , persecuted church-nation , and militant guardianship . These formations are embedded in platform logics that privilege affective, polarized, and visually dense content, enabling Christian nationalist imaginaries to circulate as ambient, banal nationalism in everyday feeds while also incubating more extreme, insurgent imaginaries.
Source: Research Square
Authors: Bahram Kazemian, Shafigeh Mohammadian
Institutions: Islamic Azad University of Tabriz, Urmia University
Language: English
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W7213542243