Religious Nationalism, Mythic Maps, and the Territorial Integrity of Mother Earth

Abstract

This article argues that what we call “religious nationalism” is best understood as a mythic, juridical, and cartographic project that naturalizes domination. Drawing on Indigenous critiques of borders—summarized in the refrain “we didn’t cross the border, the border crossed us”—and on concepts such as the One Dish One Spoon wampum, the Doctrine of Christian Discovery, and Aileen Moreton-Robinson’s “white possessive,” we show how eurochristian nation‑states transform theology into law, territory into property, and relatives into resources. Maps, borders, and legal categories such as “terra nullius,” “plenary power,” and “domestic dependent nations” function as sacred texts of the modern nation‑state, encoding hierarchies of race, religion, and civilization while erasing Indigenous sovereignty and relational cosmologies. Engaging Patricia Seed, Steven T. Newcomb, Atalia Omer, and others, we frame religion, nationalism, and religious nationalism as second‑order analytic categories that expose the ritualized fusion of faith, law, and political identity. The article juxtaposes eurochristian ceremonies of possession with Indigenous understandings of Mother Earth’s territorial integrity, where sovereignty is rooted not in state borders but in webs of kinship with land, waters, and more‑than‑human relatives. By tracing how religious nationalism operates through narrative, ritual, and institutional power—from colonial papal bulls to contemporary Christian nationalism and Project 2025—it is argued that dismantling religious nationalism requires decolonizing the myths, metaphors, and legal grammars that sustain it, and recovering relational frameworks in which language, land, and sovereignty are inseparable.