This panel examines how religious symbols, historical narratives, and collective memory are mobilized in the construction of nationalist projects across diverse contexts. Bringing together case studies that consider Poland, Korea, and the United States, the panelists explore how nations sacralize their pasts—through martyrdom, racial destiny, and providential mission—to legitimize present claims to power and identity. Together, these papers ask how religious imagination underwrites nationalism not only through theology but through the selective crafting of memory, raising urgent questions about whose pasts are remembered, how they are sacralized, and what futures such memories make possible.
This paper demonstrates how the historical paintings in the Capitol Rotunda contributed to the formation of an American national identity by constructing memories of a heroic past, animated by a religious imagination. It considers these paintings in light of Anthony D. Smith’s work on nationalism and reads them alongside primary source materials relating to their production and reception. Despite the sometimes differing, even competing, political and theological visions of these paintings, they cohere in the (re)production of a national creation myth in order to make visible an imagined providential destiny for the American project. This usable past continues to fund nationalist futures that understand domination as America’s divine mission and sacralize regenerative violence, which prompts the question of whether other futures are possible. And if not, what forms of forgetting must be cultivated for the sake of a livable future?
This paper explores how Korean immigrant leaders in the United States from the 1930s to 1940s reformulated the story of their country’s past toward advancing a vision of a future sovereign Korea. Drawing on petitions and letters written by Korean immigrant organizations to American government agencies as well as news articles, it situates these efforts within a moment when Korean immigrant leaders began to see the growing possibilities of forming kinship with the United States in opposition to the Japanese empire. By doing so, this paper argues that Korean immigrant leaders glorified their country’s history to highlight their racial superiority—or their racial “fit”—and thus position Korea less as a colonized country than as an equal player among other national powers on the global stage.
Since Jan Gross called attention to Poles’ complicity in the murder of Jews during the Second World War with the publication of Neighbors in 2000, a populist “backlash” (Forecki 2018) to critical historiography on the Holocaust in Poland has emerged among Polish ethnonationalists seeking to defend the “good name” of Poland. In this paper, I critically analyze one salient locus of this ethnonationalist backlash: The Chapel of Remembrance (Kaplica Pamięci) in Toruń, which commemorates Poles murdered for helping Jews during the Holocaust. Building on recent sociological engagements with the Chapel of Remembrance, I offer a theological analysis and critique of the chapel’s portrayal of the “dead rescuers” (Łysak 2023) it commemorates as martyrs. Ultimately, I argue that the Chapel of Remembrance deploys the symbolic grammar of martyrdom for nationalist ends and, in doing so, sacralizes the Polish nation in a manner fundamentally at odds with a Christian theology of martyrdom.