This panel explores how religious imaginaries—shaped by apocalypse, mediation, memory, and authority—inform contemporary political life across diverse global contexts. Bringing together digital religion, political theology, and ethnographic analysis, the papers examine how religious frameworks interpret crisis, organize collective action, and shape competing visions of sovereignty, democracy, and the future.
Across cases from U.S. Christian nationalist media to the wartime targeting of Iranian energy infrastructure, Indigenous Christian communities in Northeast India, and European debates over Christian heritage and secularism, the panel highlights how religious discourse operates through both material and mediated forms. The papers show how crisis is not only interpreted but materially produced through war, extraction, and media circulation.
Apocalyptic language emerges as a response to these conditions, while invocations of “Christian heritage” reveal how religious memory continues to structure political identity within secular frameworks. Together, the panel demonstrates how religious imaginaries shape contemporary struggles over power, legitimacy, and collective futures.
The rise of Hindu nationalism within the Indian political system has reshaped relations between the state and religious minorities, affecting even the Christian-majority state of Nagaland. Although constitutionally part of the Indian republic, political life in Nagaland remains deeply structured by Indigenous village councils whose decisions often guide communal and electoral participation. As a result, voting frequently follows collective resolutions rather than individual choice, challenging liberal democratic assumptions about autonomy, conscience, and rights-based citizenship.
Drawing on the social conflict approach of Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza, this paper analyzes how religious authority, customary governance, and party politics intersect to shape democratic representation. These overlapping structures influence who speaks and who participates, sometimes limiting individual political voice—especially for women and younger citizens. The study argues that the issue is not a simple conflict between tradition and democracy, but a deeper struggle over authority and accountability, calling for ethical renewal through inclusive and transparent public engagement.
This paper ethnographically examines dialogues of European Christian representatives in the context of a 2025 ecumenical meeting in Paris that was focused on building dialogue across religious and cultural difference. While the values of dialogue across difference might appear antithetical to Christian nationalist values, this paper analyzes how Christian leaders – despite expressing concern over the rise of religious nationalism – can still participate in its historical logics. In their evocation of world war memory, the speakers cast Christianity as central to an exceptional Europe. Ultimately, the paper suggests that secular governance – both in its institutional mode of interfacing with Christian representatives and as a rhetorical alternative to religious nationalism – does not preclude these affinities. The paper therefore concludes with a consideration of how appeals to “Christian heritage” would need to account for its history of exclusions.
When U.S.–Israeli strikes hit Iran’s Shahran oil refinery, toxic black clouds covered Tehran and turned daylight into an apocalyptic dusk. Media commentators described the scene using biblical imagery of a cosmic catastrophe. But who—or what—is the agent of this apocalypse? This paper offers a materialist rereading of Iranian political history by treating petroleum but as an active historical agent. Drawing on Reza Negarestani’s fictional demonology of oil in Cyclonopedia and Timothy Mitchell’s Carbon Democracy, it argues that petroleum has functioned as Iran’s most persistent adversary. From the Abadan oil strikes of the 1940s to the 1953 coup and contemporary geopolitical conflicts, oil has repeatedly structured political violence, economic dependency, and environmental devastation. Apocalypse is thus reframed not simply as a theological image or geopolitical narrative, but as a material condition produced by petroleum itself—a form of petropolitical destiny in which the nation’s adversary lies embedded beneath its own soil.
This paper examines how digital prophetic media interpret political events as sacred conflict and shape religious visions of the nation’s political future. It analyzes Give Him 15, a daily prayer platform led by Dutch Sheets that blends devotional practice, political commentary, and online mobilization. Drawing on a computational analysis of 2,992 posts published between 2016 and 2025, totaling roughly 2.8 million words, the study tracks recurring frames such as spiritual warfare, mobilization, national identity, and persecution. Results show that the platform stabilizes follower participation by narrating both victories and setbacks within a larger framework of divine struggle. Conflict oriented framing intensifies during elections and other high salience political moments, while grievance and mobilization language correlate with higher audience engagement. The findings show how digital charismatic leadership converts political uncertainty into a durable system of religious interpretation and mobilization within contemporary Christian nationalist movements.