In this time when religious nationalisms loom large, public discourse overflows with concern about the impact of political turmoil on our experience of time itself, on how we feel time passing in a frantic rush, coming to a crawl, or coming apart altogether. This panel improvises on the 2026 presidential theme, “FUTURE/S,” using the broader category of temporality to explore the role of affect and religion in the development, maintenance, and contesting of religious nationalisms. Presenters will examine the ways in which religious affects shape political action and the horizon of political possibility through theological discourses and aesthetic practices, both in the United States and India.
This paper frames Christian Nationalism as a deep story founded on an apocalyptic narrative that fuses Christian and American identities, rooted in historical and theological interpretations of the book of Revelation and Puritan founding myths. Drawing on sociological frameworks, it explains how these stories shape ontology, mythology, and epistemology for adherents, forging strong group cohesion by framing their experience as a divinely mandated cosmic struggle. This apocalyptic framework promotes a perception of persecution and a sense of divine purpose that inspires political engagement, supports exclusionary practices, and forms the basis for movements such as Dominionism and the New Apostolic Reformation. The Christian Nationalism narrative interprets perceived challenges to a divinely established national identity as grounds for efforts aimed at restoring and sustaining Christian prominence in society.
The study of affect has been historically attributed to Western philosophical traditions, beginning with Kant, Spinoza, Husserl, Freud, and Heidegger. In contemporary times, the politics of academic publications on affect invariably involve their ethnographic accounts from the ‘Orient’ but do not engage with these accounts as theories or epistemes in themselves. As a form of the decolonial methodology of undoing the Eurocentrism inherent within the academic study of affect and looking at its pluriversal conceptions, in this paper, I will discuss the Vedic concept of ‘Rasa’ that was first systematically defined by Bharata in the 2nd century BCE, its expansion by later Sanskrit scholars and its relevance in contemporary India.
This paper explores moral disorientation as an affective experience of temporal rupture. Interweaving short audio clips, images, and analytic commentary, I read everyday pastoral disclosures through phenomenologies of dis/orientation, vertigo, and hesitation developed by Sara Ahmed, Ami Harbin, Zakiyyah Iman Jackson, and Alia Al-Saji. I argue that moral disorientation disorderly reorients bodies in and out of time with God and the world, generating ambivalent intervals of indetermination where moral and temporal orientations can either be unsettled or renewed. The presentation contrasts pastoral strategies that resynchronize congregants into linear futures guided by divine providence with homiletic practices that sustain affective and temporal wobble as an opening toward queer/just futures.