Heaven Is a Place on Earth: Religion and the Politics of Territorial Identity

Followers of the Christian faith pray for God’s will to be carried out “...on Earth, as it is in Heaven.” Yet Earth is not Heaven. Unlike one religion’s afterlife, Earth is home to believers of numerous faiths and to individuals who are not religious at all. Amid the presence of multiple religious groups, how does religion guide individual conceptualization of one’s own belonging to territorial communities, as well as others’ belonging? In my dissertation, I explore the nexus of religion and territorial identity from three angles. Chapter 1 highlights the role of majority religion group status, yet not religious behaviors, in strengthening national identity across European countries. Despite waning traditional religious practice in Europe, national norms rooted in the historically-majority religion allow individuals who are affiliated with the majoritytradition (or who grew up in it) to take for granted the relationship between religious and national norms. Chapter 2 examines how political elites leverage historical intersections of the center-periphery and secular-clerical political cleavages to distinguish subnational identity from national identity and exact material authority via religion policy. Through a comparison of Catalonia, Spain, and Alsace-Moselle, France, I show that 20th-century national elites sought to construct unified national identities using religious tools, while subnational elites used religion to resist universal national identity construction. Subnational elites continue this pattern today by taking the opposite position from the state on matters of multiculturalism, particularly with respect to religious minority groups. Chapter 3 uses a survey experiment to study how Christian nationalism fosters resistance to humanitarian appeals in the United States. I find that even after reading anews story with strong humanitarian appeals about refugees, stronger Christian nationalism decreases an individual’s willingness to resettle and integrate refugees into the U.S., especially for Muslim refugees compared to Christian ones. Taken together, the findings of these articles demonstrate the ways in which religion has been and remains animportant tool for drawing boundaries of community identity at the individual, subnational, and national levels, and this conclusion carries implications for intergroup relations, political behavior, and political strategy.Doctor of Philosoph