Generational Attenuation and Sacralized Governance: Why Contemporary Great Powers Are Turning to the Sacred

Over the past decade, major global powers across diverse regimes and civilizations have concurrently turned to sacred sources of political legitimacy. This article develops a framework of Generational Attenuation to explain this puzzling trend, defined as the irreversible erosion of founding narratives' emotional resonance and persuasive force through generational turnover. Drawing on generational value division in both American and Soviet ideological blocs, it examines sacral governance practices in eight major powers: India, Russia, Turkey, Iran, North Korea, Japan, the United States, and China. It distinguishes three dominant pathways—civilizational, religious, and leader sacralization—each operating under unique logics of dignity allocation. The core testable hypothesis holds that once generational erosion diminishes founding narratives below a functional threshold, great powers adopt sacral strategies to stabilize cross-generational legitimacy as a structural, rather than merely ideological, response to temporal pressure. The paper further specifies theoretical boundary conditions and observable implications for subsequent empirical testing.