Christian, pagan, positivist: the religious repertoires of white nationalism

Scholarship on the far right often treats Christianity as the dominant religious frame structuring contemporary white nationalist politics. I argue that this emphasis overstates the movement’s metaphysical coherence and obscures the multiple existential orientations competing to articulate racial dominance. Drawing on Smith’s (2021) typology of Christian, Pagan, and Positivist orientations toward the secular and Swidler’s (1986) theory of culture in action, I conceptualize these existential orientations as macro-cultural toolkits that actors deploy to render race, nation, and political action meaningful. I draw on more than 600,000 posts (2001–2022) from the white nationalist forum Stormfront, combined with a novel dataset of opt-in user social groups to classify religious affiliation. Using a combination of computational tools, I show that Christian, Pagan, and Positivist repertoires are empirically distinct yet durably co-present. Christian discourse moralizes race through themes of family and decline; Pagan discourse sacralizes vitality, heritage, and struggle; and Positivist discourse rationalizes hierarchy through economics and biology. The persistence of these differentiated repertoires indicates that racial projects are stabilized through internally plural cultural supply rather than doctrinal unity. More broadly, my findings suggest a generalizable sociological dynamic where movements organized around secular concepts may derive durability from metaphysical plurality rather than coherence.