Micro-Level and Macro-Level Factors in Religious Nationalism: How Religious Pluralism and Religiosity Shape Attitudes

Religious nationalism links national belonging to membership in a country’s dominant religious tradition, yet most research focuses on the United States and gives less attention to how individual religiosity operates within broader religious contexts. Drawing on symbolic interactionist theory, this study examines how micro-level religiosity and macro-level religious pluralism shape support for religious nationalism across countries. We combine individual-level data from the Spring 2024 Pew Global Attitudes survey with country-level measures from the Global Religious Composition Estimates and Global Restrictions on Religion datasets, producing a sample of 34,160 respondents across 33 countries. Using multilevel mixed-effects ordered logistic regression models, we find that religiosity is positively associated with religious nationalism, while religious pluralism is negatively associated with religious nationalism. Notably, we also find that religious pluralism moderates the relationship between religiosity and religious nationalism: the association between religiosity and religious nationalism is stronger in religiously homogeneous countries and weaker in more pluralistic countries. These findings suggest that religious nationalism is not simply a product of individual religious commitment but emerges through the interaction between personal religiosity and national religious composition.