olga mihel Olga Mihel. STRONG RELIGION AND NATIONAL SENTIMENT - A CASE STUDY INQUIRY FROM GERMANY

This contribution discusses the possible interrelations between the strongly religious identity and other intersecting codes of self-determination such as an ethnie and a nation. It identifies the factor of religious world-denying as crucial for understanding identity politics employed by fundamentalist actors in their positioning to the organizational environment, understood as “the sinful world”. This factor explains the character of positioning towards “different others”, i.e. people with different religious and ethno-national identity features or with dissenting lifestyles and dissenting worldviews. The study provides a case analysis involving a strongly religious, ultra-conservative movement from Germany: On the grounds of this case, it explains the role of religious world-denying in identity politics of strongly religious actors and in their conflictive positioning towards “the world” and “the different” perceived in opposition to the ‘divine plan of salvation for the people of God’.