Religion, Race, and the Making of White Nationalism

This talk presents work in progress from a book manuscript that examines white nationalism in the United States as a religio-racial formation, rather than simply an extremist political ideology or a variant of Christian nationalism. The project argues that white nationalist intellectuals fuse esoteric myth, antisemitic historical revisionism, and racial pseudoscience into a sacralized worldview organized around the conspiratorial myth of 'white genocide' or 'great replacement.' Within this framework, whiteness is cast as a sacred category under existential threat, and racist violence is rendered morally intelligible as defensive and redemptive. Drawing on archival research in the Keith Stimely Collection and the Savitri Devi Archive, alongside analysis of contemporary digital platforms such as Counter-Currents and AltRight.com, the lecture traces the intellectual genealogy of white nationalism from Enlightenment-era constructions of modern Aryanism to Nazi esotericism, postwar Holocaust denial, and contemporary online radicalization. This research demonstrates how the 'white genocide' myth functions as the theological core of US-based white nationalism, providing the ideological scaffolding that binds antisemitism, anti-Blackness, Islamophobia, and xenophobia into a single conspiratorial worldview.

The presentation will be followed by discussion and Q&A, with the author inviting feedback on the project’s conceptual framing, intellectual genealogy, and implications for the study of antisemitism and extremism.

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Host or Publisher NYU Center for the Study of Antisemitism