This article theorises ideations of “the people” in a comparative reflection on Latin-Christian theologies and typologies of time and secularised appropriations thereof in right-wing as well as far-right movements in Europe and the United States of America. Understanding the world in grand narratives of “good” and “evil” emerges from Christian eschatological hope: the hope of the restoration and renewal of the cosmos and the final defeat of evil prophesised in association with the return of Christ. However, this language of good and evil becomes detached from the wider corpus of Christian belief and theology. In its secular expression, it may attach the good to an abstract and normative account of “the people”, who are defined in contrast to a range of others, both internal and external to the nation. Secular iterations might further echo the stratification of present, past and future through a sacralisation of the past and a dramatization of the future. The context of contemporary right-wing and far-right movements poses a series of questions about the relationship between belief and belonging, the acceptability of the secularization of Christian traditions and theologies, and the extent to which Christian communities can legitimately associate with right-wing movements.

Contemporary conflicts about secularity in 'the West' tend to focus on public space. Although collective Christian heritage means that public space is rarely exclusively neutral, conflicts continue to arise over the relationship between secularity and religious symbolism, and especially over those symbols which derive from religious minorities. This contribution critically considers the designation of space as either sacred or secular in political imaginaries, approaching processes of secularisation as part of a fragmentation of the sacred and of sacred space. We introduce the concept of transliminal space: spaces which can contain multiple and potentially conflicting ascriptions of meaning. Conceptualising public space as trans-liminal allows for contemporaneous and competing ascriptions of the secular, the sacred, the secular-sacred, the sacredsecular, without being exclusively grounded in either. Transliminality does not preclude public space to be predominantly secular, but it does problematise the phenomenon of normative exclusions of religious symbols from public spaces.

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This article discusses a reorientation of supersessionist postures in German and Dutch Protestant reflection on emerging nation states in the nineteenth-century. Historically, Christian thought often othered “the Jew” as the “nascent Christian.” Since the seventeenth-century, Protestant theologians also entertained the possibility of theological othering on the basis of the legalism of the Mosaic covenant, of which ancient biblical Israel and its cultural liturgies were regarded as a token. In the context of the modern nation, German and Dutch Protestant thought entertained this typological othering of biblical nationhood to construct the modern Jew as “Gentile” to the modern nation. As “Gentile,” “the Jew” remains the embodiment of the ultimate other, yet as “nascent Christian,” modern Jews begin to face an unrelenting demand to assimilate. This conundrum contributed to a fundamental tension in the imaginary of the nation, namely between patterns of othering and structures of belonging, echoing far beyond antisemitism, and especially in patterns of othering that are inherent to racism and Islamophobia.

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