Salutary Reminiscing, Pathological Nostalgizing, and the Psychopolitics of Christian Nationalism

In the psychology literature, nostalgizing is largely considered a handy coping skill centered on people recollecting past favorable memories to assuage present feelings of loneliness and personal insecurity. This approach fails to distinguish between recollecting fond memories for benign self-flourishing reasons, and malignant self-foreclosure ones. The former is better conceived of as salutary reminiscing – savoring old memories of a life well lived for purposes of holding hope alive that analogous self-affirming experiences can be agentically pursued in the present and future. The latter – pathological nostalgizing – pertains to overattachment to a sentimentalized past that is felt to be superior to anything obtainable in the present and future. Its psychological underpinnings often involve parental idealization and thwarted grief. This article explores these themes and details how a depth-psychological perspective on nostalgia is pivotal for any robust psychosocial understanding of the allure of the Christian Nationalist Movement and its authoritarian spokespersons. Conservatively minded citizens who feel marginalized and psychologically undone by techno-modernist social transformations and secular trends can easily fall prey to nostalgic rhetoric by demagogic leaders of an enchanted past where traditional social order and moral correctness prevailed.