Excepting the Catalans, none of the New Nationalism has a clear raison d’etre. But it would be a grave misjudgment to dismiss nationalism as a force in the 21st century. The conventional wisdom has been overturned too many times in the past two years. The same conventional wisdom that deprecates the New Nationalism was shocked by the Brexit vote and the Trump victory in the United States. The nationalist protest vote in Germany has left the AfD in political isolation, but it has so weakened the reigning Volksparteien that Germany is hard-put to assemble a functioning coalition government. Hungary, Poland and now the Czech Republic and Austria have elected nationalist governments that have dug in their heels against the EU’s immigration policies. And the Catalan insurgency is far from over at the time of writing: the new parliamentary elections that Spain’s central government has called for December look likely to return a separatist majority, leaving the country in an intractable constitutional crisis.

The New Nationalists emerged in response to specific irritations: EU meddling in the UK, hollowed-out manufacturing and surging immigration in the US, the migrant wave in Germany, and so forth. But there is a deeper motivation for the nationalist resurgence. This could be seen in November in Poland, when 60,000 nationalist marches paraded through Warsaw, many under signs declaring, “We want God!” Polish nationalism contains chauvinist and anti-Semitic elements at its fringes, to be sure, but the religious fibre that set Poland in opposition to the Soviet Union is not entirely attenuated.

The spiritual centre of the Catalan nationalist movement lies at the ancient Benedictine monastery of Montserrat, where Father Sergi d’Assís Gelpí has preached support for separatism from his pulpit. Four hundred Catholic priests, including several bishops, signed a declaration in support of independence in September, so outraging Spain’s central government that the country’s ambassador to the Vatican filed a formal protest. There are economic grounds for separatist sentiment in Catalonia, certainly. Spain’s richest province contributes a disproportionate share of Spanish taxes, and the Catalans would rather spend their money at home. But tax grievances did not motivate Catalans to interpose themselves between the ballot boxes and Spain’s National Guard during the October 1 referendum and sustain hundreds of injuries in the confrontation.

Donald Trump’s election victory stemmed in part from an economic protest vote, notably in the rust belt states of Ohio, Michigan and Wisconsin. But Trump also garnered a higher proportion of the evangelical Protestant vote than any other candidate in US political history, by a margin of 80-16 among white evangelicals, according to exit polls cited by the Washington Post. He also won overwhelmingly among America’s small but indicative community of Orthodox Jews. It may seem odd to think of the thrice-married and occasionally vulgar Trump as the champion of America’s religious Right, but the data are unambiguous.