The interplay of new national movements („neo-nationalism“) with religious actors and symbols has received increasing attention in research in recent years. Exploring the entanglements of religious discourses and the construction of national identity is also the focus of this project. It aims at a decolonially poised reconstruction of the theologian Karl Barth’s theological critique of religion as a critique of domination, which, as a critical theory of the Christian church, reflects the domination-legitimizing and -organizing effects of religion. To this end, discourse-theoretical approaches to the concept of religion (Bergunder, Neubert, Nehring), post-fundamentalistic concepts of the political (Laclau, Mouffe, Machart), the postcolonial debates on the interdependence of religious discourse, sacularism and the nation-state (Asad, Mahmood, Masuzawa, among others), and reflections on the problem of epistemic framing (Spivak; Mignolo, Butler, among others) will be drawn upon. The theoretical framework will be tested in a comparative study of the use of religious semantics in the field of political construction of national identity (Germany/South Africa).