The Wolves in Green Clothing, How Christian Nationalism Is Infiltrating Earth-Based Spaces
Updated: Aug 26
Something unsettling is happening in Earth-based spiritual spaces across America. Christian nationalism, white nationalism and other forms of far-right extremism are increasingly finding ways to move into communities built around nature, ancestry, traditional living, natural healing, herbal medicine, homesteading, folk practices and self-sufficiency. They do not always arrive carrying a Bible or announcing themselves as a political movement. Instead, they can adopt the language and appearance of the communities they are entering, presenting old political ideas through seemingly different conversations about heritage, natural order, family, tradition and returning to the land.
Christian nationalism is not simply Christianity practiced by politically conservative people. It is a political ideology that seeks a privileged place for Christianity in the identity, government and public institutions of the nation. There is an important difference between religious freedom and religious political power. Religious freedom protects the right of Christians to practice Christianity just as it protects Earth-based religions, other faiths and people with no religion at all. Christian nationalism seeks something fundamentally different: a society in which one religious worldview is elevated above the others and given influence over the laws and institutions governing everyone.
That is not religious equality, and changing the aesthetic does not make it acceptable.
When Christian-nationalist ideas enter Earth-based spaces, biblical hierarchy can be described as “natural order,” restrictions on women can become “traditional femininity,” opposition to LGBTQIA2S+ people can be framed as protecting the “natural family,” and nationalism can be presented as protecting heritage or ancestral culture. None of this requires abandoning the underlying ideology. It only requires translating it into language more likely to be accepted by a different audience.
This is not happening because Earth-based spirituality naturally leads toward Christian nationalism, white nationalism or far-right politics. Earth-based religions and practices are extraordinarily diverse and do not belong to a single institution, political movement, racial group or theological authority. Some people understand what they practice primarily as religion, others as spirituality, cultural practice, folk tradition or simply a way of living in closer relationship with the natural world. What many of these spaces share is an interest in land, seasons, plants, ancestors, community and the relationship between human beings and nature. Those are powerful ideas about identity and belonging, and nationalist movements understand that they can be exploited.
That strategy can become especially effective in communities experiencing economic and cultural upheaval. Across Appalachia, the Rust Belt and other parts of the country shaped by industrial decline, people have watched factories disappear, industries contract, populations shrink and institutions weaken. Younger generations leave for opportunities elsewhere, down towns struggle and families remember communities that once seemed more economically secure. The pain behind that experience is real, but nationalism offers an emotionally satisfying and dangerously distorted explanation for it. It tells people that what they lost was not simply economic security or political influence but their country, their culture, their traditions and their rightful place within society.
The manipulation happens when legitimate grief is redirected toward other people. Wanting to understand your ancestors becomes believing ancestry determines who belongs. Wanting to preserve local traditions becomes believing outsiders are destroying them. Loving the land becomes believing certain people have a greater right to it. Wanting community becomes demanding cultural conformity. Eventually, the desire to preserve something meaningful can be transformed into the belief that it must be protected from a threatening “them.”
This relationship between ancestry, territory and nationalism is not new. Far-right movements have repeatedly attempted to transform people's attachment to land and heritage into political identity. European fascism notoriously expressed this through the concept of “Blood and Soil,” tying ancestry to territory and treating the nation as something inherited through blood. Modern nationalist movements do not need to repeat the slogan for the basic idea to survive. The same politics can be packaged through softer language about roots, heritage, ancestral identity, traditional culture, demographic change and protecting a way of life.
That is precisely what makes the infiltration of Earth-based spaces difficult to recognize at first. An interest in ancestry is not white nationalism. Growing your own food is not Christian nationalism. Herbal medicine, traditional crafts, self-sufficiency, homeschooling, preserving food, raising animals or choosing to live off-grid are not inherently political acts. Millions of people participate in these things for ordinary reasons: economics, environmental concerns, spirituality, family traditions, personal independence or simply enjoyment. The problem begins when far-right politics are attached to those practices and presented as though they are the natural conclusion of them.
Social media has made this particularly visible through the romantic image of “traditional living.” Cottage core, homesteading, natural living and the increasingly visible trad wife aesthetic can all present extraordinarily seductive images of a simpler existence: the farmhouse, the garden, homemade food, traditional clothing, children playing outside, the rejection of modern consumer culture and the promise that life can become meaningful again by returning to something supposedly more authentic.
There is genuine beauty in many of those things. Growing your own food is not extremist. Baking bread is not political radicalization. A woman choosing to be a homemaker is not a white nationalist. People should be free to build the lives they actually want.
The political shift occurs when choice becomes hierarchy.
A woman choosing a traditional domestic life is a personal choice; claiming women naturally belong beneath male authority is an ideology. A family choosing traditional gender roles is one thing; claiming other families violate nature is another. Raising children according to one's own beliefs is a freedom; portraying LGBTQIA2S+ people as threats to children is political propaganda. Practicing Christianity is religious freedom; demanding that Christianity possess political authority over everyone else is Christian nationalism.
That distinction is particularly important when discussing trad wife culture because an aesthetic and an ideology are not automatically the same thing. The problem is not a dress, a loaf of homemade bread or a woman who enjoys homemaking. The problem appears when an appealing traditional-living aesthetic becomes a vehicle for misogyny, Christian supremacy, white nationalism or rigid political ideas about who women are permitted to be.
The word “natural” becomes especially useful in this environment because it can make political choices sound inevitable. If something is presented as simply the natural order, there is supposedly nothing left to debate. Men lead because it is natural, women submit because it is natural, heterosexuality becomes the only legitimate foundation for a family because it is natural, and Christianity can be presented as the natural spiritual foundation of the nation. People who fall outside those categories can then be portrayed not merely as different but as violations of nature itself.
That is not the Earth speaking. That is a political ideology putting words in the Earth's mouth.
Natural-health and wellness communities provide another opening. Many people enter these spaces because they want greater control over their health or because they have legitimate concerns about corporations, environmental contaminants, healthcare costs or institutions that have failed them. Pharmaceutical companies pursue profit, governments make mistakes, corporations can cause environmental harm and medical institutions have histories that deserve scrutiny. The problem is not skepticism. The problem begins when skepticism becomes a worldview in which every institution capable of disproving a belief is automatically considered part of a conspiracy.
The intersection between spirituality, wellness culture and conspiracy thinking is sometimes described as “conspirituality.” In these environments, language about awakening, hidden knowledge, toxins, natural healing and institutional corruption can gradually become mixed with increasingly extreme political claims. Someone may begin by following an account about herbal medicine, then encounter content about toxins, pharmaceutical companies and government corruption. From there, the recommendations can move toward accounts claiming that virtually every major institution is lying, and eventually toward political conspiracies about immigration, LGBTQIA2S+ people, feminism, religious minorities or the supposed destruction of Western civilization.
There does not have to be a single moment when a person knowingly enters a Christian-nationalist or white-nationalist political space. That is part of what makes online radicalization difficult to recognize. Propaganda does not always require people to abandon everything they believe and accept something radically different. It can work by gradually changing the meaning of words they already value: tradition, family, nature, heritage, community, freedom, faith and purity.
This is also why conversations about a so-called “cottage core-to-trad wife pipeline” have attracted attention. It would be irresponsible to claim that cottage core automatically leads to far-right extremism, because it does not. Nor does being a trad wife automatically make someone a white nationalist. The concern is how political movements can enter aesthetically appealing spaces, normalize pieces of an ideology and make ideas that would sound extreme in explicitly political language feel ordinary when presented through lifestyle content.
The language of purity deserves particular attention. Wellness spaces often talk about pure food, clean ingredients, clean water and removing harmful substances from the body. Those ideas are not inherently political. Far-right movements, however, have historically developed their own obsessions with purity: religious purity, cultural purity, sexual purity, national purity and, at their most extreme, racial purity. The danger appears when the concept of contamination moves away from substances and begins being applied to human beings.
First the body must be protected from toxins. Then the family must be protected from corrupt culture. Then children must be protected from LGBTQIA2S+ people. Then the community must be protected from outsiders. Then the nation must be protected from immigrants. The language remains one of protection and purification, but the supposed contaminant has become another person.
That is where the rhetoric becomes dangerous.
None of this means Appalachia, the Rust Belt, rural communities or Earth-based spiritual spaces should be treated as inherently extremist. Doing so would replace serious analysis with another stereotype. Appalachia has complex traditions of organized labor, mutual aid, Christianity, folk spirituality, environmentalism, community organizing, conservatism and resistance to corporate exploitation. What economically neglected communities sometimes possess is not a unique attraction to far-right radicalization but a vulnerability familiar to people everywhere: the need for dignity, meaning and belonging.
When people feel that governments have forgotten them, corporations have exploited them and national culture looks down on them, movements promising to restore their importance can become powerful. Nationalism can replace humiliation with importance and isolation with identity, while redirecting anger away from complicated systems and toward carefully selected human enemies.
That is one of the oldest tricks in extremist politics. Give people someone to blame, convince them that their identity is under attack and then present yourself as the only movement willing to defend them.
Understanding why that works does not mean excusing the ideology.
Christian nationalism is unacceptable as a governing principle in a pluralistic society because no religion is entitled to political authority over everyone else. White nationalism does not become ancestral pride because it adopts spiritual language. Misogyny does not become acceptable because it is called natural order. Anti-LGBTQIA2S+ politics do not become harmless because they are described as protecting families, and racial exclusion does not become heritage simply because someone invokes their ancestors.
Changing the vocabulary does not change the ideology, and Earth-based communities should not be expected to tolerate political movements attempting to use their spaces as recruiting grounds. Inclusivity does not require giving a platform to ideologies built around excluding others. Religious freedom does not require accommodating a movement seeking religious supremacy. A community does not become intolerant by refusing to allow intolerance to take it over.
At the same time, these spaces should not surrender their practices simply because nationalists have discovered them. Christian nationalists do not own traditional living. White nationalists do not own ancestry. The far right does not own homesteading, herbalism, self-sufficiency, family, rural culture, traditional knowledge or a connection with nature. Allowing extremists to monopolize those things only makes their appropriation more successful.
The most useful warning signs are therefore not gardens, herbs, traditional clothing, ancestral practices or people choosing simpler ways of living. The warning signs are the ideas underneath them. A community claiming Christianity deserves political authority over everyone else is telling us something important. So is a community portraying LGBTQIA2S+ people as unnatural or corrupting, presenting women's equality as a violation of natural order, describing immigrants or minorities as contamination, turning ancestry into a test of who belongs or using spirituality to justify racial, religious or political hierarchy.
Those beliefs should be identified for what they are rather than excused because they arrive wrapped in the language of nature.
There is nothing sinister about wanting to reconnect with the Earth. People should be able to grow food, learn old traditions, understand their ancestors, practice Earth-based religions, seek natural approaches to their lives and build communities around the natural world without those spaces becoming recruitment grounds for Christian nationalism, white nationalism or far-right extremism. They should be able to honor ancestry without being taught supremacy, practice traditional skills without accepting traditional oppression, question institutions without being pulled into conspiracy movements and seek belonging without being told that somebody else must be excluded for them to have it.
The contradiction at the center of all of this is difficult to ignore. Forests do not ask what religion someone practices before providing shade. Rivers do not examine ancestry before giving water. Plants do not determine which family structures deserve sunlight, and seasons do not recognize national borders. The Earth does not belong to Christianity, nationalism, one race, one gender or one sexuality. It belongs to all of us.
That is why Earth-based spaces are worth defending. The danger is not that people are returning to the Earth. The danger is that Christian nationalists, white nationalists and other far-right movements have realized they can meet people there, adopt the language of those communities and gradually redefine what their traditions mean.
Christian nationalism can put on linen. White nationalism can grow a garden. Misogyny can bake bread. Bigotry can learn the names of medicinal plants.
None of that makes it natural.
It only means the wolves have learned to wear green.
And they still don't get the forest.
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