From institutional faith to affective legitimacy

The Polish Catholic Church has long functioned as a cornerstone of national identity and moral legitimacy. Its role in resisting communism endowed it with symbolic authority that extended far beyond theology: the Church was seen as a vessel of Polishness itself, a sanctuary of truth in an era of repression. Yet, as Porter-Szűcs (Reference Porter-Szűcs2011) reminds us, this image of a singular “Catholic Poland” is historically selective. For centuries, the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth had been home to Jews, Orthodox Christians, Protestants, Armenians, and Muslims, but these plural histories were gradually erased in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries as Catholicism was recast as the nation’s defining essence. The Church’s modern moral authority thus rests not only on resistance to foreign domination but also on the retrospective construction of a sacred national myth in which faith and fatherland became indistinguishable. The Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth was among Europe’s most religiously diverse polities—Catholics, Protestants, Jews, Orthodox, Armenian Catholics, and Muslims—so equating “Pole” with “Catholic” required later narrative pruning (Porter-Szűcs Reference Porter-Szűcs2011).

In contemporary Poland, the Church’s institutional credibility has begun to erode. Surveys show that younger Poles increasingly disaffiliate from the Church, citing corruption, sexual-abuse scandals, and its political entanglements (Associated Press 2024; Notes from Poland 2020). Still, the Church remains a crucial site of political resonance. Its authority has not disappeared—it has changed form. Rather than resting on doctrinal coherence or institutional trust, it now operates through affective legitimacy, where emotions such as fear, pride, and moral disgust are mobilized as political resources.

This transformation can be read as an illustration of what Ahmed (Reference Ahmed2004) calls affective economies—structures through which emotions circulate and “stick” to bodies and symbols, producing collective attachments. Within Poland’s religious nationalism, these affects are not incidental but central to governance. Fear of the “Islamic migrant,” pride in Christian heritage, and disgust toward perceived moral decline circulate through sermons, media coverage, and nationalist mobilizations, binding together otherwise disparate publics (Kasińska-Metryka et al. Reference Kasińska-Metryka and Dudała2022). When clerics warn of an “Islamization of Europe” or of refugees as vectors of chaos, they are not merely describing threats; they are enacting emotional orientations that align the faithful into a moral community defined by shared vulnerability and sacred duty.

While the tropes of purity, family protection, and civilizational defense recall earlier authoritarian and fascist vocabularies, what is new here lies less in their content than in their infrastructural form. These moral repertoires now circulate through networked media, livestreamed sermons, and digitally coordinated civic actions, producing legitimacy through visibility and emotional resonance rather than formal hierarchy. In this sense, Poland’s affective Catholic nationalism rearticulates rather than revives earlier scripts: familiar symbols are redeployed within new affective economies that translate piety into performance and emotion into authority.

At the same time, as Muehlebach (Reference Muehlebach2012) argues in her ethnography of “moral neoliberalism,” declining institutional legitimacy often generates moral infrastructures—networks of ethical practice and discourse that substitute moral conviction for bureaucratic or legal authority. In Poland, the Church’s erosion as an institution has paradoxically strengthened its function as a moral infrastructure: its authority now lies in the capacity to define virtue and vice, purity and corruption, inclusion and exclusion. Clerics and lay commentators often frame border defense, protection of women, and defense of national sovereignty as moral rather than political imperatives (Ruch Obrony Granic 2025). These claims function as ethical vocabularies that authorize action, especially exclusionary or illiberal action, as expressions of virtue.

This reconfiguration is especially visible in the Church’s rhetoric on migration. In the early 2010s, official episcopal statements often echoed Vatican appeals for solidarity with refugees. Yet by the late 2010s, nationalist factions within the clergy increasingly reframed migration as a civilizational test. As Krotofil and Motak (Reference Krotofil and Motak2018) show, these statements typically coupled gestures of Christian compassion—“we must help those in need”—with distancing phrases such as “help them where they are,” translating universal ethics into spatialized exclusion. Through repetition, these ambivalent messages cultivated a moral common sense in which national security and spiritual purity became indistinguishable. While not all clerical voices endorse exclusionary nationalism, the discursive pattern is consistent: leaders evoke Christian hospitality and shared humanity yet simultaneously reinscribe an “us/them” boundary that renders Muslimness a proxy for threat (Krotofil and Motak Reference Krotofil and Motak2018). In Ahmed’s terms, these moves are classic affective economies: fear and disgust “stick” to figures and signs over time, so that “the migrant” accrues the affective charge of danger and disorder, guiding bodies toward protectionist postures as if they were self-evidently moral.

Historically, Catholic nationalists handled demographic and confessional pluralism by distinguishing “nation” from “state,” reserving the former for a putatively Catholic core—an exclusionary move now echoed in vigilantist scripts (Porter-Szűcs Reference Porter-Szűcs2011). Systematic analyses of the Polish Episcopate’s communications confirm this pattern. Krotofil and Motak (Reference Krotofil and Motak2018) show how official statements and press releases on the Polish Episcopal Conference and KAI websites frame Christian compassion through distance, foregrounding Caritas campaigns that send aid to Syria and Lebanon or for the Family sponsorship program, thus affirming moral virtue while outsourcing practical responsibility to charities and the state. Dudzińska and Kotnarowski (Reference Dudzińska and Kotnarowski2019) document a complementary slippage in populist political discourse, where the terms migrant, refugee, and Muslim are used interchangeably, reproducing fear and moral distinction. Goździak and Márton (Reference Goździak and Márton2018) identify similar rhetorical conflations across Central Europe, showing how civilizational tropes of “Christian Europe under threat” circulate even in societies with negligible Muslim populations. Together these studies suggest that compassion, distance, and conflation operate as affective techniques of governance, moralizing exclusion while preserving the appearance of care.

Yet the Church is not monolithic. Alongside nationalist factions, many priests, bishops, and lay Catholics continue to appeal to the Gospel’s language of piety, humility, and mutual care, seeking to reclaim the Church’s social mission of solidarity rather than exclusion (Meyer Resende and Hennig Reference Meyer Resende and Hennig2021). In recent years, figures such as Archbishop Gądecki and Primate Polak have cautioned against nationalist distortions of Catholic identity and reaffirmed that Christian duty includes respect for constitutional order and hospitality toward strangers, echoing Vatican teaching on human dignity and solidarity (Meyer Resende and Hennig Reference Meyer Resende and Hennig2021). These countervoices highlight that Poland’s Catholicism contains its own internal struggles over what it means to live a moral life and whether virtue is proven through care or through defense.

Yet despite these countercurrents, the emotional gravity of Polish Catholicism seems increasingly to lie with those who translate faith into public feeling. For many Poles, the Church’s moral resonance now appears to derive less from its institutional authority than from its ability to channel and amplify collective affects. Sermons such as Bishop Długosz’s homily at Jasna Góra in July 2025 illustrate this dynamic vividly. When he warned of “Islamic migrants pushed into Poland by foreign powers” and praised the ROG for its vigilance (Notes From Poland 2025; Stowarzyszenie Roty Marszu Niepodległości 2025; The Catholic Herald 2025), he enacted what could be called an affective performance of legitimacy: the congregation’s applause was not simply agreement but participation in a ritual of belonging. Here, legitimacy is felt before it is reasoned, produced through shared emotion rather than institutional decree.

This affective realignment does not eliminate the Church’s political power; it redistributes it. As Muehlebach (Reference Muehlebach2012) and Ticktin (Reference Ticktin2021) suggest, moral claims and practices of care can sustain political legitimacy precisely when formal institutions lose traction. The Polish case can be read as illustrating how that process operates within a right-wing populist context: moral certainty fills the void left by institutional doubt (Cora Reference Cora2025). The Church’s discursive ambivalence, oscillating between compassion and condemnation, makes it both a mirror and a motor of illiberal affect, translating social anxieties into moral imperatives.

This transformation points toward the broader argument of this Dispatch: that when faith fuses with affect, legitimacy itself can become an emotional relation rather than an institutional one. In this emergent configuration, the credibility of liberal democratic authority seems increasingly secured less through representation or procedure and more through shared moral feeling, what might be called affective legitimacy. The Church thus operates as both a template and a transmitter of this emerging moral order, demonstrating how emotions can be mobilized as warrants for political action. In Poland, as elsewhere, faith no longer merely blesses the nation; it becomes the medium through which belonging and virtue are felt to be true. This convergence of faith and affect marks the emotional re-foundation of legitimacy that may define contemporary moral populism. This sets the stage for what follows: the translation of this affective-moral grammar into civic vigilantism. If the pulpit produces the emotional script, movements like ROG will soon perform it on the street.

Performing protection: Vigilantism as moral theatre

Formed in early 2025 amid continuing anti-migrant rhetoric, ROG presented itself as a civic initiative defending Poland’s borders (Ruch Obrony Granic n.d.-a). Yet its aesthetics (e.g., uniforms, insignia, torch-lit gatherings, and devotional language) transformed policing into ritual (Ruch Obrony Granic n.d.-b). Drawing on theories of performative politics and affective publics (Butler Reference Butler2015; Papacharissi Reference Papacharissi2015), these acts can be read as moral theatre: public performances that stage virtue, dramatize threat, and render protection sacred (Radio Maryja 2025). They do not simply communicate ideology; they produce moral authority by mobilizing emotion, faith, and spectacle.

In this sense, ROG’s digital and physical performances exemplify what Papacharissi (Reference Papacharissi2015) terms affective publics—networked collectives formed less through shared ideology than through shared feeling. These publics appear to displace the deliberative spaces that liberal democracy presupposes, often substituting affective intensity for procedural accountability. Livestreams, comments, and shared prayers circulate not as debate but as confirmation, generating legitimacy through visibility and resonance. What begins as connective media thus becomes connective faith: a digitally mediated congregation that transforms sentiment into authority. The liberal democratic deficit here appears not only institutional but also emotional: the crowd’s capacity to feel together becomes a substitute for democratic participation itself.

ROG’s border patrols resembled pilgrimages of vigilance. Members livestreamed night walks, reciting prayers and patriotic hymns while invoking the defense of “Christian Europe.” The border, illuminated by torches and drones, became a symbolic altar, a visual trope repeated across nationalist media (Notes From Poland 2025; Wprost 2025). Participation required no institutional sanction: legitimacy was earned through affective display. To patrol was to perform faith and patriotism in one gesture (Radio Maryja 2025; Święcicki Reference Święcicki2025). The night patrol thus becomes a liminal drama in Turner’s (Reference Turner1974) sense—an in-between stage that converts diffuse anxiety into moral order. Prayer, costume, and choreography bind participants into an exclusive “we,” where the performance of danger reaffirms belonging. While such ritualized vigilance draws on older nationalist repertoires, its digital mediation and devotional framing mark a distinct affective infrastructure: moral legitimacy now accrues through circulation and emotional resonance rather than through hierarchical command.

When Bishop Antoni Długosz praised ROG from the Jasna Góra altar that July in 2025 (Stowarzyszenie Roty Marszu Niepodległości 2025; The Catholic Herald 2025), he amplified the movement’s legitimacy. His warning about Islamic migrants pushed into Poland by foreign powers publicly sanctified ROG’s mission (Radio Maryja 2025). The congregation’s applause completed the affective circuit: fear became devotion, dissent became belonging. Rather than hierarchical instruction, this was participatory ritual. This applause, along with the synchronized reactions on ROG’s livestreams, constitutes what Massumi (Reference Massumi2015) calls collective attunement: intensities traveling across bodies that feel like truth before they are argued as such. Affect, in this sense, functions as evidence, and resonance substitutes for justification. The sermon’s force lay less in its propositional content than in its form: its ability to translate state failure into divine calling. Border vigilance became a liturgy of national redemption. That resonance is amplified by a canon of siege-memory—Jasna Góra as miracle and mandate—that long yoked Marian devotion to national defense (Porter-Szűcs Reference Porter-Szűcs2011).

Comparable staging appeared during civic ceremonies organized previously by Ordo Iuris (Notes From Poland 2024) and Roty Marszu Niepodległości, where the European Union flag was burned, the holy rosary was prayed, and participants dressed up as medieval knights (Drozd Reference Drozd.2024). These hybrid rituals merged piety and policing, as well as charity and confrontation. Their choreography blurred distinctions between religious celebration and political rally, making virtue visible through defense. Such episodes demonstrate that ROG was not an isolated anomaly but part of a wider moral infrastructure (Muehlebach Reference Muehlebach2012; Ticktin Reference Ticktin2021) linking Church, civil society, and nationalist networks (Stowarzyszenie Roty Marszu Niepodległości n.d.). Across these publics, moral worth was proven by guarding borders—geographical, cultural, and spiritual alike. This theatre also unfolds through a gendered script of what Young (Reference Young2003) terms masculinist protection: the trope that positions the male citizen-protector as moral guardian of “women and families” (Ruch Obrony Granic 2025). Such framing legitimates pre-emptive control and recasts exclusion as care, fusing nationalist virtue with paternal authority. Historically, Catholic nationalists handled demographic and confessional pluralism by distinguishing “nation” from “state,” reserving the former for a putatively Catholic core—an exclusionary move now echoed in vigilantist scripts (Porter-Szűcs Reference Porter-Szűcs2011).

Comparable framings—the “Islamization” trope, the collapsing of refugee, migrant, and Muslim, and appeals to Christian heritage—animate anti-refugee discourses across Central Europe (Dudzińska and Kotnarowski Reference Dudzińska and Kotnarowski2019; Goździak and Márton Reference Goździak and Márton2018). Similar performances of protection-as-piety in Hungary’s border volunteer units and Italy’s family-defense marches further illustrate that this moral choreography is not uniquely Polish but part of a wider regional repertoire through which moral feeling becomes the currency of legitimacy. The patrol, the sermon, and the march together suggest how abstract ideals of sovereignty, purity, and protection are translated into felt truths. Following Muehlebach (Reference Muehlebach2012), moral infrastructures emerge when institutional trust erodes: citizens seek ethical certainty where bureaucratic authority falters. Ticktin (Reference Ticktin2021) shows how such infrastructures decide whose lives count as worthy of care. In Poland’s current moral economy, compassion is re-routed toward the imagined community of the faithful nation, leaving migrants outside the circle of empathy. Zürn’s (Reference Zürn2018, Reference Zürn2021) notion of a legitimation shift clarifies the broader democratic consequence. As procedural trust declines, new actors claim moral sovereignty. For ROG and its clerical supporters, righteousness displaces legality: the right to act derives from virtue, not representation. These affective publics relocate the center of moral authority from institutions to emotion itself.

ROG’s performances thus illustrate how liberal democratic erosion may proceed not only through legal or institutional decay but through the re-choreographing of moral affect. What appears as spontaneous patriotism is carefully staged moral theatre, sustained by emotional resonance and sacred imagery. As moral infrastructures replace procedural ones, protection is rendered pious, exclusion becomes care, and applause at a sermon or likes on a livestream can signify a stronger sense of belonging than participation in elections. The risk is not the disappearance of liberal democracy but its emotional repurposing: the collective joy of defending “the people” eclipses the pluralism that liberal democracy requires. Faith, once a legitimizing force for resistance, now legitimizes exclusion. The pulpit scripts the virtue of vigilance, and movements like ROG stage it for all to see, turning border defense into a devotional act and making exclusion the theatre through which democracy performs itself.

Affective legitimacy and the reconfiguration of democratic authority

The convergence of affect and faith observed in Poland suggests not only an ideological turn but also a possible transformation in how legitimacy is produced and felt. What Ahmed (Reference Ahmed2004) described as the circulation of affect can, in this context, act as a partial substitute for procedural legitimacy: emotional intensity comes to supplement or even displace institutional credibility. When publics are bound through feeling rather than deliberation, legitimacy becomes affective—secured through resonance, repetition, and ritualized conviction. This form of affective legitimacy does not abolish liberal democracy’s procedures; it hollows them out affectively, leaving emotion to be mobilized elsewhere, by actors who can make moral certainty feel truer than institutional mediation.

Zürn’s (Reference Zürn2018, Reference Zürn2021) account of a global “legitimation shift” helps situate this tendency theoretically. As confidence in representative and bureaucratic institutions erodes, new sources of authority emerge that claim moral sovereignty rather than legal or procedural standing. In Poland, the Church and its lay extensions such as ROG can be read as examples of this shift: they act as affective authorities whose legitimacy derives from their ability to mobilize virtue, indignation, and care in the name of “the people.” This realignment alters not only who governs but also how governing feels. What was once a question of compliance and consent becomes a matter of moral attunement: whether citizens feel that authority is righteous.

From the perspective of democratic theory, this may be the emotional underside of what Mounk (Reference Mounk2018) calls the populist crisis of liberal democracy: citizens remain attached to the idea of liberal democracy but detach from its liberal infrastructure. They seek immediacy, sincerity, and protection rather than mediation, pluralism, or procedure. Affectively legitimate movements thrive because they promise a moral shortcut to belonging, bypassing the slow, uncertain processes that liberal democracy demands. In this way, affective legitimacy translates democratic disenchantment into emotional participation, allowing illiberal projects to appear redemptive rather than repressive.

At the same time, moral infrastructures (Muehlebach Reference Muehlebach2012; Ticktin Reference Ticktin2021) ensure that these affective formations endure beyond momentary outrage. They embed emotional logics into everyday practices of care, charity, and citizenship, naturalizing exclusion as a moral stance. Once moral feeling becomes a key medium of political legitimacy, liberal democratic authority no longer depends solely on procedural justification but increasingly on affective recognition: who feels seen, who feels safe, and who feels righteous. The consequence is a reconfiguration, not a collapse, of democracy’s moral architecture.

Seen through this lens, Poland’s moral populism may signal a broader democratic metamorphosis visible in other settings where faith, virtue, and national belonging fuse, such as Hungary, Italy, or the United States. Liberal institutions appear to lose traction not only because they fail to deliver materially but also because they fail to move emotionally. In their place arise affective publics and moral infrastructures that make illiberalism feel virtuous, binding citizens through sentiment rather than accountability.

While these moral repertoires evoke older nationalist and even fascist grammars of purity and protection, what is new lies in their infrastructural form and emotional economy. Earlier regimes of moral nationalism were vertically organized and state-directed; today’s are networked, participatory, and digitally mediated, circulating through livestreamed sermons, online mobilizations, and transnational Catholic media rather than through party propaganda. The ideological symbols may echo the past, but the affective infrastructures and connective technologies that sustain them are distinctly contemporary, producing legitimacy through emotional resonance and viral visibility rather than coercive hierarchy. Understanding this shift requires democratic theory to grapple not only with power and institutions but also with feeling itself, as both the symptom and the substance of political legitimacy today.

Conclusion: The moral politics of democratic legitimacy

The Polish case suggests that the crisis of liberal democracy is increasingly experienced as a crisis of moral feeling. As institutional trust declines, legitimacy appears to migrate from the procedural to the affective—from the rule of law to the rule of sentiment. Where liberal democratic norms once rested on deliberation and representation, they now seem to depend on emotional repertoires that define virtue and vice, belonging and betrayal. The fusion of faith and vigilance that animates movements like ROG illustrates how moral affect can be harnessed to re-enchant political authority: democracy survives, but its moral center shifts. In short, when affectively charged rituals are taken as warrants for action, liberal democracy’s commitment to pluralism and procedural accountability risks being displaced by a politics of felt righteousness.

This transformation matters because it may be reconfiguring the very grammar of democratic legitimacy. When protection is sanctified and exclusion is felt as care, the ethical vocabulary sustaining pluralism begins to erode. What claims to defend “the people” simultaneously narrows who counts as the people. Emotional resonance replaces accountability, while applause or outrage stands in for deliberation. These may not be superficial distortions but signals of a deeper reordering in how moral authority operates. Illiberal movements succeed not only through coercion or propaganda but also by feeling truer, offering emotional clarity when liberal democratic institutions appear ambivalent or indifferent.

Seen in this light, the Polish case echoes dynamics visible elsewhere in contemporary liberal democracies. In Hungary, Italy, and the United States, moral narratives of purity, duty, and divine mandate often resonate alongside appeals to civic equality. Whether framed as “defending Christian Europe,” “protecting our families,” or “upholding civilization,” the affective choreography is strikingly similar: fear binds, disgust mobilizes, and care justifies control. These parallels suggest that the infrastructures of feeling which once animated solidarity can, in certain contexts, be repurposed to sanctify exclusion.

For democratic theory, this implies moving beyond diagnoses of populism or authoritarian drift. The task may be to understand how moral infrastructures and affective economies together reshape legitimacy. When moral conviction begins to substitute for political accountability, the space of democracy contracts even as its emotional charge intensifies. The question is no longer only who governs, but who feels entitled to govern, and whose safety or suffering counts as evidence of righteousness.

The stakes are therefore conceptual as well as political. If liberal democracy becomes a theatre of sanctified protection, its institutions risk losing the capacity to mediate conflict or extend care beyond moral boundaries. The challenge ahead may be to reclaim moral language for democratic ends: to rebuild forms of legitimacy grounded not in fear of contamination but in shared vulnerability and mutual obligation. Doing so might allow liberal democracy to remain a space for plural care rather than moral conquest.