Blood, Soil, and Sourdough: Fabricated Heritage and Christian Nationalism in the Digital TradWife Movement investigates the religious and political meanings attached to contemporary homesteading, food purity, domestic labor, and return-to-the-land culture. Across social media, practices such as baking sourdough, drinking raw milk, gardening, raising livestock, preserving food, homeschooling, and rejecting industrial systems are often presented as pathways out of modern disorder. These practices promise renewed intimacy with nature, stronger families, healthier bodies, and recovery of an older moral world.

The project examines how these intimate practices acquire political force through the narratives and images surrounding them. Online homesteading content frequently links household self-sufficiency to Christianity, traditional gender roles, ecological purity, reproductive futurity, and national restoration. The kitchen, garden, and family farm become sites where creators stage an alternative to modernity and invite audiences to imagine return as both personal transformation and collective repair.

The title Blood, Soil, and Sourdough names the convergence of kinship, land, and domestic practice within this cultural world. “Blood” invokes family, inheritance, reproduction, race, and ancestry. “Soil” points toward land, nature, cultivation, sovereignty, and the politics of belonging. “Sourdough” captures the ordinary, tactile, and highly mediated domestic practices through which these larger ideas become familiar and desirable.

A central concern of the project is the way narratives of return can detach land from its histories. Appeals to ancestral practice, localism, and natural order often take place on Indigenous lands while obscuring colonization, dispossession, migration, and the social conditions that make homesteading possible. The project therefore places digital homesteading in conversation with settler colonialism, right-wing ecologism, Christian nationalism, wellness culture, and the environmental politics of purity.

Rather than treating sourdough, gardening, or home education as inherently political, the project attends to the stories through which these practices are organized. It asks how a loaf of bread becomes evidence of moral discipline, how domestic labor becomes a vision of social order, and how the desire for a simpler life can be woven into broader claims about gender, race, religion, land, and nation.

An early version of this work was presented at the University of Chicago’s Global Christianity Conference. The recorded presentation is included above.