Research
Terra Sage Wallin studies contemporary religion in the United States at the intersections of digital media, gender, ecology, and political culture. Her work examines how religious worlds are made through performance, aesthetics, affect, embodiment, and everyday practice—and how those worlds become persuasive through platforms, communities, and public media.
Across her research, Terra Sage is especially interested in claims to authenticity, tradition, conversion, nature, and spiritual authority. She asks how people learn to recognize certain identities, practices, and social arrangements as morally or religiously true; how audiences participate in sustaining those worlds; and how questions of gender, race, land, class, and belonging become embedded within them.
This area of research examines how religious identities, authorities, and communities are produced through digital platforms and mediated performance. Terra Sage studies influencers, livestreams, podcasts, conferences, testimony videos, online communities, and audience practices as spaces where religion is staged, interpreted, contested, and made emotionally compelling.
Her work draws particular attention to authenticity, charisma, spectacle, kayfabe, audience participation, and the unstable boundary between sincerity and performance. It asks how people remain invested in mediated worlds even when their construction is visible, and how followers, critics, fans, and hate-watchers all participate in shaping the meaning and circulation of religious content.
Digital Religion, Media & Performance
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This research explores how gendered identities are formed through conversion, testimony, spiritual discipline, and claims to religious authority. Terra Sage is especially interested in the ways femininity, domesticity, marriage, sexuality, motherhood, autonomy, and submission become organized through stories of spiritual danger and transformation.
Her work examines digital TradWife culture, evangelical conversion narratives, spiritual warfare, biblical womanhood, and movements between alternative spirituality and Christianity. It asks how testimony rewrites the past, how spiritual transformation becomes a model for others to follow, and how certain forms of womanhood are presented as natural, timeless, or divinely ordered.
Gender, Conversion & Religious Authority
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This area of research investigates the religious and political meanings attached to land, nature, food, ancestry, health, and environmental practice. Terra Sage studies homesteading, back-to-the-land culture, food purity, ecological nostalgia, and spiritual claims to place as sites where moral visions of family, community, and belonging are produced.
Her work also asks whose histories are invoked — and whose are obscured — when settlers describe practices as ancestral, traditional, or rooted in the land. Bringing religion and ecology into conversation with Indigenous studies and settler-colonial theory, she examines how narratives of return can conceal histories of dispossession while presenting particular relationships to land as universal or innocent.
Religion, Ecology & Settler Colonialism
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