Abstract: National identity is all about time travel, a nation's journey between different points in time: the past, the present and the future. The present is but a temporary resting place from the past, but also the starting point for the future of this continuous national journey. For ancient cultures, however, the weight of the distant past is heftier and thus more cumbersome for the present to carry and even weightier for the future to bear. Is it ever possible to unload any of this weighty baggage and travel less restrained into the future? Even if it were possible to do so, hasn’t the deadweight of the past already made its mark on the back of the nation? Be that as it may, the collective consciousness, the shared psyche, the identity of a nation is formed only through this cumbersome time travel carrying this heavy baggage. This immutable burden of history leaves nations two viable choices:1- how this burden is perceived collectively; 2- how to distribute or adjust this weight at different points along this journey. In this presentation I will argue that the two weightiest loads on the collective consciousness of the Iranian people, continually shaping the national identity, are nationalism and religiosity . I will further argue that during the past 150 years these two heavy loads have gained ascendancy because they each have provided a safe haven from the vicissitudes and uncertainties of modern age. I will argue that modernity with its rationalism, its agnosticism, its individualism, and its grand claim of universalism posed a qualitative challenge to the traditional identities of the nation-- as they were historically defined by the two powerful institutions of power the monarchical order and the Shia clerical establishment. The challenge of modernity and responses of those two institutions of power have produced a civil war of competing discourses reaching back to even before the Constitutional Movement of 1905. The victor of this civil war will stake its claim to the defining character of Iranians’ national identity. Globalization has further intensified the efforts of both the nationalists and the Islamists in shaping this identity. Along with the reactions of these two traditional stakeholders, I will present an assessment of the modernists’ and the globalists’ attempts to influence the outcome of this struggle for identity.