This paper examines the canonization and veneration of so-called "patriotic saints" (Russian imperial military commanders Fyodor Ushakov and Alexander Suvorov) as a key site where religion and politics intersect in contemporary Russia. While much scholarship treats the fusion of Orthodoxy and state interests as a pathological deviation from a presumed normative separation of these spheres, this paper argues that such an approach obscures how religious nationalism — understood both as a political program and as a logic of social imagination — actually operates in practice. Focusing on concrete practices, particularly projects of canonization, the paper shows that the entanglement of Church and state is routine rather than exceptional. Canonization emerges not merely as a theological procedure but as a socially consequential act that redistributes symbolic authority over understandings and public representations of national history, concepts of sacrifice, and moral exemplarity. The analysis highlights the inherent instability of this entanglement. Neither the Russian state nor the Orthodox Church fully controls the production of religious-national meaning; instead, it is continually negotiated among diverse actors, including clerics, state officials, intellectuals, military institutions, and lay publics. The figure of the "patriotic saint" exposes the fragility of this synthesis, as efforts to sacralize military service and state-building achievements must reconcile competing regimes of value — ecclesiastical ideals of holiness and humility, and secular narratives of national greatness and historical justice. Controversies surrounding such canonizations thus reveal not their success, but the persistent tension and labor involved in sustaining a particular regime of religious nationalism.