During the celebrations to mark the first anniversary of the Ustasha state's founding in Osijek in April 1942, Vilko Rieger, the head of the State Information and Propaganda Office (Državni izvještajni i promičbeni ured—DIPU) gave a speech in which he linked the fate of the Croat people and the survival of the nation to the leadership of the Poglavnik:

By deifying the Poglavnik and presenting him to the Croat people as an omnipotent leader given to the nation by God, he was not merely attempting to argue for unquestioning obedience on the part of ordinary citizens as well as Ustasha activists toward the supreme leader but also illustrating how the Ustasha movement sought to legitimate its rule through the use of sacralized imagery and the identification of its ideology as a new religion.

Despite the frequent use the movement made of religious symbolism and sacralized imagery, when relating Ustasha ideology to religion, historians and scholars of the Ustasha regime in socialist Yugoslavia predominantly focused on the relationship between the Ustasha regime and the Catholic Church in Croatia. While some of this was rooted in legitimate historical inquiry, much of this historiographical approach was also motivated by the state's anticlerical orthodoxies and the desire to provide evidence of the church and state's mutually close relationship and common struggle against both the Partisan resistance movement and the new Yugoslavia. In fact, the relations of the church hierarchy and the Ustasha authorities were characterized by a combination of ambivalence, suspicion, and, eventually, hostility.