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Introduction – religion and the rise of populism
Daniel Nilsson DeHanas and Marat Shterin
The seemingly unstoppable rise of populism has caught observers by surprise. Donald Trump’s US election victory, the Brexit referendum in Britain, and President Erdoğan’s emboldened power in Turkey are just three of the many cases in which populism has radically altered the tenor of contemporary politics. In these three examples, religion seems to have played a significant role, yet is often overlooked.
In this special issue, we aim to provide a corrective to the general neglect of religion in academic work on populism. The contributors to this special issue shed light on roles of religion in the three populist cases already mentioned as well as in an array of other examples of populist discourse and action, stretching from Germany to Kyrgyzstan. In this brief introductory piece, we draw on key existing works and the case studies included in this issue to suggest useful ways of approaching the intersections of religion and populism.
Roles of religion in populism
Despite the dearth of work on religion and populism, two prominent social scientists, Olivier Roy and Rogers Brubaker, have recently written on these themes. In Saving the People: How Populists Hijack Religion (2016), Nadia Marzouki, Duncan McDonnell and Oliver Roy offer a balanced look at the intersection of populist movements and democratic politics in country case studies which include the US and Israel, alongside eight European nations. Published too early in 2016 to take into account Donald Trump’s election victory or the results of the Brexit referendum, the book includes a chapter by Olivier Roy on the Front National (FN) in France (Roy 2016a) and his conclusion to volume (Roy 2016b), both of which are particularly insightful and relevant to the theme of this special issue.
Roy (2016a) demonstrates how the FN instrumentalises Christianity in its politics, yet often finds itself at odds with the institutional Catholic Church. An amalgam of secularist, Christian, and pagan currents, the FN tends to see the Church as too liberal on issues of immigration, and yet, interestingly, too conservative on family values and sexuality. The FN can therefore dismiss the Church as an element of the loathed French establishment. In doing this, it simultaneously taps in its own ‘Christian’ identitarian narrative while upholding the strong anti-clericalism that undergirds French laïcité. In his conclusion, drawing on this and other cases from the volume, Roy remarks that for populist parties, ‘religion matters first and foremost as a marker of identity, enabling them to distinguish between the good “us” and the bad “them”’ (Roy 2016b, 186). Christianity as national identity is so ‘thin’ that, as Roy puts it, it can be easily ‘hijacked’. Christian identity has the dual purposes of building nostalgia for a golden national past and rendering Islam an intrinsically foreign culture. In Roy’s words, populist movements that employ Christianity are ‘Christian largely to the extent that they reject Islam’ (Roy 2016b, 186).
The sociologist Roger Brubaker has more recently entered the fray on populism and religion, with an essay that provides a conceptual exploration of populism (Brubaker 2017a) and another that centrally concerns Christianity as a key factor in the civilisational politics of populism (Brubaker 2017b). Brubaker (2017a) takes a ‘stylistic repertoire’ approach to populism, building from Benjamin Moffitt’s (2016) work on populism as political style, among others. In reference to religion, Brubaker (2017b) argues that populist movements in North Atlantic societies share a kind of ‘civilizationism’ in which they cast Islam as a threat to their civilisational integrity. These movements tend to respond to this threat with what Brubaker calls ‘Christianism’ which, ironically, includes putatively liberal views on issues of gender and sexuality as a way of distinguishing a ‘Christian civilisation’ from allegedly regressive Islamic cultures. A strong illustration of this is the Dutch case, where the murders of two staunch critics of Islam – politician Pim Fortuyn and filmmaker Theo Van Gogh – set in motion a movement of Christian civilisational rhetoric against Islam in this relatively secular country. The anti-Muslim ‘civilisational fight’ in the Netherlands is now spearheaded by Geert Wilders. Brubaker argues that the same dynamics of Christian civilizationism are mirrored in many cases throughout Europe and in the U.S.
Putting together the insights of Roy and Brubaker, then, we can see that the role of religion in populism seems to be almost entirely identitarian and negative: it is about what distinguishes the ‘civilised’ western societies from ‘barbaric’ Muslims. In the contexts these authors have studied, populist politicians evoke a reinvented Christian past to warn about the existential threat of its loss in the face of invading Muslims robbing it from the present. ‘The people’ therefore must expel these Muslims from the nation’s future to guarantee its survival. It is clear, as Brubaker writes, that populist politicians borrow liberally from each other in their repertoires of (anti-)religious expression. This tallies well with Roy’s observation that populists who make use of Christianity tend to be Christian essentially only to the degree that they are anti-Muslim.
These aspects of Roy and Brubaker’s thinking bring out two important elements of populism: its vertical and horizontal dimensions (Brubaker 2017a). Populism is an anti-elite politics ‘in the name of the sovereign People’ (Aslanidis 2016), as it is the liberal establishment that is responsible for the erosion of the nation’s virtues and its well-being. Populists are also against ‘others’ (Marzouki and McDonnell 2016, 2) who threaten the national virtues and well-being. In western states, the opposition to ‘others’ tends to focus on immigrants and/or Muslims. In the non-western or anti-western variants of populism, ‘others’ can be ‘secularists’, ‘communists’, or ‘western intruders’ themselves. Populists single out ‘others’ as a threat to the livelihoods or cultural heritage of ‘the people’. It is often the case that populists object to elites precisely because they have been seen as catering to ‘others’ for far too long. They are therefore guilty of misusing power that should rightfully be in the hands of ‘the people’.
The populist style and populist politics
Populism has become a buzzword to refer to a disparate range of phenomena that appear to have much in common but can involve radically different ideas, sentiments and politics, both right-wing (e.g. FN in France and Lega Nord in Italy) and left-wing (e.g. Mélenchon in France and Chávez in Venezuela). Some of the latest contributions to the vast literature on populism (for a useful overview, see Brubaker 2017a), seem to offer useful conceptual solutions to this puzzle of the diverse manifestations of what appears to be a recognisable phenomenon. The new approaches point out that populism can hardly be seen as a ‘thin-centered’ ideology that sets a noble people against corrupt elites, as Cas Mudde (Mudde 2004; Mudde and Kaltwasser 2012) suggested in his influential work. This ideological approach fails to capture the malleability of actual populism (Aslanidis 2016; Moffitt and Tormey 2014), and the virtual absence of consistent ideology in many of its salient manifestations (e.g. Trump, Le Pen, Chávez, etc). Most convincingly, Moffitt (2016) treats populism as a ‘political style’, or a repertoire of discourse, political image and performance (see also Brubaker 2017a; and Bonikowski and Gidron 2015). In doing so, he recognises that populism is not only discursive but it also involves performative elements such as gestures, emotional tone, imagery and symbolism.
The political style approach is more fitting to populism in practice because as researchers we are not in a position to strictly categorise who is or is not a populist. Political styles are transposable and can be used for a set period of time within specific contexts, such as in an election campaign or a time of crisis. In very different contexts, Russian President Vladimir Putin and former Australian Prime Minister John Howard have engaged in a populist manner, but for various reasons might not ‘pass’ a populist ideology test. Indeed, sometimes a populist style can be adopted by leaderless movements. The successful Swiss campaign to ban minarets was run by a loose grouping of individuals, many associated with the Swiss People’s Party. Rather than relying on the charisma of a leader, the campaign became notorious for its anti-minaret posters of a woman in a burqa surrounded by ominous missile-like black minarets, thus drawing from the repertoire of populist style to appeal to the voters.
If populism is a political style, then what are its key stylistic features? The populist style places an emphasis on advocating for ‘the people’. The people are understood in absolute terms as morally ‘pure’, ‘noble’ (Mudde 2004) and ‘virtuous’ (Marzouki and McDonnell 2016). Their countries are seen as promised lands where ‘the people’ have inviolable rights to the culture, heritage, jobs and other entitlements of their political communities. These qualities and rights are evoked to point to the existential threat ‘the people’ are facing, thus turning immigrants into evil invaders and political elites into insidious enemy within. Thus, the enemies are on what Brubaker (2017a) has referred to as the vertical dimension (elites) and the horizontal dimension (‘others’), or ‘those who threaten our way of life’. By extension, by exposing and fighting the enemies, populist leaders or movements become national saviours.
This moralistic (Müller 2016) and Manichean evocation of the political community, we argue, makes the populist political style animated, implicitly or explicitly, by a notion of the sacred people. In using the word ‘sacred’ here, we draw on the recent tendency in sociology in general and the sociology of religion in particular to build on a neo-Durkheimian conceptualisation of the sacred as continuing to be present in public life (Alexander 2003; Knott 2013; Lynch 2012). Gordon Lynch, who has made a particularly valuable contribution to the elaboration of the concept, defines it as ‘what people collectively experience as absolute, non-contingent realities which present normative claims over meaning and conduct of social life’ (Lynch 2012, 29). We believe that the notion of the sacred encompasses a range of populist cases and complements Marzouki, McDonnell, and Roy’s use of ‘salvation’ in Saving the People (Marzouki and McDonnell 2016). Indeed, Lynch’s notion of the sacred applies well to the wide range of populist cases that do not obviously involve religion in the conventional sense. A good example can be seen in the UK Vote Leave campaign’s claim that leaving the EU would enable taking back control of £350 million per week for the National Health Service, an institution that is secular yet occupies a sacred place in British national consciousness. We also think that the ‘sacred’ is a better term than those such as ‘noble’ or ‘moralistic’ for capturing the moral seriousness that can animate populist followers to act in defence of their values (sometimes with violence) for the cause of ‘the people’.
Putting it all together, we define populism as a political style that sets ‘sacred’ people against two enemies: ‘elites’ a...
