A New Paradigm in Political Religion? Global Right-Wing Populism as the Great Leveler
Photo by Artem Beliaikin
BY NORA FISHER ONAR
A hallmark of the new, global right-wing populisms has been the bid to capture religious constituencies. The strategy is one of harnessing the emotive solidarities and conservative values which often characterize religious communities to the steed of ethno-religious nationalism. This pattern is evident from Donald Trump and Jair Bolsonaro’s engagement of evangelicals in the Americas, to the vilification of religious “others” by populists from Poland and Hungary to Turkey and India. And while the leaders of populist movements arguably act out of opportunism as much as conviction, their conjuring of ethno-religious passions has culminated in exclusionary legislation and pogroms against religious, ethnic, and gender minorities.
But even as right-wing populism relies on demonizing dualisms, its global scope undermines the binary frames we all too often use to read world politics. After all, scholars and policymakers alike tend to presume that pluralist democracy is to be found in the Global North and West, while illiberal and authoritarian regimes are situated in the Global South and East.
They share tactics, like electoral majoritarianism, court stacking, and demonization of the political opposition and critical media. They also show solidarity via diplomatic and social media engagement of populist incumbents and candidates across the globe.
This cross-cutting salience suggests that we are confronted with a new paradigm in the study and practice of political religion. Jocelyne Cesari’s conceptually ambitious, empirically drenched, comparative study of the intersections of religion, nationalism, and statecraft offers rich resources for making sense of right-wing populism on the global scale. Inspired by Cesari’s toolkit, I offer below three fields of analysis which populism, for all its perils, can help us to rethink.
First, populism demands that we confront a Eurocentric assumption which has long structured academic and policy analysis: the view that religion is or ought to be private vis-à-vis a presumptively secular public sphere. This view is rooted in Christian notions of the sacred/profane which were transmuted via the Enlightenment into the religious/secular divide that Western analysts assume structures politics everywhere. As a result, we tend to label as reactionary those political systems, especially in the Global South, where separation of church and state is less institutionalized or operates differently. In the process, we ignore the enduring resonance of religiously-inflected habits in Western political culture and practice (like nonchalant accommodation of Christian symbolism in public life, but the oftentimes allergic reaction to non-Christian, especially Muslim, semiotics like the veil).
The upshot, I argue, is a failure to grasp the power of religious referents in mobilizing support for political programs across the West and “the rest” alike.
Second, the global ascendance of right-wing populism challenges the secularization thesis—a reading of the relationship between religion and politics which dominated twentieth century analysis. According to the thesis’s linear logic, even private religiosity will eventually disappear as states and societies in the Global North, but eventually also in the Global South, become increasingly modern and hence disenchanted. Yet, the picture we are confronted with today is far more checkered. In much of Western Europe, and among younger demographics everywhere, people are indeed leaving their churches.
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Nora Fisher-Onar is assistant professor and director of the Bachelor of Arts in International Studies at the University of San Francisco.
This article was originally published on the Berkley Center for Religion, Peace & World Affairs.
The views and opinions expressed here are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the Pacific Council.
