THE ROUTLEDGE HANDBOOK OF

RELIGION, POLITICS AND IDEOLOGY

This comprehensive handbook examines relationships between religion, politics and ideology,
with a focus on several world religions – Christianity, Islam, Buddhism, Hinduism and Judaism –
in a variety of contexts, regions and countries.
Relationships between religion, politics and ideology help mould people’s attitudes about
the way that political systems, both domestically and internationally, are organised and operate.
While conceptually separate, religion, politics and ideology often become intertwined, and as
a result, their relationships evolve over time. This volume brings together a number of expert
contributors who explore a wide range of topical and controversial issues, including gender,
nationalism, communism, fascism, populism and Islamism. Such topics inform the overall aim
of the handbook: to provide a comprehensive summary of the relationships between religion,
politics and ideology, including basic issues and new approaches.
This handbook is a major research resource for students, researchers and professionals from
various disciplinary backgrounds, including religious studies, political science, international rela-
tions and sociology.

Jeffrey Haynes is Emeritus Professor of Politics at London Metropolitan University, UK. His
areas of expertise are religion and international relations, religion and politics, democracy and
democratisation, development studies, and comparative politics and globalisation. His publi-
cations include more than 50 books, most recently: Trump and the Politics of Neo-Nationalism
(2021), Religion, Conflict and Post-Secular Politics (2020) and The Routledge Handbook to Religion
and Political Parties (ed. 2020).
THE ROUTLEDGE HANDBOOK
OF RELIGION, POLITICS AND
IDEOLOGY

Edited by Jeffrey Haynes

 First published 2022
by Routledge
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Names: Haynes, Jeffrey, 1953- editor.
Title: The Routledge handbook of religion, politics and ideology /
edited by Jeffrey Haynes.
Other titles: Handbook of religion, politics and ideology
Description: Abingdon, Oxon; New York, NY: Routledge, 2022. |
Series: Routledge international handbooks |
Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2021005412 (print) | LCCN 2021005413 (ebook) |
ISBN 9780367417826 (hardback) | ISBN 9780367692445 (paperback) |
ISBN 9780367816230 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: Religion and politics. | Religion and politics–Case studies. |
Ideology–Political aspects. | Ideology–Religious aspects.
Classification: LCC BL65.P7 R785 2022 (print) | LCC BL65.P7 (ebook) |
DDC 201/.72–dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021005412
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 CONTENTS

Notes on Contributors viii

Introduction: Religion, politics and ideology 1

Jeffrey Haynes

SECTION 1
Core issues and topics 7

1 Liberal religion 9
Emanuel de Kadt

2 Secularism 23
Linde R. Draaisma and Erin K.Wilson

3 Atheism and religion 37

Stuart McAnulla

4 Nationalism, religion, ideology 51

Atalia Omer

5 Religion and gender 65

Leila Hadj Abdou

6 Life after communism: Contemporary Orthodoxy, politics and society in

Eastern Europe 78
Greg Simons

v
 Contents

7 The radical right in Europe: Cultural shifts and religious nativism 91

Michael Minkenberg

8 Islamism from piety politics to party politics 106

Roel Meijer

SECTION 2
New debates and controversies 121

9 Religion between ethics and ideology 123

Joseph A. Camilleri

10 Religion and the ideology of populism 138

Timothy Peace

11 Anarchism and religion 153

Erik Ringmar

12 Religion and the Alt-Right 164

George Hawley

13 Making Sense of Salafism: Theological foundations, ideological iterations,

and political manifestations 177
Naveed S. Sheikh

14 Buddhist nationalism 197

Saul Tobias

15 Christianism 211
Ben Ryan

16 Evangelicals and ideology—transnational or local?: Examining the case

of Latin American Evangelicals 227
Ruth Melkonian-Hoover and Dennis R. Hoover

SECTION 3
Country case studies 245

17 Italy 247
Luca Ozzano

18 A world awakening: American evangelicalism and late-war order 260

Robert J. Joustra

vi
 Contents

19 Russia: Orthodox Christianity 273

Marko Veković

20 Religious fundamentalism, liberal nationalism, and sectarian solidarity

among Lebanese 285
Mansoor Moaddel, Jean Kors, and Johan Gärde

21 Politics, identity and religion in Turkey: From Atatürk to the AKP 302
Jeffrey Haynes

22 Iran: Construction of a Shia political ideology in the Modern Age 314

Alireza Raisi

23 Religion and ideology in Sri Lanka: Buddhism 328

Peter Friedlander

24 Hinduism, Hindutva, and ideology 341

Abdul Shaban

25 Israelization of Judaism 356

David Ohana

Index 369

vii
 NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS

Leila Hadj Abdou is a Lecturer in the Department of Politics at the University of Vienna,
Austria, and a part-time Research Fellow at the Robert Schuman Centre for Advanced Studies,
Italy. She specialises in identity politics, the governance of migration and immigrant integration.
Joseph A. Camilleri OAM is Emeritus Professor at La Trobe University, Australia. He was
Chair in International Relations (1994–2012), Founding Director of the Centre for Dialogue
(2006–2012) and is a Fellow of the Australian Academy of Social Sciences. He is the author or
editor of some 35 major books and has written over 100 book chapters and journal articles
on security, geopolitics, governance, the role of culture and religion in international relations,
cultural diversity, intercultural dialogue and conflict resolution. He has convened several major
international dialogues and conferences.
Linde R. Draaisma is a Research Assistant in the Faculty of Theology and Religious Studies
at the University of Groningen, the Netherlands. She is interested in how power and religion
intersect, especially in the context of human rights and climate change. She has experience
in international policy (UN Human Rights Council, Dutch Ministry of Foreign Affairs, EU
Agency for Criminal Justice Cooperation) and is pursuing a PhD in Religious Studies.
Peter Friedlander is Associate Professor of South Asian Studies and Hindi in the School
of Culture, History and Language at the Australian National University, Canberra. His main
research focuses on Ravidas and Kabir and the Sant traditions of South Asia and the interactions
between language, literature, culture and politics in South Asian religions.
Johan Gärde is an Associate Professor of Sociology of Religion at Uppsala University, Sweden,
and a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Social Sciences at Ersta Sköndal Bräcke University
College (ESBUC), Sweden. He is Chairman of the Council for International Academic
Coordination at ESBUC. His teaching and research interests include civil society, the Middle
East and North Africa (MENA) region, religion and social work. He has more than 25 years of
field experience in Latin America and the MENA region and with international development
projects in Africa and Asia.

viii
 Notes on Contributors

George Hawley is an Associate Professor of Political Science at the University of Alabama,

USA. His research interests include political behaviour, religion and politics, the conservative
movement in America and right-wing extremism.
Jeffrey Haynes is Emeritus Professor of Politics at London Metropolitan University, UK. His
areas of expertise are religion and international relations, religion and politics, democracy and
democratisation, development studies and comparative politics and globalisation. He is the
author or editor of more than 50 books. He received the International Studies Association
Religion and International Relations Section’s Distinguished Scholar Award in 2016. He is
Co-Editor-in-Chief of Democratization, Editor-in-Chief of the International Journal of Religion
and series editor of the book series, Routledge Studies in Religion and Politics.
Dennis R. Hoover is Editor of The Review of Faith & International Affairs. He is also Research
Advisor to the Covenantal Pluralism Initiative at the Templeton Religion Trust and a Senior
Fellow at the Institute for Global Engagement, USA.
Robert J. Joustra is Associate Professor of Politics and International Studies at Redeemer
University, Canada. He is author and editor of several books on religion and international affairs
and serves as an editorial fellow with The Review of Faith & International Affairs.
Emanuel de Kadt is Emeritus Professor of Cultural Anthropology at Utrecht University, the
Netherlands. After many years working in development studies, he has returned to his early
interest in religion and society. Recently he has focused on the contrast between aggressive and
tolerant versions of religion and their effects on society.
Jean Kors is an international expert and strategist with over 25 years of experience in socioeco-
nomic development, strategic planning, management and financial controls. He has lectured at
many universities and has successfully designed and managed multi-million-dollar development,
relief and capacity building projects in addition to providing specialised consultations to numer-
ous local and international governmental and non-governmental entities.
Stuart McAnulla is an Associate Professor in Politics at the University of Leeds, UK, and co-
convenor of the Religion and Politics specialist group of the British Political Studies Association.
He has research interests in the politics of contemporary atheism, ideological and institutional
change in British politics and social/political science meta-theory.
Roel Meijer is Associate Professor of Islam Studies at Radboud University, the Netherlands. He
is a historian and teaches History and Political Science of the Modern Middle East and North
Africa and Modern Islamic Political Thought. He has published widely on social movements,
modern Islamic political thought, Salafism and social and political processes of transition in the
Middle East and North Africa.
Ruth Melkonian-Hoover is Professor of Political Science and International Affairs at Gordon
College, USA, where she has taught since 2005. Her scholarly interests include Latin America,
immigration and religion and international affairs.
Michael Minkenberg is Professor of Comparative Politics at the European University Viadrina
in Frankfurt (Oder), Germany. His research focuses on the radical right in the West and East,
on religion and politics in Western societies and on democracy and architecture in capital cities.
Mansoor Moaddel is Professor of Sociology at the University of Maryland College Park,
USA. He studies religion, ideology, political conflict, revolution and social change. His current
work addresses the causes and consequences of human values. He is engaged in a comparative

ix
 Notes on Contributors

cross-national panel survey in Egypt, Tunisia and Turkey in order to understand the dynamics of
change in values and political engagements.
David Ohana is a Professor of History at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, Israel, and a
life member at the Clare Hall College at the University of Cambridge, UK. He studies Modern
European and Israel Studies.
Atalia Omer is Professor of Religion, Conflict and Peace Studies at the Kroc Institute for
International Peace Studies and at the Keough School of Global Affairs at the University of
Notre Dame, USA. She is also a Senior Fellow at the Religion, Conflict and Peace Initiative
at Harvard University’s Religion and Public Life programme, USA. Her research focuses on
religion, violence, peacebuilding and theories and methods in the study of religion. She was
awarded an Andrew Carnegie Fellowship in 2017.
Luca Ozzano is Associate Professor of Political Science at the University of Turin, Italy. His
research interests include religion and political parties, religion and politics in Italy, religiously
sensitive political debates and community organising. He is Chair of the religion and politics
groups at the International Political Science Association (IPSA) and the European Consortium
for Political Research (ECPR) and Associate Editor of the journal Political Research Exchange.
Timothy Peace is a Lecturer in Politics at the University of Glasgow, UK. His research
interests include the study of religion and politics, social movements and populist parties in
Europe.
Alireza Raisi is a Lecturer at Northeastern University, Boston, USA. His research focuses on
comparative political economy, public policy, religion and politics and foreign policy analysis.
In 2021, his research focuses on the origins of sectarian attitudes in the Middle East and North
Africa.
Erik Ringmar is a Professor in the Department of Political Science and International Relations
at Ibn Haldun University, Istanbul, Turkey. His next book will deal with dance, cognitive theory
and the writing of history.
Ben Ryan is the Home Affairs Adviser in the Mission and Public Affairs division of the Church
of England, where he leads on policy and projects on migration and criminal justice. He was
previously Head of Research at the religion and society think tank, Theos. He is an author of
a number of books and reports on religion in society, including on the themes of religion and
politics in Europe, immigration and Catholic Social Teaching.
Abdul Shaban is a Professor at the Centre for Public Policy, Habitat and Human Development
and the School of Development Studies at the Tata Institute of Social Sciences (TISS), Mumbai,
India. He is an urban geographer and economist with research interests in issues related to cities,
entrepreneurship, creative industries and religious minorities. He has been a member of vari-
ous committees, commissions, and policy think tanks in these areas. He has also been Visiting
Professor/Fellow at several universities, which include LSE, UK, Muenster University, Germany,
Erasmus University, the Netherlands and Paris Diderot University, France.
Naveed S. Sheikh teaches International Relations with a focus on Middle East Studies and
Terrorism Studies in the School of Social, Political and Global Studies (SPGS) at the University
of Keele, UK. Since 2009, he has been the Editor-in-Chief of the peer-reviewed journal, Politics,
Religion & Ideology. He has published broadly on Islamicate politics, won awards for research and
teaching, and has held visiting positions at Harvard University, USA, Hosei University, Japan,

x
 Notes on Contributors

the University of Louisville, USA, the University of Notre Dame, USA, Cambridge Muslim
College, UK, and the College of Europe, Belgium.
Greg Simons is an Associate Professor and a Researcher at the Humanitarian Institute at Ural
Federal University, Russia, a Researcher at the Institute for Russian and Eurasian Studies (IRES)
at Uppsala University, Sweden, and a Lecturer at the Department of Communication Science
and leading Researcher at the Business Technology Institute at Turiba University in Riga, Latvia.
His research interests include changing political dynamics and relationships, mass media, public
diplomacy, political marketing, crisis management communications, media and armed conflict
and the Russian Orthodox Church.
Saul Tobias is Professor of Liberal Studies at California State University, Fullerton, USA. His
research and publications range across political theory, comparative philosophy, and politics and
religion. His current work explores Indo-Tibetan Buddhism in dialogue with Western political
thought.
Marko Veković is Assistant Professor of Religion and Politics at the University of Belgrade,
Serbia. His research focuses on religion and politics and has placed special emphasis on the
political behaviour and attitudes of Eastern Orthodox Churches. He has been appointed as a
Visiting Scholar at Temple University, USA (2014), Columbia University, USA (2016), and as a
Postdoctoral Scholar at the University of Erfurt, Germany (2019).
Erin K. Wilson is Associate Professor of Global Politics and Religion,Vice Dean and Director
of Education in the Faculty of Theology and Religious Studies at the University of Groningen,
the Netherlands. Her research explores the intersection of religion and secularism with various
global political issues, including migration, gender equality, human rights and climate change.

xi
 INTRODUCTION
Religion, politics and ideology

Jeffrey Haynes

A ‘religious ideology can be defined as a set of ideas that refer to religious and secular tools and
accompany political actions and processes in a sustained and systematic way’ (Rachik, 2009:
357).The study of the relationships between religion, politics and ideology represents a relatively
understudied subfield of research. However, given the increasing global significance of these
relationships, the topic has recently witnessed increased scholarly, policy and popular interest.
Initially, the research field focused rather narrowly on the relationship between Christianity
and the development of modern states in Europe (Lipset and Rokkan, 1967). More recently,
due to the impact of decolonisation, the end of the Cold War and globalisation, the subject area
expanded in terms of geographic extensiveness – to cover much of the non-Western world –
and in relation to the number of faiths included in the research focus.
The relationship between ideology, religion and politics can shape people’s attitudes about
the way that political systems, both domestically and internationally, are organised and operate.
The relationship has evolved over time, and the relationship between ideology, religion and
politics has varied in its relative importance, while sometimes becoming intertwined. At the
start of the third decade of the 21st century, the ties between them are both in a state of flux
and, in many cases, becoming more pronounced.To try to understand this complex relationship,
it is important to try to shed light on a variety of topical and controversial concerns, including
Islamism in Iran and Egypt, Hindu fundamentalism (Hindutva) in India, Buddhist nationalism in
Sri Lanka, and Christian civilisationism, reflecting the rise of a culturally-orientated right-wing
populism in the United States and sundry European countries, including Hungary, Poland and
Italy (Haynes, 2019).
Following decolonisation in the 1950s and 1960s, Western politics and ideology influenced
the political development of much of the non-Western world, including Africa, Asia, Latin
America and the Caribbean, as well as the Middle East and North Africa (MENA). Primarily
motivated by the pursuit of economic gain, the desire to spread their civilisation, and the urge
to Christianise the rest of the world, Europe’s imperial powers spread the West’s officially secu-
lar ideologies. This process continued until the aftermath of World War II, when a rapid yet
conclusive process of decolonisation ensued. Prior to that, for a century from the mid-19th to
the mid-20th century, the vast European empires in the non-Western world – mainly run by
the French and the British – had huge social, economic, political and religious impacts. Secular
ideologies – such as conservatism, liberalism, communism and nationalism – found numerous

1
 Jeffrey Haynes

new adherents around the globe. Religion, on the other hand, was typically associated with
‘traditional’ behaviour and backwardness. But as Europe’s erstwhile colonial possessions gained
independence, the ideologies of their new nationalist governments were mostly shaped and
guided by Western political ideals. Many independence movements and post-colonial nationalist
governments in Asia, Africa and elsewhere found socialist and nationalist ideologies especially
attractive. At the same time, the Cold War struggle raged over which Western ideology would
prevail: secular liberalism or secular communism. In the late 1980s, the end of the Cold War left
many countries, including the erstwhile components of the Soviet empire, to look for political
values and ideologies with roots in their own cultures and histories rather than those imposed
from outside by Western or Eastern imperialism.
Francis Fukuyama (1991) proclaimed in his notable book, The End of History and the Last
Man, that the close of the Cold War marked the world’s turning away from ideology. With the
exception of Maoist beliefs that at the time continued to guide the ideology of anti-state rebel
groups in a few ‘developing’ countries, such as Peru and Nepal, the age of clashing ideologies,
he contended, had come to an end.
However, contemporaneous with the decline of ideological competition and conflict, vari-
ous expressions of religious faith began to reassert themselves, both socially and politically, com-
municated in both religious revivalism and resurgence. Having been diminished in the West by
the rise of secular politics and ideology and undercut globally by Western and Eastern impe-
rialisms, many religions began to reassert themselves both publicly and politically. Political and
social movements in many former Western colonies, notably in Asia, Africa and the MENA
region, looked to religion to rediscover both political and cultural identities. To do this, sundry
political actors looked to the ideology of Islamism to further and fuel political objectives.
Reflecting these developments, there soon developed a novel scholarly, policy and popular
focus on the relationships between religion, politics and ideology. The consequence was an
expanded focus and purview – especially in terms of the depth in scope of inquiry – to look
beyond the subject of social cleavages in order to analyse the complexity and multiplicity of
forms by which religion, politics and ideology interact. For example, the recent (albeit tem-
porary) victories of Islamist political parties, consequential to the events of the Arab Uprisings
in 2011, as evidenced by the electoral successes of the Freedom and Justice Party (FJP) in
Egypt, Ennahda in Tunisia and the Party of Justice and Development (PJD) in Morocco, col-
lectively highlight the increased significance of the interaction of religion, politics and ideology
in the MENA region. However, despite their proclaimed adherence to the same religious faith,
Islam, the rise to power of these different, yet similarly ideologically focused, parties highlighted
diverse religious dimensions while underlining various ways that ‘Islam’ could be manifested
both politically and ideologically. This divergence serves to drive the need for further research
on questions of religion and ideology with regard to areas including democratisation, party
platform formation, party moderation and secularisation, social constituency representation and
interest articulation.
Elsewhere, a renewed focus on religion and ideology occurred much earlier. Political events
in the 1980s reminded social scientists of the power of religion to influence ideology, politics
and social movements in various parts of the world. In particular, the Iranian revolution of
1979 provided evidence of how a radical religious movement with an ideology of forming an
Islamic state could overthrow an established secular regime once seen as the regional exemplar
of modernisation and go on to create and consolidate in power a revolutionary religious, politi-
cal party, the Islamic Republic Party (IRP) (Skocpol, 1982). In the United States, at roughly
the same time, the rise of the Christian Right indicated how religious movements can evolve
ideologically – even when a country appears to be secularising. In addition, the role of the

2
 Introduction

Pope and the Roman Catholic Church in supporting Solidarity in Poland during the 1980s
ably demonstrated the power of religious groups to encourage social movements and parties to
challenge non-democratic regimes in a clearly ideological direction: away from communism
and towards democracy.
Like the broader field of religion and politics, the study of religion and ideology was long
circumscribed in the context of the once-dominant secularisation paradigm. For decades after
World War II, modernisation and secularisation theories channelled scholarly attention away
from the relationship between religion and ideology (Gill, 2001) while predicting that the
importance of religion in relation to ideological politics would decline – a position that never-
theless failed to explain the political resurgence of religion in many countries from the 1970s
and 1980s. Although secularisation is clearly still occurring in many, if not most, countries
(Norris and Ingelhart, 2004), it coexists with often notable religious revivals (Finke and Stark,
1992). Contrary to the tenets of secularisation theory, the impact of religion on politics has
not declined tout court; instead, it has changed in rather complex ways (Bruce, 2003), while the
separation of religion and state has paradoxically decreased with higher socio-economic devel-
opment throughout the world (Fox, 2006). Consequent to these developments, the relationship
between religion, politics and ideology has become increasingly pronounced in many countries.
The study of religion, politics and ideology, the subject of this handbook, has been a difficult
area for inquiry due to the complexity of the interrelationship between the two. Although there
are a number of extant studies of relationships between religion, politics and ideology, most are
rather old, with a focus in many cases on Marxism before the end of the Cold War. In the con-
text of particular countries, however, there are relatively few recent analyses of the relationship
between religion, politics and ideology, perhaps because of the complex variety of relationships
in play and difficulties involved in trying to ascertain their precise and analytically important
connections. Consider just a few examples:

·· In officially secular India, the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) first came
to power in the 1990s after staging a 10,000-kilometre march that sought to destroy an
ancient mosque that was alleged to be built on the remains of Rama’s temple (Sahu, 2002).
In 2014, the BJP won the majority of seats in the parliament – the first time any single party
has accomplished such a feat since 1984 – propelling BJP party leader Narendra Modi to
the position of prime minister of India. In power, the BJP sought to implement its ideologi-
cal preference: Hindutva, or ‘Hindu-ness’.
·· In the United States, long known for the constitutional separation of church and state,
candidates of both main parties, Republican and Democrat, today make speeches from
church pulpits. Candidates for political office from both main parties speak openly of their
faith and its implication for their policies. The administration of Donald Trump (2017–21)
had ‘self-confessed’ Christian Nationalists as vice-president (Mike Pence) and secretary of
state (Mike Pompeo). Both appealed greatly to Trump’s Christian Right supporters, mainly
right-wing Protestant evangelicals and conservative Catholics (Haynes, 2021).
·· In Turkey, a secular state with a large Sunni Muslim majority, parties that are insufficiently
secular have traditionally been banned (Özbudun, 2010). The current ruling party – the
Justice and Development Party (AKP) – is ideologically somewhat Islamist while attempt-
ing to embellish its rhetoric with the secular nationalist goals. Many critics fear a creeping
Islamising agenda by the ruling party and the national president, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan
(Kaya, 2014).
·· In the Netherlands, three confessional parties once represented distinctive pillars of poli-
tics. These three parties merged in 1980, but their strength declined with secularisation

3
 Jeffrey Haynes

(Lacardie, 2004). By 2002, a new party – the Pim Fortuyn List, which sought to focus and
drive popular suspicion of Muslim immigrants – became for a time the largest party (Van
Holsteyn and Irwin, 2003). More recently, the Party for Freedom, which has also had a pro-
nounced anti-Islam position and programme, has consistently gained a strong parliamentary
presence (Vossen, 2011), becoming the second-largest party in parliament following the
2017 elections.
·· In several majority Buddhist countries, including Myanmar, Thailand and Sri Lanka, recent
years have seen the emergence or consolidation of Buddhist nationalist political parties and
movements. Sometimes such parties are inspired by a proclaimed desire to ‘clean up’ politics
according to Buddhist precepts, while others bring in Buddhist ideals in the context of a
focus on nationalism, which tends to discern non-Buddhists as a threat to the integrity of
the nation (Walton, 2018).

Finally, in many countries around the world, religion links to politics via various ideological
relationships.These include but are not limited to secularism, conservatism, liberalism, socialism,
nationalism, gender, (post-)communism, fascism, fundamentalism, Islamism, populism, theoc-
racy, Salafism, Buddhist nationalism, Christian evangelicalism and Christian civilisationism. Such
issues are of particular interest in certain countries, including the United States, Italy, Russia,
Turkey, Iran, Sri Lanka, India and Israel.
The chapters of this book examine the many and varied relationships between religion, poli-
tics and ideology in various ways. The overall aim of the handbook is to offer an array of highly
illuminating accounts of how these relationships evolve and manifest themselves.

References
Bruce, Steve (2003) Politics and Religion. London: Blackwell.
Finke, Roger, and Stark, Rodney (1992) The Churching of America, 1776–1990: Winners and Losers in Our
Religious Economy. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press.
Fox, Jonathan (2006) ‘World separation of religion and state into the 21st century’. Comparative Political
Studies 39, no. 5: 537–69.
Fukuyama, Francis (1991) The End of History and the Last Man. New York: Free Press.
Gill, Anthony (2001) ‘Religion and comparative politics’. Annual Review of Political Science, 4: 177–198.
Haynes, Jeffrey (2019) From Huntington to Trump: Thirty Years of the Clash of Civilizations. New York,
Lexington Books.
Haynes, Jeffrey (2021) Trump and the Politics of Neo-Nationalism: The Christian Right and Secular Nationalism
in America. London, Routledge.
Kaya, Ayhan (2014) ‘Islamisation of Turkey under the AKP rule: Empowering family, faith and charity’.
South European Society and Politics 20, no. 1: 47–69.
Lacardie, Pierre (2004) ‘Paradise lost, paradise regained: Christian democracy in the Netherlands’. In
Christian Democratic Parties in Europe Since the End of the Cold War, edited by Steven van Hecke and
Emmanuel Gerard, 159–78. Leuven: Leuven University Press.
Lipset, Seymour Martin, and Rokkan, Stein (1967) Party Systems and Voter Alignments: Cross-national
Perspectives. New York: Free Press.
Norris, Pippa, and Ingelhart, Ronald (2004) Sacred and Secular: Religion and Politics Worldwide. New York:
Cambridge University Press.
Özbudun, Ergun (2010) ‘Party prohibition cases: Different approaches by the Turkish constitutional court
and the European court of human rights’. Democratization 17, no. 1: 125–42.
Rachik, Hassan (2009) ‘How religion turns into ideology’. The Journal of North African Studies, 14, 3: 347
– 358.
Sahu, Sunil. K. (2002) ‘Religion and politics in India: The emergence of Hindu nationalism and the
Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP)’. In Religion and Politics in Comparative Perspective: The One, the Few, and the
Many, edited by Ted. G. Jelen and Clyde Wilcox, 243–68. New York: Cambridge University Press.

4
 Introduction

Skocpol, Theda (1982) ‘Rentier state and Shi’a Islam in the Iranian revolution’. Theory and Society 11, no.
3: 265–83.
Van Holsteyn, Joop, and Irwin, Galen (2003) ‘Never a dull moment: Pim Fortuyn and the Dutch parlia-
mentary election of 2002’. West European Politics, 26: 41–66.
Vossen, Koen (2011) ‘Classifying Wilders:The Ideological Development of Geert Wilders and His Party for
Freedom’. Politics 31: 179–89.
Walton, Matthew (2018) Buddhism and the Political: Organisation and Participation in the Theravada Moral
Universe. London: Hurst.

5
 SECTION 1

Core issues and topics

 1
LIBERAL RELIGION
Emanuel de Kadt

Introduction
The relationship between religion and ideology deals, above all, with the effects of religion on
society and politics. This will be one of the issues I shall deal with in this chapter. A first caveat:
though I will be referring, below, to liberal religious people, this piece deals above all with liberal
religion. In doing so, it presents those liberal versions of different religions as coherent wholes.
Yet what their adherents (liberal religious people) make of those views is another matter: many of
them will not follow the code lock, stock and barrel, but will pick and choose what to respect.
Another qualification: insofar as I shall be dealing with society and politics, my focus is not on
‘liberal polities’, but on religiously liberal people in such societies; in discussions, these differ-
ent approaches to liberalism are often not clearly kept apart.1 I have dealt at length with liberal
religion in my book of the same name (de Kadt 2018), and I will try not to repeat myself here.
Even so, some overlap is inevitable.
My focus will be on the Abrahamic religions: Judaism, Christianity and Islam.2 The liberal
versions of these religions are not a recent phenomenon: they have existed as reactions and
counterparts to traditional varieties for many decades – no, for centuries. In fact, we can find
the earliest reformers, the earliest religious thinkers to open a ‘liberal’ perspective, as far back as
the 17th century. They challenged at least some of the accepted tenets of traditional versions,
tenets that were felt to be particularly difficult for contemporary people. Such challenges have
continued over time.
Distinctive to the early 21st century – in contrast to what might have been expected accord-
ing to the widespread ideas about the ‘decline of religion’ – is the strengthening, in all three
Abrahamic religions, of non-liberal versions, and notably of fundamentalist varieties. Jewish fun-
damentalists, specifically in Israel, have had substantial influence: official policy towards the
Palestinians has been deeply affected by their Judaic superiority complex. Much attention has
been paid to versions of Islamic fundamentalism, partly because of their aggressive, often violent,
stance towards other religions. Within Christianity, the world-wide growth of Pentecostalism as
a reaction to earlier theological liberalism has been widely remarked upon.3 But there have also
been reactions within the traditional churches: Richard Cimino describes the Biblical Witness
Fellowship as a grassroots Protestant renewal – but renewal, here, away from liberalism and back
towards traditional Protestant viewpoints (2001).

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 Liberal religion

All this is likely to have influenced how liberal religion presents the ‘counter-argument’ to
this upsurge in fundamentalist views. It would be interesting to know whether liberal religion
has grown in response to this ‘turn to the right’ or whether it has been ‘squeezed’. Such an
exercise can be attempted for individual countries, where country statistics are available.Yet even
there, it would remain a hazardous enterprise, as statistics are not organized according to a scale
from ‘liberalism’ to ‘fundamentalism’, nor do they show to what extent different religious con-
gregations may be shifting towards one or the other. What tends to emerge in many countries
is an increase in those who declare themselves without religion. By way of example, figures for
The Netherlands from 2010 to 2018 show growth in those declaring themselves to be without
religion from 45% to 53%, a fall in Roman Catholics from 27% to 22%, and basically steady
figures for other denominations, including Islam.4 As some of those other denominations can be
regarded as being towards the non-liberal side of the spectrum, this does suggest that – at least
in one specific country – there is no clear shift either towards the liberal or the non-liberal side.
Most forms of liberal religion share a focus on the here and now, on inner-worldly issues,
on the world we live in rather than on the hereafter – issues such as civil rights, racism, wom-
en’s reproductive freedom, gay rights, stopping nuclear proliferation or the environmental crisis
(Parker 2010). Yet, it is essential to remember that the origins of these contemporary views lie
in the 19th century or even earlier. The liberal religion we speak of today is not a recent, or a
merely modern-day, phenomenon. More on this shortly.
In the American Protestant churches, such a here-and-now approach has been called Social
Gospel Christianity. Side by side with the Social Gospel Christians, we find the Universalists,
who are above all concerned with ‘getting along’ with each other and with others. Again, it is
the here and now that is the focus: when love prevails, Heaven on earth is thought to be achiev-
able. The Universalists oppose the ‘ultimate division of the saved and the damned’ (ibid:10).
Parker, a professor of theology, states: ‘We come to know this world as paradise when our hearts
and souls are reborn through the arduous and tender task of living rightly with one another and
the earth (ibid:16). A similar note is struck by John Buehrens in the same volume: ‘Progressive
eschatology has the courage to hope for justice, peace, and sustainability in this world. The one
we have been given’ (2010:22). Since its emergence within the Roman Catholic Church in the
1960s, Liberation Theology, and the adoption of its main principles in many other religions,
has focused on the experiences of those who are poor, oppressed and marginalized (Gutierrez
1973).
Traditional religious communities – as opposed to liberal ones – can be seriously oppressive,
often by holding out the threat of hell for those who do not conform. As a result, people can
develop significant misgivings about organized religion, especially if they have no experience of
a more liberal variety.Yet, religious communities can also be ‘communities of resistance’ in unjust
dominant cultures, resistance that is rarely effective when attempted by individuals on their own.

Good religious communities convert people to the way of life our society needs to
move to: from believing that violence is redemptive to practicing justice and compas-
sion; from going it alone to giving and receiving care from others; from isolating one-
self in individualism to sharing work on behalf of the common good.
(Parker 2010:45)

I have no intention, here, of going at length into the historical background of liberal religion,
yet a few main points need to be made. The original impulse for liberal religion came from the
Protestant side. ‘Modernizers’ in the Catholic Church and within Judaism basically followed
their lead, though often without acknowledging this. A significant contributing factor was the

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rise of biblical criticism in the 19th century: it led to texts, hitherto regarded as sacred, being
examined ‘objectively’. All reformist approaches wanted to adapt to the modern world and fully
take account of the findings of science; they believed tradition to be something that develops,
and they accepted that there was a core to the belief system that should remain untouched
and a layer on the fringes, so to speak, that could change. Yet the details here could well be
challenged, and issues can and did arise as to how such issues should be settled and by whom.
‘Modernizers’ in religion are fissiparous: modernist congregations tend to split. This is especially
so among Protestant liberals. I am not just referring to people with modernist or liberal views but
to modernist congregations. Such separate, ‘different’ congregations exist among Protestants and
Jews, and to a more limited extent in the Roman Catholic Church; they are considerably more
difficult to identify as between different mosques. Yes, there are mosques whose Imams have a
more liberal approach to Islam, but while among Jews and Protestants, these liberal approaches
crystallized out into separate, progressive movements, and to a more limited extent also among
Roman Catholics (especially in the USA, as will be shown below), in Islam, no such crystalliza-
tion took place.
Another issue that needs to be mentioned is the way in which identity has come to be increas-
ingly intertwined with religion. Especially for immigrants, notably those in Western Europe
from Islamic countries, religion has taken on greater importance in how they understand them-
selves (how they experience their identity) and how they are seen by others. In contrast, religion
is likely to be less prominent in the identity of liberals: after all, they have replaced aspects of
the traditional and more assertive religious views (‘we know’) with more open-minded and
questioning approaches. Liberals are what they are in part because religion plays a less constrain-
ing part in their identity make-up and in the way they run their daily lives, as compared to the
more traditional believers. Even so, the four dimensions of identity construction, pinpointed by
Hervieu-Léger (1999), remain important to liberals.These are (1) communitarian: the distinguish-
ing social and symbolic markers, such as circumcision or practising the five pillars of Islam; (2)
ethical: the acceptance of values related to the religious tradition; (3) cultural: doctrine, books, art
within the tradition; (4) emotional: the feelings that accompany identity.
I have already suggested that there is much variation in the extent to which people who
profess to be of a particular religious persuasion actually follow its directives. In any religious
community, there will be those who try to ‘live by the book’, but others will be more easy-
going about the extent to which they follow all the prescriptions and prohibitions. This is also
the case for those who belong to liberal congregations: their members can be on quite a range
of ‘correctness’ on matters such as weekly presence in church or synagogue or the following of
dietary restrictions (e.g., many Jews do not eat pork, but are much less concerned about keeping
the many other dietary rules – which is true, incidentally, also for many who are members of
more traditional congregations). Yet as Frank Opton (1982), a leader of the Unitarian Church
in the USA, has emphasized, whatever the actual behaviour of their members, liberal varieties
of religion shun indifference and do not promote what might be called ‘religion lite’. They can
differ considerably from each other, even within the same religious family, but they take religion
seriously and want to be seen to take it seriously.
Let us now consider in more detail the liberal approaches in Christianity, Judaism and Islam. I
shall begin with Protestantism because it was among Protestants that liberal ideas first took hold.

Liberal Protestantism
It is, of course, problematic to speak of ‘Protestantism’ in this context because of the many varie-
ties of Protestantism, also among liberals.Yes, there are some aspects that are shared by all: their

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opposition to seeing good deeds as helping to lead to salvation, thought to be only attainable
through faith (sola fides); the reluctance to focus on ‘the sacred’; and the widely shared mistrust of
powerful Church institutions – all developed in the original ‘stand-off ’ from Roman Catholicism.
Yet there are considerable differences between the diverse denominations, Lutherans, Calvinists,
Anglicans, Baptists, Methodists, Pentecostals: some of these are liberal, some are fundamentalist,
and many are in between, or with a more or less formal range of views. Remember also that the
very concept of fundamentalism comes from the Protestant sphere. The contrasts between the
extremes are stark.
The roots of liberal Protestantism go back to the 16th century and the followers of Jacobus
Arminius in The Netherlands (Klooster 2006). One of the main issues they had with the domi-
nant Calvinists, an issue which reverberates with liberal Protestants today, related to the formers’
view that only the ‘elect’ are saved. Whether you were among those or not was not something
you could influence: it was simply an unknowable given. In contrast, the Arminians called the
Remonstrants in The Netherlands insisted that salvation solely depended upon a person’s faith
or lack of it; if you had faith, you could/would be saved. They were influential outside The
Netherlands, notably through John Wesley in the UK, the founder of the Methodist movement.
Of importance were also the ideas of tolerance regarding belief (different variants should be
able to exist side by side within the same Church) and of freedom of conscience: the Arminians
opposed the ‘imposition’ of specific beliefs.
In the 19th century, liberal Protestants had to come to terms with the new insights in science,
notably the theory of evolution, and face up to the consequences of raw capitalism. Important
figures straddling the 19th and 20th centuries were Walter Rauschenberg (1861–1918) in the
USA and Ernst Troeltsch (1865–1923) in Germany.They stressed that theology should be just as
open to criticism as other branches of learning and that Christianity needed to be understood
in the context of other historical religions. They also focused on the contemporary socio-
economic reality, with its dominant materialism and glorification of power (‘might is right’),
which had led to widespread poverty and exclusion. This was seen as a social evil, even as a sin.
In general, liberal religious views have tended to go together with progressive approaches to
the social and economic order, with human rights and tolerance – but not tolerance for social
injustice or discrimination – very much up-front (Muray 2008; Chapman 2001).
Some issues are salient in the liberal Protestant view. There is hesitancy about the portrayal
of God, on the whole not seen as a being ‘out there’, let alone ‘up there’. God is seen as imma-
nent rather than transcendent, and humans can only ‘understand’ God through their critical
questions. Miracles and literalist interpretations of the Bible are rejected. The Bible has to be
approached with respect, but also as a historical document. Much of what characterizes liberals
is what they do not believe: that Jesus walked on water, that Christ was literally resurrected, that
Mary gave birth as a virgin, that Christianity is the only religion that brings salvation. Protestant
liberals hold that the notion of God has evolved over time and that it continues to evolve. A
good example is Anglican Bishop John Robinson, who interpreted God as the ground of our
being (Robinson 1963). The Bible is regarded as a time-bound document with its own internal
contradictions, which needs interpretation in the light of contemporary concerns. While tradi-
tionalists have looked forward to the time that God will solve the problems of the world, liberals
do not believe in such intervention: it is up to people to make the best of life on earth. Liberal
Protestantism is not a clearly demarcated movement, though the different elements all tend to
pull away from authority, stressing instead the autonomy of the spirit and the centrality of ques-
tions rather than answers (Klooster 2006).
As for the organization of congregations, liberal Protestants insist on the avoidance of top-
down authority: preachers should not raise their finger and tell congregants what to do. Rather

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they should help them to see how each can lead her or his own life according to scripture. There
may be circumstances when the Church can, and should, provide moral leadership – an example
may be how to behave towards recent immigrants – but overall, people should be left to come to
their own moral conclusions. Reaching such conclusions can be helped along with the discussions
in church community groups. Historically, Protestant churches have been patriarchal, and among
Protestant communities (even among the non-liberal), there have been various forms of feminist
reaction. At the very least, that historical patriarchy is rejected; as one travels along the traditional-
liberal continuum towards the liberal end, there is also the rejection of ‘compulsory’ heterosexuality.
All of this is starkly different from the beliefs of those at the other extreme of the Protestant
spectrum, the Evangelicals, for whom revelation rather than human experience characterizes
‘true religion’, and whose preachers do, or so they appear to believe, have all the answers.
Protestants have long sought to spread their religion overseas (notably in Africa) by mis-
sionary work, with the missions often having a medical component to make them attractive to
people.Yet as Pamela Klassen (2011) has noted, among liberal Protestants in the USA, there has
in recent times been a reaction to those medical missions, whatever their historical importance.
They have come to be seen as aspects of colonialism and Christian triumphalism – ‘an imperi-
alist virus, unfaithful to the teachings of Jesus and inadequate to the challenge of transforming
toxic structures of power’ (ibid:13). Yet ‘healing’, seen as a manifestation of love, has remained
important for liberal Protestants. They ‘moved from medical evangelizers to holistic contempla-
tives, taking on practices such as yoga and Reiki, a Japanese, energy-based form of healing touch.
Their medical missions are no longer rooted in eager evangelism but in a desire for “cross-
cultural experience”’ (ibid:12). Liberal Protestants were also ‘in the vanguard of a sexual revolu-
tion in which the literal “pathologizing” of homosexuality was transformed into a political and
religious movement for the celebration of sexual difference’ (ibid:18). And, not surprisingly, in
the later 20th century, a strong feminist element became part and parcel of liberal Protestantism.
Clearly, it has a significant socio-cultural component. As we shall see, it is not alone in promoting
such a blend of the religious and the secular.
So, Protestants have been liberal pioneers. Many of their innovations have also been taken up
by liberals in other religious congregations.

The Roman Catholic Church and liberal religious views

The first ‘reformers’ within the Roman Catholic Church emerged in the late 18th century, with
priests such as Josef Eybel in Austria-Hungary or Abbé Gregoire in France.Their reforming ideas
were influenced by those of the French Revolution and enough to make them suspect once the
political reaction set in.That political reaction came to be known as the counter-Enlightenment,
re-affirming the unquestionable and unquestioned role of the pope as the infallible primate. A
number of deeply conservative encyclicals were issued, which eroded the idea that the pope was
to act with the bishops. Those encyclicals squarely rejected independent critique of scripture,
which was being promoted by some (quite isolated) ‘modernists’ in the Church, by priests such
as Alfred Loisy. Pope Pius X (1903–1914) was particularly angered by their modernist ideas.
Pope Pius XI (1922–1939) was more open to certain liberal views, stood up strongly to
the Nazis, went along with a shift towards spirituality, accepted the idea of the People of God
and supported Catholic Action, a lay movement with separate branches for workers, university
students and others. These developments weren’t ‘liberal’ as such, yet they helped make the idea
acceptable that ‘issues’ could be discussed. In France, the movement Nouvelle Théologie was at
first driven by Dominican monks, later by the Jesuits. It encountered opposition in Rome; Pope
Pius XII (1939–1958) insisted that theologians should only transmit the Church’s official and

13
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accepted views, not give their own interpretations.The great palaeontologist and scientist Pierre
Teilhard de Chardin (1881–1955), who helped the Church face up to scientific facts, was origi-
nally also given a hard time because of his views.Yet eventually, renewal also came to the Roman
Catholic Church, most prominently through the efforts of Pope John XXIII (1958–1963) and
the Second Vatican Council, convened by him. Notably, there was the fact that the Council was
allowed to set its own agenda. Pope John’s encyclicals, Mater et Magistra (1961) and Pacem in Terris
(1963) were trail-blazers in the socio-economic sphere and dealt specifically with the issue of
underdevelopment, which had moved increasingly into the limelight. Pope John also allowed
the discussion about doctrine to reopen, and he reversed the isolation of the proponents of the
Nouvelle Théologie.The role of the laity as the People of God went some way towards softening the
previously unalloyed hierarchical structure. The current pope, Francis, is – despite considerable
opposition from within the Vatican – manifestly a liberal and innovator.
An important area of that innovation has been the slow opening up to the idea that priests
should be allowed to marry, for which there is increasing pressure from within the Church.
Married Anglican priests have been allowed to move over to the Roman Catholic Church,
while married men can act as priests in remote regions such as the Amazon.These developments
have no doubt been reinforced by the sorry saga of paedophilia. These are as yet limited steps,
but they suggest a deeper change may eventually occur, in spite of the opposition of non-liberal
elements among the hierarchy.
Since the mid-1970s, there has been a specific liberal reform group among American Roman
Catholics called Call to Action (CTA). According to Cimino (2001), at the beginning of the mil-
lennium, it had some 20,000 members, of which around two-thirds were laity and one-third
religious (most of these are said to be nuns).5 CTA members have been locked out of parish
buildings, and some have even been excommunicated by their bishops. The movement had
developed following a consultation called by the American bishops collectively. Over 800,000
responses were received after parish gatherings had formulated answers to the question as to
what was most important in their lives as Catholics. Those responses focused on the desire
for changes in the Church’s approach to issues such as birth control, clerical celibacy, capital
punishment and economic justice. In Chicago, the ‘local association of liberal Catholics moved
toward a national expression after Catholic activists attended a 1987 Vatican synod on the role
of the laity and realized that they would not have much of a role unless they started organizing’
(ibid:125). Their liberal views on theological matters went together with their progressive per-
spectives on socio-economic issues, human rights and democracy; like Liberation Theology, they
made the link between social justice and salvation explicit. CTA saw itself as ‘carrying out the
unfinished agenda of the [Vatican] council’ (ibid:139).
CTA organized annual conferences, which focused on reform and renewal in the Roman
Catholic Church, dealing with matters such as the role of women in the Church. However,
there was a widespread sense that you couldn’t have much influence to bring about change in
the Church; this led to considerable frustration. Cimino gives much detail derived from inter-
views. One good example is his discussion of Corpus Christi Parish in Rochester, NY.

Women were invited to the altar to consecrate the Eucharist; the unions of gays and
lesbians were publicly blessed; and non-Catholics were openly invited to receive com-
munion. In short, the parish was imbued with the liberal reform spirit that drives CTA
and the host of other progressive groups in American Catholicism. The priest, Father
James Callan, was not only pushing the envelope on contentious issues in the Church
but also building one of the most influential parishes in the city.
(ibid:135)

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Eventually, his bishop excommunicated Callan when he didn’t stop his ‘unorthodox practices’
(ibid:135). A few months later, Callan returned and started his own parish as an independent
Church, Spiritus Christi.6 All this led to serious divisions – there were many who believed you
should continue in the Church, and try to reform it from within. The exclusion of CTA from
the Roman Catholic (RC) mainstream accelerated since the appointment of more conserva-
tive bishops, notably by Pope John Paul II (1978–2005). Pope Francis, as we shall see, has to an
extent reversed this trend.
A few words need to be said on the Catholic Charismatic Renewal Movement, as it is seen
by many in the RC Church as part of a ‘renewal’. And a renewal it is indeed: from the late 1960s,
it ‘generated a more personalized and informal style of faith that spilled out from the prayer
groups and large charismatic conventions to have a significant impact on the contemporary
church’ (Cimino 2001:14). Among charismatic groups, the role of priests, and that of ritual, is
seen as less important than in the mainstream; people often meet in private homes. They see
similarities between themselves and Pentecostals, and ‘speaking in tongues’ occurs among them.
They regard their approach as a throwback to the ‘miraculous and communitarian character of
the early church’ (ibid:16). After initial hesitancy, the hierarchy broadly approved of the move-
ment, and Pope John Paul II was a ‘fan’. That confirms that the movement, though a ‘renewal’,
does not represent an opening towards liberalism: its position is firmly on the side of tradition. It
is best seen as a ‘sideshow’ to the mainstream Church.7
More broadly, the RC Church has persisted as an organization in which hierarchy remains
dominant and the pope’s role central. This has not remained unchallenged: as long ago as the
early 18th century, the Old Catholics separated from the RCs, with the former (still an active
religious movement in The Netherlands and elsewhere in Europe8) objecting specifically to the
concept of papal infallibility. That has been one of the main issues that have led to the forma-
tion of ‘non-Roman’ Catholic congregations. Many of these continue to operate, especially in
the USA, even though they are not particularly visible internationally. Other major non-Roman
Catholics are the Anglicans and the Orthodox.
Julie Byrne (2016) has focused on these ‘other Catholics’ (a label already used in the US
Census of 1890!), a motley collection of congregations, some of which are in fact more tradi-
tionalist than the mainstream RC Church. Even so, it is a label that mainly covers ‘left-leaning’,
liberal congregations. Byrne recognizes that these independent Catholics are few in number
– possibly no more than 1 million in the USA, compared to some 64 million RCs. Yet today,
‘many left-leaning independents not only ordain women, but also perform same-sex marriages,
open communion to all, and allow multiple religious affiliations, among other surprising things’
(ibid:4). Since Vatican II, Rome has become less intolerant of them, even considering them as
part of the ecumene. Byrne’s research has focused on the Church of Antioch, founded in 1959
by the Dutch-born Californian Herman Spruit, who included women in the ministry from the
start and whose partner, Meri Spruit, succeeded him as presiding bishop. Byrne notes that many
of the ‘Antioch-connected churches are liberal, eclectic, and metaphysical. But other offspring
lean right, because Herman made friends on the conservative side as well’ (ibid:13). And she
observes:

Many Roman Catholics believe that women should be priests, but some independents
are women priests. Many Roman Catholics accept other religious truths, but some
independents hail the Buddha at mass. Many Roman Catholics question bishops’ deci-
sions, but independents question the idea that Catholicism is only real if your bishops
are Vatican-approved.
(ibid:19)

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The Church of Antioch split in 2010; in this respect, it was no different from many independ-
ent churches, notably among Protestants. But most of the independent Catholics, though they
modify Catholicism in a number of ways, do ‘keep succession, sacraments, and saints, as well
as identification with the word “Catholic” … Left-leaning independent Catholics showcase
conciliarism, liberalism, and modernism. They precociously consecrated black men, ordained
women, and married gay people. They dropped sin and universalized salvation’ (ibid:291).
Vatican II accepted some of these views to a limited extent, but it is worth remembering that
Benedict XVI (2005–2013) called women’s ordination a ‘grave crime’.Yet, it cannot be doubted
that world-wide, RCs have wanted increased participation in Church governance. The inde-
pendent Catholics have provided that.

Jewish approaches to liberalism

In most countries, liberalism among Jewish congregations has taken two forms – a moder-
ate one, called reform in the UK and conservative in the USA, and a more ‘radical’ version,
called respectively liberal/progressive in the UK and reform in the USA. There, another non-
Orthodox movement is that of the Reconstructionists, who see Judaism as a civilization rather
than as a revealed religion.The antecedents of Jewish liberalism do not go back as far as those in
the RC Church, let alone among the Protestant liberals. Jewish liberalism was given its earliest,
though incomplete, impulse in the late 18th century through the work of Moses Mendelssohn
(1729–1786) – incomplete because Mendelssohn remained a member of his Orthodox congre-
gation and accepted many aspects of its belief system that have come under criticism from liberal
congregations in more recent times. It was the French Revolution and its incorporation of the
Jews as full French citizens that changed the situation dramatically, most clearly among the Jews
of Germany, where the first explicitly liberal synagogue was founded early in the 19th century.
When others followed, they bundled together as the Reform Tempel Verein, whose congrega-
tions accepted the historical approach to Judaism of the followers of the so-called Wissenschaft
des Judentums. They wanted to see traditions adapted to the contemporary world and regarded
the Prophets, and their universalist ethical teaching and emphasis on social justice, as more
important than the ever-so-detailed prescriptions and prohibitions found in the Talmud, in the
Mishnah and even in the Torah. These were regarded as hindrances to the full incorporation of
Jews in the surrounding nation.
An important figure in the crystallization of a liberal Jewish world-view was Abraham Geiger
(1810–1874). As Koltun-Fromm (2006) notes, for Geiger the issue of the personal meaning of
religion for the believer was fundamental, and this needed to be explored in an engagement
with ‘modernity’. When commandments have lost their force and have become ‘dead letters’,
keeping them was regarded as showing a lack of personal integrity. Geiger’s liberalism went only
so far – he notably regarded women as belonging in the private, household sphere and accepted
the patriarchal conceptions of traditional Judaism – a far cry from liberal Judaism today, which
strongly emphasizes the equality of women and men. Koltun-Fromm’s interpretation is clear:
‘The liberal’s search for religious authority is rooted not in fact but in meaning, not in history
but in memory, not in the past as such but in an ethical presence that bridges that past with
contemporary moral aspirations’ (ibid:39). And as he notes later, history is a source of personal
meaning, not ‘the truth’, but personal meaning within a communal framework.
Today, after abandoning the more extreme approaches that were at times adopted in the
early years – in some places services were even held on Sunday rather than on Saturday – liberal
Judaism continues to stress that laws, originally formulated more than 2000 years ago, need
to be reconsidered in the light of contemporary reality and that people should above all be

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concerned with the spirit rather than the letter of those laws. Similarly, the religious services
and rituals of the synagogue have been ‘updated’. Although in the liturgy, God continues to be
mentioned in ways that echo traditional formulations, which rather jars with people’s beliefs
in this context, liberal Jewish leaders will voice uncertainty about the very idea of God (and
not just because of the question ‘where was God during the Holocaust’), while the liberal-
ism in religion crosses over into socio-political liberalism, notably in relation to Israel and the
Palestinians (Sarah 2012).
This fits broadly with the ideas of the American movement Jewish Renewal, as depicted by
Richard Cimino (2001). Jewish ‘Renewalists’ were concerned about the disaffection of young
people, and they initiated a range of innovations meant to be attractive to them, notably the
havurah movement, from the Hebrew word for ‘fellowship’. This argued that you didn’t need
rabbis or cantors for a meaningful service: laypersons could gather in homes to discuss how
Judaism was relevant to everyday life. (Echoes, here, of the CTA movement among Catholics.)
Relevance was considered the mainstay in this return to a more holistic Judaism, and it revived
the interest in mysticism that had been central for the Hasidim. It spilled over into community
action, with emphasis on activities under the heading of tikkun olam (repair the world). Two
rabbis were of particular importance to Jewish Renewal: Rabbi Zalman Schachter and Rabbi
Shlomo Carlebach.
For the Renewalists, spiritual traditions were at the core – also non-Jewish ones. This was
different

from the modernizing of tradition that Reform Judaism sought. The modernist
approach was ‘editing halakhah [Jewish law] on the basis of personal preference’. In its
place, Schachter proposed a ‘psycho-halakhic process’, which says that ‘everything we
have done in halakhah is important but we have to ask, What function did it fulfil in
an earlier time and what’s the best way to fulfil that function in our current situation?’
(ibid:151)

Equality became a central theme – notably that between women and men – and broad lay
participation in services was seen as essential. Renewalists accept women, gays and lesbians on
equal terms, while in traditional synagogues, ten men are required to provide the minyan (the
number of people needed to hold a service); among the Renewal synagogues it is ten persons.
The old, basically patriarchal, prayers were replaced by new texts that stressed inclusivity and
equality, using gender-neutral language – a change that also occurred among the liberal move-
ment in the UK. Spirituality, community life and social action were given prominence. Cimino
gives various examples, such as:

Rabbi Jonathan, leader of a prominent New York synagogue, has gradually integrated
many renewal practices into his congregation: meditation classes are offered weekly,
and healing services are held regularly. The contemplative dimension of Judaism is
found in the synagogue’s prayerful Sabbath services, punctuated with long periods of
silence, as well as in the music by popular renewal composers.
(ibid:164)

Most of the Renewal adherents interviewed by Cimino do not want the movement to become
another ‘branch’ of Judaism, side by side with the Orthodox, Conservatives, Reform and
Reconstructionists. But there is a division among them ‘between those who see the move-
ment as representing a new brand of Judaism and others who see the renewal as exactly that

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– a r­evitalization of existing Jewish institutions and theology’ (ibid:169). How the latter option
would play out remains an open question.

Liberal Islam?
Nader Hashemi wrote:

The political analysis of my left-of-center friends was particularly unhelpful in under-

standing the complicated politics of Muslim societies where today religion is a key
marker of identity, secularism has few supporters, and social movements whose par-
ticipants self-identify with Islam are gaining in popularity and are important players in
emerging social and political debates.
(2009:x)

He may have been talking about politics, but the quote hardly suggests that there is likely to be
much space for a liberal version of Islam. He later argues that, in contrast to Western societies,
modernization in Islamic ones has meant ‘dictatorship, repression and corruption – in short
social injustice’ (ibid:133). As we have seen among liberal Protestants, Catholics and Jews, social
justice is at the very heart of their conception of liberal religion; here could be a first important
difference, especially as religion continues to be ‘a key marker of identity in Muslim societies’
(ibid:135). In this context, the modernizing efforts in Iran of Shah Reza Khan and his son
Mohammed Pahlevi affected the clergy especially, as their powers in the fields of law and educa-
tion were reduced substantially – a useful reminder in the context of the enormous increase in
those powers, there, after the Islamic revolution.
Hashemi argues that the more the West rejected traditional Islamic practices (e.g., corporal/
capital punishments), the more Muslims have seen these as central to Islam. Khomeini (and his
successor Khamenei) specifically regarded the idea of the separation of religion and politics as
imperialist. Secularism – a portal to liberal religion? – is interpreted very negatively, both among
Shi’a and Sunni Muslims, and is in fact regarded as the equivalent of atheism.
Hashemi rightly notes that in the West, religious reformation preceded secularization. His
view that in the Muslim world, it has been the reverse is a more dubious proposition: what
religious reformation, one must ask? Yes, there has been modernization of society in various
Muslim majority countries – for example, in the judiciary and the educational system – but
there are no significant examples of changes in the religious arena. In fact, as Hashemi himself
observes:

a significant portion of Muslim society today is responsive to political appeals that call
for the integration of religion and state and a rejection of secular political principles.
This is because the religious underpinnings that shape and inform Muslim political
culture allow for it.
(ibid:152)

Hashemi’s book was published ten years ago, and it is interesting to see how in certain respects, he
‘got things wrong’. He stated that Indonesia and Turkey had the ‘brightest’ prospects for democ-
racy. It is hardly a view one can hold in 2021, with Turkey in the grip of a ‘soft’ Islamist regime
and Indonesia under pressure to introduce shari’a law at sub-national levels. Yes, Indonesia has
continued to avoid self-identification as an Islamic state, and at the beginning of the new millen-
nium, progressive Muslim thinkers (such as Abddurahman Wahid) were encouraged by one of

18
 Emanuel de Kadt

the main Muslim organizations in the country, Muhammadiyah. But that changed around 2005
when conservatives took over. Moreover,

proponents of a formalization of Islamic law within Indonesia’s legal and judicial sys-
tem are using the opportunities provided by the devolution and decentralization of
power from the central government to provincial and local authorities to introduce
‘Regional Shari‘a Orders’ or perda syariat.
(Kersten 2016:286/7)

As for Turkey, the Fetullah Gülen movement, with its ‘soft and conciliatory voice on the most
hotly debated subjects’, was said to have an ‘extensive’ reach in Turkish society (Hashemi
2009:155f). Indeed, at the end of the first decade of the millennium, that was true: there was co-
operation between the government of President Erdoğan and the movement.Yet that co-oper-
ation fell apart from 2014 and completely vanished as Erdoğan accused Gülen of being behind
the 2017 coup attempt. Since then, the movement has been rigorously repressed in Turkey.
For all its openness to dialogue and its holding back from extreme views, the Gülen move-
ment cannot really be seen as representing a liberal version of Islam.Yes, it can be argued that its
‘interpretation of Islam is decidedly tolerant, pluralistic, modern, and compassionate’ (ibid:156).
And it is a movement, which holds together groups of people with broadly similar views. But it
would be perverse to characterize these as ‘liberal’: its perspective on Islam remains conventional
and conservative (see also Balci & Miller (eds.) 2012).
A significant problem with the concept of liberal Islam arises from the fact that mainstream
Islam tends to be called ‘moderate’ just because it keeps its distance from Islamic fundamentalist
versions, which, largely because of their frequent appeals to violence, are much more in the pub-
lic eye than the fundamentalists among Christians or Jews.Yet the fact that (often indiscriminate)
violence is opposed hardly qualifies such ‘moderates’ as liberals. Mainstream Islam continues to
assert that Islam is both the superior religion and the ‘final’ one – a far cry from the openness to
other views promoted among Christian and Jewish liberals.
Many individual Muslims do, however, feel that it is alright to interpret Islam in a ‘liberal’
way – despite the fact that historically Islam holds that interpretation (ijtihad) is only permissible
by officially sanctioned clergy – using free reason when approaching the sacred books of Islam.
In this respect, they are in tune with many Islamic scholars from the 19th century onwards, who
thought that the official interpreters, the mullahs, were too distant from the issues of contem-
porary society to be able to adequately relate to them. Yet there was always the risk of being
called an apostate, which would potentially expose them to the violence of those who regarded
themselves as the upholders of the true faith.
A valuable approach to liberal Islam can be found in Rabasa et al. (2007).While its focus is on
what is needed to build moderate Islamic networks and to what kind of people priority should
be given in this effort, it does actually discuss in some detail what can be meant by moderate (or
liberal) Islam.While this is Rabasa’s view rather than how moderate Muslim’s define themselves,
it is nevertheless useful.
Moderate Muslims are defined not so much in religious as in political terms: they are people

who share the key dimensions of democratic culture. These include support for
democracy and internationally recognized human rights (including gender equality
and freedom of worship), respect for diversity, acceptance of nonsectarian sources of
law, and opposition to terrorism and other illegitimate forms of violence.
(ibid:66)

19
 Liberal religion

The idea of an Islamic state, run by self-appointed clerics, is taboo; the dividing line is whether
shari’a should apply, as under shari’a men and women, and believers and unbelievers, do not have
the same rights.
Shari’a is seen as a product of historical circumstances – cf. Jewish liberal views of the Torah
and Talmud. Specifically, Gülen is said to promote a form of moderate Sufi Islam: here, again, we
need to ask whether that moderate Islam is actually liberal or merely not fundamentalist – in other
words, mainstream. The issue of gender equality is a touchstone: shari’a remains, in that respect,
decidedly non-liberal. Rabasa reminds us that outside Europe, in countries such as Indonesia,
moderate Islam may well have roots in local culture, ‘very different from the deracinated and
globalized Islam of the Salafis’ (ibid:89).Yet criticism, let alone rejection, of core aspects of Islam
is regarded by traditionalists as apostasy, which justifies the killing of such critics by any means,
an issue that must surely be very much in the minds of individual Muslim liberals. Among con-
temporaries, one might mention Fazlur Rahman (1919–1988) from Pakistan or Abdolkarim
Soroush (b. 1945) from Iran. Soroush distinguished between religion, which is ‘sacred and heav-
enly’, and religious knowledge, seen as ‘human and earthly’; the latter may, and needs to be,
persistently criticized (Ahmed 2013). Soroush lasted in Iran until the year 2000, though stripped
of all his public functions – eventually ending up in the USA.
There are other Islamic thinkers who can be regarded as liberals (see de Kadt 2018). Liberal
Muslims believe that Islamic values are consistent with democracy, pluralism, human rights and
individual freedoms. Yet they have not come together as such, have not seen themselves as a
group, a movement, nor have they acted as such. Consequently, while there are liberal Muslims,
one cannot speak of a liberal Islam.

A brief conclusion
Which of the findings above are most noteworthy? I would begin with the fact that in the
21st century, possibly with the exception of Roman Catholicism, among the Abrahamic reli-
gions, it is fundamentalism, rather than any liberal variety, that stands out as growing in influence
and numbers: Christian Pentecostalism, the Jewish sense of superiority increasingly nurtured in
Israel, violence in support of religion among both Shi’a and Sunni Muslims. And there is no
indication that this is likely to change any time soon.
Liberal religious views have developed more strongly since the 19th century, and for all vari-
eties, the focus, today, is less on the afterlife and more on the here and now: on civil rights, the
rights of gays and lesbians, the environment in a broad sense. There is a measure of uncertainty
around the meaning of ‘God’, though this hardly shows up in the liturgy and prayers. Individual
liberals (in fact, individuals among all believers) differ in the extent to which they follow the
prescriptions and prohibitions of their religious community: some are quite strict, many can
be said to be lax about the details. Even so, liberal religion is emphatically not regarded, by its
proponents, as ‘religion lite’.
It was among Protestants that liberal views first crystallized out in The Netherlands in the
late 16th century, with separate liberal communities gradually being set up and coming together
in distinct movements. Tolerance of other beliefs was distinctive for these right from the start;
theology was not set in stone and could be examined critically. Top-down authority has been
frowned upon, as has patriarchy in more recent times. A range of views continues to flourish
among liberal Protestant communities.
Liberal views have emerged in the RC Church much later, with the Papacy of John XXIII,
notably through the Second Vatican Council called by him. Distinct movements of a liberal kind
were formed in different parts of the world. In Latin America, Liberation Theology was a fore-

20
 Emanuel de Kadt

runner (though liberal mainly in a socio-political sense rather than theologically). In the USA,
the movement CTA was distinctly anti-patriarchal and innovated in ways that brought the ire
of the hierarchy upon it.There, a distinct development was that of the emergence of non-Roman
Catholic communities, which followed in broad lines Catholic liturgies but explicitly distanced
themselves from the tutelage of Rome.
Liberal Jewish communities, in the USA as well as in Europe, to a greater or lesser degree
distanced themselves from the strict observance that was expected by the Orthodox: the empha-
sis shifted away from ‘rules’ as developed in the Old Testament and later Jewish texts, towards
greater stress on ‘meaning’ and social relevance, as developed by the Prophets. Even though the
representation of God continues to be strictly traditional in the liturgy, there is theological hesi-
tancy around the concept. Equality between women and men is a centrepiece, and community
action is encouraged.
Finally, as for Islam, religion continues to be central to Islamic societies, be they Sunni or
Shi’a, and this is to an extent reflected among Muslims in the ‘diaspora’. Anything regarded as
unorthodox tends to be rejected, and those who hold unorthodox views may well be called
apostates, making them liable to attack (even to death) on the part of traditionalists. This is a
serious problem for individuals, especially Imams, who interpret Islam in a liberal manner, the
Islamic liberals. Islamic law, treats people unequally – men versus women, Muslims versus non-
Muslims. Islamic liberals take their distance from that aspect of the shari’a, as well as from the
idea of an Islamic state, which imposes its views on citizens.Yet Islamic liberals are circumspect
in their presentation of self, and (hence?) there are no organizations that explicitly represent
them, in contrast to those found among Christians and Jews.
Liberal religion exists – but it continues to be a rather fragile plant.

Notes
1 See, for example, Miller (2010).
2 Hinduism, under the Modi government, has become clearly more ‘illiberal’, and some research on the
liberals in that situation would be interesting. However, this has to be left to others, more knowledge-
able in that area than myself.
3 Among recent analyses see, for example, Annelise Reid’s MA thesis for Leiden University (2017):
Moved by the Spirit: Sensing the Divine in a Pentecostal Church. https​:/​/ww​​w​.rel​​igiou​​smatt​​ers​.n​​l​/bui​​
lding​​s​-ima​​ges​-a​​nd​-ob​​jects​​/arti​​cle​/m​​oved-​​by​-th​​e​-spi​​r it​-s​​ensin​​g​-the​​-divi​​ne​-in​​​-a​-du​​tch​-p​​entec​​ostal​​
-chur​​ch/
4 https​:/​/ww​​w​.sta​​tista​​.com/​​stati​​stics​​/5277​​82​/po​​pulat​​ion​-o​​f​-the​​-neth​​erlan​​​ds​-by​​-reli​​gion/​
5 Heidi Schlumpf gives the same figure in a recent article, notwithstanding the fact that the movement
is said to have lost some 5000 members over the past decade (Schlumpf 2019).
6 See below, Byrne on the non-Roman Catholics.
7 See also the US charismatics website: nsc​-chariscenter​.org​/about​-​ccr/.
8 See the World Council of Churches’ summary article on the Old Catholics: https​:/​/ww​​w​.oik​​oumen​​e​
.org​​/en​/c​​hurch​​-fami​​lies/​​old​-c​​atho​l​​ic​-ch​​urche​s

References
Ahmed, Safdar, 2013, Reform and Modernity in Islam. The Philosophical, Cultural and Political Discourse among
Muslim Reformers, I.B. Tauris, London & New York.
Balci, Tamer & Christopher L. Miller (eds.), 2012, The Gülen Hizmet Movement: Circumspect Activism in
Faith-Based Reform, Cambridge Scholars Publishing, Newcastle upon Tyne, UK.
Buehrens, John A., 2010, ‘Last things first‘, in: Buehrens & Parker, 2010, Beacon Press, Boston.
Buehrens, John A. & Rebecca Ann Parker, 2010, A House for Hope: The Promise of Progressive Religion for the
Twenty-First Century, Beacon Press, Boston.

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 Liberal religion

Byrne, Julie, 2016, The other Catholics. Remaking America’s Largest Religion, Columbia University Press, New
York.
Chapman, Mark D., 2001, Ernst Troeltsch and Liberal Theology: Religion and Cultural Synthesis in Wilhelmine
Germany, Oxford University Press, Oxford, UK.
Cimino, Richard, 2001, Trusting the Spirit: Renewal and Reform in American Religion, Jossey-Bass, San
Francisco, CA.
Gutierrez, Gustavo, 1973, A Theology of Liberation, Orbis Books, Maryknoll, NY.
Hashemi, Nader, 2009, Islam Secularism and Liberal Democracy. Toward a Democratic Theory for Muslim Societies,
Oxford University Press, Oxford, UK.
Hervieu-Léger, Danièle, 1999, La religion en mouvement. Le pélerin et le converti, Flammarion, Paris.
De Kadt, Emanuel, 2018, Liberal Religion. Progressive Versions of Judaism, Christianity and Islam, Routledge,
London & New York.
Kersten, Carool, 2016, Islam in Indonesia: The Contest for Society, Ideas and Values, Oxford University Press,
Oxford, UK.
Klassen, Pamela E., 2011, Spirits of Protestantism, Medicine, Healing, and Liberal Christianity, University of
California Press, Berkeley, CA, London, & Los Angeles.
Klooster, Rienk, 2006, Het Vrijzinnig Protestantisme in Nederland, Kok, Amsterdam.
Koltun-Fromm, Ken, 2006, Abraham Geiger’s Liberal Judaism: Personal Meaning and Religious Authority, Indiana
University Press, Bloomington & Indianapolis.
Miller, Richard, 2010, Terror, Religion and Liberal Thought, Columbia University Press, New York.
Muray, Leslie A., 2008, Liberal Protestantism and Science, Greenwood Publishing Group, Westport CT &
London.
Opton, Frank G., 1982, Liberal Religion: Principles and Practice: A Popular Theology, Promotheus Books,
Buffalo, NY.
Parker, Rebecca, 2010, ‘This holy ground‘, in: Buehrens & Parker, 2010, Beacon Press, Boston.
Rabasa, Angel, et. al., 2007, Building Moderate Muslim Networks, RAND Corp, Center for Middle East Public
Policy, Santa Monica, CA.
Robinson, John A.T., 1963, Honest to God, SCM Press, London.
Sarah, Elli Tikvah, 2012, Trouble-Making Judaism, David Paul Books, London.
Schlumpf, Heidi, 2019, ‘Call to action: The ‘loyal left opposition’ – reorganizes amid an uncertain future‘,
National Catholic Reporter, May 6.

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 2
SECULARISM
Linde R. Draaisma and Erin K. Wilson

Introduction
The idea that secularism is itself a distinct ideological construct is a relatively new conceptual
innovation. For the most part, it has only been in the 21st century that scholars, policymakers
and practitioners have explored the proposal that, rather than constituting normal and natural
reality, the ‘secular’, ‘secularity’, ‘secularization’ and ‘secularism’ are premised on distinct ideas
and assumptions about the nature of ‘religion’ as a socio-political category and phenomenon,
and the place of religion in politics and public life.
This increased interest in secularism is hardly surprising, however, considering what pre-
ceded it. Renewed interest in and concern about the apparent resurgence of religion in public
life, when the long-prevailing assumption was that religion would disappear, almost inevitably
leads to critically engaging with and rethinking the paradigm that predicted religion’s demise
in the first place. As part of this critical engagement, scholars have identified that the underlying
assumptions that secular ideologies contain about religion in general and religions, in particular,
are not neutral and universal but subjective and particular. The result has been a plethora of
sophisticated, nuanced studies that have assisted in the development of a more comprehensive
view of the ideological commitments of secularism and their consequences for politics and
public life across different social, political, historical and cultural contexts.
In this chapter, we provide an overview of the contours of secular ideology. We begin with
an exploration and contextualization of the concepts of the secular, secularization, secularity
and secularism, in order to make clear how these interrelated yet distinct ideas differ from one
another and the specific ways in which each is connected to the idea of secularism as ideology.
Following this brief conceptual overview, we provide a more focused analysis of secular
ideologies themselves. While secularism has been understood as both ideology and as a form of
statecraft, the two are interrelated and the one almost inevitably informs the other. There are a
variety of secular ideologies and forms of statecraft, which we briefly discuss. Yet what they all
have in common is the idea that religion is something that can be neatly and cleanly separated
from the rest of human life and activity. Further, each variety of secularism is premised on
implicit normative assumptions about what religion is and does. These implicit embedded nor-
mative assumptions subsequently produce a conceptual structure whereby that which is deemed
religious is subordinated to that which is rendered secular, creating a system of unequal power

23
 Linde R. Draaisma and Erin K. Wilson

relations that has consequences for how individuals, communities and institutions analyse and
respond to the various challenges associated with living together well as a global community
in the 21st century. In the final section of the chapter, we explore how these secular ideologi-
cal power relations affect interpretations and approaches to three global challenges – climate
change, disease pandemics and gender inequality. Dismantling the implicit assumptions of secu-
lar ideologies, which colour these political engagements and policy areas and thereby limit the
scope of vision for developing new initiatives, is an urgent task for scholars, policymakers and
practitioners.

Unravelling secularism: the secular, secularization and secularity

Understanding secularism as an ideology is to describe a complex system of thought that is con-
cerned with the power relationships between systems of beliefs and practices concerned with
the existence of the transcendent; of a realm or realms beyond that which we as human beings
can physically see, touch, hear and measure in some sense; between religion and nonreligion. As
Casanova (2011: 1051) describes it, secularism may be understood as ‘a whole range of modern
worldviews and ideologies concerning “religion”, which may be consciously held and reflex-
ively elaborated or, alternatively, which have taken hold of us and function as taken-for-granted
assumptions that constitute the reigning epistemic doxa or “unthought”’.
Foundational to secularism is the idea that religion is an identifiable realm of human activ-
ity that is distinct and separate from others, such as politics, economics, education and so on.
Religion represents the ‘non-rational’ beliefs about what may or may not exist beyond this
world. The secular and thus secularism are concerned with the ‘rational’, the perceivable in
the here and now. The secular provides the neutral meeting space in which different religions
can encounter one another, discuss, debate and disagree, yet not erupt in chaos and violence
because they are governed by the rational, objective, neutral and universal rules of the secular
sphere. Embedded in this understanding of the world, however, is the implicit assumption that
the secular is superior to and can therefore govern and moderate public religion. It is these
two foundational assumptions – that religion is something that can be clearly identified and
that religion should be governed by the secular – that make secularism an ideology. Ideologies,
including secularism, consist of patterns of ideas about the world believed to be ‘true’, codified
and reinforced by political and social elites (Steger & Wilson, 2012), establishing a system of
discursive and conceptual power that privileges one understanding of the world over others.
Establishing this system of ideological power rests on a series of assumptions about what
religion is and does, as well as about the optimal arrangements for collective social and politi-
cal life. As has been well-established by Talal Asad (2003), amongst others, the idea that religion
is something that can be neatly and cleanly identified and separated out from other realms of
human activity is a relatively modern invention – an invention that is entangled with the emer-
gence and development of secular ideology. Prior to the articulation of secularism, what we
now refer to as religion was seen as part and parcel of the fabric of human existence (and still
is in many places). Religion was not one belief system amongst many others, as Charles Taylor
(2007) describes our ‘secular age’. Rather, religion was reality. As the dominance and power of
particular beliefs and institutions became increasingly questioned, religion came to be seen as
one option amongst many other systems of beliefs and practices. Yet the destabilization of this
power was only made possible through a series of conceptual and philosophical moves that in
turn established the idea of the secular as an immanent realm of human activity, separate and dis-
tinct from the transcendent religious realm. These moves occurred over time and history, as we
briefly explore below. Further, it must be noted that the emergence of secular ideology and the

24
 Secularism

understanding of religion as something separate and distinct has been shaped by the European
experience, and thus many of the assumptions about what religion is and does, contained within
secular ideology, are based on experiences, beliefs and practices associated with Christianity. We
trace this intellectual history in broad brushstrokes by unpacking key concepts associated with
secularism – the secular, secularization and secularity – before fleshing out the ideological struc-
ture of secularism in more detail.

The secular
The concept of ‘the secular’ stems from the Latin word ‘saeculum’, which refers to ‘time’ or ‘age’
and ‘world’. In the Middle Ages, saeculum was the denominator of one side of a binary system
structuring the Medieval European Christian world: the religious, sacred and eternal world on
one side and the secular, profane and temporal world on the other (Casanova, 2011). In this
understanding, the secular and the religious were not mutually exclusive or even competing, but
rather two domains of lived reality, the spiritual and the temporal.
The Christian binary system of the religious/sacred and the secular/profane has remained,
developed and expanded over time, although what these categories actually entail is neither
fixed nor universally agreed upon. What is considered secular and what is considered religious
shifts depending on socio-historical, political, cultural, economic, theological and environmental
circumstances (Wilson, 2012). Despite these differences across contexts, the secular, however
defined or understood, has nonetheless become ‘the dominant category that serves to structure
and delimit, legally, philosophically, scientifically, and politically, the nature and the boundaries
of “religion”’ (Casanova, 2009b: 1063). This dominant place of the secular is observable in the
socio-political milieux of Europe, North America, the former colonial territories of European
powers and international institutions established to foster global cooperation and collective
security (Gutkowski, 2014: 6).
Charles Taylor (2007) provides further insight on this historical development of the secular/
religious binary. In A Secular Age (2007), Taylor posits that the religious and the secular together
form a dyad. Within this dyadic structure, the religious is always the opposite of the secular. The
dyad slowly shifts, from being merely descriptive of equipollent dimensions of existence to an
ontological hierarchy, where religion becomes subordinated to the secular. In addition to this
vertical positioning of religion below the secular, religion and the secular are also placed along a
horizontal temporal line of human progress and development. This is what Taylor (2007) refers
to as the ‘stadial consciousness’; the notion that via enlightenment, religion can and should make
way for secularism, as supposedly shown by Western Europe.

Secularization
In pre-modern times, to secularize largely meant to ‘make worldly’, to transport something
or someone from the religious domain into the secular domain (Casanova, 2011). During the
Protestant Reformation, for example, many properties and objects were ‘secularized’, as art was
removed (or destroyed) from churches and monasteries were dissolved. In contrast, the concept
of secularization in contemporary political settings is more complex. In addition to the origi-
nal meaning of separating the transcendent and supernatural from the immanent and natural,
secularization now also refers to the gradual restriction or removal of religious influences in the
public realm through various institutional, political, legal, social and even theological mecha-
nisms (Wilson, 2012). Peter Beyer (1999) highlights the importance of distinguishing between
secularization as descriptive – articulating observable changes in religious beliefs and practices and

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 Linde R. Draaisma and Erin K. Wilson

the status of religious institutions and communities – and prescriptive – theorizing and predicting
what those changes with regard to religion will and should be. Prescriptive understandings of
secularization are often referred to as the secularization theory or thesis.
Casanova (1994) highlights three components of secularization theory: secularization as the
decline of religiosity, secularization as the privatization of religion, and secularization as the dif-
ferentiation of religion. Whereas in some contexts, secularization might indeed manifest as the
falling numbers of religious adherents, it can also materialize as religion becoming something
that happens behind closed doors, when it is pushed into the private sphere of people’s homes.
The banning of religious symbols from the public sphere is an example of secularization as pri-
vatization. Secularization as differentiation refers to the processes by which religious and politi-
cal institutions and authorities are identified as distinct from one another and their separation
continually managed and reinforced.
Throughout the late 19th and most of the 20th century, dominant forms of secularization
theory posited the decline in religion’s influence, generally taken to refer to religious institu-
tions and beliefs (Herbert, 2003; Swatos Jr & Christiano, 1999). A key assumption of this theory,
building on Weber’s concepts of enchantment and mystery, is that religion is pre-modern, often
irrational, based on superstition and illogical beliefs (see, for example, Apter, 1965; Smith, 1974;
Swatos Jr & Christiano, 1999). Consequently, secularization theorists argued that because reli-
gion is irrational, it will gradually be excluded from society through the process of moderniza-
tion (much like Taylor’s concept of stadial consciousness).
In recent years, however, scholars have challenged this predictive form of secularization the-
ory. The perceived growth of religious violence and religious nationalism during the 1990s
led scholars to re-examine the secularization thesis. In many parts of the world, secularization
has not occurred as expected (Wilson, 2012). Religion’s influence on society and politics has
not necessarily declined but rather has taken on different forms. Further, it is not only about
whether religion continues to influence society or not, but dominant conceptions of what
religion is in the first place have come under increasing scrutiny, placing the very idea of secu-
larization in question.
The transformation – rather than the disappearance – of religion challenges many of the
assumptions on which secularization theory was based. Rather than revisiting these assump-
tions, however, many social scientists have instead employed secularization theory in a descrip-
tive manner. ‘[The] value [of secularization theory] is not and never has been in predicting
outcomes, but rather in offering a useful description of the societal situation in which we find
ourselves with respect to religion’ (Beyer, 1999: 299). In the view of some theorists, seculariza-
tion theory does not predict what will happen to religion as a result of modernity but actually
describes the current situation and provides an opportunity for explaining the challenges that
face religion in the present time. Scholars promoting this use for secularization theory focus
primarily on church attendance figures and the number of individuals who continue to profess
personal religious beliefs. Attention also tends to be on formal, established traditional religions,
particularly Christianity.This focus suggests that a very particular understanding of what religion
is and does underpin such descriptive versions of secularization theory, an understanding that is
heavily reliant on and influenced by Euro-American Christian experiences. It further raises the
question as to whether secularization theory, and its related concepts of secular, secularity and
secularism, have any relevance beyond (Western) European and North American contexts. Even
there, experiences of secularization are neither consistent nor homogeneous.
Casanova (2011) has argued that of the three parts of secularization theory – decline, pri-
vatization and differentiation – only secularization as differentiation remains an analytically
useful framework for investigating socio-political dynamics with regard to the evolution of

26
 Secularism

relationships between religious and state institutions and the place of religion in contemporary
politics and public life. This distinction between religious and secular authority is embedded in
the foundations of the modern state (Mavelli, 2011) and states-system, having been exported
from Europe and imposed in other contexts through the colonial process (Gutkowski, 2014).
The differentiation between nominally ‘secular’ and ‘religious’ authorities is observable across
large swathes of the world.Yet, because the meaning of both the secular and the religious shifts
as a result of context, as we previously observed, processes of secularization and differentiation
between the secular and the religious also diverge widely in different contexts.

Secularity
These different processes of secularization led to different secularities. Put simply, ‘secularity’
refers to ways of being secular. If secularization is seen as a process of (re-)establishing the
relationship between the religious and the secular, whatever form that establishment takes, the
interim outcome of this process is a form of secularity. As we have argued, secularization is
context-specific and not linear, and consequently, there is not one single secularity. Indeed, as
Wohlrab-Sahr and Burchardt (2012) argue, there are ‘multiple secularities’ present and observ-
able within contemporary global politics. Casanova (2007; 2009), while recognizing some
parallels in processes of secularization in Western societies such as The Netherlands and New
Zealand, also identifies multiple patterns within Western Europe. While Europe is often spoken
of as a homogenous, unified whole, patterns of secularity and religious adherence within Europe
are extremely diverse.
A secularity can operate on the individual level but also within a group, nation or civiliza-
tion.Taylor (2007) argues that the West, although comprised of many different sub-societies and
milieux, currently inhabits a secular age. Without ignoring the vast array of personal interpre-
tations of and ideas about religion, he argues that there exists a ‘Western secularity’, in which

the presumption of unbelief has become dominant in more and more of these
[Western] milieux; and has achieved hegemony in certain crucial ones, in the academic
and intellectual life, for instance; whence it can more easily extend itself to others.
(Taylor, 2007: 13)

For Wohlrab-Sahr and Burchardt (2012), secularity predominantly operates at the level of state
governance and politics, coinciding with an understanding of secularism as statecraft, which we
explore further in the next section.

Secularism: statecraft, ideology and ontology

Understanding secularism as an ideology requires moving beyond the somewhat superficial
focus of secularization and secularity, which are predominantly concerned with the separa-
tion of church and state or of religious and political authority. Secular ideology is, rather, a
highly specific, culturally embedded model for managing the relationship between that which
is deemed religious and other areas of human activity. It is not only prominent in the politi-
cal domain, but it also affects culture, education and worldviews. It ‘redefines and transcends
particular and differentiating practices of the self that are articulated through class, gender, and
religion’ (Asad, 2003: 21–22). Secularism constitutes particular practices and ideas along the
natural/supernatural binary, positioning some practices within the category of the natural or
the secular, while others are placed in the category of the supernatural – religion, superstition

27
 Linde R. Draaisma and Erin K. Wilson

or fetishism – and normatively distinguishing between these practices by privileging the secular
over and above the religious (Wilson, 1992).
While we have so far referred to secularism in the singular, it is important to emphasize that
there is not one singular, homogenous secular ideology. Similar to understandings of religion,
secular, secularization and secularity discussed above, secular ideologies manifest and operate
differently across different contexts as a result of history, culture, economics, politics and multi-
farious other factors.
There have been two key ways in which scholars have attempted to develop a typology of
secular ideologies. Most typologies or classifications are concerned with their impacts on con-
temporary domestic and international political institutions and structures. Ahmed Kuru (2009)
identifies passive and assertive variations of secularism, while Elizabeth Shakman Hurd (2008)
highlights laïcité and Judeo-Christian secularism, and Daniel Philpott (2009) speaks of positive,
neutral and hostile secularisms. Each of these typologies offers a variation on a theme, with
passive secularism corresponding to positive and Judeo-Christian secularism, while assertive
secularism is similar to laïcité and hostile secularisms.
The main point of distinction between these secular ideologies is their understanding of
religion and its influence on public life. Passive/neutral/positive/Judeo-Christian secularisms
either do not have especially strong views about what religion is and does or hold the view that
religion can be a positive influence in public life, contributing to the common good. Assertive/
hostile/laïcité secularisms, on the other hand, view religion as potentially dangerous, disruptive
and irrational, a source of violence, division and chaos when permitted in the public sphere.
Consequently, all elements of religion, including expressions of religious belief such as the wear-
ing of religious symbols, should be excluded from politics and public life.
While it is tempting to understand these classifications as simple binaries – a political sys-
tem is governed either by passive or assertive secularism – it is more helpful and closer to what
exists on the ground to see this as a spectrum, with various shades of grey in between the two
extremes of passive and assertive.
These kinds of secular ideologies are the ones that most often shape public policy and the
governance of relationships between religious and secular institutions – what Casanova (1994)
refers to as secular statecraft, aligning with Wohlrab-Sahr and Burchardt’s (2012) understanding
of secularities. States that are governed predominantly by passive secularism may allow or even
foster public expressions of religion and the involvement of religious organizations in public life.
These kinds of involvement could include anything from the provision of welfare and public
services to political campaigning. The United States of America is often held up as the example
par excellence of passive secularism, though there are a number of other states that display similar
approaches to governing religion. Often, however, passively secular states do not view all reli-
gions in the same positive light. Another consequence of secular ideologies is that within the
category of religion, a hierarchy between different religions exists. Thus, the contributions of
some religious groups to politics and public life are viewed more favourably than those of other
religious groups. In passive secular contexts in Europe and North America, Christianity is often
deemed a positive presence in public life, part of the liberal democratic values and cultural herit-
age of these regions (Beaman, 2013). As such, Christian presence in public life is permitted and
at times even encouraged, while the public presence of other religions, and especially of Islam,
is severely discouraged and delimited. By contrast, in India, Hinduism is the religion that holds
the most privileged position when it comes to hierarchies of public religions (Nelson, 2020). In
Indonesia, it is Islam (Menchik, 2015; Gruell & Wilson, 2018). Thus, while passive secularisms
may not assiduously exclude all religion from the public sphere, they are also not neutral with
regard to how they perceive and value different religious traditions and communities.

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 Secularism

Assertive secular statecraft, in contrast, actively polices the boundaries of the public sphere to
exclude religion. Legislation passed by a number of European states in the last decade to ban the
wearing of religious symbols in public places offers an example of this kind of secular ideology
in practice. Kuru (2007) and Hurd (2008) both highlight France as the prototype for assertive
secularism’s manifestation in state politics. It is important to bear in mind, however, that while a
state may be predominantly governed by passive or assertive secularism, it may nonetheless shift
and change its approach to religion over time, alongside changes to governing political parties,
for example, and may even display the influence of different secular ideologies and assumptions
on different policy issues.
The other approach to categorizing secular ideologies, developed by Casanova (2011),
focuses at a more meta-level, distinguishing between political secularisms (which encompasses
passive and assertive secularisms) and philosophical-historical secularisms. While political secu-
larisms are concerned with managing the place of religion in contemporary public and political
life, philosophical-historical secularisms focus on the developmental trajectory of religion and
its implications for humanity. Philosophical-historical secularisms are concerned more with
whether religion will survive and thrive into the future or whether it will entirely disappear.
Some variations of philosophical-historical secularisms, relating to Taylor’s (2007) stadial con-
sciousness and underpinning secularization as decline, see the disappearance of religion as evi-
dence of humanity’s development and enlightenment, that as people become more educated,
developed and ‘modern’, religion will naturally die out. Other philosophical-historical secular-
isms see the disappearance of religion as a potential portent of moral decline. Philosophical-
historical secularisms thus contain an assumption about both what the future of religion will be
and should be in the broader context of human flourishing.
Underlying each of these kinds of secular ideologies, however, whether they are political,
philosophical-historical, passive, neutral or assertive, is an assumption that religion is something
separate from the rest of human life and activity. In proffering this understanding of the world
as taken for granted, secularism is potentially much more than an ideology. It may be more ana-
lytically useful to think of secularism, rather, as an all-encompassing ontology. Understanding
secularism as an ontology enables us to see beyond the normative assumptions about the value
of the religious and the secular. It allows us to comprehend how these assumptions are enacted
not only through the ways people think and understand the world but in the very ways in which
they behave, how they occupy spaces, the practices they embody, particularly in their interac-
tions with others and with nature. In addition, describing secularism as an ideology, philosophy
or worldview carries with it ideas of transience and changeability. Ideologies and philosophies
are (often, not always) consciously held and articulated belief structures. An ontology, by con-
trast, is frequently not articulated or consciously held. Ontologies are rather more intuitive,
ingrained in the fibre of a person’s being largely through the process of being brought up with
and living in the middle of it. There is something about an ontology that one feels rather than
knows, or perhaps knows through feeling or experiencing rather than through conscious cogni-
tive processing. Further, ontology seems to be one of the few concepts that are able to encom-
pass both secular and religious ways of understanding the world. It offers us a way to think about
these terms as different yet interconnected components of a broader category rather than as dia-
metrically opposed ways of understanding the world. Understanding secularism as an ontology,
then, offers a way to address the often implicit conceptual and normative inequality between
the secular and religious. It enables us to think about the categories of religion and the secular
without repeating and reinforcing the conceptual and ontological patterns of secularism itself.
By exploring these contours of secularism, we do not suggest that secularism is monolithic,
homogenous or exclusively Western. Like religion, secularism is not a singular entity. Secular

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ontologies are diverse, shifting, changing, unstable and contextually specific (Daulatzai, 2004).
Indeed, while secularism emerged from local contexts and historical trajectories in Europe and
the US, through globalization, it has merged to constitute a globalized agglomeration of ideas
and practices that vary at the level of the local. What secularism means in The Netherlands, for
example, is very different from what it means in India, Bangladesh, France, Canada and so on
(Hurd, 2008; Kuru, 2007).
At the same time, while secularism does not mean the same thing from one place to the
next, there are certain family resemblances that characterize ideological forms of secularism
across their different manifestations. These family resemblances exist in the following basic
assumptions:

(a) religion is something tangible and identifiable that can be clearly distinguished, defined and
separated from the secular, which can also be clearly defined. Not only that, but
(b) religion should be clearly distinguished and separated from other areas of human activity,
such as politics, economics, law, education and so forth, that are grouped under the secular
(Asad, 2002: 116) because
(c) religion is subjective, particular, individual and irrational (Hurd, 2008; Wilson, 2012), as
opposed to the secular, which is neutral and universal, and
(d) religion is what people disagree about more frequently and violently than anything else
(Cavanaugh, 2009); thus religion is the fundamental cause of violence, intolerance and
chaos; therefore
(e) religion must be kept out of the public sphere and relegated to the private to preserve order
and peace (Taylor, 2009; Wilson, 2012), meaning that the distinction between religion and
the secular is managed through the existence of public and private spheres (that are equally
as unstable and problematic as categories of religion and secular). Finally,
(f) religion is always subordinated to the secular, in that, even if religion is viewed as something
that can positively contribute to politics and public life, its interventions should still be
regulated by so-called secular authorities and institutions.

These underlying normative assumptions about that which is rendered religious have signifi-
cant consequences for how public life is carried out across multiple contexts. It renders certain
kinds of knowledge and evidence less valuable than others, excluding or marginalizing people
and groups whose ways of being and knowing in the world do not align with dominant secular
ontological structures (Wilson, 1992; see also De Sousa Santos, 2014).
It is important to stress that critics of secularism are not arguing that it should be dispensed
with, nor are they unconscious of the many important achievements that secularism has ena-
bled. Secular approaches to public life are bound up with questions of justice and equality. As
Mahmood (2016: 21) notes: ‘To critique a particular normative regime is not to reject or con-
demn it; rather, by analysing its regulatory and productive dimensions, one only deprives it of
innocence and neutrality so as to craft, perhaps, a different future’. Critiques of secularism are an
attempt to recognize the vulnerabilities and shortcomings of secularism, so as to contribute to
the development of alternative, more inclusive futures.

Secular ontologies and global challenges

In this final section, we explore the consequences of the normative assumptions underpinning
dominant secular ideologies/ontologies by considering responses to three global challenges:
climate change, disease pandemics and gender inequality. In responding to global challenges,

30
 Secularism

the organizations mandated with protecting humanity’s safety and welfare (World Health
Organisation, United Nations Security Council, Conference of the Parties, amongst others)
rely almost exclusively on scientific, technological and economic solutions. This emphasis on
science, technology and the economy stems in no small measure from the secular ontological
assumptions we have outlined above. These assumptions, which are also connected with other
frameworks such as modernism and colonialism (Asad, 2003;Wilson, 2012), have come to domi-
nate particular arenas of global politics and policy (Ager & Ager, 2011; 2015; Gutkowski, 2014).
They shape a) who is considered to be a legitimate actor in global politics; b) which rights and
freedoms are considered inviolable and which are nice to have, as well as who is entitled to those
rights and who is not; c) what kinds of knowledge and evidence are viewed as acceptable; and
thus, crucially, d) the kinds of policy responses that are deemed appropriate.
The overlap between the binary oppositions of secular/religious, reason/emotion, culture/
nature along with male/female and tradition/modern all contribute to the privileging of par-
ticular actors, rights, sources of knowledge and the exclusion and marginalization of others.
Firstly, secular ontologies affect who we deem to be religious actors and nonreligious actors.
This designation has multiple implications in the area of human rights law, especially freedom of
religion or belief (Sullivan, 2005; Hurd, 2015), yet also affects global health policy, gender equal-
ity and climate politics. Initiatives to engage religious actors in responding to global crises make
assumptions about who these religious actors are, which can lead to the exclusion and margin-
alization of other actors who are not religious but who also do not fit the accepted mould of
a rational, secular political actor. This can result, for example, in a preponderance of religious
leaders – individuals, usually men, who hold official, often national or international positions of
authority within religious institutional hierarchies – while religious communities that are not
organized around hierarchical structures are not represented, or leaders at the local community
level, frequently women, are marginalized (Bartelink & Wilson, 2020).
Once this distinction between religious and nonreligious actors is made, religious actors are
then imbued with particular characteristics on the basis of core secular assumptions. These can
range from traditional secular assumptions that religious actors are irrational, violent, conserva-
tive, patriarchal or more recent assumptions stemming from the ‘good religion/bad religion’
view (Hurd, 2015; see also Fiddian-Qasmiyeh, 2014;), where religious actors are deemed either
good or bad depending on how well they align with prevailing secular liberal norms and val-
ues. These assumed characteristics affect the position an actor has or the way they are viewed
and valued within global political arenas. In humanitarian responses, this instrumentalization of
religion is a common strategy, and some might argue that it can be mutually beneficial (Ager &
Ager, 2015). It is also important to highlight that religious actors themselves can reinforce the
assumptions of secular ontologies by endeavouring to demonstrate their ‘added value’ to secu-
lar programming (Ager & Ager 2011: 460). A case in point concerns the capacity for religious
actors to contribute to gender equality, a frequent discussion within development studies and
policy and non-governmental organization (NGO) circles. Donor agencies are often sceptical
of the capacity of religious organizations to promote gender equality. Conversely, some reli-
gious development organizations are eager to demonstrate their credentials in this area. World
Vision International and Tearfund UK, for example, have developed training programs aimed at
promoting gender equality and reducing gender-based violence that explicitly utilize scripture
and theology (Bartelink & Wilson, 2020). Either way, it demonstrates an imbalance of power
between secular humanitarian organizations or states and religious communities, where the lat-
ter are often only recognized when they are deemed useful to the undertakings of the former.
Second, in the midst of severe global challenges, such as the COVID-19 pandemic, climate-
change-induced disasters and migration, amongst others, governments can all too easily curtail

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individual rights and freedoms, including the right to freedom of religion or belief, in the name
of ‘saving lives’ (Little & Vaughan-Williams, 2016; McGowan, 2020). Although the Universal
Declaration of Human Rights pronounces the right to freedom or belief as universal and inal-
ienable, in the face of global disasters, religious freedoms are deemed optional and selectively
applied. India’s response to the COVID-19 pandemic is a case in point. While nominally a
(passively) secular state, a clear double standard emerged between religious practices that were
permissible for Hindu communities while Muslim communities had to suspend their gatherings
(Nelson, 2020). The saga surrounding the burkini that emerged in Europe in the summer of
2016 offers another example. Women were issued with fines for not wearing an ‘outfit respect-
ing good morals and secularism’ and forced to publicly disrobe (Quinn, 2016), while French
Prime Minister Manuel Valls claimed that naked breasts were more representative of French
freedom and values than a headscarf (Chrisafis, 2016b). The headscarf, burka and burkini, so the
argument goes, is a symbol of women’s oppression. It is antithetical to the values of secular-
ism that include gender equality and emancipation. This argument can be found in previous
rulings by the European Court of Human Rights on wearing headscarves in public (see, for
example, European Court of Human Rights decision on Dahlab v. Switzerland, 2001), as well
as statements from politicians in countries such as Australia (Cullen, 2014), The Netherlands
(Agerholm, 2016), Germany (Hamblin, 2016) and France (Chrisafis, 2016a), and were aired in
relation to the burkini ban. Thus, Muslim women’s right to manifest their religion is deemed
secondary to the broader goal of achieving gender equality, which is cast in the debate as a
secular aspiration.
Yet, as both Joan Wallach Scott and Wendy Brown have highlighted, the process of establish-
ing the modern secular nation-state by no means heralded a new era of freedom, emancipation
and autonomous agency for women. According to Brown (2006), the feminine became even
more privatized and sexualized as part of the process of secularization and the establishment
of the modern state. Discussing the differences between how the ‘Jewish Question’ and the
‘Woman Question’ were dealt with in the 19th century, Brown notes that while Jews were
increasingly racialized in order to clearly distinguish them from ‘native’ citizens, women were
overly sexualized in order to emphasize their differences from men. Scott (2007; 2011) points
out that laïque and secular efforts forcing Muslim women to ‘de-veil’ because of their belief that
the veil is a symbol of women’s oppression, epitomized by the burkini saga, are in fact just as
oppressive and discriminatory as the practice of forced veiling itself.
Thirdly, secular ontologies also influence the kinds of knowledge and evidence that are
considered acceptable or reliable. Knowledge that stems from science and scientific research is
deemed more reliable in some contexts than forms of knowledge drawn from local cosmolo-
gies and religious ontologies (though the danger of romanticizing local indigenous cosmologies
within the climate justice movement, for example, or instrumentalizing religious and indigenous
actors must also be acknowledged). All of this influences practical programs, funding, collabora-
tion and which actors are given a platform and which are not. Certain religions and religious
actors, in particular Christianity, enjoy a level of acceptance and legitimacy within global secular
ontologies and institutions influenced by secular ontologies because they are interconnected,
and the one arguably grew out of the other (Asad, 2003; Casanova, 2011). Other religious actors
do not enjoy this same level of acceptance and legitimacy.Thus, there exist not only inequalities
between secular and non-secular ontologies, but within the dominant secular frame, there are
inequalities amongst different religions.
In addition, secular ontologies can contribute to erroneous understandings of who the
trusted and legitimate actors are in particular local contexts, an issue that is particularly signifi-
cant for efforts to promote climate justice (Daulatzai 2004). For actors and institutions embed-

32
 Secularism

ded in secular ontologies, so-called ‘secular actors’ – NGOs, grassroots movements, civil society
networks, universities, to a lesser extent states – are the trusted power brokers, negotiators and
mediators. This can lead to the marginalization of religious actors or actors who do not con-
form to the strict secular/religious binary, in research, policy and advocacy by institutions and
actors embedded within secular ways of being. This is not the case the world over, however. In
many small island nations, countries in the Middle East and on the African continent, states and
secular actors are often distrusted, in part because of a history of failed secular politics in cer-
tain countries and regions (see, for example, Nunn, 2017). However, it is also because, in these
contexts, secular ontologies just do not make sense.They are not the way people understand the
world. Many people do not inhabit secular worlds.Yet, this also indicates a further way in which
secular ontologies are implicated in the politics of global challenges. Secular ontologies are a
central structuring logic in global discourses and policy-making around how we understand and
respond to global challenges, largely because of the pivotal place they have in the development
of the modern state and states-system.The dominance of these secular ideologies and ontologies
makes it difficult to move beyond scientific, technological and economic fixes to these chal-
lenges, fixes that are already proving to be inadequate in the face of the scale of global pandemics
and considering the speed of the changes that are occurring in our climate. Creating more space
to listen to and learn from other ontologies in global policy arenas is vital if we are to develop
more innovative and creative responses beyond business as usual to these global challenges.

Conclusion
In this chapter, we have explored secularism as a distinct ideological construct, based on subjec-
tive and particular assumptions about what religion is and where religion belongs in politics and
public life. These assumptions can be recognized in a form of statecraft, when a role is assigned
to religion that is separate from politics and public life, but also – and often in relation to this
statecraft – as an ideology.Through an exploration of the formative concepts of secularism – the
secular, secularization and secularity – we have suggested that although secularism is context-
specific and ever-changing, it nonetheless represents a particular conceptual ordering struc-
ture that contains normative assumptions about ‘religion’, legitimating and reinforcing unequal
power relations between actors deemed secular and those deemed religious. Further, through
colonial processes, this structuring logic has come to dominate contemporary global political
institutions and frame and delimit the ways in which we analyse and respond to contemporary
global challenges.
We have argued that, while secularism is an ideological construct, secularism can also be
understood as being more than an ideology. Secularism is not only a view on the way the world
should be but rather is the world that some people inhabit, a world that is utterly antithetical to
the worlds occupied by those for whom the supernatural and transcendental form a real lived
component of their everyday experiences (Viveiros de Castro, 2013; Blaser, 2013). Secularism,
for this reason, is not a structure that can easily be abandoned or exchanged for a different
worldview or ideology. It is because of these foundational and often unconsciously held assump-
tions about humanity and the world that we suggest secularism is an ontology, as well as, or in
addition to being an ideology.
We suggest that recognizing secularism as an ontology not only does justice to the all-
encompassing nature of secularism’s impact on people’s being but also allows us to go beyond
the concepts of religion and the secular as being mutually exclusive. Secularism as an ontology
allows us to see the religious and the secular as components of the same broader category and
enables us to recognize the power imbalance between the two.

33
 Linde R. Draaisma and Erin K. Wilson

Furthermore, we have suggested that secular ontologies are a crucial component of the
way in which we presently make sense of and respond to global challenges. Secular ontologies
rely on binary distinctions between reason and emotion, modern and traditional, nature and
humanity, to reinforce the central binary of secular and religious. Reason, modern, the secu-
lar and humans (especially men) are privileged above emotion, tradition, religion and nature
(and women). This logic helps to exclude particular kinds of knowledge and evidence as ille-
gitimate from contemporary politics and therefore as inappropriate for responding to global
challenges. Secular ontologies also generate hierarchies of religions, privileging some religions
(usually, though not always, Christianity) and marginalizing others, especially Islam and indig-
enous ontologies.This leads to certain (Christian) voices and narratives having (symbolic) influ-
ence in global politics, while other (non-Christian) religious voices are ignored. Addressing the
dominance of secular ontologies and their associated assumptions opens up space for other ways
of thinking and being in the world to contribute to more creative and innovative responses to
collective global challenges.

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 3
ATHEISM AND RELIGION
Stuart McAnulla

Introduction
The relationship between atheism and religion is a complex one, but there has often been a
great deal at stake in their interplay. This chapter explores some important contours in how
atheistic worldviews have been both threatened by theistic contexts but have also challenged
dominant types of religion through their role within broader ideological frameworks. The dis-
cussion begins by first considering what is meant by atheism, arguing for a broad understanding
of the term and questioning the common tendency to designate it as the ‘opposite’ of religion.
This is followed by consideration upon the issue of whether atheism as we now understand it
is a wholly modern phenomenon through highlighting some of the historical ways in which
godless attitudes have manifested themselves within heavily religious societies.The chapter then
explores why atheism is still, to a great extent, a ‘silent’ influence in contemporary society before
then examining its more vocal forms. It is demonstrated that atheism has featured strongly in
both optimistic and pessimistic ideological narratives before analysing the key features of the
highly visible ‘new atheism’ and responses to it. The discussion concludes with reflections on
how debates concerning atheism and its relationship with atheism may develop.

What is atheism?
What is an atheist? This chapter follows the tendency in much recent academic work to define
atheism primarily as the absence of belief in God (or gods) (Bullivant and Ruse, 2013). It does not
limit the use of the term, as some surveys do, to apply only to those who readily describe them-
selves as atheists. Atheism is not taken to equate with total personal certainty that God does not
exist, or, necessarily, a belief that no gods exist. Even some of the most globally famous atheists
do not include themselves in the former category. Atheism indicates a lack of belief in God – the
atheist has found no reason to take on any belief in deities, and this may, or may not, involve a
conscious rejection of specific claims regarding God’s existence. Thus many people who iden-
tify more with labels such as agnostic, non-theist, freethinker or humanist could legitimately
be counted as atheists if atheism is understood in this way. Historically the term has been used
in innumerable other ways, often being applied to those feared to be resistant to the dominant
religious-political order of the time. In contemporary discussions, atheism is often unhelpfully

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conflated with the wider category of the ‘non-religious’ or what is often referred to now as
the religious ‘Nones’. However, ‘Nones’ refer to those who, when asked to name their religious
identity or affiliation, reply that they do not have one. Such people are often not atheists – they
may believe in God but choose not to link themselves to any particular established religious
group.
Indeed discussions of atheism are often rather bedevilled by treating religion as its ‘opposite’.
Lois Lee notes that even scholars who have sought to avoid reducing discussions of religion to
theism or belief-based approaches have tended to do this (2015: 62), and one might argue that
even some sophisticated atheists have tended to fall back on such contrasts (Gray, 2018a). Lee
argues that pairing atheism and religion can be a category error ‘like comparing masculinity and
feminism, for example, rather than femininity’ (2015: 38).
Atheists lack belief in God but may or may not identify with practices that could be described
as religious. This may strike some readers as a rather academic distinction since monotheistic
claims lie at the heart of the world’s biggest categories of religion: Christianity and Islam. Claims
made in relation to God or Allah provide subsequent grounds for further beliefs in the religion
concerning morality and duty. It is therefore perfectly true that atheism stands in profound ten-
sion with much within such religions. However, religions do not reduce simply to belief in sur-
rounding deities and, of course, they involve varied cultural and material practices. Furthermore,
there are other religions that do not make claims concerning God as such or within which belief
in God is not a prerequisite for membership or participation.
Indeed to be ‘against religion’ in an absolutist sense (or to speak as if one is) can arguably be
a problem for some atheists as it commits them to oppose beliefs and practices of huge diversity,
many of which may not entail belief in God as such. When Christopher Hitchens argued that
‘religion poisons everything’ he seemed to pitch himself against anyone identifying with any
kind of religious commitment (2007). Yet this may partly have been a case of careless (or per-
haps effective!) book promotion, as when pushed on the point, it was clear that Hitchens meant
that theism has the potential to poison action. Hitchens argue that if God is invoked to justify
actions, good or bad, it thereby undermines the idea of personal responsibility. Nonetheless, as is
discussed below, atheism is often articulated within a wider set of ideological beliefs that do set
themselves against religion in a direct manner.
However, is the contrast between atheist and theist a straightforward one? It can appear a
very simple distinction – people either believe that there is a God (or gods), or they don’t. God
either exists, or s/he doesn’t. However, some have questioned whether a clear distinction is actu-
ally possible or desirable (Caputo, 2007). If we assume that the basic distinction does generally
hold, there are still more complicated stances that can be taken. For example, some have argued
that God did exist in the past but later died – the so-called ‘death of God’ literature. Indeed,
some have argued that Jesus Christ’s apparent abandonment by God whilst being crucified sig-
nals that there is now no deity overlooking human experience (Altizer and Hamilton, 1966).
Others suggest that the fate of Jews during the Holocaust indicates the effective ‘death of God’
(Rubenstein, 1992). On the other hand, the atheist philosopher Quentin Meillassoux (2008)
argues that although God does not exist, it is possible that a God could exist in future and hence
he has a ‘belief ’ in God, of a sort.
These perspectives are uncommon, but a question that does arise more often is that of what
kind of God are atheists rejecting? Rather than atheism simply indicating an absence of belief,
in practice, it may often invoke some positive notion of what kind of God it thinks others are
endorsing. Indeed atheists often reject the idea of a God who is seen as in some way to have cre-
ated the world and who has an active interest in and influence over how humans behave in that
world. This may include what can be called a ‘personal God’ who is considered to judge human

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actions and perhaps even to intervene to affect the direction of affairs. Many arguments between
atheists and theists can be conducted on shaky grounds – they are not necessarily debating
the existence or otherwise of the same sorts of gods. Theists themselves can be as vehemently
opposed to certain notions of God as atheists are. Indeed theologians sometimes sympathise
with atheist arguments as they view them as means through which more refined and non-naïve
understandings of God can be reached. Against what they see as anthropomorphic ideas of
God, some stress that God cannot be understood as an agent in the regular sense of the term,
and indeed apophatic perspectives suggest that we cannot say much about God in language.
Thus theists will often reject the arguments of atheists on the basis that the former simply aren’t
rejecting a God which they recognise. For example, David Bentley Hart opposes what he sees
as the crudely materialistic outlook of prominent public atheists and suggests that God can be
understood through ideas of ‘being, consciousness, bliss’ (2013). At the same time, such perspec-
tives can seem removed from much everyday exposure to teaching about God. Schoolchildren
are routinely taught about what God may think, what he wants, how he has secured food and
resources and so on.The idea of God as an agent that witnesses and punishes transgressions from
moral positions is commonplace, and it is this kind of God that many contemporary atheists
find themselves rejecting.
One can concur with Jeanine Diller (2016) that there may be no ‘global atheism’ as such,
i.e., a form of atheism that denies all possible formulations and definitions of gods or God. But
this need not mean we are limited to articulating atheism in only specifically local ways. For
example, a non-belief in an omnipotent, omniscient, omnibenevolent (OOO) God arguably
entails a rejection of the dominant traditions in Jewish, Christian and Islamic theology over
many centuries (Diller, 2016: 16).
This kind of refusal of monotheistic worldviews can sometimes be understood as necessar-
ily committing the atheist to some kind of alternative worldview. To deny God is to reject the
ontological claims about the character of being, and arguably, to commit to an ontology mak-
ing different assumptions about reality. Indeed as discussed below, atheism does link to a wide
variety of ontological and ideological perspectives, many of which challenge religious beliefs
and practices directly.

Is atheism a purely modern phenomenon?

It is widely agreed that atheism has a long history, but there is less consensus about how long it
has had particular relevance and in which contexts. One difficulty is that it is unclear whether
an apparent lack of atheism during a historical period reflects either silence on behalf of atheists
concerning their godlessness or simply a total lack of atheist thought. Arguments are sometimes
made that atheism as we now tend to understand it only became a phenomenon in the modern
era and is a product of the specific ideological, scientific, religious and political contexts that
emerged during the Enlightenment. However, this view is disputed by scholars such as Tim
Whitmarsh, who argue that modern-day discourse surrounding atheism is not so different from
arguments that could be found in antiquity. What is apparent within the history of atheism is
that it has consistently faced physical and ideological repression, meaning that it has frequently
been a silent phenomenon.
Whitmarsh records that despite the reputation of Classical Greece for developing democracy,
high culture and even atheistic thinking amongst philosophers, there were periods of brutal
repression. It was around this time that the word ‘atheos’ appears, implying the absence of a God,
in turn denoting a wild or lawless personality, but then later used to describe someone without
a belief in the gods (2016: 116). He draws upon the work of the 5th-century BC historian

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Plutarch who documents how Diopeithes successfully proposed a bill to the Athens assembly
which sought to publicly impeach those who did not worship or believe in gods (2016: 74,
117–121). Rubel argues that the awful effects of a plague on Athens (as well as military causali-
ties) provided members of the religious establishment with an argument that the Demos had
damaged relations with the gods (2014: 31–38). It appears that both religious fervour and politi-
cal manipulation played a role in establishing what may have been the first anti-atheist text of
this kind. Several trials ensued, including that of the playwright Diagoras of Melos, who had a
strong reputation for atheism. He was banished from Athens after being found guilty of ‘impiety’
(Whitmarsh, 2016: 122). The much later trial of Theodorus, who publicly denied the existence
of gods, emphasised how attacks on religion were now capable of being seen (or conveniently
presented as) threats to the state itself (ibid.: 123). Yet the most famous trial of antiquity was
that of Socrates, who was accused of believing in no gods or false gods, and subsequently was
sentenced to death, having also been found guilty of corrupting the youth of Athens through
his questioning of authority. Bremmer notes that Socrates’ death was an important moment as
most philosophers ‘got the message’ and were subsequently cautious in articulating their views
(Bremmer, 2007: 19).
According to some interpretations, atheism simply did not appear in medieval Europe, given
that ‘enchanted’ modes of thinking existed, which may have been quite different from modern
types of rationalism and logic.Yet a difficulty with this claim is that records from the period are
often written by clergy whose interpretation of heresies they witnessed may not do justice to
the thinking of those who would question aspects of religious practice. Also, Susan Reynolds has
noted that ‘most dissidents in a persecuting society will keep their heads down’, and the limited
direct evidence of disbelief during the period does not itself demonstrate that doubts were not
quietly entertained (1991: 33). Indeed there do appear to have been specific instances of overt
atheism being expressed in 13th-/14th-century Italy and 15th-century Spain (ibid.: 27). It was
also alleged that the Peasants Revolt in England in 1381 was motivated by the sins of lords, some
of whom believed there was no God (ibid.: 33).
Certainly in late-16th-/early-17th-century Britain, God could not be avoided. In 1639,
John Virgin commented that ‘God is always in one like a cuckoo’ (Haigh, 2007: 180). Churches
played a central role in daily life, with people being baptised and taught morals through Christian
instruction. Attendance at church on Sundays was legally required, and the teachings of the
Church were considered essential for ensuring appropriate behaviour. Numerous people were
burned at the stake for holding heretical beliefs during the period (Thomas, 2003: 203). At the
same time, many people would flout Christian ethics in practice, and clergy would often be
mocked or satirised in everyday conversation. Heretical comments featured, but these tended
not to express doubt about God existing. Indeed detecting genuine historical expressions of
what we might now agree to be an atheistic worldview is not straightforward as the term ‘athe-
ist’ was initially much more deployed as a term of abuse or a smear against those accused of
holding some kind of heterodox belief or who were deemed to be living in a debauched or
ungodly way (ibid.: 4, 6).
The ideological and political dimensions of expressions of atheism are also of key importance
when examining how efforts were made to silence those challenging belief in God in the mod-
ern West.The importance of Christianity in underpinning many social and political structures in
the century was such that expressions of atheism were understood to present a profound threat.
Nick Spencer argues:

Wherever you went, to deny God was not simply to deny God. It was to deny the
emperor, or the King who ruled you, the social structures that ordered your life, the

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ethical ties that regulated it, the hopes that inspired it and the judgement that reas-
sured it.
(Spencer, 2014: xvii)

Turner comments that in the medieval period, doubts about God probably crossed some minds
at points but ‘such questioning could only sustain itself and grow into lasting disbelief only if
nourished by social and intellectual sustenance’, which was not available, leading him to doubt
that any people in the period took a permanently atheistic perspective.
However, court cases in this period suggest that atheistic attitudes were held by some in a
context where some conventional religious beliefs were becoming more doubted. For example,
in 1635, a defendant, Brian Walker, stated, ‘I do not believe there is either God or Devil; neither
will I believe anything but what I see’ (Thomas 2003: 202). Thomas suggests that the fact such
evidence appears against a background of severe threat to heretics means it may be reasonably
surmised that many thought what they dared not say aloud (ibid.: 204). Clergy sometimes
reported that they had encountered people who directly argued that there was no God.Yet even
if some allegations made against ‘atheism’ were false, the complaints themselves suggested that
the idea that there might be no God (and that things emerge by nature or chance) was at least
‘thinkable’ in the period (Haigh, 2007: 169). The Calvinist defender of the Church of England,
Henry Smith, published the relatively popular book, God’s Arrow Against Atheists. Alymer raises
the question of whether such works were addressed to ‘an assumed but silent body’ of people,
more vocal atheists or instead served as a means for Christians to persuade themselves of the
truth or their religion (1978: 23).
A frequently commented upon irony is that the development of some key strands of athe-
ist thought in Europe originated in theological and philosophical efforts to theorise about the
nature of God. Gavin Hyman argues ‘atheism in its founding moment was constituted by a
revolution within theology itself’ (Hyman, 2010: 67). He suggests the work of Duns Scotus in the
13th century was important in departing from the assumption that being was something created
by God to argue that being is something which God and humanity share on a ‘single onto-
logical plane’ (2010: 70). This arguably helped change the dominant understanding of theism,
in which the world is no longer perceived as participating in a higher ontological order but is
self-sufficient and self-explanatory (2010: 79). God was thus not seen as transcending the world
but as part of it, something that has to be accommodated to a single reality. In Hyman’s view,
this helped lay the groundwork for later atheist perspectives to emerge to argue God was not
needed at all to account for the world.
Atheism would subsequently make an appearance in political discussion as philosophers
such as Thomas Hobbes questioned using God as the key justification for maintaining sovereign
political power (Berman, 1988). These authors became accused by some of advocating athe-
ism despite professions of theism. However, as philosophers such as Rene Descartes sought to
provide intellectual groundings for the existence of God, so they helped create space in which
atheistic arguments could at least theoretically be posited (1993).
It can therefore be argued that atheism, as we now understand it, did not depend for its
development on the scientific and philosophical upheavals that arose during the transition to the
modern period and the ‘Age of Reason’. However, it is also clear that atheist thought rarely had
the space to be heard or shared without fear of severe repression, and hence there was a limited
textual articulation of arguments challenging theism. Atheism only became a sustained chal-
lenger to theistic belief when the intellectual context became transformed by modes of thinking
which challenged traditional theological assumptions and profoundly questioned the existence
of political and religious orders (see discussion of atheistic ideological narratives below).

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Contemporary atheism: still largely silent?

However, it is important to first highlight that in many ways atheism remains a largely silent
phenomenon, even in contexts such as the contemporary UK and much of Europe, where
non-belief is common. Indeed, the dramatic decline of traditional Christian practice in much of
Europe since World War II owes much to people silently abandoning their religious heritage and
belief in God. This process is often not a consequence of particularly conscious reflection and
relatively rarely comes from engaging with campaigning secularist or atheist literature. Historian
Callum Brown reflects:

Silence grips 90% of atheists. They don’t speak of being without god, they don’t argue
with religionists at parties, they don’t campaign in the street and they don’t join an
organisation which expresses their position. For centuries they have been pretty noise-
less or inaudible.
(2017: 70)

Yet we should not assume that silence will mean non-communication. Depending on the con-
text, silence can express and reveal a great deal. For instance, refusal to participate in religious
rituals such as singing or prayer can serve as a way of marking dissent from faith. But even quiet
disengagement from theistic practices can paradoxically ‘speak’ powerfully and, when it becomes
widespread, can threaten the authority of religious institutions.
It is only in more recent times that one can speak of ‘mass atheism’ in parts of the world, and
as such, there tends not to be many familial or communal traditions of unbelief for non-theists
to draw upon (ibid.: 71). Thus, such atheism is often not outwardly expressed or strategically
reflected upon. However, this lack of being heard can hold certain advantages for atheism. For
one thing, such silence means this form of atheism cannot easily be included in either denuncia-
tions or even celebrations of atheism. It refuses to play in the game if it is even particularly aware
of the game. It thus has no declared content for the theist to challenge.
Even some of the most famously vocal atheists can have doubts about discussing atheism as
atheism. Sam Harris (2007) reflects thus:

Attaching a label to something carries real liabilities, especially if the thing you are nam-
ing isn’t really a thing at all. And atheism, I would argue, is not a thing. It is not a philoso-
phy, just as ‘non-racism’ is not one. Atheism is not a worldview – and yet most people
imagine it to be one and attack it as such.We who do not believe in God are collaborat-
ing in this misunderstanding by consenting to be named and by even naming ourselves.

Harris himself did not use the term ‘atheism’ at all in his best-selling book, The End of Faith
(2004), even though this publication led to him being anointed as a leader of the new atheism
(see discussion below). He fears that the issues people raise against types of religion risk being
‘marginalised under the banner of atheism’ (2007) rather than being confronted on their own
merits. In other words, the concerns of non-believers may be dismissed, however unconvinc-
ingly, by the deployment of standard anti-atheist arguments rather than efforts to defend the
specific religious beliefs or practices that may be being questioned. Better, he argues, to focus
efforts on using reason, logic and intellectual honesty to challenge the religious beliefs that are
identified as particularly dangerous.
However, it is unclear that a decision not to use the term ‘atheism’ brings the strategic ben-
efits to atheists, which Harris hopes for. For one thing, the history of atheism suggests that the

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term is often deployed to categorise people regardless of the language they themselves choose
– people may be no less stuck with a label being used to dismiss their position. Indeed they may
be sacrificing the opportunity to contest the meanings that become attached to it by hostile
groups. Also, Harris tends to assume a starting position in which the contestation of religion is
the priority, rather than a defence of atheism itself. He appears to think it possible, if not likely,
that monotheism may erode to the point ‘when atheism is scarcely intelligible as a concept’
(2007). However, with no clear prospect of theism disappearing in the foreseeable future, other
public atheists tend to embrace the term itself more.
A dilemma for the contemporary atheist concerns how far it is worth speaking out regarding
this perspective. To the extent that atheism represents an absence or lack of theism, it might be
considered unnecessary within relatively liberal political contexts whilst remaining dangerous
in many theocratic environments. Most atheists may be largely mute regarding their atheism,
seeing little need to think about their practical godlessness, let alone express it in any particular
way. The decline of traditional practices of Christian monotheism has helped create the space
for atheism to be tolerated, and this has been the result of much wider social change rather than
the public expression of atheism. Indeed at times, to be vocal about atheism may be viewed as
unnecessarily antagonistic, in some contexts even raising the risk that the atheist will come to
be defined in terms of a social ‘out-group’. There is certainly evidence that prejudice against
atheism can result from the perception that atheists violate ‘the very foundations of religious
belief ’ (Kossowscka, Czenatowiscz-Kukuczka and Sekerdej, 2017: 136). However, if the aim is to
defend the acceptability of atheism and protect atheists against discrimination, it is unclear that
an approach where all keep quiet is optimal. In a study of 54 countries, Gervais (2011) finds that
prejudice against atheists decreases where atheism is more prevalent. Follow-up studies in the
US suggest that the more people are aware of atheist prevalence, the more distrust towards athe-
ism decreases (Gervais, 2011: 548). This does not appear to merely be an effect of inter-group
contact with atheists, but rather about knowledge or information regarding atheist presence. In a
UK study, Giddings and Dunn (2016) find that distrust of atheists is deeply culturally ingrained
even amongst non-religious people. They consider that this is perhaps because of uncertainty as
to the moral stance of atheists (2016: 133, 134). Simpson and Rios (2017) suggest that challeng-
ing atheists’ perceived lack of kindness and caring may be an important consideration if seeking
to challenge prejudice against atheists (2016: 506). Those experiencing social rejection due to
their atheism may benefit from expressing an atheist identity, which can sometimes reduce the
negative effects of discrimination on well-being (Doane and Elliot, 2015: 136).
Also, evidence suggests that ‘pluralistic ignorance’ can be a problem for atheists. During the
American Civil Rights Movement, white people were found to overestimate support amongst
other white people for a racially segregated society (Strosser et al., 2016: 151). Many more indi-
viduals were privately in favour of a racially mixed society than was generally realised. Similarly,
it appears that where religious people perceive the prevailing social norm to be against atheists,
they are more likely to themselves express negative behavioural intentions towards atheists, or
mimic this assumed more general disapproval. However, in private, individual attitudes towards
atheists can be more positive and, unlike with many other stigmatised groups, there does not
appear to be greater negativity towards atheists in private than in public.This is suggestive of the
possibility that greater public awareness of atheists and atheism may aid the process of greater
acceptance (ibid., 2016: 159, 161). Research in the US also indicates that when theists are simply
prompted to imagine coming in to contact with actual atheists, their distrust may lessen and the
level of comfort with the idea increase (LaBouff and LeDoux, 2016: 337).
However, despite the prejudice that can still exist against atheists, we are now living in an
era where the frequency and acceptability of non-belief is historically remarkable. Not only

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is ­atheism often socially acceptable in many contexts; it is now regarded as almost yawningly
mundane. So much so that those who have no belief in God scarcely feel the need to articulate
or justify this at length, nor do they usually come under particular pressure to do so.When asked
about how they came to have no faith in God, respondents in places such as the UK often have
little to say (Sheard, 2014). In parts of Europe, abandoning any notions of belief in God is some-
times understood simply as an aspect of growing up (Zuckerman, 2010: 94). Wider secularising
trends have removed the centrality of belief in God as a foundation of everyday life for many
people, even where Churches and Christian teaching still play a role in national affairs.
According to a World Values Survey of 57 countries conducted between 2010 and 2014,
11% of those surveyed population said they had no belief in God (quoted in Keysar, 2015: 137).
One-third of adults in the UK are reported to have no belief in God (Jordan, 2015). In the still
heavily religious United States, the number of people answering ‘No’ when asked if they believe
in God has risen from 1% in 1944 to 12% in 2017 (Gallup, 2017). The phenomenon of appar-
ently growing levels of atheism in parts of the world has arisen over just a few short decades, in
some senses indicating a dramatic transformation in cultures within which public endorsement
of atheism was only recently regarded as a scandal. And over the last two centuries in the West,
there have been episodic and influential expressions of atheism from minorities even as they
endured much social contempt and exclusion. But there is little doubt that major change has
occurred to the point wherein much of Europe and the Anglosphere, people can be openly
atheist without concern that this will count against them in most aspects of life. Indeed, at times
atheists justifiably feel less judged for their non-belief than their neighbours may be for enthu-
siastic advocacy of a religious faith in God or Allah.
Historically then, these societies are only in the early stages of accepting overt atheism, and
in large parts of the world matters there is no such acceptance. Even in these atheism-accepting
nations, atheism coexists alongside multiple theistic faiths and confronts an institutional and cul-
tural context strongly shaped by monotheism, alongside many more secular influences. Atheists
may suffer no oppression but may find that their children are discriminated against for entry to
a popular local school that has a faith-based selection criteria. They may happily participate as
‘cultural Christians’ in Christmas and Easter celebrations but be bemused by the political influ-
ence of the Church of England in the legislature. Importantly, the 21st-century influence of
forms of religious fundamentalist ideology, both Islamic and Christian, has proven an important
factor in inspiring some of the more vocal and controversial expressions of atheism over the last
couple of decades.

Atheism and ideological narratives

A striking feature of prominent forms of atheism is how they have become entangled in vari-
ants of wider ideological narratives. Atheism has often been expressed as a component of types
of both liberal and revolutionary/socialist/Marxist assumptions regarding societal progress and
claims that increased godlessness may be part of a transcendent ‘arc of history’. It has often been
attached to optimistic narratives about how ‘backward’ ways of thinking are in decline, and new
forms of social, political and economic progress are being enabled by the sweeping away of
superstitious beliefs and belief in God.
A spectacular early example of this came with the ‘Cult of Reason’ established by several
French revolutionaries in the late 18th century. The French Revolution itself was greatly con-
cerned with removing the political and economic power of the Roman Catholic Church, as
Enlightenment ideals of equality and liberty gained salience. Key figures such as Jacques Hebert
sought to replace the worship of God with the worship of human reason, in effect establishing

44
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a new civic religion (McGrath, 2004). Although the Cult of Reason lasted only months before
being replaced by Robespierre’s deistic ‘Cult of the Supreme Being’, the idea that belief in God
and traditional religious faith should be eliminated in the cause of greater human prosperity was
to recur in multiple ways over the following two centuries. In the mid-19th century, Auguste
Comte proposed a ‘religion of humanity’ that he conceived would represent a higher stage in
human development in which society would be guided by science instead of theology or meta-
physics (Wernick, 2001). Karl Marx later also theorised that whilst belief in deities and religion
provided an escape for working people exploited by capitalism, they were ultimately an obstacle
to material advance and a product of unequal class relations (McKown 1975, McLennan 1987).
Following the Russian Revolution in 1917, leaders sought to repress religion, persecuting many
believers and promoting the ‘scientific atheism’, which they argued was integral to liberating
working people. However, as matters transpired, religion eventually survived the experience of
the Soviet Union – despite the Gulag, theistic belief endured for many in a way which Marxist-
Leninism ultimately did not.
However, the historic failure of such projects has not dissuaded contemporary atheists work-
ing within ideologically more liberal frameworks from embracing positions both that predict
and encourage abandonment of theistic belief. Indeed, further scholarly developments in sci-
ence, philosophy, archaeology, textual analysis and other academic disciplines are considered
to mount insurmountable challenges to monotheism. Atheist authors such as Steven Pinker
(2018) provide optimistic global narratives arguing that despite our exposure to depressing daily
media coverage, in fact, problems such as global violence and war are in decline. Scientific and
empirically focused approaches to dealing with societal challenges are considered much likely
to produce positive outcomes for people than worldviews saturated with religious assumptions.
Secular enquiry is argued to have eliminated deadly diseases, increased life expectancy and led
to the abolition of human sacrifice and slavery. Material and economic progress is considered
to have massively reduced poverty levels, and moral progress has produced advances in human
rights and equality for many minority groups. Similarly, the renowned atheist scientist Richard
Dawkins (2006) has spoken of gradual progress in the ‘moral zeitgeist’ and the benefits gained
from a naturalistic worldview in contrast to those offered by monotheistic religion. Such athe-
ist writers are regularly presented as believing that the long-term decline of belief in God and
religious faith are near inevitabilities, and thus atheism is believed to have the tide of history on
its side, especially when tied to the championing of reason and science.
However, such optimism seriously jars with many observers. With political systems recently
being jolted by events such as the US Presidency of Donald Trump (2017–2021), the rise of
authoritarian-populist movements and the UK’s vote to ‘Brexit’ from the European Union,
a pervasive sense of instability and insecurity is palpable within ideologically liberal circles.
Intellectual critics such as John Gray detect what they see as measures of statistical sorcery in the
way the data of people such as Pinker are used to defend a story of the triumph of enlightened
values (2018b). Worse, he argues that the type of atheism and liberal secularism that Pinker
advocates avoids facing up to the global violence that flows from particular uses of science and
military defences of liberalism. Just as atheists in the past (such as many Jacobins or Bolsheviks)
perceived themselves as bringing in a new, better world by battling theism, so Gray argues
contemporary militant atheists are willfully blind to the potential for disaster within their own
worldview. Critics such as Terry Eagleton (2009) argue such atheism can too easily become the
handmaiden for war and violence against peoples viewed as unenlightened. This kind of athe-
ism thus becomes portrayed as smug and elitist, yet also rather deluded and historically myopic.
On the other hand, atheism is frequently tied to more pessimistic ideological narratives.
Many theists are happy enough to portray the growth of atheism as a symptom of the decline

45
 Stuart McAnulla

of moral standards and the turn away from God as producing all kinds of idolatry, selfish con-
cern, hedonism and nihilism (e.g., Haught, 2008; Lennox, 2011; Hitchens, 2010). However, it
is also the arguments of some atheists themselves which are used to paint a very bleak picture
of the likely future of human beings. Friedrich Nietzsche’s madman argued that God had
been killed but that people had not faced up to the consequences of the ‘murder’ (2001). Such
had been the dependence of social, political and legal systems in the West on the idea of the
Judeo-Christian God that without any effort to properly cement this foundation, Nietzsche
thought that catastrophe could emerge. Indeed some have argued his words were accurately
predictive, with atheistic Communism resulting in the murder of many millions of people a
few decades after his death. Branches of existentialist philosophy have advocated atheism as
part of a view that the cosmos itself is absurd, a view eagerly leapt upon by theistic evangelists
who insist God is needed to secure a meaningful, purposive life. John Gray’s own atheism is
frequently described as pessimistic, with humans being understood as inconsistent, internally
divided, rapacious, flawed creatures who cannot achieve more than temporary remedies to
recurring human evils (2008a; 2008b; 2009; 2015a; 2015b; 2018a; 2018b). Practices like slav-
ery and torture may be banned in apparently enlightened societies yet reappear in new forms
under different names such as human trafficking or ‘enhanced interrogation techniques’. For
Gray, these are truths which humans are often too weak to bear and hence the attraction to
either religious myths of salvation in the after-life or more secular myths of human progress,
which he takes to be ironically and unwittingly influenced by the Christian idea that there is
progress in time. He argues that all too often, these secular myths end extraordinarily badly,
with hubristic decisions such as the US–UK intervention in Iraq in 2003 leading to large-scale
human disaster.
However, the highest-profile form of vocal atheism in recent years has undoubtedly been the
‘new atheism’, associated with the work of public intellectual figures such as Sam Harris (2004;
2008),Christopher Hitchens (2007), Richard Dawkins (2006) and Ayaan Hirsi Ali (see also
Stenger, 2008; Grayling, 2011; Boghossian, 2013). Publication of the famous new atheist books
in the mid-noughties was prompted in significant part in reaction against the role of mono-
theism in world affairs following the 9/11 terrorist attacks in New York and Washington. The
perceived threats to societies posed by both Islamism and the influence of groups such as the
Christian right in the US were viewed as sufficiently alarming to warrant hard-hitting polemical
attacks on Christianity, Islam and Judaism and to champion atheism as an alternative to these
movements and ideologies. The new atheist texts and related videos, public debates, blogs and
media coverage have inspired many atheists and others to engage with such arguments and to
voice or amplify their own non-belief. At the same time, many texts and other materials were
authored seeking to debunk new atheist arguments, which were felt to distort, misunderstand
or misrepresent what religious faith means to many believers. Some active secularist, humanist
and atheist groups felt the new atheism was unnecessarily hostile to religion. However, whilst
we may now be well past ‘peak’ new atheism, it has not disappeared as a cultural influence and
indeed, it is still commonly referenced in public debates concerning religion, theism, secularism
and atheism. Nor have we seen the end of polemical attacks on the perceived threats posed to
humanity by religion.
Key aspects of new atheism include its political dimensions – it poses direct challenges to
forms of religious authority. Smith argues that there are three crucial elements:

1) Challenging the public role of religion through secularist calls for church and state separa-
tion and removal of perceived unfair privileges granted to religious groups

46
 Atheism and religion

2) Challenging the social conventions that arguably prevent due criticism of religion in public
and private life
3) Promoting an atheist identity-politics – encouraging atheists to be open about lack of faith
in God, in the hope of helping and encouraging other atheists (see also Taira, 2012)

Critics of the new atheism have tended to focus less on the above aspects and more on the
controversial way in which new atheists attack monotheistic religions. Calls from key figures
such as Richard Dawkins to mock and ridicule those who believe in religious miracles stand
alongside efforts to portray holy texts as fundamentally immoral.They have not spared the more
‘moderate’ branches of monotheistic religion from strong criticism but instead attacked them for
giving legitimacy to the more fundamentalist kinds. The argument here is that once you grant
special status and protections to holy books, you thereby grant more legitimacy to those groups
who may use literal or extreme interpretations of those texts. The new atheist believes that too
much respect for traditional custom and/or excessive political correctness results in a lack of
sufficient scrutiny of religious practices that can be oppressive, particularly to women, children
and minority groups. Indeed, part of the appeal of the new atheists for many has been their
flamboyant willingness to challenge taboos surrounding the discussion of religion.Yet numerous
authors have argued their portrayal of religious traditions is reductionist and inadequate, provid-
ing dubious grounds for their aggressive polemical attacks.
Some new atheist sympathisers have made concessions on this point. In 2015, Hector Avalos
and Andre Gange set out a manifesto for a ‘second wave’ of new atheism to encompass experts
in the study of religion and sacred scriptures. They argued that Dawkins et al. have made claims
that were ‘rightly viewed as simplistic or inaccurate in some cases’, but maintained the new
atheist commitment to seek to stop the use of sacred scripture as a source of moral authority in
the contemporary world and highlight the role of religion in sustaining violence. Others have
argued that to progress further, then campaigning atheists in places such as the US need to tie
their cause more to wider anti-discriminatory and pro-equality political stances (Bekiempis,
2011; Benson, 2014).
There have been other ‘mini-waves’ of atheist writing in the wake of new atheism. Most have
argued that atheists should adopt a somewhat more engaging attitude towards religion or instead
take seriously the need to provide atheists with a meaningful alternative to theism. Philosophers
such as Julian Baggini (2009) argued the was a need to ‘turn down the volume’ on new atheist
attacks on religion, whilst Alain de Boton argued there were positive ideas and practices atheists
could usefully learn from religious traditions (2013). De Boton has even proposed the building
of atheist temples (Booth, 2012).Tim Crane has argued that the claims religions may make con-
cerning God and the cosmos are an important part of their outlook, but that religions combine a
sense of the transcendent with a sense of belonging to a historical tradition (2017: x). He argues
these wider meanings of religion suggest that scientific and philosophical arguments are most
unlikely to lead to the removal of religion (ibid.: xi).
In his book Life After Faith (2015), Philip Kitcher argues that new atheists rather treat
religion as a ‘mass of rubbish’ (3) without paying attention to what could replace its role if
abandoned. He argues for the need for an ethically-grounded secular humanist substitute to
prospectively replace the loss of meaning that might come from converting to atheism. In
Religion Without God (2013: 9–11), Ronald Dworkin argues for ‘religious atheism’, claiming
that the value aspects of religion, e.g., the assertion of the intrinsic value of life, does not
depend on God’s existence and therefore available to the atheist. Indeed, he argues that reli-
gion has a deeper meaning than God, denoting a ‘deep, distinct and comprehensive worldview’
(ibid.: 1). Todd May (2015) confronts the question of what may be meaningful in a silent (i.e.,

47
 Stuart McAnulla

godless) universe. He suggests people have been presented with a false alternative, i.e., there is
either meaning in the universe itself, or there is no such thing. Instead, he proposes that narra-
tive values (e.g., steadfastness, intensity) may give meaningfulness to lives in the way they unfold
(2015: 73–76).

Conclusion
Therefore, we see that much atheist writing following new atheism has argued for a more
sophisticated perspective on religion and/or for a more developed view on what can sup-
ply people with an integrated and moral worldview in the absence of God. However, atheists
continue to face considerable dilemmas in their relations with both theism and religion. This
chapter has highlighted that atheism continues to be a silent phenomenon in much of practical
life and that in many religious contexts, there is still a price that may be paid for overt forms
of atheist expression. This cost can be anywhere in a spectrum between minor inconveniences
or limitations through to more impactful types of social exclusion. Certainly, atheists may still
easily find themselves cast as an ‘out’ group or to be suspected of lacking deep moral founda-
tions. When placed in the context of the domination of monotheistic religion over many cen-
turies, it is perhaps unsurprising to see the legacies of a period when atheism was considered
an unconscionable stance. We cannot be sure of the prevalence or depth of atheistic thought in
medieval eras, where an embrace of godlessness posed a threat to life and limb. However, we
can trace threads of apparent resistances to theism that existed prior to the radical developments
in theological, philosophical and scientific thought, which paved the way for both modern
atheism itself and the far-reaching ideological movements in which it has often found a place.
It is through association with these ideological projects that atheism has at times posed seri-
ous threats to the survival of religion, particularly when the removal of belief in God has been
presented as a necessary part of human advancement. Contemporary public atheists tend to
emphasise science and naturalism over promoting particular political frameworks, yet they still
tend to be entangled with liberal assumptions regarding social progress. Both the contemporary
crisis of liberal ideology and persistence, indeed growth, of religion in many parts of the world
present challenges to such perspectives.These global trends are likely to shape the developments
in the more vocal forms of atheism as we move beyond the early 21st century.

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 4
NATIONALISM, RELIGION,
IDEOLOGY
Atalia Omer

“The sewage of European thinking”

Gush Emunim is a folk movement. It’s the pipeline that conveys the sewage of European
thinking right into the core of Judaism. It’s taking classical European nationalism with
all romantic, organic elements of the people’s attitude toward its homeland, the sanctity
of land and transferring it into the core of Judaism.

These words were said by Jewish studies scholar Moshe Halbertal in an interview featured in
the film The Settlers (2016). Shimon Dotan, the filmmaker, portrays not only the emergence and
consolidation of religious messianic Zionism but also how both its enabling and eventual main-
streaming of the ideology can be understood only in terms of an analysis of secular Zionism and
its ethos of security, physical redemption, and an always-selective reliance on Jewish histories,
symbols, texts, and meanings. When Halbertal highlights the “sewage of European thinking,”
he telegraphs the need to analyse the supposed religiosity of Gush Emunim or “Block of the
Faithful,” the original designation of the religious Zionist settler movement in Palestine/Israel
and subsequent manifestations of this movement in terms of European ideologies, especially
those centered on romantic expressions of nationalism, as unchanged essences suddenly awak-
ened in the nineteenth century. This romantic nationalism is inflicted by the “sleeping beauty”
syndrome turned into Frankenstein’s monster (Minogue 1967: 7). Indeed, Benedict Anderson’s
Imagined Communities analyses the modernity of nationalisms as involving their capacity to “turn
fatality into continuity” (1991: 11) and rendering death and human sacrifice meaningful along
different registers than theological ones, all along creating narratives of blood, martyrdom, and
sacred topographies that intersect, cross-reference, and dialectically transform religious mean-
ings and idioms. Zionism, as a modern political movement, is a thoroughly European develop-
ment and, when it intersects with messianic and apocalyptic mythology, it explodes. This means
its scaffolding constitutes the many ills of Europe, including anti-semitism, orientalism, settler
colonialism, and romantic nationalist impulses, along with more liberal, humanist, and universal
interpretations of nations and belonging. The messianic and explicit religious ideology of Gush
Emunim is as modernist as colonialism and nationalism; thus, it also challenges explanatory
frames that interpret its emergence and consolidation as hijacking, in this case, the “good old”
Israel (Zertal & Eldad 2009).

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The explosion of this ideological movement onto the scene, with its prioritization of the
biblical commandment to settle the land, resolved some of the inherent contradictions of
secular political Zionism. Zionism, as a romantic nationalism, was unique in its reliance on
a land whose acquisition necessitated settler colonialism, along with biblical land titles and
an underpinning orientalist imagination. This process is captured in the phrase “negation of
exile,” which characterized the ethos of the pre-state “Yishuv” and the early decades of the
Israeli state. Hence, Hebraism versus Judaism posed a contradiction, replacing the kibbutz as
the fulfillment of the Zionist logic of settlement and recreation (which entailed the disposses-
sion and depopulation of Palestinian communities), using increasingly religious rationales over
and against universalist or nationalist discourses of self-determination and “normalizing” the
Jews. The tension between a Jewish and democratic state is also something that, for later gen-
erations of settlers, became irrelevant as they promoted an unapologetic Jewish exclusionary
scheme that does not try to hide behind democratic principles. For the political establishment,
the entrenchment of the settlements as “facts on the ground” reveals a history of instrumen-
tal relationships between religious settlers and secular politicians and their invocation of a
security ethos that always relied on the strategic use of human shields through settlements.
The intricate topography of massive settlements in the occupied territories could not have
been implemented without the active participation of governments through policies, building
infrastructure, and military security. Halbertal’s labeling of the consolidation of Gush Emunim
as the “sewage” of Europe tries to hold on to secular innocence that is not there. The case of
Zionism is unique, certainly, but it also exemplifies the ways in which an explicit framing of
political ideology in terms of exclusionary religious visions helps to normalize more “benign”
nationalist expressions and to conceal their own ideological implications, underpinning exclu-
sions and patterns of racialization and dehumanization from which Euro-Zionism emerged
from the start.
At stake, therefore, are two dominant plots, both of which are flawed.The first is the “hijack-
ing” narrative where religious extremism takes over the secular state infrastructures and trans-
forms expressions of nationalism in its own image (e.g., “Frankenstein’s monster”). The second
is the “archeological dig” approach, which reads secular nationalism in terms of a political the-
ology, pretending something other than its theological grounds. As a result, if the hijacking
storyline holds on to a naïve defence of secular nationalism’s liberal ideology, the archeological
dig storyline does not concern itself with the messiness of policies and nation-state institutions
of socialization and emergent alternative storylines. The one plot overlooks the ideological and
religious underpinnings of secular articulations of nationalism; the other traffics with ahistori-
cal discourse in reading nationalism only through a demystification of its ostensibly true theo-
logical and imperial essence. This reading of the political-qua-theological mutes a historically
grounded, sociological approach to nationalism, religion, and ideology. To argue this point, I
need to return to the basic categories of analysis. Therefore, the next part of this chapter tack-
les the issue of how the very categories of religion, nationalism, and ideology are implicated
in enduring colonial legacies and unreconstructed secularist assumptions. I then analyse why
race, gender, and class cannot be segregated from an examination of religion, nationalism, and
ideology and why their sequestering in conventional framings itself reveals the endurance of the
colonial legacies of these analytic categories. Finally, I challenge the broadening of the concept
of political theology, which is currently in vogue as a way of encompassing the scholarly space
through which to interpret the relationship of religion to political ideology. My analysis clarifies
why an intersectional prism, identifying epistemologies from the margins, illuminates alternative
scripts for the study of religion and ideology in nationalist discourse that neither the hijacking
nor the archeological dig approaches provide.

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The complicity of categories

The deployment of religion, nation, ethnicity, and race to interpret different sociopolitical and
cultural phenomena conceals their modern interweaving with one another. In other words, it
is important to scrutinize the construction of “religion” as an anthropological and comparative
category and how it has been deployed as a colonial tool in the service of European colonial
forces to map the human terrains of the expanding empire (Chidester 2014). This conversation
is central to the academic study of religion, a field that grapples, like anthropology, with its own
colonial legacy, especially pertaining to the comparative study of religion. In the nineteenth
century, so the critical history of the discipline’s original sin goes, the study of religion as a
comparative anthropological category participated in social evolutionary paradigms of human
progress, situating some communities in more “primitive” or, to invoke Durkheim, “elemental”
development stages, as people who are not coeval (Fabian 2002). Of course, this temporal dis-
tancing authorized enslavement, exploitation, genocide, and epistemicide (e.g., Mignolo 2011).
These are the legacies of modernity, as is the emergence of the nation-state, which coincided
with such developments.
So, the first step here is to challenge a secularist presumption that marks one form of nation-
alism as “secular,” and therefore “benign” or “good,” and another form as “bad,” “pathological,”
or “religious.” In reality, as the transformation of political Zionism illuminates, secular liberal
nationalism is neither non-ideological nor non-religious. This last sentence can easily lead us
down a rabbit hole, generating a whole host of questions, such as what is meant by “religion”?
While this definitional question is outside the scope of this essay, it is also very much within it
because “nationalism” or, rather, “bad” nationalism is often narrated as the contested cultural and
political site that is overtaken by religion-qua-ideology. Accordingly, one needs to interrogate
the common genealogy of modern nationalism and the comparative study of religion.
Historians of religion, therefore, have helpfully exposed the orientalism underpinning the
construction of “world religions,” the eventual ideology of pluralism and multiculturalism, and
the participation of these inventions in multiple forms of epistemic, symbolic, cultural, struc-
tural, and genocidal violence. Tomoko Masuzawa (2005: 172–176), for example, examines the
tension between Ernest Renan and Max Müller, juxtaposing Müller’s philological approach to
classifying linguistic groups with the increased popularity of a blood-based and racial approach
articulated by Renan’s account of the nation, one that also articulated a modern Christian
supersessionism. Even if it is true that Müller, the “father” of the comparative study of religion,
resisted the racial turn, he still trafficked through the discourse of philology with the valuation
(and devaluation) of peoples according to their linguistic inheritances. The philological outlook
of Müller, at least in the way Masuzawa reads him, allowed for a tension with what came to be a
racialized, modernist, deterministic, and essentialist approach to people’s belonging, also articu-
lated through the label of “ethnicity.”
As Max Weber (1979) pointed out, ethnicity, nationalism, and religion share “elective affini-
ties” and the “nation” may be a descriptive designation, but it is also always about a narra-
tive of what might be called “chosenness.” Here, Weber’s observation intersects with the work
of Anthony Smith (e.g., 2003), a theorist of modern nationalism, who cataloged nationalist
mythologies all over the world, exposing in each case their story of chosenness, martyrs, sym-
bols, rituals, and sacred geographies whose sacredness is usually invested with blood sacrifice.
The work of another theorist, Anthony Marx (2003), not only focuses on the study of national
mythologies but also on how they are shaped dialectically by institutions. He pushes the nar-
rative of the emergence of the modern nation back to 1492 rather than locating it later, as
Anderson does, with the Industrial Revolution and the invention of print capitalism. Both are

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critical developments, certainly, but Marx’s redrawing of the periodization of the modern nation
is particularly helpful because it exposes the nation’s exclusionary logic, despite contemporary,
liberal, democratic projections of values of tolerance through the ideology of multiculturalism
and pluralism.To this extent, he also connects to Masuzawa’s critique of the invention of “world
religions” as highly convenient to the logic of European colonialism.
Hence, it is important to challenge pedestrian understandings of the key concepts in order
to denaturalize their apparent commonsensical meanings and self-evident nature. The concept
of ideology as a set of political beliefs and principles organizing or seeking to organize society
carries with it a genealogy from Karl Marx that renders “religion,” in particular, as a form of false
consciousness especially useful for the formation of self-alienating socioeconomic and political
structures, which intersect with the hijacking storyline.To the degree that nationalism manifests
in exclusionary terms, this manifestation posits nationalism as a form of religious and/or eth-
nocentric ideology that authorizes the privileging of certain groups because of their supposed
authentic embodiment of the “nation.” Often this privileging does not translate into economic
justice, but rather the deployment of a discourse of superiority that functions to elide economic
disparities under the illusion of “nation” or a common belonging that also translates into the
language of policing “our values” and “our cultural inheritance.” Such patterns of rearticulating
religio-cultural building blocks as cultural inheritance to be celebrated and conflated with the
secular nationalist imagination and narrative of belonging and non-belonging (Zubrzycki 2016)
recur in multiple Euro-American nationalisms. These discourses of authenticity and superiority
also manifest economically as principles structuring intergenerational wealth and opportunities
for human flourishing.
The point to stress here is that nationalism is always embedded within social scripts about
the community whose boundaries are often drawn linguistically, culturally, religiously, and eth-
nically. The language of nationalism, in other words, can contribute to enduring exploitation
and marginalization of non-normative citizens and inhabitants through the illusions or delu-
sions of a community. Indeed, standing on the shoulders of many who came before, such as
Angela Davis and James Baldwin, recent anti-racist struggles such as the one spearheaded by
#BlackLivesMatter engage in a critique of American empire, exploitative capitalism, and mili-
tarism as central to their struggle against the enduring structures of White supremacy. This
also reflects cross-learning with such movements as the South African #RhodeMustFall and
#FeesMustFall, which deploy similar intersectional analyses and critical consciousness to chal-
lenge neoliberalism and the colonial legacies persistently informing structural injustice and
knowledge production in South Africa.
Indeed, when marginalized communities articulate critiques of a nationalist discourse not
only from the perspective of their aspiration for inclusion within the normative framework
but also through linking their own conditions of oppression to other oppressed communities
globally, they expose the complex ligaments that link domestic contestations of race, religion,
gender, class, and histories of exploitation to global and international dynamics. Even if and
when nationalism assumes the shape of multicultural diversity discourse, neoliberalism reveals
a contemporary manifestation of a long history of global extraction, exploitation, and civiliza-
tional ideologies, initially grounded in the Christian cosmology of conversion and later through
different grammars of “good news” (Grosfoguel 2015). For #BlackLivesMatter, therefore, the
challenge is not one of inclusion but rather of disrupting the norms that persist in re-inscribing
White supremacy.
The case of the enduring struggle of African Americans not to be killed by the appara-
tuses of the state (police, for example)—but also by other dehumanizing systems and forms
of structural violence, such as the health care system, environmental racism, and underfunded

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schools—underscores that bracketing the colonial history of transatlantic slavery, in this case,
and leads to a skewed picture of root causes. The latter include the ascendance of explicit and
violent White nationalism, an ideology that is also rooted in “White Christianity” or White
European Christian history, philosophy, and theology. Even if some analysts bracket race in
their interpretation of Christian nationalism in the US (Whitehead & Perry 2020), the photo
opportunity of then American President Donald Trump in June 2020, standing in front of St.
John’s Church in Washington DC, holding a Bible upside down, was orchestrated to assuage
“his base.” This act occurred in the midst of an anti-racism uprising, which was primed by
the COVID-19-related lockdown, with its disproportionate effects on Black, Indigenous, and
People of Color (BIPOC), and by the murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis. It signaled to
“his base” that Trump (and later Trumpism) would continue to deliver on their agenda, which
includes not only the further reduction of women’s rights to their reproductive health but also
the White supremacy as conveyed through the language of “law and order” and signaled by the
literal violent dispersal of peaceful protests in front of the White House in order to facilitate
this photo-op. Regardless of criticism and to distract from its colossal failure containing the
pandemic, this messaging continued through the Trump administration’s deployment, in the
summer of 2020, of unmarked federal troops to Portland and other “liberal democratic” cities
where they kidnapped “anarchist” protesters. Clearly, the “Christian” agenda is also thoroughly
racialized and conveyed to the electoral base through a variety of dog whistles, subtle and not so
subtle.This form of racialized Christianism found a grotesque and tragic expression in the insur-
rection of January 6th, 2021 incited by the promulgation of “big lie” concerning the supposed
theft of the elections from Trump. The insurrection scene in the Capitol of the US displayed
images of crosses, confederate flags, antisemitic expressions such as 6MWNE (‘6 million wasn’t
enough’) on a White man’s sweater, and the occasional Israeli flag, denoting that Zionism and
antisemitism can coexist and are not unrelated to White supremacy.
The exclusionary nationalist discourse is Christian, but Christianity figures more through
an identitarian discourse that often bears little relation to real Christian piety and observance.
Christianity, as Brubaker (2017) comments, is often empty of any actual content beyond an
ethnic formulation of belonging. Indeed, it is Christianism. As in the case of Zionism, Christian
nationalism or White nationalism reduces “religion” to “ethnicity,” as articulated through the
idiom of nationalism. Therefore, it is not surprising that Richard Spencer, one of the ideo-
logues of American White nationalism, is a longtime admirer of Theodore Herzl, the father of
political Zionism. In fact, in an interview for an Israeli TV station, Spencer referred to his own
nationalism in terms of “White Zionism,” holding up an ugly mirror in front of Israeli society
(Kastenbaum 2017). Still, claims for Christianity outside the violence of Christianism bypasses
an investigation of how the “original sins” of the slavery, colonization, dispossession, and liquida-
tion of people cross-fertilized and coalesced with Christianity-qua-empire. Such bypassing once
again reinforces the hijacking storyline and reaffirms liberal innocence.
A push to uncover secular ideological formations of modern nationalisms in general and
on a case-by-case basis dispels a simplistic association of religion and ideology as one only
manifesting through explicit appeals to religious warrants. White supremacy is an ideology, if
by “ideology,” we mean the organizing principle of a society and its institutions. This ideol-
ogy can assume different morphologies, including a multicultural mode. Instead of explicitly
waving exclusionary claims to belonging around ethnoreligious identities, a multicultural vari-
ety of Christianism seeks to domesticate and privatize religiosity to ensure its exclusion from
determining socioeconomic and public structures. This “capitalist” or “(neo)liberal” variety of
ideology ensures, nonetheless, Christian and post-Christian politico-cultural hegemony (e.g.,
Shakman Hurd 2017). Further, the logic of multiculturalism entails racializing and ­minoritizing

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religious c­ommunities, always an outcome of concrete policies rather than merely rhetoric,
which reveals, once again, the modernist reshaping of religion within secularist ideological
formations. The issue, for example, is not only persistent anti-black racism in the US but also
specific “hard on crime” or xenophobic profiling policies.
But the rhetorical reconfiguration is critical to interpreting the racialization of religious
communities and requires a challenge to the hijacking model. Jensen and Meer identify “the
European ‘Christo-secular’ imagination” as pivotal to “reimagining the race-religion nexus”
(2020: 7). Jensen and Meer, therefore, engage in an archeological dig to try to understand the
nature of enduring relationships between anti-Muslim oppression and racism, on the one hand,
and the legacies of Christian European (White) anti-semitism, on the other. Such an analytic
effort to denaturalize the differentiation between “race” and “religion” in the production of
European modernity—or exposing and reimagining “the race-religion nexus,” as Jensen and
Meer (2020) articulate it—precisely dispels the myopic frame of the study of religion, ideology,
and nationalism. Of course, modernity’s dark sides were also propelled by economic incen-
tives for “primitive accumulation,” in Marx’s sense. This multivariable analytic prism prompts
us to think not only about the race/religion nexus but also about further intersectionality
along the economic axis and how people were dispossessed from their lands systematically,
often through appeals to liberal constructs about property rights and titles (while other humans
became ­property).
One of the central methodologies for the archeological dig approach is genealogical. It illu-
minates the constitutive relation between liberal nationalism, secularism, orientalism, and the
cultivation of capitalist and consumerist sensibilities (e.g., Mahmood 2015). The archeological
dig demystifies secular pretences and liberal innocence. Hence, all of these categories of nation,
ethnicity, religion, culture, tradition, and so forth carry their own inheritances and are impli-
cated in modernist narratives of “progress” on the back of colonial and genocidal practices. The
issue at hand not only surrounds the economic principles according to which the state will
be regulated but also those determining what the nation is, what its subjective boundaries are,
and who gets to populate the cleavages, hybrids, and margins. This mode of analysis requires an
exegetical excavation of the political theologies underpinning nationalisms; in the case of the
US and Europe, this is White Christianity and/or the “Christo-secular imagination” and, in the
case of Israel, this is Euro- or Ashkenazi Zionism. Such exegetical scrutiny is the necessary work
of critique, or the archeological dig mode, which challenges the hijacking storyline also framed
alarmingly as a “religious resurgence.” I argue below that exegesis, however, is not a sufficient
scholarly practice for analysis of religion, ideology, and nationalism.
For now, it will suffice to stress that the categories deployed as identity markers and subjective
boundaries share in common their presentation as self-evident facts and as ontological realities
(expressing the things as they are supposedly inscribed in the nature of being) that seek political
expressions. This is precisely what a historicist account of the study of anthropology, linguistics,
and religion highlights. It is not beside the point that scholarship produced in the centres of
colonial power mapped the world according to races, linguistic families, and religions where
supposedly inferior varieties of each also coincided with the bodies of non-Europeans as well
as, through a complex semiotics, the domestic “other” of Europe, the Jews, as the Inquisition’s
concurrence with Columbus convey.

Identifying the intersections

One of the challenges of the contemporary study of nationalism, religion, and ideology is
to unsettle this Eurocentric origin story or, rather, always expose its constitutive relation to

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the ­projects of empire and colonialism. Nelson Maldonado-Torres (2014), for example, works
within the tradition of scholars of coloniality to expose how race and religion are constitu-
tive even before the very biological and scientific language of race became prevalent in the
nineteenth century. While advancing a different disciplinary outlook than Anthony Marx,
Maldonado-Torres likewise pushes modernity back to 1492, which is the symbolic, but also
very real, mark of the launch of the Western Christian colonial project. Holding modernity
and colonialism together as constitutive exposes how the project of modernity depended upon
devising a system of dehumanization. Indeed, in the absence of “race” in the sixteenth century,
“religion” as a comparative and anthropological category of classification functioned, in the
words of Maldonado-Torres, “as a dispositive of the coloniality of power, knowledge, and being
in the formation and solidification of ‘modern Western civilization (2020).’” Religion, in other
words, determined the difference between the colonized and the colonizer who, concurrently in
Spain, launched the system of the Inquisition, which was underpinned by the language of blood
purity in a departure from classical modalities of Christian anti-Semitism (also see Anidjar 2014).
One key takeaway here is that thresholds drawn as supposed expressions of conceptions of
peoplehood are not self-evident nor natural but rather always gesture toward a deeper history
and power formations. These legacies cannot be interpreted outside a fuller analysis of moder-
nity that also involves the colonial and the intricate logic of dehumanization and classification it
generated as well as how such logic underpinned, indeed even offered, an ideological frame for
dispossession, enslavement, and genocide.
This is where the “boomerang effect” (e.g., Mbembe 2003) connects the death factories of
Europe and its fascism during World War II to what was already the practice in Europe’s colo-
nies. Accordingly, World War II and the systematic liquidation of certain communities was not
a departure, an aberration, from an enlightened Europe; instead, it was true to its legacy if we
deploy a global analytic lens. Such a view is necessary in order to unpack the issue of religion,
nationalism, and ideology in places as different as the US and Israel.
Hence, to scrutinize the manifestations of violent expressions of hatred to BIPOC and how
such bigotries interlace with one another and with conceptions of the “authentic” national
community, we have to expose the operative logic of whiteness and the long legacies of colo-
niality. The first decades of the twenty-first century compel such an analytic interlinking or
an intersectional approach to the question of religion, ideology, and nationalism. It is clear,
in various countries, including the US, Hungry, Poland, France, and England, that ideological
exclusionary nationalist discourses rely not only on appeals to some real or imagined Christian
inheritance, but also to an inheritance that is also White, and thus itself constitutes as an “ethnic,”
or “ethnoreligious” marker, which results in the racialization of certain religious communities
such as Muslim-Americans. In the US, former President Trump explicitly relies on, incites,
and inflames White nationalist discourse, which finds its ugliest expressions in various violent
movements such as the Ku Klux Klan and the more recent Boogaloo movement, which seemed
to thrive during the Trump presidency (Allam 2020). Such movements, however, rely on the
scaffoldings of White supremacy in the same way that the settler movement in Palestine/Israel
relies on secular forms of Jewish supremacy. White supremacy or Eurocentricity alone, however,
cannot explain such “hijacking,” nor should the analytic scope end with the “archeological dig”
of the colonial logic and the Christo-secular imagination that underpins explicitly religious
ideological nationalist discourses. Indeed, a citizenship discourse is not static or deterministic.
Thus, it needs to be analysed on a case-by-case basis in terms of tensions between jus soli (birth)
and jus sanguinis (blood) principles and thresholds of belonging, legally, culturally, and otherwise.
The challenge on the level of archeology, once again, is not only identifying and tackling the
visible parts of the iceberg but also illuminating—through an analysis of ideological formations

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and genealogical analysis—what is submerged under the water, what enables the most obvi-
ously grotesque and offensive expression of the very ideology of Christian White supremacy.
This kind of analysis is both intersectional and decolonial. It is intersectional because colonial-
ity, as Lugones (2007), Wynter (2003), and other feminist theorists have exposed, was not only
about racialization, but also, integrally, about gendering. Gender metaphors of conquest, rape,
and domination offered ontological certainty to colonial practices (see also McClintock 1995),
just as they did to nationalist discourses, where concepts and metaphors such as rape and honor
are often attached to escalating nationalist rage as well as central to the deployment of rape as a
technique of war (Cohn 2013).
Gender continues to play a significant role in contemporary manifestations of sexual
politics in exclusionary nationalist discourse and thus in the formation and reformation of
national ideology. Sexual politics also intersect in complex ways with religion in constructing
thresholds of national belonging or non-belonging. While Jaspir Puar (2007) exposes how the
domestication of LGBTQI+ coalesces with the discursive operation of the war on (Muslim)
terrorism and the deepening of the securitizing of Islam and Muslim bodies “at home” in
the US, Sara Farris’s concept of “femonationalism” (2017) reveals how women’s rights are
instrumentalized and leveraged by exclusionary, right-wing, neoliberal, European ideologues,
such as Marine Le Pen in France. Femonationalism, often advanced and implemented by
“femocrats” who depart in significant ways from feminist emancipatory politics, manipulate
the orientalist discourse of gender equality to both stigmatize Muslim men and to exploit,
through immigration and labor policies, migrant women (mostly Muslims), “liberating” them
supposedly from their traditional shackles through the “opportunity” to plug into the care
industry. Farris shows how anti-Muslim rhetoric is both racialized and gendered as well as
enacted through long-term immigration policy and state infrastructures. In other words, the
instrumentalization of women’s and LGBTQI+ rights is not mere rhetoric or façade. Instead,
it reinforces White ethnonationalist populist discourses that, even if they differ in their degree
of projecting “sexual progressivism” (e.g., France, The Netherlands) or outright attacks on
so-called “gender ideology” (e.g., Hungry, Poland), entail “Christian,” “post-Christian,” or
“Judeo-Christian” boundaries for inclusion or exclusion from the “imagined community” in
their respective appeals to some purported “golden age.” Anti-Muslim oppression—sometimes
explicitly, sometimes implicitly—connects intimately to the legacy of European Christian
anti-Semitism.
Of course, the construct of the “Judeo-Christian” is a myth that myopically conceals what
Anya Topolski (2020) calls, together with Jensen and Meer (2020), the “race-religion constel-
lation” and that serves to mask Islamophobia and anti-Jewish oppression through a variety of
orientalist civilizational discourses, including synonymizing it with secularism. Topolski high-
lights that, while “Judeo-Christian” is deployed “as a proxy for Christianity,” the co-imbricated
concept of secularism constitutes “a form of post-Christianity.” Both terms, accordingly, “serve
to obscure the reality of a continued Christian privilege, and in particular Protestant privilege,
in European public spheres” (Topolski 2020: 85). Once again, an archeological dig model reveals
an illusion of liberal and secular innocence. Dispelling the race-religion concealment through
semiotic and discursive maneuvers, therefore, become critical for unpacking the question of
religion, nationalism, and ideology. Exposing the functionality of the Judeo-Christian construct
reveals the persistence of the privileging of Christianity as an underpinning of the organization
of power in Europe (Topolski 2020: 86), that is, its ideological formations. These unfold, on a
case-by-case basis, in various nationalist constellations where anti-Muslim oppression manifests
as a phenomenon with roots in the long centuries of racializing Christianity, even if such racial-
izing patterns are masked through the language of “values” or “cultural inheritances.” The latter

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is then weaponized to exclude Muslims on the level of supposed incompatibility with European
progressive values.
Topolski’s intervention on the level of discursive politics, along with theorists who have
directed their attention to sexual politics, confirms the need to re-approach the question of reli-
gion, nationalism, and ideology through an intersectional prism and with decolonial horizons.
I finally want to address why, despite its own effort to demystify the race/religion nexus, the
reconfiguration of the subfield of political theology as a variation of the archeological dig model
presents a problem from a sociological and historical perspective.

Political theology or the exegesis of national ideology

In addition to the “sewage of European thinking,” other ideological currencies also mark
Zionism as an internally plural European movement. As I have written elsewhere (e.g., Omer
2013), secular Zionism in whatever variety, including in its statist realities of Israel, cannot be
understood without also grappling with the political theology underpinning them or bracketing
the historical, sociological, and anthropological reconfigurations that cannot simply be analysed
on the level of “ideology” as a political theology, always consistent with itself. By “political the-
ology,” I refer to the (always selective) ways in which Judaism and Jewish history are retrieved,
reinterpreted, and reproduced in the construction of peoplehood or nation. Neither liberal nor
socialist Zionism could gain traction and coherence outside a teleological mode of reading
Jewish history and destiny, one that negated and devalued Jewish diasporic lives over centu-
ries. The genealogical shift in conjunction with a related subfield of secularism studies, mainly
devoted to exposing the nefarious weaponization of religion in the service of constellations of
power and ideology, also underpins emerging conversations that reflect more hermeneutically
on enduring political theologies of nations. A shift in the academic focus that reflects an effort
to reinterpret the concept of “political theology” outside its parochial theoretical and historical
locations reflects a saturation of the genealogical and poststructuralist exposition of the gram-
mar of the secular, thus redirecting the gaze to the “political theology” or the ways in which
secular assemblages are authorized. This shift to political theology, therefore, is situated along
a continuum with the genealogical turn informing secularism studies as exegesis of (national)
ideology and the ideology of White supremacy.
The point behind my detour into political theology is that neither liberalism nor social-
ism can actually be intelligible within nationalist discourse without also specifically analysing
the religio-cultural meanings and passions motivating people to (potentially) commit ultimate
sacrifices(of their and their children’s lives) to this construct of the “nation.” To this degree, this
archeological exegesis of ideology reveals the limits of the hijacking model. Frankenstein’s mon-
ster of Zionism, the messianic settler movement, was initially labeled extremist, yet it was always
enabled by the secular government, which offered resources, infrastructure, and security for the
settlement project in the territories Israel occupied in 1967. The success of the Greater Eretz
Yisrael movement gradually marked by actual representation in the Knesset (e.g., The Jewish
Home Party and the Kahanist Religious Zionism Party), its exclusionary discourse, and Jewish
supremacist logic has indeed been effective politically because of its ideological links and con-
tinuity with secular Zionisms rather than any narrative about the good secular being somehow
hijacked by religious ideologues.
This case is instructive because it exposes how ideological formations inform secular and
“peaceful” varieties of nationalism. This is indeed within the scope of political theology as an
exegesis of national ideology. I surround the word “peaceful” with scare quotes because obvi-
ously, the secular variety of Zionism and Israeli nationalism has been experienced violently by

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indigenous Palestinian communities, starting with the immigration of Jews from Europe at the
turn of the nineteenth century and accelerated since the collapse of the Ottoman Empire and
the conclusion of World War I. To a different degree, Mizrahi and other marginalized Jewish
communities, such as the Ethiopians, suffered from Euro-Zionism (Shohat 1988) and its “sewage
of European thinking.”
In other words, what makes the analysis of the relationship between nationalism, religion,
and ideology interesting is not only by identifying when such a link is obvious empirically,
as actors articulate their political forms of violence through appeals to exclusionary religious
claims. Instead, the analytical task is infinitely more interesting when it requires us to uncover
and illuminate the operative force of ideological formations, such as White supremacy, antisem-
itism, settler colonialism, and secularism itself. Nationalism as a narrative of the legitimacy of the
infrastructures of the state (or state-in-the-making) relies, by definition, on sets of exclusionary
thresholds, whether linguistic, religious, ethnic, or cultural. All of these categories cross-fertilize,
sometimes even overlap with, one another. The task of political theology is to interpret the
construct of the nation in terms of its theology and selective theological imagination and to
relocate this imagination within a broader storyline of modernity as coloniality. In particular, the
disentangling of race and religion, which Topolski and others subvert, conceals and normalizes
the operative force of White Christianism in Euro-America. In the case of Israel, the consolida-
tion of religiously flavored colonization of the Palestinian territories occupied in 1967 in the
form of the red-roofed settlements was never a departure from normalized and naturalized
secular Ashkenazi Jewish supremacy that has organized social and political life within the Green
Line of 1948.
Euro-Zionism, as noted, was incubated with all the ills of Europe, including an orientalism
that played out in detrimental ways for Jews from Arab and Muslim countries (i.e., the Mizrahi
groups) who were initially channeled to ma’abarot or refugee camps, sprayed with DDT, had
their babies kidnapped, were subject to sterilizing practices and other medical experiments, and
had their children funneled into vocational schools as they eventually were relocated, again as
human shields, to “development towns” in the south or to neighbourhoods around “hostile”
environments, implementing the familiar “facts on the ground” strategy. Arab-Jewish refugees
or immigrants were often settled in Palestinian homes, standing empty due to the events of the
Nakba. As critical Mizrahi scholarship and activism have exposed, the Ashkenazi-normativity of
the Yishuv and the successive Israeli governments entrenched discrimination against Mizrahis, a
sense of Israel’s supposed European superiority as well as its branding through the weaponiza-
tion of anti-semitism and the mobilization of pre-existing orientalist frames that posit it as a
“villa in the jungle,” in the words of former Prime Minister Ehud Barak.This self-representation
once again illuminates the need to expose the ideological scaffolding and its ethnocentric loca-
tion in Europe and its ongoing legacies in Israel (Mizrachi 2016). This is where the archeologi-
cal dig model clarifies that the supposed hijacking of secular Zionism by settler ideology is no
hijacking at all, but rather the unfolding of the very logic of settler colonialism-qua-messianic
Jewish supremacy.
Yet is there a possibility for other syntaxes? While there are notable critiques of Anderson’s
thesis, one dimension remains relevant and is contained in the very title of his book. Nationalisms
are “imagined communities,” and any effort to analyse the nation should study how this imagi-
nation occurs; by whom; through which institutions, narratives, and memories; and how reli-
gious and cultural meanings, discourses, symbols, institutions, networks, and texts intersect in
the production and reproduction of political meanings. In addition, a critical outlook asks
whose stories are not included, whose imagination and meanings are excluded, why, and by
whom.

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These latter questions are important in my efforts to understand how and why nations are
contested by those who inhabit the silences, the margins, and the spaces of counter-imagination
or, in James Scott’s words, the “hidden transcripts” (1990). This is where exegetical and archeo-
logical accounts seem to reach their limits. Unlike the exegetes of “secular” national ideology
who now see themselves as expositors of “political theology,” the archeological excavators/exe-
getes either demystify ideology or interpret prophetic interruptions of ideology. I am interested
in moving beyond the mere exegesis of the scripts authorizing exclusionary interpretations
of nation or, conversely, of the prophetic disruptions that, like political theology/ideology, are
interpreted in abstraction from sociological realities and social movement praxis. The prophetic
is said to reinterpret the past as a way of challenging the present (Lebovic & Weidner 2020),
which precludes interpreting current counter-hegemonic resources and concentrates agency in
the persons of virtuosos and exemplary actors rather than in grassroots organizing, critical praxis,
or social re-scripting.
This level of exegesis of the political-qua-theological and a renewed focus on it through
the broadening of the concept of political theology tends to focus on textual references and
archetypes. As a result, they overlook the historical and sociological unfolding that is generative
of “hidden scripts” or, in the words of Nadim Khoury, “counter publics of memory” (2019). By
this, Khoury refers to the need to grapple in complex ways—rather than through what he calls
“narrative partition”—with the events of the Holocaust and the Nakba. Khoury’s argument, like
Edward Said’s (2006), challenges the compartmentalized, exclusionary reading and commemo-
ration of the Holocaust and the Nakba. He relates this phenomenon to an intentional narrative
partition, which “would leave the core of the Zionist narrative intact” (Khoury 2019:121). By
challenging the partition logic of the Oslo Accords (between Israel and the Palestine Liberation
Organization) as itself entrenched in an exclusionary ideology, grounded in ethnoreligious
nationalism, Khoury’s “counter publics of memory” reveals “the centrality of both historical
injustices” (ibid, 124) associated with the Nakba and the Holocaust in any effort to reimagine
cohabitation of Palestinians and Israelis outside an otherwise intact Zionist logic of separation.
This constitutes an invitation for historical and sociological messiness, which a fixation on the
archeology of political ideology-qua-theology precludes in its search for some deeper (theologi-
cal) truth and a (colonial) logic.
Because of its continuous embeddedness within Europe as an ideological and political pro-
ject, the case of Israel is particularly instructive for an analysis of religion and ideology in relation
to the political construct of nationalism. To the extent that marginalized and oppressed com-
munities such as the Palestinians, but also Mizrahi and Ethiopian-Israeli Jews, can identify how
this ideology linked their differentiated conditions of marginality and oppression (Lavie 2018;
Shohat 1988), they can also articulate alternative scripts, decolonized consciousness, and political
futurity. The deployment of an intersectional lens and sociological methodologies can reframe
this question regarding the relation between religion, nationalism, and ideology. This reframing
entails critical sociopolitical action and the re-envisioning of nations and state practices along
more inclusive and intersectional lines—lines that do not participate in the erasure of settler
colonialism through a discourse of myopic liberalism but rather attempt to redress historical
injustices.
Therefore, the study of nationalism, religion, and ideology cannot rely on national histori-
ography alone. If it does, it becomes mere exegesis. If such an analysis takes religion seriously
and seeks to trace how religiosity, religious meanings, religious symbols, religious texts, and so
forth are selectively integrated into the (re)production of nation, together with processes of
racialization, then this analysis constitutes mere exegesis under the renewed framing of political
theology, which is renewed because of a concentrated effort to de-center (White) Christianity,

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even though it is still lurking in the background and even in the foreground as the main target
of critique. That is, regardless of what contextual particularity the political-theological exegesis
focuses on, its target is the collusion between whiteness and Christianity, a basic storyline with
multiple morphological manifestations.
This monochromatic frame delimits a scholarly discourse that remains reactive to the “sewage
of Europe” rather than generative of new transformative, historical, and emancipatory scripts.
This exegetical framing of political theology as a broad category under which one can engage
in the comparative study of religion as if liberated from the traces of Christian- and Euro-
centricity, is renewed because the explosion of writings subsumed under “political theology” in
the second decade of the twenty-first century distances itself from Carl Schmitt’s domination
of the concept as well as from the aforementioned colonial complicity of comparative religious
ethics. Nevertheless, this subfield re-inscribes the nation-qua-theology as an ideology working
over and against people, structurally but not substantially replacing religious authority through
the discourse of secularism. Sometimes theology-qua-ideology appears to be inscribed within
people’s bodies by virtue of their phenotypes, reflecting an ahistorical reading of political reali-
ties that people inhabit.
By operating merely on the level of critique, the archeological excavation of political theol-
ogy underpinning secular nationalism offers no alternative futurity beyond demystification of
the “secular” and “political” and persistently colonial realities that people inhabit. For example,
the Mizrahis, as a community with a distinct identity at the margins of Israeli society—one cre-
ated as an outcome of Israeli policies—constitute potential connectors to Palestinian experiences
and to the possible horizons of the counterpublics. Their potential as a counter-hegemonic site
of reimagining belonging or what I have called elsewhere the “hermeneutics of citizenship”
(Omer, 2013) is occluded within a study of nationalism that simply assimilates Zionism into a
global grammar of White supremacy. Hence, despite sociological and historical processes that
have shaped Mizrahi and Ethiopian-Israeli political proclivity in support of Jewish supremacy, a
focus only on nationalism-qua-theology risks ahistoricity and an oversimplified buttressing of
the “sewage of European thinking.”
Political theology as a reinterpreted field now encompasses everything from settler colonial-
ism and indigenous resurgence to the study of racism globally, but it does not de-center Europe.1
Indeed, remove big constructs such as White supremacy and settler colonialism and politi-
cal theology remains without a target, revealing a field submerged in the work of critique of
modernity while nevertheless re-inscribing Christian theology as the main reference point. To
this degree, the proliferation of political theology to frame the analysis of the relation between
religion and nation is anti-empirical and anti-sociological. Thus, it constitutes mere exegesis on
national historiography or a description of decolonial, queer, and/or indigenous forms of spir-
ituality and religiosity, often revealing not sociological realities and concrete political visions but
rather the elitist locations of those articulating them.
The main problem is that works under the rubric of political theology, even in their decolo-
nial register, focus on epistemic contestations or power reductionist critiques at the expense of
sociological and anthropological research. Thus, they traffic in abstractions and in poststructur-
alist critiques of power (now interlinking whiteness and Christianism) without opening up to
hidden scripts or counterpublics as sites of alternative futurities. I embrace such a critique, but
also the practices of “critical caretaking.” Critical caretaking (Omer 2013) illuminates both the
critique of religion and ideology within the framework of nationalist contestations, but also the
multiple ways in which people, through social movement dynamics and epistemologies from
the margins, reimagine the meanings of political inclusion and belonging within the messiness
of their historical locations.This reimagining is not an intellectual exercise in academic seminars

62
 Nationalism, religion, ideology

where proposals tend to reinforce Manichean binaries and prevent the consolidation of coun-
terpublics of memory and futurity.
To conclude, this chapter challenges both the hijacking and archeological models. The for-
mer holds on to liberal innocence by rendering only explicit manifestations of religious political
claims as ideological. The latter, reductively and ahistorically reads political ideology as theology
persistently beholden to 1492, searching for the grammar of hegemony. Indeed, the constitutive
dimensions of nation-making on the back of processes of dehumanizing in the colonies and
through the mechanisms of exclusion “at home” is critical for my efforts to think in robust ways
about religion and ideology through the core issue of nationalism.The colonial frame, of course,
operates differently in the postcolonial contexts of India, Kenya, or the Philippines, to name just
a few examples, but nevertheless, its traces are apparent in exclusionary ideological nationalist
discourse, such as Hindutva in India or the cyclical, violent eruptions around elections in Kenya.
The focus of this essay, however, reflects back on Euro-America and its postcolonial grappling
with persistent colonial presences. The case of Israel and Zionism confirms the many afterlives
of ongoing European legacies, as does Trump’s upside-down Bible photo-op in the midst of
the anti-racism uprising that he violently dispersed. To only remain on this level of exegesis of
empire and nation however is insufficient if one is also interested in counterpublics and their
decolonial openings.

Note
1 To assess the reconfiguration of political theology and its expansion beyond Carl Schmitt’s fram-
ing, see the Journal of Political Theology and the Political Theology Network, https://politicaltheology​
.com/.

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 5
RELIGION AND GENDER
Leila Hadj Abdou

Introduction
During the 2020 Black Lives Matter protests in the wake of the murder by US police forces
of African American George Floyd, activists were asking to—alongside Confederate monu-
ments—tear down statues in which Jesus was depicted as a white European.The activists argued
that these statues conveyed a bigger political message: If Jesus is imagined as white, and God is
white, this then implies that authority is white. Thus, the statues, activists emphasized, symbol-
ized white supremacy (Washington Post, June 25, 2020). A popular graffiti slogan that appeared
from the 1980s onwards on the walls of European and North American cities in turn reads:‘God
is black, yes she is’. The graffiti slogan goes one step further than the activists calling out the
whitening of Jesus.The slogan not only questions the idea of authority as white but also the idea
of authority as being male. After all, ‘God made Adam and Eve, not Adam and Steve’ is a popular
car bumper sticker in the United States, a country where political positions, in this example, a
stance against homosexuality, tend to be exhibited on cars.
These slogans highlight that not only religion itself is deeply gendered and interwoven with
power relations, but that religion plays a key role in political debates and contestations about
gender and gender relations in contemporary societies. In light of the gendered-ness of religion
and its politicization, discussing the theme of gender and religion is highly relevant to under-
standing past and current political developments, and especially also the current rising polariza-
tion of society in which values related to gender (conservative versus liberal) play a key role.
Scholars engaging in the academic study of religion have paid growing attention to gender
dimensions, but still, many aspects are either still underexplored or not sufficiently linked (Aune
and Nyhagen 2016, Knibbe and Bartelink 2020, McMorris and Glass 2018). In this chapter,
I provide an overview of the different themes of this scholarly debate. To contextualize the
debate, I first discuss the role religion plays in the life of women. I then proceed to look at the
female agency of religious women, and more specifically, at female activism in religious, ideo-
logical movements. I then continue to discuss the role of religion and gender ideologies in the
contemporary global rise of right-wing populism and/or authoritarianism, which is followed
by a focus on the so-called ‘anti-gender ideology’ movement, a movement strongly related to
religious authorities. The last section of the chapter concerns the current use of gender equal-
ity rhetoric in mobilizations against the ‘religious other’, i.e., Muslim migrants and minorities

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(see also chapters on populism and nationalism in this handbook). Before proceeding to these
main parts of this chapter, as part of this introduction, I will now discuss the interconnections of
religion and gender concerning power and define the concept of ideology used in this chapter.

Power
A useful starting point for any scholarly discussion about issues of gender and religion is that
both are inherently about power, embodying, distributing, and representing power (Woodhead
2012). As such, they are both structuring society.
Gender orders are intricate socially and historically constructed systems of power relations
enacted through institutions, structures, and everyday actions through which relations between
women and men are ordered, remade, changed, and/or reified in a society (Connell and Pearse
2015).
Religious ideologies, practices, and institutions are, in turn, a constitutive part of gender
orders. They play a key role in ordering gender relations. Religion can confirm and provide
grounds of legitimation for the existing societal gender order, or it can also challenge this order
and aim to bring about changes or reverse changes concerning gender orders (Woodhead 2012).
This also implies the existence of progressive religious movements and ideologies as regards gen-
der equality. The fact that all three monotheistic religions tend to anthropomorphize the divine
(Aslan 2017)—including Islam despite its emphasis that the divine has no image, substance, or
form—resulting in ideas or representations of God as male, is revealing the centrality of gender
orders in religious ideologies and their link to secular sources of gendered power.

Ideology
Religions can be considered comprehensive or thick ideologies. Different—sometimes incom-
patible—variants of feminism, which at the core are propagating the equality of humans inde-
pendent from their sex, but also nativism, i.e., the belief that nation-states should be inhabited
exclusively by natives and that foreign elements (persons or ideas) are threatening the nation
(Mudde 2016), instead can be seen as thin ideologies.
Thick ideologies exhibit the following characteristics: (a) substantive internal integration; (b)
a rich core related to a large range of political concepts; (c) the ability to express a large range
of concepts and political positions; (d) a large range of answers to socio-political questions; (e)
far-reaching objectives and scope; (f) a sufficient cohesive and intricate ‘ideological product’; and
(g) unity among those actors producing the ideology (Freeden 1996, cit. after Aslanidis 2016,
64). Thin ideologies, in opposition to thick ideologies, do not provide a comprehensive range
of answers to socio-political questions. As Aslanidis (2016) rightly argues, the vagueness of the
definition of ideology in social science makes the distinction between thick and thin ideolo-
gies arbitrary at times. Despite its shortcomings, these concepts are still helpful in distinguishing
between full-fledged ideologies and more fragmented or less comprehensive sets of political
thought.The term ‘ideology’ as used in this chapter is thus not value laden and it includes politi-
cal thoughts across the political spectrum.

The gender gap of religiosity

One of the most debated issues in the scholarship on religion and gender is the fact that women
tend to display greater levels of religiosity. This gender gap has been identified and repeatedly
confirmed in surveys going back to the 1930s (Pew 2016). Put differently, men are predomi-

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nantly in positions of authority; but it is often women who continue to sustain faith through
their religious devotion and also through their unpaid voluntary labor in religious community
actions (Tolleson-Rinehart and Perkins 1989).
The extent of this gender gap varies across different world regions and different religions. It
thus has to be studied and understood in its particular context. Among 84 countries looked at
in a recent study by Pew (2016), in two countries (Mozambique and Israel), religion was more
important to males than to females. In the rest of the globe, religion is equally or more important
to women than to men. In the United States, a country in which religious commitment overall
is exceptionally high compared to other similar states in the Global North, the gender gap is
particularly pronounced: 60 percent of women, as opposed to 47 percent of men, see religion as
very important to their lives, and 64% of women in contrast to 47% of men in the United States
say they pray daily (Pew 2016).
Given the restrictive gender perspectives that many religious ideologies are seen to endorse,
this gap has been seen as a major puzzle for social scientists, and despite continuous academic
studies to explore this gap, empirical findings explaining this phenomenon remain inconclusive.
Two major and competing explanatory approaches exist and are worth mentioning briefly
here. The scholarly debate about these two approaches is often summarized with the phrase
‘nature versus nurture’, since the first approach sees the gender gap of religiosity rooted in innate
differences, whereas the second sees it as a result of socialization.
In a nutshell, the first strand is based on a cost-benefit approach. It states that given the divine
punishment for being irreligious that exists in many religions, not being religious poses a greater
risk than being so. Men, who are said to be more prone to risk taking, are consequently less
religious. Scholars have explained this risk-affine as opposed to risk-averse behaviour in different
ways. Some research, for instance, suggests that higher androgen levels make men more willing to
take risks; thus, according to this approach, the religiosity gender gap comes down to the influ-
ence of hormones (Stark 2002, Das 2018, Ellis et al. 2016). However, despite some empirical evi-
dence in its favour, given that this explanatory approach employs rather deterministic ideas about
women and men, it has been widely debated and contested (see McMorris and Glass 2018).
The second approach is attempting to explain the gender gap of religiosity through the big-
ger exposure of women to economic and social vulnerability. Given unequal gender relations,
women often find themselves in a more precarious or vulnerable socio-economic status; hence,
according to this strand of research, this exposure to vulnerability can explain religious com-
mitment, as faith helps to overcome socio-economic hardships and can provide a sense of safety
(Pipper and Inglehart 2008). Faith can indeed play a positive role in providing a sense of safety
and stability, and material security has been shown to decrease the gender gap of religiosity (Voas
et al. 2013). This approach, however, does not entirely solve either the puzzle of why women
would support religious ideologies that are supportive or even constitutive of gender orders that
render them vulnerable in the first place.
Many of the shortcomings of these approaches can be understood by their limited perspec-
tives on female agency. Partly, this idea of the gender gap being puzzling is also based on omit-
ting the fact that humans can have multiple identities and different priorities regarding their
sense of belonging. Women (just as men) hold different values and some do endorse rather than
reject conservative gender norms.

Female agency
Scholarship going beyond this limited perspective has highlighted that religious devotion can
offer personal fulfillment and thus increase personal well-being. Some women choose to be

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religious not despite but because of conservative gender roles that provide women with a clear
role in an ever more complex world. Religion can also be especially appealing for women, given
that in many religious ideologies, men’s role is as a provider with responsibility for their family
(Woodhead 2012).
An interesting example in this regard is the transformative power of Pentecostalism.
Pentecostalism has been shown to redefine gender relations considerably to the benefit of women,
as conversions can decrease male violence toward women and foster the dedication of men to
family life. So, it is not despite but because of its conservative outlook that requires asceticism
that Pentecostalism is said to increase the well-being of women, in particular women in settings
of poverty, alcohol abuse, and deprivation (Brusco 2010, Thornton 2016).Yet, Pentecostalism is
not countering conservative gender orders or patriarchy. On the contrary, it indeed relies on it.
Yet, it transforms existing gender relations by proposing a new type of patriarchy, namely, one of
taking responsibility for one’s family (Mira and Lorentzen 2002).
Belonging to a religious community provides not only an important source of meaning and
a structure to live one’s life in a purposeful way, but it thus can also serve as a means for (self-)
empowerment for women, as well as a way of contesting and changing discriminatory norms
from within (Mahmood 2005, Hong Tschalaer 2017).
Activism and/or proactive engagement by women within religious institutions and settings
is widespread, and in terms of gender, ranges from consolidating behaviour to a tactical and
questing type of behaviour and also countering forms of activism. Consolidating engagement
reinforces and sacralizes existing gender orders and norms and unequal power relations that are
underlying these orders, whereas tactical and questing types negotiate and push the boundaries
for women’s well-being within the existing norms and gender orders. Countering activism,
eventually, is an active opposition against existing gender orders (Woodhead 2012).
To cite the feminist theologian Alice Hagemann (1974, 27), religious women have been
questioning gender orders ‘within the Church if possible, outside the Church if necessary’.
Religious feminists used a gender-critical lens to come up with interpretations of sacred texts
that deviate from established perspectives provided by male authorities. An important example is
the rise of Christian feminism in the Global North from the 1960s onwards.This wave of activ-
ism was strongly related to the Women’s Bible (1895) by the North American suffragist Elizabeth
Cady Stanton. A key writing of this wave of activism then was Mary Daly’s book The Church
and the Second Sex (1968), which exposed the attitude of the Catholic Church toward women
across history in an attempt to push reforms.
Certainly, a gender-critical approach by religious women has not been confined to
Catholicism. Islamic feminism, for example, started to grow by the late 1980s and early 1990s.
The growth of Islamic feminism has been exposed to specific challenges that can be under-
stood from a postcolonial perspective. Feminism in the Global North has been entangled with
(neo-)colonial politics. Colonial narratives construed Islam as irreconcilable with ‘modernity’
and women’s emancipation, and calls for women’s rights ‘saving brown women from brown
men by white men’ (cf. Spivak 1994 [1984]) were part of the colonial project. As Ahmed (1992)
reminds us, those colonialists who were opposing patriarchal gender orders abroad, insisting
that Islam inhibited emancipation, tended to be at the same time fierce opponents of women’s
rights movements at home. More recent political developments such as the ‘War on Terror’ used
similar perspectives and arguments of women’s emancipation to argue in favour of interventions
(Abu-Lughod 2002). Muslim feminists thus were caught between a rock and a hard place: ‘On
the one hand, Islamists were denying us equality in the name of Shari‘a; on the other, hegemonic
global powers were pursuing a neo-colonial agenda in the name of feminism and human rights’
(Mir-Hosseini 2019, 113). Despite this challenge, women have been increasingly questioning

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established ideas by Muslim authorities and have been reinterpreting sacred texts. This includes
Muslim feminists who rely on secularist ideas, as well as women who have been pointing to a
liberating potential of Islam for women.
Some women, in turn, have also taken up key roles in extremist, religious organizations, i.e.,
organizations that aim to change established social and/or political systems through violence.
This includes women who, for instance, have joined the Islamic State (ISIS) or Hindu national-
ist movements in India (Aune and Nyhagen 2016). As fundamentalist organizations not only
contradict but aggravate gender inequality and endorse the oppression of women and violent
masculinity, women participating in these organizations have been predominantly viewed as
victims who have been manipulated and lured into these organizations. As the international
relations scholars Gentry and Sjoberg (2016, 44) outline, this denial of agency concerning
women’s involvement in political and religious violence is in itself an utterly gendered perspec-
tive. Men participating in politically violent organizations are viewed as making autonomous
decisions, while women are seen as ‘controlled, coerced or insane’. Indeed, studies have indi-
cated that it is a variety of considerations, including that of empowerment and conservative
gender roles, that drive women to participate in misogynistic, political violence (Lokenz and
Selenz 2018, Nuraniyah 2018). Research (Kneip 2016) about women from the West joining
ISIS found that such women sought independence from parental control and freedom from
perceived Western oppression while obtaining respect from the ISIS community, as well as
power over others. The insights gathered in the past few years about ISIS all point toward the
fact that the position women hold within the organization is far beyond the simplistic idea
of ‘jihadi brides’ presented in public debate, with women’s tasks ranging from recruitment to
radicalization to tax collection (Cook and Vale 2018). Moreover, a study by Nuraniyah (2018)
on female Indonesian pro-ISIS supporters also suggests that once women join the organiza-
tion, they do counter internal gender regimes such as the prohibition of women taking part
in combat.
In sum, the role women play in terms of endorsing or challenging religious gender norms, as
well as their activism in religious organizations, is complex, multifaceted, and context-depend-
ent. It would appear that religion can indeed be both a source of emancipatory reinterpretations
and patriarchal socialization (Glas et al. 2018).
Scholarly debates have also taught us that it is important to go beyond simplistic binary con-
ceptions of the ‘secular Global North’ and the ‘religious Global South’ in debates about gender.
It is necessary to move beyond the predominant one-sided fixation on non-Western women
when discussing the issue, given that there is much controversy about religion and key issues of
gender equality, including reproductive rights and sexuality, in various countries, including the
United States. Feminist research, moreover, also reminds us that it would be misleading to see
secularism as inherently linked to female liberation and gender equality. The development of
secular modernity was profoundly based on gender inequality. Both women and religion were
pushed to the private sphere to make way for ‘masculine rationality’ (Scott 2018). Women’s
rights had to be fought for with commitment against male forces, both secular and religious
ones (ibid.).

Religion’s ideologies about gender and their impact

Concerning gender ideologies that religions entail, we cannot make sweeping, generalizing
statements. Across, as well as within, religions, different ideas and practices about gender relations
and gender norms prevail, and these shift over time as a result of inner-religious debates (see also
the section above on female agency).

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Broadly, we have to distinguish between conservative religious groups and those that exhibit
more gender-equal stances. Conservative groups have grown in prominence in past decades,
often viewed as a response to globalization, including economic restructuring and erosion of
traditional gender roles based on the male breadwinner model (cf. McMorris and Glass 2018,
435).
Notwithstanding differences across religions, conservative religious groups tend to endorse
traditional gender norms, dividing the private domain from the public domain, following
rigid divisions of roles and responsibilities, and attributing to males the role of pater familias.
Heterosexuality is seen as the natural, goodly order, and conservative groups hence tend to
exhibit open aversion toward homosexuality. Other key characteristics of the gender ideology of
conservative religious groups include views of sex for procreative purposes, sexual purity before
marriage, idealization of especially female virginity, and an underlying idea of male vulnerability
to female temptation linked to modesty of dress and behavior, especially for women (ibid.).
To illustrate the widely held idea of female temptation within conservative religious groups,
McMorris and Glass (2018) refer to former Vice President Mike Pence. As a conservative evan-
gelical, he has said that he refuses to eat out with women without his wife standing close to him,
when alcohol is served, and ‘people are being loose’ (New Yorker, March 31, 2017). This devotion
also requires that only male assistants work with Pence in case he works late (ibid.), which in
turn also points toward the influence that religious ideologies can have on female employment
in a world still largely dominated by men.
Less conservative and more reformist groups also tend to have strict principles in terms of
gender relations and restrictive sexual ethics but tend to be more lenient when it comes to
religious practice, with local religious leaderships often having more capacity to deviate from
‘official’ restrictive positions (ibid., 436).
In addition, we also have to make an important distinction regarding whether religious
groups display a textual or a contextual reading of sacred texts. In the first case, sacred texts are
seen to have one static literalist meaning, while viewed from a contextualist perspective, they are
interpreted as an output of the time when they were written.
For instance, inheritance laws in many sacred texts, including the Bible and the Quran,
stipulate literally that women should prefer sons over daughters. For instance, the Quran
states: ‘Allah instructs you concerning your children: for the male, what is equal to the share
of two females’ [Quran 4: 11]. The Bible, in turn, proclaims that daughters can only inherit if
the deceased had no sons. From a contextual reading, however, such rules of inheritance can
be interpreted very differently, namely that women should be allocated more than the status
quo is granting them since at the time the texts were written, women often had no right to
inherit at all (cf. Glass et al. 2018). Such distinctions matter greatly since they impact attitudes
that religious people hold on gender equality. Recent fine-grained research from the Middle
East and North Africa (MENA) (ibid.) shows that attending religious service, that is, being
regularly exposed to institutional perspectives on religion, and a textual approach to sacred
texts, as well as devotion, actually tends to decrease support for gender equality. The salience
of religion, that is, the feeling that religion specifically guides daily life choices, in turn, does
not impact negatively on attitudes to gender equality; for women, it even increases support
for gender equality.
So, while many aspects of religion seem to foster patriarchal beliefs, actually using ‘religion
as a guideline in daily life’ (Glass et al. 2018, 705) may help limit the patriarchal influence of
religious institutions.This scholarly insight in relation to the MENA region reminds us that reli-
gion should be understood in its multi-dimensionality, and it is necessary to distinguish religious
authority from religious everyday practice.

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In addition, from another starting point, namely numerical indicators regarding women’s
share of the labor force and maternity leave compensation, research finds that religiosity tends
to have a negative impact. According to a study by Seguino (2011), all dominant religions have
varying effects on gender attitudes and outcomes, some positive, some negative, albeit with no
religion standing out as consistently more gender-inequitable in its effects than others. Overall,
her findings (ibid.) suggest that religiosity, at least concerning the major religions, tends to con-
tribute to global hierarchical gender ideologies, norms, and stereotypes.
Scholars interested in gender and religion should, however, be attentive to differences
between conservative and less conservative strands of religion, as well as different dimensions of
female well-being. Interaction of gender orders and religiosity remains intricate and complex,
linked to a multiplicity of variables.
Finally, some religious ideologies are explicitly feminist, such as the Goddess movement, a
type of paganism, which substitutes male-centered religious ideas with a spirituality focused on
female divinity (see Beavis 2016).

Authoritarian masculinity and religion

Religion has played a key role in the contemporary rise of populist or even authoritarian lead-
ers and ideologies. These leaders often display hyper-masculinity. They use this masculinity as a
resource to display power while strongly relying on references to religion in their strategies to
mobilize their followers and to emphasize a moral superiority to their followers and opponents.
A paradigmatic example in that regard is Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro, who pursues
a hardline, right-wing agenda, explicitly endorsing authoritarianism and openly positioning
himself against liberal democracy. Bolsonaro ran his 2018 presidential campaign on the slogan
‘Brazil above everything, God above everyone’. Throughout his electoral campaign, he pre-
sented himself as the saviour of traditional Christian values, opposing sexual, reproductive rights,
gender equality, and also human rights more broadly. In his mobilization strategy, he used an ‘us’
versus ‘them’ rhetoric in which he distinguished between ‘us’, ‘the people of God’, and them,
the ‘leftists’, and so-called ‘gender ideologists’. In his victory speech, the Brazilian president-elect
emphasized that he was seeking answers from the Holy Bible ‘to repair the man and the woman’
(Gomes da Costa 2020). He also vowed to ban ‘gender ideology in schools’ and argued his
administration would resist ‘ideological submission’ (Butler 2019, see the section below on anti-
gender ideology). Opposition to women’s rights and standing for conservative Christian family
values were cornerstones of his campaign. Bolsonaro, however, did not one-sidedly instrumen-
talize religion. The Catholic Church proactively supported Bolsonaro in his run for the highest
office, and in return, he increased the former’s political influence (Gomes da Costa 2020). A
Catholic, Bolsonaro also built a close alliance with Pentecostalist religious and political lead-
ers. In spring 2016, he was baptized by a fellow Congressman, an evangelical pastor, and was
consequently openly supported by evangelical and Baptist religious leaders. Although gender
has not been a relevant variable in terms of voters before, in the 2018 presidential election, it
was statistically significant. Given his outspoken rhetoric against women, Bolsonaro’s electoral
success relied strongly on the male vote. Moreover, Pentecostal Christians were more likely to
vote for Bolsonaro than Catholic voters, in spite of the candidate’s self-declared Catholicism (do
Amaral 2020). After his election, he put two ministries in his administration under evangelical
leadership: education and family, as well as women and human rights (Gomes da Costa 2020).
Similar alliances and using conservative religious values as an electoral strategy can be observed
in other authoritarian-led or populist far-right regimes, including Prime Minister Viktor Orbán
of Hungary, President Recep Erdoğan of Turkey, Prime Minister Narendra Modi in India, and

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Russia’s President, Vladimir Putin. In order to ‘rehabilitate Russian masculinity’, Putin formed a
close alliance with the Russian Orthodox Church. Under him, the Russian government estab-
lished strict anti-homosexuality laws and legalized forms of domestic abuse. Both the Putin-
appointed Minister for Education and the Minister for Children’s Rights are closely aligned with
the Orthodox Church (Roose 2018). A second example comes from the Hungarian government
led by Viktor Orbán, which based its refusal to ratify the Istanbul Convention on preventing and
combating violence against women and domestic violence, as well as its decision to remove accred-
itation from gender studies MA programs in Hungarian universities in 2018 on the claim that they
express ‘gender ideology’ (Kováts 2018, 78). The Church and religious actors play an important
role in supporting this approach, providing it with an ideological backbone. Nevertheless, the
emergence and resonance of anti-feminist and anti-gender equality positions and rhetoric in the
Hungarian case, as Kováts importantly underlines, has to be understood through the intertwining
of feminism with the illiberal restructuring of the country after the collapse of the communist sys-
tem in 1989, rather than as a result of the strength of society’s religious segments. In order to speak
to the new liberal elites, feminist movements, according to Kováts (2018), were compliant with
neoliberal restructuring. Calls for austerity went hand in hand with calls for women’s rights and
human rights more broadly. Moreover,Western theories were imported instead of aiming to build
upon emancipatory resources that were rooted within the region, and a rhetoric of the ‘developed
West’, to which the country has had to catch up, has been prevalent among human rights move-
ments (ibid.).This type of ‘self-colonizing’ rhetoric has been identified as one of the major drivers
of the rise of the radical right in Eastern Europe. As regards gender, it gave opponents of gender
equality and supporters of a conservative gender order as a basis to legitimatize its claims by fram-
ing gender as a form of ‘ideological colonization’ (Kováts 2018, 82).
These developments are not restricted to non-democratic or illiberal political settings but
have also been emerging in liberal democracies, being promoted by illiberal democratic parties
and/or leaders, such as the radical right parties Lega, Fuorza Nova, and Fratelli di Italia in Italy
(Pavan 2020), as well as President Donald Trump in the United States. Trump significantly ben-
efited from the support of white evangelical Protestant voters, a group, which by a large majority
has continuously approved his performance in office. Evangelical Protestantism is strongly cor-
related with favoring male political leaders, and respectively, a reservation against female ones.
Trump secured this support by exhibiting a strong commitment to the anti-abortion movement.
On assuming office, he reintroduced the ‘global gag’ rule first established by President Reagan
in 1984. This rule prohibits US funding to nongovernmental organizations abroad if they pro-
vide legal abortion services, referrals, or information or promote legal pro-abortion reform
(Walton Roberts 2019). Finally, the strong alliance with gender-conservative religious groups
also became apparent by the selection of the already-mentioned Mike Pence, an evangelical
born-again Christian, as vice president.

‘Anti-gender ideology’ activism

Commitment to conservative family values and traditional gender roles of the far right allows
for broad conservative alliances.We can see an especially strong coalition of the far right with so-
called ‘anti-gender ideology’ movements across the globe, a movement that frames the concept
of gender and the underlying idea that gender differences are an outcome of socialization as a
dangerous ideology. As with the recent increase in far-right movements and parties, the rise of
the anti-gender movement is strongly related to the rise of post-national, liberal rights regimes,
including the achievements of the women’s and gay liberation movements that became tangible
in international law from the 1990s.

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The roots of the anti-gender movement go back to the early 1990s with a reaction to
the 1994 UN Conference on Population and Development in Cairo and the 1995 Beijing
Conference on Women. Both conferences were crucial for the advancement of women’s human
rights and reflected the growing importance of liberal women’s movements. The Vatican took a
key role in opposing the reproductive rights of women as well as rights linked to homosexuality
by challenging key concepts of feminist movements, namely gender and equality. The concept
of gender was rejected by the Vatican as the idea of femininity and masculinity being socially
constructed contradicts the approach of the Holy See that men and women perform comple-
mentary roles. Gender, moreover, was seen as a dangerous concept as it implied alternative and
fluid sexualities and the endorsement of homosexuality (Buss 1998). The Vatican, then led by
Pope Paul II, opposed especially any notions that would imply endorsing abortion or homo-
sexuality during these conferences (ibid.).The Holy See also promoted the idea of equal dignity
in order to avoid the notion of equal rights. In the view of the Vatican, equal dignity can be
realized by recognizing the difference between men and women, as opposed to providing equal
rights (ibid.). Pope Benedict XVI also repeatedly framed gender as a misguided ‘ideology’ as it
denies the ‘pre-ordained duality of man and woman’, and thus undermines the divine, natural
integrity of the family (Butler 2019, 958). Pope Francis confirmed the line of his predecessors,
framing gender as an outright ‘diabolical ideology’:

Today children—children!—are taught in school that everyone can choose his or her
sex … And this is terrible! … God created man and woman; God created the world in
a certain way … and we are doing the exact opposite.
(cit. after Butler 2019, 958)

In Europe, ‘anti-gender ideology’ protests were taken to the streets from the mid-2000s onwards.
The first street protests emerged in Spain in 2004 as the Catholic Church, along with con-
servative civil society groups and political parties, mobilized against the government’s same-sex
marriage bill (Patternotte and Kuhar 2018, 7). Other mobilizations in the mid-2000s against
same-sex partnership, and/or marriage, and sex education occurred in Italy, Croatia, and Slovenia
(ibid.).
From the 2010s onwards, such mobilizations grew significantly and became part of a trans-
national movement in which slogans and forms of mobilization traveled across borders. The
French manif pour tous was able to bring thousands of protesters to the streets while keeping up
protests for 2 years to oppose same-sex marriage legislation, which can be regarded as a key tip-
ping point empowering the movement (ibid.).
The movement also strengthened alliances between different religions. It has united different
faith groups who have little in common apart from their conviction about the need to fight
‘gender ideology’ ranging from an opposition to abortion to transgender rights to sexual educa-
tion (Case 2019).
Research (Patternote and Kuhar 2018) has revealed that an important element for the rise
of this movement is the contemporary strength of the far right, which has provided the idea of
‘gender ideology’ with a major platform.

Gender equality and the othering of the Muslim migrant

At the same time, we can also see a strong emphasis by radical right entrepreneurs on gender
equality. This phenomenon emerged with the adoption of Muslims as a major target group in
anti-migrant mobilization.

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The following quote uttered during the 2015 migration crisis by the leader of the French
radical right (then) the National Front (now called the National Rally) illustrates this use of
gender equality rhetoric particularly well:

It is as a political leader, but also as a woman, that I address the French people today. It
is as a free French woman, who has been able to enjoy, her whole life, the very precious
freedoms fought for long and hard by our mothers and grandmothers, that I want to
warn about a new form of social, human and moral regression imposed on us by the
migrant crisis …The right to preserve the integrity of one’s own body, whatever sex
one may be, is one of the most essential rights. Today, for many women, this right is
under attack. That barbarity can once again be used against women fills me with hor-
ror. I remember these words of Simone de Beauvoir: ‘never forget that all it would take
is a political, economic or religious crisis for women’s rights to be called into question’,
and I fear that the migratory crisis signals the beginning of the end of women’s rights.
(Marine Le Pen cit. after Hadj Abdou 2017, 86)

Given the often-conservative substantive policy agenda of radical right groups and their alliances
with conservative religious groups, such gender equality and women’s rights rhetoric should
be understood as being largely instrumental instead of ideologically based. Put differently, it is
a component of nativist ideology as opposed to a substantive commitment to gender equality.
Research has shown (Hadj Abdou 2019, Akkerman 2015) that the emphasis on gender equality
is used to establish the idea of a supposedly irreconcilable cultural difference between ‘backward
(Muslim) migrants’ and ‘liberal progressive natives’ in order to legitimize claims for the restric-
tion of migration. As noted above, similar narratives of women’s oppression were also used dur-
ing colonialism to ‘prove’ the ‘quintessential otherness and inferiority of Islam’ (Ahmed 1992,
149). However, it was then used to justify colonial power in the land of the colonized; now, it is
about excluding the ‘other’ in the lands of the former colonizer.
Variants of such a rhetoric about the ‘male foreign oppressor’, establishing a view on migrants
and immigration as the existential threat to the nation, exists in political rhetoric across the
globe. One famous example in that regard is the emphasis put by Donald Trump on Mexican
migrants during his announcement speech in 2015: ‘When Mexico sends its people, they’re not
sending their best. They’re not sending you…They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime.
They’re rapists. And some, I assume, are good people’ (CNN 2018).
In that regard, Europe yet differs from developments elsewhere.The gender equality rhetoric
takes a more central role for mobilization strategies of nativist political currents in Europe than
in other regions.This difference is likely to be understood in terms of the smaller significance of
the religious electorate and the role religion plays in European Union countries more broadly,
namely as a cultural marker more than a sign of religious devotion, compared to other world
regions.

Concluding summary
This chapter has highlighted the key role religion plays in contemporary debates about gender
and the politicization of gender in today’s polarized environment. Liberal values, such as gender
equality and its contestation, are central to rising socio-political divisions that manifest in the
rise of authoritarianism and the radical right, along with a reinvigoration of masculinity by
those political groups. The radical right and religious conservative actors have strongly opposed
substantive gender equality and the conceptualization of gender differences as an outcome

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of socialization maintained and entrenched through power relations, as opposed to viewing

these differences as innate characteristics of humanity. At the same time, the radical right has
also employed strong references to gender equality in its rhetoric in order to stigmatize non-
white minorities. Both the emphasis on gender equality and the contestation of the concept of
‘gender’ are populist-style boundary-making mechanisms. While the conservative anti-gender
rhetoric divides ‘us’ and the ‘liberal’ elite, gender equality references, in turn, distinguish between
‘us’ and the (Muslim) ‘migrant’. References to gender issues thus can serve a double function in
the repertoire of radical right groups to legitimize the exclusion of the ‘other’.
Religion in this context is partly used instrumentally by some political players to gain sup-
port among conservative segments in society. But, as discussed in this chapter, religious authori-
ties also actively engage in these contestations and are partly benefiting from the rise of illiberal
political forces across the globe. Contestations about gender that rely on alliances with conserva-
tive religious authorities, moreover, are a global phenomenon. This chapter, consequently, has
emphasized that we need to go beyond simplistic binary ideas about the secular Global North
and the religious Global South while also underlining that it is inaccurate to see secularism as
inherently linked to gender equality. Moreover, this chapter has argued that we should be aware
of differences within and across religious strands and also distinguish between religious authori-
ties and religious practice. Finally, the chapter has argued that the impact of religiosity on struc-
turing gender relations is complex and context-dependent, ranging from reinforcing patriarchal
gender orders to providing a source of emancipation for women.

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 6
LIFE AFTER COMMUNISM
Contemporary Orthodoxy, politics
and society in Eastern Europe

Greg Simons

Introduction
It was not long ago, in the immediate wake of the Cold War and the collapse of communism
in the Eastern Bloc, that the perception was that the world was living in a post-ideological age.
However, this optimistic line of thinking is being increasingly challenged in an age where in-
group culture and identity formation are becoming increasingly relevant and important among
states in an era of global transformation. Following the collapse of the Eastern Bloc and the
Soviet Union, there was a new flowering of religion that was used by a number of countries as
a marker of national or cultural identity, a signifier of group values and belonging (to replace
the discredited and lost political ideology) or a demonstration of national independence (Koltsö,
2000: 53–80; Staalesen, 2005: 301–325).Today, religion is playing an increasingly prominent role
in the social and political life of Eastern Europe in the wake of a period of at least half a century
of strict, state-controlled religion (Naletova, 2009; Simons & Westerlund, 2015).
This current situation makes this an appropriate time to study, from a conceptual and theoreti-
cal perspective, the significance and motivations for this religious resurgence. Culturally conservative
countries, such as Poland, Romania and Russia, have seen closer interaction of religion and politics,
which has caused controversy in the global hegemony of liberal democracy (Byrnes & Katzenstein,
2006). Christian Orthodoxy and its political and ideological role in the post-Soviet era have been
chosen for closer review and analysis in this chapter.The research question that is posed for this chapter
is – can religion be said to play an ideological role in Eastern Europe? If so, what are its motivations and reasoning?
The first section details the method and approach taken, followed by reviewing and analysing
religion and ideology in the content of the second section. Following this, in the third section,
we focus on understanding religion as a centre of cultural production.The fourth section exam-
ines the interaction and interplay between religion and identity. The final section seeks to bring
all of the previous sections together and, in order to address the stated research question, aims to
apply them to the contemporary situation in Eastern Europe.

Method and approach

Approaches to textual analysis in the chapter include content analysis (quantifications of dif-
ferent elements in text), argumentation analysis (the structure of argumentation used) and the

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qualitative analysis of ideas in the content (with a focus on persuasion and attraction) (Boréus
& Bergström, 2017: 7–9). The combination of these approaches is expected to yield results on
the ontology (what exists) and epistemology (knowledge and how we “know” things) of reac-
tions to academic textual depictions of the political and religious groups’ attempts to persuade
and influence the symbolic use of religion as both identity marker and ideology among selected
majority Orthodox countries of the former Eastern Bloc. The objects of study include power,
ideology, policy, culture and purpose, identity and belonging (Boréus & Bergström, 2017: 1–2).
The academic texts then contextualise the relationships according to perceived and projected
power in the constructed social world order of humanity, where there is, on the one hand, a
present perceived or actual social and cultural deficit and, on the other hand, the promise of a
sense of belonging, purpose and security.
It is our aim to use a qualitative approach to analysing the data, and given the size of
the samples, to create an indicative study. The sample material collected for this chapter
was found via a Google Scholar search in 2020. Search terms that were entered are religion
and cultural production; religion and ideology; religion and identity; politics + Orthodox
Church + Eastern Europe.The first ten pages of Google Scholar search results were manually
checked by the author for relevance based upon the stated criterion in the first paragraph
of this section.
An approach using similar cases was applied as a means to reduce the size and complexity
of the total possible sample. There are various religions present in Eastern European countries,
and some countries tend to be more religiously inclined in their active practice than others.
Therefore it was decided to limit the cases to countries with a majority Orthodox presence,
such as Romania and Russia (being the most examined of relevant countries). Orthodoxy was
selected as there are a greater number of countries with an Orthodox presence, and this permits
a greater level of cross-country comparisons (in order to draw reliable inferences as to the vari-
ous uses religion plays in contemporary politics and their ideological role), while it also tends to
exhibit over time a fairly high level of consistently strong and stable identity and values (Byrnes
& Katzenstein, 2006; Simons & Westerlund, 2015). Time and space simply do not permit for
a wider empirical sample, especially given that the focus of this chapter is at the theoretical
and conceptual levels and is not intended as generalisable but rather as an indicative result of a
theoretical study.

Religion and ideology

Ideology is an emotionally laden and symbolic concept. It potentially has the power to prime
and mobilise publics. The presumed end of ideology, with the collapse of the Soviet Union and
the end of the ideologically framed bipolar world order, caused both jubilation and a declaration
of the “end of history” (Fukuyama, 1991). This suggests that the potential power of ideology
is that it can simultaneously unite and divide people. It is noted that ideologies tend to arise
during times of cultural crisis. This occurs when conventional political patterns of meaning fail
to interpret the world adequately. As Williams notes, “ideologies emerge as comprehensive sys-
tems of meaning at times when current cultural systems seem unable to handle social change”
(Williams, 1996: 371). But, what exactly is ideology and what is its conceptual and theoretical
significance?

An ideology is thus totalistic: it presents, at least in the fullest form, a broad range of
views which cover the central aspects of how society should be organised, answering
such questions as what the role of the state should be, what forms of difference or

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 Greg Simons

differentiation between people should be accepted, and which rejected. In the widest
possible sense an ideology thus offers answers to the questions of what kind of society
is desirable.
(Schwarzmantel, 2008: 25)

However, the political ideological excesses of the 20th century and the association of ideology
with Nazism and communism meant that it became a “dirty word” that carried negative con-
notations. Schwarzmantel (2008: 113) states that “new” ideologies differ from the homogenous
and mass ideologies of the past. Instead, they tend to be quite heterogeneous and reasonably
diverse, emphasising a particular desired group culture and identity. When ideology is applied to
religion, we may note similarities with the above quote from Schwarzmantel.
Pierre Bourdieu details some connections between, and significance of, ideology and religion.
He puts it like this: “The objective source of religion’s ideological function is latent in the cor-
respondence that exists between social structures [read power structures] and mental structures”
and thus “one may construct the religious fact in a strictly sociological manner, that is, as the
legitimate expression of a social position” (Bourdieu, 1991: 5, 16). In other words, religious and
political ideology seek to shape and create what they see as a perfect model of a group and/or
society by influencing how it is conceived, organised and practised. There needs to be a certain
harmony and convergence of theological and political interests to ensure its operational success.
Religion’s involvement and engagement in a country’s political life (i.e., religion as a politi-
cal resource) are characterised by empirical academic studies along two broad lines of enquiry
– religion as culture and religion as ideology. On some occasions, these aspects are kept mutually
exclusive, and on others, they are conflated. However, culture and ideology can be interactive
and complementary (Williams, 1996). In terms of the voluntary interaction between political
ideology and religion, culturally conservative politics is more likely to engage in a relationship
in order to benefit from likely forms of religious and social capital (Forbes & Zampelli, 2013:
2488). Furthermore, some studies suggest that religiously active and inclined youth tend to report
“greater levels of shared vision or shared worldview, perceptions, values, and goals with their par-
ents, and adults outside their family than less religiously active youth” (King, 2003: 199). Religion
can therefore potentially create a more unified vision of identity and culture among a people,
which during periods of change and uncertainty are valued by the political governing elite.

Religion as a centre of cultural production

Various institutions of the state (meaning the body politic) are effectively “licensed” to become
sites of cultural production through manufacturing and circulating discourse, social and cultural
meaning and identity. They “instruct” current and future citizens in the “correct” modes of
thought and conduct in relation to the mass media, parliaments, courts of law, educational insti-
tutions and expressions of organised religion (Louw, 2001). These are the mechanisms of manu-
facturing a common ideology to enable it to achieve its goals, as noted by Bourdieu (1991) and
Schwarzmantel (2008). Controlling the means of cultural production creates social and political
capital, which in turn is used to regulate and manage social and political relations within a given
society. As already noted, religion is one of the centres of cultural production, which we need
to understand in order to give context to this chapter as a means to illuminate the underlying
motivations and reasons for utilising religion in the management of relationships between the
elite and the masses.
Pierre Bourdieu provides some interesting insights into the potential power of religion in
managing the state’s affairs. Bourdieu (1987: 127) argues that religious power is measured by

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its capability “to modify, in a deep and lasting fashion, the practice and world-view of lay peo-
ple” via “absolutisation of the relative and legitimisation of the arbitrary.” This enables religion,
through the normative processes of citizens’ socialisation, to affect individuals’ thoughts and
behaviour through a process of integration by instilling conformity (Verter, 2003: 154). Swartz
(1996: 7) notes the significance of the potential symbolic capital of religion as “a form of power
that is not perceived as power but as legitimate demands for recognition, deference, obedience,
or the services of others.” Religious capital (a result of religion’s soft power appeal) is used as a
means to try and accrue political capital, which is particularly important for politicians in an era
and environment of trust deficit.
However, Bourdieu understands and then frames the application of religion’s capital, and
symbolic power tends to be viewed in a “sterile” social and political environment of influence
and persuasion of the masses. But, as Dillon notes, “although Bourdieu sees religion as a sym-
bolic system, he ignores the diversity of meanings people inject into religious discourses, expe-
riences, and participation” (Dillon, 2001: 426). Meanings can and will be contested at times in
the physical and informational environment, especially in a period of profound social, economic
and/or political change.

Religion and identity

There are three conceptual levels to identity – ego, social and collective (Beit-Hallahmi, 1991:
86). Identity is a popular topic in the contemporary social science agenda and it is also widely
found in mass media. However, the term is often ill-defined and its application is therefore vague
and misunderstood (Beit-Hallahmi, 1991). One of the basic goals of every group is to ensure its
own survival. Therefore, in matters that are considered to be relevant to the group’s existence
and activities, the creation of a common worldview is considered to be key to group integra-
tion. Following from this, collective identity is expected to manifest itself in the behaviour and
thoughts of individuals (Beit-Hallahmi, 1991: 81–82; Harrison Oppong, 2013: 13). The institu-
tions of cultural production (including religion) can be used as a tangible means (existing in the
physical realm) to communicate (via the information realm) and create an intangible ideology
(existing in the cognitive realm), where culture and identity constitute vital elements. Identity
creates intangible emotional bonds between individuals that enable cohesive and enduring col-
lectives to be created and maintained, with religion as one of the centres of cultural production
also potentially playing a significant role in identity formation.
The de-secularisation of society around the world, where religion takes an increasingly active
and central role (Byrnes & Katzenstein, 2006), is sometimes conflated with and included in the
idea of a growing “clash of civilisations” thesis (Huntington, 1996). However, some argue that
an apparently increasing role of religion in politics has little to do with civilisational clash. “The
salience of religion in contemporary politics is symptomatic of a fragmentation of the broad
movements of politics which the traditional or established ideologies of politics represented,
rather than as part of a ‘war of civilisations’” (Schwarzmantel, 2008: 122). It forms an opposi-
tional force to the ideologies of modernity (in particular what come to have been seen as the
excesses of the assumed universality of liberalism, see Sanchez, 2010, for example), demanding
recognition through the invocation of a symbolic and emotionally constructed group identity
that determines the central values and priorities.
Religious identity can be assumed to operate at the level of social identity and is based at
the group level. It is a product of social learning that tends to be ascribed rather than adopted
through the physical matter of location. This in turn influences individuals’ value systems (Beit-
Hallahmi, 1991: 86–87; Markstrom-Adams, Hofstra & Dougher, 1994: 467; Harrison Oppong,

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 Greg Simons

2013: 15). In other words, religious identity is regulated and managed by the ideological system
of time and place, together with the institutions of cultural production.
Religion has the ability to navigate and interact on the individual and collective level.

Religion is both personal and social, individual and cultural. The concept of identity
seems to provide a bridge between the private and the public realms in religion, as an
appropriate locus for that which connects the individual personality and the cultural
matrix.
(Beit-Hallahmi, 1991: 91)

Marshall argues, from a more cultural-spiritual interpretation, that

religion addresses the most important questions at the core of human existence – the
existential questions of meaning, morality, and the nature of truth. It provides many
with a sustaining meaning for life – and an explanation for death. It is a source for
community and decency and is an outlet for charity and education.
(Marshall, 1996: 387)

In sum, a significant function of and role for religion as an identity and an ideology is to project
and reassure people with a sense of order and meaning in the context of a human experience
that may otherwise appear to be chaotic and frightening.

Ideology and meaning: Orthodoxy and the state in Eastern Europe

Radu (1998: 285) observes that “the Orthodox Church in Eastern Europe sees itself and is
widely perceived as the historic repository of nationhood, national values, and, quite often,
as the saviour of a nation’s very existence.” The Orthodox Church is a culturally conservative
organisation from the very top of its hierarchy. History plays a very important role in its collec-
tive sense of identity and culture. For example, the Orthodox world did not experience either a
Renaissance or an Enlightenment, which influenced society’s values and development trajectory
differently from that in the West. There are also traumas from the collective historical memory
of the Mongol and Ottoman occupations and the decades of communist rule that perceived
religion as a threat and repressed it. This historical legacy influences its understanding of what
constitutes an ideal constructed present and future that is based on perceived periods of an
“idyllic” past.This does create the context for ideological conflict with political ideologies, such
as that of liberalism and its assumption of universal standards, values and norms (Roudometof,
1999; Ramet, 2006; Naletova, 2009). But, on the other hand, the Orthodox Church makes a
natural ally for culturally conservative political ideologies. There are potentially a number of
common (similar/close) concerns and missions in shaping citizens’ world views, behaviour and
perception through influencing their identity via the qualitative nature of the institutions of
cultural production to counter the named threat and to shape an “ideal” society simultaneously.
The sudden collapse of the Eastern Bloc caused an ideological vacuum that was rapidly pop-
ulated by various extremist and nationalist ideologies (Yasmann, 1993), following the collapse
of the formerly dominant hegemonic system. This contrasts with Western Europe, for example,
where “the problems of identity are not as urgent because [it] is not rapidly changing and there-
fore does not require doctrinal or ideological support” (Borowik, 2006: 275). As the political
and ideological centre of the Eastern Bloc, Russia experienced a profound loss of culture and
identity, as well as the state institutions that had long built and maintained the system. As a result,

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there was a search for an alternative form of ideological guidance as a means to lift the countries
and the people from the social, political, economic, ideological and identity crisis1 that resulted
from the collapse of the system. Naletova (2009: 393) notes that there are “a number of cultural,
historical and spiritual factors which suggest that the Orthodox Churches are able to strengthen
the national identities of their people as strongly or perhaps even more strongly than the tra-
ditional churches in neighbouring non-Orthodox countries.” There has been a tendency for
Eastern Europe to be prone to and experience a number of crises in the post-Soviet era.This has
prompted a search to find a “cure” or “vaccine” for the public against these periodic crises with
an aim to instil a new sense of moral and ethical culture and identity so as to develop a desired
worldview that produces an “ideal” vision of thoughts and behaviour.
Given the compromised nature of professional politics in many Eastern Bloc countries, reli-
gion was a social institution that gained both public trust and authority after the collapse of
communist systems (Naletova, 2009: 377). In addition, it is a source of cultural production. In
particular, the various local Orthodox Churches, present for many centuries in what is now
post-Soviet space, are both culturally conservative and consistent source of values, morals, ethics
and periodically partners in state identity building and ideology.2 Borowik (2006: 275) notes that
“the important difference in Eastern Europe is that religion and Orthodoxy cannot be replaced
in the forming of identities, whether individual, national, cultural, or political.” The situation is
confirmed by Naletova (2009: 377), who observes that “in spite of the dramatic changes that
happened in Eastern Europe after the breakdown of communist regimes, traditional Christian
values and practices either remained vital or were revitalised together with the resurgence of
patriotism and nationalism.” This was in spite of decades of anti-religious propaganda to limit
the Churches’ influence.
In the next section, we examine and analyse in turn the Romanian and Russian Orthodox
Churches in order to determine the extent to which they play a contemporary ideological role
(based on the theoretical framework elaborated in the preceding sections of this chapter). If they
do play such a role, an attempt will be made to clarify if there are any specific sets of social or
political or economic circumstances that explain this outcome.

Romania
In 1991, a mere two years after the bloody overthrow of Nikolai Ceausescu, 88 per cent of
Romanians declared themselves as being Orthodox (although only 8 per cent attended church
services regularly) (Mungiu-Pippidi, 1998: 86). A large part of the population base their identity
on Orthodoxy, and this has bestowed on the Church both legitimacy and authority, including
the potential to influence public policy debates (Alexandru, 2006: 67). In the immediate after-
math of the communist collapse, some 50 years of propaganda and social engineering had all but
erased traces of pre-communist Romania.The successor political authorities required a partner-
ship with the Romanian Orthodox Church as a key source and legitimiser of cultural identity.
However, the situation was complicated by the country’s gradual move towards the European
Union and, as a result, de facto reunification with the West (Mungiu-Pippidi, 1998). This both
contradicted and threatened the role and status of the Church as the main source of Romanian
culture and identity, as foreign values were said to “threaten” the spiritual welfare of the country.
Nineteen eighty-nine was seen as a watershed year in Romania’s history. The overthrow of
Ceausescu’s communist dictatorship enabled a widespread and strong feeling of liberation and a
new beginning. It also permitted the resurgence of old ideologies.Yet, many problems remained,
such as corruption, a large black market, a massive brain drain and mass emigration (Romocea,
2011: 244).The crises of the 1990s, emanating from various sources, such as political, social and/

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or economic instability, uncertainty and lack of clarity in culture and identity formation, peri-
odically revisit Romania today. As a first step to understand the situation, we shall look at the
transformation that the Romanian Orthodox Church underwent from 1989 before delving into
the issue of church-state relations. Finally, we shall analyse some of the aspects of the Church’s
work and its interactions with the public.
Although the Romanian Orthodox Church is a culturally and socially conservative organisa-
tion, one of the transformations of the 21st century has been, since 2007, to create and develop
a media organisation. It includes both radio and television stations and several newspapers
(Damian, 2010: 23). The Church now has a number of different functions among the institu-
tions of cultural production in the information age. Another is education, where the Church is
actively involved in developing educational programmes at high school, tertiary and professional
(priesthood) levels (Stan & Turcescu, 2000: 1477–1479; Stan & Turcescu, 2005; Andreescu, 2007:
462–464; Damian, 2010). They have been successful in creating a significant educational capa-
bility and capacity in a short space of time. Combined educational and media assets enable the
Romanian Orthodox Church to communicate its identity, culture and values to a mass public.
At the beginning of the 21st century, the Romanian Orthodox Church’s place in the coun-
try’s new political order was uncertain and the cause of controversy.

This is because many Orthodox leaders view democratisation as a threat to their

Byzantine view of church-state relations and the state is unwilling to relinquish its
traditional centralist coordination of every single aspect of Romanian life, including
the religious one.
(Stan & Turcescu, 2000: 1485)

Politics viewed the Romanian Orthodox Church as an impediment to the political course of
ideological modernisation (such as Euro-Atlantic integration), as the Church was seen as both
ideologically conservative and anti-liberal (Romocea, 2011).This was particularly evident in the
Romanian Orthodox Church’s opposition to EU accession, based upon the former’s perceived
role as the institutional keeper of Romanian values, identity and culture (Radu, 2005; Sincan,
2008) i.e., those aspects that shape worldviews and ideologies. In this regard, the EU was seen
as an antithesis to those cherished “native” values and the role of the Church (as the moral and
spiritual guardian of Romania and her people) as a key institution of cultural production in
Romania. Just before the EU accession in 2007, an opinion poll revealed that 50 per cent of
respondents would support the involvement of the Church in political affairs (Sincan, 2008:
211). The period was marked by competition between politics and the Church as to which
would be the source of the country’s ideological guidance. By the close of the first decade of
the 21st century, significant progress was made in religious education in public sector schools
and pre-university.This was justified as a means to counterbalance the moral vacuum created by
communist indoctrination (Turcescu & Stan, 2010: 158). At the time, there were also the begin-
nings of a new mode and quality of interaction and relationship with the state.
The fifth Patriarch of the Romanian Orthodox Church, Teoctist (1986–2007), embraced
“the semi-established and established church model and attempted to obtain a number of legal
privileges and recognition by the state as the dominant church in a country” (Turcescu &
Stan, 2011: 242).3 In 2007, Patriarch Daniel introduced partnerships4 between the Romanian
Orthodox Church and the state, which marked a significant departure from the centuries-old
Byzantine model of symphonia (harmony). This has enabled a more contemporary understand-
ing and practice of church-state relations, where both parties work on an equal footing, a
situation better suited to the conditions of the 21st century (Turcescu & Stan, 2010: 158).

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 Life after communism

An empirical illustration of this new partnership model between the state and the Romanian
Orthodox Church occurred in 2008 when the severest economic crisis for decades occurred. In
this instance, the Church assumed a number of the social functions normally performed by the
state. Four significant results can be noted:

(1) Increased importance of the religious behaviour understood as socio-cultural trans-

formation; (2) Redefinition of the role of church within the socio-political system;
(3) Rediscovery of the role of religion in the construction of collective identity; (4)
Instrumentalisation of religiosity with the purpose of consolidating the political legiti-
macy within a context characterised by instability, crisis of values and political suspicion.
(Cace, Cace & Nicolaescu, 2011: 43)

This social help engagement within the context of an economic crisis, together with associated
political, social and economic effects, were likely to increase the political and social capital of
the Romanian Orthodox Church. As a result, it is now better placed in terms of its public and
political legitimacy to influence and play a more active role in the ideological and worldview
development of the country.
Today, the Romanian Orthodox Church seeks to play a more active role in the social and
political life of Romania. There has been a move away from the traditional Byzantine under-
standing of state-church relations to a more contemporary partnership system that was intro-
duced by Patriarch Daniel as a means to break the deadlock caused by value and norm conflicts
with politics at the national and EU level. It is difficult for the Romanian Orthodox Church
to perform its traditional national ideological role as the holder and definer of the senses and
meanings of Romanian culture and identity owing to the clash of the traditional religious ideol-
ogy with the modern (EU-wide) liberal ideology. However, the Church remains an important
social and political actor in Romania, which is influenced by the high level of public trust,
recognition and identification with Orthodoxy. The ideological potential of the Romanian
Orthodox Church remains as there is a certain degree of need by the state to work with the
Church to overcome different crises that are experienced by the Romanian people, who require
spiritual and moral comfort in a chaotic worldly environment.

Russia
Sociological surveys in Russia indicate that approximately 80 per cent of Russians identify as being
Orthodox; however, only 3–5 per cent are active in practising the religion (Burgess, 2009: 5; Sokolov
et al., 2017). As with the Romanian Orthodox Church, the Russian Orthodox Church draws its
lineage of historical justification and legitimacy from its Byzantine roots and has a long tradition as
the bearer of national identity, culture and values (Ershov & Ashmarov, 2018). It is an institution of
cultural production that serves Russia and her people as a spiritual and moral guide that shapes the
national self-understanding and worldview. According to Burgess (2009: 8–13), Orthodoxy offers
three avenues of identity to Russians – a form of ideological guidance across the spheres of human
existence and experience. Firstly, many Russians perceive the connection that to be Russian is to
be Orthodox. Secondly, the Orthodox identity regulates social harmony and unity in post-Soviet
Russia.Thirdly, Orthodoxy provides Russians with a sense of having a national mission.
The collapse and break-up of the Soviet Union in 1991 not only meant the end of an ideol-
ogy but also the end of an empire. Significant and extreme social, political and economic changes
(and crises) followed.Thereafter, Orthodoxy has served a number of public functions. First, it is a
stable historical institution that Russians have turned to in times of trouble and upheaval to the

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point where it is considered to be the foundation of national culture and the very basis of the
national mentality. Second, “on a public level, religion has become an important institution that
can contribute much to the solution of the ideological and moral crises” (Titarenko, 2008: 240).
Third, there is moral education, intended as a cure for the post-Soviet social and spiritual crisis,
to counteract such diverse forms of social ills as high drug and alcohol addiction, diverse sexual
orientations and high divorce rates (Köllner, 2016: 382). In short, Russia was experiencing a
number of different crises simultaneously, and some wanted to see an active role for the Russian
Orthodox Church in helping resolve them.
The return to Orthodoxy is not only about building historical bridges as a means to restore
the nation’s historical memory and to develop the spiritual and practical aspects of historical
traditional heritage.

For some groups of political elites, religious revival is also a means to incorporate
traditional conservative ideology into the state ideology and mentality of the people,
to spread conservative moral principles and to find additional support for the idea of
strong political power.
(Titarenko, 2008: 252)

The current nature of the relationship between the Russian Orthodox Church and the Russian
state has been assessed in a different light by Ershov and Ashmarov (2018: 23), “church-state
relations in the modern Russian state are based on the principle of relative independence of the
Church and the state.The most important is cooperation in the social and cultural sphere.” Other
research has shown that there is a simultaneously existing level of independence and interdepend-
ence between the state and the Church, depending on the nature of the task at hand. For example,
the Russian Orthodox Church and Georgian Orthodox Church acted as intermediaries for their
respective states that were not communicating directly after the 2008 Georgian–Russian War
(Simons, 2015). Papkova (2011b) summarises the legacy of the 15th Patriarch, Alexei II (1990–
2008), as having a relatively weak institution that was not capable of sufficiently strengthening its
position in Russia through legislative means.There were informal means of gaining some benefits
from the state (at all levels) and governmental or institutional structures. These often functioned
on the level of personal relationships with sympathetic politicians and officials. However, many
political actors did like the appearance of “legitimacy” and “Russianness” that came from being
seen in public at important religious rituals and events (Simons, 2005; Simons, 2009; Papkova,
2011a). There have been attempts to formally articulate an ideal vision of a relationship of the
Russian Orthodox Church to different stakeholders, including the state and the public.
One of these attempts occurred in 2000, after Vladimir Putin’s election as President of the
Russian Federation, in the form of the Basis of the Social Concept.5 Positions of the Russian
Orthodox Church on political and social questions of relevance and importance at the turn of
the 21st century from the Church’s understanding were identified and formulated (Papkova,
2011a: 23–54). The Church was explicit in rejecting a church-state relationship in which the
state has any say in the internal affairs of the Church (Papkova, 2011a: 69). Patriarch Kirill
(2009–present) has argued for a more active public engagement by the Russian Orthodox
Church on a variety of social and political issues.

This engagement has an ideological foundation of a strong claim to establish the church
as a powerful actor in society which has been undergoing a post-soviet desecularisa-
tion. The claim to be a weighty political entity requires a heavy rhetorical presence.
(Agadjanian, 2017: 40)

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 Life after communism

This is an attempt to publicly articulate the ethos of the Church, underlining its moral identity
and legitimacy and connecting Russia’s religious and national identities.
One of the areas that the Russian Orthodox Church is engaged in in contemporary Russia
is instilling identity, values and norms. For example, there was the introduction of religious edu-
cation in state schools in 2012. In addition, the state emphasises the bonds between Orthodox
Christianity and Russian history, culture and identity. An underlying reason for this seems to
be linked to the instrumentalisation of Orthodoxy as a means of instilling values, thoughts
and behaviour in shaping worldviews that contribute to nation- and institution-building and
strengthening the sense of patriotism (Köllner, 2016). There has also been a periodic coming
together of state and religious interests in the social sphere, for example, in the context of the
demographic crisis facing Russia. The Church has articulated a firm stance on the issue (i.e.,
a problem given the demographic situation) of abortion, which is a key aspect in how family
values are defined (Stoeckl, 2016: 132; Agadjanian, 2017: 44). The ideological position of com-
municating a pro-life worldview and values among the public benefits both the Church and
state practically and in terms of social or political capital.
Traditional values are an important part of the Church’s communicated identity and culture.
This is used as the basis for the social and political role of the Church in the role of guarantor
of the traditional ethos of Russia, which is supported by a steady rise in the overall approval of
the Russian Orthodox Church’s significance among the population (Stepanova, 2015; Stoeckl,
2016; Agadjanian, 2017: 53–54). In its bid to become the voice of traditional values, the Russian
Orthodox Church has rhetorically securitised spiritual, moral values as being a matter of national
security in Russia. The creation of an example of a dichotomy of desirable versus undesirable
fundamental values is intended as a means to construct a stable and resilient national identity
that is able to repel cognitive threats, for example, a variant of the Colour Revolutions (Östbö,
2017). The Church’s stance on the establishing of traditional values is also supported by the
political elite, such as Putin. “the spiritual and moral foundation of civilisation in every nation
for thousands of years: the values of traditional families, real human life, including religious life,
not just material existence but also spirituality, the values of humanism and global diversity.”6
Stepanova (2015: 135) argues that the religious (Patriarch Kirill) and political (President Putin)
tend to echo each other as defenders of traditional values. However, she rates Patriarch Kirill’s
interpretation as being more nuanced and conceptually rooted.
The Russian Orthodox Church plays an active role in the conceptualisation and formulation
of a national ideology based on traditional values and worldview in a national context. This is
in part based on the historical context of the place and role of the Church as being a centre of
cultural production since the year 988; together with this is the contribution to being trusted
and perceived as the repository of Russian values and culture at the popular and political level.
In spite of some differences between the state and Church in the past, there is a convergence of
political and religious interests and agenda (even if there are some instances of different motiva-
tions and perceptions). This influences the quality and nature of church-state relations that are
currently articulated and practised as a form of an independent partnership with interdependent
social and political goals in shaping a national ideology that is resilient to internal crises and
external threats, such as contamination from “foreign” (liberal) values and neighbouring coun-
tries’ erstwhile “Colour Revolutions.”

Conclusion
The chapter commenced with a question posed in relation to the activities and function of the
Orthodox Church: can religion be said to play an ideological role in Eastern Europe? If so, what are its

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 Greg Simons

motivations and reasoning? This was specifically applied to the conditions of Romania and Russia.
The aim of this chapter was not to highlight the specifics of an empirical case but to draw an
implied theoretical result for helping to better understand the environmental circumstances and
conditions that facilitate the ideological role and function of religion in contemporary society.
Orthodoxy in Eastern Europe is by nature a deeply traditional and conservative ideological
force that has held the national role of defining their respective countries’ values, culture and
identity for many centuries. There is the common source of historical legitimacy that defined
the nature of church-state relations, which was influenced by the Byzantine practice of the
symphonia concept. The Romanian and Russian Orthodox Churches have had a fundamental
impact on forming the national identity and character of Romania and Russia. Both of these
Churches also experienced varying forms of repression and suppression during the communist
period, and both have emerged from this era with a renewed determination to contribute
to the social and political developments of Romania and Russia that have been experienc-
ing various simultaneous and successive political, social, economic and identity crises. Given
Orthodoxy is an established centre of cultural production that has outlasted various political
regimes, it is well placed to bring a sense of “order” or understanding to the current social,
political and economic chaos through instilling a worldview that supports the spiritual and
moral welfare of the people.
However, in order for the Church to be able to fulfil this function and role, the nature and
quality of relations and responsibilities need to be negotiated and agreed with the state. This
proved to be an initial obstacle after decades of state primacy over all aspects of human, eco-
nomic and political life under communism, although diminished state capacity and capability
made the political elite more accommodating. This created state-church relations that are more
independent than hierarchical in nature, yet the pragmatic goals and aims are interdependent
and require collaboration.
Therefore, it can be tentatively concluded that religion can play an important ideological role
in contemporary society. Here, ideology is understood as being a total system including a code
for creating and maintaining an idealised understanding of what constitutes an “ideal” society.
The role of transmitting and forming a national system of identity, culture and values is a central
aspect in determining a desirable society from an undesirable one as it shapes the cohesiveness
of a people’s worldview. To achieve this, there are necessary environmental factors: (1) a physi-
cal and/or psychological presence of a crisis; (2) a high level of historical and contemporary
public and political trust in an established religious institution; (3) a weakened state that lacks
the capability and capacity to successfully manage and regulate social and political affairs; (4)
a system of independent/collaborative church-state relations rather than hierarchical structure
where institutional aims and goals converge and create an atmosphere of interdependence in
their realisation; and (5) a sufficiently developed concept and vision of an ideology resonates
with the public and is appropriate for the current environmental circumstances.

Notes
1 For the purposes of this chapter, a crisis is considered to be active when three simultaneously occurring
factors are present: 1) a threat to values, 2) unpredictability and 3) a sense of urgency in achieving a
resolution.
2 For an overview of these aspects of Orthodoxy, please see this link to a Pew poll conducted in the year
2017: https​:/​/ww​​w​.pew​​forum​​.org/​​2017/​​11​/08​​/orth​​odox-​​chris​​tiani​​ty​-in​​-the-​​​21st-​​centu​​ry/.
3 See also Stan & Turcescu, 2006.
4 Two of the most significant are the Protocol of Cooperation in the Area of Social Inclusion and the
Collaboration Protocol on Social Assistance Partnership with the Romanian government.

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 Life after communism

5 To view this document in English, please see https​:/​/mo​​spat.​​ru​/en​​/docu​​ments​​/soci​​al​-co​​​ncept​​s/.

6 Presidential Address to the Federal Assembly, President of Russia, http://eng​.kremlin​.ru​/news​/6402,
12 December 2013 (accessed 7 May 2020).

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 7
THE RADICAL RIGHT IN EUROPE
Cultural shifts and religious nativism

Michael Minkenberg

Introduction
The return of religion into the political landscape in most liberal democracies and the “resa-
cralization” of politics is accompanied by the return of antiliberal religion and its marriage to
nativist ideas and the radical or populist right (Davie, 2010; Haynes, 2014; Hennig and Weiberg-
Salzmann, 2020; Marzouki et al., 2016). Yet, in the academic debate about the radical right so
far, religion is rarely introduced as an analytical category and only slowly entering the research
agenda (for an overview, see Camus, 2011; Minkenberg, 2018a). This article discusses the rela-
tionship between religion and radical right ideologies and its role in radical right mobilization
in the context of a profound cultural change in European societies since the 1980s. For this
purpose, the article offers a concept of right-wing radicalism, which is centred on the idea of
antiliberal ultranationalism and nativism and includes religion as a major determinant of out-
group/in-group distinctions. It then takes a look at the changing context of the contemporary
radical right and finally discusses the programmatic development and organizational profile of
major radical right actors, as far as religion is concerned. It is argued that while religious beliefs
may not be a core element of radical right ideologies, in an era of accelerated religious and cul-
tural pluralization, religion functions as a proxy for xenophobia in its strategy and mobilization
against the perceived threat of rapid sociocultural change and its putative carriers.

The radical right as antiliberal ultranationalism and its religious underpinnings

Most popular definitions of the radical (or populist or extreme) right do not include religion.
Instead, ethnicity, racism and/or the opposition to immigration typically constitute the defini-
tional cores (e.g., Betz, 1994; Carter, 2005; Ignazi, 2003; Norris, 2005). In a more elaborate and
widely accepted definitional attempt, Cas Mudde lists nationalism as the key concept, which he
then specifies by distinguishing the dimensions of internal homogenization, external exclusive-
ness, ethnic and/or state nationalism before qualifying it by additional key features such as nativ-
ism, xenophobia, authoritarianism and, in the most extreme version, an anti-democratic stand
(Table 7.1 and Mudde, 2007: 16–24; also Minkenberg, 1998: 21-72).
Following earlier writings (Minkenberg, 2000, 2008), right-wing radicalism shall be defined
against the backdrop of modernization theory with its emphasis on the fundamental processes

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Table 7.1 The definitional ladder in Cas Mudde’s

concept of the radical right

Ideology Key Additional Feature

Extreme right
Anti-democracy
Radical right
Authoritarianism
Nativism
Xenophobia
Nationalism

Source: adapted from Mudde (2007: 23).

of functional differentiation at the societal level and growing autonomy at the individual level.
It is seen as the radical effort to undo or fight such social change and their carriers by radical-
izing inclusionary and exclusionary criteria (Minkenberg, 1998: 29–47; also Carter, 2005: 14–20;
Kitschelt, 2007: 1179). In other words, it is the overemphasis on, or radicalization of, images of
social homogeneity which characterizes radical right-wing thinking.
Right-wing radicalism is a political ideology, the core element of which lies in the myth
of a homogenous nation, a romantic and populist ultranationalism that is directed against the
concept of liberal and pluralistic democracy and its underlying principles of individualism and
universalism. In the logic of nativism, i.e., the defence of a “heartland” and its autochthonous
population and culture, the nationalistic myth consists of the construction of an idea of nation
and national belonging by stipulating criteria of exclusion which can be ethnically based, but
also cultural, i.e., religious, aiming at the congruence between the state and the nation (Smith,
2001: 34). A summary of these exclusionary criteria is presented in Table 7.2.
Analytically, these criteria are distinct and have their own rationale. In the real world, how-
ever, they are often mixed together, and it is the task of the researcher to disentangle them and
reveal the respective or prevailing rationale of right-wing thinking. The concept of “nativism”,
as in Mudde’s and other definitions, overarches different versions of out-group/in-group dis-
tinctions based on fear of threats – imagined or real – to the native population’s identity and
homogeneity (Mudde, 2007: 18–19). Like its “parental category” nationalism, nativism does not
need an ethnocentric layer but can be religiously motivated, a trait it shares with fundamental-
ist movements that defend traditional religious beliefs and ways of life against threats such as
liberalism or modernity. Nativism, like fundamentalism, then becomes a radical right ideology
when their components of nationalism and xenophobia are complemented by authoritarian or
illiberal features (idem, 24; see above). In this ideological mixture, the populist impulse of right-
wing radicalism, i.e., the anti-establishment thrust and the identification of “the people” as the
only source of political authority, is translated into a top-down relationship between the leader
of the party (movement) and the masses (Griffin, 1991: 36; Minkenberg, 1998: 44).
Historically, the radicalized notion of national homogeneity resulted from the transformation
of an emancipatory nationalism to an integral or official version (Alter, 1985; Anderson, 1983)
and culminated in a romantic ultranationalist myth of belonging by the end of the 19th century;
as such, it borders on or even inhabits chiliastic, i.e., quasi-religious, characteristics, especially
when moral qualities of the nation and the notion of a national rebirth were added (Griffin,
1991: 32–33; also Minkenberg, 1998: 35–47). Some authors insist on including anti-system atti-
tudes or opposition to democracy as an essential definitional criterion (Ignazi, 2003). But these

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Table 7.2 In-group/out-group criteria in radical right-wing discourse (following W. Heitmeyer’s concept

of group-based enmity)

Criteria of Exclusion Core Argument

Racism Inferiority of the “other” on the grounds of biological difference (“natural”

hierarchy)
Anti-Semitism Special case of racism
Ethnocentrism Superiority of own collectivity on the grounds of cultural and economic
achievements (developmental differentiation)
Xenophobia Defensive reaction against ethnic and cultural “others” (fight for resources, fear of
“cultural mixing”)
Religiocentrism Superiority of own collectivity on the grounds of a particular faith and
(Fundamentalism) exclusionary access to “truth”
Heterophobia Intolerance to deviation from mainstream norms (unacceptability of morally
“others”, also within the own ethnicity)

Sources: Minkenberg (1998: 119); Heitmeyer (2005: 14–15); Zick et al., (2011).

attributes are often under-specified since there is a significant difference between those who
reject the entire democratic order and those who want less democracy but more state, or less
state and more democracy (Carter, 2005: 42).
According to the definition used here, right-wing radicalism is not the antithesis to democ-
racy per se (see Table 7.1). In other words, the radical right as defined here is not necessarily in
favour of doing away with democracy but wants government by “the people” in terms of ethnoc-
racy (Griffin, 1999: 308–315). Against this backdrop, the literature on the contemporary radical
right largely considers the religious factor only when identifying religious minorities such as
Jews or Muslims as targets of radical right thinking and activities or in electoral analyses where
it is usually treated as one of many demographic variables (Arzheimer, 2008: 362; Norris, 2005:
183; but see Arzheimer and Carter, 2009; Immerzeel et al., 2013). But in many countries, religion
entered the respective idea of the nation or national identity (Soper and Fetzer, 2018: 3–13).
Hence, the nationalistic myth can be characterized by the effort to construct an idea of nation
and national belonging by radicalizing ethnic, but also religious and other cultural criteria of
exclusion, to bring about a congruence between the state and the nation (Smith, 2001: 34),
and to condense the idea of nation into an image of extreme collective homogeneity. In other
words, the assumption that “the radical right’s understanding of nationalism is ethnically driven”
(Bar-On, 2018: 18) misses out on a significant dimension, i.e., religion and religious nativism,
i.e., a religiously coded celebration and defence of the heartland.
While the literature on the contemporary radical right largely ignores the religious factor,
except when identifying religious minorities as targets of the radical right, the nationalism
scholarship abounds with references to religious characteristics.This applies beyond the obvious
cases of Poland and Ireland (e.g., Zubrzycki, 2006). In fact, already, early research on national
identity was closely linked to religion. German historian Friedrich Meinecke distinguished
between the state nation and cultural nation, the latter being rooted in religion, the most impor-
tant of the “cultural good” (Meinecke, 1908: 2–3) and his French counterpart Ernest Renan,
though defining the nation as an “everyday plebiscite”, added to this definition the requirement
of a “soul”, i.e., a spiritual dimension (Renan, 1947: 903).
Contemporary nationalism research continued to use these distinctions. An important strand
of scholarship dissociates religion from nationalism, arguing, as did Benedict Anderson (1983),

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that secularization and the modern national movements resulted in replacing religion with
nationalism, which was then seen as a surrogate religion, or a “political religion” (Smith, 2001:
35). Others go one step further and distinguish various ingredients of nationalism, such as lan-
guage, ethnicity, religion, kingship or the sense of belonging to a “historical nation” (Hobsbawm,
1990: 67, 73).While Hobsbawm dismisses religion as a necessary requirement for the emergence
of nationalism (as he does with language, ethnicity and kingship), he discovers, like Smith, quasi-
religious traits or the role of “holy icons” in it. Some historians see an even stronger connection
and argue that religion lay at the roots of early modern European nation-building in that elites
mobilized against religious others to strive for social cohesion and national identity (Marx, 2003;
also Spohn, 2003a, 2003b). In a systematic account of the relationship, Rogers Brubaker (2012)
argues that religion, far from being replaced by an allegedly secular nationalism, is more often
than not intertwined with nationalism or can even constitute a distinct version of nationalism
or a cause of its emergence. Likewise, the conceptual effort to link up religion with national-
ism by J. Christopher Soper and Joel Fetzer distinguishes three models of nationalism (2018:
19), two of which contain religious core elements. The authors link up these three models,
i.e., religious nationalism, secular nationalism and civil-religious nationalism, with particular
institutional arrangements of church–state relations (establishment corresponds with religious
nationalism, separation with the secular version), degrees of religious homogeneity (religious
diversity corresponds with civil-religious nationalism and uniformity with the religious version)
and other factors.
In most of these writings, with the notable exception of Soper and Fetzer, the concepts of
religion and secularism (as in religious or secular nationalism) remain sufficiently vague as to be
malleable. Religion is treated as a particular institution, i.e., the Catholic Church, or a theology
or denomination, or, in a wider sense, the appearance of a sacred dimension which interrelates
with secularization in a zero-sum relationship (Bruce, 2002; Norris and Inglehart, 2011; and
others). Hence, “religion” and its counterpart “secularity” or “secularization” need to be speci-
fied before bringing them together with the radical right. Generally, religion and secularization
are multi-dimensional concepts, and the former entails at least the two dimensions of belief (in
the supernatural) and their institutionalization. Thus Steve Bruce defines religion as “beliefs,
actions, and institutions which assume the existence of supernatural entities with powers of
judgement and action” (Bruce, 2003: 9f). Starting from this premise and following Max Weber
(1920) and Roland Robertson (1987), the world’s large religions can be generally distinguished
along two dimensions: on the one hand, religion requires some kind of institutionalization
without necessarily being formally organized; on the other hand, religion can be characterized
in terms of its basic orientation towards the world as it exists around it. The particular mix of a
this-worldly orientation and a highly organized or formal structure, as in Christianity, transforms
an organized religion into a potent political actor – and can result in severe tensions if the fun-
damental orientations differ from those of the polity in which it operates.
Moreover, as has been shown and argued in many studies, secularization does not necessarily
mean the disappearance of religion. Instead, separate “moments of secularization” (Casanova,
1994: 19–39) must be clearly distinguished: secularization as “institutional differentiation”, in
particular the separation of state and church, the emancipation of social and political forces from
religious authority and the growing autonomy of churches in a liberal democracy; secularization
as “decline”, i.e., the loosening ties of the individual to the values and institutions of religion (in
Max Weber’s terminology “Entzauberung” or “disenchantment”) and secularization as “privatiza-
tion”, i.e., the retreat of religion from the public sphere and its subsequent marginalization (also
Taylor, 2007: 1–3; Fox, 2013). In this vein, religion can be married to the radical right as part of
its agenda, as lending legitimacy for its mobilization and as a feature of its mobilization potential

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 The radical right in Europe

among voters or the general public. All three regards lend the radical right the powerful resource
of the re-enchantment or resacralization of politics even for those who are “religiously unmusi-
cal” (Weber, 1994: 65f, 69f).

Changing contexts: cultural shifts, pluralization and the new radical right
If the radical right is seen as fundamentally antiliberal, it shares this stand with almost all reli-
gious traditions in Europe at some point in time. Historically, the radical right’s ancestors are
part and parcel of the Christian tradition, and only the modern age has differentiated religious
beliefs so as to make most of Christianity compatible with liberalism and liberal democracy.
But this process was far from uni-dimensional and linear. For example, in predominantly
Catholic societies in Europe, nation-building by mostly liberal elites put Catholicism on
the defensive, and often the question of loyalty was invoked. Here a conflictual relationship
between the Church and liberalism prevailed, with little support of the Church for the emerg-
ing democratic orders and an unholy alliance between fascism and Catholicism in inter-war
Europe (for details, Minkenberg, 2018a: 370–373; also Bruce, 2003: 110; and Warren, 1941).
The Vatican’s accepting human rights, pluralism and democracy at its second council some
20 years after World War II and the horrors of the Holocaust (Casanova, 1994: 71; Anderson,
2009: 38–40) does not mean that all of Christianity had come to terms with democracy and
tolerance, as is illustrated by the French integrists (the Fraternité St. Pie X) since the 1960s and
antiliberal Catholics in Eastern Europe after 1989 as well as currents in Protestant fundamen-
talism from Scandinavia to the United States. These religious revolts against modernization
and liberalization are a symptom of larger societal processes in the Western, later also Eastern
European world.
While the Catholic Church entered a phase of opening towards the modern world in the
1960s, various Western democracies witnessed the mobilization of a right-wing “national oppo-
sition” that was directed at the political regime and centred on a crucial issue of democratiza-
tion. In this sense, historian Wolfgang Wippermann rightly pointed out that “with the collapse
of fascist regimes in Italy and Germany … the era of fascism has ended – but not the history of
fascism” (1983: 183, my translation). For example, in Italy, fascism continued into the new era
in the form of an outright fascist party, the Italian Social Movement (MSI), which vehemently
opposed the First Republic; in France, the end of the colonial empire, especially the loss of
Algeria, fed a backwards-oriented radical right under Poujade and later under Tixier. In West
Germany, the rise of the National Democratic Party of Germany (NPD) was a reaction against
the separation of the country and the Western integration of the Federal Republic, which signi-
fied the end of the authoritarian German nation-state. In all three countries, the new political
situation was increasingly accepted by the public, thus in the 1970s, these movements – and their
issues – lost support and faded away. Instead, new political actors on the radical right appeared
by the end of the decade and proved more successful than the old radical right of fascist or racist
provenance (Minkenberg, 1998, 2000).
This renewal of the radical right must be seen in the context of far-reaching social and cul-
tural change in Western societies. These processes have been identified by numerous authors
as “post-industrialism”, “value change”, “late capitalism”, “the third modernity” and so on.
Most prominent are the contributions of Ulrich Beck (1986), who talks about “the other
modernity” and Ronald Inglehart (1990, 1997), who relates his research of “post-material
value change” to the concepts of a “culture shift” and “post-modernity”. Based on a num-
ber of similarities in these approaches and to avoid the pitfalls of “post-ism” (Rüsen, 2016),
the summary term “late modernity” is preferred to “post-modernity”. This phase of late

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­ odernity is characterized by an increasingly reflexive process of modernization and a new,

m
self-critical posture towards modernity and cultural orientations, a sharpened sense of crisis,
the primacy of the “life world” and the central role of education, language and communica-
tion. The process can be read as a new phase of individualization and pluralization, following
conventional definitions of modernization, and as the de-emphasis of authority, both religious
and rational-legal in the Weberian sense.
In addition, the religio-cultural landscape of Western democracies is undergoing a signifi-
cant change. Contrary to classical secularization theories, religion, even in the Western world,
is a power that does not want to vanish and that assumes a new significance in an ever more
complex and diverse world (Butler et al., 2011). In Europe, more than anywhere else, many
signs have pointed at a receding social relevance of organized religion since the 1960s (Davie,
2000; Norris and Inglehart, 2011); yet, this development was accompanied by a heightened
religious and cultural pluralization of Western societies. Major facets of this pluralization pro-
cess include the immigration and growth of non-Christian minorities, in particular, Muslims;
the immigration of Christians with a rather different denominational background, for example,
Eastern European Orthodoxy or African versions of Christianity; the growth of the religiously
unaffiliated or atheists; and finally the European integration process itself, which triggers new
and heated discussions about the proper relationship between religion and the state (Haynes,
2014: 63-85).
As a result of these processes, in most countries, the unaffiliated are today the second-largest
group when looking at measures of religious affiliation and Muslims the second- or third-largest
among those with an affiliation (PEW Research Center, 2016; also Table 1 in Minkenberg,
2018b). Countries where Islam was second (data from around 2010) have traditionally been very
homogeneous in denominational terms, such as Austria, Belgium, France, Italy and Spain among
the Catholic majority countries, and Denmark, Norway and Sweden among the Protestant
majority countries. In addition, from around 1980 until around 2000, religious diversity has
increased in all Western European democracies, except for Sweden (ibid).
These processes of pluralization and the growing presence of (non-Christian) immigrants
and their descendants challenge the established institutional and political arrangements in the
religio-political field. They also provoke religious and political counter-reactions, which to a
large degree are driven by nativist, antiliberal and radical right actors and react to the chal-
lenges to what they perceive as the religio-political “normalcy” (Minkenberg, 2018b). In that,
the new radical right can assume a substitute role for weakened institutions and actors in the
religious sphere or open the gates for new holy or unholy alliances between the radical right
and illiberal religion/religious nativism (Hennig and Weiberg-Salzmann, 2020). More specifi-
cally, radical right parties may flourish more in secular than in religious societies in particular
if their incorporation of religion into their agenda provides them with a mark of distinction
in the competition with other parties. The summary overview in Table 7.3 indicates some
relationship, with the bulk of modestly or weakly secularized countries having a weak presence
of those parties; however, the inverse is not true regarding countries with advanced seculariza-
tion. When considering the presence of Islam and the dose of religion in these parties’ ideolo-
gies (see also next section), the link becomes stronger: regardless of the secularization of the
country, the parties which added Islamophobia to their traditional ethnocentrism are more
successful and they have established themselves especially in countries with a strong presence
of Islam (see Table 7.6).
In other words, the current radical right is strong where it couples its ultranationalist or racist
message with Islamophobia, especially in countries with a long tradition of Christian mono-
confessionalism. Widespread Islamophobia and the rejection of multiculturalism in large parts

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Table 7.3 Secularization and the radical right (RR) in Western Europe (post-2000)

Weak RR Presence Strong RR Presence

Weak or modest Ireland Austriaa

secularization Germany Belgiuma
Great Britain Italya
Netherlands Switzerland
Portugal
Spaina
Advanced secularization Swedena Denmarka
Finland Francea
Norwaya

Sources: Norris and Inglehart (2011: 84–91); Minkenberg (2018b, Table 6).
Note: Strong RR presence: countries with a radical right party which has received at
least 4% in every national parliamentary election since 1990.
Note: Secularization is measured by low church-going rates (advanced = less than
20% going to church at least once a month; average for World Values Survey data from
1981 to 1998).
Note: aCountries, in which Islam was the second-largest religious community in 2010.

Table 7.4 Religious diversity and pluralization trends (1980–2000) and strength of radical right
parties in West European democracies

Weak Pluralization Moderate Pluralization Strong Pluralization

(d < 0.10) (d = 0.10–0.20) (d > 0.20)

Low level diversity Ireland Belgiuma,b Francea,b

(< 0.20) Portugal Denmarka,b Italya,b
(Swedena: d = negative) Norwaya,b Austriaa,b
Finland Spaina
Moderate diversity
(0.20–0.50)
High level diversity Switzerlandb Germany
(>0.50) Great Britain
Netherlands

Sources: Minkenberg (2018b, Table 1 and Table 6).

Note: The base of categorization is the diversity value of 1980 (0: completely homogeneous,
1.00: completely diverse).
Note: d = difference of diversity value between 1980 and 2000
Note: aCountries in which Islam is the second-largest religious community.
Note: bCountries with a strong radical right-wing or xenophobic party in the country’s party
system (at least 4% in every national parliamentary election since 1990). The two periods are
not synchronized because such processes do not translate into political changes immediately.

of Western European publics (Minkenberg, 2008, 2013; Zick et al., 2011) provide an opening
for the radical right to look more “mainstream” and less extremist, in contrast to earlier racist
discourses such as anti-Semitism or biological racism. Table 7.4 shows that the link becomes
even more evident when considering the pace of change in religious diversity (as presented in
Table 1 of Minkenberg, 2018b).

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 Michael Minkenberg

The distribution of countries in Table 7.4 reveals a very clear pattern. One group of countries
exhibits low levels of diversity around 1980 and a low degree of pluralization (Ireland, Portugal).
Here, the monopoly of Catholicism by and large persists, and no relevant radical right party has
emerged. The situation changes in the next group, with low levels of diversity but a medium
degree of pluralization from 1980 to 2000 (Belgium and the Nordic countries, except Sweden).
These countries also start with a denominationally homogenous society, and in all of them but
Finland, Islam now occupies the second place among the large religious communities. It is here,
again with the exception of Finland, that a new or renewed radical right party has become a
permanent fixture in the party systems since the 1990s. In the third group (upper right cell),
this scenario grows most obvious, with little diversity as a starting point and strong pluraliza-
tion. Again, in these countries, which are all predominantly Catholic, Islam takes second place,
and, except for Spain, the new radical right has established itself firmly in the party system well
before the current debate on “populism”. The remainder of the countries fall in the category of
already elevated levels of diversity. They constitute the heartland of the Protestant Reformation,
with an early institutionalization of religious diversity. Here, Switzerland stands out with its
strong radical right party, which had consolidated before the later waves of immigration.
In contrast to Western Europe, post-Communist Eastern Europe is not characterized by pro-
cesses of large-scale immigration and religious pluralization. Instead, it is ethnic minorities that
feed the radical right “backlash”, and there is only a weak link between (overall rather modest)
ethnic pluralization and radical right electoral success (Mudde, 2007: 214; Minkenberg, 2017:
112–114). Moreover, in denominational terms, most countries in the East are even less diverse
than in ethnic terms. With 12% of the population being of Turkish descent, Bulgaria is the only
country in the East with a significant Muslim minority, but this is not due to immigration but
the Wilsonian order in Eastern Europe after World War I. Consequently, as Table 7.5 reveals,
there exists only a weak relationship between the degree of religious diversity and the success
of the radical right.

Table 7.5 Religious homogeneity and the radical right success in Eastern Europe (1990–2015)

Radical Right Success (2000–2015)

Religious homogeneity Low High

(2010)

Medium–low Czech Republic Bulgariaa

Estonia Hungary
Latvia
Slovakia
High Lithuania Poland
Romaniaa

Sources: Minkenberg (2017: 113), Census nearest 2010, PEW Research Center 2020.
Note: Religious homogeneity high: majority religion (Catholicism, Eastern Orthodoxy) is more
than 80%.
Note: Religious homogeneity medium–low: large share of unaffiliated (>30%), large share of
non-majority religion (>20%).
Note: Radical right success is measured by a radical right party obtaining at least 5% of the vote in
at least three national parliamentary elections between 1995 until 2015. This takes into account
a period of regime settlement from 1990 to 1995, which is excluded from consideration, and
the generally high level of electoral volatility/low level of party attachment in the entire region.
Note: aCountries in which Orthodoxy is the majority religion.

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 The radical right in Europe

The Changing frames of the radical right: the

return of religion as religious nativism
In light of the above-mentioned processes of cultural shifts and modernization, various new
organizations on the far right appeared from the late 1970s on, which tried to influence elec-
tions and the policy-making process. In the 30 years between 1965 and 1995, 19 right-wing
radical parties were formed in Western Europe, with more than half of them gaining an aver-
age of at least 4% in national or European elections in the 1980s and 1990s (Kitschelt, 1995:
52). Besides these electoral organizations, there are new groups of the radical right that try to
influence public debate and the minds of people rather than voting behaviour. These groups
– think tanks, intellectual circles, political entrepreneurs – are summarized as the New Right
in the literature. In Europe, the most prominent groups are the French Nouvelle Droite groups
Club de l’Horloge and especially GRECE, led by philosopher Alain de Benoist, the German Neue
Rechte, the Italian Nouva Destra and other country chapters, also in Eastern Europe. The New
Right is inspired by the Weimar Conservative Revolution, in particular Carl Schmitt’s antilib-
eral “Political Theology” (Bar-On, 2013; Schmitt, 2010; Sedgwick, 2019). The ideas of these
groups are disseminated largely in magazines such as the French Éléments or the German Junge
Freiheit or Criticón.This New Right builds a bridge, or hinge, between established and traditional
conservatism and the organizations of the new radical right. It is characterized by its effort to
create a counter-discourse to the “ideas of 1968”. The German New Right historian Rainer
Zitelmann, for example, advocated overcoming the German “double trauma of 1933 and 1968”
(Der Spiegel, 11/1994: 224).The New Right more or less successfully appropriates strategies and
issues of its political opponents, especially the New Left and new social movements.This process
of “issue framing” aims at establishing a cultural war, a Kulturkampf von rechts, or a Gramcisme de
droite, with the goal of filling terms of public debate with a right-wing meaning of a homog-
enous nation, a strong state and discrimination of all things “foreign”.
In Europe, the most important ideological renewal took place with the New Right’s for-
mulation of the concept of “ethnopluralism”, which demarcates New Right thinking from
old-fashioned ideas of biological racism and white superiority. In direct appropriation of the
left’s concept of the right to be different (“droit à la difference”), the New Right emphasizes the
incompatibility of cultures and ethnicities and advocates the right of the Europeans to be differ-
ent and to resist cultural mixing. As French sociologist Pierre-André Taguieff (1994) shows, this
concept, despite its claim of pluralism, still smacks of racism, or “mixophobie”. Ethnopluralism
only appears to be pluralist and liberal; its essence is a politically enforced segregation of cultures
and ethnicities per geographical criteria, a global apartheid. Thus, ethnopluralism is the New
Right’s countermodel to concepts of multiculturalism, a modernized strategy against immigra-
tion and integration (Camus, 2011; Minkenberg, 1998: 141-166.
At the level of the political parties’ discourse in Western Europe, this concept boils down to
a defensive nationalism. None of the parties mentioned advocates a return to pre-democratic,
dictatorial political orders; all stress their support for republican principles and the liberal-dem-
ocratic constitution (a difference to inter-war fascism in Italy, Austria or Germany). They don’t
want to abolish democracy but to redefine it in terms of ethnocracy (Minkenberg, 2000; Mudde,
2007):“Les Français d’abord!”,“Deutschland den Deutschen” (also “America First”) are their slogans.
In line with the New Right’s countermodel to multiculturalism, this is a modernized strategy
against immigration and integration and also used as a religious defence against multiculturalism
and Islam – albeit the Nouvelle Droite around Alain de Benoist originally attacked Christianity
as an alien religion just like Islam, in their embrace of a pre-Christian European identity (see
Camus, 2011). However, other New Right think tanks in France, such as the Club de l’Horloge,

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appropriated Catholicism as part and parcel of French and European identity (Minkenberg,
1998: 153f).
Further along the line, smaller far-right groups and movements without electoral ambitions
and a more particular agenda emerged, heavily relying on religious narratives and mobiliz-
ing against Islam in an increasingly aggressive fashion, such as Aarhus against the Mosque in
Denmark, the (successful) mobilization in the Swiss referendum on the banning of minarets
in Mosques, and more recently the Dresden-based PEGIDA (Patriotic Europeans Against the
Islamization of the Occident) movement and the Europe-wide anti-Islam Identitarian move-
ment (Minkenberg, 2008: 48–50;Vorländer et al., 2018; Zúquete, 2018). From the Nouvelle Droite
to PEGIDA and the Identitarians, the ethnopluralist argument centres its agenda on religious
grounds and connects the ideology of nativist nationalism with a religious logic, thereby turning
religion into an ultranationalist “master frame”, which meant to provide a direct link between
these groups and the political mainstream, thereby bypassing all parties and partisan discourse.
Yet, in Western Europe, it was the parties of the new radical right, which most successfully
appropriated this frame in their electoral politics.
The recent shifts of radical right parties towards emphasizing a religious divide by attack-
ing Islam and claiming the role of defenders of the Christian or Judeo-Christian heritage in
the respective countries, or Europe in general (Immerzeel et al., 2013: 946), does not need to
be interpreted merely as a strategic ploy to gain political advantages (Arzheimer and Carter,
2009: 989). For one, a number of these groups and parties had already long-time links to ultra-
conservative or orthodox currents of Christianity. For example, Le Pen’s Front National (FN)
cultivated an alliance with the antiliberal Lefebvrists/integrists, some of whom held prominent
posts in the party (see above, and Camus, 2011; Minkenberg, 1998). Bruno Mégret, the number
two in the party until the split in 1999, made the case that France was a Catholic country and
should embrace the history of her Catholicism as she should embrace her pre-revolutionary past
(1996). The FN’s recent shift towards Islamophobia was not the result of the change in leader-
ship; it appeared already before Marine Le Pen took over in 2012. Yet, under her leadership of
the FN, renamed 2018 into Rassemblement National (RN), Islamophobia was coupled with a
new emphasis on the secular-republican traditions of France, which the party sees under attack
by Islam and its allies in the French establishment. In this context, Catholicism in the FN/RN
assumes the role of a “cultural Christianity” or religious nativism, compatible with principles
of French laïcité, rather than an expression of religious faith (Hennig and Weinberg-Salzmann,
2020; Roy 2016).
Likewise, despite the anti-clerical tradition in Austria, the Freedom Party of Austria (FPÖ),
just like the Swiss People’s Party (SVP) and the Italian Lega Nord (now only Lega), have increas-
ingly attacked Islam as incompatible not only with their countries’ democratic order but also
their Christian identity (Marzouki et al., 2016: 13-60). The British National Party (BNP) has
discovered Islam as the country’s enemy, as has the Danish People’s Party (DF) (Goodwin, 2011:
177–178; Widfeldt, 2015: 146–149, 171). In Denmark, Protestant fundamentalists – just like
Catholic integrists in France – sided with the major party of the radical right (Minkenberg,
2008: 48–50), and in the Netherlands, the List Pim Fortuyn in 2002 and Geert Wilders’ Party
of Freedom (PVV) were almost completely centred on a strongly Islamophobic platform from
their beginning (Art, 2011: 179–187).
Finally, the German radical right, old and new, followed and enhanced this trend. While the
“Republikaner” in the early 1990s still focused more on xenophobia than Islam, the more extreme
and, if anything, pagan National Democratic Party of Germany (NPD) has found religion a
promising programmatic point and echoes its British counterparts in embracing anti-Semitism
as well as Islamophobia. More recently, the new Alternative for Germany (AfD), first organized

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as a fiercely anti-EU and anti-Euro party in 2013, has moved further to the right and increas-
ingly mobilized against immigrants, refugees and Islam. Like PEGIDA and the Identitarians, the
AfD discovered the Christian heritage of Germany as a political resource in its ultranational-
ist fight against immigrants and the establishment, and its various sub-organizations include a
Protestant-pietist group, the Christians in the AfD, similar to the Lefebvrists in the French FN
and the Protestant fundamentalists in the Danish DF (Zick and Küpper, 2015).
This overview of the West European radical right illustrates the voyage of the concept of
ethnopluralism from the intellectual New Right of the 1970s into the party platforms of nearly
all contemporary radical right parties in the West: religion today serves as a master frame to
mobilize support and appear more mainstream. Where mainstreaming is not the goal like in the
BNP until the late 1990s, radical right groups remain outright racist and/or put more emphasis
on anti-Semitism than on Islamophobia, with the obvious results of finding political allies in
anti-Semitic circles in the Muslim world (Camus, 2011: 272–274; Goodwin, 2011: 172–173; also
Carter, 2005: 35–41).
In Eastern Europe, the relationship between the radical right and religion does not signal
a return of religious ultranationalism. It has never been gone, except for a 40-year long hia-
tus in the Communist era when both religion and nationalism were suppressed by the Soviet
hegemon. In this region, the radical right has stood for a merger of religion and ultranationalist
platforms since it reappeared in the 1990s. The most notable case is Poland, where the radical
right tries to out-Catholicize the Catholic establishment and political mainstream. Here, the
inter-war ideas of the anti-democratic and antiliberal Roman Dmowski find new resonance
with listeners of Radio Maryja, street marches organized by the All-Polish Youth and parties
such as the now-defunct League of Polish Families, the ruins of which have been absorbed
by the governing Law and Justice party (PiS). This party, in cooperation with parts of the
Catholic clergy, has also embarked on an antiliberal moral crusade against all real or perceived
threats to the Polish nation and the Catholic way of life (Hennig and Weinberg-Salzmann,
2020; Pytlas, 2016). In Hungary, the Hungarian Justice and Life Party (MIÉP), as well as Fidesz,
took over Catholic voters in the late 1990s when the Hungarian Christian Democratic party
declined in the wake of internal rivalries (Minkenberg, 2017: 86). Today, the Movement for a
Better Hungary (Jobbik) has, until recently, echoed the Polish radical right by emphasizing that
Hungarian national identity and Christianity are an “inseparable concept” (Pirro, 2015: 71–73;
also Ádám and Bozóki, 2016). The Slovak National Party (SNS) stands for a particularly strong
fusion of national identity and Catholicism, which in the first phase of national independence
in World War II bordered on clerical fascism; these traditions were carried on by the SNS in the
2000s, which under the leadership of Jan Slota tried to rehabilitate the fascist priest Tišo (Pirro,
2015: 89–91;Václavík, 2015). Its successor at the extreme right-wing end of the party spectrum,
the Kotleba party, has also adopted Catholicism in its ultranationalist platform and vehemently
mobilizes against Muslims and LGBT rights. An anti-Muslim thrust informs the radical right in
Bulgaria, where Ataka was formed as an anti-Turkish party (Avramov, 2015: 300f). In Romania,
on the other hand, radical right parties such as the Party for a Greater Romania (PRM) have
declined since 2000, but increasingly, the Orthodox Church of Romania (ROC) has taken over
the role of an antiliberal safeguard of the Orthodox identity of the country (Andreescu, 2015).
Only in the Baltics does cultural Christianity or religious nationalism remain largely absent
from the radical right’s agenda. Here, ethno-cultural nationalism and anti-immigration rheto-
ric dominate, as exemplified by the most successful party in the region, the partly governing
National Alliance in Latvia (Minkenberg, 2017: 80).
To sum up, relevant actors of the radical right in European democracies can be distin-
guished according to the extent to which they disseminate a religious agenda, either in terms

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Table 7.6 The radical right and its religious agenda in Europe, west and east (since 1990s)

Party Movement

No explicit religious reference/ NPD, Republikaner (DE) Freiheitliche Arbeiterpartei (DE)

agenda from the beginning Movimento Sociale Italiano (IT)
on
Explicit religious reference/
agenda as an addition to
ethnocentrist platform
Explicit religious reference/
agenda as the core
of platform from the
beginning on
Dansk Front (DK)
British National Party (GB) FANE (FR)
National Alliancea (LV) NOP, ONR, PWN-PSN(PL)
PRM (RO) Magyar Gárda, MÖM (HU)
NSS, SNJ (SK)
Vatra Romaneasca (RO)
AfD (DE)
Vlaams Blok/Belanga (BE)
Front/Rassemblement Nationala (FR)
DFa (DK)
Lega Norda (IT)
FPÖa (AT)
SVPa (CH)
List Pim Fortuyna, PvVa (NL) Identitarian Movement (various)
LPRa, PiSa (PL) PEGIDA (DE)
SNSa Kotleba (SK) Comités-Chrétienité-Solidarité (FR)
MIÉP, KDNP, Jobbika (HU) New Era (DK)
Fidesza (HU, after 2015) Arhus against the Mosque (DK)
Atakaa (BG) Radio Maryja, All-Polish Youth (PL)
[ROC (RO)]

Sources: Country chapters in Bertelsmann Stiftung (2009), updated; Minkenberg (2013, 2017).
Note: aParties with sustained electoral relevance (see Tables 7.4 and 7.5).

of ­affirming a religious identity of the nation they claim to defend or attacking “others” on
religious grounds. This reasoning leads to three types: a non-religious radical right, a fundamen-
tally religious radical right and a radical right which added religion to its repertoire during its
existence, as shown in Table 7.6.
Regardless of these differences, all variants have in common a strong quest for internal
homogeneity of the nation through the primary “we-group” – a rejection of difference and
pluralization – and a populist anti-establishment political style (Minkenberg, 1998: 21-72, 237-
309, 2000; also Kitschelt, 2007: 1179f). The relevant parties in selected countries, as presented in
Table 7.6, are also marked with regard to their electoral success, and the overview in the table
suggests a link between the programmatic focus and the electoral success as far as radical right
parties in Western Europe are concerned: the mixture of “ethnocentrism” and “Islamophobia”
seems to be the new winning formula. In Eastern Europe, on the other hand, deeply religious
ultranationalism predominates, except for the Baltic region.

Conclusions
In liberal democracies, religion and the radical right interact at various levels on which religion
acquires a political quality, from beliefs and doctrine (ideology) to the organizational and insti-
tutional interaction to legitimation and mobilization (Fox, 2013: 56–108). Against this backdrop,
“the return of religion” adds a new element to the interaction because it occurs in an age of secu-
larization and affects even those political actors who were long interpreted as offering a substitute

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 The radical right in Europe

for religion: an extreme “faith” in the nation, a quasi-religious identity providing a sense of politi-
cal home for those who felt lost in an increasingly complex world. But the article proposes that
this return of religion to the European radical right agenda since the 1990s stems mainly from
outside pressures and societal dynamics, in particular, an accelerated religious pluralization, rather
than from the beliefs of the activists or the tradition of the respective parties. Hence it should be
seen as a strategic adjustment, not the core identity of the radical right, which remains its anti-
plural ultranationalism. In other words: the changing agenda of the radical right does not signal
the return of the traditional religious nationalism, which presupposes a religious population.
However, because of the enduring success of dyeing the radical right agenda with religion,
above all Islamophobia in the West, religion may become a core component of the radical
right ideology by being appropriated as “religious nativism”. This means a justification of
the defence of the fatherland with religious rhetoric, thereby approaching the more conven-
tional models of religious nationalism in Eastern Europe (south of the Baltics and southeast
of the Czech Republic) and in the United States, especially in the Midwest and the South
(Minkenberg, 1998). In sum, religion and the radical right will not undo their marriage of
convenience even in a secular age. But with the exception of Poland and similar cases, the dose
of religion in the radical right’s ultranationalism is a religion for non-believers rather than the
religiously devout.

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 8
ISLAMISM FROM PIETY
POLITICS TO PARTY POLITICS
Roel Meijer

Introduction
In this chapter, I will analyse the ideological transformation of Islamism during its politicization
over the past century. Islamism or political Islam emerged with the foundation of the Egyptian
Muslim Brotherhood in 1928. Its branches later spread to Jordan, Syria, Lebanon and Kuwait in
the Mashreq; from the 1970s, the organization had counterparts in Morocco, Algeria, Libya and
especially Tunisia. My main argument is that the term “political Islam” is a misnomer. Although
Islamism laid claim to being political and this process started in the 1930s, only in the 1980s did
its politicization developed in earnest, when Islamist movements established political parties and
severed their ties with their movements. Political Islam started out as a social movement focused
on spreading the word and organizing Muslims in a society (jama‘a) in order to live according
to God’s word (McCarthy 2018, 5). It is not that the movement eschewed power, but it was not
focused on gaining power either; until the 1980s, it did not have an analysis of power and did
not develop a strategy on how to gain it or how to wield it. Its goal was to gradually Islamize
society in response to secularization. Only after it became a social force to be reckoned with
and drew the attention of the powers that be (Mitchell 1994, 12) did it start to act politically.
For countries in the Middle East, modern politics with its mass mobilization, elections and
parliaments was quite new at the time. The confusion in the West about the nature of Islamism
derives from its claim that Islam is a “comprehensive system” (shumuliyya), covering all aspects of
life, personal, social, economic and political. Islamism assumes that Islam is a “complete system”
(nizam kamil) and that if believers follow Islam, they will produce a perfect society. This idea is
expressed in the well-known dictum “Islam is religion and state” (al-islam din wa dawla) (Mitchell
1994, 14; Al-Anani 2016, 54–6, 111–13; Kandil 2015, 85–6; Conduit, 2019, 45). Its translation
to a populist electoral slogan in the 1980s was that “Islam is the solution” (al-islam huwa al-hall).
This ideological claim has been called “totalitarian” (Mozaffari 2007; Soage 2008), but perhaps a
better, more neutral term, coined by Shepard, is “Islamic totalism” (1987, 307–8). Entertaining a
moralistic, idealistic, even utopian notion of politics based on individual and collective virtue was
the foundation of Islamism. The main function of the Islamic state was to uphold and enforce
this moral order. In fact, Islamism’s emphasis on faith, unity and harmony, and its condemna-
tion of strife (fitna) and conflict and its rejection of finding ways of solving a clash of interests
would be considered by political philosophers as Mouffe (1993, 4) and Lefort (1981, 85–106) as

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“politicide” (Meijer 2017; Meijer 2012c). Others like Saba Mahmoud call it “embodied politics”
(Mahmoud 2012). But the nature of this type of politics is that it reduces political, economic
and social issues to a religious identity and morality. As a consequence, political opponents are
regarded as sinners and religious deviationists (munharifun) rather than representatives of dif-
ferent political views (Kandil 2015, 49–50). It was only after parliamentary politics, formerly
condemned as partisanship or “partyism” (hizbiyya), was accepted that politics came to be valued
in its own right. Indeed, this step marked for Islamism a revolutionary transition from a utopian
notion of politics as an ideal to the recognition of politics as a separate field and the acceptance
of formal politics. To adjust to the new situation, Islamism not only had to end its dichotomous
concept of the world, redefine its enemies and friends, draw up feasible political programmes and
enter alliances with the “lesser enemy”, it also had to rethink Islam and the doctrine of its com-
prehensiveness.This entailed a major ideological shift to an ethical concept of Islam as providing
guidelines to live by, the so-called principles of Islamic law (maqasid al-shari‘a).
One of the main results of Islamism’s claim to comprehensiveness was the tension between its
origin as a piety movement, its political claims and the seeking of power and its option of using
violence. While the flexibility to use all three instruments at the same time led neutral research-
ers to point out the movement’s deep ambiguity (Al-Anani 2016, 60, 111; Kandil 2015, 43–47;
McCarthy 2018, 3–6; Meijer 2012b/c; Wegner 2011, 64–8; Wickham 2013, 14, 132–144), its
critics have accused it of wilfully developing a “double discourse”, an uncompromising religious
one for the members of the movement and a democratic one for outsiders (Meijer 2012a).
However, this tension was not limited to outsiders. Recent research has demonstrated that it
has also led to severe tensions within the movement between, on the one hand, the partisans
of political participation and, on the other hand, the proponents of the gradual Islamization of
society (Marks 2014, 17; McCarthy 2018).
In the first part of this chapter, I will show how the Muslim Brotherhood has turned Islam
into an ideology through its doctrine of comprehensiveness (shumuliyya) and how this was
reflected in its formation of a collective identity. In the second part, I will trace the politicization
of Islamism and its gradual opening up to political ideas, a discourse of rights, cross-ideological
alliances and democracy. Finally, I will look into the post-Islamism debate.

The ideologization and mobilization of religion

It is the ideological character of Islamism that makes Islamism modern. Its leaders were not
part of the ulema who are trained specialists in the complexities of jurisprudence (fiqh) but were
laymen who took up Islam in order to instruct the population to cope with the challenges the
modern world posed. Islamism finds its background in the decline of traditionalism, the emer-
gence of the public sphere, open debate, contestation, mass movements, the end of the Ottoman
caliphate in 1924 and the rise of the modern state and its capacity to regulate society. As Rachik
points out, the ideologization of religion entails selectively choosing Islamic terms and using
them as “tools” and “ideological weapons” in order to bring coherence to the otherwise com-
plex text and adjust it to inspire and mobilize a following (2009, 354). Ideologies are simplifica-
tions of religions and function as maps in a modern world. According to Freeden, ideologies
have their own rules.They consist of core concepts, which, together with their components and
adjacent and peripheral concepts, build a solid structure and morphology that must be convinc-
ing through a mixture of cultural and logical elements (1994). The core concept of the Muslim
Brotherhood is the virtuous community. Its goal is to establish an Islamic moral order and to
protect Islam against the Western economic, political and cultural onslaught by calling in the
help of the state, which together with Islamic law are adjacent concepts. In this sense, the state

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is an instrument in the service of the ideologization of the community and politics: a means to
enforce that moral order, not an independent field where conflicts in society are solved.
Officially the doctrine of the comprehensive system was launched during the fifth congress
of the Muslim Brotherhood in 1939, where its founder Hasan al-Banna (1906–49) stated,

We believe that [the] rules and teachings of Islam are comprehensive in organizing
people’s affairs in this life and the next, and that those who believe that these teachings
only cover worship and spiritual matters are mistaken. Islam is a belief and worship;
homeland and citizenship; religion and state; spirituality and practice; revelation and
sword.
(Kandil, 2015, 85–6)

This was also how the Tunisian Islamist movement started out 50 years later (McCarthy 2018,
15, 27). In 1979, its leader Rachid Ghannouchi stated,“Islam is not just spiritual da‘wa but creed,
and worship, and a comprehensive political system which does not differentiate between the
material and the spiritual” (McCarthy 2018, 37).
But ideology is not just limited to a set of ideas and values or a world view, especially in a
social movement. Islamism is also a practice and conduct. As recent research of its organizational
structure and membership has made clear, they extend to the creation of a collective iden-
tity and the disciplining and socialization of members into an organization (McCarthy 2018,
96–112; Al-Anani 2016, 34–49; Kandil 2015, 5–47). Their function is to create an ideal Islamic
society through bonding and establishing a strong organizational structure. In the case of the
Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood, Al-Anani calls this the “weaving of a web of internal relations,
culture, norms and values in order to produce a specific identity that constitutes the backbone
of the organization” (Al-Anani 2016, 3).
The mixture of ideology and practice finds its expression in what has been called the Islamic
“method/approach/way” (manhaj) (Al-Anani 2016, 62), which has its origins in the early
Muslim Brotherhood (Mitchell 1994, 31–2). The manhaj of the Brotherhood can be divided
into two activities. The first, da’wa, can be divided into the dissemination of ideology (propa-
ganda) and recruitment, its main activity. In an antagonistic political environment, this is a
long process of identifying a potential member and scrutinizing, monitoring and evaluating his
character concerning faith, correct conduct, obedience and loyalty (Al-Anani 2016, 67–81).
Once a potential member has been found eligible, he undergoes a period of cultivation and
indoctrination, tarbiya, the second activity. Tarbiyya is focused on the deepening of indoctrina-
tion, the purification and disciplining of the movement’s members to make them internalize
the Brotherhood’s rules, so they apply them to everyday life and instil in them a commitment
to the goals of the organization and a deep sense of solidarity with the movement. After a pro-
bation period, which can last between a year and several years, he becomes a devotee/sympa-
thizer (muhibb), subsequently climbing the ladder of supporter (mu‘ayyid), appointee/associate
(muntasib), and regular member (muntazim) and active or full member (‘amil). At some point in
this process, members enter an usra, sometimes called a cell, but, according to Kandil, it is more
akin to a biological family, where they learn to support (takaful), understand (tafahum) and get
to know each other (ta‘aruf) (Kandil 2015, 7; Al-Anani 2016, 87). The emphasis throughout this
process is on submission and fulfilling duties. The end result is a “conversion to a world view
and the production of a new person, the Muslim Brother” (Kandil 2015, 6). In turn, he becomes
a recruiter (da‘iya/du‘ah). His family members, friends and neighbours are the primary focus
of his da‘wa. The result is an exclusive organization, constituting a parallel society. Its members,
following the same codes of conduct, socialize only with like-minded members, fully engage in

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promoting the Brotherhood’s values and power and eventually marry a sister of the organiza-
tion (Kandil 2015, 70–1). Their children, born into the Brotherhood environment, are social-
ized according to Brotherhood values (Al-Anani 2016, 73). Another important element that
strengthened internal ties and separation from society is its cultivation of victimhood (mihna)
at the hands of the authoritarian state (Al-Anani 2016, 137, 141–6) and its dichotomous world
view (Kandil 2015, 56–8).
This highly structured disciplinary model was replicated in other countries. Or, if it was first
an open democratic organization, as in Syria in the 1940s and 1950s (Reissner 1980; Conduit
2019, 46–52), it became far more closed after it was persecuted by repressive states in the 1960s.
Research on the Ennahda movement shows that the same structure was followed in Tunisia.The
criteria for recruitment were moral rectitude and commitment. Recruitment occurred when
members moved from “informal families” to “formal families” and entered a tightly organized,
exclusive, underground organization (Wolf 2017, 37–8). Members participated in a host of
activities, ranging from study circles, halaqat (McCarthy 2018, 23) social events, common prayer
sessions, sports and activism, until it became a “way of life” (manhaj hayat) (McCarthy 2018, 27,
53–9, 127–9). As in Egypt, Ennahda was hierarchically organized with regional branches and
a congress, a national consultative council and leadership. The same applies to the Jordanian
branch of the Muslim Brotherhood (Wagemakers 2020, 92–3).
To what extent internal debate took place depended on the type of organization and the
intellectual and political circumstances it operated in. Of these movements, the Egyptian Muslim
Brotherhood was probably the most authoritarian. Political consciousness and critical thinking
were subordinated to building the organization. The pursuit of knowledge for its own sake and
critical debate and democratic procedures was discouraged (Kandil 2015, 14, 58–60). For fear
of dissent, (fitna) unity is rigorously imposed, and punishment and repentance were applied to
ensure obedience (Kandil 2015, 27–8, 47). Mitchell makes clear that from its inception, inter-
nal critique was regarded as dissent by its charismatic leader, Hasan al-Banna (Mitchell 1994,
17–19, 52–5). In contrast, Ennahda was much more open. Probably because its three trends—a
progressive, liberal trend, a flexible political trend and finally a conservative da‘wa trend—the
more liberal trend was represented by its leadership and would gain the upper hand after 1995
(McCarthy 2018, 80; Wolf 2017, 61–3, 76–7, 93–8). It also tuned in to a much more liberal
and rational modernist Islamic environment prevalent in the Maghreb (Cavatorta and Merone
2015).

Politicization of Islam
To trace the politicization of Islamism and the shedding of the comprehensive ideology in
the countries of the Middle East and North Africa in a systematic manner, I will analyse six
stages: (1) the introduction of political ideas and the rejection of violence; (2) political partici-
pation and integration; (3) the founding of especially independent political Muslim parties;
(4) the adoption of a discourse of rights; (5) the formation of cross-ideological alliances; and
finally, (6) how these elements came together during the Arab Spring. The process, however, is
neither uniform nor linear. It can even be reversed. Much depends not just on factors within
these movements but also on local and international political circumstances and how the
movements react to them (Brown 2012). For instance, for reasons of self-preservation, move-
ments can retreat to safer da‘wa activities and claim to be apolitical, or they can adopt a rights
discourse when they are being repressed but reject it when the threat of repression recedes.
More common is that they adopted different tactics at the same time and remained deeply
ambivalent.

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Early politicization
The introduction of political ideas started with the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood at the end
of the 1930s, but it remained largely within the limits of the comprehensive system, demanding
the establishment of an Islamic state and the application of shari‘a. This changed in the 1940s,
when poverty became one of the main political issues in the Middle East, and the modern state
was called upon to intervene. In this period, the Syrian Muslim Brotherhood under Mustafa
Siba‘i adopted the doctrine of “Islamic socialism” (Reissner 1980, 302–15). It participated in
general elections, winning between three and ten seats during 1945–63. It even entered coali-
tion governments (Conduit 2019, 68).This was also the period in which Sayyid Qutb wrote his
Social Justice in Islam. In 1956, the Muslim Brotherhood in Jordan also participated in elections
(Wagemakers 2020, 94).
This development was interrupted by the establishment of authoritarian states in the 1950s,
either in the form of republics (Egypt, Syria, Iraq) or monarchies (Morocco, Jordan, Saudi
Arabia) and the repression of Islamism in most of these states. New Islamist intellectuals took
the doctrine of shumuliyya to its extreme in promoting a total submission to God as the only
means of personal liberation in the struggle against authoritarianism (Euben 1999, 49–92).Their
influence on Islamism extended from Morocco to Syria and would last until the early 1980s.
Although the Muslim Brotherhood had already published its rebuttal of Qutb’s jihadism in the
1960s (Zollner 2009), it was the disastrous results of violence on the organization and reputa-
tion of the Brotherhood and its affiliates due to unmitigated state repression that induced the
movement to recoil from violence and return to the da‘wa strategy.The most spectacular expres-
sions of violence were the assassination of Egyptian president Sadat in 1981 and the uprising
in the Syrian town of Hama—and its destruction—in 1982 (Conduit 2019, 52–9). Also, in the
Maghreb, violence was promoted by radical groups. In the 1970s, the Islamic Group (Jama‘iyya
al-Islamiyya), the forerunner of the Party of Justice and Development (PJD), had assassinated a
Marxist intellectual, while in Tunisia, the Islamic Tendency Movement (MTI), the forerunner of
Ennahda, had undertaken a bomb attack in which one person was killed and was also involved
in planning a coup d’état against President Ben Ali (Wolf 2017, 31–45, 64, 73–4, 95–7). The
first reaction was to stay away from politics and concentrate on the expansion of the organiza-
tion through da‘wa and tarbiya. This retreat from politics had saved the Muslim Brotherhood
in Jordan in the 1950s when it escaped persecution by adopting the cloak of a pious society
(Wagemakers 2020, 95). In most Arabic countries, the Islamic Group could keep under the
radar by acting as pious societies and building their infrastructure da‘wa and tarbiya subculture
(McCarthy 2018, 53–9).
If political ideas penetrated these piety movements, this often occurred in the universities
during clashes with the left in the 1960s and 1970s. It seems that where the left was strong
and the debates more open as in Tunisia, Morocco and the major cities of Egypt, Cairo and
Alexandria, politicization was deeper and faster; where the left was weak or non-existent, as in
the new universities in the cities of Upper Egypt such as Asyut and Suhag, politicization was
slower or non-existent. In Tunisia, the debates with the left were lively, the Islamists even posting
their own newspapers such as Political News, posted on walls McCarthy 2018, 51–3; Wolf 2017,
4, 32, 42–3). Other political events that contributed to the politicization of the movements were
the protests in Tunisia in January 1978 and the Iranian Revolution in 1979, which provided
them with a strong social egalitarian content in Islamic terms of the struggle between oppressed
(mustad‘afin) and oppressors (mustakbarin) (McCarthy 2018, 43, 54; Wolf 2017, 48–9, 71).
Despite these social and revolutionary upheavals, a major precondition for the process of
politicization was the rejection of violence and anti-systemic radicalism. At some point between

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1970 and the 1990s, these movements decided to play by the rules laid down by the regimes,
even if they were heavily skewed against the Islamist movements. This occurred in Egypt in the
early 1970s when the general-guide of the Muslim Brotherhood, Umar Tilmisani, accepted the
legitimacy of the Sadat regime. As Al-Awadi shows, this was done on the basis of the traditional
doctrine of the acceptance of the ruler as the imam of necessity (imam al-darura) (Al-Awadi
2004, 15–16). In Tunisia, this turning point was reached in 1995 when during a congress in
Switzerland, Ennahda rejected violence in all its forms and accepted democracy and political
pluralism (Wolf 2017, 94). Ennahda had taken several other steps on this road before, but these
had been ambivalent, often not excluding violent methods as a last resort. Its more moderate
and realistic political attitude is represented in the self-criticism of a member during the 1995
congress, who stated that “you cannot drag people into confrontation, because you have an
agenda” (Wolf 2017, 94). In Morocco, the forerunner of the PJD, the Islamic Group, accepted
the legitimacy of the monarchy in 1990 (Wegner 2011, 23). This opened the way for Islamist
political participation, although its ideology was still couched in religious terms.

Political participation and integration

The next phase was that of participation in formal politics. This phase could overlap with the
previous one in the sense that politicization is furthered through participation, but this does
not necessarily mean that these movements participated in politics as political parties, nor that
they immediately developed a political programme. The best example is the Egyptian Muslim
Brotherhood. It was able to take part in elections for the first time in 1984 and 1987, first in
a coalition with the liberal Wafd party (winning 8 of the 58 seats of the coalition), and then
with the Socialist Labour Party (winning 36 of the 56 seats of the coalition; 448 total seats in
parliament). In neither of these elections did its members participate as official members of
the Muslim Brotherhood. Nor were its slogans, “Islam is the solution” and “Give your vote to
Allah, Give it to the Muslim Brotherhood”, very political. Rather, it showed that parliament
was considered a minbar (pulpit) for spreading the da‘wa (Wickham 2013, 47). Or, as Umar
al-Tilmisani said at the time, “When the Brotherhood talks of politics, they don’t speak as
political men but as Islamic du‘ah (preachers)” (Wickham 2013, 48). Hamid confirms this view:
political participation of the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood in the 1980s was primarily meant
to promote the application of Islamic law and the Islamic moral order (Shadi 2014, 67–77).
On the other hand, once in parliament, members did address general issues such as housing,
education, unemployment and international issues such as the American invasion of Kuwait in
1991 (Wickham 2013, 55).
This ambiguity is also reflected in Ennahda in this period. In 1981, it changed its name to
the Islamic Tendency Movement (MTI) in order to take part in the first open general elections,
but its programme called for the revival of Tunisia’s Islamic legacy and unity of Islam to “liberate
the Islamic conscience from civilisational defeat by the West” (Wolf 2017, 55). Eight years later,
the programme of its successor, Ennahda, was markedly more political, but by then, it had allied
itself with worker’s rights and human rights organizations and established closer contacts with
secular parties (McCarthy 2018, 62;Wolf 2017, 59–60, 69). In the fraudulent general elections of
1991, it won 14.4 to 30 per cent of the votes, although its application for a licence was refused
(Wolf 2017, 71–2). It also distanced itself from its Brotherhood wing, which in 1995 was evicted
(Wolf 2017, 94). But by that time, it faced the worst suppression in its history. Between 1992
and 2005, most of its political leaders lived in exile. Only after the worst had passed could its
members in Tunisia establish an underground organization, which laid the groundwork for its
revival as a political party in 2011.

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In Morocco, this development would start later, proceed more slowly but also manage to be
continuous and more thorough. Not until Hassan II ended the years of repression, the “years of
lead” in 1990, did he allow for greater political pluralism. Over the next years, the forerunner of
the PJD, the Movement of Unity and Reform (MUR), was integrated into the political system.
Its twin goals were reviving Islamic culture and values in Moroccan society and working with
the regime on the principle of “critical support” (Daadawi 2017, 362). Its realist view was that
“to participate is the only way to improve things”. Another incentive was to gain political expe-
rience (Kirdis 2015, 80–1). In 1992, its political wing entered a deal with a secular shell party
(formalized in 1996), a step that was mandatory before the monarchy allowed it to launch the
PJD in 1998 as the political arm of MUR.The PJD’s focus during the first years was on promot-
ing da‘wa and the implementation of Islamic law (Wegner and Pellicer 2009, 160).

Founding political parties

The third step was the establishment of Islamic political parties. An important precondition for
its success, as Wegner has shown in her excellent study of the PJD in Morocco (2011), con-
firmed by Zollner in her comparison of Egypt and Tunisia (2019b), is the creation of political
parties that are independent of their movements. This step signifies the recognition of politics
as an independent field and is decisive in replacing the doctrine of the comprehensiveness of
Islamism. Only a few parties would succeed in making this transition. A good example of a
party that failed to make this step is the Islamic Action Front (IAF), founded by the Jordanian
Muslim Brotherhood. It was the first officially recognized party of the Muslim Brotherhood in
the Mashreq. In 1989, the first open elections were held, and the Brotherhood-affiliated can-
didates won 22 of the 80 seats of parliament (together with independent Islamists, the Islamist
bloc won a spectacular 36, or almost half of the seats). In 1992 the Brotherhood established the
IAF, which participated in the 1993 elections, winning 20 per cent of the seats (Wickham 2013,
205–9). But because it criticized the government’s peace policy towards Israel, relations with the
state deteriorated. The AIF did take part in the political process after the Arab Spring but never
gained the same number of seats (Wagemakers 2020, 100–19). An important drawback was that
it remained the political arm of the Muslim Brotherhood and could not break away. It also was
plagued by internal division between a conservative da‘wa faction and more progressive, reform-
ist, political factions (Wagemakers 2020, 104–6).
In contrast, the Moroccan PJD was highly successful in becoming independent from the
movement from which it sprang. The first elections in 1997 were still organized by members of
the MUR who, under the banner of Morocco’s Islamic identity, called for the moralization of
politics (Wegner 2011, 100–2). It won 9 seats, later expanding to 14 (of 325 seats in parliament).
Over the following years, the PJD became increasingly financially and organizationally inde-
pendent from the MUR, developing its own strategies based on political considerations rather
than religious ones (Wegner 2011, 32–71). At the same time, the organization became more
transparent and changed from a vanguard to a more open organization with internal democratic
elections, attracting new members and broadening its appeal to non-members (Wegner 2011,
40–57). By 2007 it was a regular party ready to take advantage of the Arab Spring. It increased
its seats in parliament from 42 in 2002 (total 325 seats) to 43 in 2007. The MUR continued as a
movement and concentrated on tarbiya and da‘wa (Wegner and Pellicer 2009, 161–5).
The Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood never established an independent political party. The
main reason was that the Mubarak regime (1981–2011) did not allow the movement to do
so. In addition, its candidates could not openly affiliate with the Brotherhood. As in Tunisia,
the 1990s spelled the end of the previous decade’s brief period of liberalization. Nevertheless,

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Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood, like its counterpart in Jordan, was never completely suppressed.
Periods of repression were followed by brief periods of toleration. It boycotted the 1990 elec-
tions; in 1995, it won 1 seat, 17 seats in 2000 and during a brief period of openness in 2004–5, it
won a spectacular 88 of the 444 seats in the 2005 elections, but none in 2010, when repression
worsened again. However, the most important reason for not establishing a political party was
that the Brotherhood leadership did not give sufficient support to the political struggle and sup-
pressed a more democratic, open internal discourse, and the development of a broader coalition
strategy that such an approach would have demanded (Wickham 2013, 97–153). Characteristic
of the closed culture of the Brotherhood was that the preservation of the Tanzim and the exclu-
sive collective identity, ingrained through years of tarbiya, had become a goal in itself (Al-Awadi
2004, 62–4).
It was the student generation of the 1970s that pushed politicization forward and explored
strategies and intellectual vistas that transformed Islamism and, in some cases, ended it. Because
the Egyptian Brotherhood had a long history, this generation has been called the “middle gen-
eration” (technically, it was the third generation). Originally, members of the Jama’at al-Islamiyya,
this generation had been recruited into the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood at the end of the
decade. This generation gained its political experience in the 1980s by entering the elections of
the syndicates of the professional organizations. Despite the authoritarian nature of the Mubarak
regime, these elections remained free as long as the secretary-general (naqib) was a government
representative. Between 1987 and 1992, the middle generation won the elections of the syndi-
cate of the doctors, the engineers, the lawyers and the pharmacists. According to Wickham, the
cooperation with other ideological groups, the practical experience of working together with
liberals, Nasserists and communists, making compromises and the realization that they shared
common goals, especially in pushing back the authoritarian state, were decisive in developing a
new, politically mature world view (2013, 58–66, 74; Al-Awadi 2004, 95–8). In 1996, this politi-
cal experience and frustration with the conservatism of the leadership, expressed in the culture
of obedience, authoritarianism and discrimination of youth and women, led to the foundation
of the Wasat party (centre party) under the leadership of Abu Ala Madi. Indeed, the Wasat
party was part of a much broader intellectual current of the wasatiyya current that had attracted
Muslim thinkers outside the Brotherhood (Baker 2003). These intellectuals regarded Islam as a
“civilization” rather than a law and a state. Islam accepts plurality, in fact, humanity is strength-
ened by pluralism. They proclaimed that all citizens in Egypt, including Christians and women,
were equal and that Islam was, in essence, democratic (Wickham 2013, 81–95; Meijer 2017,
193–201). The liberals who remained in the Brotherhood and reached the Guidance Council
were purged in 2008 (Wickham 2013, 127–31).
From the 1980s onwards, all Islamist movements experienced critique from their more lib-
eral wings. Especially in the Mashreq, where rationalist modernism was stronger than in the east,
this was the case (Cavatorta and Merone 2015). Another explanation is that, in contrast to the
Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood, which had undergone a process of ruralization (Kandil 2015,
201), their members were better educated, belonged to the middle classes, lived in cities and
had stronger female representation (Wegner and Pellicer 2011, 313). This was also reflected in
the internal political debate of the Maghreb movements. Already in 1972, a progressive group
had split off from the Tunisian MTI, followed in 1991 by a second group that left Ennahda,
disagreeing with the confrontational tactics and undemocratic structures of the movement at
the time (Wolf 2017). In Morocco, the democratic, conservative modernism goes back to Allal
al-Fasi and Moroccan nationalism of the Istiqlal (Zeghal 2009, 72–6).The difference with Egypt
was that dissenters were able to either influence the original movements or rejoin them at some
point after they had reformed themselves. Exceptionally, in Jordan, the foundation of the Centre

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Party (Hizb al-Wasat) in 2001, the so-called ZamZam initiative in 2012 and the foundation
of an alternative Muslim Brotherhood in 2015 would even lead to the Brotherhood’s demise
(Wagemakers 2020, 111–19). The ideological divisions reflect the splits seen elsewhere between
adherents of the comprehensive system and da‘wa on the one hand and politicos and reformists
on the other (Wagemakers 2020, 123–231).

Adopting a discourse of rights

The acceptance of equal rights and the notion of equal citizenship was the fourth indica-
tor of moving away from the comprehensive system. It showed that the focus shifted from
implementing shari‘a and an Islamic state according to the doctrine of Islamism to a rights
discourse (Al-Awadi 2004, 91–2). Modernism was reflected in position papers on the rights
of women to work and vote, the equal position of non-Muslims and the acceptance of party
politics (Wickham 2013, 69–70; Scott 2010). An early indication of this trend was the MTI’s
support of workers’ rights and the popular protests in Tunisia in the 1980s. After Ennahda took
part in elections, it demanded freedom of organization and free and fair elections (Wolf 2017,
87). This transition to rights was enhanced by the increasing repression of these movements by
authoritarian states in the 1990s. As a result, Ennahda joined the human rights organization,
the Tunisian Human Rights League (LTDH) (Wolf 2017, 59–60, 62). In the same period, the
Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood published position papers and programmes that supported the
right to freedom of expression and organization (Al-Awadi 2004, 84;Wickham 2013, 55). As the
middle generation acquired greater insight into politics, it became aware of the depth of cor-
ruption and demanded greater accountability (Al-Awadi 2004, 95), holding regimes responsible
for the abuse of power (McCarthy 2018, 86–7). The last step in the discourse of rights was the
right of the people to rule and the sovereignty of the people, as opposed to the sovereignty of
God. The increasing embrace of a rights discourse laid the foundation for acceptance of the
reformed Islamic movement by liberals and leftists. For instance, the left-wing politician Chebbi
declared in 2006 that “Islamists are Tunisians” and that their “right to participate in political life”
needed to be recognized (Wolf 2017, 102).The liberal programme of 2004 of the Syrian Muslim
Brotherhood, after two decades of repression and radicalization, had the same goal (Conduit
2019, 61–5).
On the other hand, as Wickham points out, a rights discourse of freedom was often limited
to the organization itself and was universalized nor included its opponents (2013, 44). Nor was
it clear to what extent the whole movement switched to a rights discourse.The focus in Western
research on Muslim liberals hides the fact that conservative currents remained the backbone of
these movements and, in the end, were vastly more influential (Wickham 2013, 138–40). In fact,
as McCarthy makes clear for Tunisia, during the period of repression in the 1990s and 2000s,
the da’wa project of the 1970s revived. Morality, community building and applying Islamic eth-
ics thrived in the underground movement and in the prisons while the liberal leadership was in
exile (2018, 102–3).

Cross-ideological alliances
Where politicization, the establishment of independent political parties and the acceptance of
a discourse of universal rights took place, the chances for forming cross-ideological alliances
grew. As cross-ideological alliances are regarded as essential for taking down autocratic regimes
or forcing them to reform, they attract scholarly attention (Abd al-Rahman 2015, 92–116;
Clark 2006; McCarthy 2018, 112–22;Wegner Pellicer 2011;Wickham 2013, 7, 107–17, 155–62;

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Wolf 2017, 98–103). Cross-ideological coalitions are made for different reasons. They can be
tactical, to pursue temporary goals; strategic, to dismantle authoritarian regimes; or they can be
long-term alliances based on ideological rapprochement. Long-term alliances depend on two
ideological conditions: a) the recognition of the sovereignty of the people, expressed in the term
civil state (dawla madaniyya) which replaces the concept of a religious state (dawla diniyya), ruled
by Islamic law; b) and the acceptance of inclusive and equal citizenship (Meijer 2017; Steuer
and Brouët 2015).
Not surprisingly, cross-ideological exchanges and influences seem to have been strongest in
Tunisia, where in the 1970s, MTI/Ennahda had already exchanged ideas with the left (Wolf
2017, 48). During the 1980s, it joined the executive committee of the Tunisian League of
Human Rights, and a new student organization, the Tunisian General Union of Students (Wolf
2017, 59–62, 62). Other alliances followed. The first reconciliation between Ennahda and other
oppositional forces occurred in 1991. In 1995, a common communique calling for democracy
and freedom of expression was issued. In 2001, the Tunis Agreement in Aix-en-Provence was
launched, and in 2005, the foundation was laid for the post-revolutionary change when the
18 October Movement and the Collectif were launched (Wolf 2017, 100–3; McCarthy 2018,
112-–14).
In Morocco, the initiative to create cross-ideological coalitions came from the PJD itself as
a way of integrating into political society. In 1998 it lent “critical support” and later “construc-
tive opposition” to the secular, left-wing Youssoufi government (Wegner 2011, 97). After 2007,
it tried to cooperate with the Socialist Union of Popular Forces (USFP) at the national level.
Cooperation was achieved at the municipal level after elections in 2009 (Wegner and Pellicer
2011). Also, in other respects, it was willing to accept cooperation even when it opposed certain
measures. For instance, in 2003, it supported the change of the personal status code, despite its
distaste for the law (Wegner 2011, 87–9). From its side, the USFP accepted the PJD as a legiti-
mate political force after 2003. In the end, cooperation failed for political reasons—electoral
competition—rather than ideological reasons (Wegner and Pellicer 2011).
In Egypt, cross-ideological alliances had begun in the 1980s with the tactical alliance between
the Wafd and later the Islamic Alliance with the Socialist Labour party (Wickham 2013, 47). It
was furthered by its reformist middle generation in the professional syndicates and the Wasat
party, hailed by some leftist intellectuals (Wickham 2013, 84). During the 2000s, this trend
was apparent in several cross-ideological initiatives, like the Egyptian People’s Committee for
Support of the Palestinian Intifada (EPCSPI), the protests against the American invasion of Iraq
in 2003, the Kifaya (Enough) movement in 2004–5 (which took eight months of negotiation to
establish) and the National Association for Change (NAC) in 2010 was half-hearted (Wickham
2013, 148–9).
In Syria, cross-ideological cooperation only emerged after the Brotherhood had reformed
itself and published its liberal programme in 2004. It signed the liberal reformist programme of
the Damascus Declaration in 2005 in which secular and religious groups participated but aban-
doned it for the National Salvation Front with former vice president Abd al-Halim Khaddam a
few months later (Conduit 2019, 87–8). In Jordan, the IAF was an active member of the Higher
Committee for the Coordination of National Opposition Parties (HCCNOP) (Clark 2006).

The Arab Spring

The Arab Spring was a litmus test of the extent to which Islamist movements had succeeded
in distancing themselves from Islamism. Their success depended on their ability to move away
from the manhaj of the comprehensive system, create independent political parties and establish

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cross-ideological coalitions strong enough to dismantle the authoritarian state. These develop-
ments were crucial because the uprisings were not related to Islam but demanded employment,
the end of repression, freedom and social justice.
The failure of the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood to withstand the military and the evic-
tion of its president Muhammad Morsi in July 2013 can be ascribed to their inability to
take these steps. The Freedom and Justice party (FJP) was founded in June 2011, but it was
financed by its parent organization, which appointed its top leaders to the leadership of the
new party, evoking strong critique from its reformist wing (Wickham 2013, 175; Meijer 2013).
Many left the movement when the general-guide forbade members to join any other parties
(Wickham 2013, 177). Moreover, rather than establish broad cross-ideological alliances, the
Muslim Brotherhood/FJP put its faith in exclusive deals with the military (Zollner 2019a,
14; Meijer 2013) or aligned itself with the Salafi Nour Party, abandoning its rights discourse
for a return to its Islamist roots calling for the implementation of shari‘a (Shadi 2014, 174).
Once its majority was secured in parliament, with 37.5 per cent of the votes (44.9 per cent
of the seats), and 27 per cent for the Salafi Nour Party (25 per cent of the seats), it tried to
translate it in bending the constitution assembly to its will. This provoked opposition from its
own members. Abd al-Gawad member of the youth organization the Egyptian Current, for
instance, stated that his political participation would “be a reflection of my religious convic-
tions, but my main priority is to address the needs of the Egyptian street. I’m not going to
say, ‘Islam is the solution,’ since the people cannot eat Islam” (cited in Wickham 2013, 180–1).
Isolated, incompetent, and in the belief that moralism is sufficient to run a country, the Muslim
Brotherhood rapidly became unpopular after Morsi was elected president in May 2012. As an
unreformed, secretive, unaccountable movement, it provoked a deep mistrust of the Egyptian
population (Meijer 2013).
In line with previous developments, Ennahda adopted a more reformist line in Tunisia. It
immediately established a political party, and after winning 89 of the 217 seats (37.4 per cent)
in the elections of 2011, it formed a coalition government with two secular parties, form-
ing the “Troika”. And although there were severe tensions between the coalition partners in
2013, it was able to compromise on the constitutional assembly, accepting that shari‘a was
not mentioned and equal rights of women were recognized and blasphemy was not crimi-
nalized. The major decision, however, was to sever relations with the movement in 2016. As
McCarthy makes clear, after the loss of the 2014 elections (26.5 per cent; 69 seats), it decided
that the only way to operate as a broad political party and appeal to a larger conservative
electorate was to cut its relations with the da‘wa movement and establish an independent
political party. In this transition, Islam became a moral guide instead of a comprehensive
system (2018, 148–54).
The Moroccan PJD continued its march to power and won 107 seats (22.8 per cent) of
the 395 seats in 2011, growing to 125 seats (27.9) in the 2016 elections. For the first time,
it provided the prime minister. It won the municipal elections in 2015, which attests to its
impressive campaign machine. Its “Islamist-light” discourse of “honesty and transparency” is
in line with the citizenship movements on rights and accountability (Daadawi 2017, 366).
Although the danger of co-optation increased, the PJD still tries to chip away the monarchy’s
political power.
The Syrian Brotherhood had already made the ideological change in 2004 and, after the
uprisings in 2011, worked together with other oppositional forces in the Syrian National
Council (SNC) and later the National Council for the Syrian Revolution and Opposition
Forces (SOC) (Conduit 2019, 163). But like the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood, it was widely
distrusted because of its dominance in these organizations (Conduit 2019, 162–5).

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Post-Islamism
As a result of the changes analysed above, some researchers have stated that Islamism no longer
exists in its original form and has morphed into post-Islamism. According to Roy, post-Islamism
is the precedence of politics destroying the myth of unity of politics and religion in Islam, both
becoming independent. This leads to a fragmentation of religious identity (Roy 2002, 3–4).
According to Bayat, the major change is a shift from duties to rights. No longer is the empha-
sis on implementing Islamic law and establishing an Islamic state. Pluralism, party politics, the
acceptance of liberal political values, the separation of powers and a democratic system has
largely been accepted; the old emphasis on tarbiya (education, indoctrination) has been replaced
by hizbiyya (party politics). The culture of listening and obedience has been undermined as
well, as the Muslim Brotherhood no longer claims to be the only organization to represent all
Muslims (Bayat 2013).
However, many scholars are deeply sceptical of the extent to which Islamism has changed its
character. Shadi rejects the whole notion of post-Islamism as a chimera. Although he acknowl-
edges that the movement has accepted democracy, this has its foundation in the conviction that
it is inconceivable that God’s sovereignty and people’s sovereignty would not coincide and that
the will of people would go against shari‘a. By adopting this stance, the doctrine of comprehen-
siveness of Islam is incorporated into democracy, and the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt and
Jordan have become illiberal democratic movements (2014, 167–89). Kandil, who focuses on
the internal structure of the movement, argues that the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood remains a
da‘wa organization (Kandil 2015, 137–45), while Wickham, who acknowledges greater diversity
within the movement and does not exclude the possibility of change, is also sceptical (Wickham
2013, 25). It has not reformed itself because in the struggle for power between its three cur-
rents—the da‘wa current, the pragmatic conservative current, and the reformist, progressive
wing—the first two defeated the reformist wing just before the Arab Spring (Wickham 2013,
132–44). But even the reformist wing, according to Wickham, falls short of liberal ideals, accept-
ing in the final instance the rule of shari‘a (Wickham 2013, 92–5). Like Shadi,Wickham explains
the moderation of the movement in the 1990s and 2000s as a response to repression (Wickham
2013, 151). None of the Muslim Brotherhood movements in the Mashreq succeeded in making
a full transformation, ideologically, organizationally or in their strategies towards potential allies.
Like Shadi, Wickham argues that the adoption of a rights discourse lasts as long as repression
and that it is relinquished as soon as it wanes. Ironically, democracy revives the comprehensive
doctrine as long as movements dominate the political parties (Shadi 2014, 141–5); Wickham
2013, 275–8).
In contrast, Maghreb Islamist movements were better prepared for the Arab Spring. After
1996, the PJD had transformed itself organizationally and ideologically, while the political wing
of Ennahda, which was also the reformist wing, had embraced democracy in exile. Although
here repression had also led to moderation (Cavatorta and Merone 2013/2015), it had become
ingrained and ideologically rooted during the years of exile.This transition was probably helped
by the fact that its da‘wa branch had been suppressed for so long and was unable to establish
a presence in civil society on the scale of the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood. Although both
Ennahda and PJD are conservative parties, their trajectory seems to confirm the view that
post-Islamism can only come about after a substantial transformation has taken place in which
five steps are taken: politicization, political participation, the embracement of a discourse of
equal rights, the establishment of an independent political party and the formation of cross-
ideological alliances. This transformation is accomplished by the acceptance of the doctrine of
the broad principles of shari‘a, which leaves room for freedom of expression and organization,

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equal c­ itizenship, protection of minorities, inclusion and sovereignty of the people. This trans-
formation spelled the real emancipation of political Islam from the totalizing claims it had made
in the 1930s as a movement.

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 SECTION 2

New debates and controversies

 9
RELIGION BETWEEN
ETHICS AND IDEOLOGY
Joseph A. Camilleri

The relationship of religion to ideology has given rise to competing interpretations, none of
which offers a fully satisfying explanation of what is a complex and elusive set of interconnec-
tions. Some have stressed the ideological preferences and tendencies of religious leaders and
movements intent on defending doctrinal positions and institutional interests (Rachik 2009).
Others have argued that religion is a crucial lever on which states and empires often rely to
legitimate their rule and even military expeditions (Beyers 2015). Others still see religion as a
socially and culturally conservative force serving primarily as an instrument of acculturation and
assimilation into the dominant ideology of the times, not least the consumerist ideology of late
capitalism (Martin 2014, 141–156).
Though the relationship between religion and ethics may at first sight appear conceptu-
ally straightforward, troublesome questions abound. At one level, the proposition that religious
teachings have an important ethical dimension appears well founded. Sacred texts and the utter-
ances of religious sages, prophets and founders devote much attention to the moral precepts that
should guide human conduct. Some go so far as to suggest that ethical reasoning and the ethical
impulse itself owe a great deal of their persuasiveness and traction to their religious underpin-
nings (Green 1988). At another level, the opposing view seems no less plausible. Religious affili-
ations and convictions are said to have caused, or at least triggered, some argue with predictable
regularity, extreme violence and other horrendous crimes (Kimball 2008) that glaringly contra-
dict the lofty moral principles espoused in religious ethics.
Religion and ideology and religion and ethics are therefore best understood as binary sys-
tems, in which the two components sit in uneasy tension with each other. Each binary reflects
a high level of ambiguity, at times bordering on contradiction. If ambiguity lies at the heart of
religion, it is in no small measure because of the conflicting pressures bearing upon religion,
namely ethical aspiration and ideological seduction. As we shall see, that tension holds the key
to an understanding of religion’s actual and potential role in a world undergoing a profound
transformation.

Definitional issues
A methodical analysis of the push-pull factors that help shape religion’s response to the compet-
ing claims of ethics and ideology requires that we first clarify the definitional content of religion,

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but also of ethics and ideology. Religion is the obvious starting point, given the quasi universal-
ity of the phenomenon and the diverse and variable manifestations which have punctuated its
evolutionary trajectory.
Religion, it need hardly be said, is a multifaceted phenomenon that encompasses a great deal
more than just teachings and beliefs. Religion finds expression in an intricate web of attitudes,
emotions and experiences, which are in large measure time- and place-specific and inextricably
linked to cultural and civilizational influences.Yet another important dimension of the religious
domain relates to religious observances and rituals that help bind the community of believers
and instil a deep sense of identity and belonging (Küçükcan 2005). A useful conceptualization
that highlights the multidimensional character of religion identifies four key dimensions: a) the
‘associational’ dimension, which includes involvement in various forms of religious practice; b)
the ‘communal’ dimension, which relates to primary-type relations privileged by religious affili-
ation; c) the ‘doctrinal’ dimension which refers to belief systems; and d) the ‘devotional’ or pietis-
tic dimension which involves communion with the divine or the transcendent through prayer,
meditation or other religious experience (Lenski 1961, 21–24). Each of these dimensions plays a
part in shaping one of religion’s crucial social functions, namely identity formation. As Hill and
Hood have observed, this function is all the more potent in that religion places ‘both personal
and social identity within the cosmic or metaphysical background’ (Hill and Wood 1999, 269).
Religious engagement, then, reflects a range of cognitive, psychological, relational and ritualistic
strands which combine and take shape in the context of the prevailing social, economic and
political milieu. Religion and society, in other words, are entangled in a complex web of recip-
rocal influences which powerfully impact the sense of personal and communal identity.
When we turn to ideology, we soon discover that the concept is just as slippery and conten-
tious. At the most general level, ideology has been defined as ‘a verbal image of the good society
and of the chief means of constructing such a society’ (Downs 1957, 96). Notwithstanding the
multitude of aspects or features of ideology referred to in the literature (Hamilton 1987), an
adequate exposition of the concept can be condensed to three key elements: a) a set of ideas and
theories which purports to explain the existing reality; b) a vision of the good society which
usually draws its inspiration either from the past – a golden age of peace, harmony, stability,
and prosperity – or from some kind of utopian future; c) a proposed path forward or manifesto
which needs to be followed for the desired goal to be achieved. The second of these elements
lies perhaps at the heart of much ideological contestation. In Stuart Hall’s formulation, ideology
can move in two quite different directions. It can encompass ‘the concepts and the languages of
practical thought which stabilize a particular form of power and domination; or which reconcile
and accommodate the mass of the people to their subordinate place in the social formation’ (Hall
1986, 29). But ideology can just as easily propel and steer ‘the processes by which new forms of
consciousness, new conceptions of the world, arise, which move the masses of the people into
historical action against the prevailing system’ (Hall 1986, 29). In other words, ideology can be
used both to preserve and to overturn the status quo. Whichever direction is followed, power
is a constant, as it is invariably seen as the necessary means to the ideological end. Religion is
thus entangled in a constant tug of war between these opposing drives – ideologically driven
power games and religiously informed ethical norms – from which, it seems, it can never fully
disentangle itself. The question then becomes: to what extent are religion’s ethical aspirations as
expressed in its teachings able to shape its institutional practice and the conduct of the faithful.
The ethical imperative is a defining element of all religion, but considerable differences sepa-
rate one religious tradition from another with respect to the way ethical norms are formulated,
the cosmological frame within which they are located, and the role of revelation or sacred texts
in setting ethical standards. In the Christian tradition, the Bible, while it does not offer anything

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approaching a systematic ethical treatise, is nevertheless viewed by its adherents as an authorita-

tive account of God’s action in the world and humanity’s response, which ‘teaches morality in
its stories, sermons, prayers, exhortations, proverbs, and commandments’ (Gensler 2016, 3). But
even within any one religious tradition, there is considerable scope for interpretation, especially
when moral guidance is applied to the specific contexts of everyday life. Variation also occurs
as a natural by-product of the evolutionary process. In the Christian Bible, we see a progression
in the moral understanding of the scripture writers, with a clear break separating the Old from
the New Testament. Under the law of Moses, often referred to as the Old Covenant, moral
principles were set largely in the context of a conditional agreement between God and the
Israelites, whereby God would guide and protect them while they would worship and obey him.
The duties towards others captured in the last seven of the ten commandments derived from
the overarching principle of obedience to God as expressed in the first three commandments:
‘You shall have no other gods before me … You shall not make wrongful use of the name of the
lord your God … Remember the sabbath day, and keep it holy’ (New Revised Standard Version
Bible – NRSV 2001, Exodus 20: 3–10). In the New Testament, love thy neighbour, while it
still complements the first and greatest commandment, namely, love thy God, is given unprec-
edented prominence and extended to include love of the enemy. Simply put, when exploring
the role of ethics in religion we need to give due weight to commonalities between and within
the world’s religions, but we also need to be attentive to variation as it manifests itself across time,
space and culture. Religion’s approach to ethics cannot be divorced from the social context in
which ethical norms are articulated and applied.
One other complicating factor is the distinction often drawn between individual and collec-
tive morality, or individual and collective responsibility, a subject of considerable contention in
moral philosophy (Isaacs 2011). The core question in this debate can be put quite simply: can
a community, nation, business organization or other collectivity exercise moral responsibility?
The widely held view has been that collectivities cannot be assigned moral intent, and therefore
cannot be said to exercise moral responsibility in the same way we ascribe it to an individual. It
is those in positions of authority within collective entities, it is argued, who can be held respon-
sible for the harm inflicted on others.Though there is much to the argument that moral agency
as exercised by individuals is not readily applicable to groups or communities, it does not follow
that the latter is entirely deprived of moral agency. This becomes clearer if the question is posed
a little differently. When it comes to collectivities of one kind or another, does group culture
lend itself to ethical decision-making? If we are thinking of a nation or state, we may legiti-
mately ask: do ethical norms apply to its decision-making processes and, if so, what might these
be? Here, it is also relevant and useful to inquire whether such influence as religion exercises in
that society strengthens or weakens respect for ethical norms.

Religion’s ethical bent

As noted above, religion is a multidimensional phenomenon that finds expression in highly
diverse traditions and cosmologies. Nevertheless, a defining feature of all world religions has
been the attempt, indeed the strong impulse, to develop a moral framework as a guide to
human conduct (Göçer and Habib 2005). Given the widely varying conceptions of the divine
or supernatural and accompanying metaphysical beliefs between and within the major religious
traditions, it is hardly surprising that their respective ethical prescriptions should differ in both
content and emphasis. Notwithstanding these differences, virtually all religiously inspired moral
frameworks have a good deal in common, the most important element of which is the principle
of ethical reciprocity or the ‘golden rule’ as it is generally known.

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Concerned first and foremost with how one should treat the other, the golden rule has obvi-
ous relevance as much for the way societies function and interact as for personal relationships.
And, as we shall see, the notion of reciprocity can be extended to embrace human relations
with other forms of life. The golden rule informs an ethical code centred around the relatively
simple, almost intuitive proposition, often formulated as ‘do not do to others what you would
not wish to be done to you.’ It is found in the Abrahamic faiths, Judaism, Christianity and Islam,
but also in the main dharmic religions, Hinduism, Buddhism, Sikhism and Jainism (Bakker
2013, Neusner and Chilton 2008, Wattles 1996). One of its earliest formulations can be traced
back to The Tale of the Eloquent Peasant, a literary work on the theme of justice from the Middle
Kingdom of Egypt, probably composed around 1850 BCE (Parkinson 1991). Another early
reference to the golden rule appears in one of the two major Sanskrit epics of ancient India,
the Mahabharata (13th Parva), whose origins are thought to fall between the eighth and sixth
centuries BCE. The relevant maxim reads:

That man who regards all creatures as his own self, and behaves towards them as
towards his own self, laying aside the rod of chastisement and completely subjugat-
ing his wrath, succeeds in attaining to happiness … One should never do that to
another which one regards as injurious to one’s own self. This, in brief, is the rule of
Righteousness.
(Mahabharata 2003, 13, CXIII)

In the Judaic tradition, the rule of altruistic reciprocity is first enunciated in a well-known Torah
verse: ‘You shall not take vengeance or bear a grudge against your kinsfolk. Love your neigh-
bour as yourself: I am the LORD’ (Tanakh 1985, Leviticus 19:18). The same verse in Leviticus
appears in the Old Testament of the Christian Bible, and the same sentiment is voiced again a
little later: ‘The alien who resides with you shall be to you as the citizen among you; you shall
love the alien as yourself, for you were aliens in the land of Egypt: I am the Lord your God’
(NRSV 2001, Leviticus 19:34).
The negative version of the rule also appears in Tobit, which forms part of the Catholic and
Orthodox biblical canons:‘Do to no one what you would not want done to you’ (Wansborough,
New Jerusalem Bible, Tobit 4:15). It is, of course, in the New Testament that the golden rule
comes fully into its own, especially in Luke’s Gospel, first when Jesus is quoted as saying: ‘And as
ye would that men should do to you, do ye also to them likewise’ (Luke 6:31), and again in the
parable of the good Samaritan (Luke 10:30). In the Sermon on the Mount, the rule of reciproc-
ity is taken to an even higher level:

You have heard that it was said, ‘Eye for eye and tooth for tooth.’ But I tell you not to
resist an evil person. If someone slaps you on your right cheek, turn to him the other
also; if someone wants to sue you and take your tunic, let him have your cloak as well;
and if someone forces you to go one mile, go with him two. Give to the one who asks
you, and do not turn away from the one who wants to borrow from you. You have
heard that it was said, ‘Love your neighbour and hate your enemy.’ But I tell you, love
your enemies and pray for those who persecute you.
(NRSV 2001, Matthew 5: 38-43)

How these moral prescriptions are to be applied to highly complex and troublesome personal
and societal relationships is no doubt problematic. Some commentators have gone so far as
to describe this version of the golden rule as counter-intuitive in that it appears to prescribe

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behaviour that is little short of heroic. But this line of argument simply underscores the idealism
– some might call it utopianism – of the Christian ethic.
The notion of ethical reciprocity is equally evident in the canonical texts of Islam, notably
the Qur’an, at times explicitly and often implicitly. Though the Qur’an gives priority to one
type of love, namely the love of Allah and for Allah, nevertheless, the language of the Qur’an
is replete with references to good deeds, good behaviour and the virtues of justice and fair-
ness, which are meant to extend not just to believers but to all who are neighbours. In their
pathbreaking declaration, A Common Word between Us and You issued in October 2007, 137
Muslim scholars and religious leaders stressed ‘the necessity and paramount importance of love
for – and mercy towards – the neighbour.’ They described love of the neighbour as ‘an essential
and integral part of faith in God and love of God.’ Without love of the neighbour, they argued,
‘there is no true faith in God and no righteousness.’ These sentiments find clear expression in
the Qur’an:

Serve God and join not any partners with Him: and do good to parents kinsfolk
orphans those in need neighbors who are near neighbors who are strangers the com-
panion by your side the way-farer (ye meet) and what your right hands possess: for
God loveth not the arrogant the vainglorious.
(The Meaning of the Holy Quran 2018, Nisāa
4:36)

The Qur’an explicitly requires justice to be pursued, even if it be against self-interest or inclina-
tion to hatred:

O ye who believe! stand out firmly for justice as witnesses to God even as against
yourselves or your parents or your kin and whether it be (against) rich or poor: for
God can best protect both. Follow not the lusts (of your hearts) lest ye swerve and if
ye distort (justice) or decline to do justice verily God is well-acquainted with all that
ye do.
(The Meaning of the Holy Quran 2018, Nisāa
4:135)

In Islam, the twin commandments, love of God and love of neighbour, are inseparable and
mutually reinforcing.
An even sharper statement of the golden rule can be found in the Hadith, which is the record
of the traditions and sayings of the Prophet Muhammad, and as such revered and received as a
major source of religious law and moral guidance second only to the authority of the Qur’an
itself. The most esteemed Hadith scholars have attached considerable weight to notions of ethi-
cal reciprocity. Muhammad ibn Ismā‘īl al-Bukhāri places it in the introduction to his collection,
where we read: ‘None of you has faith until he loves for his brother what he loves for himself ’
(al-Bukhārī 2002). Among the numerous narrations that draw attention to the centrality of the
principle, the following again by al-Bukhārī is worth noting for the forcefulness with which it
is expressed and its direct attribution to the Prophet:

Aby Hurayrah reports that the Prophet said ‘By Him who holds my soul in His hand,
you shall not be admitted into heaven until you are truly Muslims, and you shall not be
true Muslims until you love one another in whose hand my soul is, you will not enter
the Garden until you submit. You will not submit until you love one another. Spread

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the greeting of peace and you will love one another. Guard against the hatred for it is
the razor. I do not say to you that it shaves hair; rather it shaves the faith altogether.’
(al-Bukhārī 2017)

These injunctions to love the other raise the obvious question: how far does the proposed altru-
ism extend? Does it apply just to one’s own tribe, coreligionists and others with whom one
readily identifies or does it also take in the stranger, the prisoner of war, even the enemy? Here,
it is worth noting that in Islam, as in other faith traditions, a certain tension or ambivalence exists
between love and justice or, to put it differently, between love of the sinner and punishment of
the transgressor. Defence against aggression, by force, if necessary, and chastisement of the crimi-
nal form part of the moral pragmatism expressed both in the Qur’an and traditional Islamic Law.
The moral tensions and caveats to be found in Christian theology, Islamic jurisprudence and
other faith traditions do not invalidate the centrality of the ethic of altruism in the religious
imagination. Even in Buddhism, a religion that does not issue moral commandments as under-
stood in the Abrahamic faiths, the moral imperative not to do harm, whether to self or to others,
is nevertheless paramount. The five precepts that are central to Buddhist wisdom spell out the
principal forms of harm to be avoided: taking the life of other beings; taking things not freely
given; sensual overindulgence; false speech; and the mindlessness that comes with intoxication.

Religion’s ethical deficit

What emerges from this cursory review of the place of the golden rule in religious discourse is a
moral conception of life, in which are embedded notions of goodness, rightful conduct, respect
for life, compassion, forgiveness, justice, harmony and peace. This we may describe as the ethical
foundation of religion, which, it must be said, many adherents do not fully grasp and often do
not observe. In other words, we need to distinguish between the ethical injunctions contained
in religious teachings and sacred texts and the actual customs, practices and institutions that give
shape and content to the religious experience. Historically, most religions have found it difficult
to apply their ethical vision to the concrete conditions of everyday life and to their own collec-
tive decision-making, let alone to the institutional arrangements that govern the distribution of
wealth and power within and between societies (Mische 2007).
No single factor can fully explain this discrepancy. Part of the explanation lies in the doctrinal
and succession disputes that have historically produced profound and often mutually reinforcing
cleavages within and between religions. As religions subdivide into competing schools, denomi-
nations, sects or tendencies, what often ensues is an intense, at times violent and protracted con-
test for authority and influence, in which ethical principles are subordinated to the demands of
religious truth claims. In pursuing these claims, the tendency of leadership structures is to assert
the authenticity of their respective interpretations of sacred texts, which they contrast with the
mistaken positions of their spiritual competitors, at times leading to accusations of heresy and
even apostasy. The ensuing doctrinal and organizational barriers erected within and between
religions may help strengthen the level of in-group identification and buttress the authority of
those in leadership positions, but at the cost of heightening inter-group tensions. Such conflicts,
which are acrimonious enough between different religions, can prove even more divisive and
violent when conducted between sects, schools or denominations of the same religion (e.g.,
Catholic and Orthodox, Shia and Sunni) (Brubaker 2015).
In Europe, the Reformation and Counter Reformation triggered armed conflict between
Catholics and Protestants across the continent, culminating in the Thirty Years’War (1618–1648),
which ravaged much of Germany and killed one-fifth of its population. Though Catholic–

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Protestant animosities have eased over the years, more than three centuries later, the bitter feud
in Northern Ireland, which began in the late 1960s and ended with the Good Friday Agreement
of 1998, though essentially an ethno-nationalist conflict, showed how Christian Churches were
still susceptible to the manipulation of emotions based on longstanding mutual mistrust and sus-
picion.The Islamic world too has been riven by sectarian conflicts at several points in its history,
including the most recent period, which has seen a sharpening of the Sunni–Shia divide that
pits Iran against Saudi Arabia, and infects a great many other regional conflicts. Compounding
this collision, as much geopolitical as religious, are the crippling fractures within the Sunni
world that have accompanied the emergence of Wahhabism and different versions of Islamism
(Moussali 2009). Inter-religious conflicts have proven equally if not more destructive. In the
post-1945 period, the Israeli–Palestinian, India–Pakistan, Ethiopia–Somalia and Balkan conflicts,
as well as the civil wars in Nigeria, Lebanon, Sri Lanka, Myanmar and the Philippines are just
a few of the many instances where religion has been a source of acrimony and armed hostili-
ties. Even when not paramount (Anthony, Hermans and Sterkens 2015), the religious factor
has often exacerbated or prolonged the conflict, and in the process, diverted religion from the
nobler elements of its mission.
While the preoccupation with doctrinal rectitude goes some way towards explaining reli-
gion’s ethical deficit, an even more telling factor is the will to power, and with it the ideological
lens through which it is viewed and rationalized. Leadership plays a critical role in virtually all
religious institutions, whether loosely or hierarchically structured. Regardless of its institutional
trappings, leadership is invariably associated, not least in the minds of leaders, with authority,
status and influence, attributes commonly associated with power. In other words, the exercise
of power is as relevant to leadership in the religious domain as it is in politics, the marketplace
or other social settings. It finds expression in two distinct but closely interconnected arenas,
one endogenous (internal to religious institutions) and the other exogenous (pertaining to the
institution’s external environment).
The endogenous arena encompasses the institutional infrastructure, laws, rules, rites and deci-
sion-making processes that govern the interpretation of sacred texts, organization of rites and
rituals, application of the teachings of founders and prophets and more generally, the running
of religious educational institutions (seminaries, monasteries, theological colleges, universities,
schools, madrassas, study circles in churches, mosques and temples, bookshops, libraries, web-
sites), all of which play a vital role in shaping religious faithfulness. The question here is the
extent to which these institutions, through their ethos, curriculum and pedagogy, equip the
community of believers to practise the ethic of altruism and so live harmoniously and creatively
not only with each other but with people of other faiths, ethnicities and nationalities.
This brings us to the exogenous arena. People of faith relate in one way or another to the
wider social order, that is, to the political and economic norms, institutions and policies which
shape the structure and distribution of authority, power, status and wealth locally, nationally and
internationally. All of which raises a simple but challenging question: are people of religious
faith, whether as individuals or communities, able to relate to these norms, policies and struc-
tures with ethical discernment? To put it another way, can they develop a praxis that privileges
the dignity of the human person, the satisfaction of basic human needs, the peaceful settlement
of disputes and importantly, respect for nature?
Perhaps the single most powerful constraint bearing upon religion’s capacity to apply ethical
wisdom is its relationship with the state, not least the coercive apparatus that underpins much of
the state’s domestic and external policies.To illustrate, despite the calamitous loss of life in World
War I and again in World War II, the actual or threatened use of force has been a constant feature
of the political landscape. In both industrial and developing states, political repression has been

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widespread, with ethnic and religious minorities often the victims of wholesale discrimination.
Yet, by and large, religious institutions and their leaders have been reluctant to address the ethi-
cal shortcomings of the modern state. This is not to say that people of religious conviction have
not engaged with many of our contemporary ailments, be it poverty, unemployment, housing,
indigenous rights, other forms of discrimination, humanitarian crises and war, but they have
generally been in the minority. Seldom has the majority religion in any country been prepared
to confront its own state head-on, even where the latter’s actions entailed egregious violations
of the most basic ethical principles. Religion, it seems, has, for the most part, allowed itself to be
swept along by powerful ideological currents, either because it expected to profit from doing so
or because it judged resistance too high a price to carry.
In this context, three ideological currents have proven especially potent: nationalism and
other forms of tribalism, secularism and its corollary privatism and religiously sanctioned or led
statism, which in its most radical form can mean the effective fusion of state and religion. The
first current comprises the many and varied exclusivist ideologies that have dominated national
and international politics for well over a century. Notwithstanding the exemplary responses
of a good many religiously motivated groups and individuals, the general tendency has been
for majority religions to turn a blind eye to authoritarian ultranationalist ideologies, especially
once they have gained control of the state. The generally positive response of the German
Evangelical Church to the rise of Nazism is not entirely surprising given that it had traditionally
viewed itself as one of the pillars of German culture and society, with a theologically grounded
tradition of loyalty to the state. While several Catholic bishops pressed for a critical stance vis-
à-vis Hitler’s policies, they were unable to gain the support of the German Catholic Bishops
Conference (Li 2015). For his part, Pope Pius XII preferred to pursue a public stance that
oscillated between conspicuous silence and diplomatic neutrality. Catholicism’s relationship to
the other brands of fascism that mushroomed across much of Europe in the interwar years was
similarly compromised, generally ranging from studied reclusiveness to active complicity (Nellis,
Morelli and Praet 2015). Nor has flirting with radical nationalism and various forms of extrem-
ist populism been the preserve of Christian Churches. In India, as in other parts of Asia, radi-
cal religious-national movements have had no compunction sanctioning deadly attacks against
Muslim minorities (Banaji 2018; Beech 2019).
The second ideological current, loosely associated with notions of secularism, is often taken
to mean that God and politics do not mix, that religion is basically a private matter. The corol-
lary of this view is that religious beliefs and religiously defined ethical standpoints should not
enter the public sphere or in any way shape the attitudes and policy preferences of those hold-
ing public office. Taken to its logical conclusion, such ideological compliance, which has largely
governed the functioning of mainstream religion in the West, has, among other things, required
acceptance of the neo-liberal consensus in economic policy and nuclear deterrence as providing
the ultimate guarantee of national security. In these and other areas of policy, religion’s capacity
to advocate ethically informed positions that call into question the prevailing political ortho-
doxy has been significantly constrained.
In so far as religion enters the political sphere, such intervention is normally driven by the
pursuit of self-interested objectives. The causes they have espoused, often vociferously and at
times with notable intransigence, generally fall into two categories: political pressure designed
to maximize government support for the material infrastructure of religious establishments (be
it places of worship, schools, hospitals or fundraising arrangements), on which depend their
authority and prestige, and advocacy of certain laws and regulations which usually pertain to
the realm of personal morality, and in particular sexual ethics. Straddling these two categories is
the tendency of majority religions to defend their privileged positions vis-à-vis minority faiths,

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usually with respect to their extensive physical or financial assets or to the particular moral code
they uphold on such issues as abortion or gay rights. Such self-promotion has inevitably eroded
religion’s credibility as an advocate of religious and cultural pluralism and, more generally, of
the rights of the ‘other.’ It has tarnished religion’s image and fed the widespread perception that
religious activism is no less self-interested or more ethically informed than other self-indulgent
pressure groups.
A contrasting but no less ethically prejudicial dynamic is at work when the dominant ide-
ology renders the state and religion virtually inseparable. The fusion of state and religion can
assume different guises. The classic theocratic model, as in the case of contemporary Iran, envis-
ages a religious or clerical class being placed directly in charge of the state. Since the 1979 revo-
lution, Iran’s supreme leader, the highest-ranking religious and political leader in the country,
exercises ideological and political control over a system that requires ‘all civil, penal, financial,
economic, administrative, cultural, military, political, and other laws and regulations’ to be based
on ‘Islamic criteria’ (Article 4). The role of the religious establishment in Saudi Arabia is equally
pervasive, though more opaque and variable over time. It offers the House of Saud power and
legitimacy in return for a system of governance that is aligned to the teachings of the Prophet
Muhammed and the Islamic principle of tawhid (the principle of monotheism). As a conse-
quence, the official place of religion in Saudi Arabia’s public life, as enshrined in its 1992 Basic
Law, stipulates that the Qur’an is the foundation of the country’s constitution, Islam the official
state religion, and sharia (Islamic law) the official criminal law in the country. Though open
to periodic friction, the political-religious alliance remains a sine qua non of regime stability
(Guillemin-Puteaux 2018). Iran and Saudi Arabia are the best known but by no means isolated
examples of the coalescence of religious and political authority. If anything, the recent period
has seen a marked upsurge in support for the principle of theocratic governance in diverse
parts of the world, including Afghanistan, sub-Saharan Africa and the Middle East (Hirshl 2018,
1079–1080).
Quite apart from its intrinsic importance, religion’s relationship to the state bears upon two
other distinct yet closely related fronts, where religious institutions have been singularly inef-
fective in articulating, let alone giving effect to, a well thought out ethical position. The first
relates to the failure of most religious establishments to recognize the inroads of the market
into virtually every facet of everyday life and, in particular, the insidious logic and far-reaching
psychological, cultural and political consequences of the unfettered globalization of market rela-
tions. Secondly, religious institutions, though periodically deploring the corrosive effects of mass
consumption culture that has been the hallmark of late capitalism, have found it difficult to set
out the ethical framework that might inform the construction of an alternative set of economic
and political arrangements.

Some promising signs

Powerful ideological currents may have clipped the ethical wings of the religious imagination,
but they have not entirely blunted its ethical impulse. Amidst the mounting hazards of economic
breakdown, environmental degradation, cultural dislocation, terrorism and armed conflict, signs
have emerged over the last several decades of a rising, though still far from generalized, con-
sciousness of the immensity of the ethical challenges which presently define the human con-
dition (Society of Christian Social Ethics 2018). Many are calling into question the idea that
religion is first and foremost a private experience and affirming instead the need for thought-
ful, religiously grounded responses to the politics of mistrust, intolerance and chauvinism. The
sustained efforts of the World Council of Churches to raise awareness of the evils of racism,

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caste-based d­ iscrimination and other exclusionary practices have been a highlight of its work,
as was the Decade to Overcome Violence (2001–2010), which combined an extensive study
and reflection process with a series of creative projects challenging the churches ‘to overcome
the spirit, logic, and practice of violence; to relinquish any theological justification of violence;
and to affirm anew the spirituality of reconciliation and active nonviolence’ (World Council of
Churches 2011, 8). Notable developments in Catholicism include the contributions of libera-
tion theology and base communities in parts of Latin America, and importantly the aggiorna-
mento or renewal movement ushered in by the Second Vatican Council (1962–1965), widely
regarded as the most significant event in the life of the Church in the Modern era (Neuhaus
2008).Though the pontificates of John Paul II and Benedict XVI stymied and to a degree undid
the theological and pastoral advances decreed by the Council, the new opening to the world
most graphically expressed in the Pastoral Constitution on the Church in the Modern World
promulgated in December 1965 has remained a rich source of ethical reflection and inspiration.
Another notable instance of the same trend is the emergence of Engaged Buddhism, a term
that entered parts of the Buddhist world in the latter part of the 20th century. In response to the
social and ecological realities of the times but also building on precedents in Buddhist history,
a conscious attempt is being made in different social and national settings to reframe Buddhist
practice in ways that combine sustained social engagement with radical personal transformation.
For engaged Buddhists, the aim is to make notions of social change, human agency, responsible
citizenship and historical consciousness integral to a compassionate life (Loy 2004).
Within the Christian tradition, public theology, with its renewed conception of the common
good, has gathered considerable momentum (Bradstock and Russell 2017). Though the theo-
logical arguments advanced to support the notion of socio-public engagement vary, they share
a common understanding of the principal elements of which are commitment to ‘public goods,’
engagement in the public sphere, and an implicit, at times explicit, critique of neo-liberal ideol-
ogy (Elsbernd 2005). A key feature of the theology of engagement is a sharper understanding
of solidarity as the basis of a social ethic tailored to the needs of an increasingly interdependent
yet deeply fractured world (Hollenbach 2002, Ogletree 2002). Another notable strand in current
theological reflection is the attempt to develop the Christian principle of forgiveness as a basis of
reconciliation, especially in societies that have experienced war, genocide and other mass atroc-
ity crimes. Reconciliation – and its corollary restorative justice – are posited as central to the
process of conflict resolution and post-conflict peacebuilding and reconstruction, of which truth
and reconciliation commissions are seen as a valid practical expression (Vorster 2009).
It is, however, the ecological turn that best characterizes religion’s most far-reaching reas-
sessment of the nature and scope of the contemporary human predicament. One should hasten
to add that the relationship with the Earth’s living systems has been an enduring feature of
the perceptions and beliefs of the world’s religions (Taylor 2005, vii–xxi, Gottlieb 2009). Yet,
it is only in the late 20th century that ecotheology has emerged as a distinctive and increas-
ingly influential stream in theological discourse, primarily in response to the deepening global
environmental crisis and importantly as a critique of the long-held Christian view that God
has entrusted humans with dominion over nature. This reinterpretation of the Genesis story has
come to be seen as the necessary corrective to the mindset that would underpin the industrial
transformation of Western civilization, in particular its addiction to the economics of growth
and the manipulation, even exploitation, of nature on which it was premised. Some contribu-
tors to this new theological current found inspiration in Francis of Assisi’s legendary respect for
nature and all its creatures, others in the rich theological insights of the two leading Protestant
reformers of the 16th century, Luther and Calvin, both of whom affirmed God’s presence in
nature. But it was not until the middle of the 20th century that theological reflection began to

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shed its anthropocentric worldview. Teilhard de Chardin helped pave the way with his explo-
ration of the human phenomenon, which he located in the ongoing emergence of the cos-
mos, or cosmogenesis (Teilhard de Chardin 1968, Turner 2005). He was followed by other less
well-known contributors, and then came the pioneering Lutheran and ecumenical ecothe-
ologian Joseph Sittler (Pihkala 2017), for whom the world of nature was ‘God’s other living
creation which has its own integrity and which defines the human place in the world’ (Sittler
2005, 2). Many others followed in quick succession, notably Catholic cultural and Earth histo-
rian Thomas Berry, Protestant theologians Jürgen Moltmann, John Cobb and James Nash, and
Eastern Orthodox theologian Paulos Gregorius, to which must be added Rosemary Radford
Ruether, Sallie McFague, Heather Eaton and others who have enriched the new ecological
consciousness with a feminist reading of theology and scripture.
Though each of these contributions brings to the table a distinctive understanding of the
relationship between religion and ecology, several recurring themes nevertheless characterize
the ecotheological project:

·· The divine is immanent in the whole cosmos.

·· The relationship between the divine, the cosmos and humanity can be best understood
holistically.
·· The Earth and all its creatures have an intrinsic worth and are meant to serve a greater
purpose.
·· The Earth is a community in which all living things are interconnected and interdepend-
ent.
·· Humanity’s role is not to exercise mastery over the Earth, but to engage with it in a spirit
of custodianship and partnership.
·· With creation ‘groaning in travail,’ humanity’s responsibility is to speak with a new and
powerful voice on behalf of the whole creation and address the injustices which afflict it.

Ecotheology represents a significant advance in Christianity’s attempt to chart an ethical

response to the deepening ecological crisis. But, for all its potency and resonance, it remains, first
and foremost, an intellectual exercise which, if it is to bear fruit, needs institutional legitimacy
and leverage. This has been one of the important functions of Pope Francis’s second encyclical
Laudato Si’.
Ecumenical in inspiration and widely acclaimed as much outside as inside the Catholic
Church, the encyclical’s analysis rests on two pillars: theological and spiritual reflection on the
one hand and scientific evidence on the other.Though the challenge posed by climate change is
addressed at length, it is viewed as another symptom of a deeper ailment, which has as its under-
lying cause the ideology of exclusion. The exclusion of people and nature, of the marginalized
and vulnerable, it is argued, is the natural outcome of the spirit of domination and profound
indifference to the harm it inevitably brings in its train.
The remedy proposed by the encyclical is to place the care of creation, our ‘common home,’
at the heart of Christian theology. It categorically rejects the theology of human domination and
seeks to replace what Pope Francis calls ‘tyrannical anthropocentrism’ with respect for all living
things. He advocates ‘a sense of fraternity that excludes nothing and no one,’ an understanding
of the Earth as a ‘shared inheritance,’ a ‘collective good,’ the ‘patrimony of all humanity,’ the
‘responsibility of everyone.’ The ethically-driven rejection of exclusivist ideologies is the over-
arching message of Laudato Si’. In this and other pronouncements, Pope Francis has called for a
cultural revolution that replaces domination with responsible stewardship and paves the way for
an ‘integral ecology.’ He offers a framework that connects spirituality, nature, culture, economy

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 Joseph A. Camilleri

and governance and sets ethical benchmarks which enable us to evaluate the performance of our
political, economic and legal institutions and decision-making processes.
The ecological turn, it should be stressed, is by no means confined to the Christian world.
Parallel developments in other faiths, notably in Buddhism and Islam, point in the same direc-
tion. That the key tenets of Buddhism should be conducive to the development of an envi-
ronmental ethic is hardly surprising. The principle of non-harming (ahimsa), the existential
centrality of suffering, the positing of compassion as the only valid remedy and importantly,
the emphasis on holism and the interdependence of all forms of life have provided teach-
ers and practitioners in all branches of Buddhism with the inspiration and intellectual and
moral equipment to rethink the relationship between humanity and nature. It is, however,
the severity of the ecological crisis which has prompted the rediscovery of classical texts and
a flood of new writing and discussion based on historically and philosophically informed
but contextualized explications of traditional Buddhist thought (Kaza and Kraft 2000, Thich
Nhat Hanh 2008, Darlington 2019, 2017, Lim 2019). Using Buddhist teachings and rituals, a
growing number of monks and Buddhist environmental groups are working with community
organizations, farmers, educators and representatives of other faiths to foster the attitudinal
and behavioural shift needed to sustain a range of educational, advocacy and land care projects
(Bu and Chi 2014).
Much the same pattern is evident in Islam, though what is distinctive about its response to
the ecological impasse is the emphasis on the divine origin of all life. Indeed, the whole of crea-
tion is viewed as a sign (ayat) of Allah, the Creator. In the words of the Qur’an,‘Allah sends down
water from the sky; and by it brings the dead earth back to life. There is certainly a Sign in that for
people who hear’ (16:65; italics added). Four precepts are said to underlie Islamic ethics in general
and the environmental ethic in particular (Khalid 2010, 710–711):

The ‘unity’ principle (Tawhid) – because all that exists flows from God, the unity of the Creator
is reflected in the unity of his creation;
The ‘creation’ principle (Fitra) – everything in creation has a potential for goodness, which it is
for humanity to express;
The ‘balance’ principle (Mizan) – creation has an order and a purpose and is in dynamic balance,
which it is for humanity to discern;
The ‘responsibility’ principle (Khalifa) – the Creator has appointed human beings to be khalifs or
trustees of his creation; that is, creation is entrusted in humanity’s safekeeping.

On the basis of these general precepts, Islamic jurisprudence has formulated specific principles
that are to guide lawmaking, three of which have direct relevance for environmental policy:
people may hold land, but there are no absolute rights of ownership; abuse of rights is prohibited
and penalized and the benefits derived from natural resources are to be held in common.Where
resources are scarce, utilization must be carefully controlled, and at all times, the common good
must be protected and any detrimental effects avoided or strictly limited.
The reality on the ground, it is true, tells another story.Virtually all states in Muslim major-
ity societies, including Iran and Saudi Arabia, have been integrated to a greater or lesser extent
into the global neo-liberal order, which means that Islamic principles of governance are more
honoured in the breach than the observance. Nevertheless, Islamic scholars have, since the
late 1960s, paved the way for an Islamic ecotheology movement comprising Islamic ecologi-
cal jurisprudence, Sharia-based environmental law and Islamic environmental activism (Zbidi
2013). An extensive consultative process led by IFEES/EcoIslam and Islamic Relief World Wide
culminated in the adoption of a substantive Declaration on Global Climate Change in Istanbul

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 Religion between ethics and ideology

in August 2015. With rising environmental awareness has come many environmental campaigns
and projects (Grossman 2019), but all this is but the beginning of a long and difficult journey.
This cursory survey of religion’s efforts to affirm ethical guidelines relevant to our epoch
suggests rich possibilities and daunting limitations. That the world’s religions have accumulated
over time a rich reservoir of wisdom that can help humanity navigate the turbulent seas ahead
may be a contentious proposition. What is less open to argument is that we are witnessing an
uneven but widespread ethical reawakening of the religious imagination. Not surprisingly, many
obstacles stand in the way, not least the ideological currents that serve to normalize and legiti-
mize the addiction to power and privilege within both the religious and secular realms, often in
mutually reinforcing ways. It is difficult to see the ethical enterprise making much headway until
such time as ethical pronouncements and advocacy are supported by the full weight of religion’s
institutional infrastructure. Especially important in this context is the complex of educational
institutions and practices, which by virtue of their ethos, curriculum and pedagogy, can inspire
and equip the community of believers to engage with the defining issues of social, economic
and political life. Much will also depend on whether those of religious persuasion are able and
willing to engage in sustained intellectual and practical dialogue across religious and ideological
boundaries. If not, the ethical imperative will remain little more than a pious aspiration.

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 10
RELIGION AND THE
IDEOLOGY OF POPULISM
Timothy Peace

Introduction
On 24th February 2018, Matteo Salvini, the leader of Italy’s populist right-wing party Lega
(formerly Lega Nord, LN), addressed a large crowd in Milan’s Piazza del Duomo. Flanked by the
imposing presence of the city’s immense cathedral, he was taking part in a campaign rally for
supporters ahead of the national election the following month.1 During his speech, he suddenly
brandished some rosary beads and told his adoring supporters how this memento had been
gifted to him by a downtrodden woman. Citing the Bible, he claimed that ‘the last will be first’
and then proceeded to swear on copies of both the Italian Constitution and the gospels that, if
elected to government, he would be ‘faithful to his people’. Even in a country like Italy, where
religion and politics often combine, this blatant use of Christian symbols and discourse to win
an election shocked many observers. Since this moment, Salvini, one of the most prominent
populist leaders in Europe, has not ceased to use Christian symbols such as the crucifix to send
rather unsubtle messages to his supporters during his subsequent time both in and out of the
Italian government, often provoking the ire of senior Catholic figures (Giuffrida 2018). His use
of religious imagery and references to garner popular and electoral support has come to sym-
bolize a trend among populist leaders worldwide to demonstrate that they are united with ‘the
people’. Indeed, the use of religion by populists is, of course, not limited to the Christian faith.
It also finds very clear expression in the Hindu nationalism of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP)
in India, which also deploys religious belonging to define, promote or exclude people. We can
also find parties and leaders in the Muslim world promoting an ‘Islamic populism’ (Hadiz 2016)
such as the Justice and Development Party (AKP) in Turkey, and the term ‘Jewish populism’
(Flic 2010) has equally been applied to parties in Israel including the Likud. Indeed, the lead-
ers of India, Turkey and Israel have been characterized as using ‘a common populist playbook
of neoliberal economic policies, the leveraging of ethnoreligious tensions as well as attempts to
denigrate independent news media, by portraying it as the “enemy of the people”’ (Rogenhofer
and Panievsky 2020: 1394).These prominent examples of religion and populism are from socie-
ties where it is expected, rightly or wrongly, that religion forms a dominant role in social and
political life. In largely secular Europe, where religion’s influence has been on the wane for such
a long time, the use (and abuse) of the sacred by populists is more curious and deserves closer
inspection. To that end, this chapter will largely concentrate on the phenomenon of right-wing

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populism as it relates to Christianity in Europe, in particular, its main Catholic and Protestant
denominations in both Western and Central and Eastern Europe (CEE).2

Populism and its relation to religion

In line with the growing success of populist parties and leaders around the world, populism
has now become one of the most studied political phenomena. Yet, achieving consensus on
what actually constitutes populism has been somewhat elusive as different scholars, across varied
academic disciplines, have used the term in different ways according to competing definitions
(or sometimes without any definition whatsoever). Gidron and Bonikowski (2013) identified
three key conceptual approaches in the political science and sociology literature on the topic:
(1) populism as political ideology, (2) populism as political style and (3) populism as political
strategy. At the heart of many conceptual debates is the question of whether populism does
indeed constitute an ideology. Those who adhere to the ‘ideational approach’, which is closely
associated with the preeminent scholar of populism Cas Mudde, would argue that it should be
treated as a ‘thin centred ideology’. Others stress that it should be viewed as a discourse or com-
munication style that can be adopted by a range of political actors irrespective of positioning
on an ideological spectrum (Moffitt and Tormey 2014). Some argue even more forcefully and
consider that ‘the misclassification of populism as ideology raises significant problems for the
proper analysis of populist phenomena, due to the normative elements that essentialist accounts
force on their study’ (Aslanidis 2016: 94). While acknowledging the critiques of ‘populism as
ideology’, Cas Mudde has defended his approach for its distinguishability, categorizability, trave-
lability and versatility and argued that

whether or not populism is defined as a full ideology rather than a looser set of ideas,
centred around the fundamental opposition between ‘the pure people’ and ‘the cor-
rupt elite’, is in most cases of secondary importance to the research question and often
impossible to determine empirically. In essence, the various definitions within the
ideational approach share a clear core, which both holds them together and sets them
apart from other approaches to populism.
(Mudde 2017: 31)

This chapter will consider populism as an ideology in line with the dominant trend in the com-
parative politics literature and adopts the most broadly used definition as

an ideology that considers society to be ultimately separated into two homogeneous

and antagonistic groups, ‘the pure people’ versus ‘the corrupt elite’, and which argues
that politics should be an expression of the volonté générale (general will) of the people.
(Mudde 2004: 543)

Using the ideational approach allows for comparisons of different forms of populism that can
be a feature of various party families, in different regional settings, and that may be found
on both the left and right. A useful distinction is over whether populists can be described as
either inclusionary or exclusionary depending on how they define the people, with the former
often associated with Latin-American left-wing populists and the latter characterized by the
European populist radical right (Mudde and Kaltwasser 2013).3 The relevance of inclusion
and exclusion is particularly salient when discussing the relationship between religion and
populism. Religion and the idea of the sacred naturally lend themselves to being exploited

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by populists, and in many populist movements there is ‘a strong overlap between religious
imagery and moral fundamentalism’ (Taggart 2002: 78). Religious faith can be utilized both
positively, signalling belonging to a national culture or as a moral compass for political action,
and negatively, using either the religion of the ‘other’ or irreligious elites to denote a threat to
the body politic. Populism can be conceived as a disguised political theology that elevates ‘the
people’ to the role of a transcendent God. The language of this political theology has its roots
in some versions of Marxism and is capable of mobilizing strong religious-type sentiments
(Arato 2015). For Bergem and Bergem (2019), populism, as a reconstructed ideal of the politi-
cal, represents the natural limit point of political theology in the tradition of Carl Schmitt.They
find that the Schmittian theologico-political structure is explicitly avowed in the discourse
of the populist Front National (FN, but now Rassemblement National) party in France. Yet one
could equally argue that populism is in tension with many monotheistic and salvation-seeking
religions because they

refer to very different and incompatible sovereigns: the sovereign people and their very
worldly authority in the case of populism, vs. a transcendent sovereign deity, an oth-
erworldly lawgiver whose earthly high priests are religious figures, not politicians …
from the perspective of the religious, and of churches, the near deification of the sover-
eign people and of their leader as the quasi-sanctified vessel and instrument (prophet),
of their message (good news), is tantamount to idolatry.
(Arato and Cohen 2019: 107)

However, neither sacred texts nor deities need to be invoked for populists to imbue certain
political ideals, ‘the people’ or even themselves with hallowed characteristics. Populist leaders
often seek to portray themselves as almost divine saviours of the people without any direct
reference to established forms of religion. Following Zúquete (2017), we can divide ‘religious
populism’ into two dimensions. The first is overtly religious and is shaped by a particular faith
tradition as it is often tied in with traditional organized religions. This is characterized by politi-
cians, or their supporters, claiming they are doing ‘God’s work’ and constitutes a politicization of
religion.This may or may not involve the backing of religious authorities and organizations.This
politicization of religion is clearly evident in the way many US politicians, both Republican
and Democrat, explicitly claim they are pursuing an agenda that glorifies their maker. The sec-
ond dimension of religious populism is covertly religious and relates to the experience of the
sacred rather than a specific spiritual tradition. This constitutes a sacralization of politics, which
in earlier work, Zúquete (2008: 92) defined as ‘missionary politics’, which is a ‘characteristic
form of political religion that has at its centre a charismatic leader who leads a chosen people
gathered into a moral community struggling against all-powerful and conspiratorial enemies,
and engaged in a mission toward redemption and salvation’. This may be particularly relevant
for left-wing populists and is exemplified by a leader such as former Venezuelan President Hugo
Chávez, who portrayed himself as a messianic figure who could save the nation with frequent
references to a chosen people, a moral community as well as the steady use of myths, rituals
and symbols (Zúquete 2008). To this, we might also add the celebration of historical figures by
populist parties, such as the sacralization of the figure of Joan of Arc by the FN in France, cel-
ebrated more for her nationalism than her religious commitment. Indeed, this element is often
secondary for populists whose use of religion is more about ‘belonging’ than ‘belief ’ and revolves
around the notions of restoring a native religious identity and battling both the elites and foreign
‘others’. We shall now explore both dimensions of religious populism through the example of
the populist radical right (PRR) in Europe.

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The ‘conversion’ of the populist radical right in Europe

The party family that is today commonly referred to as the ‘populist radical right’ shares a
core ideology that combines nativism, authoritarianism and populism (Mudde 2007). Despite
these similarities, the parties have diverse origins and can trace their lineage to various politi-
cal currents in Europe including neo-fascism, regional secessionism, anti-tax campaigns and
Euroscepticism. If we consider the PRR as it emerged in post-war Western Europe, the religious
component was certainly marginal, although not completely absent. Each national context, and
the form of party competition that developed from 1945 onwards, largely dictated the extent to
which religion, and in particular Catholicism, became entwined with far-right ideology. Some
PRR parties have strong anti-clerical roots such as the Austrian Freedom Party (Freiheitliche
Partei Österreichs; FPÖ), which developed out of the German nationalist movement and in oppo-
sition to both Catholic conservatism and social democracy.Yet most appeared largely indifferent
to religion and it is important to remember that across Western Europe at this time, the defence
of a Christian identity was, of course, the preserve of the mainstream Christian democrats.
Indeed, parties of the radical right only ever attracted the support of so-called ‘traditionalist’ or
‘fundamentalist’ Catholics that raged against the modernization process of the Church instituted
by the Second Vatican Council in the 1960s. This turning point led to a strong reaction from
illiberal Catholic forces that later ‘split from the church and formed their own, politically right-
wing organizations that claimed to preserve the “true teachings” of the church’ (Minkenberg
2018: 372). These fringe ultra-Catholic groups were able to find a home in various radical right
milieu and constituted a sort of sub-culture within many radical right parties. They represented
minor currents within both the Italian Social Movement (Movimento Sociale Italiano; MSI) in
Italy and the FN in France, although both parties largely avoided making public references to
religion. In the latter case, fundamentalist Catholics co-habited uneasily alongside neo-pagan
elements that condemned Christianity for its promotion of equality and the ‘cult of humility’
(Shields 2007: 149). Interestingly, it was always the neo-pagan element that dominated the FN,
which was unable to penetrate the mainstream conservative Catholic circles in France and thus
never aligned itself with the religious right (Roy 2016). The only real points of convergence
were on ‘moral’ political issues such as opposition to abortion, which never became central to
the platform of PRR parties, which were increasingly focused on opposing immigration. There
were few incentives for religious leaders to join forces with such parties given their reputation
for racism and antisemitism. The PRR parties that developed in the 1970s and 1980s were
either indifferent to religion, such as the Scandinavian Progress parties, or openly critical of the
established Churches. Ethno-regionalist parties such as the Flemish Bloc (Vlaams Blok but now
Vlaams Belang;VB) in Belgium and the emerging Leagues in Northern Italy that would federate
as the Lega Nord (LN) in the early 1990s were often disparaging about the Church hierarchy.
The founder and leader of LN, Umberto Bossi, famously even dabbled in pseudo-pagan rituals
such as collecting water from the source of the Po river and symbolically pouring it into the sea
in Venice (McDonnell 2016).
The 1990s were an important decade that saw the creation of new populist parties on the
Western European right. Some were the result of schisms in existing parties, such as the Danish
People’s Party (Dansk Folkeparti; DF) that broke away from the Danish Progress Party (Rydgren
2004). Others were the result of mergers, such as the LN, or even rebirth such as the ‘post-fascist’
Allianza Nazionale (AN) in Italy, which replaced the MSI in 1995.These developments coincided
with the decline of Christian democratic parties in countries such as the Netherlands and, most
spectacularly, in Italy. Both the LN and AN attempted to attract right-leaning Catholic voters
in the north and south of the country, respectively. Religion had not yet become a rallying call,

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but all these parties were united in their opposition to immigration and multiculturalism, which
they saw as a threat to the very existence of their own (latent) Christian culture.Towards the end
of the decade, it became increasingly common for such parties to view Christianity as part of
a wider European heritage and identity that needed to be promoted and protected against the
threat of foreign invasion. The FPÖ in Austria distanced itself from anticlericalism and began to
include a commitment to Christianity in its manifesto from 1997 onwards.

This endorsement of Christianity was not meant to convey an ideological congruence

with Church dogmas. Instead, the significance of Christianity in the party manifesto
was confined to an understanding of religion as culture, an idea which in turn aimed
at mobilising demands based on identity.
(Hadj-Abdou 2016: 34)

This would presage a move made by most PRR parties just a few years later.
Such a conversion to religion was not necessary for PRR parties in Central and Eastern
Europe as they developed in the 1990s. Religiosity was associated with anti-communism, which
gave both religious actors and ideas a certain amount of political capital after the democratic
transition. Religion became associated with values such as conservatism, nationalism, a Western
orientation and solidarity with the lower classes (Enyedi 2000). It thus became a key value
of the right-wing party family, including the populist radical right. As Minkenberg (2017)
has remarked, the difference between these PRR parties in the East and West is that the East
European parties addressed religion as a core element of their programme from their incep-
tion. He also observes that they are more extreme, more inherently religious and more anti-
democratic than their Western counterparts. Although countries like the Czech Republic have
remained resolutely secular with little scope for religious mobilization, populist parties have
been able to successfully exploit religion in countries such as Bulgaria, Hungary, Poland and
Slovakia. Many of these parties were primarily proponents of ethnic nationalism that exploited
religious sentiments. In Hungary, this even extended to governing parties as the first ruling
coalition of the post-communist period included the Christian Democratic People’s Party
(Kereszténydemokrata Néppárt; KDNP), the Hungarian Democratic Forum (Magyar Demokrata
Fórum; MDF) and the Independent Smallholders’ Party (Független Kisgazdapárt; FKgP).The very
rationale for this coalition was the contention that they formed a Christian-national camp
with the government publicly supported by the Catholic and (to a lesser extent) the Protestant
Churches (Enyedi 2000). The more extreme Hungarian Justice and Life Party (Magyar Igazság
és Élet Pártja; MIÉP) also attempted to siphon off voters from the KDNP by defining itself as a
Christian party. In Poland, the relationship between religion and nationalism was also a feature of
party politics, in no small part due to the important role played by the Catholic Church, which
became a major political figure and managed to achieve a variety of policy goals (Grzymała-
Busse 2015). The development of an explicit brand of religious nationalism was pioneered by
the Christian National Union (Zjednoczenie Chrześcijańsko-Narodowe; ZChN) in the 1990s. The
internal diversity and different currents in Polish Catholicism also helped to politicize the use
of religion by populists. The development of a split between an ‘open’ and more liberal strand
with a ‘closed’ nationalist and conservative faction of Catholicism became politically salient.
The populist political parties of the 1990s clearly aligned themselves with the precepts of closed
Catholicism, although ‘its most influential exposition emerged from a source outside party poli-
tics: the Catholic-nationalist media empire centred around Radio Maryja’ (Stanley 2016: 113).
In the early 2000s, the marriage of religion and populism would be pushed to new heights in
Poland with the formation of the conservative Law and Justice party (Prawo i Sprawiedliwość; PiS)

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and the League of Polish Families (Liga Polskich Rodzin; LPR), which espoused clerical national-
ism and an even more extreme agenda.

Scapegoating the ethnic and religious ‘other’

At the start of the millennium, most Western PRR parties were still largely secular in outlook,
while there was a clearer focus on religious themes in the post-communist East. Where both
overlapped was the mutual suspicion and sometimes outright hostility to religious minorities,
especially Jews and Muslims. Antisemitism was the hallmark of the most extreme parties in the
West. If the heart of the populist worldview was the denunciation of the corrupt elites, the figure
of the Jew was never far away. Long-time leader of the FN Jean-Marie Le Pen regularly warned
‘against the “Jewish international” as a source of “anti-national sentiment” and denounced the
“hidden forces and vested interests” conspiring against France’ (Shields 2007: 222). Over time,
these parties toned down explicit antisemitic references as part of a mainstreaming strategy,
even if their members still harboured such views. This contrasts with most PRR parties in
CEE which ‘with the exception of those in the Czech Republic or Slovenia, espouse explicit
antisemitism, often in terms of anti-Zionist and pan-Slavic versions’ (Minkenberg 2017: 85).
The LPR in Poland was notorious for its antisemitism in the early years after its foundation in
2001, and this was sometimes even expressed in theological terms. More recently, the torch of
unambiguous antisemitism has been passed to the Jobbik party in Hungary, which is also fiercely
anti-Roma but yet professes to be ‘Christian’. Jobbik politicians have ‘consistently taken a pro-
Arab stance against the Jews and the state of Israel, underlining the alleged similarities between
the situation of the Palestinian people in Israel and of Hungarians in Europe. Antisemitism thus
overrides Islamophobia within the party’ (Ádám and Bozóki 2016:137).The opposite stance can
now be found among most populist radical right parties. Antisemitism has been jettisoned in
favour of apparently pro-Jewish and even pro-Israeli stances. Most notably in the Netherlands,
the Party for Freedom (Partij voor de Vrijheid; PVV) has cultivated relations with Jewish organiza-
tions. Its leader Geert Wilders has stated that he feels an affinity with Judaism and the State of
Israel, and pro-Israeli sentiments can be found in their electoral manifestos (van Kessel 2016).
Support for a ‘Judeo-Christian’ civilization/culture juxtaposed against an Islamic threat had
been pioneered in the Netherlands by Pim Fortuyn, and now many populist radical right parties
espouse support for such a concept. For these parties ‘the nation’ is being re-characterized in
civilizational terms and ‘when religious differences are highlighted, it is not the intra-Christian
confessional differences that have historically been closely aligned with national identities in
Europe; it is the supra-confessional civilizational divide between (Judeo-) Christianity and Islam’
(Brubaker 2017: 1211).
Hostility to Islam and Muslims has become the glue that unites the populist radical right
across Europe, even if this is a newer phenomenon in the East. In the West, the tradition of
PRR parties stressing negative attitudes to Islam as a dangerous religion can be found in those
countries that received a significant number of migrants from Muslim majority countries in
the post-war period. In the case of France, this was also tied up with the painful memory of
decolonization and the failed fight for ‘French Algeria’. In the 1980s, a national debate emerged
about the problems of immigration and the danger of a cultural threat posed by Islam that Jean-
Marie Le Pen was adept at exploiting (Peace 2015). In a book written in 1985, he claimed that
Islam ‘resists assimilation and threatens our Western and Christian civilisation’ and later declared
in 1988 that ‘France will never be an Islamic Republic’ (Stora 1997: 14). This discourse acceler-
ated in the 1990s and spread to similar populist parties in other European countries, perhaps
unsurprisingly, given that the FN was seen as a model to follow. Islam became a key concern

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for the FPÖ in Austria where Turkish migrants began to be seen as the ‘Muslim other’ with
then-leader Jörg Haider claiming in a 1995 book that ‘the social order of Islam is diametrically
opposed to our Christian values’ (Hadj-Abdou 2016: 36).The anti-Muslim posture of the PRR
was the principal reason for the turn towards the Christian religion amongst these previously
secular parties. The new populist parties that emerged in this decade enthusiastically embraced
this anti-Muslim discourse, none more so than the Danish People’s Party. In 1998, it opposed
the construction of a mosque in Aarhus by arguing that Denmark was a Christian country and
its leader Pia Kjærsgaard, later claimed that immigrants with a Muslim background had ‘no
wish to be part of Danish society’ and had the ‘deepest disrespect for all that is western, Danish,
Christian’ (Betz and Meret 2009: 318). By the end of the decade, these ideas had become main-
stream in radical right-wing populist circles but had not yet become central in their discourse.
This all changed after 11 September 2001.
The events of 9/11 are crucial to understanding the pivot of European populist parties to
an overtly Islamophobic discourse at the heart of their electoral appeals. Interest in but also fear
of Islam and Muslims rocketed in the wake of the terrorist attacks, and PRR parties found the
perfect justification for their assertion that there was no difference between Islam and radical
‘Islamism’ (Betz and Meret 2009). Aided by various conspiracy theories, as well as the work of
certain scholars such as Samuel Huntingdon and his ‘clash of civilisations’ thesis, the idea was
propagated that there was a planned ‘invasion’ of Europe and that Muslims wanted to ‘Islamize’
the continent:

For contemporary right-wing populists in Western democracies, the main ‘others’ are
almost always immigrants and, in particular since 9/11, Muslims. Muslims allegedly
want to impose their religious values and traditions on the people as part of a surrepti-
tious ‘Islamisation’ plan. Moreover, they are said to receive the support of liberal elites
(who are accused of always favouring minority rights over those of ‘the people’). Ideas
of invasion, infiltration, contagion, conspiracy, replacement and impending irreversible
crisis represent key components of the populist imaginary, and all of these are present
in the notion that a deliberate process of Islamisation is occurring under our noses in
many Western democracies.
(Marzouki and McDonnell 2016: 5)

In the wake of 9/11, populist parties and leaders focused their efforts on restricting immigration,
particularly from Muslim majority countries, and also insisting on the assimilation of existing
Muslim communities to ‘our values and way of life’. Although this discourse could be expected
from the leaders of parties that were part of the radical right tradition, it also infused those with
more liberal roots. The Dutch populist Pim Fortuyn, who back in 1997 had published a book
entitled Against The Islamisation Of Our Culture, was emblematic of this approach which sought
to juxtapose liberal European values against a ‘backwards’ and ‘regressive’ Islamic culture. In
the first decade of the 21st century, populist parties appeared to try and outdo each other with
increasingly more outrageous actions designed to symbolize their opposition to Islam, most
commonly through opposition to the building of mosques. In Italy, the LN regularly partici-
pated in anti-mosque campaigns and organized marches involving the desecration of land using
pigs.4 Where it held local power, it would often refuse permission for Muslims to open spaces
for prayer, thus demonstrating that its populist opposition to Islam was more than just symbolic.
In Austria, the FPÖ and splinter party BZÖ both made opposing mosques a key strategy of
their election campaigns, trying to effectively outdo each other on this issue. BZÖ leader Jörg
Haider even called for the Austrian Constitution to be amended to prohibit the construction of

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minarets.This prefigured the decision in Switzerland to hold a national referendum in 2009 that
led to a ban on the construction of minarets. The populist Swiss People’s Party (Schweizerische
Volkspartei, SVP) had been at the heart of this campaign from the launch of the popular initiative
to extensively canvassing for a ‘yes’ vote in the referendum.
The Islamophobia promoted by populist leaders and their parties was increasingly being
couched in terms of the need to defend Western/Christian civilization encapsulated in the FPÖ
campaign slogan from 2009, ‘The West in Christian hands’. In this same period, such a com-
mitment was explicitly recorded in their party manifestos. The SVP claimed that it was ‘com-
mitted to upholding Switzerland’s Western Christian culture’ (Mazzoleni 2016: 50), the British
National Party (BNP) stressed its ‘commitment to the values of traditional Western Christianity,
as a benchmark for a decent and civilised society’ (Peace 2016: 104) and the PVV stated that
Jewish-Christian and humanist values were fundamental to the Netherlands’ success (van Kessel
2016).5 Geert Wilders became the face of this approach, travelling around Europe to show his
controversial film Fitna and improving links with like-minded parties and their leaders. However,
concerning the role of religion in his discourse, ‘negative references to Islam were clearly more
dominant than positive references to traditional Christian norms and values’ (van Kessel 2016:
67).The same could be applied to other PRR parties whose use of Christianity remained super-
ficial and as a simple identity marker. The FN had occasionally referred to the ‘Christian roots’
of France and Europe, but after Marine Le Pen gained leadership of the party in 2011, the party
actually began to make more references to secularism (laïcité) held up as a symbol of national
identity. Here again, the importance of this shift was to signal opposition to Muslims and Islam
and ‘ownership’ of issues relating to migration and integration. Thus paradoxically, ‘both laïcité
and Christianity are presented as non-negotiable parts of the French identity’ (Roy 2016: 91).
The critical stance of Western European PRR parties on Muslims and Islam remained
throughout the second decade of the 21st century, peaking during certain critical junctures
such as the Charlie Hebdo terrorist attacks in France. New populist parties also emerged
which rode the wave of anti-Muslim feeling such as the Alternative for Germany (Alternative
für Deutschland; AfD) and Vox in Spain. East European populist parties also followed this path
by adding Islamophobia to their religious agenda even if the actual presence of Muslims in the
region is minuscule (Minkenberg 2017). Anti-Muslim discourse and narratives were able to
travel easily from Western to Eastern European populists. This is again framed as a civilizational
clash between the Christian Occident and Muslim Orient, but also between a culturally authen-
tic Central and Eastern Europe which defends its heritage and a decadent and liberal Western
Europe, symbolized by the EU and its supposedly pro-migrant elites. A common theme among
Eastern European populists is that they must avoid the ‘problems’ that Western European nations
have faced as a result of admitting too many Muslim migrants. In the narrative of the Eastern
European populist right, they are

waging a two-front war: they defend Christian values by fighting against the
‘Islamization’ of Europe, and they protect the traditional values against the liberal,
‘post-1968’ ideologies such as multiculturalism and gender equality, which currently
rule the West but at [the] same time undermine its strength and immune system.
(Krekó, Hunyadi and Szicherle 2019)

According to Kalmar (2018), the so-called migration or refugee ‘crisis’ of 2015–2016 was the
decisive moment in the story of the political exploitation of Islamophobia in the East of the EU
when the Visegrád Four countries (Poland, the Czech Republic, Slovakia and Hungary) united
against an EU Directive asking Member States to accept a limited number of refugees.6 The

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presence of populist parties at the heart of these governments means that Islamophobic discourse
cannot be dismissed as a phenomenon confined to the political fringes. The Prime Minister of
Hungary, Viktor Orbán, claimed in September 2015 that the EU was in the grip of madness
over immigration and refugees and argued that he was defending European Christianity against
a Muslim influx (Traynor 2015). He has since repeatedly made incendiary statements charac-
terizing refugees as Muslim invaders or terrorists who want to take over the country and that
Hungary represents the last bastion in the fight against the ‘Islamization’ of Europe. Orbán has
become the figurehead of anti-Muslim populism in the region and is lauded by fellow right-
wing populists across Europe for this hard-line stance. In Poland, attitudes to Muslims have also
hardened in the wake of the refugee crisis, an event that contributed indirectly to the election
of the right-wing populist Law and Justice (PiS) party, which strongly opposed the EU migrant
relocation scheme by arguing that Muslim refugees would not integrate and potentially threaten
Poland’s national security. Since its election to power in October 2015, the PiS government has
refrained from the kind of crude Islamophobia espoused by Orbán but has resolutely refused to
accept Muslim refugees from other EU countries. This policy

corresponds with voter attitudes (while also influencing those very attitudes). The
government is unlikely to moderate its position, because of the competition from the
more radical right. PiS is afraid that other right-wing parties will capture those voters
who are against accepting refugees in Poland.
(Dudzińska and Kotnarowski 2019)

Do religious citizens vote for populists?

While it is clear that populists have resorted to religious appeals to attract voters, evidence of
the efficacy of this strategy among religious voters is still lacking. The literature on religion and
party choice in Europe has demonstrated that, although confessional voting has experienced a
significant decline, religion still matters when voting for Christian democratic and conservative
parties and the relationship between religiosity and voting behaviour is strongest in countries
where Christian democratic parties have been established (van der Brug, Hobolt and de Vreese
2009, Minkenberg 2010). There does not appear to be a strong correlation between identifying
as religious or ‘practising’ and voting for the PRR, although the various studies operationalize
religiosity in slightly different ways. Arzheimer and Carter (2009), whose data come from 2002,
found no overall link between religiosity and anti-immigrant attitudes, although in France and
Switzerland, the religious were slightly more likely to vote for the radical right. Immerzeel,
Jaspers and Lubbers (2013) followed this up with data from 2008 by examining both the prac-
tice and belief dimensions of religion. They show that religious involvement, in general, leads
to lower levels of support for the PRR, but what they describe as ‘orthodox believers’ in some
countries are more likely than ‘mainstream believers’ to vote for these parties. Both these stud-
ies relied on data for voting in Western European countries, but more recent scholarship has
tried to incorporate the East–West comparison. Montgomery and Winter (2015) expanded on
Arzheimer and Carter’s findings to include cases from post-communist Eastern Europe using
data from 2010. They found that higher levels of Christian religiosity are weakly or negatively
associated with voting for the PRR and holding populist attitudes associated with PRR party
support. Interestingly though, they found significant positive correlations between Christian
religiosity and nativism in Western Europe but did not find a strong relationship between
religiosity and nativism in Eastern Europe. The exception to their findings was Poland, where
Christian religiosity was consistent with populist attitudes and church-attending Catholics share

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a national-conservative-authoritarian worldview and vote for PRR parties such as PiS. These
differences between East and West are also confirmed by Allen (2017), who shows that PRR
voters in Western Europe are less religious than their post-communist counterparts and that
mobilizing on religious ties is a more profitable strategy in the East.
The Polish case is certainly intriguing but also difficult to interpret in a country where
the vast majority of citizens still declare themselves as Catholic. The situation is further com-
plicated by the way surveys are designed as they rarely ask respondents to declare the extent
to which their political choices are motivated by religious ‘belonging’ and ‘believing’ but also
rarely ask questions directly intended to measure populist attitudes (Stanley 2016). Most stud-
ies consider the populist electorate, and support for parties like LPF and PiS, to be tied to the
‘closed’ Catholicism type, although this too can mask other sociological divides. For instance, it
is common to refer to ‘Poland A’ associated with the more prosperous west of the country and
the major cities and ‘Poland B’ in the East and rural areas where support for PiS dominates. In
her analysis of religiosity and voting behaviour in Poland since 1989, Grabowska (2017) finds
that church attendance has certainly influenced electoral behaviour. Participation in religious
practices heightened the likelihood of participation in elections and church attendance helped
to shape party preferences. Concerning the period 2005–2015, she found that

in choosing PiS in all the parliamentary elections, as well as in voting for that party’s
candidates in the presidential elections—Lech Kaczyński in 2005, Jarosław Kaczyński
in 2010, and Andrzej Duda in 2015—church attendance did have a definite influence.
In other words, participation in religious practices raised the likelihood of voting for
PiS and its candidates for president.
(Grabowska 2017: 272)

Church-attending Catholics in Poland may be particularly attracted to PiS as a party that is not
only ideologically conservative, promoting the traditional values most cherished by ‘Poland B’,
but one that is also actively supported by the Catholic Church. In 2015, when it won an overall
parliamentary majority, the Church ‘refrained from overt campaigning, but its support played a
major if indirect role in the PiS victory. The Church helped to keep core PiS voters on board
even as the party tacked rhetorically to the centre’ (Fomina and Kucharczyk 2016: 61). To this,
we can also add the support given to the party from the radio station Radio Maryja and reli-
gious TV channel Telewizja Trwam.

Responding to the use of religion by populists

In terms of support, albeit implicit, from Church authorities for a populist party, Poland again
appears as the outlier in both Western and Eastern Europe. The use of religion by populists
in their appeals to voters has, more often than not, been routinely condemned across various
denominations. In particular, the xenophobic anti-immigration attitudes of PRR parties are
difficult to square with the Christian ideal of ‘love thy neighbour’ and ‘given that Church lead-
ers can be considered part of society’s elites and that they usually advocate charity and accept-
ance of immigrants, there are many obvious reasons why right-wing populists could come into
conflict with Christian Churches’ (Marzouki and McDonnell 2016: 7). Opposition to populists
may be expressed by local level religious groups and leaders as well as national representa-
tives and senior clergy. In the UK, senior figures from the Anglican, Catholic and Methodist
Churches have condemned the BNP, and in 2009, the Archbishops of Canterbury and York
released a statement urging people not to vote for the party (Peace 2016). In the same year, the

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 Timothy Peace

Ecumenical Church Council in Austria that represents fourteen Christian Churches, responded
to the FPÖ’s ‘The West in Christian hands’ slogan by declaring that ‘it was opposed to any
exploitation of the Christian faith during electoral campaigns’ (Hadj-Abdou 2016: 42). Likewise,
in the Netherlands, Geert Wilders has come in for criticism from the ecumenical Council of
Churches, as well as individual leaders in both the Protestant and Catholic Churches (Kessel
2016). As a response to such criticisms, populist parties often accuse Church authorities of being
far from the people, not looking after their ‘true interests’ and being influenced by the ‘politically
correct’ left. The SVP has found itself on numerous occasions at odds with both Protestant and
Roman Catholic Churches in Switzerland and has even made pronouncements on what the
role of these Churches should be. In one manifesto, the party claimed to be opposed to ‘biased
pronouncements by Church functionaries based on left-wing ideology … [and] egalitarian,
socialist interpretations of the Christian message’ (cited in Mazzoleni 2016: 52). Similarly, in
Italy, the Lega and its leader Salvini uses classic populist ideas about contrasting out of touch
elites with the ‘real people’ by differentiating between the ‘bad elites of the Church hierarchy
and the “good” local northern priests’ (McDonnell 2016: 27).
The ‘refugee crisis’ and its aftermath has brought conflicts between religious figures and
populist parties in Europe to the fore. Churches and Christian charities/non-governmental
organizations (NGOs) have been on the frontline in terms of welcoming and integrating asylum
seekers and refugees. This has angered populist politicians who have argued that the Church
should be prioritizing helping its ‘own people’ first and that such charitable actions merely
encourage further migration. Another common accusation is that religious groups are only
getting involved in refugee work in order to enrich themselves. In 2016, Petr Bystron, the head
of the AfD in Bavaria, alleged that German Churches were earning ‘billions of euros per year’
from the arrival of refugees in Europe and singled out the Catholic charity Caritas and the
Lutheran Diakonische Werk (Diaconical Mission) for particular criticism (Deutsche Welle 2016).
In a similar vein, Matteo Salvini has constantly suggested that NGOs who help migrants, includ-
ing those with links to the Catholic Church, are simply motivated by the money that can be
made by using state funds for refugee integration. During his time as Minister of the Interior
(2018–2019), he regularly came into conflict with Church officials and accused them of being
too generous with migrants:

I have been attacked by some leaders in Caritas and by some priests … because we
[Italian government] reduced the daily allowance for migrants from 35 to 21 euros …
if you’re so generous, you can take care of them with less money, or were you welcom-
ing them in order to make money?
(Cernuzio 2019)

Since the ‘refugee crisis’, Salvini has been increasingly critical of the Catholic Church and
its leadership while at the same time professing a public commitment to faith. The numer-
ous pronouncements of Pope Francis on the importance of welcoming migrants have been
derided, and the legitimacy of the Pontiff questioned – something that even just a few years
previously would have been considered a step too far in a country like Italy. Salvini is seeking
to exploit the ideological divide in the Italian Catholic Church, and even within the Vatican
itself, which pits liberals who focus on Catholic social teaching and conservatives who repre-
sent the ‘Salvinization of the faith’ (Ferraresi 2019). The Pope has replied to this challenge in
kind by warning in several interviews of the dangers of the rise in populism, a clear reference
to Salvini, and such comments have drawn scorn from other populist leaders such as Marine
Le Pen (Le Figaro 2019). The power of populists in government has not just undermined the

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Pope’s authority in Italy, as the Polish Catholic Church is also reluctant to welcome migrants,
and the Hungarian Catholic Church also ‘went against the statements of Pope Francis, and
acted as a national organisation loyal to the government before the Vatican’ (Ádám and Bozóki
2016: 144).

Conclusion
This chapter has shown how populists in Europe engage in both the overt and covert dimen-
sions of religious populism. The key driver for this phenomenon is Islamophobia and the desire
to promote a civilizational clash between the ‘West’ and ‘Islam’. The traditional xenophobia and
nativism of the PRR that focused on ‘immigrants’ and ‘foreigners’ without denoting particular
religious characteristics now invariably perceives and racializes them as ‘Muslims’. As has been
highlighted by the contributions to the most recent edited collections on the topic (Marzouki,
McDonnell and Roy 2016, De Hanas and Shterin 2019), religion has been ‘hijacked’ or ‘co-
opted’ by populist forces rather than what we might define as a genuine spiritual conversion.
Religion functions as a relevant context factor and frame for political mobilization (Minkenberg
2018), but the PRR cannot be classified as ‘religious parties’. The recent resurgence of the use
of religion by populists in the mostly secularized societies of Europe has very little to do with
genuine Christian faith and religious adherence as commonly understood. It is not a substantive
Christianity but a secularized notion of Christianity-as-culture, a civilizational and identitarian
‘Christianism’ (Brubaker 2017).What is being mobilized is not religion at all but merely culture.
Olivier Roy (2019) also notes that in Europe, populists often appropriate Christian symbols
for political ends while discarding the religion’s core values. What they are pushing is a form of
‘Cultural Christianity’ which functions as an identity marker rather than a value system. Until
recently, studies that addressed the relationship between religion and populism were still thin on
the ground. There is now a surge of interest in this topic (Arato and Cohen 2019, Molle 2019,
Ozzano 2019, Palaver 2019, Wagenvoorde 2019, Schwörer and Romero-Vidal 2020). What is
needed now are comparisons between the use of religious populism in the West and other parts
of the world. For example, the BJP in India offers

an enlightening comparison with Western cases, both in terms of the construction of

‘the other’ and how the party reconciles the complexities of caste within its concep-
tion of the Hindu ‘people’. This may have points of contact with how some Western
right-wing populists subsume long-standing Catholic-Protestant differences within
the frame of a Christian people under siege from the Muslim ‘other’.
(McDonnell and Cabrera 2019: 496)

A further area for study would be on how the religious react to their faith being ‘hijacked’ and
what practical steps Churches and faith-based organizations are taking to resist the populist
wave.

Notes
1 The video can be viewed at https​:/​/ww​​w​.you​​tube.​​com​/w​​atch?​​v​=hWo​​​9OtXS​​U​-8.
2 A truly global account of the phenomenon is not possible within the constraints of this chapter but the
cases of populists harnessing religion in other parts of the world are covered in other chapters in this
volume. I have also deliberately avoided discussing the situation of Orthodox Christianity despite the
fact that there is often a close relationship between populist nationalism, Orthodox national Churches
and their adherents.

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 Timothy Peace

3 Inclusionary populists are now a significant feature of Southern European party systems too (Font,
Graziano and Tsakatika 2021).
4 This tactic started in 2000 when pig urine was poured on land set aside for the construction of a
mosque in Lodi and in 2007, prominent LN politician Roberto Calderoli even called for a ‘pig-day
against Islam’ (Betz and Meret 2009).
5 We can also note at this same time the emergence of the so-called ‘counter-jihad’ movement, based on
the belief that Islam and the West are at war, inspired the emergence of Islamophobic street movements
such as the English Defence League (EDL). This movement also influenced the discourse of the most
extreme parties such as the BNP, PVV and the Sweden Democrats.
6 It should be noted that at the EU summit on 15th September 2015, the Polish minister originally voted
in support of the EU relocation plan, a decision for which the Polish government was roundly criti-
cized by other leaders of the Visegrad Group. The PiS government was voted into power one month
later.

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 11
ANARCHISM AND RELIGION
Erik Ringmar

Anarchism is first and foremost a disposition (Oakeshott 1962, 168).1 To be an anarchist is to

be disposed to think and behave in certain ways; to prefer certain kinds of conduct and condi-
tions; to make certain choices (Graeber 2009; Chomsky 2005; Scott 2012; Fiala 2018). Although
anarchists embrace different policies, contradict each other and occasionally themselves, the
disposition is in all cases the same.To be of an anarchist disposition is to be defiant of authorities
and exercises of power, to reject hierarchical relationships and institutions, to be suspicious of
established ways and conventional morality. Anarchists are sceptical of social norms and prefabri-
cated rules of action. Instead, they insist on universal freedom and equality and put their faith in
self-help and self-organization. Anarchists are followers of Groucho, not Karl, Marx. An anarchist
political party is a contradiction in terms, and even the notion of an “ideology” is probably too
constraining. The quintessential anarchist party is a flash mob, and its ideology is best spray-
painted on city walls (Vaneigem 1967; Debord 1994).
The state is the traditional enemy of all anarchists.The reason is the state’s claim to sovereignty
and the associated insistence on a monopoly on the legitimate use of violence. Sovereignty
means that the state is above the law, but if that is the case, anarchists point out, no one is in a
position to legitimately challenge it, and dissent is turned into a crime. Right-wing anarchists
reject the state’s right to regulate the behaviour of individuals, and they object to paying taxes –
“taxation is theft.”2 Instead, they insist on the right of individuals to make their own decisions.
Economic markets are crucial here since they allow individual choices to be coordinated in a
decentralized fashion. Left-wing anarchists, on the other hand, insist that power is illegitimately
exercised not only by the state but also by markets. Since economic power is unevenly distrib-
uted, workers and consumers are exploited, and only a small minority gets rich – “property is
theft” (Proudhon 1848, 1). Although left-wing anarchists share the Marxist critique of capital-
ism, they object strongly to the idea of a “dictatorship of the proletariat.” All dictatorships are
bad, and political power should instead be vested in self-governing, egalitarian communities.

“No gods, no masters”

As far as religion is concerned, the vast majority of anarchists are scathing. Anti-religious tracts
featured prominently among the writings of the first generations of anarchists, and they are
written to this day. Classical pamphlets include Pierre-Joseph Proudhon’s, “God Is Evil Man

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 Erik Ringmar

Is Free” (1849), Mikhail Bakunin’s God and the State (1970), Sébastien Faure, “Douze preuves
de l'inexistence de Dieu,” (1909), and Emma Goldman’s, The Philosophy of Atheism (1913)
(Proudhon 1849; Bakunin 1970; Faure 1908; Goldman 1916). But there are many other texts
which make the same arguments, including entries in the Encyclopédie Anarchiste (1930) (Brocher
1930; Berneri 1930; Barbedette 1930; Pelletier 1930; Blanqui and Dommanget 2009). A more
recent example is De l’inhumanité de la religion (2000) by the anarchist and soixante-huitard Raoul
Vaneigem (Vaneigem 2000).
Gods, anarchists explain, are if anything more detrimental to human freedom than kings
since (1) their power is infinitely greater, and (2) they do not exist. In their omnipotence, gods
make human beings powerless and subservient; before their majesty, there is nothing for us to
do but prostrate ourselves and confess our sins. Meanwhile, their non-existence points to the
existence of a widespread conspiracy. Someone or something has convinced us to believe in this
mirage, no doubt because someone or something stands to benefit from our gullibility (Bakunin
1970, 16). Anarchists have taken it upon themselves to expose this hoax. Anarchist authors, that
is, share in a general post-Enlightenment prejudice which sees religion as a remnant of the Dark
Ages, but there is at the same time a particular vociferousness, a misotheism, to their rhetoric.3
By swearing in church, the anarchists believe they can jolt people out of their complacency. But
in addition, blasphemy helps the anarchists assert their credentials as rabble-rousers. A number of
slogans make the same point: “No gods, no masters!”, “God is evil, man is free!”, “If God really
existed, it would be necessary to abolish him!” (Bakunin 1970, 28).
The biggest problem, anarchists explain, is religion’s long-standing support of political
oppression. This connection can be traced back to the very first states some 12,000 years ago
(Vaneigem 2000, chap. 2; Goldman 1913; 1916).The rulers of Mesopotamia were not only kings
but also gods who promised good harvests in return for obedience and taxes. Their societies
were as hierarchical as their ziggurats, and it was the God/king on top who was in charge. We
find the same theocratic dictatorship in all early agricultural societies. The Pharaohs of Egypt
were also gods, and they too controlled their societies from atop pyramids, and so did the
God/kings of pre-Columbian America. In imperial China, the emperor was designated “Son of
Heaven,” with a “Heavenly Mandate,” which the subjects questioned only at the pain of death.
And the need for divine backing has not diminished over time. In early modern Europe, kings
ruled by “divine right,” invoking biblical passages to prove that ordinary people must defer to
their authority. In Protestant countries, kings made themselves heads of the Church and forced
their subjects to attend regular church services, turning political disobedience into a religious
crime (Olli 2008, 457–70).
A related problem is the close connection between religion and warfare. As anarchists point
out, religions have always helped justify violence against foreigners (Landauer 2010b, 84–91;
Ellul 1991). Religious denominations that have enjoyed the protection of the state have hap-
pily given their blessings to the state’s wars. After all, what good is a God who cannot defeat the
enemies of his people? Indeed, to this day, most wars are fought “with God on our side.” And
admittedly, from a sociological point of view, the connection between religion and violence is
easily explained. Religion is a strong marker of identity. It is one of the easiest ways to tell people
apart, especially if the practices of the religion in question make its believers stand out in some
fashion. As a result, ethnic conflicts in Northern Ireland, Lebanon, Sri Lanka, the Philippines,
and more or less everywhere else, have turned into “religious conflicts.”
Another issue that anarchist authors commonly mention is the connection between religion
and capitalism. Religions often encourage their followers to focus on otherworldly goods, but
in practice, this only means that they are encouraged to accept injustices. Capitalism is a pre-
eminent example. Capitalism exploits the many and enriches the few, anarchists insist; it under-

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develops the world while undermining traditional ways of life; it raids nature for resources
while destroying the environment. Marx was wrong about many things, they explain, but he
was right about capitalism, and he was right about religion too, which really is “the opium of
the people”(Bakunin 1970, 16; McKinnon 2005, 15–38). And if people refuse to be sedated and
decide to rise up, they are told by the religious authorities that it is not for man to judge, but
for God, and that justice will be found in the world to come. Baked goods will be served to us
after our deaths.
In addition, religion exercises a nefarious power of its own (Goldman 1913; 1916). Religious
institutions are authoritarian and repressive and require their adherents to bow their heads and
live their lives in fear of divine retribution. Catholicism, in particular, has a bureaucratic struc-
ture and a hierarchical chain of command in relation to which believers are utterly helpless.
Controlling access to the sacraments, the Church monopolized access to the divine, and only
the sufficiently obedient qualified for its services. God’s judgement, we are always told, will be
swift and merciless, and most of us are destined to burn, alternatively rot, in hell. In addition, and
lowering the tone, anarchists have often reiterated traditional anticlerical talking points – priests
are stupid, lazy, and often drunk, monastics are gluttons and sexually depraved, and so on. “There
is no freedom until the last aristocrat is hanged with the entrails of the last priest!”4 Much the
same arguments apply to other religions. Islam, for its part, literally means “submission,” and
requires its adherents to practice five daily prostrations, meaning that they constantly are placed
in a supplicant position. Judaism, likewise, disciplines its believers by ensnarling them in the
minutia of assorted hard-to-explain rules and regulations.
Anarchists object to the very language of religion – all those disciplinarian, authoritarian
tropes (Bakunin 1970). Thus the God of Christians, Jews, and Muslims is said to be not only
omnipotent, omniscient, and omnipresent, but immanent, immutable, impassable, impeccable,
and so on. In Islam, God has 99 names – All-Compassionate, Most Merciful, Exalted in Might
and Power, and 96 others. The Abrahamic God is sexist too – He is always a “he,” a “father,” a
“master,” or “king.” Even referring to Jesus as a “shepherd” is problematic since shepherds are
male and in a position of absolute power in relation to their flocks. Indeed, anarchists are likely
to question even the most benign phrases. Talk of “love,” and “peace,” and “meekness,” and of
how “blessed” the poor are supposed to be, is nothing but attempts to pacify us and make us
forget about the upcoming revolution. The Garden of Eden, so enthusiastically reviewed in the
Christian tradition, was actually a prison in which human beings were kept in a state of per-
petual ignorance. Among anarchists, even Heaven has its detractors. As long as Heaven is ruled
by an omnipotent God, there will be no eternal bliss (Bakunin 1970; Goldman 1913; 1916).

A question of legitimacy
It is at the same time impossible to object to power as such. There are many kinds of power,
after all, and many different ways to exercise it. We generally do not object to, say, the power of
love or the power of logic. And in any case, the relevant issue is not power, but whether or not
power, however defined, is exercised legitimately. Legitimacy, in turn, requires a source, and all
exercises of power must be authorized in some fashion. Compare what anarchists say about the
state (Scott 2012, xiii–xvi). Although all states are bad, they are not all equally bad. A welfare state
with democratic institutions is, for example, more legitimate than an authoritarian kleptocracy.
Civil liberties and regular elections are not enough to constitute a proper democracy, an anar-
chist will insist, but it is still an improvement over political systems that are considerably much
worse. It is consequently possible, at least in theory, to imagine a state which, if only radically
reconstructed, would be legitimate also in the eyes of anarchists (Wolff 1998).

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The same argument could be made in relation to religion. A distinction between power and
its legitimate exercise will show that not all religions are equal, and not all of them are equally
reprehensible. After all, while one God may lay claims to unlimited power, and do so with little
legitimacy, another God may have more modest pretensions, and for that reason, be more palat-
able. For example, in a polytheistic religion, the power of each God will by logical necessity be
more circumscribed than the power of a God in a monotheistic religion. Not all gods are gods of
the sky, as it were, who can see everything and judge us all from the vantage point of their lofty
perch. Some gods are gods of the earth. They are local gods who dwell in particular locations
and enjoy only limited jurisdictions. Earth gods are in charge of certain things, at certain times,
but their power apart from that is limited. And while anarchists still will reject them, they are less
likely to get upset by them. In theory, we could imagine gods who are so inoffensive that even
anarchists would not object to their (non)existence.
The fact that the founding generation of anarchists ignored such diversity reveals the
Eurocentric bias of their thought. Their rhetoric, and their misotheism, can only be successfully
applied to the Abrahamic God. There have been anarchist movements outside of Europe too, of
course – in Japan, China, and throughout South America for example – but at least in the case
of Asia, the anti-religious arguments have been wide off their targets (Hirsch and Van der Walt
2010; Anderson 2005; Graham 2004). The Shinto gods of Japan, for example, are quintessential
gods of the earth, and Daoists in China worship “life forces” rather than gods, properly speaking.
Buddhism, for its part, is an explicitly atheistic, godless religion. Buddhism and anarchism are not
necessarily in contradiction with each other.
Societies also differ in the extent to which the religious institutions let themselves be used for
political ends. In medieval political theory, it was common to make a distinction between “the
two swords” – one sword denoting the power of the Church, the other the power of political
rulers (von Gierke 1900, 9–21). The discussion among political theorists at the time concerned
the relationship between the two. According to some writers, kings should be subject to the
Church rather than the other way around, and that gave all the power to the Pope in Rome.
The more common view, however, was that the two swords were separate and that the Church
and the state ruled in their own independent spheres. This gave kings more freedom, but it
also made it more difficult for them to appropriate the trappings of religion in support of their
political aims.
The same issue arises in all monotheistic religions. That is, the absolute claims of God and
the absolute claims of kings have to be adjudicated in some fashion. In the case of Islam, this is
squarely done in favour of the divine (Crone 2005). All political authority is subject to God, and
politicians who fail to acknowledge this fact are illegitimate by definition. While the first four
caliphs who succeeded the Prophet were righteous and wise, all subsequent rulers have been
considerably less so. Hence the calls to revive the caliphate. There is a powerful critique of the
state here which anarchists have failed to fully consider. If the representatives of a religion decide
that political power is an abomination in the eyes of God, invocations of the divine cannot be
used to support the legitimacy of the rulers. Such a religion would be as critical of political
authority as the anarchists themselves.

Religious anarchists
There are not many anarchists who are religious believers, but there are some, and this com-
bination of commitments is intriguing (Christoyannopoulos and Apps 2017; Van Steenwyk
2012; Eller 1987; Christoyannopoulos 2006; Christoyannopoulos and Adams 2017;Walter 1991;
Christoyannopoulos et al. 2017; “www​.jesusradicals​.com” 2020) In the minds of religious anar-

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chists, a rejection of the power of the state is combined with an acceptance of the power of God.
The power of God has legitimacy, the argument must be, which the state lacks. The question
is only what the source of divine legitimacy might be. Given their instinctive scepticism of all
authorities, religious anarchists are unlikely to be converted for any of the traditional reasons.
Traditional sources of religious beliefs are too obviously manipulative, and unless they are caught
unawares, anarchists are likely to resist them (Barclay 2002; Crone 2005; Fiscella 2009; Morris
2007). And sure enough, religious anarchists often try to undermine the traditional authorities
of their own faith (Meggitt 2017).They are critical of the hierarchical nature of religious institu-
tions and accepted rituals and suspicious also towards received interpretations and conventional
beliefs.
Many religious anarchists are also struggling with ways to reinterpret passages in their sacred
texts that fail to fit with their political creed. For example, the passage where Jesus tells his fol-
lowers to “render unto Caesar that which is Caesar’s” is not, on the face of it, supportive of an
anarchist outlook (Christoyannopoulos 2013). In general, anarchist believers point out, Jesus
taught in parables, and parables are open to different interpretations. We should always prefer
the interpretation that gives the least comfort to people in power. And what exactly did Jesus
have in mind with his constant references to “the Kingdom of God” (Meggitt 2017, 138–51)?
Surely he did not envision some kind of theocratic dictatorship! Rather, say anarchist believers,
the Kingdom of God is a community made up of poor and marginal people who share their
religious faith, but also everything else. The Kingdom of God is the ideal anarchist community.
Given such scepticism, we may wonder why religious anarchists are religious in the first
place. The only authority that could convince them, it seems, would be an authority without
authority. Or rather, their faith would have to be established on some alternative basis. For a
suggestion of how it could work, consider Bakunin’s argument in God and the State concerning
the power of nature (Bakunin 1970). As an anarchist, you might object to the laws of nature, yet
doing so will quickly identify you as a fool, and not even anarchists are likely to rally behind a
cry to “repeal gravity!” The reason no one does is that the laws of nature are inescapable. But
for the laws of nature, we would not live in the world where we live, and we would not be
the kinds of beings we take ourselves to be (Bakunin 1970, 29–34).You can imagine religious
anarchists making a similar argument. We believe, they might say, because we see God in the
world around us and in the eyes of the persons we love. If God is a force of nature, we cannot
deny his existence without involving ourselves in self-contradiction. But this is not, at the same
time, to say that we must believe everything that the representatives of religious institutions
tell us. Religious institutions are human inventions, after all, and as such, necessarily partial and
flawed (Maritain 1951, 473–81). What religious anarchists end up with here, in other words,
is a version of deism. They are referring to God as a life-force – something like a cornucopia
from which life continuously issues forth – or perhaps as a structure that undergirds the uni-
verse. Deism, however, is not a particularly inspiring faith, and this conclusion is unlikely to
win many converts.
An alternative is to base one’s faith on the legitimacy provided by direct revelation. We
believe since God has revealed himself to us. We had a vision; a booming voice suddenly spoke;
we felt a tangible presence. Other people may question such experiences, of course, but to us
they are as real as anything we might experience.We believe in God for the same reason that we
believe that roses are red and the sky is blue. As such, direct revelation has a number of subversive
implications which fit nicely with an anarchist disposition. After all, if you have your own per-
sonal access to God, there is no reason to defer to either political or religious authorities. There
is no need to drink bottled water, as it were, if we can drink directly from the source. Kings who
say they rule by divine right are consequently blasphemers, and religious leaders who claim to

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speak in God’s name are serving false gods. For the same reason, religious anarchists will have
scant regard for conventional morality, leading, in some cases, to some eccentric lifestyle choices.
We are on a mission from God, so what if we walk around naked?5
Religious authorities never know quite what to do with people like this.They are difficult to
dismiss. After all, even the most bureaucratic creed presupposes some form of religious experi-
ences. And if God indeed has appeared among us and left some people to bear witness to this
fact, it is difficult for religious authorities to reject them out of hand. However, accepting such
prophets constitutes an obvious risk. If ordinary people have established direct access to God,
they have no reason to turn to the Church, and if the Church loses its monopoly on the sacra-
ments, it loses everything. In addition, there is also the distinct possibility that the prophets in
question may be charlatans or cranks. As a result, the medieval Church had rigid criteria for how
to assess visionaries and their visions (Holdsworth 1963, 141–53; Cohn 1970).Visions that were
deemed false were rejected, and the visionaries persecuted; visions that were deemed true were
accepted, and the visionaries incorporated into the institutional framework of the Church. The
reformers of the Reformation faced the same challenge. While they too derived their legiti-
macy from their independent access to God, they were less than keen on other reformers who
made the same claims. Martin Luther, for one, repeatedly wrote of the sin of “antinomianism”
– anti-nomos referring to those who are “against the law” – and he was involved in a number of
“antinomian controversies” (Hall 1990).
Every religion has believers who claim the authority of direct revelation, and most religions
struggle with what to do with people like that. Judaism, for example, has had antinomian con-
troversies of its own, with independent religious entrepreneurs who reject the authority of the
Torah (Magid 2005). In Islam, Sufi mystics swirl their way to religious revelations, and they
too have established their independent religious institutions; Alevis like to dance as well, and
they prefer home-cooked ritual meals to regular mosque attendance (Karamustafa 1994). The
adherents of Buddhist sects like Zen explicitly search for independent religious experiences,
which effectively makes antinomianism into the religious norm (Rapp 2012; Onians 2002;
Galván-Álvarez 2017, 78–123). Finally, in Hinduism, each sadhu, or holy man, goes off on his
own, bringing his disciples with him. Religious anarchists highly approve of alternatives such as
these, and they see direct revelation as a foundation for non-coercive forms of worship. More
importantly, perhaps, direct revelation proves that God is here right now and present in our lives.

The religious community

People who claim to have received messages from God tend to attract followers, and the fol-
lowers tend to create communities for themselves. Many of these communities have, at least in
theory and to begin with, been ruled by entirely different principles than traditional political
communities. They have often been egalitarian and democratic, and, at least in principle, with-
out hierarchies or exploitation; there has been mutuality, self-help, and self-rule; property has
been held in common, and some have even abolished traditional families, including monoga-
mous sexual relations. For believers, this is a society designed according to religious principles,
but it is also a society very close to anarchist ideals (Critchley 2009, 283).
In Europe’s Middle Ages, the most obvious examples of this kind of community were the
monasteries. Renouncing the world and all worldly goods, monks and nuns devoted themselves
to a life of prayer and contemplation; they owned things together, referred to each other as
“brothers” and “sisters,” and so on. The monastic orders were recognized by the authorities of
the Church, and as a result, they managed to defend the structure of their alternative societies.
This was not the case with the sects that sprung up around various freelancing spiritual leaders

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– the Brethren of the Free Spirit, Petrobrusians, Waldensians, Neo-Adamites, and many others
(Cohn 1970). The aim of these groups was to recreate the world in the image of the revela-
tions they had received, and this often put them in conflict with the authorities. Before long,
they were excommunicated and persecuted. Such conflicts intensified with the establishment
of sovereign states in early modern Europe. Now the visionaries were not only bypassing the
sacraments of the Church, but also the state’s own attempts to monopolize access to the divine.
After all, people who can invite God directly into their homes are unlikely to attend state-
sponsored church services. These religious entrepreneurs were known as “enthusiasts” – people
“filled with the spirit of God” – and enthusiasm was roundly condemned. Religious persecution
brought many of these groups to the Americas, and some are still there – the Amish, Hutterites,
Mennonites, Doukhobors, and a few others (Cohn 1970).
We find similar social experiments in other religions. Members of the Buddhist sangha, the
monastic community, are living in poverty and brotherhood, and it was originally organized
according to perfectly democratic principles (Mishra 2005, 280–92). In Hinduism, there are
ashrams, religious retreats, that have turned their back on the world, including the demands
of its political authorities (Skaria 2002). In Islam, some sects have drawn the conclusion that
since it is next to impossible for political leaders to rule in accordance with divine law, it is
better to abolish political leaders altogether (Crone 2000, 9–11). Thus, the Mu’tazilites and
Kharijites in ninth-century Basra, in southern Iraq, accepted that while a righteous ruler one
day may emerge, it is in the meantime better if the community can rule itself (Crone 2000,
12–19).
However, in practice, many of these communities were never all that close to anarchist ideals.
Some were always guided by different principles, and many fell away from their high-minded
principles over the course of time. For one thing, as spoken to by God, the leaders of the
congregations would always have a privileged position in relation to regular members, and in
some cases, the groups turned into personality cults. Egalitarian and democratic principles were
difficult to live up to, and property was not held in common; sexual exploitation and mistreat-
ment of members were institutionalized. And if nothing else, as their size and wealth increased
over time, the sects grew increasingly bureaucratic. Large organizations need structures, formal
rules, and chains of command. While these patterns are obvious in the case of Christian sects,
the same patterns recur in other religions. Sufi sects are run by religiously inspired leaders who
have tended to pass their positions on to their children, creating what in effect is a religious
aristocracy (Karamustafa 1994). Buddhist and Hindu sects, with their master/disciple structure,
are hierarchical by definition, and whatever equality that exists can exist only among the masters.
But even here, distinctions are made – between masters of different ranks and level of spiritual
achievements. In Buddhism and Hinduism too sexual and other forms of exploitation are not
unheard of.
By closing themselves off and by organizing themselves in their own fashion, independent
religious communities have often had a fraught relationship with the rest of society (Cohn
1970). A badly concealed sense of superiority has antagonized outsiders, who have resented their
preachiness and holier-than-thou attitude. In addition, the eschatological fantasies propagated
by some sects have been premised on a Manichean division between good and evil. In the case
of Christian sects, the enemy is always the Antichrist, some version of the Devil, who must be
defeated before God’s kingdom can be established here on earth. The Antichrist is then associ-
ated with the enemies of the sect – the king, the established Church, but often just any outsider
or marginalized group such as the Jews. In the final Armageddon, violence will purify the earth,
and good will conquer evil (Critchley 2009, 283; Beavis 2004). Such self-righteous utopianism
is often totalitarian and far removed from anarchist ideals.

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God, anarchist
Religious anarchists, we said, display an intriguing combination of commitments. Religious
anarchists reject the power of the state while accepting the power of God.The power of God has
a legitimacy, they claim, which the state lacks. And while it never is quite clear what the sources
of that legitimacy might be, there is an alternative way to think about God, which solves that
problem. Here anarchist thought has a contribution to make to theological debates regarding
the nature of God.
What such an anarchist theology would look like is quite clear. God, the anarchist, is a God
who is stripped of most of his attributes and with far fewer than 99 names to his name. Above
all, this is a God who exercises no power. It is not a creator God, not a legislator God, and not a
miracle worker God either. An anarchist God has no idea where the world came from and has
nothing much to say regarding questions of morality. This God makes no promises that things
will work out for the best in the end. However, it is not a God who suffers from theodicy related
problems, and radical evil is perfectly compatible with his existence. As a consequence, an anar-
chist God asks for no submission and no devotion. In fact, even the word “God” is likely to make
him feel uncomfortable, and in any case, the word should not be capitalized. God, the anarchist,
is not a “he” either, and if it was not for the grammatical inconvenience of it, he would much
prefer to be referred to as “he/she/it.” An anarchist God is entirely different, in other words,
from the jealous author of the Ten Commandments or from the Allah of the Qur’an. God, the
anarchist, does not mind if we fool around with other divinities. “Enjoy yourselves; we have an
open relationship!”
Established religions sometimes talk about their gods in similar terms. Thus Jesus, for exam-
ple, is often portrayed as an outcast and a misfit, a friend of the poor and as a poor person him-
self, or as a helpless human being dying on a cross.Yet, the role Jesus is playing here is only the
prelude to the eventual apotheosis. Jesus is the fall guy who has to die in order for God to display
his resurrectionary powers, but he is also the ultimate comeback kid who one day will make his
triumphal return. In the Second Coming, everyone will be judged, and everything will be set
aright. While an anarchist theology accepts the first part of this story, it rejects the second part.
God, the anarchist, cannot resurrect his son, and Jesus never returns to earth. In brief, Jesus and
his alleged father are both quite useless.There is nothing much they can do for us. But, one may
wonder, what is the point of a God like that?
One possibility is that the anarchists’ God could serve us humans as a conversation partner
(Whitehead 1978; 1927; Epperly 2011). It is good to talk; everyone needs someone to talk to,
and human beings first and foremost have God. “God hears prayer,” established religions insist,
but by that, they simply mean that God grants favours to those who are sufficiently supplicant in
their attitude.The gods that established religions make available to us are like kings who listen to
petitions presented by humble subjects. An anarchist God, by contrast, is engaging with us as an
equal partner in a real conversation. He takes a genuine interest; he actually wants to hear what
we have to say.“God is the great companion – the fellow-sufferer who understands” (Whitehead
1978, 351). But God, the anarchist, not only listens, but he also talks, and if we only paid proper
attention for once, we would realize that he is constantly trying to communicate with us. But
here, as always, in a conversation between equals, no ad hominem argumentation is allowed. We
should have no patience with Godsplaining (“Feminist Dismisses Bible As ‘Godsplaining’” 2017)
God, for all we know, may be wrong, or perhaps he has not thought things through properly.
God is “love” say many religions, but the love that is extended to us here is always the
love granted by an authority figure. In Christianity, it is usually “our heavenly father” who is
said to love “his children.” That is, the love in question always features as a part of an unequal

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relationship. But love is antithetical to all exercises of power. Try as we might, we cannot force
someone to love us. But love is antithetical to market transactions too. Love is not a matter of
a quid for a quo, and God does not prove his love for us by getting us stuff. Rather, God, the
anarchist, loves us in a perfectly non-authoritarian fashion. Since God is love, he cannot but
love us, and since his love is unconditional, he does not ask for anything in return. And since
human beings were created in God’s image, we should love both God and other human beings
in exactly the same way. To forget this fact is to forget who we are, and this is what it means
to sin (Ellul 1991, 39).
In many religions, including Christianity in its esoteric versions, the final goal is to transcend
the confines of our individual selves. God’s love, and our love for God, erase the boundaries
between us and the world, between you and me, and allow us to lose ourselves in the cosmos
and in the divine. To a religious anarchist, this is the ultimate renunciation of power (Landauer
2010a; Critchley 2009). It is hard work to be a particular someone, after all, and much of the
hard work requires us to exercise power over ourselves, over our environment, and over other
people.You are supposed to “assert yourself,” “control yourself,” “fulfil yourself,” and follow any
number of similarly vapid self-help suggestions. Anarchists are not immune to such social imper-
atives, and in the stridency of their revolutionary fervour, they may indeed be more self-assertive
than most. It is power games such as these that God, the anarchist, relieves us of. We learn to let
go of ourselves, and with renunciation comes liberation. This inner quest is quite different from
the political agenda which anarchists usually set for themselves, but it is something that God, the
anarchist, can teach us (Landauer 2010a).

Notes
1 Thanks to Alexandre Christoyannopoulos, Jeffrey Haynes, and Yrsa Ringmar for comments and
­suggestions.
2 Nozick 1974, 169–72, 265–68; Cf. Taylor 1982. Right-wing anarchists will not be further discussed in
this article. On this distinction, see Rothbard 2008; Prychitko 1997, 433–55.
3 Cf. Bakunin’s praise of the Devil as “the first freethinker and emancipator of worlds” (Bakunin 1970,
10). Wiktionary defines misotheism as “hatred of God or gods.” https​:/​/en​​.wikt​​ionar​​y​.org​​/wiki​​/miso​​​
theis​​m.
4 Adage ascribed to Jean Meslier, a French priest who after his death was found to have written anti-
religious tracts. Cf. the mass killings of priests by anarchists during the Spanish Civil War (Preston 2012,
221–58).
5 Cf. inter alia the Communism of property and nudity of the Doukhobor community in Canada
(Hardwick 1993); on anabaptism more generally, see Hill (2015); Roth and Stayer (2007).

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 12
RELIGION AND THE ALT-RIGHT
George Hawley

When the so-called Alt-Right, short for “alternative right,” began making its presence
known in American politics, mostly in the context of the 2016 U.S. presidential election, it
garnered an extraordinary amount of attention from journalists, watchdog groups, and schol-
ars. The Alt-Right’s rapid rise seemed shocking to many people. However, the Alt-Right’s
ideology was not new, even if it used novel tactics. At its core, the Alt-Right was the latest
manifestation of the white nationalist movement that has long existed in various forms in
the United States.
The subject of religion and its relationship with the racist right can often be confusing. We
often think of religion and right-wing thought, at least in the U.S., as being closely connected.
The Christian right, for example, has long been an integral element of the American conserva-
tive movement and a critical element of the Republican Party’s electoral coalition. For the white
nationalist right, however, the story is more complicated.White nationalist attitudes toward reli-
gion in general, and Christianity specifically, have often been, at best, ambivalent. Often white
nationalists have been openly hostile to Christianity, viewing it as a barrier to stronger feelings
of white identity and white solidarity in the American public. This ambivalence is also found
in the Alt-Right.
To begin, I should note that, although the term “Alt-Right” remains in wide circulation, the
movement has suffered calamitous decline since its peak in 2016. Following the violent “Unite
the Right” white nationalist rally in Charlottesville,VA, the Alt-Right received unprecedented,
worldwide attention. However, this was also the moment when the movement began to come
apart (Hawley 2018). The negative attention led to massive waves of online deplatforming,
making organizing and spreading Alt-Right propaganda more difficult. It also led to a series of
devastating lawsuits, ruining organizations that already operated on shoe-string budgets. The
event was also a public relations disaster, turning the mass public sharply against the Alt-Right
to a new degree. Since then, the Alt-Right has suffered massive in-fighting and has had great dif-
ficulty maintaining its existing organizations or starting new ones.The term “Alt-Right” is now
considered so toxic that relatively few people still use it as a self-description. Informed observers
may reasonably question whether the Alt-Right even exists as a movement at the time of this
writing (July 2020). It nonetheless deserves continued scholarly attention because the ideas that
motivated the movement remain in circulation, and it is quite likely that a successor movement
will arise in the future, pursuing a similar ideological agenda.

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In this chapter, I will discuss the broad history of religion and its role in U.S. race relations,
noting that Christianity, in particular, has had a complex relationship with racial ideologies,
sometimes supporting white supremacy and sometimes undermining it. I will then explain
the modern white nationalist movement and discuss its relationship with Christianity. I will
also discuss the European New Right and its views on Christianity. This discussion is necessary
because of the significant influence of this European movement on the U.S. Alt-Right.This will
lead into a discussion of the Alt-Right, in which I explain its rise and what made it distinct from
its ideological predecessors, followed by a discussion of the Alt-Right’s views on Christianity –
which were, and are, not monolithic. I will end by speculating on the role of religion and racist
movements in the future.

Religion and race in America: an ambiguous relationship

The relationship between racism and religion in the United States has been extraordinarily
complex. For much of U.S. history, the country was almost universally Christian, at least in
terms of the population’s self-identification, with religious minorities making up just a small
fraction of the nation. However, there was, from the colonial period onward, a dizzying number
of Christian denominations competing for adherents (Finke and Stark 2005). Different denomi-
nations took different positions on the question of slavery, going back to the colonial period.
Quakers, for example, took an early stance against slavery, whereas Anglicans were generally
accepting of the institution (Fischer 1989). In the 19th century, some denominations split over
the issue of slavery. The Southern Baptist Convention, for example, broke with Baptists in the
Northern states because of the latter’s opposition to slavery.
Part of the diversity of opinion on this subject stems from ambiguities within the funda-
mental Christian texts. In both the Old Testament and the New Testament, one will not find
a single verse that explicitly describes slavery as sinful, and many that suggest it is acceptable as
long as slaves are not mistreated. On the other hand, one can also reasonably argue that slavery
goes against the spirit of Christianity, especially the egalitarian message that Jesus preached in
the Gospels.This ambiguity has given Christianity a great deal of flexibility, allowing it to thrive
in a great number of social contexts. Nonetheless, in the years leading up to the U.S. Civil War,
Christian leaders in the North were some of the most vocal proponents of abolition.
Following the Civil War, with the question of slavery permanently settled, there remained no
Christian consensus on the subject of how African Americans should be treated. The defeated
South remained intensely Christian and simultaneously reasserted white supremacy in the
region without apparent religious compunction. At the same time, there were still religious
movements in the U.S. that were intensely devoted to the ideal of racial equality.
The Ku Klux Klan (KKK) is best known for its anti-black racism. However, especially at the
organization’s peak in the 1920s, it also had a strong religious element. The Klan sought not
just to maintain white supremacy in the United States but to ensure the continued dominance
of Protestant Christianity. The group was thus also intensely anti-Catholic and anti-Semitic
(Pegram 2011).
Christianity had a mixed record in the Civil Rights Movement. Martin Luther King Jr’s
status as a Christian minister gave him special credibility in the eyes of many white Christians,
and many Christian leaders, both black and white, played important roles in the fight for racial
justice. Churches played an important institutional role in organizing and supporting civil rights
activists.
Some pro-segregation Southern leaders furthermore recognized that anti-segregation reli-
gious leaders represented a particularly dire threat to the racial order in the South. Charles

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Wallace Collins, one of the most important Southern political strategists behind the “Dixiecrat”
revolt of 1948 (Lowndes 2008), expressed special concern that religious leaders would use the
government to undermine white supremacy in the South.This subject occupied an entire chap-
ter of his manifesto, Whither Solid South (1947).
Nonetheless, it is also true that some of the most vocal voices denouncing racial integra-
tion were white evangelical Christians. In the 1960s, figures like Carl McIntire and Billy James
Hargis had popular radio programmes promoting evangelical Christianity and defending racial
segregation. These programmes were especially important for laying the groundwork for the
subsequent electoral realignment of the American South, as white Southerners abandoned the
increasingly progressive Democratic Party in favour of the more racially conservative Republican
Party (Matzko 2020).
As Southern states were increasingly forced to accept the integration of public schools, a
growing number of segregated private Christian schools were formed throughout the region.
The growth of these “segregation academies” was unquestionably driven, in large part, by racial
concerns, though other social trends, such as greater secularism in public education, were addi-
tional reasons parents sought them out.This way of bypassing school integration came to an end,
however. The Internal Revenue Service began denying the tax-exempt status of educational
institutions that practised racial segregation. This issue, among others, was one of the driving
forces of the Christian right, which began to flex its political muscles in the 1970s, and would
eventually be a major player in the Republican Party and American politics more generally
(Martin 2005). That said, we should not overstate the role of race in contemporary evangeli-
cal thought. We must acknowledge the racial diversity of American evangelicals, as well as the
pro-immigration stances taken by leading conservative evangelical leaders (McAlister 2019). We
should also recognize the distinction between white racial conservatives – those who oppose
greater government efforts to achieve higher levels of racial equality – and explicit white nation-
alists, who articulate a much more radical racist vision.

The origins of post-war white nationalism

Although racism and white supremacy have always played a role in American life, often a cen-
tral role, white nationalism, as we currently understand it, is a relatively young phenomenon,
not really emerging until after World War II. Prior to that point, the notion of a single, unified
“white” race with shared interests across the globe was not a common sentiment in the United
States, though certainly not unheard of. During the height of eugenic thinking, during the pro-
gressive era of the early 20th century, many intellectuals, such as Madison Grant, were focused
on biological distinctions between various European groups. “Nordic” Europeans, for example,
were deemed superior to “Alpines” and “Mediterraneans” (Grant 1916). Although they were
certainly racist toward non-whites, one of their primary political projects was to reduce immi-
gration from those Southern and Eastern European countries whose genetic qualities they
deemed inferior. This would thus maintain the “Nordic” racial characteristics of white America.
These policies would become law in 1924, with the passage of an extremely restrictive national
quotas immigration policy. This began a four-decade period of extremely limited immigration
to the United States (Tichenor 2002). One of the ironies of the immigration restrictions of the
1920s, which contemporary white nationalists often admire, was that one of its biggest long-
term effects was a reduction in the number of Europeans that came to the United States in the
mid-20th century.
In the first decades of the 20th century, most Americans and Europeans took it for granted
that whites would continue to dominate the globe for the foreseeable future. The non-white

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world was not expected to play a significant role in future struggles between great powers.
There were exceptions to this. Oswald Spengler in Germany, for example, warned that Western
powers would soon face threats from abroad, especially if they did not carefully safeguard their
technological advantages. In his short 1931 book, Man and Technics, he pointed to Japan’s vic-
tory in the Russo-Japanese War as evidence for this possibility. In the U.S., Lothrop Stoddard,
a protégé of Madison Grant, was similarly sounding the alarm that the growing demographic
strength of the non-white world would end white supremacy and ultimately destroy the white
race. He argued in The Rising Tide of Color against White-World Supremacy (1920) that whites
would be doomed if whites did not begin showing greater racial solidarity. These voices were
in the minority, however.
After World War II, as anti-colonial movements in Africa and Asia drove European powers
out of one country after another, and as the struggle for African American civil rights began
gaining new momentum in the United States, arguments for a pan-European sense of identity
and solidarity, including members of the European diaspora in the Americas, became more
common on the extreme right. It was in this context that white nationalism, as we currently
understand it, began to grow. Damon Berry (2017, p. 3) described white nationalism as “racial
protectionism” justified by the “belief that the white race is imperilled and it is the duty of every
white man and woman to do what they must to protect it from biological extinction.”
Francis Parker Yockey, a leading intellectual of the post-war extreme right, called for a new
form of white solidarity that would extend beyond the traditional bounds of the nation state.
His 1948 book, Imperium, would be an important early text in the development of modern
white nationalism.
Other figures in the United States soon emerged promoting other varieties of white nation-
alism.The flamboyant George Lincoln Rockwell, a former officer in the U.S. Navy, founded the
American Nazi Party in 1959. Over the subsequent decades, many new white nationalist organ-
izations developed in the United States, such as the Aryan Nations, the National Alliance, and
the Church of the Creator. Each of these different groups developed its own unique approaches
to religious questions. Few significant white nationalists, however, were conventional Christians.

White nationalism and religion

Although they have never been monolithic on this question, white nationalists have had a few
common critiques of Christianity. One argument is that Christianity is not truly indigenous to
Europe and thus not an appropriate religion for whites. If whites must have a religion, according
to this logic, it should be a religion that originated in Europe and was practised by Europeans’
pagan ancestors. The Norse/Germanic pantheon of gods (Odin, Thor, etc.) is especially popular
among a subset of modern white nationalists (Gardell 2003).
Another problem with Christianity, from a white nationalist perspective, is that it elevates a
non-European people to a special status within the religion. Although there is a long record of
anti-Semitism within Christianity, it is also true that the Old Testament of the Christian Bible
describes the ancestors of modern Jews as “God’s chosen people.” This special religious status,
white nationalists argue, gives Jews undue influence over white Gentile society. White national-
ists believe the degree to which white evangelicals are willing to provide extraordinary support
for Israel is evidence for this claim.
Some white Christian nationalists have resolved this problem by altering Christian theology
in a way that elevates white Europeans (Barkun 1996). The “Christian Identity” religion holds
that different European peoples are the actual descendants of the original Israelites from the
Bible. Contemporary Jews, far from enjoying an elevated position in the religion, are actually

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a cursed people. This variety of Christianity has always been opposed by mainstream Christian
denominations and has never had more than a small number of followers. However, it has been
promoted by prominent white nationalists. Although George Lincoln Rockwell was person-
ally agnostic when it came to religion (Rockwell 1967), he endorsed Christian Identity as an
approved religion for his followers (Simonelli 1996). Aryan Nations, led by “pastor” Richard
Butler, also promoted Christian Identity.
White nationalists have also objected to Christianity’s universalist aspects. Christian doctrine
explicitly states that salvation is open to all people, regardless of demographic background. As
Paul wrote in his Epistle to the Galatians, “There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither bond
nor free, there is neither male nor female: for ye are all one in Christ Jesus.” Such a perspective,
if taken seriously by Christians, seems necessarily to lead to diminished levels of ethnocentrism.
Right-wing Christians can reasonably counter that there is nothing in the Bible calling for the
end of distinct ethnicities, races, or nations or that spiritual equality necessitates political equal-
ity. This claim is technically correct. Nonetheless, the most important Christian texts contain
egalitarian messages that can be difficult to reconcile with the most extreme right-wing political
positions.
Finally, elements of the far right have objected to Christianity on Nietzschean grounds that
are not necessarily racialist. The anti-egalitarian, aristocratic aspects of right-wing thought have
long objected to Christianity’s celebration of humility and weakness, calling it a “slave morality.”
This right-wing approach to life, which often, but not necessarily, overlaps with ethnocentrism,
would prefer a more virile, masculine religion, one that celebrated strength and a will to power.
White nationalist leaders and organizations that had problems with mainstream Christianity
sought different solutions to these perceived problems.As mentioned, George Lincoln Rockwell,
while not personally a believer, was not anti-Christianity – though he preferred to promote
Christian Identity rather than more mainstream Christian denominations. Others sought to
provide spiritual alternatives to Christianity.
William Pierce, founder of the National Alliance and author of the notorious genocidal
novel, The Turner Diaries, did not personally have any supernatural beliefs. Before dedicating his
life to his racist cause, Pierce had a career as a physics professor. He nonetheless believed his
movement required some kind of spiritual foundation. Pierce thus promoted a quasi-religion he
called “Cosmotheism,” which might be described as a racialist variety of pantheism. According
to this worldview, whites have a duty to advance the race, moving it toward its ultimate destiny
of evolving toward a kind of secular godhood (Whitsel 1998). Pierce detested the Christian left
and the Christian right and made it clear that one could not simultaneously be a member of the
National Alliance and a member of a liberal Christian church that supported racial egalitarian-
ism or a conservative Christian church that supported Zionism. As he put it:

Any Alliance member who is also a member of a church or other Christian organiza-
tion which supports racial mixing or Zionism should decide now where he stands, and
he should then resign either from his church or from the Alliance.
(Pierce 1982)

Ben Klassen, who founded the white supremacist “Church of the Creator” in 1973, was even
more focused on religious questions – though he also rejected entirely the existence of an
afterlife or anything supernatural. “Creativity,” as it is also called, calls for whites to make a
religion out of the advancement of their race, forsaking all other religious notions. He wrote
three “holy books” promoting this belief system: Nature’s Eternal Religion, The White Man’s Bible,
and Salubrious Living. He attempted to organize his followers in a manner analogous to what

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one finds in an organized religion and declared himself “Pontifex Maximus.” He hoped his
compound would one day become the premier training ground for a new generation of white
nationalist leaders.

Religion and the European far right

Although the Alt-Right is a new iteration of the white nationalist movement in the United
States, it was arguably more influenced by right-wing currents in Europe than in America. In
particular, the Alt-Right was strongly influenced by the European New Right, which had very
strong views on religion (O’Meara 2004).
The European New Right was a movement that developed at a time when the European
far left was at the peak of its influence. In 1968, as the far-left protests threatened to bring down
the French government, a young intellectual named Alain de Benoist founded a new think
tank called the Research and Study Group for European Civilisation (in French, this forms the
acronym GRECE). De Benoist and his colleagues sought to create a new right-wing alterna-
tive to the mainstream ideologies of the day (Bar-On 2007). Their goal was a new approach
to politics, distinct from pro-American, pro-business, and pro-Catholic conservatism, but also
rejecting left-wing egalitarianism and cosmopolitanism. The European New Right borrowed
elements from other ideological groups, appropriating much of the left’s critique of capitalism.
It also built on far-right ideas from earlier in the 20th century, especially those thinkers associ-
ated with the “Conservative revolutionaries” of inter-war Germany – people like Carl Schmitt,
Oswald Spengler, and Ernst Jünger.
In his early writing career, De Benoist was explicitly racist. As time went on, he tempered
his approach to race, dropping his arguments about biological differences between racial groups
while still maintaining exclusionary attitudes toward immigrants. The European New Right
eventually called for “the right to difference.” That is, in place of the homogenizing effects of
American capitalism, Soviet communism, or progressive liberalism – all of which, at least in
theory, were cosmopolitan and tolerant – different cultures had a right to maintain their unique-
ness, even if it meant excluding outsiders.
De Benoist wrote extensively on religion (2004). His open criticism of Christianity was one
reason his movement did not seek to build bridges with conservative Catholics in France. De
Benoist’s critiques of Christianity are interesting in that he simultaneously attacks the religion
from the left and the right. He shares the right-wing critique of Christianity’s inherent egalitari-
anism and suggests that, although the modern left is generally secular and often anti-religion, it
nonetheless maintains a certain fundamental Christian ethos.
However, some of De Benoist’s arguments against Christianity sound as though they are
coming from the political left. In his view, Christianity is inherently totalitarian, and modern
totalitarian regimes in the West also had certain Christian roots. In his view, Christianity was
problematic because of its insistence on a single path to heaven. One either accepted Jesus Christ
as the sole means of salvation, or one was condemned to hell. According to De Benoist, this
is very different from the pagan view of spirituality, which accepted a plethora of gods, each
unique to different peoples.The Ancient Romans notably never sought to force conquered peo-
ples to abandon their local gods and accepted spiritual diversity within the Empire. This ended
when Christianity became the official state religion and continued after the Roman Empire
fell. Pagan groups that did not accept Christianity were often violently suppressed. Emperor
Charlemagne’s massacre of Saxons was a particularly notable, but not unique, example of this.
The end result of Christianity’s rise was the demise of religious diversity within Europe and,
eventually, its demise in many places beyond Europe when conquistadors and other colonialists

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forced Christianity upon foreign peoples. Thus Christianity was fundamentally at odds with the
premise of the right to difference.
The European New Right is worth discussing here because of its influence on the U.S. Alt-
Right. Alt-Right leaders such as Richard Spencer and Greg Johnson have cited that movement
as an inspiration. De Benoist lectured at a conference hosted by Spencer’s white nationalist think
tank, The National Policy Institute. The now-defunct Alt-Right organization, Identity Evropa,
was clearly modelled on right-wing movements in Europe.

The Alt-Right’s origins, rise, and decline

The Alt-Right was born at a time when the older white nationalist groups and leaders men-
tioned above were at a nadir in terms of members and influence. The National Alliance largely
collapsed after William Pierce’s death in 2002. The Aryan Nations suffered financial hardship
following a shooting incident in 1998. A subsequent lawsuit cost the group its Idaho compound.
Neither Christian Identity nor Creativity gained a substantive number of adherents in the early
2000s. White nationalists had a presence on the internet, but such content was mostly found
on fringe sites such as the white nationalist message board Stormfront, which meant it was
largely out of view for most people. Other varieties of right-wing thought that differed from
mainstream conservatism, such as the “paleoconservatism” represented by figures such as Patrick
Buchanan, was also mostly defunct by the time President George W. Bush was inaugurated in
January 2001 (Hawley 2016).
For the first few years of the Bush Administration, the mainstream conservative movement,
especially the social conservatives and the foreign policy hawks, seemed to dominate American
politics. President Bush launched the invasion that resulted in a regime change in Iraq. Anti-
gay marriage initiatives were passed in states throughout the country. Conservative evangelical
Christians could reasonably claim that they were responsible for President Bush’s 2004 re-
election.
By the end of Bush’s second term, however, the political situation looked very different. The
Iraq War had become a bloody quagmire. A financial crisis threatened to spark a global depres-
sion. Prominent Republicans were embroiled in embarrassing scandals. In a few short years, the
Republican Party had undermined its credibility as the party of national security, economic
growth, and moral virtue. At the start of 2009, Barack Obama was president, and Democrats
controlled the U.S. House of Representatives and the U.S. Senate. This opened up space for
right-wing alternatives to Bush-era conservatism to seek adherents.
It was during this period that the term “Alternative Right” was coined by Richard Spencer,
then the editor of a webzine called Taki’s Magazine, in 2008. At first, the term was not explicitly
racial and instead could describe any American right-wing movement that broke with one or
more fundamental tenets of Bush-era mainstream conservatism, including libertarians, the rem-
nants of the paleoconservatives, localists, and white nationalists. One common thread for all of
these groups was a tendency to support the libertarian Ron Paul’s quixotic campaign for the
Republican nomination for president in 2008.
The racial aspect to the Alternative Right became more apparent over time, especially after
Spencer left Taki’s Magazine and formed his own new website, AlternativeRight​.co​m. At this
new site, race was a much more prominent topic, and white nationalist and anti-Semitic content
was prevalent. This site was relatively short lived, however, as Spencer shut it down in 2013. At
the time, it appeared that the term “Alternative Right” was going to die out.
In subsequent years, however, a new radical online right-wing movement began to form,
especially on image boards like 4chan and social media sites like Twitter. It differed from older

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white nationalist online content in that it had greater visibility – it was not mostly cordoned
off in its own online spheres, as had been the case for earlier white nationalist material on the
internet. It had a significant presence on YouTube, social media, and popular message boards.
This new movement, mostly anonymous, used the language of internet-savvy millennials, pro-
moting an extreme right-wing agenda via ironic memes, pop culture references, and hashtags.
Although ideologically congruent with earlier manifestations of white nationalism, the Alt-
Right relied mostly on humour and online trolling, in contrast to older, drearier promoters of
the same philosophical principles. In place of dour broadcasts from voices like William Pierce,
the Alt-Right preferred to spread its racist message via baffling cartoon characters like Pepe the
Frog.This new online right-wing movement eventually embraced the term “Alternative Right,”
shortening it to the punchier phrase, “Alt-Right.”
The Alt-Right’s online presence grew dramatically in the context of the 2016 presidential
election when the movement determined from the very beginning that Donald Trump was
their candidate of choice. It is worth noting that, in most recent presidential elections, explicit
white nationalists have shown little interest in mainstream Republican candidates – showing no
enthusiasm for candidates like Bob Dole, George Bush, John McCain, or Mitt Romney. Trump
earned their support because of his aggressive anti-immigration positions and his total rejection
of so-called political correctness.
As the election season continued, the Alt-Right’s popularity and name recognition contin-
ued to grow. For a time, the term seemed like a wide-ranging term for Trump’s entire right-
wing populist base, which included, but was not limited to, explicit white nationalists. At one
point, Steve Bannon, then head of Breitbart, a popular right-wing news and opinion venue,
declared his website a “platform of the Alt-Right.”This is obviously concerning, given Bannon’s
subsequent role in the Trump campaign and in the Trump White House (Bannon later became
chief executive of the Trump campaign and for several months served as White House Chief
Strategist). However, Joshua Green, author of a comprehensive biography of Steve Bannon,
noted that, when he used that term, Bannon was using the “catchall definition” of the Alt-
Right, which included at that time, not just “white supremacists and full-on neo-Nazis,” but
also “populists, libertarians, immigration restrictionists, reactionaries, [and] paleoconservatives”
(Green, 2017, p. 212).
The Alt-Right made such an impact over the course of the election that Hillary Clinton
dedicated an entire speech to the Alt-Right, its radicalism, and its association with Donald
Trump. Although the speech was entirely negative, the Alt-Right was jubilant at receiving so
much exposure. From that point on, the Alt-Right could reasonably claim to be major players in
the campaign, and perhaps even in American politics more broadly.The Alt-Right was addition-
ally ecstatic when Trump surprisingly won the election.
Following Trump’s victory, however, the Alt-Right’s subsequent history was mainly one of
setbacks. Shortly after the election, when Richard Spencer’s National Policy Institute hosted a
conference, Spencer infamously declared, “Hail Trump. Hail our people. Hail victory.” At which
point, many people in the audience responded with Nazi salutes. This led Trump to denounce
the Alt-Right, something he had declined to do throughout the campaign (Diamond 2016).
Things only got worse for the Alt-Right during the first year of the Trump presidency. As
mentioned in the introduction, the “Unite the Right” rally, which was intended to demonstrate
the Alt-Right’s status as a permanent fixture of American politics, proved to be the movement’s
high-water mark. Furthermore, the Trump presidency did not mark the dramatic break with
traditional conservative Republican policies. The Trump White House was mostly filled with
conventional Republicans, and Republicans in Congress mostly set the domestic agenda during
the first years of the Trump Administration (Alberty 2019).

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Religion and the Alt-Right

As was the case with the earlier manifestations of white nationalism in America, many leading
figures in the Alt-Right were deeply concerned with questions of religion. Also, like earlier
white nationalists, many of the most important voices in the Alt-Right were overtly hostile to
Christianity. Richard Spencer, for example, has never hidden his contempt for Christianity. The
same is true for other prominent, contemporary white nationalists such as Greg Johnson, who
runs the influential white nationalist webzine Counter-Currents (Berry 2017).
Many leading Alt-Right writers explained at length why they believed Christianity is prob-
lematic for their cause.These commentaries often echoed the critiques of earlier white national-
ists. The prolific Alt-Right essayist Gregory Hood, for example, argued that Christianity makes
it more difficult to create a movement for explicit identity politics around race or ethnicity
because “Such a creed renders family, kin, and nation irrelevant” (2013). Hood nonetheless
suggested that, from his ideology’s perspective, one could find some redeeming qualities in
Christianity. There is therefore no need to destroy ancient cathedrals, which are now a treasured
part of Europe’s cultural heritage. However, all of those Christian qualities he considered posi-
tive were due to the influence that German paganism had on the early church, qualities that
have now been mostly expunged from the religion: “The only kind of ‘Christendom’ that could
redeem the West is a Germanic Christianity, which is to say, a pagan Christianity drawing upon
European folk traditions. Given our history, why must we continue to cling to this unnatural
conglomeration?”
Throughout the Alt-Right’s rise, it was easy to find Alt-Right voices denouncing Christianity
in both scholarly and vulgar fashions. However, as I analysed both the Alt-Right and its ideo-
logical predecessors, I concluded that anti-Christianity in white American nationalism is less
pronounced now than it was in the past. Although most of the Alt-Right’s leading figures were
not Christians, in recent years, few expressed any real sense of urgency to the “problem” of
Christianity. This may be because traditional religion is simply less politically relevant now than
it was in the 20th century.
Christianity is in a period of long-term decline in the U.S. (Hawley 2017a). Compared to
the religious right’s peak of influence, Christian conservatism’s political and cultural clout is
greatly diminished and thus no longer represents the same challenge to overt white nationalism
as may have been the case in the late 20th century. For this reason, white nationalist organizers
may feel less necessity to offer some kind of replacement religion, whether in the form of a
racist version of Christianity (Christian Identity), the revival of pre-Christian pagan religions
(Odinism), or the creation of new religious cults dedicated entirely to racial purity and advance-
ment (Creativity, Cosmotheism). Instead, I saw a large number of contemporary white national-
ists simply ignoring the subject of religion entirely.
To be clear, over the last decade, we have witnessed the appearance of some explicitly Christian
white nationalists and white nationalist groups. For example, the now-defunct Traditionalist
Worker Party identified itself as an explicitly orthodox Christian organization. American white
nationalists tend to view Orthodox Christianity more favourably than other denominations.
This is because many view Orthodox Christianity, with its many different national branches, as
more comfortable with nationalist sentiments than either Roman Catholicism or mainstream
Protestant denominations.
During discussions of non-white immigration into the United States and Europe, right-
wing activists, intellectuals, and politicians tend to bring up the hot-button topic of Islam and
Islamophobia. Anti-Muslim attitudes in the U.S. surged after the 11 September 2001 terror
attacks (Gerges 2003) and have been a fixture of populist conservative discourse ever since (Belt

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2016). Donald Trump famously called for a complete ban on all Muslim immigration during
the 2016 presidential election – a promise that was only partially fulfilled (in the form of a travel
ban from some majority-Muslim countries) following his election.
One, perhaps surprising, element of the Alt-Right’s rhetoric around immigration and
Muslims is that it is often, in some ways, less Islamophobic than what one hears from mainstream
American conservatives.That is not to say that Alt-Right supporters and other white nationalists
want Islam’s presence to grow in Western countries. However, they do tend to focus less on Islam
as such and instead focus more on the fact that most Muslims in the world today would not be
classified as white. As Richard Spencer argued in 2015: “Ultimately, a person’s race, ethnicity, and
country of origin are far more important components of identity than religion; and these should
be, as they have been in the past, the primary criteria in considering the immigration question.”
To put it another way, the Alt-Right, on average, may have been less Islamophobic than many
mainstream conservatives precisely because it was more racist (Hawley 2017b).
Animus toward Islam and Muslims definitely played a role in the rise of Trump’s right-wing
populist movement – though we should not overstate this (Hawley 2019). These anti-Muslim
views are often framed in a peculiar way. They are rarely presented as unbridled religious dis-
crimination or as part of a Christian nationalist agenda. Instead, conservatives tend to justify
anti-Muslim policies in two general ways. One frame is the concern about terrorism, combined
with the claim that fundamental Muslim beliefs require religious violence (Beck 2015). The
other, perhaps more interesting, conservative claim is that Muslims should be excluded from
America and Europe because Islam is supposedly incompatible with progressive Western values.
That is, Islam is, according to this narrative, hostile to women and sexual minorities and it does
not respect the separation of church and state. Muslims are furthermore not assimilating to
Western norms on these questions (Caldwell 2009).
One can reasonably argue that conservatives that make the latter argument are being disin-
genuous. After all, during its peak, the Christian right was not friendly toward feminism, gay
liberation, or the notion that we must keep religion out of government. Whether it is out of
conviction or political expedience, however, many mainstream conservatives have felt it neces-
sary to frame their opposition to Muslim immigration in terms of modern progressivism, in a
sense conceding that they acquiesce to, or even celebrate, liberal victories on these questions.
The Alt-Right did not follow this approach. Few on the Alt-Right expressed their problems
with Islam in these terms. Although, to my knowledge, no significant figure associated with the
Alt-Right has suggested that Muslim immigration to the U.S. or Europe is a good thing, few
have complained that Islam is incompatible with the West because that religion (which, I should
note, is incredibly diverse in terms of theology) is inherently illiberal. In fact, some on the Alt-
Right expressed admiration for the supposed illiberal qualities in Islam.
Although I argue that the Alt-Right is fundamentally a white nationalist movement and
focused on race, it was also fundamentally an anti-feminist or misogynist movement. For this
reason, many on the Alt-Right actually celebrated the most illiberal aspects that they see in
contemporary Muslim countries. In Alt-Right discourse online, one can readily find voices
describing modern American culture as “degenerate,” especially because of its willingness to
tolerate homosexuality and promiscuity among women. Some suggested that the Alt-Right
should appropriate the most reactionary elements of Islam without converting to the religion.
They would like to see white people become more explicitly patriarchal and again have separate
spheres for men and women. Especially in 2017, many on the Alt-Right were calling for what
they called “white Sharia.” That is, white Americans and Europeans should place the same legal
restrictions on women’s activities that one finds in many (though certainly not all) majority-
Muslim countries.

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The idea of “white Sharia” was promoted primarily by the white nationalist website, The
Daily Stormer, mostly in 2017 and 2018. It is infrequently used by the extreme right now, but
for a time, it was a prominent meme. Some Alt-Right voices were harshly critical of the idea,
suggesting it was counterproductive (Thoresen 2017). Others, however, suggest that the meme
became popular precisely because it provides a vision that might prove to be a useful recruiting
tool for young white men:

[White Sharia] serves as a distant beacon of the patriarchy we as a people need and will
one day have. It is both a rallying cry for the disillusioned young men in our move-
ment as well as their guiding light.
(Vandal 2017)

This point may be largely moot now, however, as the white Sharia meme seems to have lost
momentum. I can find few recent examples of a prominent Alt-Right figure either endorsing
the idea or attacking it. In any event, the Alt-Right’s stance on Islam was always distinct from
that of mainstream conservatives. They were simultaneously more insistent that people from
majority-Muslim countries should not be allowed to enter the U.S., and more willing to express
admiration for the social orders in those countries as they perceived them.

Conclusion
Given the Alt-Right’s current state of disarray, how the movement dealt with questions of reli-
gion may be an academic point. However, as it has always done in the past, we can anticipate that
the white nationalist movement will regroup from its recent setbacks. I suspect its next major
manifestation will be under a different name. It is thus worth speculating how the Alt-Right’s
successors will deal with this issue.
We may have got some hints about this from right-wing YouTube programme host Nick
Fuentes and the so-called “Groyper movement.” This was a far-right movement that achieved
some national attention due to its activism on college campuses in 2019 (Coasten 2019). This
movement, which included many people formally associated with the Alt-Right, generally
abandoned calls for explicit white nationalism, and instead focused on a nebulous, but clearly
racialist, “American nationalism.” This movement was also more pro-Christian – Fuentes, for
example, is a Catholic. Activists from this movement often presented themselves as ostentatiously
Catholic. The movement largely came to a halt when Covid-19 shut down college campuses,
and thus their main means of activism was shut down.
It is notable that Fuentes and his movement made a more conscious effort to be less alienat-
ing toward mainstream, middle-class Americans than the Alt-Right. For some on the Alt-Right,
the lesson from Charlottesville was that they need at least some support from ordinary white
conservatives – most of whom are Christians. Thus being pro-Christian, or at least not anti-
Christian, was a logical step. This focus on ordinary Americans contrasts with most of the nota-
ble figures of the Alt-Right, who mostly largely presented themselves as part of a revolutionary
vanguard movement (Marcy 2020). This limited its appeal to ordinary conservatives, who were
not interested in revolutionary change or in abandoning Christianity.
Regardless of the future direction of the American extreme right, its internal debates about
Christianity will surely continue. The question of whether Christianity must be destroyed or
accommodated to create a new white nationalist order is unlikely to be resolved. The fact that
this issue remains divisive on the extreme right is advantageous to supporters of tolerance and
liberal democracy, as this debate has proven a stumbling block to white nationalism’s internal
cohesion and its ability to engage in successful outreach.

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 13
MAKING SENSE OF SALAFISM
Theological foundations, ideological
iterations, and political manifestations

Naveed S. Sheikh

Introduction: the idea of ‘Salafism’

The ‘religious turn’ in the study of international relations (Petito and Hatzopoulos, 2003;
Thomas, 2005; Haynes, 2013) together with the emergence of distinct threats to Western secu-
rity—military as well as ontological—have brought to the fore concerns about how precisely
religion interacts with political ideology in the making of subjects and the emergence of prac-
tices. The Muslim-majority world, as the historic nemesis of the West and its foremost ideo-
logical challenger after the implosion of Soviet-conditioned bipolarity, has been central to such
concerns.The post-9/11 period—our brave new Age of Terror—reinforced the notion that par-
ticular strands of Islam were potentially harmful to global conviviality, or to the preservation of
a West-centric world order. Among the theo-political outlooks that consequently has received
much political currency, and thus scholarly scrutiny, over the course of the last two decades is
the nebulous religious philosophy of Salafism (al-salafiyya). But what exactly is ‘Salafism’? How
has it evolved as a worldview? What are the key ideational tensions within it? And how do these
tensions manifest in politics?
In the growing academic literature on Salafism in the English language, three overarching ten-
dencies appear to exist: one can be referred to as the ‘securitization’ of Salafism, in which Salafism
is depicted as a security threat to either Western civilization or Islamic civilization, or indeed both
(Oliveti, 2002; Schwartz, 2003; Habeck, 2006). Albeit far from alarmist, a set of penetrating studies
on key thinkers in Salafi militancy has further served to consolidate the focus on security (e.g.,
Lia, 2007; Lahoud, 2010;Wagemakers, 2012;Kassim, 2015; Hegghammer, 2020), but have not
engaged with Salafism as a broad category. A second tendency entails an inverse, often apologetic,
‘mainstreaming’ of Salafism, through which Salafism is rehabilitated as little more than Sunni
Islam with added rigour (Delong-Bas, 2007; Oliver, 2004). The third scholarly tendency could
be referred to as the ‘localization’ of Salafism, found in a host of valuable studies that focus on
the development of Salafism in particular national settings (Hegghammer, 2010; Bonnefoy, 2011;
Lacroix, 2011; Rabil, 2014; Thurston, 2016; Pall, 2018; Wehrey and Boukhars, 2019; Adraoui,
2020). In addition, two edited volumes on comparative Salafism have contributed immensely to
the field (Meijer, 2009; Cavatorta and Merone, 2016). Intellectual histories of Salafism are few
(Lauzière, 2016; Maher, 2016;Weismann, 2017), while theological interrogations are both few and
tentative (Murad, 1999, 2008; Abou el Fadl, 2001; Malik, 2002; Sheikh, 2015; Nahouza, 2018).

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 Naveed S. Sheikh

Even if widely invoked, the conceptual entailments of the term ‘Salafism’ remain opaque and
ill-defined. While Gallie (1956) wrote of ‘essential contestability’ surrounding the definition of
key notions in much of political theory, Salafism is characterized by compounded contestability in
that a whole series of concepts and their relationship remains contested, at times with ferocious
consequences. In its origin, though, Salafism is primarily a theological outlook which, over
time, has morphed into multiple competing ideological currents.1 Following Freeden (1996),
ideologies (and theologies, too) are not to be understood as static dogma but instead as spatio-
temporally malleable ‘semantic fields’. Ideologies are demarcated by concepts (both core and
peripheral) and characterized by perpetually evolving hierarchies between them.The appeal of a
given ideology relies on its proponents’ ability to reify or naturalize these contingent conceptual
relationships and to convince others that their definitions are the ‘correct’ ones while competing
definitions are somehow fallacious (Freeden, 1996, 2001). This approach to ideological analysis
is, as we shall see, eminently apposite for the analysis of Salafism.
Lexically, the term ‘Salafism’ derives from the Arabic expression for predecessor (salaf) or, more
elaborately, ‘the righteous forebears’ (al-salaf al-ṣāliḥ). The Salafi self-ascription is thus anchored
in a homogenized model of religious normativity, derived from a reimagination or recasting
of the very early generations of Muslims (Afsaruddin, 2007), often defined as the first three
generations of Islam: that of the Prophet and his Companions (ṣaḥāba), that of the Followers
(tābiʿūn) of the Companions, and that of the successors to the Followers (atbaʿ al-tabiʿīn). The
foundational epoch of Islam is construed as providing the original model of religious belief and
praxis, in contradistinction to the religious ideas and norms of successive (khalaf) generations. In
this way, Salafism is predicated on a kind of theological originalism, according to which doctrinal
and legal prescriptions are to be explicated with an epochal fixity, based on the historic time of
enunciation (here, of course, relating to revelation and scripture). Salafi originalism thus entails
an interpretative method that seeks meaning from historically circumscribed semantic construc-
tions, the adherence to which identifies not only ‘original meaning’ but also ‘original intent’ (cf.
Solum, 2008).
Salafism is premised on a return to an imagined primordial Islam, free of the accretions and
religious ‘innovations’ of millennium-long traditions within Sunni jurisprudential schools (the
madhāhib, sing. madhhab) and spiritual practices (including, but not limited to, Sufism, as insti-
tutionalized in the Sufi ṭuruq). Itzchak Weismann (2017, p. 33) usefully refers to Salafism as ‘the
basic theological-ideological formation that postulates a return to pristine Islam to overcome
tradition and bring regeneration’. To its adherents, Salafism is neither a sect nor even stand-
point: it is (ontologically) unadulterated Islam and (epistemologically) Islam rediscovered. As
with comparable forms of puritanism, the scripture—both the Qur’an and the compilations of
aḥadīth (transmissions of the Prophet’s words and deeds, sing. ḥadīth)—are central to Salafism’s
epistemology. With a proclivity for both literalism (deriving from an emphasis on the apparent
purport of the text, a method known as ẓāhir al-riwāya) and selectivism (in addressing the creedal
credentials of any author before accepting his scholarship), Salafism has become a theological
thought complex with well-known strictures and semantics, easily distinguishable from more
customary expressions of scholarship and religiosity. The politics of Salafism, however, are less
easily distinguishable and can take up a variety of, even contradictory, positions on questions of
statecraft, citizenship, fidelity, and mutiny.
In the remainder of this chapter, I outline Salafism’s conceptual history and the conse-
quences for Salafism today. The aim is to synthesize a complex intellectual-cum-political his-
tory of Salafism by, first, examining its trifold genealogies in premodern or early modern
thinking. Second, I discuss three religio-political syntheses from the twentieth century, all
evolving within a single site of contestation, namely Egypt. Thirdly, I turn to a cartography

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of contemporary Salafi currents, offering modest revisions to the taxonomies found in the
literature. Finally, I show how recent developments in Salafism may lead to new fluidities and
hybridities, eluding neat categorization and challenging some widely-held assumptions about
Salafism.

Premodern and early modern genealogies of contemporary Salafism

Genealogy A: Ibn Hanbal and the Ahl al-Ḥadīth
While contemporary Salafism is predicated on a form of ‘anti-madhhabism’ (Murad, 1999), it
remains strongly influenced by distinct theological and legal maxims that can be traced back to
Ahmad Ibn Hanbal (780–855), a Baghdad-based imam of the eighth century and the eponym
of the Hanbali madhhab. Of the four extant Sunni schools of jurisprudence, his was the most
explicit, or rigourist, in relying on aḥadīth as proof texts (adilla, sing. dalīl) in matters of doctrine
(ʿaqīda) and legal rule-derivation (fiqh), uneasy with more speculative or rationalist forms of
argumentation (Haddad, 2007). Ibn Hanbal’s reliance on the explicit import of the text (naṣṣ)
was exceeded only by the literalism of the Ẓāhirī school, founded by his student, the Persian
Dawud al-Zahiri (c. 815–883), and later popularized by Andalusian jurist Ali Ibn Hazm (994–
1064). The Zahiris would outright reject analogical reasoning (qiyās) as a method for deducing
jurisprudential rulings while considering consensus (ijmāʿ) to be binding only when comprising
a first-generation consensus of the Companions of the Prophet (Kamali, 2003).
Due to their ‘fideist minimalism’ (Al-Azmeh, 1988, p. 266), both Hanbalis and Zahiris were
labelled the ‘Folk of Hadith’ (ahl al-ḥadīth or aṣḥāb al-ḥadīth) in contradistinction to those juris-
tic approaches—most prominently the Hanafis—they deemed driven by excessive scholastic
discretion and opinion (the ahl al-raʾ‎‎y). The Ahl al-Hadith movement thus became a broader
fideist movement that questioned the role of ratiocination in jurisprudence as well as in doc-
trine, opposed initially to Mu‘tazilite sophistry but later also to the Ash‘ari–Maturidi creedal
condominium of Sunni Islam. The divine names (asmāʾ‎‎) and attributes (ṣifāt) mentioned in the
scripture, therefore, were affirmed (ithbāt) while denouncing attempts of allegorical interpreta-
tion (taʾ‎wīl)—a theme that later became a mainstay in Salafi discourse.

Genealogy B: Ibn Taymiyya and creedal proto-

Salafism (al-salafiyya al-iʿtiqādīyya)
What might be referred to as ‘proto-Salafism’, or creedal Salafism (al-salafiyya al-iʿtiqādīyya),
became emblematic in the scholarship of the fourteenth-century imam Taqi al-Din Ahmad Ibn
‘Abd al-Halim al-Harrani (1263–1328)—better known by his matronymic Ibn Taymiyya—the
most important medieval reference for contemporary Salafism. According to Lauzière (2016),
he was the first to speak of the school of the Salaf, madhhab al-salaf, as a theological position.
A maverick (or, to his followers, a mujtahid), his mission was to introduce a reform theology to
re-establish orthodoxy in doctrine and orthopraxy in devotional acts. Although trained in the
Hanbali rite and with students that spanned the other Sunni rites, Ibn Taymiyya adopted posi-
tions that were not dominant in any of the extant four schools of jurisprudence or three schools
of theology. Regarding himself as a staunch defender of Islamic monotheism (tawḥīd), his theol-
ogy also entailed novel claims: true monotheism was no longer entailed only in the unicity of
lordship (tawḥīd al-rububiyya), which is the belief that God is the Lord of all else, but also unicity
of worship (tawḥīd al-ʿibāda or tawḥīd al-ʿuluhīyya), which demands that all worship be directed
to Him alone without seeking intermediaries.

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His denouncement of both the (high-church) ʿulamāʾ‎‎ of the rival theological schools—
particularly the Ash‘aris, even as he muddied the waters by calling them anachronistic names
such as ‘Jahmis’ after the heterodox theologian Jahm Ibn Safwan (d. 745)—and (low-church)
folk religion steeped in local understandings of Sufism, earned him the authorities’ wrath. He
was imprisoned on charges of corporealism (tajsīm) and likening the attributes of God to those
of His creation (tashbīḥ), a dual charge that his followers from Ibn Qayyim al-Jawziyya (1292–
1350) onwards have also faced. Ibn Taymiyya’s intransigence in the face of significant hostility
from state officialdom paralleled Ibn Hanbal’s tribulations as a consequence of the latter’s stance
on the uncreated (qadīm) nature of the Qur’an, and both became sources of inspiration for later
Salafis, keen to follow in their footsteps as martyrs for orthodoxy.
Like in matters doctrinal, so too, in matters political, Ibn Taymiyya was an iconoclast. The
Mongol carnage infuriated Ibn Taymiyya, and although the Mongols had largely converted (at
first to Sunnism and later also to Shi‘ism), in three separate fatwas, he denounced Mongol lead-
ers as apostates on account of their bellicosity towards Muslims and on account of them ruling
by the syncretic Yasa code of law, rather than the Shari‘a (Hoover, 2019).This would, in time, set
a precedent for the anathematization (takfīr) of Muslim leaders who did not rule in conformity
with Shariatic injunctions.

Genealogy C: Wahhabism (al-daʿwa al-najdiyya)

Although modern forms of Salafism antedated the emergence of the eighteenth-century mis-
sion of Muhammad Ibn ‘Abd al-Wahhab (1703–1792) on the Central Arabian plateau of
Najd, he is seen as the very epitome of the call to eradicate accretions (bidaʿ, sg. bidʿa) in
religion. As with Ibn Taymiyya, from whom he took many positions, both creed and reli-
gious practice were to be purified and the primordial monotheism of the Salaf reinstated
(DeLong-Bas, 2007). By the epistemic leapfrogging of centuries of legal scholarship and theo-
logical discourse, Ibn ‘Abd al-Wahhab’s reform movement (often eponymously referred to as
Wahhabism) constituted a remaking of Islam in the name of the forbearers, stripped of human
subjectivity and the interpretative methods of historic Sunnidom. The quest was to salvage
Islam from the idolatrous deviancies that had become prevalent in the course of Muslim his-
tory and to return to authentic Islam, practised by the first generations. Above all, the cardinal
sin of polytheism (shirk) was to be eradicated and those seen to be guilty of this abomination
(in particular, the Shi‘i and the intemperate groups among the Sufis) were to be fought and
converted anew (Commins, 2006).
Influenced by the revivalist zeitgeist of proponents of the ahl al-ḥadīth, such as Muhammad
Hayat al-Sindi (d. 1750) in Medina—who inspired the Yemeni reformers Muhammad bin Isma‘il
al-San‘ani (d. 1768), and later Muhammad al-Shawkani (d. 1834), and shared intellectual pedigree
with the influential Indian reformer Shah Waliullah Dehlawi (d. 1762)—Ibn ‘Abd al-Wahhab
took a staunch position against those he considered guided by ‘blind adherence’ to traditional
praxis (Nafi, 2006). He likened their mindset to the proclivity of heathen peoples to continue
their forefathers’ misguidance. He considered the veneration of tombs, saints, and charms to
violate tawḥīd, and believed those engaged in such actions to be infidels (kuffar), while his own
followers were true monotheists (muwaḥḥidūn). As their power spread, the razing of tombs, the
plundering of shrines, and the levelling of graves (even of the immediate Companions and family
of the Prophet) became the signature move of the arrival of the Wahhabi ‘true believers’.
The collective anathematization (takfīr) of groups of people also paved the way for mas-
sacres of rival persuasions, once Ibn ‘Abd al-Wahhab allied with the Saudi chieftains in 1744
CE to spread both the Wahhabi mission and the Saudis’ territorial domain (Commins, 2006).

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For both the Wahhabi zealots and the aspiring rulers of the peninsula, considering the enemy as
infidels disinhibited violence: it could, after all, be construed as metering out divinely-ordained
punishments. The alliance between the clergy (Ibn ‘Abd al-Wahhab and his progeny) and the
chieftains-turned-kings (the House of Saʿūd) made for a pact that would see the influence of
both spread first across Arabia and later globally (Al-Rasheed, 2002). Wahhabism remains the
single most important influence on the development of contemporary Salafism, as evidenced
in the global dissemination of the theological tracts of Ibn ‘Abd al-Wahhab, often considered
mandatory texts in Salafi religious instruction.2

Late-modern antecedents of contemporary Salafism

There is significant confusion in the literature concerning the loose network of Muslim mod-
ernists of the 1880s–1930s who, to various degrees, invoked or were ascribed with Salafi notions.
According to Lauzière (2016),though initially forced by the Procrustean interpretations of a
whole generation of Western Orientalists, beginning with Louis Massignon (1883–1962), it
remains a (category) mistake to include this group in a discussion of the evolution of modern
Salafism. The import of the abstract noun of ‘salafiyya’ rather should be understood with spatio-
temporal specificity, and it is perilous to read contemporary Salafism back in history by means
of a reverse teleology.Yet, as Griffel (2015, p. 213) notes, the curvature that links the liberalizing
modernists from the turn of the twentieth century to the reactionary reformists some decades
later was predicated on ‘a real similarity of approaches to Muslim reform’, while Weismann
(2017, p. 36) too notes ‘structural affinities and continuities’, even if the aspired end goals were
vastly different. In the following, I shall discuss key ideas entailed in Muslim modernism, how it
gave rise to the making of a self-conscious ideology of Islamism, and how Islamism radicalized
and ultimately synthesized with Wahhabism to produce contemporary Salafism.

Antecedent A: reformist Salafism (al-salafiyya al-iṣlāḥiyya)

In the late nineteenth century, much of the greater Middle East found itself under imperial domi-
nation, either European or Ottoman. Faced with decline, Jamal al-Din Asadabadi (c.1839–1897),
commonly known as ‘al-Afghani’, insisted that for Islam to free itself from foreign encroachment
and compete with Western civilization, Muslims had to recover, or rediscover, Islam’s rational
bases. While scholars debate al-Afghani’s commitment to any theological tradition (Kedourie,
1966; Hourani, 1970; Keddie, 1972), they generally agree that his goal was to mobilize religion
as a political resource towards a reinvigorated pan-Islamic consciousness. For al-Afghani and his
followers, secularism meant subservience to foreign masters, while a reformed Islam would offer a
rival pathway to modernity. Al-Afghani was well-travelled in Europe, and his pan-Islamism came
to be influenced by Western thinkers, such as François Guizot, according to whom civilizations
advance by progressing on two fronts, socio-economic development and intellectual enhance-
ment through conceptual innovations (Hourani, 1970, pp. 114–115). As such, al-Afghani chose
efficacy over authenticity: if it served to empower Islam, he would adopt any notion as Islamic.
Al-Afghani’s most prominent student was the leading Egyptian scholar Muhammad ‘Abduh
(1849–1905). Like al-Afghani, ‘Abduh was a pragmatist and, even as he was trained at Al-Azhar,
the bastion of Sunni traditionalism, his tenure as Egypt’s Grand Mufti from 1899 was driven
by a quest to challenge traditional Islam’s ossified institutions (Sedgwick, 2010). For ‘Abduh,
unquestioning adherence to madhhab-bound legal precedent stifled creative thought; it was not
a matter of re-establishing a pre-madhhab orthopraxy but of progressive telos, of the unimpeded
exercise of reason in the image of the Enlightenment in Europe. In marked contrast to the strict

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constructionism of the Hanbalis, ‘Abduh insisted on the need for the human intellect to deci-
pher the intent of the sacredlaw.
In the thirty years after ‘Abduh’s death, his Syrian protégé, Muhammad Rashid Rida (1865–
1935), however, fundamentally changed the tenor and redirected the energies of the reformist
enterprise. While ‘Abduh’s opposition to traditionalism was grounded in inertia, Rida’s animus
to historic concepts and practices related to their inauthenticity. With the territorial expansion
of Saudi domains, the Wahhabi movement became ascendant, and in it, Rida saw an ally. Sensing
a shared mission, such as the rejection of being bound by juristic precedence and seeking the
return to pristine sources, Rida became an apologist for Wahhabism and, despite significant
incongruities, facilitated the convergence between Wahhabism and reformist Salafism (Lauzière,
2016). In this rapprochement, Rida was not alone but may well have been influenced by three
Damascene scholars, ‘Abd al-Razzaq al-Bitar (1837–1917), Tahir al-Jaza’iri (1852-1912), and
Jamal al-Din al-Qasimi (1866–1914) as well as two Baghdadi savants Nu‘man Khayr al-Din
al-Alusi (1836–1899) and the latter’s nephew Mahmud Shukri al-Alusi (1857–1924). Together,
they spearheaded the intellectual assault on popular Sufism, questioned the soundness of estab-
lished madhabdom, and rehabilitated Ibn Taymiyya (Weismann, 2001, 2009; Nafi, 2009; Griffel,
2015). In 1926, Rida’s student, Muhammad Hamid al-Fiqi (1892–1959), became the founder
of the first puritanical Salafi organization in Egypt, Jamāʿat Anṣār al-Sunna al-Muḥammadiyya,
antedating the Muslim Brotherhood’s formation by two years.

Antecedent B: the Muslim Brotherhood (al-Ikhwān al-Muslimūn)

As explained in the following section, much mutual animosity exists between sections of the
Salafi movement and sections of the Islamists (understood, here, as those motivated by ideo-
logical precepts to challenge or capture the state in the name of Islam, cf. Denoeux, 2002).
Nevertheless, in their historical dialectic, they mutually influenced and reshaped each other.
Pivotal for the development of the Islamist paradigm was the emergence in 1928 of Jamāʿat
al-Ikhwān al-Muslimīn (The Society of Muslim Brethren, or Muslim Brotherhood, for short).
Dedicated to societal revival (tajdīd) over intellectual reform (iṣlāḥ), the Muslim Brotherhood
spread across the Middle East, North Africa, and in parallel forms further afield in South Asia,
Southeast Asia, and within diaspora communities in the West to become ‘the most influential
revivalist Islamic movement of the twentieth century’ (Al-Abdin, 1989, p. 219).
To the founder-leader of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, the teacher Hassan al-Banna
(1906–1949), Egypt needed Islam to recover from colonialism. Al-Banna’s formative years coin-
cided with a Kulturkampf surrounding the Egyptian nation’s collective identity after formal
independence from the British in 1922 (Mitchell, 1969). Amid strong secularization tendencies
within Egypt’s elites, who often prided themselves on speaking French over Arabic, al-Banna
decried the ‘colonised, submissive and servile Islam that accepts its confinement to the private
sphere’ (Soage, 2008, p. 27). Instead, al-Banna sought a reinvigorated, and very public, Islam,
true both to the nature of Islam, as a political faith, and the religion’s historic mission. A proud
(and perhaps chauvinistic) Arab, al-Banna linked the historic decline of Islam with the Muslim
centre of gravity having moved away from Arabs to non-Arab ethnicities, including Mamluks,
Persians, and Turks, ‘who had never tasted true Islam’ (Qureshi, 1999,p. 146). The incorporation
of foreign ideas—such as Greek philosophy, Christian fatalism, Jewish ritualism, and Persian
superstitions—had served to contaminate and weaken Islam, whose primordial strength derived
from the purity of its doctrine. Nevertheless, al-Banna did not extend his critique to Sufism as
a whole, seeing it rather as part of an ancient culture of devotion in contrast to the hedonistic
pursuits of contemporaneity.

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To al-Banna, Islam was no mere theology but a comprehensive ideational system (niẓām),
encompassing personal morality, community, society, economy, politics, and statecraft (Mousalli,
1993). Islam was thus rearticulated as a potent political ideology and, as such, entailing (as all
political ideologies) conceptions of a normative socio-political order together with a program-
matic commitment—in this case, to arrest, and reverse, the secularization of Muslim lands.
Adopting part of the repertoire of Salafism (a term he did use, albeit eclectically), he deemed the
secular distinction between religion and government to be an ‘innovation’ (bidʿa), and thought
of those who accepted this distinction to have imbibed ideas from their colonial masters (Soage,
2009a, p. 298). Al-Banna’s interpretation of the lordship (rububiyya) of God rather entailed the
application of His rule to all facets of private and public life (Lia, 1998).
In opposition to ‘Abduh, but somewhat in line with Rida, al-Banna was ‘suspicious of reason’
(Soage, 2009b, p. 192), and less than impressed with Western empiricism and its technological
fruits. Still, al-Banna’s thought may be more Western than he acknowledged. Beholden to the
étatism of Western models of statecraft, it was in the Islamization of the Westphalian state that he
found a panacea for the woes of the Muslim condition. The very ideologization of Islam itself
also testifies to a mindset that was far from traditional. Overall, al-Banna was a syncretic thinker
who did not call for a particular theological understanding of Islam but rather offered Islam as a
formal political identity to withstand the influence of Western imperialism and its local agents.

Antecedent C: Sayyid Qutb’s radical Salafism (al-salafiyya al-qutbiyya)

Sayyid Qutb (1906–1966) began as an educator and a prolific literary critic and ended up a
radical ideologue. Though he was born in the same week of October 1906 as Hassan al-Banna,
he came to Islamism only in his early forties and, formally, to the Muslim Brotherhood only
after al-Banna’s death. Influenced initially by the work of the French eugenicist and Nobel
Prize laureate Alexis Carrel (1873–1944), an early proponent of gassing undesirable elements in
society, Qutb developed a critique of the degenerative potential of Western civilization (Larsen,
2011). An antithesis to prevailing narratives surrounding the liberating consequences of the
Enlightenment, Qutb’s oeuvre described Western modernity as having ontologically enslaved
people. His educational pursuits in Colorado in the period 1948–1950 did little to assuage his
critique and rather reinforced his perception of Western pursuits of the ‘good life’ as trivial, even
primitive. Contrary to the modernizing effects of Muhammad ‘Abduh’s travel encounters with
Europe, Qutb’s experience of the United States exacerbated his animus towards what he saw as
the unhinged hedonism, sybaritic licence, spirit-devoid scientism, and violent racism of Western
society (Soage, 2009b).
On his return to post-colonial Egypt, Qutb publicly turned to Islam. He gave up his position
in the civil service and joined the Muslim Brotherhood, eventually becoming editor-in-chief
of the Brotherhood’s weekly and a ranking member of its committee and council structure,
including head of its Propagation Section (Calvert, 2010). As the emerging chief ideologue of
the Muslim Brotherhood, he wrote scathing critiques of capitalism, Western society, and non-
Islamic ideologies. While initially receptive of the Egyptian revolution of 1952, he soon fell out
with Jamal ‘Abd al-Nasser (1918–1970) and the Free Officers for their lack of enthusiasm for
an Islamic programme. After a failed assassination attempt on Nasser in October 1954, he was
imprisoned and wrote most of his works on Islamist political thought in jail.
Appalled by the socio-cultural and political position of contemporary Islam, Qutb identified
two principal causes of Muslim decline: first, Muslims’ lack of adherence to the Qur’an—which
for Qutb was fundamentally a political text—thus detaching themselves both from celestial
guidance and divine grace. Second, was the filling of this void of religion by ungodly ­ideologies,

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courtesy of colonial imposition and the gradual internalization of foreign precepts by Arab
elites as well as non-elites. Borrowing from his South Asian contemporaries, Syed Abu al-A‘la
Mawdudi (1903–1979) and the latter’s student Abu al-Hasan ‘Ali Nadwi (1914–1999), Qutb
referred to this state of the supplantation of Islam and the erasure of its guidance, as a state of
‘jāhiliyya’, an expression historically used to denote the pre-Islamic age of ignorance (Khatab,
2006). For Qutb, a form of heathenism was thus inherent in any secular political authority
which was not in alignment with the supposed directives of God. Juxtaposed to the over-
powering jāhilī dystopia were the practices of the Salaf, who for Qutb were not only religious
role models but political role models, too, inasmuch as they had abandoned jāhiliyya precepts,
internalized Quranic guidance, imbibed Islamic ideology, and institutionalized an Islamic polity
(Soage, 2009b).
Yet, history would need some help in coming full circle. In proffering a form of Islamic
actionalism—and taking a leaf out of the Leninist playbook—Qutb argued that the vanguard
(ṭalīʿa) would have to arise to challenge both the ideational and institutional manifestations
of jāhiliyya. The vanguard movement would spread until it became a community of believers,
spreading through Muslim lands (by daʿwa and jihad) until, finally, it challenged the hegem-
onic pretensions of non-Islamic socio-political orders. For Qutb, any location which failed
to apply the Shari‘a was simultaneously a heathen realm (dār al-kufr) and a realm of war (dār
al-ḥarb) and, as such, a recourse to force was admissible. Albeit epistemically totalist, Qutb’s
call was not for a totalitarian model but rather for a kind of piercing sovereignty of the divine
that did away with the need for strong political institutions. This was the notion of ḥākimiyya,
or the absolute Sovereignty of God over all beings and all institutions (Khatab, 2002; Calvert,
2010).
In his prison-written manifesto, Maʿālim fi-l-ṭarīq (rendered into English as ‘Signposts Along
the Way’ or ‘Milestones’), Qutb condemned Muslim governments as ṭāwaghīt (sing. ṭāghūt, a
term that concurrently denotes ‘transgressor’ and ‘demigod’) for ruling based on human—thus
specious—judgement, rather than divine ḥākimiyya, reaping only decline and degeneration in
consequence. The conclusion was that anyone acting outside of the parameters set by Shar‘i
governance and statecraft was ‘outside of God’s religion’ even as he might ‘claim to profess this
religion’ (Qutb, 2002 [1964], p. 122). With this, Qutb initiated a form of political takfīr of secu-
lar forces, both Arabist and Occidental, applying a formula for the anathematization of fellow
Muslims not seen in Islamic intellectual history since Ibn Taymiyya.
Qutb’s writings were sufficiently perspicuous to function as evidence against him in the
expedited trials that ended with his death sentence in 1966. While he was hastily buried, the
ideas of the martyr endured. Within the Egyptian Tanẓīm Al-Jihād, the electrician-turned-revo-
lutionary, Muhammad ‘Abd al-Salam Faraj (1954–1982), while not a trained scholar, managed
to adapt Qutb’s thoughts on jihad into a call for clandestine direct action. His tract on jihad,
The Neglected Duty (1979), took vigilante jihad in a decidedly Clausewitzian direction as the
primary instrument of establishing, de novo, an Islamic order. As with Qutb, jihad was posited
as individual obligation (farḍ ʿayn)—not an obligation that rested with any political or religious
authority (Orbach, 2012). Jihad could henceforth take the form of attrition or assassination over
outright strategic coercion, paving the way for the decision of the Al-Jihad Organization to slay
‘the Pharaoh’, President Anwar Sadat, in 1981 (Kepel, 1993; Jansen, 2013).

A cartography of the contemporary Salafiscape

Keen observers have commented on the myriad of mutual contradictions plaguing the many
contemporary groups that refer to themselves as Salafi. Hegghammer (2009, p. 264) averred that

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the epithet ‘Salafism’ was frustratingly ‘vague and ambiguous’, proposing instead an expansive use
of the term ‘Islamism’, according to which different types of Salafis would constitute subsets of
Islamists (which, however, makes for useful schemata only if all Salafis are indeed Islamists, which
does not appear to be the case). Taking on the challenge of disambiguation, a number of authors
have instead sought to offer taxonomies by which the increasingly global Salafi movement could be
better understood. Wiktorowicz (2006) developed the most frequently cited typology to describe
rival articulations of Salafism, positing three foundational types of Salafis, which he described
as, respectively, ‘purists’ (for the primacy-of-theology group), the ‘politicos’ (for the primacy-of-
politics group), and the ‘jihadists’ (for the primacy-of-militancy group). This section presents a
modestly revised taxonomy that seeks to avoid some of the pitfalls of the previous lexicon.

Stream A: Conformist Salafism (al-salafiyya al-taqlīdiyya)

The semantic repertoire of what I am calling ‘Conformist Salafism’ entails several core con-
cepts: a self-referential focus of being the ‘saved sect’ (al-firqa al-nājiya) and, eschatologically, the
‘victorious group’ (al-‎‎ ṭāʾifa al-manṣūra); a focus on tawḥīdic orthodoxy and the making of the
muwaḥḥid subject; a focus on taṣfiya (purification) of the faith tradition and tarbiya (cultivation)
in the Salafi canon; an insistence on a particular normative approach (manhaj) to religiosity and
admonitions against deviating from it; and a focus on submission (tāʿa) to authority and the
avoidance of sedition (fitna). The differential markers between ‘true believer’ and malbelievers
continue to be the rectitude of doctrine (ʿaqīda) and the combatting of overt and covert forms
of polytheism (shirk), including the illicitness (ḥurma) of seeking intermediation (tawassul) from
prophets, saints, and relics.
Overall, thus, two concerns underpin Conformist Salafism: first, the quest for authenticity
and, second, the fear of anarchy. The former drives it, centripetally, around the socio-cultural
mores of Central Arabia (Najd, perhaps, over the Hijaz), whereas the latter manifests itself in the
support for established political authority. Adherents strictly avoid the schisms of politics (even
as the politics of religious schism remains a hallmark). They reject modern expressions of par-
ticipatory politics, such as elections and parliamentary policymaking, and all forms of conten-
tious politics, even demonstrations, public protests, and petitions. Party-based political activity
is referred to as partisanship (ḥizbiyya) and its adherents—the ḥizbiyyūn or ‘partisans’—are seen
as discordant and driven either by zealotry (ghuluww) or passion (hawa) for power. At most, the
conformist shaykh is expected to provide private counsel (naṣīha) to leaders without transgress-
ing into activist or militant modes of propagation: the word, not the sword, is thus central to
Conformist Salafism.
Conspicuous in Conformist Salafism is the fixation on manhaj, by which is meant the epis-
temological method as well as method of propagation, both of which must conform to the
Prophetic model and neither of which can tolerate ‘innovation’. Conformist Salafis thus retain
distinct modi operandi, chiefly proselytization (daʿwa), purification (taṣfiya), and cultivation (tar-
biya). By purification—even as the term has a Sufi pedigree in ideas such as the ‘purification
of the hearts’ (taṣfiyat al-qulūb)—the Salafis mean the purification of knowledge; the vetting
out of bogus (bāṭil) ideas and practices in Islam itself (Al-Albani, 2004). It is for this reason that
Wiktorowicz (2006) refers to them as ‘purists’.3
Paradigmatic for the intellectual consolidation of Conformist Salafism was their authority
in ḥadīth studies, par excellence, namely the Albanian-born Syrian Muhammad Nasir al-Din al-
Albani (1914–1999), who edited the traditional corpus of ḥadīth from the vantage point of iden-
tifying past errors in distinguishing verified (ṣaḥīḥ) narrations from undependable (ḍaʿīf) and
fabricated (mawḍūʿ) reports about the Prophet’s words and deeds (Brown, 2018, pp. 294–299).

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For Albani, as for the Ahl al-Hadith before him, any allegiance to a fiqh madhhab was a form of
learned bias, and although his ire was predominantly directed against his ancestral Hanafi school,
the Saudi Hanbalis too fell out with al-Albani, forcing his departure from a prestigious teaching
position at the University of Medina.
From the vantage point of both ontology and praxeology, the term ‘Conformist Salafism’ is
fitting: the adherents must conform to the singularity of religious truth and culturally adapt to
a homogenized pattern of thought, speech, behaviour, and apparel. Espousing an ethos of anti-
diversity, the Salafi mission is hence dedicated to (re)producing a flock of the faithful who are
remade in the supposed image of the first generations of believers, with implications for cultural
mores, social interaction, gender roles, and political dynamics.The self-appellation, to the extent
that any exists, is of course not Conformist Salafism (al-salafiyya al-taqlīdiyya), which is rather
the detractor’s term for this stream, popularized by the Egyptian-born Kuwaiti scholar ‘Abd
al-Rahman ‘Abd al-Khaliq (1939–2020). Less abrasive terms used in Arabic are al-salafiyya al-
rasmiyya (‘customary Salafism’), al-salafiyya al-daʿwiyya (‘proselytizing Salafism’), or most abun-
dantly al-salafiyya al-ʿilmiyya, which could be rendered into English as ‘epistemic’, ‘scholastic’, or
‘knowledge-based’ Salafism. The core referent here is thus a particular concern with the trans-
mission of ‘sound’ religious knowledge. Its adherents are exhorted to pursue the study of the
Salafi canon as the primary obligation of the followers, and many refer to themselves as ‘students
of knowledge’ (ṭullab al-ʿilm, the Pashto equivalent to which is, incidentally, ṭālibān). Conformist
Salafism is thus highly socialized, and often relies on authority figures to mediate issues of schol-
arly difference or political controversy, which in turn reinforces the epistemic control of a small
group of scholars, often Saudi-based or Saudi-educated.
A substream of conformist Salafis could be labelled neo-Wahhabi because of its assimilation
with the Saudi clerical estate, as products of their education in institutions such as the Islamic
University of Medina—the most important Salafi seat of learning (Farquhar, 2016; Thurston,
2016, pp. 67–72)—or in terms of membership in the Saudi-sponsored epistemic communities
around the world. This substream remains faithful to the Hanbali school, not only in rela-
tion to creed (ʿaqīda) but also largely in legal maxims (fiqh). Key leaders of the neo-Wahhabi
substream have historically included figures such as the two Saudi clerics ‘Abd al-Aziz bin
Baz (1910–1999) and Muhammad Ibn Salih al-‘Uthaymin (1925–2001), together with the
Ethiopian-born Muhammad Aman al-Jami (1930–1996) and the Yemeni Muqbil al-Wadi‘i
(1933–2001).
The current leadership in Saudi Arabia consists of Salih al-Fawzan (b. 1933), ‘Abd al-Muhsin
al-‘Abbad al-Badr (b. 1933), ‘Abd al-Aziz Al al-Shaykh (b. 1943), and Rabi’ al-Madkhali (b.
1931).The last-mentioned, a former Head of Sunna Studies at the Islamic University of Medina,
has given rise to the eponymous ‘Madkhalism’ for a kind of establishment Salafism that is furious
in its ultra-loyalism and opposes any challenge to established political authority, teaching instead
unquestioning obedience to rulers (ṭāʿat walī al-amr) as a doctrine of political acquiescence. As
such, Madkhalism is opposed to both Islamism and Salafi activism. Sayyid Qutb’s radicalism
is denounced as a form of heresy, and he is depicted as non-Salafi by way of ʿaqīda as well as
manhaj, while the jihadi Salafis are often referred to as ‘khārijīs’, using the name of a secessionist
group in early Muslim history (Kenney, 2006). Madkhalis, as other conformist Salafis, do regard
secular governance (whether democratic or authoritarian) as a form of disbelief (kufr), but while
they insist that the only acceptable laws are those of the Shari‘a, they do not incite agitation or
coercion towards that objective.
Their anti-politicization polemics notwithstanding, the Madkhalis do serve political func-
tions, often in the service of Saudi foreign policy. This is because Madkhalis are best understood
not simply as ‘propagandists’ (Wagemakers, 2016a, p. 16), but as anti-revolutionaries. In Libya,

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besieged Mu‘ammar al-Gaddafi (c. 1942–2011) sought help from al-Madkhali and several of his
international ideational allies, who, true to form, condemned uprisings against the Muslim ruler,
just as they had sided with besieged despots in Yemen and Egypt (Bonnefoy, 2016, p. 211). Later,
amid a raging civil war in Libya, Madkhali militia (otherwise considered an oxymoron) sided
with the Saudi-backed General Khalifa Haftar’s secularists in fighting a coalition of jihadists,
all the while staying true to the Salafi disposition by demolishing Sufi mausoleums. Yesterday’s
conformists thus became today’s militants.

Stream B: Activist Salafism (al-salafiyya al-harakiyya)

During the 1960s, persecution of the Muslim Brotherhood in Nasserite Egypt, Ba‘athist Syria,
and other pan-Arabist strongholds led to an exodus of their activists. Many sought refuge in
Saudi Arabia, a kingdom with oil riches looking for human resources to assist state-building
efforts (Al-Rasheed, 2002). The Ikhwanista were received with open arms, soon occupying
important roles in the charitable sector and in the mushrooming institutions of higher learn-
ing. While helping the growth of the Saudi state, this also influenced the tenor of Salafism with
more overtly political stances on world affairs.The Ikhwani-Wahhabi hybrid was a more activist
kind of Salafism, not shy to address global political issues. A new discursive field emerged under
the rubric of al-fiqh al-wāqiʾ‎‎, or the ‘discernment of current affairs’, and a new generation of
scholar-activists would claim rival authority to the conformists who controlled state institutions
(Wiktorowicz, 2006).
In this changing intellectual milieu, the younger brother of Sayyid Qutb, Muhammad Qutb
(1919–2014) and Syrian-born Muhammad Surur Zayn al-‘Abidin (1938–2016) were both
activist educators in Saudi Arabia. The former lectured to both leaders of the future al-Qa‘ida,
Osama bin Laden (1957–2011) and Ayman al-Zawahiri (b. 1951), while the latter gave rise to a
substream of political Salafism, called surūriyya or the Sururi current, which sought to synthesize
Ikhwani-style activism (decidedly anti-insurgent) with a strict Salafi theology. Initially, a politi-
cally aware Salafism had served regime interests. During the intra-Arab Cold War between the
conservative monarchies and revolutionary republicanism in twin Nasserite and Ba‘athist forms,
the strategic use of religion qua foreign policy strategy allowed the Saudis a new ideological
discourse by which to discredit enemy regimes (Sheikh, 2003). Soon, though, political Salafism
would turn against the Kingdom.
The Iranian Revolution of 1978–1979 served to politicize Islam across the Muslim world.
The radicalization of Salafism dramatically manifested in the seizure of the Meccan sanctorum
by a millenarial group of Salafis in 1979, led by a disgruntled car mechanic, Juhayman al-‘Utaybi
(1936–1980). Though initially a beneficiary of patronage from the senior conformist cleric,
and later grandmufti, Bin Baz, al-‘Utaybi’s anti-regime Salafism came to entail a takfīr of the
Saudi state for the royalty’s decadence, for its courtship of the West, and for its lack of adherence
to Islamic precepts (Hegghammer and Lacroix, 2007; Trofimov, 2007). This was a radical and
unrepresentative manifestation of activist Salafism, though not entirely unprecedented in Saudi
history, where zealous tribesmen had turned against the royalty even before the consolidation
of the regime (Al-Rasheed, 2002). Ideological precepts matured over the next decade and came
to the fore with American military operations in the region, Desert Fox and Desert Storm.
Conceptual innovations entailed politicization of the precept of al-walāʾ‎‎ wa-l-barāʾ‎‎, entailing
fealty (al-walāʾ‎‎) to both religion and co-religionists and abnegation (al-barāʾ‎‎) of non-Islamic
ideas and modes of life. Although the fealty-and-abnegation conjunction is salient across all
Salafi discourses, activists politicize it to signify a disavowal of non-Islamic alignments, non-
Islamic modes of governance, and supporters of either (Wagemakers, 2008).

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The new activist impulse in Saudi Arabia, embodied in a new generation of young preachers,
was referred to as the Ṣaḥwa (or the Awakening) movement, which decried the clerical establish-
ment’s legitimization of American troop presence in Saudi Arabia. More global in outlook, the
activist Salafis chided the conformists for their myopic parochialism, their lack of comprehension
of political affairs, and their complacency towards, or worse complicity in, both domestic cor-
ruption and foreign collusion (Lacroix, 2011).They were also far more critical of the Saudi sotto-
voce alignment with Israel, subservience to the United States, and in general thought that the
trivialities that preoccupied establishment Salafis diverted them away from more pressing issues
confronting the umma. Far from liberalizers, the activist Salafis sought to extract more conces-
sions on Salafi positions from state institutions, such as stricter gender segregation, fewer rights
for the ‘heretic’ Shi‘a minority, increased suspicion towards foreign cultures and guest workers,
more equitable distribution of public funds, more Shariatic laws in public administration, greater
independence of the ʿulamāʾ, and disentanglement from foreign security alliances (Fandy, 1999).
While the Sahwists did not propagate violent insurrections in the name of religion, they
came under suspicion for their critique of the regime. The two foremost spokesmen of the
Ṣaḥwa, clerics Safar al-Hawali (b. 1950) and Salman al-‘Awda (b. 1955), experienced a cheq-
uered relationship with the Saudi state. Initially incarcerated in 1994 for inciting opposition
to the Saudi government, in the form of public petitions or letters of demand, they emerged
rehabilitated in 1999, able openly to preach with a television programme and website in al-
‘Awda’s name (al-Rasheed, 2006). Following 9/11 and the 2003 terror attacks on Saudi soil,
al-‘Awda denounced violence against the Saudi state while supporting Iraqi resistance against
the coalition troops as a legitimate form of jihad. Al-‘Awda was arrested again in September
2017 during Crown Prince Muhammad bin Salman’s (b. 1985) crackdown on activist Salafis,
ostensibly for tweets that were considered unsupportive of Saudi foreign policy vis-à-vis Qatar
(Smith, 2019).
In particular, in the post-Arab-Spring period, Salafi activism expanded and took new insti-
tutional forms as Salafi political parties emerged across the Middle East and North Africa. Even
if initially wary about the potential for public discord (fasād), the post-Arab-Spring period saw
the increased political involvement of erstwhile conformist Salafis, including those who had
initially condemned the uprisings on religious grounds (Bonnefoy, 2016). Most spectacularly,
the newly-formed Hizb al-Nur, the political wing of the Alexandria-based al-Daʿwa al-Salafiyya,
won 107 seats in the post-Mubarak People’s Assembly, one of several new Salafi-based parties
in Egypt (al-Anani and Malik, 2013). The Arab Spring thus accentuated the polarization of the
Salafi faithful.Traditional conformists remained opposed to politics (siyāsa), which they believed
was a distraction from issues of daʿwa and ʿaqīda. But they were now facing two streams of politi-
cal Salafis: the electoral nouveau activists, often ex-conformists wanting to take advantage of the
opening of the political space to challenge their ideological foes or avoid marginalization, and
the original agitational activists, fundamentally opposed to parliamentary politics and demo-
cratic governance but striving to see (an ahistoric and utopian) Islam embodied in the polity.

Stream C: Militant Salafism (al-salafiyya al-jihādiyya)

Where activist forms of Salafism lost credence with major setbacks in the 1990s, such as the
clampdown on the Ṣaḥwa and the (contrived) failure of the Front Islamique du Salut (FIS) in
Algeria, militant forms of Salafism had already claimed a resounding victory in Afghanistan—a
shock so great, according to the militants, that the Communist superpower imploded from its
aftereffects.This, then, was the beginning of a kind of Salafi Maoism: the route to power did not
go through the ballot box, but power rather grew out of the barrel of a gun.

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Often referred to as the ‘father’ of contemporary Salafi jihadism, the Palestinian ‘Abdullah
Yusuf ‘Azzam (1941–1989) was initially a lecturer at King ‘Abd al-Aziz University in Jeddah
(where he may initially have encountered a young Osama bin Laden) but later became the
paradigmatic jihad practitioner against the Soviets in Afghanistan. He openly acknowledged
his intellectual debt to Ibn Taymiyya and Qutb, and had fallen out with al-Albani, under
whom he used to privately study, on the latter’s disparagement of Qutb. ‘Azzam’s central
idea was that jihad was ‘individually incumbent’ (farḍ ʿayn) upon able-bodied believers in the
face of the confluence of two phenomena: the non-Muslim onslaught on Islam and regime
acquiescence by nominally Muslim regimes (Hegghammer, 2020). Unlike the takfīri strand
of jihadism—like that which became the rival ‘Jalalabad school’ in Afghanistan (Hamid and
Farrall, 2015, pp. 164–176)—‘Azzam cautioned against the wholesale excommunication of
Muslim rulers, and the focal point of his (somewhat irredentist) jihad ideology remained the
defence of Muslim lands, rather than revolutionary insurrection against wayward Muslim
rulers.
A decade after ‘Azzam’s assassination, Ayman al-Zawahiri’s Knights Under the Prophet’s Banner
(2001) became conspicuous for articulating a new strategic doctrine for a kind of ‘total jihad’,
reconciling earlier debates on the ‘near’ and ‘far’ enemies, while seeking to expand the strategic
reservoir of jihad as a millennial war (Gerges, 2009). Al-Qa‘ida’s trans-territoriality, however,
was non-étatist, and conceptually, too, al-Qa‘ida invested few intellectual resources in seeking
to define the nature or strictures of a future Islamic State (Maher, 2016). Indeed, al-Qa‘ida’s
approach arguably came spectacularly close to a form of anarcho-Salafism: in seeking to destroy
states, it hoped that a more Islamic order would grow from the ashes of their destruction.
The creeping nihilism led also to a new anti-nomianism, no longer the kind of anti-sacerdo-
talism displayed by activist Salafis but extended to major questions of Islamic law. Abu ‘Abdullah
al-Muhajir’s Questions About the Jurisprudence of Jihad, better known as The Jurisprudence of Blood,
was the key text, promoting ‘self-martyrdom’ (istishhād) operations on civilian targets as a strategy
of jihad—thus seeking to settle a divisive debate on the admissibility of suicidal operations. Soon
after, the Egyptian Abu Bakr Naji’s epistle, Management of Savagery, explicitly embraced anti-
nomianism and argued that jihad is ‘nothing but brutality, callousness, terrorism, deterrence and
infliction’ (Hassan, 2016, p. 12).To him, disorder and discord were forms of creative violence, and
the most abominable level of savagery was morally and strategically preferable to stability under
the infidel (kufrī) order, for ultimately rival institutions of power would emerge from collapsing
states. In jihadi terrorology, this text could thus be viewed as signifying the paradigm shift from
al-Qa‘ida to Islamic State. Where al-Qa‘ida had identified enemy states, Islamic State identi-
fied enemy people in a form of ‘full-spectrum’ takfīr against theological, political, and military
­adversaries.
Takfīr has always been a volatile subject matter between Salafi groups. Since the mid-1980s,
Abu Muhammad Al-Maqdisi, the nom de guerre of the Palestinian-born ‘Isam Muhammad
Tahir al-Burqawi (b. 1959), perhaps the leading contemporary jihadi ideologue, had reiterated
known Qutbist ideas of political systems as religions (hence constructions such as ‘the religion
of democracy’) and the imperative of militant resistance to all modern systems of government,
including the Saudi state whom he branded infidel (Wagemakers, 2012). The ousting from
the faith community on the basis of politics became a technology by which political leaders
were transmuted from co-religionists (subject to loyalty) to anti-religionists (thus subject to
disavowal), and thus constituted a major reinterpretation of the idea of al-barāʾ‎‎, the final form
of which was rejectionist jihad itself. Yet, al-Maqdisi sought to walk the tightrope between the
pointed takfīr of the non-Shariatic government (takfīr al-khāṣ) and the wider takfīr of the public
at large (takfīr al-ʿumūm)—a distinction that later disappeared with Islamic State.

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Underlying the mutual animosity between the conformists and the militants was a particular
theological dispute on the relationship between faith and works, which, like many anachronistic
tropes in Salafism, goes back to a seventh-century Muslim schism. Insofar as the Salafi defini-
tion of faith (imān) entails its co-constitution by interior belief (when verbalized) and exterior
actions, it permits the faith (or faithlessness) of others to be judged on account of apparent sins
or transgressions. All Salafis reject the precept of irjāʾ‎, or moral ‘postponement of judgement’
(to God), as a cardinal theological error, allowing actions to speak for themselves and disal-
lowing faith to be equated with professed belief only. From here, the dual-pronged jihadist
argument proceeds as follows: by ‘ruling by other than what God has decreed’ (ḥukm bi ghayri
mā anzalallāh), a ruler has not only committed a major (kabīra) sin but engaged in the gravest
form of infidelity (al-kufr al-akbar) and, ipso facto, committed apostasy (irtidād) (Lav, 2012; Kassim,
2015). Like the Khariji radicals of the seventh century, the jihadis thus take the view that serious
infractions against the Shari‘a are tantamount to excommunication from Islamdom, and that
jihad is mandated against such recalcitrant rulers. It is on this basis that the jihadists often face
the charge of being latter-day ‘kharijis’ both from conformist circles and non-Salafis (Lahoud,
2010). The conformist push-back additionally entails a great deal of writing on whether a ruler
who rules ‘by other than Islam’ can be declared infidel or which mitigating factors might apply,
whereas the jihadis charge the non-jihadis with having become murji‘ī or ‘counterfeit Salafis’ on
account of hesitancy in takfīr (cf. Abdelhaleem, 2004).
The Saudi cleric Ahmad Ibn ‘Umar al-Hazimi, albeit not an active jihadi, went further still
and gave rise to the so-called Hazimiyya current by his public negation of conformist argu-
ments of excusing the transgressor of the Shari‘a on the presumption of ignorance (al-ʿudhr
bi-l-jahl) which, he argued, did not extend to the gravest transgressions in faith (al-kufr al-akbar).
Referring back to the third principle in Ibn Abd al-Wahhab’s treatise Nullifiers of Islam (nawāqiḍ
al-islam)—whoever harbours doubt about the disbelief of a disbeliever is himself a disbeliever—
he even argued that their hesitancy surrounding takfīr on this matter would render the con-
formists disbelievers. This approach of ‘excommunicating the excuser’ (takfīr al-‘ādhir) went
significantly beyond historic methods of takfīr and fed into the internecine feuds within Islamic
State in 2014–2018 (Lounnas, 2020).
The hyper-takfīri ‘Hazimi’ faction within Islamic State were called extremists (ghulāt) even
by the self-declared caliphate and some were executed as secessionists (indeed, ‘kharijis’) when
they turned against its less takfīrī religious leaders—such as the Bahraini-born Turki al-Bin‘Ali
(1984–2017)—for questioning the perpetually expanding purview of excommunication (al-takfīr
bi al-tasalsul) (Bunzel, 2019). At the height of the feud, takfīr was pronounced by the Hazimis not
only against rival jihadi organizations, but also against rival factions of Islamic State (for harbour-
ing doubt about the disbelief of apparent apostates), some not even sparing the soi-disant Caliph
(Lounnas, 2020). Takfīr, thus, had seen infinite regress, and in the process, jihad had turned on itself.
Seeing the project of Salafi jihadism turn awry in the twenty-first century, repentant jihadis
have challenged the ideas that have led to spiralling violence. In Saudi Arabia, three leaders of the
so-called Shuʿaybī current that had previously promoted jihad and legitimized al-Qa‘ida, pub-
licly recanted after the Riyadh bombings in 2003. A few years later, the Libyan Islamic Fighting
Force offered a 416-page ‘post-jihadist’ manifesto, entitled ‘Corrective Studies’ (al-murājaʿāt),
deeming the overthrow of Muslim governments illegitimate (Ashour, 2011), while Sayyid Imam
al-Sharif (a key opinion leader in the jihadist intellectual universe and formerly an associate of
al-Zawahiri) called for a moratorium on unfettered militancy and a revision of jihadist ‘miscon-
ceptions’ (Lahoud, 2010). But most astounding was that the case of Abu Hafs al-Rafiki, the lead-
ing jihadi intellectual in Morocco, who not only renounced jihadism, but Salafism altogether
(Rachidi, 2017).

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Conclusion: Wither Salafism?

Within the semantic field of Salafism, one can identify six discursive constants: first, a specific
interpretation of doctrinal orthodoxy (ʿaqīda) with roots in Hanbali fideism and a professed
concern for the adherence to pure monotheism (tawḥīd); second, a particular antithetical con-
ception of orthopraxy, self-consciously reliant on the transmitted Prophetic precedent (sunna)
but with great opposition to (austerely defined) ‘innovations’ (bidaʾ); third, an interpretative
approach that is both selectivist (in the discarding of supposedly inauthentic, or ghayr-ṣahīh, nar-
rations) and literalist (in disallowing taʾwīl, or allegorical understandings); fourth, an animosity
to the reification (taqlīd) of the historical schools of jurisprudence (madhāhib); fifth, a widened
and (il)liberally applied technology of excommunication (takfīr); and, finally, a social identity
predicated on in-group fealty and out-group disavowal (al-walāʾ wa-l-barāʾ). In addition, politi-
cal-activist forms of Salafism rely on the notion of God’s unchallengeable political sovereignty
(ḥākimīyya), which disallows free political choice, while militant Salafis additionally subscribe to
the core concept of jihād as a personally mandatory (farḍ ʿayn) practice.
In terms of its conceptual morphology, Salafism iterates oppositional binaries in social con-
structions of (often mortal) threats, whether they relate to theological, institutional, or geopoliti-
cal ‘dangers’. Salafism entails multiple salvific theories—or soteriologies—that link intimately to
the choice of manhaj of a given Salafi group, ranging from propagation to activism to militancy.
The espoused end-goal invariably revolves around a submission to tawḥīd, but the readings of its
entailments differ, and while this often involves a rejection of non-Shariatic modes of govern-
ance, it may or may not involve active opposition or violent insurrection. Hence, even if seman-
tically relatively coherent, the presumed homogeneity of Salafism disintegrates on account of
amorphous political praxes. As Hegghammer (2010, p. 5) argues, the Salafi label does not ‘corre-
spond to discrete and observable patterns of political behaviour’ nor to clearly delineable politi-
cal positions, despite discursive continuities. The shared Salafi moniker thus conceals important
theological, ideological, and strategic differences among groups, so much so that Salafism, in the
singular, may no longer be a coherent signifier.
The fissures within the Salafi repertoires pertain both to contested hierarchies of objectives
and to the preferred operational strategies in response to situational contingencies, such as the
involvement in politics, contentious or otherwise, and the legitimacy of violence. Variations of
Salafism accentuate competing ideas—from the primacy of theology, to the primacy of govern-
ance, to the primacy of militancy—but all are, in the final instance, political ideas, if we follow
Asad’s (2003) argument that all forms of religiosity have political implications because they
entail norms of action and notional distribution of rights and privileges. Noteworthy, however,
is that the Salafi dispensation itself demurs to such plurality of interpretation, and each stream
of contemporary Salafism continues to see itself as the true salafiyya, with the others having
fallen into error and deviancy, on occasion meriting anathematization (takfīr). Each faction,
thus, believes itself to be the ‘true believers’, adhering to not only correct creed (ʿaqīda) but also
correct method (manhaj). Divisions in thinking apart, monolithic representations of the Salafi
phenomenon are belied by the diversity of the Salafi experience across national and regional
contexts (Meijer, 2009; Cavatorta and Merone, 2016). The global diffusion of Salafism(s) thus
adds not only complexities of variegation but also cultural economies of contestation and
decentralization (often exacerbated by the internet’s erosion of central authority).
Is it still meaningful, then, to speak of Salafism as a distinct religious orientation? It is, but with
the proviso that this religious orientation can lead to multiple, often opposing, political positions.
Wiktorowicz (2006, p. 213), for instance, mentions how a close circle of students and associates of
al-Albani in Jordan ended up fragmenting when they took dramatically different political positions,

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ranging the entire spectrum from conformist to radical to militant. Elsewhere, too, students of con-
formists are known to have declared jihad, as with the case of Ja’far ‘Umar Thalib (1961–2019), the
founder of the now-defunct Indonesian Lashkar Jihad (International Crisis Group, 2004).
The classification of Salafisms into (ideal) types is intellectually worthwhile, but the catego-
ries themselves are slippery: given sufficient challenges, it is possible for conformists to become
politicized, just as it is possible for the activists to militarize. Indeed, the double leap too is pos-
sible—from conformism to militarism—as seen with the Madkhali experience in Libya and the
senior Saudi conformist cleric Salih al-Luhaydan’s public support of jihad in Iraq. Yet, there is
no unidirectional ‘conveyor belt’ from theology to terrorism, and reverse travel remains possible
too, as seen when yesterday’s clandestine militants sought (unsuccessfully) to become today’s
social movement in Tunisia’s Anṣār al-Shariʿa association (Merone, 2017), and the many ‘repent-
ant’ jihadis elsewhere. Overall thus, rather than a fixed typology, the Salafi repertoire emerges
as a spectrum that is acutely context (thus also interest) sensitive and driven, at least in part,
by opportunity structures. Nor should the fact that Salafis often speak anachronistically in the
language of medieval theological schisms—denouncing others as jahmī, murjiʾī, khārijī, etc.—
obscure the equally pervasive fact that the Salafi phenomenon is an utterly modern dispensation
that responds to particular perceived encroachments by non-Islam, however defined, and the
consequent pressures on Muslim identity.

Notes
1 According to Griffin (2006, p. 81), ‘Ideology is a relatively cohesive, [yet] dynamically evolving, set of
collectively held ideas or beliefs [on matters political], whether expressed verbally or in some other
semiotic, performative, ritual, artistic or behavioural form’.
2 The six most oft-rehearsed tracts of Muhammad Ibn ‘Abd al-Wahhab all relate to tawhid and the ever-
present dangers of shirk. They are Kitāb al-tawḥīd (The Book of Monotheism); al-Uṣūl al-thalātha (The
Three Principles); al-Qawāʿid al-arbaʿa (The Four Maxims); Nawāqiḍ al-islām (The Nullifiers of Islam);
Shurūṭ lā ilāha illallāh (The Conditions of [the Declaration] There is No God But Allah); and Kashf
al-shubuhāt (The Removal of Doubts). Interestingly, his Kitāb al-kabāʾir (The Book of Major Sins) has
far less circulation, which may illustrate how Wahhabism is a puritanical, but not necessarily pietist,
movement.
3 Wiktorowicz’s (2006) choice of the term ‘purist’, following the International Crisis Group (2004),
has elicited some critique, predicated on the objection that all forms of Salafism are in fact purist
(Wagemakers, 2016a, p. 11; Pall, 2018, p. 20). The critique is not damning, however, as the signature
identity of the ‘purist’ stream is precisely the familiar Salafi themes of purification and decontamination
of the faith tradition, in turn obtained by adherence to the correct methodology (manhaj) that follows
the prophetic sunna and rejects operative bidʿa. Although none of the Salafist schools can be said to be
pluralist, the purists are particularly self-conscious in disallowing syncretism. Some have argued that
such groups should instead be referred to as ‘quietist’ (e.g., Wagemakers, 2012, 2016a; Rabil, 2014), but
this epithet suffers from simplification, in that they are not consistently quietist but may actively speak
out in defence of the political status quo, or occasionally against it, while invariably being vociferous
in theological debates. Some have preferred the adjective ‘apolitical’, but that would assume (a) that
religion itself is not inherently political, and (b) that a loyalist posture of support is not political—both
highly questionable assumptions. Finally, the term ‘non-violent’ has been ascribed to this stream and
while this is largely true, it does not extend to violence by state institutions, nor to what Galtung
(1969, 1990) has referred to as ‘structural violence’ (violence enacted by socio-economic structures) or
‘cultural violence’ (violence perpetuated by cultural norms). For the above reasons, I use ‘Conformist
Salafism’ as the designation of this stream of Salafism.

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 14
BUDDHIST NATIONALISM
Saul Tobias

Introduction
The violence perpetrated by Buddhist ultra-nationalists in countries such as Sri Lanka and
Myanmar in recent decades has drawn worldwide condemnation, dispelling the notion that
Buddhism, uniquely among world religions, is immune to the lure of political violence (Beech,
2013). While it is important to correct this misconception of Buddhism as pacifist and non-
political, it is also true that prominent Buddhists who condone nationalist violence are rela-
tively rare, even in countries where Buddhism has a long history of political entanglements. A
glance across the landscape of Buddhist Asia reveals that in contrast to these over-simplifications,
Buddhism’s relation to nationalism is complex and varied, encompassing a spectrum of ideologi-
cal thought ranging from democratic nationalism to nationalist authoritarianism.
The term “Buddhist nationalism” itself poses problems. Neither “religion” nor “nation” is a
concept with obvious equivalents in pre-modern Asia. Both are borrowed from the West, trans-
lated and re-appropriated for use by Asian scholarly and political elites in the modern period
(Ashiwa, 2009). From around the 19th century, the European colonization of Asia elevated the
concept of the nation as a principal focus of anti-colonial resistance. At the same time, policies
of modernization and secularization promoted by both European colonizers and Asian elites
highlighted the question of religion’s status and relation to the state, a question also posed by
Asian scholars of religion as they incorporated Western academic approaches into their stud-
ies. The result was a variety of re-imaginings of Buddhism’s relation to the nation. Since then,
the term “Buddhist nationalism” has been used by a number of politicians, such as Burmese
post-independence Prime Minister U Nu or Sri Lanka’s present-day Bodu Bala Sena organiza-
tion to describe their ideological agenda (Kawanami, 2016; Schonthal & Walton, 2016). More
broadly, Buddhist nationalism may refer to a range of modern political movements and ideolo-
gies that infuse nationalism – the view that “the political and national unit should be congru-
ent” (Gellner, 1983, p. 1) or that political sovereignty and legitimacy reside in an “imagined
community” defined by a shared history, culture, or ethnicity (Anderson, 2006) – with Buddhist
ideas, values, and identities. Though the focus of this chapter is on Buddhist nationalism in the
modern period, rulers in pre-colonial Asia also utilized Buddhism to affirm communal bonds
within a populace and to cultivate a sense of shared purpose in the face of external threats, a
kind of proto-nationalism (see Smith, 1991). However the term is used, one should keep in

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mind that there is nothing inherent to Buddhist teaching or tradition that implies an obvious
affinity with nationalism, and much, in fact, that opposes it (Tobias, 2018). Instead, fluid ideas
about the meaning of Buddhist community on the one hand, and political community on the
other, have coincided, diverged, and recombined over time. The particular form of Buddhist
nationalism that emerged depended, in part, on such factors as:

·· The traditions and doctrinal resources that advocates of Buddhist nationalism drew on in
articulating the relation between Buddhism and the nation, including differences between
the Theravada Buddhism of Sri Lanka and South-East Asia, and the Mahayana Buddhism
of Central and East Asia.
·· The particular geopolitical interests and ideological orientation of political actors at par-
ticular historical moments.
·· The political and sociocultural situation of Buddhism in each country.

While these factors interacted in historically and regionally specific ways, we can get a sense of
their differing impact by distinguishing three ideal types of Buddhist nationalism: Buddhist civic
nationalism, Buddhist patriotism, and Buddhist ultra-nationalism. These ideal types allow us to
pick out pertinent features of Buddhist nationalism in the modern period. However, as we shall
see, none of these ideal types is in practice mutually exclusive, as one may give rise to another,
given the right conditions.

Buddhist civic nationalism

Buddhist civic nationalism denotes an ideological association of Buddhism and the national
interest that emerges from an enduring and well-established relation between Buddhism and the
state. This kind of relation already existed prior to colonization and the subsequent formation
of modern nation-states in the Buddhist kingdoms that spanned South and South-East Asia,
in what is today Sri Lanka, Myanmar (Burma), Thailand, and Cambodia. Theravada Buddhism,
with its strict rules governing the life of the sangha (the monastic community) and its canon
of sacred Pali texts, dominated religious life in these countries, providing a cultural and moral
foundation for the community.
Two early images of Buddhist leadership were influential in these countries. The first is the
(originally pre-Buddhist) idea of the Cakkavatti (Sanskrit: Cakravartin), the universal monarch
who fuses divine and temporal power. The second is the idea of the Dhammaraja (“Dhamma-
King”), a secular ruler who manifests the noblest qualities of the dhamma (Sanskrit: dharma; the
Buddhist teachings) and defends and promotes Buddhism in his realm without impinging on
the sangha’s claim to ultimate spiritual authority. The historical figure closely associated with
this ideal is Asoka (c. 304–232 BCE), the Indian monarch who spent the latter part of his reign
propagating Buddhism across much of the subcontinent and who stands as the archetype of
Buddhist kingship for monarchs in many Buddhist-majority countries.
In addition to these images of leadership, two other factors were conducive to the align-
ment of Buddhism and the nation in Buddhist-majority countries. First, Buddhism does not,
in principle, associate “being a Buddhist” with membership in a particular ethnic or cultural
community (as is the case in Judaism and in modern conceptualizations of Hindutva), nor does
Buddhism identify the faithful with a unified community conceived in spatial or territorial
terms (as the Islamic notion of the ummah or community of believers can sometimes imply).
However, with no central authority to help maintain transnational relationships among the
faithful, sanghas came to rely on local political authorities for protection and the right to prom-

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ulgate the dhamma. Hence, many became quite parochial in outlook, reinforcing a symbiotic
relationship between sangha and state (Borchert, 2007). Second, despite its otherworldly focus
on escaping the cycle of rebirth, Buddhism also emphasizes a life of virtue as a prerequisite for
favourable rebirth and ultimate liberation.While the monastic community was meant to provide
the optimal environment for such conduct, the wider community and polity could also demar-
cate the bounds of a “virtuous community.” The idea of the Buddha-sasana, or Buddhist dispen-
sation, became influential in Theravada countries as marking not only a cosmological epoch but
also a geopolitical expanse in which the dhamma could thrive and its moral influence reign.Well
before Buddhist-majority countries in South and South-East Asia transitioned from empires and
then colonies into modern, constitutional nation-states, this interweaving of Buddhist doctrine
with notions of ethnos and territoriality were commonplace in both elite political discourse
and popular political self-representation, laying the foundation for Buddhist civic nationalism in
the independence period.

Cambodia and Thailand

While Buddhist civic nationalism was sometimes revolutionary, more frequently it had a con-
servative character, functioning less as a force for change than as a basis of identity, stability, and
morality, and in the case of constitutional monarchies, as an important adjunct to the monarch in
his or her role as the personification of the nation. This kind of civic nationalism is exemplified
in Cambodia and Thailand, where political elites were tasked at the end of the colonial period
with constituting these countries as modern nation-states.
In Cambodia, Theravada Buddhism has dominated religious life since the fall of the Angkor
Empire (which included Shivaist,Vishnuist, and Mahayana Buddhist elements) in the mid-15th
century. During colonial rule (1863–1941), the French used the monasteries to administer their
protectorate while establishing educational institutions that promoted the modernization of
Cambodian Buddhism. The Buddhist Institute, founded by the French in the 1930s, sought to
enhance French control by reducing the influence of Thai Buddhism on the Cambodian sangha
(Chandler, 1991). Such endeavours helped craft the image of a distinctly Cambodian Buddhist
nation.
Following independence, Buddhism played a key role in legitimizing the claims of political
leaders. Foremost among these was King Norodom Sihanouk, presented as the “great righteous
king” (dhammika mahareach) in the 1947 Cambodian Constitution and who referred to himself
as “king-monk” (Harris, 2008, p. 144). Sihanouk later abdicated to form a political party with
an official ideology of “Buddhist Socialism,” and his premiership during the 1950s and 1960s
included a national programme of economic and cultural revival guided by Buddhist princi-
ples. Defending against accusations that he was merely aping Burmese Prime Minister U Nu’s
Buddhist nationalist programme, Sihanouk asserted a distinctly Cambodian Buddhist identity,
insisting his policy emerged from “Buddhist morality and the religious traditions of our national
existence rather than doctrines imported from abroad” (quoted in Harris, 2008, p. 148). The
right-wing coup that deposed Sihanouk in 1970 continued to use Buddhism to support its
ideological agenda. Its leader, Lon Nol, advertised his personal piety and emphasized the contrast
between Buddhism and the rising communist threat of the Khmer Rouge.
Following the deaths of an estimated 63 per cent of monks during the Khmer Rouge period
(1975–1979), Buddhism was restored under the strict control of the Vietnamese-led liberation
forces. With progress to democracy, Buddhism has been elevated to a pillar of the new state and
once again deeply integrated into the social fabric of society, with close relations between state
and monastic institutions. The constitutional monarchy was re-established in 1993, under the

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national motto of “Nation, Religion, King,” and the current monarch, Norodom Sihamoni, has
remained, at least in public, above the political fray. As Ian Harris notes, Khmer Buddhism has
learned to adapt to “a great variety of political contexts – be they colonial, monarchical, socialist,
republican or doctrinaire Marxist.” To this list of political ideologies, one must now add creep-
ing authoritarianism, as the current Cambodian government under Hun Sen is dismantling
democracy in the country. It remains to be seen how the sangha will respond, given the tension
between its established role as a stabilizing institution and the quiet support of many monks for
the democratic opposition. Whatever the outcome of the current situation, Harris’s conclusion
remains valid:

The visible presence of the sangha and its unique significance as the only institution
able to operate effectively and with high levels of mass support throughout the whole
of the country has ensured that almost all governments have felt the need to cultivate
[it], whatever their political philosophy.
(Harris, 2008, p. 230)

The tripartite formula of monarchy-religion-nation is also found in Thailand, and as in

Cambodia, Buddhism’s contribution to defining Thai national identity has been ideologically
flexible, available to democratic and authoritarian regimes alike. Though never colonized by a
European power, modern Thailand faced many of the same challenges as its colonized neigh-
bours. From as early as the 19th century, the monarchy faced pressure to democratize and
Westernize, as well as intermittent challenges to its existence by anti-monarchist forces. The
country also faced the destabilizing impact of global trade, great power rivalries on its borders,
economic depression, and two world wars. In seeking to secure its position while transforming
Thailand into a modern state, the monarchy turned to its well-established role as protector and
patron of Buddhism. Modern Thai monarchs, invoking the Cakkavatti and Dhammaraja ideals,
looked to the example of notable predecessors such as Rama I (r. 1782–1809), who returned the
statue of the Emerald Buddha, considered the national palladium, from Laos to the Royal Palace
in Bangkok, and Mongkut (r. 1851–1868), a monk for 27 years before becoming king, who had
been active in reforming the sangha.
In 1902, King Chulalongkorn’s Sangha Act established a national monastic hierarchy admin-
istered by the crown. With oversight of a monastic organization that reached deep into the
provinces and into village life, the state had at its disposal a valuable tool for instilling in the
populace a sense of shared communal responsibility and civic duty, with temples functioning as
public schools and monks as instructors (Keyes, 2019). The organization of the national sangha
remained a principal concern of the state, its structure fluctuating from more democratic to
more centralized forms, as Thailand oscillated between periods of democracy and military rule
throughout the 20th century (Walton, 2017). Throughout these changes, Buddhism continued
to play a stabilizing and unifying role, pervading the discourse and symbols of Thai nation-
hood as exemplified in the “three-pillars” of the Thai nation – Buddhism, the monarchy, and
the nation – and symbolized in the three colours of the national flag, adopted in 1917. King
Bhumibol Adulyadej (r. 1946–2016) was widely perceived as an ideal Buddhist king, associated
with the Buddhist virtues of moderation and self-sacrifice. Today, Thais have become increas-
ingly secular or have turned to Christianity or millennial Buddhist movements such as the
Dhammakaya sect that are better suited to their needs (Keyes, 2016). Nonetheless, Buddhism as
a central pillar of Thai national identity and sensibility is likely to endure, however loosely con-
nected to Buddhism urban Thais become in their daily lives.

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Sri Lanka and Burma (Myanmar)

Certain conditions that gave rise to Buddhist civic nationalism in Thailand and Cambodia are
also found in Sri Lanka and Burma. These countries have well-established Theravada Buddhist
institutions and cultures and a historically close connection between the monastic hierar-
chy and the monarchy. For example, Sri Lanka has the longest history of Buddhism of any
Buddhist country, with a largely unbroken connection between the various ruling dynasties and
Theravada Buddhism that lasted from the 3rd century BCE until the 19th century. Sinhalese
kings were active patrons of Buddhist institutions, with custodianship of the sacred relic of
the Buddha’s tooth. Buddhism in Burma was almost as well-established, and Burmese kings,
whose empires were among the largest in pre-colonial South and South-East Asia, emulated
the ideal of the Dhammaraja as defender and patron of the faith. King Mindon (1853–1878)
erected Buddha statues and stupas, oversaw the compilation of volumes of Buddhist texts, and
after 1865 took direct control of the state’s religious council rather than install a monastic to
the position of Chief of Religious Affairs. He also summoned the fifth great Buddhist synod of
1871, attended by more than 2500 monks from across Asia, a gathering that had not taken place
in 2000 years (Charney, 2006). Hence, long before “nationalism” as a modern ideology emerged
in Sri Lanka and Burma, Buddhism’s role as the principal ground of national identity had been
firmly ­established.
There are, however, a number of factors distinguishing Sri Lanka and Burma from Thailand
and Cambodia, which have shaped Buddhist nationalism in these countries. Most prominently,
Burma and Sri Lanka contain sizeable ethnic and religious minorities and an overlap between
ethnic and religious identity that is less evident in Cambodia and Thailand. Kings of Sri Lanka
and Burma spent considerable time in wars with Hindu and Muslim neighbours. This sense
of vulnerability to incursion by religious “others” was exacerbated during the colonial period,
which introduced secular administration, job preference for Christians, and encouraged Christian
missionary work, all of which weakened the cultural and political hegemony of the Theravada
Buddhist establishment (Brac de la Perrière, 2016; Lehr, 2019). In Sri Lanka, Buddhist intellectu-
als such as Anagarika Dharmapala (1864–1933), the founder of modern Buddhist nationalism in
the country, responded by spearheading a Buddhist cultural and intellectual revival. The YMBA,
or Young Men’s Buddhist Association, was established in 1898 as a lay Buddhist alternative to the
YMCA, followed by the establishment of the YMBA of Burma in 1906. Both organizations used
Theravada Buddhism as the ideological basis of their efforts to end colonial rule (Lehr, 2019).
Alongside lay Buddhist organizations, monastics fought to preserve the Buddha-sasana (Buddhist
dispensation or realm) as the bedrock of national identity. The role of Burmese monks in this
effort was significant enough for D.E. Smith, a noted scholar of South Asian religion and poli-
tics, to opine that in “the anti-colonial struggle, the pongyis (monks) were the first nationalists”
(quoted in Lehr, 2019, p. 167). In these ways, colonialism unwittingly reinforced a conception
of the Buddhist community in territorial and even ethno-nationalist terms, as the defence of
Buddhism was identified with the defence of a national communal space against intrusion from
colonial and other outsiders.
Another factor shaping the trajectory of Buddhist civic nationalism in Sri Lanka and Burma
was that independence arrived in 1948 without the restoration of the monarchy. Instead of a
Buddhist constitutional monarchy, which enabled some symbolic distance between the civic role
of Buddhism and the rough and tumble of party politics, politicians were free to burnish their
authority by appropriating Buddhist ritual and symbols and by exploiting the majority Buddhist
antipathy towards non-Buddhist communities. In Sri Lanka, intercommunal tolerance in the
decade following independence disappeared under the premiership of S.W.R.D. Bandaranaike,

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who elevated the Sinha language, Buddhist history, and Buddhist institutions, and won the sup-
port of the sangha for these policies. Independent Burma also faced the challenge of unifying an
ethnically diverse country that, while overwhelmingly Buddhist, contained significant religious
minorities, including migrant Indians (Muslims and Hindus) in the urban areas, Christians in
the border regions, and Rohingya Muslims in Rakhine State. U Thant, the post-independence
leader, advocated for religious freedom but also promoted Buddhist nationalism in his efforts to
lay the foundation of a democratic nation-state with Buddhism as its unifying, moral founda-
tion (Kawanami, 2016). As a result of pressure from the sangha, and despite his initial opposition,
he acceded to the declaration of Buddhism as the state religion in 1961, with a constitutional
amendment that encoded the state’s duties to support the religion and defend it against insult.
During the period of military dictatorship between 1962 and 2012, the government drew on
the ritual power of Buddhism to shore up its legitimacy and suppressed other religions, even in
the face of resistance from pro-democratic forces that included many monks.This resistance was
exemplified in the so-called Saffron Revolution of 2007, named for the robes of the Burmese
Monks who marched in their thousands, carried the Buddhist flag, and chanted Buddhist verses
while calling for democratic change. These actions exemplified Buddhist civic nationalism of a
democratic kind, figuring the sangha as the moral foundation and conscience of the nation and
identifying Buddhism with national democratic values. However, in both Sri Lanka and Burma,
this kind of democratic nationalism had to compete with a more “hard-edged” Buddhist ethno-
nationalism that drew protests from religious minorities, generating serious intra-communal
clashes that laid the seeds for insurrection and civil war, and for the Buddhist ultra-nationalism
that would emerge in following decades.

Bhutan and Tibet

Whereas Buddhist civic nationalism is often quite conservative, upholding traditional roles for
the sangha and Buddhist monarchy, two examples from Mahayana Buddhist countries, Bhutan
and Tibet, indicate the varying, and arguably more innovative, forms that Buddhist civic nation-
alism can take. Tibetan and Bhutanese models of Buddhist civic nationalism go beyond recon-
ciling Western nationalism with Buddhist tradition or harnessing the ideological and emotional
appeal of Buddhism to a modernist national project. Rather, they complicate the nationalist
narrative of independent nation-states by blending claims to national sovereignty with appeals
to global discourses of ecological and spiritual interdependence, using Buddhism as a basis of
national identity and as a resource for re-imagining nationalism in ways that are responsive to
global political and cultural trends.
For much of its history, Bhutan was a reclusive kingdom ruled by a dynasty whose revered
status was inseparable from its role as protector of the Vajrayana (Tantric) form of Mahayana
Buddhism. These kings appealed not only to the traditional Cakravarti and Dhammaraja ideals
but also to the Mahayana ideal of the Bodhisattva, a realized being of boundless compassion who
works for the liberation of all beings (Mathou, 2000). In response to recent challenges, including
encroaching globalization and regional conflicts arising from the treatment of its Hindu-Nepali
community (Saul, 2000), Bhutan has endeavoured to modernize without sacrificing its political
or economic sovereignty. Bhutan established a modern constitutional monarchy and adopted a
new constitution in 2008 that carves out a civic role for Buddhism consistent with more pro-
gressive, democratic principles. The constitution invokes Mahayana Buddhism in its opening
lines – “We, the people of Bhutan, blessed by the Triple Gem [of Buddha, Dharma, and sangha]
[and] the protection of our guardian deities” – and highlights Buddhism as “the spiritual herit-
age of Bhutan, which promotes the principles and values of peace, non-violence, compassion

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and tolerance.”The constitution also names the king as “the protector of all religions in Bhutan”
and declares that it “shall be the responsibility of religious institutions and personalities to pro-
mote the spiritual heritage of the country while also ensuring that religion remains separate
from politics” (Bhutan Constitution, 2008, article 3:3). Bhutan has also promoted a distinctive
development philosophy called Gross National Happiness, a model of civic nationalism that
grounds a philosophy of national identity and development in a set of principles emphasizing
holistic well-being and the protection of religious, cultural, and ecological resources (Kinga et
al., 1999). Though problems of ethnic and religious discrimination have not been fully resolved,
Bhutan has been successful in using its Buddhist culture to present itself as a progressive country
that welcomes international cooperation, but on its own terms.
While Tibet’s history is quite different from that of Bhutan, the Tibetan independence move-
ment has also crafted a national ideology that uses Buddhism in innovative ways. For much of
its history, Tibet’s status as a sovereign state was ambiguous; its security often dependent on
the patronage of Mongolian and Chinese potentates to whom powerful lamas of the various
Tibetan Vajrayana sects acted as spiritual preceptors (Tuttle, 2005). Tibetan theocracy was for-
malized in the 17th century when the line of the Dalai Lamas, heads of the Gelug sect, was
established as the secular authority over large areas of Tibet. Considered incarnations of the
Bodhisattva Avalokitesvara (Tibetan: Chenrezig) – the embodiment of compassion and protec-
tor of Tibet – the Dalai Lamas had semi-divine status. A period of greater sovereignty, which
included the expulsion of the Chinese from the territory in 1912, ended with the communist
Chinese takeover in 1949 and the 14th Dalai Lama’s flight into exile a decade later.
Since the 1950s, a Tibetan independence movement has resisted the Chinese occupation
both within and outside Tibet. For many Tibetans, whose identity was principally regional
rather than national, religion remains “their way of ‘imagining Tibet’” (Kolås, 1996, p. 65). A
unified Tibetan national identity, in opposition to Chinese occupation and assimilation in the
diaspora, has been forged primarily out of Buddhist identity and culture. Inside Tibet, resistance
to Chinese occupation and sinification simmered throughout the decades, with frequent out-
bursts of pro-independence protests, including the uprisings of 1987 and 2008. Young monks
and nuns have been prominent in these protests, and monasteries have served as centres of
resistance. Demonstrations often take place around the Jokhang Temple in Lhasa and involve
overt or covert signs of loyalty to the Dalai Lama, whose image is banned by the Chinese.These
protests are both religious and political; the monks and nuns seem to make little distinction
between secular values of human rights and the ethical and spiritual demands of their faith. The
self-immolations that have occurred regularly since 2009 are similarly best understood as acts of
political protest and as religious acts of self-sacrifice conceived as Bodhisattva activity (Gouin,
2014; Soboslai & Gruber, 2018).
Outside of Tibet, the nationalist cause and its underlying ideology have gone through a
number of changes. Residing in India, the young Dalai Lama looked to the Gandhian example
of satyagraha and emphasized Buddhist non-violence as the spiritual heart of the Tibetan inde-
pendence movement. Furthermore, as a key goal of the Tibetan government in exile is the pres-
ervation of Tibetan culture and religion in the face of perceived “cultural genocide” in Tibet,
the religious, cultural, and political goals of the exile community have frequently overlapped
(Anand, 2000, p. 275).While many nationalist causes have appealed to diaspora and international
support, the Tibetan cause is exceptional in the extent to which it operates as a “transnational
force,” drawing in Tibetans and non-Tibetans, including many non-Tibetan converts to Tibetan
Buddhism (Houston & Wright, 2003). Exile has provided Tibetan monks and teachers a new
audience, so converts to Tibetan Buddhism are frequently exposed to the Tibetan independ-
ence cause as an indirect result of their religious instruction. This, combined with the global

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celebrity of the 14th Dalai Lama who embodies the roles of a political leader, Buddhist teacher,
and ecumenical spiritual “guru” all at once, gives Tibetan Buddhist nationalism a more interna-
tional character than is the case with most other examples of Buddhist nationalism. As a result,
the rhetoric of Tibetan nationalism has softened in recent decades, shifting from the depiction
of Tibet as a nation-state deprived of its sovereignty to an endangered spiritual and ecological
resource, whose preservation is of global concern. This approach, promoted by the Dalai Lama,
focuses on Tibet as a future “peace zone,” exemplifying values of demilitarization, interreligious
dialogue, and environmental stewardship.This evocation of Buddhism as a moderate philosophy
of the “middle way” underpins the Dalai Lama’s retreat from a policy of Tibetan independence
to that of autonomy within China. Of course, the fusion of Buddhism and politics in Tibetan
nationalism is not without its tensions, embodied most obviously in the figure of the Dalai
Lama, who espouses a liberal, democratic, and progressive vision for Tibet but personifies the
non-democratic history of Tibetan theocracy. In recent years, the Tibetan government in exile
has sought to resolve these contradictions, culminating in the Dalai Lama’s 2011 abdication of
all political authority.

Buddhist patriotism
A different type of Buddhist nationalism is evident in places where Buddhism’s relationship to
the state has been more tenuous, even though its presence in people’s everyday lives is well-estab-
lished. In most East Asian countries, including China, Taiwan, and Japan, Mahayana Buddhism
remains one religion among several influential competitors, including Daoism, Confucianism,
Shinto, and Christianity. In these countries, shifting dynasties or political regimes often meant
changes in Buddhism’s fortunes. The attitude of the sangha and lay Buddhist intellectuals to
their modernizing nation-states was therefore characterized by the need to reassure political
authorities of Buddhism’s loyalty and benefit to society, often in the face of competing claims
by these other religious traditions. This need was especially pronounced at historical junctures
when political elites were forging new ideologies of the nation that sought to reconcile Western
discourses of modernization with essentialist notions of a national spirit or essence. This essence
was often associated with religion or culture and not always to Buddhism’s advantage. While
ideologies of “Buddhist patriotism” that emerged in these circumstances were as diverse in form
as those of Buddhist civic nationalism, they are all explicit in articulating the compatibility of
Buddhism with national projects of modernization and moral regeneration and the ways in
which Buddhism can serve the goals of the state.

China and Taiwan

Since its arrival in China as early as the Han dynasty (206 BC to 220 AD), Buddhism’s politi-
cal status has depended on the shifting ideologies of the imperial court. Periods of gener-
ous patronage by successive dynasties such as the Tang (618–907 AD) alternated with periods
of persecution in which Buddhist activity was severely curtailed. Buddhism’s foreignness was
often a factor in this persecution, as well as the perceived unproductiveness of the monastic
community and their withdrawal from social life, characteristics at odds with Chinese social
norms. From at least the 7th century, the emperors sought to control admission to the sangha,
requiring the registration of monks and nuns and closely controlling their movements. During
the last imperial dynasty, the Qing (1636–1912), Chinese Buddhism declined as the court
embraced Confucianism while also patronizing Tibetan Buddhism as a way to exercise control
over Mongolia.

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With the establishment of the Chinese Republic in 1912, nationalists embarked on a process
of modernization that emphasized science, secular education, and an overhaul of all imperial
institutions. They differentiated religion from superstition and sought to rationalize the influ-
ence of religion in government and civil life (Scott, 2011).The resulting “Smashing Superstition”
movement, initiated by more radical nationalist party officials, and the “Converting Temples to
Schools” movement, threatened the survival of Buddhist institutions (Ashiwa, 2009). However,
these developments also offered leading Buddhist reformers, among them Dai Jitao, Yang
Wenhui, and the monk Taixu, an opportunity to promote a Buddhist revival along lines that
would cement Buddhism’s position in the larger national project of social and cultural devel-
opment. Drawing on classical sacred texts such as the “Scripture for Humane Kings who wish
to Protect their States,” as well as the example of Japanese Buddhism’s successful moderniza-
tion, these reformers emphasized education, social involvement, and the rationalization of the
monastic system, as well as promoting public rituals such “nation-protecting” ceremonies (Scott,
2011). Reforms were spearheaded by new Buddhist organizations, such as the Chinese Buddhist
Association, that defended Buddhist interests and acted as liaisons to the nationalist government
(Ashiwa, 2009). Buddhist monks began to take a more active role in social and political causes
affecting the Chinese nation, including participating in armed resistance to the Japanese (Xue,
2005).
The reorganization of Chinese Buddhism during the Republic laid the blueprint for future
relations with the communist government after 1949. As Wellens notes, “Already in the early
years of CCP rule, secularization did not mean Buddhism was forced into the private sphere
or totally suppressed, but rather, remoulded and utilized by the party-state” (Wellens, 2017, p.
159). Since its suppression during the cultural revolution, Chinese Buddhism has once again
experienced a period of growth, perhaps best described as “regulated development” (Gildow,
2020). Buddhist seminaries have been established, though they mandate political instruction,
and Buddhist associations have grown, closely regulated by the state. As the Chinese Communist
Party (CCP) increases its resistance to “foreign interference,” for which Islam and Christianity
are viewed as conduits, it has grown more receptive to Buddhism as an “indigenous” reli-
gion. A number of Chinese officials, including President Xi Jinping, have publicly affirmed
Chinese Buddhism’s compatibility with Chinese cultural values and traditions and with the
CCP’s agenda for a Chinese cultural renaissance. The sangha has proved receptive to this role,
as evidenced by its support for the government’s ongoing suppression of the Falun Gong sect,
in part because it benefits from this relatively privileged status compared with other faiths.Yet,
despite such recent “harmonization” of Buddhism with the state, Buddhism’s political position
in China remains tenuous. Its current relationship to the state could be described as one of open
arms and an iron fist, as heightened scrutiny and increased regulation by the more authoritarian
Xi regime attest.
In Taiwan, the nationalist government that fled the communist victory in 1949 elevated
Confucianism to a virtual state religion, partly because Confucianism’s emphasis on social unity
and respect for authority suited the Kuomintang’s purposes. Taiwanese Buddhists responded by
aligning Buddhist organizations with the interests of the state. Buddhist reformers like Cheng
Yen (b. 1937), the founder of the Tzu Chi movement, presented submission to family and
community as essentially Buddhist values, a view that was consistent with the development of
Taiwan under the Kuomintang’s authoritarian leadership (Madsen, 2007, pp. 26–27). The influ-
ence of Christian missionary activity offered Taiwanese Buddhists an additional opportunity
to demonstrate their loyalty. Buddhist publications in Taiwan in the 1950s published articles
extolling “patriotism and political loyalty … as part of Chinese Buddhist identity, in contrast to
Christianity” (Pacey, 2020, p. 60).

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Japan
Like Buddhism in China and Taiwan, Japanese Buddhism has a turbulent history in which
its political status has been much contested. Japanese Buddhism’s association with the state
goes back to the 6th century, and the legendary Prince Shotoku, considered the founder of
Japanese Buddhism, through his support of Buddhist scholarship and monks. In later centuries,
Buddhism flourished under the patronage of the state but also faced repression during the
Azuchi-Momoyama Period (1573–1600), when Shinto and neo-Confucianism were favoured.
Buddhism’s political revival came under the Tokugawa Shogunate (1603–1868), which folded
Buddhist institutions into the operations of the state. Buddhist temples functioned as central
registrars for localities, and with their monopoly on the performance of funeral rites, these
temples gained wealth and political influence (Wilkinson, 2016). However, after the Meiji res-
toration in 1868, Buddhism again faced a backlash. Buddhist temples lost land and power, and
monks faced persecution.
The response of Buddhist intellectuals to the modernizing Meiji state was to recast Japanese
Buddhism as consistent with the official ideology of state Shinto and integral to the nation’s
well-being and development. The figure of Prince Shotoku was revived with new biographies
and editions of his writings, and his status as an ancestor of the imperial family highlighted as
evidence of the natural alliance of Buddhism and the modern imperial regime. Tanaka Chigaku
(1861–1939), founder of a number of neo-Nichiren Buddhist organizations, expounded a ver-
sion of Nichiren Buddhism that maintained that the imperial constitution, despite the privi-
leged position it accorded to Shinto, was an “ideal manifestation of Nichiren’s religious teaching,
in which the unity of the dharma and the absolute authority of the Emperor could be fully
realized” (cited in Kawanami, 1999, p. 109). Buddhist scholars embraced the task of establishing
Buddhist studies as a scientific field that aligned with the state’s ideological interest in presenting
Japan as a modern nation. The first decades of the 20th century witnessed a surge in Buddhist
research and publications, particularly of canonical works and scholarly editions of scriptures
(Wilkinson, 2016). Leading figures in Japanese Buddhism such as Shimaji Mokurai (1838–1911),
a leader of the Jodo Shinshu sect, and Inoue Enryo (1858–1919), an influential Buddhist scholar
at Tokyo University, viewed these developments in Japanese Buddhism as a boon to Japan’s
national self-assertion. Inoue wrote that

If we continue to nurture [Buddhism] in Japan and disseminate it some day in foreign

countries, we will not only add to the honor of our nation but will also infuse the
spirit of our land into the hearts and minds of foreigners.
(cited in Wilkinson, 2016, p. 289)

These patriotic efforts to reform Buddhism would secure its ideological position in Japanese
national life, though not without dire consequences in the 1930s and 1940s.

Buddhist ultra-nationalism
As can be seen, Buddhist nationalism is not monolithic. It includes various permutations that reflect
the interaction between Buddhist doctrine and tradition, historical circumstances, and the specific
sociopolitical conditions to which a country’s Buddhist institutions must adapt. This is also true
of Buddhist ultra-nationalism, the most publicized, but, in fact, most infrequent, type of Buddhist
nationalism. Ultra-nationalism can be described as extreme devotion to one’s nation, accompanied
by violent actions or rhetoric directed at perceived “outsiders.” Buddhist ultra-nationalism adopts
these positions while equating the defence of Buddhism with the defence of the national commu-

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nity. For this reason, it is inaccurate to describe this ideological position as Buddhist fundamental-
ism (at most, it is a “syncretic fundamentalism”) given that the view of Buddhist purity it espouses
is inseparable from ethnocultural or ethnonational concerns (Almond et al., 2003).
Buddhist ultra-nationalism has emerged out of both Buddhist patriotism and Buddhist civic
nationalism, with Japanese Buddhism in the 1930s and 1940s a striking example of the former,
and militant Buddhists in Sri Lanka and Burma examples of the latter. By and large, Buddhist
countries have avoided this kind of ultra-nationalism, though Thailand witnessed such extreme
views in the 1970s, as the threat of communism loomed at home and abroad. A prominent
Buddhist monk, Kittivuddho Bhikkhu, expressed the view that communists were less than
human and to kill them would not be a sin. More recently, Thai monks in the south of the
country have been vocal about the need to defend Buddhism against the region’s Malay Muslim
minority, if necessary by force (Keyes, 2016).

Japan
In Japan, Buddhist support for ultra-nationalist militarism grew out of “patriotic” efforts to align
Buddhism with the state’s imperialist foreign policy and state Shinto emperor worship. Militant
strains in 20th-century Japanese Buddhism were apparent as early as the Russo-Japanese war
(1904–1905), when leading Buddhists such as Zen master Shaku Soen identified Buddhist values
of self-sacrifice for a greater cause with service to the emperor and the state (Victoria, 2006).The
association of Zen Buddhism with the ancient warrior code of Bushido was one way in which
Buddhism and militarism were aligned, but the wholesale endorsement of Japanese aggression
extended to almost every sect of Japanese Buddhism. By the 1930s, leading Buddhist organiza-
tions, including the Nichiren-aligned Association for the Practice of Imperial-Way Buddhism
(Kodo Bukkyo Gyodo Kai) and the pan-Buddhist association Myowai Kai, published declarations
of support for the state under the rubric of “Imperial-way Buddhism,” which held that complete
submission to the emperor was required by Buddhist teaching (Kawanami, 1999). An influential
work on the subject, The Buddhist View of War, published in 1937 by Hayashiya Tomojiro and
Shimage Chikai, stated that “the reason Japanese Buddhism regards the emperor as a Golden
Wheel-Turning Sacred King [Cakravartin] is because he is the Tathagata [fully enlightened
being] of the secular world” (cited in Victoria, 2006, p. 86). Apologists for Japan’s wars went on
to argue that the expansion of Japanese Buddhism through conquest was a form of Bodhisattva
action, benefitting the Asian countries that would come under Japan’s control. Furukawa Taigo,
in Rapidly Advancing Japan and the New Mahayana Buddhism (1937), explained that this meant it
would be possible for Japan as a divine nation “to transform the world into a pure Buddha Land”
(cited in Victoria, 2006, p. 92). Contemporary writings indicate that Buddhist ultra-nationalists
of the time asserted not only the superiority of the Japanese nation but also the superiority
of Japanese Buddhism, which they held to represent the perfection of Buddhist thought. The
Myowai Kai association responded to Chinese criticism of their support for Japanese aggression
by explaining that “Chinese Buddhists believe that war should absolutely be avoided no mat-
ter what the reason. Japanese Buddhists, on the other hand, believe that war conducted for a
[good] reason is in accord with the great benevolence and compassion of Buddhism” (quoted
in Victoria, 2006, p. 87).

Sri Lanka and Burma

In contrast to Japan’s patriotic ultra-nationalism, Buddhist ultra-nationalism in Sri Lanka and
Burma is better conceived as an offshoot of the “hard-edged” Buddhist civic nationalism that is

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present in these countries.The combination of democratic nationalism and reformed Buddhism

advocated by urban political elites in the first years of independence was unable to contend
with this more exclusionary, communalistic vision of Buddhist nationalism that took hold in
these countries in response to the perceived threat of religious and ethnic minorities. In recent
decades, both Sri Lanka and Burma have experienced the further ethnicization of nationality,
with national identity increasingly identified with the majority Buddhist, Sinha, and Burmese
communities (Lehr, 2019). Defenders of this ethnicized Buddhist nationalism have revived tradi-
tions that reinforce the connection between ethnos and religion, such as the legend of the 2nd-
century BCE Sinhalese King Dutthagamani, whose war against non-Buddhists was sanctioned
by Buddhist monks and rituals (Harris, 1999). Such violence against ethnic and religious minor-
ities has been framed as necessary to the survival of Buddhism. In both Sri Lanka and Burma,
extremist monks emphasized the territory of the nation as a sacred space, often conceived as a
Buddhadesa or “Buddha-Land” (Lehr, 2019). Sinhalese ultra-nationalists insist that Buddhism is
preserved in its most authentic form in Sri Lanka and that the obligation to defend the Buddhist
character of the island against Hindu nationalists or the spread of Islam or Christianity is akin
to preserving Buddhism itself. This territoriality is often expressed through monastic opposi-
tion to the construction of churches, Hindu temples, or mosques or through the renovation
and rehabilitation of Buddhist wats and stupas in disputed territory, even when this exacerbates
conflict. In Burma, ultra-nationalism has also included a strain of Buddhist apocalypticism that
views current strife as evidence of a dark age. Such movements have proliferated in the country-
side, where they combine monarchist revivalism and hopes for the arrival of the future Buddha
Maitreya with violent rhetoric towards outsiders (Lehr, 2019).
Although most Buddhists in Sri Lanka and Burma oppose the active involvement of monks
in politics, such activity has been a notable feature of Buddhist ultra-nationalism in these coun-
tries. In Sri Lanka, monks have stood as candidates for the Sinha Buddhist supremacist Jathika
Hela Urumaya party and been elected to parliament, advocating policies that included the violent
prosecution of war against the Tamils and restrictions on Muslim and Christian proselytizing
(DeVotta & Stone, 2008). In Burma’s volatile border regions, militant monks played an active
role in establishing organizations such as the Arakan Liberation Party (founded in 1968) and the
Democratic Karen Buddhist Army (founded in 1994) to oppose insurgencies by Muslim and
Christian ethnic minorities (Lehr 2019). These longstanding tensions fuelled the anti-Muslim
boycotts and violence that have plagued Burma in recent years, spearheaded by organizations
such as the Theravada Doctrine Network (later the Association for the Defence of the Nation,
Religion and its Teachings) and the 969 movement that targeted Muslim businesses (Brac de
la Perrière, 2016). In recent years, social media has played an important role in disseminating
the views of ultra-nationalist monks such as Galagoda Aththe Gnanasara of the Bodu Bala Sena
organization in Sri Lanka and Ashin Wirathu in Burma.Wirathu has focused his speeches, shared
widely on social media, on the perceived threat to Buddhism posed by the “foreign” Muslim
Rohingya community in Rakhine state, despite their having lived in Burma for many genera-
tions. Furthermore, the failure of prominent democratic Buddhist politicians, such as Burma’s
Aung San Suu Kyi, to condemn such actions indicates that the distinction between Buddhist
democratic civic nationalism and Buddhist ultra-nationalism is not always clear.

Conclusion
While it is tempting to identify Buddhist nationalism with its most extreme and militant mani-
festations, this overlooks the long history of Buddhism’s interaction with the idea of the “nation”
and the diversity of forms that Buddhist nationalism takes. As Buddhism is characterized by an

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“interpretive plasticity” (Jackson, 2002), Buddhist thinkers have been able to integrate Buddhist
ideas with nationalist ideology in a variety of ways, under different political conditions. Such
efforts have been generated by political elites using Buddhism to legitimate programmes and
policies and to suppress dissent, as well as by Buddhist religious figures and scholars to secure
and enhance Buddhism’s political position. Regardless of whether its principal proponents are
religious authorities, scholars, or politicians (it is frequently all three), Buddhist nationalism tends
to take hold under the same social and political conditions in which nationalism, in general,
has appeal. To suggest that Buddhist nationalism is merely a reflection of these conditions is to
unduly minimize the responsibility of its advocates, particularly when such advocacy adds fuel
to a smouldering fire, but neither does this particular ideology arise in isolation from wider
sociopolitical forces. Nor should we expect Buddhist nationalism to decline. As the meaning
of the “nation” continues to evolve under the impact of transnational forces and economic and
cultural globalization, and as Buddhism confronts the challenges of changing social and politi-
cal landscapes across Asia and beyond, new iterations of Buddhist nationalism will undoubtedly
emerge in response to transforming conditions.

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 15
CHRISTIANISM
Ben Ryan

The term “Christianism” has been in use for some years. At least as early as 2003 in the
American context, the journalist Andrew Sullivan was using it in relation to the American
Christian right on his personal blog. Sullivan expanded on the idea in a Time Magazine
piece in 2006 (Sullivan, 2006). Its usage in the European political sphere had been more
limited until 2017, when the sociologist Rogers Brubaker re-coined the phrase in the con-
text of populist movements in Europe (Brubaker, 2017a). The two uses denote, as explained
below, different, though related phenomena. The American religious right and the populist
Christianists share some common language and aspirations to power but are otherwise quite
distinct both in their intellectual heritage, the depth of their piety and in their specific politi-
cal aims.
In this chapter, I am following Brubaker in treating Christianism as an identitarian move-
ment that considers Christianity as a civilizational marker of a pure people counterposed against
an outside threat (most particularly Islam). Unlike the American religious right, this identitarian
Christianity is fundamentally secular in its outlook, largely divorced from institutional church
networks and comfortable inhabiting a language of liberalism (particularly on LGBT issues).
Unlike historic and contemporary Christian nationalist movements, it is largely willing to leave
in place the structures of the liberal state and is more internationalist, seeing itself as a protector
of a Western Christendom than having a specific nationalist agenda.
What ought to be immediately apparent from these distinctions is that this is not an easy des-
ignation but part of a sliding scale of differing movements that often defy easy categorization. By
and large, those looking to corral the contemporary populist right into easy boxes for academic
comparison struggle for the simple reason that there is little coherent ideological basis to much
contemporary populism, and such as there is, is often prone to being overthrown or shifted by
the personalities who are critical to such movements (Rooduijn, 2018), (Norris, 2019).
In truth, though the methodological challenges also reflect the struggles of a large part of
contemporary political thought to deal with the perceived irrationality of either ideology or
religion, this is not a new challenge.The anthropologist Louis Dumont recognized the challenge
with ideology in the 1970s:

I do not consider as an ideology everything that is left over once that which is sup-
posed to be true, rational and scientific has been accounted for. Quite the contrary, it

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is everything that has been thought through at a social level, which has been believed,
and acted upon based on the hypothesis that constitutes a living unity.
(Dumont, 1977, p. 31)

This is a helpful and thoroughly unheeded warning. It is a tribute to the extent to which politi-
cal theory remains, as Francis Fukuyama has long argued (Fukuyama, 1989). It is unconsciously
devoted to a Hegelian (or, perhaps more accurately still, a Christian teleological) sense of history
developing epoch by epoch towards a rational end that what seems fundamentally reactionary
and irrational in populism is derided in so much academic analysis.
To this, we can add that the one thing considered more irrational and reactionary than ideol-
ogy and, accordingly, dismissed by much of political and social science, is religion. Combine the
two, populist politics and religion, and it is little wonder that there is such confusion and con-
flating of related but distinct phenomena as the American “religious right” and the identitarian
“Christianists”. It is also at the root of why these movements have proven so difficult to confront
by liberal establishment politicians in a host of contexts.
This chapter seeks to more clearly differentiate the underpinnings of the Christianist move-
ment by exploring its common features while recognizing the difficulties in clear dividing lines
with other related movements. It does this first through an analysis of how Christianism, unlike
other religious ideologies, relates (or perhaps more accurately does not relate) to Christianity
and the institutional churches. Second, through looking at its relation to Islam. Finally, it seeks to
put this movement into historical context, analyzing the extent to which this represents a new
phenomenon and how it differs from rival right-wing Christian projects.

Differentiating Christianism
Brubaker identifies the Christianists by a number of common features (Brubaker, 2017a)
(Brubaker, 2017b). Chiefly he identifies Christianism with a view of Christianity as civiliza-
tional rather than necessarily religious (i.e., defining who we are as a collective narrative of
identity, support for secularism, and a secularized view of religion).To this, he adds several other
common features including a commitment to at least some tenets of liberalism, philo-Semitism
and most, importantly, since it underpins everything else, a vehement opposition to Islam. Islam
is in many ways the glue for everything. In Brubaker’s model:

“Christianism” as I term it … is a matter of belonging rather than believing, a way

of defining “us” in relation to “them”. If “they” are Muslim, then “we” the Europeans
must in some sense be Christian, but that does not mean we must be religious”.
(Brubaker, 2017a)

Elsewhere, in an interview for The Atlantic, Brubaker expands on that thought to reiterate that
what he is defining as Christianism is a fundamentally negative creed – a statement of what is
not, rather than a substantive claim to Christianity: “It’s a secularized Christianity as culture …
It’s a matter of belonging rather than believing … We are Christians precisely because they are
Muslims. Otherwise, we are not Christian in any substantive sense” (Green, 2017).
There are several aspects to draw out here which are essential.The first is that the Christianists
treat Christianity as a civilizational marker. In this, they closely reflect the famous clash of civi-
lizations thesis of Samuel Huntington (Huntington, 1993). Huntington proposed that the 21st-
century would be defined less by a clash of ideology and more by competing civilizations, where
civilization is marked by the cultural inheritances and identities of people who share historical,

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territorial and linguistic characteristics. Most important in this, Huntington insists, is religion, as
a marker more essential even than ethnicity in creating insiders and outsiders.This taps precisely
into the Christianist view of a world of competing and fundamentally opposed civilizational
cultures that mark Christianity as the West and Islam as an alien other. Some have made the
link with Huntington not only consciously but explicitly. Pym Fortuyn, the charismatic far-
right Dutch politician who was in many ways ahead of his time as a forerunner of the current
Christianists before his assassination in 2002, for example, referred to himself on a number of
occasions as the “Huntington of Dutch politics”.
There is nothing especially radical in the claim that Europe, or the West, is a fundamentally
Christian space defined by a history and theology to such a degree that it is in some sense
haunted by Christianity, even its most virulent secularism (Taylor, 2007). The distinctive edge
of Christianism is not the claim that the West is Christian but that this identity is sufficiently
thick, and other civilizations (particularly Islam) so alien that they are utterly incompatible to the
extent that the presence of Islam in the West is fundamentally threatening.
In this, Christianists often lean on the “Grand Remplacement” (“the Great Replacement”)
theory, best associated with Renaud Camus’s book of the same title (Camus, 2011). Camus’s
argument, that mass migration and Islam in particular pose both a demographic and cultural
threat to the West, has been taken up by a number of right-wing campaigns, including into
the rallying chant of “you will not replace us” from parts of the American far right. It has
also been satirized (though the author stresses he deems it plausible) in Michel Houellebecq’s
Submission (Houellebecq, 2015). An equivalent Anglo-American trend is found in writers such
as Douglas Murray (Murray, 2017) writing on Europe and in an even more alarmist American
trend, Robert Spencer (Spencer, 2008).
This taps into the second radical aspect to the civilizational claim of the Christianists, which
is that, as captured by Brubaker’s distinction, this is a negative identity claim. The threat of a
proposed other to the status quo puts less of an emphasis on the need to present a coherent
alternative to the current political model. Christianists can lay rhetorical claim both to being
anti-establishment and to being the best chance of maintaining the established liberal demo-
cratic model against alien invaders. The Christianists, as we shall explore in much more depth
below, do not offer much of a theological view of what a Christian West ought to look like.
The term “Christianism” is, in this sense, a deliberate mirroring of the term “Islamism”. Like
Islamism, Christianism is generally applied pejoratively (nobody, to my knowledge, self-defines
as either an Islamist or a Christianist) and in ways that are often convenient for believers of those
faiths as much as outsiders. By this, I mean that the term is deliberately used to differentiate
between the faith (Islam or Christianity) and a political movement that claims an attachment to
that faith but which other believers seek to disown (Islamism or Christianism). It is convenient
for many people to be able to draw a line between authentic belief (and theo-political visions
derived from that belief) and an extremist political vision that claims to derive from the faith
but which is represented as a distortion. In truth, it is usually more difficult to wholly disentan-
gle the faith from the extremist political movement. Hannah Strommen and Ulrich Schmiedel
have been critical of the use of the term precisely because it seeks to deny any culpability on
the part of religions themselves for the extremist political use of their theologies (Strommen &
Schmiedel, 2020).
This correctly points to the methodological problem in trying to identify and differentiate
Christianists from other far-right Christian movements. There are politicians who can readily
be identified as never having had much obvious piety or even openly declared themselves as not
being religious, who have come to argue vociferously for a Christian West in need of defence
(Matteo Salvini, in Italy, who for years was openly a neo-pagan, Marine Le Pen, in France, Lutz

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Bachmann in Germany and Donald Trump in the US being four prominent examples). There
are others though who can fairly be said to have always consistently and publicly been Christian,
such as Marion Maréchal in France and Norbert Hofer of Austria. Without putting windows
into souls, it is always difficult to identify exactly who sees Christianity purely in cultural terms
and for whom it is a deeply held belief. We have to treat Christianism in some ways as no more
than an imperfect heuristic tool to differentiate between different factions and individuals while
recognizing that the reality will be more of a sliding scale.

The relationship between Christianism and the Church

Perhaps the single biggest differentiator between Christianists and other right-wing Christian
movements (e.g., the American religious right or the East European Christian nationalists) lies
in the relationship between their movements and the Church. There are three features to this.
First, is the ambiguity of Christian belief in Christianism. Second, the specific interactions and
tensions between churches and Christianists. Finally, attitudes towards secularism.

Belonging, not believing

On the first note, part of the corollary of seeing Christianity as a cultural marker is a corre-
sponding reduced relevance of belief. If religious identity can be divided according to belonging
and believing (Davie, 1994), then the Christianists have taken the belonging end to a cultural
extreme. This transition in parts of the far right towards seeing Christianity as a critical marker
of cultural identity has been developing for some time. It matches a broader trend apparent since
the 1980s of the far right downplaying previous explicitly racialized narratives of outsiders and
moving to cultural norms instead – a process dubbed by Rita Chin as the “new racism” (Chin,
2017).
Typical in this trend have been the changes in the French Rassemblement National (RN) (pre-
viously Front National) party and the Italian Lega party. The former, when led by Jean-Marie Le
Pen was openly anti-Semitic and favoured racialized definitions of the French and non-French.
Under his daughter, Marine Le Pen, the rhetoric and messaging have been carefully and delib-
erately shifted. Anti-Semitic elements (at least the explicit ones) have been largely expunged,
and the party has shifted its emphasis to cultural markers, not least, and as we shall see without
apparent paradox, to being the champions of both Catholic France and laïcité (Roy, 2016).
Similarly, the Lega party for most of their history have been more noted for their enthusiasm
for neo-pagan symbolism, but since 2000 have gradually reinvented themselves as protectors of
Catholic Italy from heathen invaders (McDonnell, 2016).
Unlike other right-wing groups such as the American religious right, Christianists have
developed a thick cultural sense of Christianity as belonging accompanying a tepid, or even
non-existent, sense of Christianity as believing. The founder of PEGIDA, Lutz Bachmann, for
example, is open about not belonging to any church, even as his organization campaigns to pro-
tect Christian Europe from Islamic invasion. The trend extends beyond the leadership of these
parties and groups to their supporters.
The supporters of populist right-wing parties are disproportionately made up of men and
women who are disconnected from religious institutions, though they may (and often do) still
consider themselves Christians when filling in surveys – adding weight to the idea that this is
Christianity as belonging over believing. Indeed, perhaps counter-intuitively, data suggest that
in terms of religiosity, the voters of the populist right are actually less religious even than voters
for European socialist parties (Guth & Nelsen, 2019).

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Regular church attendance has been found to have an “immunization effect” against the
appeal of right-wing populist parties (Arzheimer & Carter, 2009), (Immerzeel, Jaspers, &
Lubbers, 2013). This is particularly true in contexts where there are traditional Christian con-
servative political parties (e.g., in Germany and the Netherlands). In these places, church attend-
ance is a significant and disproportionate barrier to supporting the populist right. However,
nominal Christians are more likely to see an appeal in Christianist politicians and movements,
particularly in countries with a strong tie between national identity and denominational confes-
sion (e.g., Italian Catholicism and Norwegian Lutheranism).

Clashes with the churches

Particularly significant as part of the immunization effect is that where mainstream churches
have been vociferous critics of the populist right, it has a particularly strong effect on church-
attending Christians and their opposition to far-right populist parties (Marzouki, McDonnell,
& Roy, 2016). Here we see one of the critical dividing lines between Christianism and the
American religious right or Christian nationalists in Poland and Russia. In the latter cases,
the political movements are closely tied to, and supported by, churches. True, there are other
churches (particularly in the American context) that loudly condemn these political move-
ments, but nevertheless, there remains significant mainstream denominational support for many
of their campaigns and often whole political parties (the success of the American religious right
in the 1990s and 2000s rested on finally achieving a unity of political purpose, if not a religious
one, between conservative Catholic and Evangelical leaders). In contrast, one would struggle to
find any Christian leader in the UK who did not vociferously condemn the far-right British
National Party (BNP) and only marginal clerical voices in the Italian and French Catholic
Churches who are not consistently opposed to the RN. In Germany, both the Evangelische
Kirche in Deutschland and the Catholic Church have publicly condemned and released official
resources countering PEGIDA and the Alternative für Deutschland (AfD). Equivalent examples
can be found across Western and Northern Europe. Tensions flair particularly over attitudes
towards migrants and refugees.
One result of this is that some Christianists have begun to characterize the churches them-
selves as part of the elite liberal state that acquiesces to Islamification and the undermining of
European culture. The AfD in Germany has been perhaps the most vociferous in condemning
the churches for what they see as their disavowal of Christianity (Strommen & Schmiedel,
2020). They are “Amtskirchen” (official or establishment churches), and like all other institu-
tions of establishment are, in the populist depiction, hierarchical and detached institutions that
have lost touch with the true people. The PEGIDA founder Lutz Bachmann has made the link
explicit, accusing churches of selling out their own culture like Judas. Church leaders are “fat
princes of the church who … have sold their faith … for … a few pieces of silver” (Bachmann,
2016).
The perception of religion as co-opted by the elite has also been seen in relation to the Brexit
debate in the UK. The UK is a curious example when it comes to the analysis of populism. In
parliamentary electoral terms (even in local government), the populist right has been largely
unsuccessful, certainly by international comparisons. The UK Independence Party (UKIP), the
Brexit Party and the BNP between them have only ever successfully won a single parliamentary
seat in general elections. However, the impact and power of the populist right have nevertheless
had a significant political impact, forcing a move to the right in the Conservative Party, a prom-
ised referendum on Brexit and then, of course, playing a major role in the delivery of a leave vic-
tory. Looking specifically at Christianism is more complex still. The BNP produced a Christian

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manifesto and attempted to take on the mantle of the Christian right in the early 2000s, but
with very limited success. (Spencer, 2019). UKIP, the most successful of the UK’s populist right
parties, has made some sporadic efforts at presenting itself as a party of Judaeo-Christian values,
but rarely in a sustained or developed way (certainly by contrast to significant campaigns from
the populist right in France, Italy, the Netherlands, Austria and Germany).
Brexit, however, does provide a partial exception to this rule in so far as there was a signifi-
cant attempt to tie Brexit not only to a civilizational narrative of resisting migration (particularly
Islam) but also that this process and freedom was in some way a direct re-enactment of the
English Reformation. There were dozens of opinion pieces explicitly linking the Reformation
to Brexit. It is notable too that nominal Christians (i.e., non-church-attending), particularly
Anglicans, voted by a significant margin for Brexit, well above other groups and even accounting
for other demographic features such as age (Woodhead & Smith, 2018). As with Christianism
and voting trends elsewhere, actual church attendance made a significant difference (though
even then, Anglicans voted by a majority to leave). Woodhead and Smith (2018) note that
among these voters, the Church was valued as a critical symbolic aspect of English identity and
did so despite the episcopal leadership of the Church of England being widely perceived as
overwhelmingly supporting the remain campaign.
The stance of the Church of England came in for heavy criticism for precisely this reason
among many Brexit supporters, to the point in which serving clergy have accused it of being co-
opted and compromised by the liberal establishment (Norton, 2020). The counter-accusation
comes from others that Brexit has been at least in part an exercise in Christianist civilizational
conflict, with the Christianist right tapping into historic ideas of English exceptionalism as a
nation set aside by God with notions of civilizational and racial superiority and little theological
merit. So, for example, Anthony Reddie concludes,“The superiority of Britain is built on a bed-
rock of Christian-inspired exceptionalism in which God has set apart the British, particularly
the English, to occupy a special place in the economy of God’s kingdom” (Reddie, 2019, p. 16).

Secularism
Drawing the two previous trends (belonging rather than believing and clashes with churches)
together is a third key issue around secularism. This is the most obvious point of departure from
either the American religious right or the European Christian nationalists. Those two move-
ments are, to use the Davie model again, both belongers and believers.They are active Christians
who desire a dilution of the barrier between Church and State and for whom secularism is a
symptom of a wider Western problem. By contrast, the Christianists have a far more ambiguous
relationship with secularism.
It is not quite so simple as to say that Christianists are consistently secular. Many of their cam-
paigns mirror those other movements in seemingly diluting the line between Church and State.
Prominent, for example, are campaigns in Italy, Germany and Southern France to have crucifixes
displayed in all public buildings. These have been defining campaigns for Lega, RN and the AfD
as well as the more populist element of the Christlich-Soziale Union in Bayern (CSU) in Bavaria.
Similarly, campaigns for nativity cribs in schools, for increased state funding for churches to pre-
vent them from being turned into mosques and for official recognition of St Joan of Arc day as
a national celebration have been prominent RN campaigns in France. This might seem like a
straightforward undermining of the principles of secularism, but it is important to note that the
Christianists do not seem to see it themselves that way. At the same time as having these campaigns,
they also want to hold themselves as the champions of secularism. In the words of Marine Le Pen:
“France is France. It has Christian roots.This is how it is.This is what makes its identity. It is laïque

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and we are attached to this identity.We won’t allow the transformation of this identity” (Roy, 2016,
p. 91). There is no sense in this of a contradiction in the claim to be Christian and secular.
Nor is Le Pen a lone contradiction. Alain Finkelraut, a French Jewish philosopher and sup-
porter of RN reiterates the same message in an interview quoted by the American writer Sasha
Polakow-Suransky:

When I raise the issue of nativity scenes in public buildings, as clear a sign of a crum-
bling wall between church and state as I can imagine through American eyes, he is
dismissive. Echoing Le Pen he argues, “There will be nativity scenes in town halls
because France is an old Catholic country” and anyway, he insists, they are completely
innocuous. “Catholicism is part of the cultural heritage of France”. In his eyes it is not
a state forcing religion down the throats of minority groups. “It is not at all the signal
of a dominant religion that wants to impose its law”.
(Polakow-Suransky, 2017, p. 133)

Part of the success story of RN in this space has been the ability to capture laïcité, previously
a feature of the political left, with a strong anti-clerical and anti-establishment sentiment, and
repurpose it as a feature of the political right and as a tradition to be upheld (Bergem & Bergem,
2019).This is a subversion of previous political norms into a populism that can borrow from the
political left and right in a way that more traditional Christian right groups would not be able
or willing to undertake.
Finkelraut is, therefore, idiosyncratic but correct. This is not an example of Christianity as a
belief system imposing its values on others, but Christianity as a cultural marker of belonging
being embedded as a dominant civilizational norm employed against unwelcome outsiders.
On the one hand, Christianists call for nativity scenes and crucifixes and an undermining of
secularist norms; on the other, they lead protests against the rights of religious groups to wear
particular items of clothing or to open places of worship. In conflict with many of the estab-
lished churches, they campaign for LGBT rights and abortion, and against religious opt-outs
or recognized presence in the legislative sphere, on the basis that Western culture is not only
Christian but simultaneously secular. There is no contradiction. First, because as belongers but
not believers, Christianists have nothing to fear from secularism undermining their own faith or
its privileges. To quote Christian Joppke, “this is a light, essentially vestigial and symbolic privi-
leging of Christianity” (Joppke, 2018: 236).
Second, there is no contradiction in that in some ways, this represents the ultimate victory
of a secularist mindset that has reduced public Christianity to a purely cultural marker. It is in
many ways the absolute inverse of the remarkable worldwide growth of Pentecostalism over
the past century. If Pentecostalism is the ultimate example of Christianity as belief (as opposed
to belonging), in which pure religion requires a personal conversion (you must be born again),
cultural Christianity in the hands of the Christianists is the polar opposite. Christianity becomes
a culture in which specific beliefs and actions are irrelevant, but also to which one cannot con-
vert, but can only be either born into or only very gradually assimilated towards (Roy, 2008).
Christianism is theology as personal identity, not faith. In that sense, it is a covenantal theology
of a sort, in so far as it identifies the chosen people of God with a particular ethnic grouping
(in a way in which Luke Bretherton believes to be innately heretical (Bretherton, 2019)), but
without any expectations, behaviours or beliefs being expected of that people. “Christian” is an
adjective to describe your culture, not a creed.
Finally, and perhaps most importantly, there is no contradiction between the support for
Christianity and secularism within Christianism because the target of the campaign is the same:

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Islam and the exclusion of Muslims from Western public life, which can be established by either
Christianity or secularism.

The relationship between Christianism and Islam

To repeat the quote from Brubaker above, “It’s [Christianism] a secularized Christianity as cul-
ture … It’s a matter of belonging rather than believing … We are Christians precisely because
they are Muslims. Otherwise, we are not Christian in any substantive sense” (Green, 2017).
Islam and Christianism are innately tied. The root of Christianist support for secularism and,
simultaneously, for a dilution of the distinction between Church and State in favour of publicly
privileging Christianity, lies in a narrative of civilizational conflict. Campaigns in the name of
secularism to ban particular outfits (the so-called Burkini on French beaches, for example),
while also insisting on crucifixes and cribs in public buildings serves one and the same purpose,
which is the exclusion of Islam from the Western public square. It is notable quite how signifi-
cantly Islam features in Christianist narratives. The acronym PEGIDA is fascinating as a cultural
marker. Patriotic Europeans Against the Islamization of the Occident, as it is usually rendered
in English (Patriotische Europäer gegen die Islamisierung des Abendlandes), explicitly names Islam as
the threat while positing a common European Western identity. Political scientists spent decades
debating the attainability of a common European demos and collective identity but seem to have
been blindsided by PEGIDA’s apparent ability to tap into a continental cultural identity.
The Huntington clash of civilizations thesis, so central to this view of Europe, was prophetic
only truly in so far as the populist right has taken it on as a vision to be enacted, rather than a
natural evolution. It has become a propulsion of what it sought to predict.The popularity of the
thesis belies the fact that, overwhelmingly, civilization has proven to be a poor predictor of con-
temporary conflict, prejudice and discrimination (Fox, 2019). It has, however, fed a narrative that
has allowed Islam to become increasing securitized and placed outside the standard democratic
norms. It has been argued that in secular democracies, religious threats are particularly suscepti-
ble to becoming securitized (Lausten & Waever, 2000). The lack of religious literacy, opposition
to migration on the political right and the normative assumptions about the benefits of secular-
ism on the liberal left combine to leave Islam as an easily ostracized other in a civilizationalist
discourse. It is precisely this trend that Christianism has latched on to, using Huntington’s civili-
zational model combined with statist responses to external and internal threats with securitiza-
tion (the so-called war on terror) to identify an acceptable enemy.
That is not to say that opposition to Islam came from nowhere or that it does not have
deeper historic origins. Fear of the Turks and warfare on an eastern front that culminated in the
besieging of Vienna in 1529 and again in 1683 by the Ottoman Empire played a significant role
in constructing a common sense of identity among the Christian kingdoms of Europe. It is no
coincidence that the sala regina hall in Rome, a room which has often been used for essential
Vatican functions, depicts a large mural of the 1571 battle of Lepanto. This crucial victory over
the Turks by a coalition created by a Pope serves as a model of Christian victory over Islamic
outsiders. The national identity of more than one Eastern and Central European country is
innately tied up in its status as a bastion of Christendom against an Islamic empire. The Spanish
Reconquista is older but again provides a reminder that the idea of Islamic empires in conflict
with Christian (particularly Catholic) ones is not without historic roots.
These historic roots cannot be denied, but neither can it be denied that the specific identifi-
cation of Islam as a threat is more recent, and in particular since 9/11 and the war on terror.This
is not simply a continuation of an ancient tension but more a contemporary trend that draws on
a historic lineage. The better comparison for how Christianists view Islam is not the Ottoman

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empire but with the far-right populism of a previous age and its attitude to anti-Semitism. So,
for example, the far-right populism of Charles Maurras and Edmond Drumont in the late 19th
century used Jews as a scapegoat for the failings of the French Third Republic, managing to
combine in anti-Semitism a traditionalist Catholic suspicion of Jews as a threat to the Catholic
traditions of France with a left-wing populist anti-capitalism. This “pragmatic antisemitism”
(Bergem & Bergem, 2019) was largely opportunistic, though it tapped into ancient prejudices.
We are witnessing a similar phenomenon today, in which pragmatic Islamophobia has become
a useful tool for Christianists.
It should be noted that this pragmatic Islamophobia is effective precisely because it taps into
genuinely widespread concerns. Polls in France in 2016 and 2018 revealed that around half of
the French public believed Islam was incompatible with French values (Point, 2018). In the UK,
only 28% were confident that Islam was compatible with British values in 2016; 43% believed
it had a negative impact on the UK (ComRes, 2016). This context, along with media narratives
and a persistent overestimation across the West of how large the Islamic population actually is
has led to Muslims as a group becoming securitized to such an extent that even remarkably
extreme positions have entered into Christianist proposals. In 2016, Geert Wilders’s Partij voor de
Vrijheid, (Party for Freedom or PVV) party manifesto included explicit calls to ban the Quran
and to close all mosques. They won 13% of the popular vote and 20 parliamentary seats.

Christianism in comparison to other right-wing Christian movements

The intent in this chapter has been to distil the distinctive nature of Christianism vis-à-vis other
right-wing Christian political movements. The focus has, accordingly, been on the distinctive-
ness of Christianism rather than aspects on which it matches with the broader right-wing
populist movement in Europe and North America. There are, of course, as Brubaker’s articles
remind us, a number of other features of Christianism which are not as distinctive but fit into
the mainstream of the contemporary populist right (Brubaker, 2017b). This would include, in
general terms, a discourse that differentiates a pure people from the establishment elite and, by
and large, an opposition to immigration and (in a European context) to the EU.
The extent of similarity and distinction from other right-wing Christian political move-
ments is perhaps more obvious when put into direct comparison with other movements. Too
often, these are conflated in a way that hinders good analysis. Accordingly, in order to better
illustrate where Christianism sits as a genuinely novel development, what follows is a brief
summary of how it compares to other right-wing Christian political movements, including,
in a roughly chronological order, the late 19th- and early 20th-century Christian national-
ists and fascists, Francoism, the mid-20th-century Christian democrats, the contemporary East
European Christian populist right and the American religious right.

Historic Christian nationalism and fascism

Nineteenth-century European nationalism, in its broadest sense, drew deeply on religion as a
basis for a shared civic identity (Bruce, 2003). This naturally varied in its specific context, with
different expressions in Protestant, Catholic, Orthodox and Islamic nation states, but what was
common was that this was a deliberate effort at forming a common identity or “imagined com-
munity” (Anderson, 1983) imposed by an elite (Hastings, 1997). Immediately this throws up
several distinctions from Christianism today. For one thing, Christianists are not attempting to
forge a new nationhood or conception of the people, only to amplify an existing one. Second,
the populist appeal of Christianism is defiantly anti-elite and anti-establishment, where the

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19th-century model was neither. Finally, in most European contexts, this process of nation-
building (indeed even the very concept of a nation state) was a partnership between the political
elite and Church (wherein many states those were intersecting categories), while contemporary
Christianism is often at odds with, or at least clearly distinct from, the Church.
The later 19th-century far-right nationalist movements provide a closer parallel, perhaps
particularly in the Action Française movement and Charles Maurras. As explored above, there
are parallels here in pragmatic prejudice (though directly at Jews rather than Muslims) and
in civilizational discourse (though Maurras of course long pre-dated Huntington’s thesis).
Yet there are significant distinctions, perhaps the most significant of which is the relative
downplaying of nationalism. A curiosity of the contemporary populist right is that it is less
concerned with nationalism and the Maurras’ demand to place allegiance to country above all
other things. By contrast, Christianism is comparatively internationalist, well connected across
Europe and North America and committed more to a conception of a Western, Christian
civilization under threat (the Abendland in PEGIDA and AfD terminology), than to specific
nations.
Moreover, and distinctive in this sense not only from Action Française but also Mussolini’s
fascism, is that the contemporary Christianist populists seem largely uninterested in the over-
throw of the structures and forms of the liberal democratic state (Norris, 2019). Rather, parties
like the AfD, RN, Lega and PVV are committed to parliamentary democracy. They seek to
win by turning the norms of the liberal system against its own interests rather than replac-
ing them. The Christianist approach, unlike the fascist, is not totalitarian but rather parasitic
on liberalism and liberal democratic structures. It also inhabits a different vision of history.
Where fascism understood itself as a utopian modernist vision for a new age, with a philo-
sophical underpinning in Hegel and Heidegger (albeit harking back to more classical ances-
try), Christianist and other contemporary populist right-wing movements are more innately
conservative, looking to preserve a civilizational vision set in amber, rather than beckoning in
something new.

Conservative authoritarianism
In respect of an attitude to history, there is perhaps a greater overlap between Christianism
and the conservative authoritarianism of Francoism (and, to a lesser extent Salazar’s Portugal).
Francoism far more consciously and deliberately than fascism attempted to establish a social
order based on a traditionalist Catholic vision of the state, crown and family. Though obviously
not democratic, there is some similarity in trying to preserve a traditionalist system against out-
side interference (though Islam has replaced socialism) and in the insistence that national iden-
tity is defined by a religious culture. Where they differ, of course, is that Francoism genuinely
believed that socially conservative Catholicism ought to define society in more than simply a
loose cultural sense. Opposition to secularism and liberalism was aggressively enforced, whereas
contemporary Christianism consciously promotes secularism and liberal views on LGBT and
feminist issues where it suits an anti-Islamic narrative.
There is a difference too in the approach to populism. Francoism explicitly sought to
retain existing elitist structures (Church and Crown) as being central to the national culture.
Christianism looks to maintain democratic liberal structures but is based in large part on a narra-
tive of disdain and opposition to the traditional elites and establishment that are deemed to have
capitulated and abandoned the will of the people. Francoism had little interest in the people as
a plebiscite holding the elite to account, whereas for the contemporary far right, this claim to
being rooted in the will of the people is central.

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Christian democracy
A separate, far more centrist vision of Christian right-wing politics is found in the Christian
democracy parties, particularly of the late 1940s and 1950s. Some of these parties still exist,
including the CSU and Christlich Demokratische Union (CDU) in Germany, the Chrëschtlech
Sozial Vollekspartei/Parti populaire chrétien-social (CSV/PCS) in Luxembourg and (albeit after vari-
ous mergers and changes) the Dutch Christen-Democratisch Appèl (CDA) party. Others, notably
the French Mouvement Républicain Populaire (MRP) and the Italian Democrazia Cristiana (DC)
party, that each played key roles in the establishment of the early European project have subse-
quently collapsed.The survivors have long been criticized for watering down the Christian-ness
of their politics over subsequent decades and have been victims of political decline that cannot
be entirely disentangled from Europe’s increasing secularism (Müller, 2013), (Müller, 2014).
It is noticeable that the CSU in Bavaria, particularly in recent years under the leadership of
Markus Söder, and, at a European level, Manfred Weber, have steered the party along much more
Christianist lines than previously. Notably, for example, in 2018, Söder’s government enacted
the Kreuzpflicht, an obligation to display crosses in public buildings. In a campaign reminiscent
of Christianist movements in other countries, Söder justified this in explicitly civilizational
terms, stating that the crosses are not to be seen as Christian symbols but as symbols of Bavarian
cultural identity (Agence France-Presse, 2018). Critics suggest that moves such as these come
more as a cynical heading off of threats from the AfD, but it marks a departure from the previous
trajectory of Christian democrat parties.
Certainly, there has always been a cultural element to Christian democracy’s approach to
Christianity, but it had tended to be much less consciously exclusive.The Italian Prime Minister
Alcide De Gasperi, for example, was quoted as saying:

When I affirm that Christianity is at the origin of the European Civilisation, I do not
intend to introduce any kind of exclusive confessional criterion into the evaluation
of our history. I refer to the common European heritage, to that unitary morality that
puts emphasis on the human being and his responsibility.
(Venneri & Ferrara, 2009, p. 118)

It has also tended to be more closely tied to the Church.The Christian democrat movements of
the 1940s and 1950s were extensively networked across Europe and actively encouraged by the
Vatican (Kaiser, 2007). Perhaps for this reason, they were also far more saturated in a theological
ideology that borrowed extensively from Catholic social teaching (Kazenstein, 2006). Where
Christianism is, as we have seen, a shallow theological enterprise, Christian democratic projects
in the mid-20th century have been described as an act of theo-political imagination (Thomas,
2005).
The final difference is perhaps the most critical of all. Where Christianism is a form of
populism with a demand to listen to the will of the people, Christian democracy was forged
in opposition to the virulent nationalisms and fascism of the two world wars. Perhaps as a con-
sequence, while they share some common social cures (a commitment to the welfare state, for
example), they take completely opposite approaches to power. Christian democracy, notably
through its support for the idea of subsidiarity and its internationalism, focuses on limiting
the power of states and democratically elected governments. It was no accident that the early
European project had no democratic structures.Today there is an obsession with the democratic
deficit of the European Union: in its origins, this was a design feature designed to encourage
consensus and limitations on absolute power from the ballot box.

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The Christian right

The American Christian right emerged in the late 1970s and 1980s. As a political movement,
it is necessary to distinguish it simply from socially conservative Christians (who exist in every
society). The key to the Christian right is that it is a coherent and identifiable movement, with
clear leaders and objectives and a particular association with the Republican party (Brown,
2002) (Williams, 2010). Leaders like the Baptist pastor Jerry Falwell and the televangelist Pat
Robertson developed a significant network of supporters (e.g., the Christian Coalition, with
150,000 members in 210 chapters by 1992) who were mobilized behind candidates that sup-
ported their agenda.
This immediately highlights two differences with the Christianists (though in recent years
in America, the distinction has broken down a little, as discussed below). First, the Christian
right is genuine in its social conservatism. It campaigns actively against a perceived LGBT and
anti-family agenda, for a reversal of the Roe vs Wade abortion case and for prayer in schools and
more positively on a call to moral probity and family values. This contrasts significantly with
Christianist support for liberal principles on LGBT issues, divorce and (in some cases) abor-
tion. It is also seen in the relationships with churches. Christianist formal ties with churches
tend to be limited or even hostile. The dominant personalities of the Christian right are closely
associated with churches, particularly evangelical churches, and the grassroots support is often
delivered through church networks.
Second, by nature of America’s unusual two-party system, the Christian right has always
been a pressure group within the Republican party. It has, on occasion, even attempted a
takeover, as when Robertson ran against George H.W. Bush for the Republican nomination
in 1988. It has never, however, made a concerted effort at subverting the establishment status
quo by establishing a new party. The anti-establishment claim of the Christianists, meanwhile,
has lent itself to seeking an identity as an outsider, a movement beyond the established power
brokers.
The Donald Trump phenomenon provides a note of caution to this analysis. Much of the
traditional Christian right, including Jerry Falwell’s son Jerry Falwell Jr, his Liberty University
project,1 the televangelist Paula White, Franklin Graham (the son of the famous evangelist Billy
Graham) and Ralph Reed, the president of the Faith and Freedom Coalition, have been closely
associated with the Trump presidency. This can be partly ascribed to an alignment of conveni-
ence – Trump needed evangelical votes, they needed sympathetic voices on the Supreme Court.
They share some opposition to “political correctness” and to a contemporary liberalism that is
accused of undermining traditional values.Yet it also seems a curious match given the president’s
colourful private life and seeming ambivalence towards, and ignorance of, religion (Spencer,
2017).
Trump is rather more obviously aligned (to the extent that he has a consistent ideology) with
a Christianist mindset. Light on piety himself, he does seem to believe in a civilizational culture
– “America is a nation of believers”, as he said at his inauguration. More closely aligned still,
though his stay as the White House chief strategist proved brief, was Steve Bannon. Bannon is a
curious and eclectic figure, a Catholic not previously much connected with the Christian right
but certainly closely associated with ethno-nationalist, anti-establishment and far-right groups
across the US and Europe. In Trump, there is a confluence of these two disparate movements;
the religious right model of using an establishment party as a vehicle to pursue a clear agenda
on some socially conservative values and the Christianist populist anti-establishment (“drain the
swamp”) narrative of civilization conflict. Trump is not quite either but is enough of a political
magpie to have, consciously or unconsciously, latched on to the strategic values of both.

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Contemporary Christian nationalists

Most commonly conflated with Christianists are populist right-wing Christian nationalists, par-
ticularly in Eastern and Central Europe.There is some justification for this, not least the fact that
the populist European (and increasingly North American) right are increasingly well networked.
In January 2020, for example, the National Conservatism conference was held in Rome, with
speakers including the RN politician (and Le Pen’s niece) Marion Maréchal, Hungary’s Prime
Minister Viktor Orbán, Giorgia Meloni, the leader of the Brothers of Italy party – a successor to
neo-fascist parties – Thierry Baudet, founder of the Eurosceptic populist Forum voor Democratie
(FvD) (Forum for Democracy) party and parliamentarians and intellectual outriders from vari-
ous other states including Poland, the UK, US and elsewhere. Some of these could certainly
have been grouped together as Christianists, others as neo-fascists, ethno-nationalists or more
traditional social conservative factions. This was unusually high profile but typical of an increas-
ing level of co-ordination, shared rhetoric and campaigns across the populist right.
The Christian nationalists share with the Christianists a cultural sense of Europe as defined
by Christian identity. In states like Hungary, Bulgaria, Romania and Serbia, the national culture
is deeply connected to resistance to Turkish (and Islamic) culture. In Poland, Catholicism has
long had a particular place in the national culture and served as an anti-communist and anti-
Russian badge of national pride. These give deep roots for a Christian cultural pride, as well as
some latent anti-Islamic sentiment that links closely to the Christianist pragmatic Islamophobia.
However, there are also distinctions.The first is that, whereas the West European Christianists
have encountered an immunization effect among church-going Christians, the same is not true
in Eastern Europe. Church-attending Poles are consistently socially conservative, largely scepti-
cal of liberal support for LGBT rights and abortion and supportive of nationalist rhetoric. It is a
similar story in Hungary, and both the Polish PiS (Prawo i Sprawiedliwość or Law and Justice) and
Hungarian Fidesz parties have been involved in a string of LGBT controversies. In August 2020,
the Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán attempted to tap into this, declaring that “Western
Europe had given up on … a Christian Europe, and instead experiments with a godless cosmos,
rainbow families, migration and open societies” (Komuves, 2020). The Christian nationalists
are, accordingly, more consistently anti-liberal, social conservative and anti-secular and enjoy far
more mainstream appeal among practising Christians than the West European Christianists. In
the case of the Poles, they also enjoy closer relationships with significant factions of the Polish
Catholic Church (this is less true in Hungary, though there are exceptions).

Conclusions
Ending on the note about the Christian nationalists of Eastern Europe is illustrative of the chal-
lenges in differentiating what is novel or distinct about Christianism. The anti-establishment,
largely Eurosceptic and anti-migrant policies could, by and large, be identified with any populist
right-wing politician or movement where there is a distinctiveness from other contemporary
populist far-right groups in the use and understanding of Christianity. Within Christianism,
Christianity is instrumentalized and conceived of primarily as a matter of cultural belonging.
It is in that sense an almost entirely secularized vision of religion divorced from any particular
beliefs. This explains in part how Christianist politicians often find themselves at odds with the
churches, struggle to win over church-attending Christians and how they have tended to be able
to simultaneously portray themselves as champions of liberal causes such as LGBT rights and
secularism while also claiming to be guardians of Christian tradition.The appeal of Christianism
is directed at a peculiarly Western demographic: the non-believer, disconnected from i­nstitutions

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 Ben Ryan

who wants to lay claim to a historic cultural identity against a perceived threat (migrants, or
more specifically, Islam).
This demographic is a distinct and significant portion of the population. It is also quite
unlike the population that the American religious right, Francoists or Christian democrats
ever sought to appeal. Those movements operate (or operated) with a grassroots support base
made up primarily of believing Christians and supported a set of moral claims which may be
contestable within Christian theology but are, nevertheless, a recognizable development from
theological premises or interests. The distinction is perhaps more muted in the contemporary
Christian nationalists of Eastern and Central Europe, perhaps because of the level of cross-fer-
tilization between the groups and shared interests in other areas (particularly Euroscepticism).
Yet even here, there is a recognizably different focus.The Christian nationalists have an internal
consistency in the claim to represent traditional Christian values. Though they seek to appeal
to the nominal Christian with a sense of national or cultural attachment to Christianity, they
also draw strong support from active Christians. There is no pretence among the Christian
nationalists that Christianity can be reduced to a purely cultural entity or that secularism,
liberalism and LGBT rights can happily co-exist with such a particular vision of traditional
Catholicism. This pretence, or paradoxical claim to traditional Christian values and a cherry-
picking of secular liberalism, is the curious and unique contribution of Christianism to con-
temporary populism.

Note
1 At the time of writing (September 2020), Jerry Falwell Jr was subject to a developing scandal and
had resigned from Liberty University. To what extent he would continue to be a leading figure in the
movement was at that stage unknown.

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 16
EVANGELICALS AND
IDEOLOGY—TRANSNATIONAL
OR LOCAL?
Examining the case of Latin American Evangelicals

Ruth Melkonian-Hoover and Dennis R. Hoover

Since the rise of the “religious right” in the 1980s, a large majority of white evangelicals in
the United States has aligned with partisan and ideological conservatism. White evangelicals,
which by most estimates comprise approximately one-fifth of the US population, have become
overwhelmingly Republican, with approximately eight out of ten reliably voting Republican in
presidential elections. Public opinion studies of religion and US politics have found that white
evangelicals are much more likely than average to be conservative not only on “traditional
morality” issues like abortion and gay rights but also broader issues like economic policy, the role
of the state, and immigration (Guth 2019; Melkonian-Hoover and Kellstedt 2019).
By contrast, among multi-nation comparative studies, there is less consensus regarding the
ideological contours of evangelical politics. The literature contains conflicting or ambiguous
accounts about the extent to which evangelicalism has a common political effect across borders.
This lack of clarity is especially evident in the case of Latin America. On the one hand, given the
historical and contemporary influence of the US government and of US evangelical Protestants
(via missionaries, denominational ties, and evangelistic media) in Latin America, some observers
have put forward a narrative of Latin American evangelical politics trending quickly toward the
US model of a “religious right” (e.g., Brouwer et al. 1996). On the other hand, some scholars
of global evangelicalism in general, and of Latin American evangelicalism in particular, offer a
narrative that highlights the indigenization and autonomous agency of evangelical movements,
which manifests in various ways, including a greater diversity of political attitudes and behavior
(Freston 2001; Forster 2020).
Clarifying the patterns and trends of evangelical politics in Latin America is increas-
ingly important because the region has seen dramatic growth in its Protestant popula-
tion. Evangelical Protestantism, in particular, continues to rise, primarily through a surge
of Pentecostals and neo-Pentecostals. Once overwhelmingly Catholic, the population of
Latin America is now estimated to be 19% Protestant, with two-thirds of that population
Pentecostal (Pew 2014a). In numerous Central American nations, over a third of the popula-
tion is now evangelical, which exceeds the evangelical percentage of the US population (Pew
2014a; Pew 2014b).1 In the largest Latin American nation, Brazil, evangelicals comprise over

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 Ruth Melkonian-Hoover and Dennis R. Hoover

one-fifth of the ­population and are expected to surpass the proportion of Catholics by 2032
(IBGE in Zylberkan 2020).
In this chapter, we contribute needed empirical clarity to the question of evangelical politi-
cal ideology in Latin America through analysis of a large multinational survey conducted by the
Pew Research Center in 2014.2 This survey is ideal for the purposes of this analysis as it includes
detailed measures of religious affiliation, belief, and behavior, as well as numerous variables
measuring ideological identification as well as opinions on policy issues.

Background and literature

US neo-imperial transnationalism: rationales and dominance
As social movement scholars have shown, transnational diffusion of ideas and tactics is a com-
mon occurrence (McAdam and Rucht 1993). Through globalization processes, cross-border
diffusion naturally increases as national boundaries become more permeable to cultural flows.
In the case of evangelical Protestantism and its politics, some observers have seen these flows
in neo-colonial/neo-imperialistic terms—that is, the flow of cultural power and influence is seen
as moving primarily from the West, especially the United States, to developing countries. Indeed,
American evangelicalism has vast resources that it can and does apply around the world, support-
ing myriad forms of leadership training, missionary work and revivalism, humanitarian relief and
development, broadcasting, publishing, and policy activism. Brouwer et al. (1996, 19) argue that

Christian fundamentalists in other countries find common cause with American evan-
gelists because the United States is the wellspring of anticommunism and a host of
other cultural ideologies and values that have become transnational. Halfway around
the world, religious leaders have managed to link the destinies of their countries to
that of the United States.

While they acknowledge that many of the missionaries of today are from the developing world,
they maintain that such transnational agents still tend to export an American-formulated “gos-
pel” of right-wing perspectives.
In Latin America, the Cold War history of American entanglements in the region is often
cited in support of the above perspective. A longstanding interpretation of the growth of evan-
gelicalism in Latin America is that it was an “invasion of the sects,” i.e., a pattern of religious
change very actively encouraged and supported by the US government and allied interests.
Brian Smith (1998) described the US government’s support of missionaries in Latin America
in the 1950s as a bulwark against communism and the channeling of USAID (U.S. Agency for
International Development) funds to evangelical-sponsored development projects for similar
reasons (See also Levine 2000; Stoll 1990).
Given this history, it is perhaps not surprising that recent developments in Latin American
evangelical politics have often been seen as part of a broader pattern of transnational conform-
ity to a right-wing “made in America” model. This narrative has been greatly bolstered by the
political rise of Jair Bolsonaro, who was elected president of Brazil in 2018. Bolsonaro, who is
often considered the Brazilian counterpart to Donald Trump, has actively stoked right-wing
cultural populism. He received significant support in the election from evangelical (especially
Pentecostal and neo-Pentecostal) leaders and voters.
Writing in The Nation in 2017, Omar G. Encarnación anticipated this arrival of Bolsonaro
style politics in an article titled, “Amid Crisis in Brazil, the Evangelical Bloc Emerges as a

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 Evangelicals and Ideology in Latin America

Political Power.” While Encarnación conceded that Brazilian evangelicalism is not a carbon
copy of American evangelicalism, he argued that their respective politics are increasingly trans-
national.

In crafting their advocacy against moral decline, Brazilian evangelicals take their cues
directly from the American Christian right … facilitated by the many transnational
ties linking the American and Brazilian evangelical communities … [For example,]
Trinity Broadcast Network (TBN), the world’s largest religious broadcaster, reaches
220 Brazilian cities … covering 45 million people.
(Encarnación 2017)

Encarnación pointed especially to the dramatic increase in the number of evangelicals holding
seats in the Chamber of Deputies. Known as the Bancada Evangélica (evangelical bloc), they now
number over 90, some 15% of the legislature. And according to Encarnación, the evangelical
bloc has strongly aligned with other conservative factions within the legislative body:

Together with the law-and-order lobby and the agrarian oligarchs, the evangelicals
make up the formidable—and deeply conservative—“bullet, beef, and Bible” cau-
cus. Collectively, the ‘BBB caucus’ accounts for some 60 percent of the seats in the
Chamber of Deputies.

Other analysts have been quick to connect the dots between developments in Brazil with events
elsewhere in Latin America. In a New York Times piece titled “A Perfect Marriage: Evangelicals
and Conservatives in Latin America,” Javier Corrales (2018) argued that evangelicals are “trans-
forming politics” in Latin America by

giving conservative causes, and especially political parties, new strength and new con-
stituencies … That there is convergence between the United States and Latin America
on evangelical politics is no accident. American evangelicals coach their counterparts
in Latin America on how to court parties, become lobbyists, and fight gay marriage.

In addition to the election of Bolsonaro, Corrales points to evangelical involvement in anti-gay

rights marches in Colombia, Costa Rica, the Dominican Republic, Peru, and Mexico; evangeli-
cal mobilization to defeat a referendum in Columbia on a peace deal with the FARC (Fuerzas
Armadas Revolucionarios de Colombia); and evangelical backing of the conservative Sebastián
Piñera in Chile’s 2017 presidential election.

Latin American divergence: rationales and evidence

However, in addition to the above narratives emphasizing transnational political similarities, the
extant literature on evangelical politics also includes a range of arguments that point instead to
expectations that global evangelicalism will diverge from US patterns.
First, an observation frequently made in US–Canada comparisons (Kim 1993; Reimer 1995;
Hoover and Reimer 2004; Hoover 1997) is equally valid for US–Latin America comparisons,
namely, that, unlike US evangelicals, Latin American evangelicals have no history of cultural
dominance. They cannot appeal to founding myths and nostalgia for a time when supposed
evangelical values of moral traditionalism and economic self-reliance were the de facto civil
religion.

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 Ruth Melkonian-Hoover and Dennis R. Hoover

Second, while global evangelicalism affirms a core set of doctrinal attributes (Bebbington
1989), it has always been a movement with a high degree of denominational diversity and
considerable disagreement on theological particularities outside the core beliefs. The specific
denominational/theological composition of evangelicalism can vary dramatically from country
to country and region to region, which may have important influences on evangelical politics.
In the US, the fundamentalist wing of evangelical Protestantism is unusually strong, which has
been shown to bolster a more thoroughgoing ideological conservatism (Hoover et al. 2002).3 In
many other countries, evangelicalism was only marginally shaped by the fundamentalist move-
ment. In Latin America, as in many other developing world contexts, it is the Pentecostal/neo-
Pentecostal stream of evangelical Protestantism that is particularly prominent.
Third, by contrast to analyses that make today’s US religious right the primary reference
point, scholars who take a broader historical and global approach to evangelicalism are more
apt to highlight examples of evangelical politics that do not conform to contemporary right-
wing stereotypes. For example, Paul Rowe (2019, 39-40) highlights the long tradition of social
reformism within Anglo-American evangelicalism that stretches at least to the 19th century.

Early missionaries such as William Carey and David Livingstone campaigned to pro-
mote social change in overseas colonies. During the 1800s several evangelicals came
to lead whiggish campaigns to effect global change. No doubt the most notable was
William Wilberforce and the Clapham Sect. This group of influential friends was the
driving force behind the first efforts to bring an end to the slave trade, succeeding in
the passage of the 1833 Slavery Abolition Act, signaling an end of slavery in the British
Empire. Such evangelical religious influences had a part to play in the public health
campaigns spearheaded by Florence Nightingale, the Christian social relief of William
Booth’s Salvation Army, and the Transatlantic medical and relief mission of Wilfred
Grenfell … Early 20th century populists on both sides of the political spectrum in the
United States, including both William Jennings Bryan and Theodore Roosevelt, owed
much to the efforts of earlier reformists.

Moreover, as Lamin Sanneh explains, while Western missionaries in the developing world
worked with colonial actors, they also brought the linguistic tools that local actors used to fight
colonialism and assert self-rule, as the Bible was translated into their own languages (2008, 271).
Echoes of historic evangelicalism’s reformist legacy are also evident in more recent move-
ments that have enjoyed evangelical support, including the Jubilee debt relief campaign, refugee
resettlement efforts, and international religious freedom.
Relatedly, scholars have identified myriad examples from around the world, both past and
contemporary, of evangelicals aligning with economic policies that are progressive and/or popu-
list in nature. During the Depression era in Canada, for instance, radio preacher William “Bible
Bill” Aberhart founded Alberta’s Social Credit Party, which offered a populist economic pre-
scription to the economic woes of the time (Hoover 2019). Scholars of evangelicalism in the
Global South, such as Philip Jenkins (2006), stress that the experience of socioeconomic and
political vulnerability often leads such evangelicals to embrace a political theology emphasizing
solidarity with the poor. There is consequently often evangelical sympathy in such contexts for
economic policies that by Western standards are statist and redistributionist. Timothy Samuel
Shah (2004, 117) argues that,

though evangelicals [in the Global South] are assumed to be agents of the American
religious right and purveyors of militant “fundamentalism,” their lower socioeco-

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nomic status often leads them to consider economics at least as important as “moral-
ity” and consequently to align with left-wing political movements perceived to be
pro-poor.

Joel Carpenter likewise concludes that “on abortion or gay marriage, [Global South evangeli-
cals] sound like American conservatives. But on war and peace or economic justice, they sound
like the Democratic Party” (Nussbaum 2006).
Some studies of Latin America similarly cast doubt on any easy assumption that US pat-
terns will be replicated elsewhere. For example, British sociologist of religion, Paul Freston
(2001), has found a substantial degree of Pentecostal independence from foreign missions.4
“Most Pentecostal churches (unlike their historical counterparts) were founded either by Latin
Americans who broke with an existing Protestant denomination or by independent mission-
aries, and only rarely by a foreign Pentecostal denomination” (Freston 2001, 194–195). In the
realm of political attitudes, a study of Latin Americans’ views of US foreign policy found that
evangelicals are not more pro-US than non-evangelicals (Melkonian-Hoover and Hoover
2009).With respect to partisan politics, political scientist Amy Erica Smith notes that many Latin
American evangelicals have been more ambivalent than ideological. She finds that, “Though
many evangelicals have cross-national ties, the most important leaders and their funding are
local” (Smith 2018, 6). Some Latin American evangelicals are self-consciously apolitical, seeing
politics as too dirty an affair for the faithful. Those who do participate in politics often exhibit
flexibility and pragmatism regarding partisan politics. In Brazil, for example, Catherine Osborn
(2019) argues that while a majority of evangelical voters supported Bolsonaro in 2018, this may
have been more of a transient anti-establishment wave than a stable realignment. In the recent
past, a majority of Brazil’s evangelicals supported the left-wing Workers Party (PT), and evan-
gelical leaders were credited with helping PT’s Luiz Inácio Lula get elected. Thus, the mostly
white, male, right-wing “evangelical bloc” in Brazil’s legislature is highly unrepresentative of
practicing evangelicals, who are disproportionately female, of color, and divided on Bolsonaro’s
performance (Romano 2020; Forster 2020).
Finally, there is a small but vocal evangelical left in Latin America, one that has become
galvanized to speak out against the rise of right-wing politics in the region (Deister 2018).
This evangelical left movement has deep roots, having emerged in parallel with the Liberation
Theology movement within the Catholic Church.The often-overlooked history of this move-
ment is recovered in recent books by David Kirkpatrick (A Gospel for the Poor: Global Social
Christianity and the Latin American Evangelical Left, 2019) and Melani McAlister (The Kingdom
Has No Borders: A Global History of American Evangelicals, 2018). They show how the Latin
American evangelical left, led by René Padilla and Samuel Escobar amongst others, helped
inspire a similar movement that arose in the US in the 1970s among white evangelicals. That
is, the direction of influence ran from Latin America to the US, not the other way around.
Such transnational progressivism is a significant reality, helping dismantle presumptions of
right-wing evangelical “political homogeneity” at home and globally, according to Kirkpatrick
(2019b).
Thus, we are confronted with two narratives of evangelical politics pointing in opposite
directions. One suggests that evangelical politics in Latin America can be expected to con-
form to the pattern of right-wing politics evident among white evangelicals in the US. The
other suggests more local variation in evangelical views, especially regarding economic issues.
Accordingly, in what follows, the question we investigate empirically is: do Latin American
evangelical Protestants fit the US “religious right” model of uniformly conservative ideology
across moral and economic issues?

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Data and methods

Our analysis is based on data from the 2014 Pew Religion in Latin America Survey. The data
was gathered via face-to-face interviews with over 30,000 respondents across 18 Latin American
countries (Costa Rica, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, Mexico, Nicaragua, Panama,Argentina,
Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, the Dominican Republic, Ecuador, Paraguay, Peru, Uruguay,
and Venezuela) plus the US territory of Puerto Rico.5
Our independent variable is a dichotomous measure of evangelical Protestantism.
Evangelicalism is a Bible- and missions-focused movement within Protestantism. Most evan-
gelicals stress adult baptism and conversion experiences in which believers make strong
self-conscious decisions to follow Christ (typically described as being “born again”). While
evangelicalism is concentrated in certain overtly evangelical denominational families such as the
Pentecostal tradition, it is not limited to these. Evangelicals can be found in all denominations,
including mainline Protestant denominations. And they are very prevalent in nondenomina-
tional churches.
The Pew survey contains three questions that, when used in combination, yield a suf-
ficient indicator of a respondent’s likely alignment with evangelicalism. The first question is:
“what is your present religion, if any?” Pew coded responses into five categories: Roman
Catholic, Protestant, other, unaffiliated, and don’t know. Those indicating a Protestant reli-
gious self-identification were also asked two follow-up questions that are directly relevant to
identifying evangelicals. First, Protestants were asked, “do you belong to a historical Protestant
Church, for example, Baptist, Seventh Day Adventist, Methodist, Lutheran, or Presbyterian; or
a Pentecostal Church, for example, Assemblies of God; or another Protestant church?” Second,
Protestants were asked, “would you describe yourself as ‘born again’?” We coded as evan-
gelical all Protestants who self-identified either as Pentecostal or born again. On this defini-
tion, this dataset yields an estimate of 17% of the Latin American population as Evangelical
Protestant. This estimate is similar to that produced in other studies (see, for example, the
2012 AmericasBarometer survey, which found that 15% of Latin Americans are Evangelical
Protestant; Marcano 2013).
Table 16.1 presents the religious affiliations of Latin Americans in the 2014 Pew data by
country (weighted). The distributions are very comparable with prior studies (see data reports
in US State Department 2018; Latinobarómetro 2010–2015; IGBE report in Darlington 2012).
In Central America, we see the highest proportion of evangelicals, comprising approximately
one-third or more of many nations (Honduras, Guatemala, Nicaragua, El Salvador). By contrast,
Paraguay is 90% Catholic, followed by Mexico (81%). Uruguay is by far the most secular of Latin
American nations, with 37% of its population unaffiliated.
Our dependent variables are five survey questions measuring ideological orientations
and issue positions. Our first variable is a general political ideology self-identification item.
Respondents were asked to locate themselves on a numerical ideological spectrum, typically
from left to right, which we then aggregated and recoded for comparability on a 1–5 scale from
(1) left to (5) right. Additionally, to assess attitudes on major “culture war” issues of traditional
morality, we used two survey questions: “do you strongly favor, favor, oppose, or strongly oppose
allowing gays and lesbians to marry legally?”; and, “do you think having an abortion should be
legal in all cases, legal in most cases, illegal in most cases, or illegal in all cases?” Lastly, to assess
ideological dispositions on economic issues, we used two survey items: “do you completely
agree, mostly agree, mostly disagree, or completely disagree that it is the responsibility of the
government to take care of very poor people who can’t take care of themselves?”; and, “how
important is it for followers of the Christian faith to persuade government officials to protect

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 Evangelicals and Ideology in Latin America

Table 16.1 Latin American religious affiliations by country N = 28,582

Country Catholic Evangelical Non-evangelical Other religion Unaffiliated na

(%) Protestant (%) Protestant (%) (%) (%)

Argentina 71.4 10.8 4.0 2.9 10.9 1,513

Bolivia 77.0 11.2 4.9 3.1 3.7 1,503
Brazil 60.9 21.5 4.2 5.0 8.4 1,998
Chile 64.4 10.0 7.4 2.4 15.8 1,513
Colombia 78.7 9.4 4.1 2.3 5.5 1,505
Costa Rica 62.3 19.0 6.7 2.8 9.2 1,487
Dominican Republic 56.5 21.5 1.7 2.0 18.3 1,699
Ecuador 79.5 9.7 3.2 2.4 5.2 1,848
El Salvador 49.6 30.6 5.2 2.4 12.1 1,498
Guatemala 50.2 37.1 4.1 2.5 6.1 1,499
Honduras 46.4 33.5 7.2 2.4 10.5 1,499
Mexico 80.6 5.4 3.3 4.1 6.7 1,999
Nicaragua 49.7 35.1 5.2 3.4 6.5 1,497
Panama 70.0 16.2 2.9 3.9 7.0 1,494
Paraguay 89.7 5.4 2.1 1.6 1.3 1,501
Peru 75.7 12.5 4.7 3.5 3.6 1,500
Uruguay 42.5 8.4 6.3 5.7 37.2 1,502
Venezuela 72.9 9.5 7.2 3.8 6.6 1,541

Note: aWeighted individually by country.

the rights of the poor? Very important, somewhat important, not too important, or not at all
important” (asked only of Christians).
In what follows, we first present cross-tabulations and mean scale scores for evangelicals
and non-evangelicals by country on each of our dependent variables. We present the cross-
tabulations to expose the range of opinions by evangelicals and non-evangelicals across Latin
America, while our analysis homes in on the comparison of means. Next, we compare the
means of Latin Americans across all major categories of religious affiliation (plus the unaf-
filiated). Finally, we share the findings of our multivariate regression analysis on each of the
dependent variables.

Findings
In Table 16.2, we highlight the placement and the average or mean score of evangelicals and
non-evangelicals on the ideological self-identification scale (1–5).6 For Latin America as a whole,
it is notable that evangelicals place themselves similarly to their non-evangelical peers, and in
fact slightly to the left of non-evangelicals (3.20 vs. 3.23). Latin America is still a fairly conserva-
tive Catholic region, and evangelicals do not position themselves far from the center-right norm
on the whole. On a country-by-country basis, averages are also quite similar in most countries.
Yet, in Argentina and Uruguay, evangelicals are much further to the right in ideological self-
identification than non-evangelicals (4.12 vs. 3.44 and 3.37 vs. 2.84, respectively). However, in
countries like Colombia and Costa Rica, evangelicals are somewhat further to the left (3.27 vs.
3.42 and 2.94 vs. 3.07, respectively).
Next, we turn to questions measuring opinion on two major issues of traditional values,
gay marriage, and abortion.7 Table 16.3 presents findings on the gay marriage question on a

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 Ruth Melkonian-Hoover and Dennis R. Hoover

Table 16.2 Evangelicals and ideology N = 22,289

Ideology Left (1) (%) (2) (%) (3) (%) (4) (%) Right (5) (%) Scale Average

Latin America Evangelical 10.9 9.0 48.9 11.6 19.7 3.2018

Overall
Non-evangelical 10.9 9.8 45.8 12.3 21.2 3.2298
By Country
Argentina Evangelical 7.7 5.8 17.3 5.8 63.5 4.1154
Non-evangelical 10.6 17.4 26.5 8.2 37.3 3.4407
Bolivia Evangelical 5.8 4.5 81.3 3.2 5.2 2.9742
Non-evangelical 7.9 5.8 73.0 5.9 7.4 2.9909
Brazil Evangelical 6.9 16.8 35.8 23.3 17.2 3.2716
Non-evangelical 5.7 14.8 37.6 28.5 13.5 3.2918
Chile Evangelical 6.3 6.9 74.3 4.9 7.6 3.0069
Non-evangelical 10.8 11.1 64.0 6.0 8.1 2.8944
Colombia Evangelical 13.9 8.3 37.0 18.5 22.2 3.2685
Non-evangelical 9.6 8.4 38.6 17.2 26.2 3.4186
Costa Rica Evangelical 16.0 12.5 47.5 9.5 14.4 2.9392
Non-evangelical 16.0 9.6 43.5 13.0 17.9 3.0721
Dominican Evangelical 11.1 12.0 17.3 20.4 39.1 3.6444
Republic Non-evangelical 11.6 9.4 14.4 21.6 43.1 3.7512
Ecuador Evangelical 3.8 3.8 72.0 15.3 5.1 3.1401
Non-evangelical 6.0 10.2 64.7 13.2 5.8 3.0239
El Salvador Evangelical 17.4 3.6 53.5 7.0 18.5 3.0552
Non-evangelical 17.3 7.1 52.8 6.7 16.2 2.9744
Guatemala Evangelical 3.6 8.0 63.3 12.1 13.0 3.2297
Non-evangelical 3.1 8.3 64.3 11.7 12.7 3.2260
Honduras Evangelical 8.2 12.6 39.7 11.7 27.8 3.3833
Non-evangelical 9.1 11.5 37.6 10.3 31.5 3.4367
Mexico Evangelical 10.4 13.0 46.1 13.9 16.5 3.1304
Non-evangelical 9.8 12.9 51.3 13.2 12.9 3.0634
Nicaragua Evangelical 21.6 10.8 44.6 5.5 17.5 2.8656
Non-evangelical 22.2 10.9 39.9 9.0 18.0 2.8971
Panama Evangelical 6.6 7.0 43.8 24.4 18.2 3.4050
Non-evangelical 3.1 9.0 42.9 21.7 23.3 3.5318
Paraguay Evangelical 14.6 4.9 80.5 4.6585
Non-evangelical 3.5 1.4 13.4 4.7 77.0 4.5029
Peru Evangelical 2.9 5.8 79.6 5.8 5.8 3.0584
Non-evangelical 3.5 9.2 69.5 11.6 6.1 3.0762
Uruguay Evangelical 28.7 5.3 12.8 6.4 46.8 3.3723
Non-evangelical 38.5 10.1 13.8 4.1 33.6 2.8428

four-point scale that moves from left to right (ranging from one, strongly favor, to four, strongly
oppose). In this 2014 data, Latin Americans as a whole leaned conservative, yet even in this
environment, evangelicals were notably more conservative, with an average of 3.27 vs. 2.87 for
non-evangelicals. Evangelicals were also more conservative than non-evangelicals in every single
country in the study. Differences were minimal in some nations (Paraguay and many Central
American states), yet in Argentina and Uruguay, we see stark differences between evangelicals
and non-evangelicals (3.06 vs. 2.36 and 2.92 vs. 2.13, respectively).

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Table 16.3 Evangelicals and gay marriage N = 26,431

Views on legalizing gay marriage Strongly favor Favor Oppose (3) Strongly oppose Average
(1) (%) (2) (%) (%) (4) (%)

Latin America overall Evangelical 3.6 8.7 44.6 43.2 3.2740

Non-evangelical 11.0 22.9 34.6 31.6 2.8671
By country
Argentina Evangelical 9.0 18.0 30.8 42.1 3.0602
Non-evangelical 24.3 34.1 23.2 18.5 2.3584
Bolivia Evangelical 0.6 9.6 42.9 46.8 3.3590
Non-evangelical 7.2 19.9 41.8 31.1 2.9679
Brazil Evangelical 5.1 19.9 38.6 36.4 3.0631
Non-evangelical 12.4 39.4 25.2 23.0 2.5867
Chile Evangelical 10.2 19.7 33.6 36.5 2.9635
Non-evangelical 21.9 29.4 23.0 25.6 2.5235
Colombia Evangelical 2.9 7.4 41.2 48.5 3.3529
Non-evangelical 9.7 22.1 38.0 30.2 2.8874
Costa Rica Evangelical 5.0 5.8 48.4 40.7 3.2481
Non-evangelical 11.4 20.4 34.7 33.5 2.9035
Dominican Republic Evangelical 1.7 7.6 27.7 63.0 3.5198
Non-evangelical 7.2 21.0 21.3 50.5 3.1517
Ecuador Evangelical 2.2 2.8 33.7 61.2 3.5393
Non-evangelical 6.4 11.3 37.0 45.3 3.2106
El Salvador Evangelical 3.7 3.3 39.7 53.3 3.4258
Non-evangelical 4.8 9.0 40.4 45.8 3.2729
Guatemala Evangelical 2.4 4.6 73.0 20.0 3.1066
Non-evangelical 6.0 10.2 67.5 16.3 2.9410
Honduras Evangelical 2.5 5.7 44.1 47.7 3.3691
Non-evangelical 4.9 9.7 43.2 42.2 3.2270
Mexico Evangelical 6.1 22.9 38.9 32.1 2.9695
Non-evangelical 13.0 38.1 28.9 20.0 2.5575
Nicaragua Evangelical 1.0 6.3 52.2 40.4 3.3204
Non-evangelical 5.2 17.6 47.5 29.7 3.0167
Panama Evangelical 5.3 9.8 41.2 43.7 3.2327
Non-evangelical 8.6 14.2 45.1 32.1 3.0076
Paraguay Evangelical 4.9 37.0 58.0 3.5309
Non-evangelical 1.5 13.9 33.6 51.0 3.3415
Peru Evangelical 1.2 6.8 54.9 37.0 3.2778
Non-evangelical 6.1 23.5 44.2 26.2 2.9050
Uruguay Evangelical 11.9 19.5 33.1 35.6 2.9237
Non-evangelical 31.1 37.5 18.6 12.8 2.1311
Venezuela Evangelical 4.2 4.9 33.8 57.0 3.4366
Non-evangelical 9.9 22.1 31.3 36.7 2.9481

Table 16.4 presents findings on the abortion question on a four-point scale ranging from the
belief that abortion ought to be legal in all cases (1) to illegal in all (4). As with gay marriage, we
found that on the abortion question, evangelicals were more conservative than non-evangelicals
across the board.The evangelical average was 3.44 vs. 3.18 for non-evangelicals in Latin America as
a whole, and evangelicals were likewise more conservative in every country. Here again, ­differences

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 Ruth Melkonian-Hoover and Dennis R. Hoover

Table 16.4 Evangelicals and abortion N = 27,878

Views on abortion Legal in all Legal in some Illegal in some Illegal in all Average
(1) (%) (2) (%) (3) (%) (4) (%)

LA overall Evangelical 2.6 9.9 27.9 59.5 3.4436

Non-evangelical 6.6 16.9 28.7 47.8 3.1768
Country
Argentina Evangelical 1.4 15.6 23.4 59.6 3.4113
Non-evangelical 12.9 28.8 31.9 26.4 2.7171
Bolivia Evangelical 1.2 7.5 31.1 60.2 3.5031
Non-evangelical 5.2 16.5 30.9 47.5 3.2064
Brazil Evangelical 1.7 13.5 32.0 52.8 3.3590
Non-evangelical 2.8 18.8 34.8 43.6 3.1914
Chile Evangelical 6.9 23.6 20.1 49.3 3.1181
Non-evangelical 12.1 37.1 21.7 29.0 2.6772
Colombia Evangelical 1.4 10.1 21.7 66.7 3.5362
Non-evangelical 5.0 19.2 25.4 50.3 3.2111
Costa Rica Evangelical 4.8 7.8 27.4 60.0 3.4259
Non-evangelical 6.2 13.6 27.9 52.4 3.2643
Dominican Evangelical 2.3 9.0 28.2 60.6 3.4704
Republic Non-evangelical 2.8 11.0 27.0 59.2 3.4266
Ecuador Evangelical 2.7 7.6 23.8 65.9 3.5297
Non-evangelical 5.0 14.8 29.3 50.9 3.2617
El Salvador Evangelical 1.3 7.9 19.7 71.1 3.6060
Non-evangelical 2.4 9.1 25.1 63.4 3.4955
Guatemala Evangelical 1.6 3.0 44.2 51.2 3.4505
Non-evangelical 2.8 6.0 37.6 53.5 3.4179
Honduras Evangelical 1.9 7.2 17.5 73.4 3.6236
Non-evangelical 4.9 7.1 17.9 70.1 3.5309
Mexico Evangelical 5.9 18.5 18.5 57.0 3.2667
Non-evangelical 8.8 22.2 26.2 42.8 3.0299
Nicaragua Evangelical 2.8 15.3 35.3 46.6 3.2570
Non-evangelical 6.4 21.1 33.7 38.8 3.0494
Panama Evangelical 2.9 10.8 27.4 58.9 3.4232
Non-evangelical 2.5 10.1 38.3 49.1 3.3404
Paraguay Evangelical 4.8 22.9 72.3 3.6747
Non-evangelical 1.8 3.5 25.2 69.5 3.6238
Peru Evangelical 3.0 8.4 32.9 55.7 3.4132
Non-evangelical 5.1 16.8 34.5 43.6 3.1661
Uruguay Evangelical 12.2 17.1 24.4 46.3 3.0488
Non-evangelical 27.3 31.3 20.7 20.6 2.3461
Venezuela Evangelical 2.0 5.4 21.5 71.1 3.6174
Non-evangelical 1.9 9.6 30.1 58.4 3.4500

between evangelicals and non-evangelicals were most stark in Argentina and Uruguay (3.41 vs. 2.71
and 3.05 vs. 2.35, respectively). However, in a number of other countries, the differences between
evangelicals and non-evangelicals were negligible, e.g., Paraguay (predominantly Catholic), the
Dominican Republic (majority Catholic), Guatemala (half Catholic), likely reflecting the consid-
erable role of the Catholic Church with its longstanding disapproval of abortion.

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 Evangelicals and Ideology in Latin America

Next, we turn to our two economic variables measuring attitudes toward the government’s
role in caring for the poor. We first examine responses to the question of whether or not it is
the government’s responsibility to care for the very poor who cannot take care of themselves
(Table 16.5).The variable is a four-point, left-to-right scale measure.The findings are the inverse
of the pattern we observed for the traditional morality variables discussed above. That is, in

Table 16.5 Evangelicals and government support for the poor N = 28,347

Views on government responsibility Completely Mostly agree Mostly disagree Completely Average
to care for the very poor agree (1) (%) (2) (%) (3) (%) disagree (4) (%)

LA overall Evangelical 74.4 18.8 4.0 2.8 1.3526

Non-evangelical 69.2 22.1 5.4 3.3 1.4271
Country
Argentina Evangelical 75.0 20.8 2.8 1.4 1.3056
Non-evangelical 67.2 26.4 4.5 1.9 1.4112
Bolivia Evangelical 60.7 28.2 7.4 3.7 1.5399
Non-evangelical 61.8 25.1 10.4 2.7 1.5392
Brazil Evangelical 68.6 25.2 3.5 2.6 1.4009
Non-evangelical 70.4 23.6 3.6 2.4 1.3811
Chile Evangelical 67.3 22.0 7.3 3.3 1.4667
Non-evangelical 59.8 26.5 8.9 4.8 1.5865
Colombia Evangelical 78.6 17.9 2.1 1.4 1.2643
Non-evangelical 80.3 14.6 2.7 2.4 1.2717
Costa Rica Evangelical 77.5 16.7 3.6 2.2 1.3055
Non-evangelical 75.5 15.1 4.9 4.5 1.3842
Dominican Evangelical 89.1 8.1 1.4 1.4 1.1513
Republic Non-evangelical 91.1 6.0 1.6 1.3 1.1315
Ecuador Evangelical 75.1 20.0 4.3 0.5 1.3027
Non-evangelical 75.1 20.9 3.1 0.9 1.2985
El Salvador Evangelical 74.8 16.5 4.2 4.4 1.3835
Non-evangelical 76.1 16.3 2.9 4.7 1.3619
Guatemala Evangelical 73.7 16.6 5.6 4.0 1.3993
Non-evangelical 71.2 16.9 6.9 5.0 1.4562
Honduras Evangelical 86.9 9.1 1.9 2.1 1.1913
Non-evangelical 82.3 11.2 2.8 3.7 1.2801
Mexico Evangelical 55.9 24.3 10.3 9.6 1.7353
Non-evangelical 57.7 28.1 7.7 6.5 1.6299
Nicaragua Evangelical 84.1 10.8 2.8 2.4 1.2338
Non-evangelical 81.6 11.6 3.7 3.1 1.2830
Panama Evangelical 50.0 40.2 6.6 3.3 1.6311
Non-evangelical 49.9 39.4 9.3 1.4 1.6210
Paraguay Evangelical 87.8 11.0 1.2 1.1463
Non-evangelical 87.1 10.7 1.8 0.5 1.1567
Peru Evangelical 47.4 45.0 6.4 1.2 1.6140
Non-evangelical 42.8 47.2 8.0 2.0 1.6921
Uruguay Evangelical 71.3 23.8 1.6 3.3 1.3689
Non-evangelical 58.2 25.3 8.7 7.9 1.6629
Venezuela Evangelical 73.6 19.6 4.7 2.0 1.3514
Non-evangelical 67.1 23.8 5.7 3.4 1.4536

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 Ruth Melkonian-Hoover and Dennis R. Hoover

this survey, Latin Americans as a whole were highly progressive when it comes to government
support for the poor, but evangelicals were even more progressive than non-evangelicals (1.35
vs. 1.43). On a country-by-country basis, evangelical scores were generally either more liberal
or equal to non-evangelical scores. Mexico was an exception (1.74 for evangelicals vs. 1.63 for
non-evangelicals).
In Table 16.6, we present findings of the last dependent variable, based on a question asked
only of self-identified Christians (which in this highly religious region comprise over 87% of
the dataset). When asked how important it is for followers of the Christian faith to persuade
government officials to protect the rights of the poor, the vast majority of Latin American
Christians found it to be important. And evangelicals, on average, were even more liberal than
non-evangelical Christians (1.41 vs. 1.54). However, there was greater variation by country.
In 12 countries, evangelicals were more liberal, marginally or substantially so (see especially
Uruguay, 1.37 for evangelicals vs. 1.66 for non-evangelicals). However, in six countries, the
average of non-evangelicals was more liberal, and especially so in Argentina, Paraguay, and
Mexico.
Next, we review all of our dependent variables by major religious affiliation categories
(Evangelical Protestant, Non-evangelical Protestant, Catholic, other, unaffiliated) across Latin
America (see Table 16.7). Beginning with ideology, it is clear that evangelical Protestants are
similar to other Protestants (3.2 and 3.19), while Catholics appear to be driving up the non-
evangelical ideological conservativism altogether (3.30). As for gay marriage and abortion,
evangelical Protestants are clearly more conservative than non-evangelical Protestants. Indeed,
they are more conservative than all the other groups. The religiously unaffiliated are the most
liberal, with a substantial average difference of 0.8 on gay marriage and 0.6 on abortion. When
it comes to views on government support for social services for the poor, evangelicals are more
progressive than all other categories, and the unaffiliated are the most conservative, though the
averages are close (only 0.2 difference, and likely driven by Uruguay given previous findings).
Lastly, on the final question of whether or not Christians ought to lobby the government to
support the poor, evangelical Christians are again the most liberal across the board, but not
by much. The contrast is greatest with the other-Christians category (1.41 for evangelicals vs.
1.68 for others).
Finally, in Table 16.8, we analyse each of our dependent variables side by side via regression
analyses. In addition to common demographic control variables (age, gender, education) we also
include as controls two other likely drivers of political opinion in the Latin American context.
These include frustration with the political system and corrupt politicians (Osborn 2019) and
concern over one’s personal economic status (Kirkpatrick 2019a).8
The results confirm our initial bivariate analysis. Evangelical identity is related to conserva-
tive positions on gay marriage and abortion, and with progressive positions on government
support for the poor and the need for Christians to lobby the government to support the poor.
As for ideological self-identification, it points in the expected direction (evangelicals are slightly
to the left), but the relationship is not statistically significant (though interestingly becomes so
with a revised dataset9).
Among the control variables, frustration with corrupt leadership appears to hold more
explanatory value than religion when it comes to explaining the appeals of authoritarianism and
populism. Frustration with corrupt leadership is associated with greater conservatism on social
issues and a more rightward ideological identification, but it is associated with liberalism on
economic issues. Concerns over one’s personal economic status play out the same as evangelical
status but is not consistently significant. Older people lean rightward ideologically and are more
conservative on gay marriage, but not necessarily abortion. Latin American women are more

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 Evangelicals and Ideology in Latin America

Table 16.6 Evangelicals and Christians lobbying for government protection of the poor N = 24995

Views on Christian role to lobby Very important Somewhat Not too Not at all Average
government to care for the poor (1) (%) important (2) important important (4)
(%) (3) (%) (%)

Latin America Evangelical 69.3 22.5 5.6 2.6 1.4146

overall
Non-evangelical 61.2 27.5 7.8 3.5 1.5350
Country
Argentina Evangelical 56.3 28.1 9.6 5.9 1.6519
Non-evangelical 56.1 33.2 8.0 2.6 1.5717
Bolivia Evangelical 54.4 36.1 8.2 1.3 1.5633
Non-evangelical 51.7 35.1 9.8 3.4 1.6482
Brazil Evangelical 69.8 24.7 4.0 1.4 1.3705
Non-evangelical 68.6 24.4 4.9 2.1 1.4061
Chile Evangelical 52.7 29.1 12.2 6.1 1.7162
Non-evangelical 47.9 29.9 13.7 8.5 1.8282
Colombia Evangelical 74.5 14.6 7.3 3.6 1.4015
Non-evangelical 75.0 18.2 4.5 2.3 1.3400
Costa Rica Evangelical 85.1 12.4 1.8 0.7 1.1818
Non-evangelical 81.2 15.5 2.2 1.0 1.2308
Dominican Evangelical 82.2 14.4 2.0 1.4 1.2260
Republic Non-evangelical 79.3 16.6 2.8 1.3 1.2599
Ecuador Evangelical 51.4 34.1 12.3 2.2 1.6536
Non-evangelical 50.1 34.6 11.9 3.3 1.6847
El Salvador Evangelical 65.5 23.5 5.1 6.0 1.5160
Non-evangelical 73.0 19.9 3.8 3.3 1.3736
Guatemala Evangelical 70.0 23.8 5.0 1.3 1.3750
Non-evangelical 75.6 20.8 3.0 0.6 1.2854
Honduras Evangelical 77.6 19.0 2.3 1.1 1.2693
Non-evangelical 75.0 21.1 1.7 2.3 1.3129
Mexico Evangelical 31.6 33.1 22.6 12.8 2.1654
Non-evangelical 40.3 35.5 16.5 7.7 1.9159
Nicaragua Evangelical 89.5 9.1 1.0 0.4 1.1228
Non-evangelical 85.3 11.8 2.0 0.8 1.1830
Panama Evangelical 56.1 35.7 5.3 2.9 1.5492
Non-evangelical 44.8 46.1 5.4 3.7 1.6793
Paraguay Evangelical 62.0 31.6 6.3 1.4430
Non-evangelical 68.2 27.6 2.1 2.1 1.3804
Peru Evangelical 57.6 34.3 7.0 1.2 1.5174
Non-evangelical 54.6 34.7 9.6 1.2 1.5725
Uruguay Evangelical 61.6 17.9 10.7 9.8 1.6875
Non-evangelical 49.4 23.8 13.2 13.7 1.9123
Venezuela Evangelical 59.9 24.5 13.6 2.0 1.5782
Non-evangelical 51.8 28.5 15.9 3.9 1.7186

supportive of gay marriage than men but less supportive of the legalization of abortion. Having
more education is associated with a more leftward ideology, and more liberal positions on moral
issues, but not more liberal positions on economic issues (perhaps not surprising given higher
income associated with increased education).

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 Ruth Melkonian-Hoover and Dennis R. Hoover

Table 16.7 Religious groups and ideology comparison of means

Ideology n = Gay marriage Abortion n Govt. support Christians to lobby govt.

22,249 n = 26,388 = 27,838 poor n = 28,305 for poor n = 24,980

Evangelical 3.2018 3.2740 3.4436 1.3526 1.4146

Non-evangelical 3.1920 3.0502 3.3153 1.4383 1.6099
Protestant
Catholic 3.2955 2.8974 3.2175 1.4134 1.5242
Other religion 3.0311 2.9893 3.2579 1.4278 1.6840a
Unaffiliated 2.8614 2.5225 2.7916 1.5201 N/A

Note: aOther religion on this fifth survey question only includes other-Christians (those who identify with
other religion but respond “yes” to a follow-up question as to being Christian) .

Table 16.8 Evangelicals and ideology multivariate regressions

Variables Ideology (n = Gay marriage (n = Abortion (n = Govt. to support Christians to lobby

21,602) 25,601) 26,980) poor (n = govt. for poor (n =
27,422) 24216)

Evangelical −0.030(0.021) 0.398(0.015)a 0.234(0.015)a −0.057(0.012)a −0.111(0.013)a

Corrupt 0.054(0.011)a 0.056(0.008)a 0.076(0.007)a −0.100(0.006)a −0.153(0.007)a
Politicians
Economic −0.005(0.010) 0.044(0.007)a 0.026(0.007)a −0.009(0.006) −0.022(0.006)a
Status
Age 0.002(0.001)a 0.007(0.000)a −0.001(0.000)b 0.000(0.000) 0.000(0.000)
Gender −0.009(0.016) −0.053(0.012)a 0.054(0.011)a 0.009(0.009) 0.000(0.010)
Education −0.022(0.005)a −0.059(0.004)a −0.081(0.003)a 0.042(0.003)a 0.014(0.003)a
(Constant) 3.063 (0.062)a 2.539(0.044)a 3.072(0.042)a 1.634 (0.033)a 2.081(0.038)a
R2 0.003 0.069 0.041 0.022 0.028

Note: a P < 0.001.

Note: b P < 0.01.

Conclusion
This chapter set out to answer the question of whether, at the mass level, Latin American evan-
gelical Protestants fit the US “religious right” model of uniformly conservative ideology. Some
analysts have interpreted recent developments in electoral politics (e.g., the 2018 election of Jair
Bolsonaro to the Brazilian presidency) as part of a larger pattern of conservative American evan-
gelicalism exerting neo-imperial cultural/political influence on Global South evangelicalism. By
contrast, other analysts highlight patterns of historical and contemporary diversity in evangelical
politics around the world, at least with respect to policy issues beyond the hot-button “culture
war” issues of traditional morality.
Our findings provide unambiguous support for the latter narrative. Data from Pew’s massive
2014 survey of Latin America show clearly that evangelicals are more conservative than average
on key issues of traditional morality, but they are not more conservative on economic questions.
Indeed, on the economic measures utilized, evangelicals are to the left of the Latin American
average—an average that is already well to the left of American public opinion. As George
Marsden succinctly argues in his study of global evangelicalism, evangelicals do share certain

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 Evangelicals and Ideology in Latin America

core religious traits, but they vary immensely in personality and temperament. Thus, “it is a
mistake to generalize about evangelicals on the basis of the behavior of white American Trump
voters” (Marsden 2019, 282).
Our analysis also points to an important pattern of polarization within Latin American reli-
gion and politics. Latin American evangelicals’ ideological priorities are in increasing tension
with those of secular and less-religious Latin Americans. Indeed, our findings regarding the
religiously unaffiliated (see Table 16.7) are the exact inverse of the pattern for evangelicals—that
is, seculars are the most liberal on issues of traditional morality and also the most conservative on the
government’s responsibility to care for the poor.
Environments of polarization can obscure ideological diversity or centrism, with implica-
tions for representation. Recent Brazilian politics illustrates this point. Polarization has left many
rank-and-file evangelicals, and Brazilians in general, politically “homeless,” as the current par-
tisan configuration is not providing a viable option that represents economically center-left
but culturally right positions. When combined with a strong anti-elitist/anti-corruption wave
in Brazil, the conditions were ripe in 2018 for exploitation by a right-wing populist personal-
ity like Bolsonaro, who—despite his vitriolic rhetoric and imperfect ideological fit—was sup-
ported by many evangelicals, as well as people of lower socioeconomic status, people of color,
and women. The political struggles of candidate Marina Silva in multiple presidential election
cycles further underscore this point. She is an Afro-Brazilian environmentalist, leftist, Pentecostal
who came from poverty and who tries to bridge many of Brazil’s social divides. But in an era
of polarization, opponents have attacked from both the right and left, effectively undermining
her chances (Freston 2018).
Polarization on both the religious right and secular left merits further research in Brazil and
elsewhere across Latin America. Future research should examine transnational patterns of both
right-wing cultural politics and left-wing cultural politics. Further, future comparative research
on evangelical politics should be informed by careful attention to the specific indigenous pat-
terns, histories, and contingent conditions in each country, particularly with respect to party
systems and the vicissitudes of electoral politics.

Notes
1 When evangelicals are defined by affiliation and belief only, without regard to ethnicity or race, they
are 30% of the US population. Two-thirds of these are white, and that proportion is declining: nearly
half under 30 are non-white, and one-fifth of those are Latino. See Bacon Jr. and Thompson-DeVeaux
2018.
2 We wish to thank the Pew Research Center for the use of the Religion in Latin America Survey. The
Center bears no responsibility for the interpretations presented or conclusions reached based on analy-
sis of the data.
3 Fundamentalists, like Pentecostals, are a subset of evangelicals. Fundamentalists focus on the “funda-
mentals” of the faith, and are often biblical literalists who are strict and pietistic in lifestyle prohibitions.
Pentecostals are charismatic, and highlight the gifts of the Spirit like speaking in tongues and healing.
4 Virginia Garrard-Burnett (1998) noted a similar dynamic regarding evangelicals in Guatemala.
5 As the purpose of this chapter is to compare/contrast Latin American nations with the US, we excluded
Puerto Rico from our data analysis.
6 The N (22,289) is lower in part because Venezuela could not be included, as Venezuelans were not
asked a comparable question. In addition, those who refused to answer the question, or said they didn’t
know, were dropped from the sample. Those who responded that they didn’t have an ideology were
placed in the center of the scale.We also analysed the data excluding those who didn’t have an ideology
(with a resultant n = 16,772), and the findings were consistently similar; we share the fuller responses
in our chapter. Also of note, Latin Americans were reluctant to identify with the major political parties

241
 Ruth Melkonian-Hoover and Dennis R. Hoover

in each country (with very low responses on party identification, ranging from 23% in Bolivia and
26% in Brazil, to 76% in Paraguay and 89% in Bolivia). On the whole, only half identified with a party,
reflecting a clear disaffection with politics.
7 It is worth noting that more Latin Americans were willing to respond to questions on these key con-
cerns than to label themselves ideologically.
8 The corrupt politicians measure is based on how respondents rate the problem of corrupt political
leaders: “not a problem at all (1), a small problem (2), a moderately big problem (3), or a very big prob-
lem (4).” Economic status is based on how respondents describe their personal economic situation:
“very good (1), somewhat good (2), somewhat bad (3), or very bad (4).”
9 In analysis not shown here, when Uruguay is dropped from the sample (an outlying country with a
significant proportion of religiously unaffiliated; see Somma et al. 2017, 137), a statistically significant
relationship is revealed with ideology as well.

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r​-de-​​2032/​.

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 SECTION 3

Country case studies

 17
ITALY
Luca Ozzano

The Risorgimento and the kingdom of Italy

To understand the complex entanglement between politics and religion in contemporary Italy,
it is necessary first to analyse its historical roots. When the process of the unification of Italy,
commonly known as Risorgimento (resurgence) started, between the late 18th and the early 19th
centuries, the Catholic Church still enjoyed considerable influence on the peninsula. On the
one hand, the pope ruled the Papal States, which included today’s Lazio region, and most of
Marche, Umbria and Emilia Romagna; on the other, as the leader of Christianity, the pope had
a considerable influence on the other Italian states.
Because of the fear of losing its territories, and in opposition to the Risorgimento’s motto
“Free church in a free state”, aimed at the institutional separation between the religious and
the political realm, the Vatican was not particularly favourable to the unification process. This
did not prevent some Catholic thinkers from enthusiastically supporting it.The most popular of
them probably was Vincenzo Gioberti, a Catholic priest born in Turin (the city which became
the centre and the driving force of the unification process). In his book, Del primato morale e
civile degli italiani (Of the Italians’ moral and civil primacy), he proposed a solution for the unifica-
tion process that saw the future Italian state as a federation and the pope as its leader (Gioberti
1846). This political project, shared by other circles of Catholic intellectuals, became known as
neo-Guelphism (after the name of the Italian pro-Church parties in the Middle Ages). This fac-
tion became particularly enthusiastic in 1846, when they hoped that Giovanni Mastai Ferretti,
elected pope as Pius IX, might support their cause: a hope that soon proved misplaced, when the
new pope made clear his condemnation of liberalism, modernism and secularism.
The ideological leader of the Risorgimento himself, Giuseppe Mazzini, was deeply religious
(although, rather than a follower of the Church of Rome, he seemed to see himself as the
prophet of a new “religion of humanity” to come) (Verucci 1996, p. 8) and believed that the
emancipation of peoples and faith were strictly connected. In his works, he openly invited the
nationalist patriots and the clergy to give up their reciprocal hostility and embrace each other,
since “religion is a need … for peoples” and “every social revolution is essentially religious”
(Mazzini 2005, p. 430). He also conceived in religious terms the transformation of Europe,
speaking of a “holy alliance of peoples” to build democracy against the “league of princes”
(Mazzini 2005, p. 671). Although a significant section of the clergy was against the process of

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unification (not least because it entailed expropriation of the Pontifical States), some Catholic
priests (such as Enrico Tazzoli, executed by the Austrians in 1852) were enthusiastic supporters
of the nationalist movement and even participated in the clandestine activity of the pro-unifica-
tion movement. Liberal Catholics also supported the movement, and many of them even shared
anti-clerical feelings, believing that the Church needed to renew and to give up its corruption
and political involvement to return to its spiritual function and adapt to the changes of society
and culture (Verucci 1996, pp. 4–5).
Despite the role played by Catholicism in the unification process, the political elites of the
new Italian Kingdom were mostly marked by a rationalist, secularist and often anti-clerical
ideology aimed at reducing the Church’s influence on society. In 1848, the Statuto Albertino
(the Constitution of the Kingdom of Sardinia, which in 1861 also became the Constitution of
the unified Italian Kingdom) established the separation between Church and state and granted
freedom of belief to religious minorities such as the Jews and the Waldensians, a small but influ-
ential Protestant group. (Broadly speaking, the influence of Protestant ideas played a significant
role in the development of the idea of separation between Church and state among the Italian
ruling class, including Prime Minister Cavour) (Conti 2011). The Siccardi laws (1850) further
deepened this institutional separation by abolishing ecclesiastical tribunals and the Church’s pos-
sibility to grant asylum and cancelling tax exemptions for religious buildings.These laws created
a polarisation between the Catholics and Prime Minister Cavour and his entourage, which per-
suaded Cavour to approve even harsher anti-clerical laws, such as the Rattazzi law (1955), which
abolished several religious orders regarded as organisations without social utility and confiscated
their buildings and property (Verucci 1996). In the meantime, the process of territorial unifica-
tion also implied the conquest of the Papal States, which culminated in 1870 with the annexa-
tion of Rome, which subsequently became the capital city of the Italian Kingdom. The pope
refused to acknowledge the legitimacy of the latter, withdrew to the Vatican and considered
himself a political prisoner. In the following years, there was a lively debate among the clergy
and the wider Catholic community about whether believers should participate in elections,
both as candidates and voters. The issue was resolved in 1874 when the Vatican made official
the Non expedit principle, which forbade such participation (Marotta 2011): a circumstance that
significantly slowed down the process of the development of Christian political parties in Italy.
In the meantime, however, the Church put into place a strategy of promotion of Christian
associationism in civil society, which also sought, from the last decades of the 19th century, to
counterbalance the growing influence of the socialist movement. This proved crucial for the
development in Italy of the so-called “white subculture” (particularly entrenched in the north-
east regions) (Diamanti 2009). In 1874, when the Non expedit was made official, the Church also
upgraded its social agenda by creating the Opera dei Congressi (work of the congress), a hierarchi-
cal organisation controlled by the Holy See, which aimed at coordinating the activities of Italy’s
Catholic associations. In the following years, this further promoted the growth of a wide net-
work of associations, cooperatives and mutual aid organisations (Menozzi 1997,Verucci 1999), a
development which, according to Kalyvas’s (1996) well-known thesis, inadvertently contributed
decades later to the rise of the Christian democracy movement. Indeed, this phenomenon was
not simply an economic endeavour but explicitly aimed to create a “Christian society”.This was
made clear in 1891 in Leo XIII’s encyclical Rerum Novarum, which urged Catholics to defend
and spread religious values in society and support the poorest and the workers. This became the
basis for the Church’s Social Doctrine (Coppa 1995).
During the last decades of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th, anti-religious
and anti-clerical feelings were particularly strong in the growing socialist movement (although
the Partito Socialista Italiano (Italian Socialist Party – PSI) was created only in 1892, organised

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socialist and anarchist groups that had existed in the country since the 1860s and 1870s). The
members of the latter shared a rationalist and usually atheistic vision of society: some (such as
Andrea Costa, who was also a Freemason) with the explicit aim to erase religion from the Italian
society; others (such as Leonida Bissolati) with a more pragmatic position, seeing religion as a
private matter irrelevant for the socialist struggle (Conti 2011).
The emergence and growth of socialism also deeply affected the Vatican. The new pope,
Pius X (1903–1914), put forward the Il fermo proposito encyclical in 1905, which softened the
Non expedit by allowing Catholic participation in those electoral colleges where the victory of
an anti-clerical candidate was possible. The creation of a Catholic party was still forbidden. The
Catholics’ participation was further enhanced by the Gentiloni Pact (1913) that institutionalised
the alliance with the moderates in parliament. However, the creation of a “legitimate” Catholic
party, the Partito Popolare Italiano (Italian Popular Party – PPI), was possible only in 1919, one
year after the official revocation of the Non expedit. Although led by a cleric, Don Luigi Sturzo,
the party rejected the label of a confessional party and showed a significant social and pro-
democratic orientation in line with the growing modernist movement within the Church,
“which attempted to synchronise Catholic theology with democracy” (Moos 1945, p. 270).
Indeed, the party had a mixed constituency, including both traditional and liberal wings, and
Sturzo’s attention for the poor, and particularly for the conditions of the peasants, drew accusa-
tions of Bolshevism from his conservative opponents. Although in Sturzo’s case the allegation
was exaggerated, it was true that, already in the 1890s, there had been a dialogue between some
sectors of the Catholic associational world, and the left, with some Christian groups accepting
“the method, the class struggle, and partly also the political realism of historical materialism”
(Bedeschi 1974, p. 74).
The new party proved quite successful in the 1919 and 1921 parliamentary elections, garner-
ing in both cases over 20% of the votes. This period, which followed the First World War, and
the biennio rosso (red biennium) – when Italy was ravaged by mass demonstrations and revolts
and seemed on the verge of a socialist revolution – was marked by much political instability.
This phase culminated in October 1922, with the Fascist March on Rome and the subsequent
appointment of Benito Mussolini as the new prime minister: a situation which quickly ushered
in the creation of an authoritarian right-wing regime that ruled Italy until the Second World
War.

The fascist regime

The attitude of fascism towards religion was complex and changed significantly during the over
two decades of the life of the regime. In the beginning, the fascist movement was marked by
a strong revolutionary orientation, also inspired by Mussolini’s past as a revolutionary socialist
leader, which also included anti-capitalist and anti-clerical stances (in 1910, as a local social-
ist leader in Forlì, he had promoted the approval of a document declaring the practice of
Catholicism incompatible with socialism and forbidding members of the party to take part in
religious ceremonies). Such anti-clerical feelings were shared by most of fascism’s founders and,
more broadly, by other political, cultural and artistic movements close to early fascism, such as
the Arditi movement and futurism (Conti 2011). In the 1920s, however, this orientation was
largely replaced by a more conservative ideological position, which included a more balanced
and nuanced view of religion. This new version of the fascist ideology, in opposition to the
Risorgimento’s focus on the separation between Church and state, identified in Catholicism an
essential tenet of the “universal mission” of Rome, in nationalist terms (Scoppola 1971, p. 35).
One of the consequences of this change was the Patti Lateranensi, a 1929 agreement between the

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Italian state and the Holy See, which implied a mutual recognition between the former and the
latter, and the restitution to the Catholic Church of some privileges, such as the declaration of
Catholicism as the state religion, financial compensation for the annexation of the Papal States,
the institution of compulsory religious education in public schools and the endorsement of the
Church’s position about marriage as a sacrament (Coppa 1995). As a consequence of this, the
Church disavowed the PPI – with Sturzo going into exile to the UK and the US – and sup-
ported (or at least accepted to coexist with) the regime.
Notwithstanding, the relations between the PPI and the Vatican remained tense. This was
because the Church was perceived by the fascists as a competitor for the education of the youth
and a dangerous autonomous centre of power parallel to the regime. This was particularly true
because the Church, after the rise of fascism, had reorganised its civil society movements, with
the creation of Azione Cattolica (Catholic Action – AC): an association, organised by age and sex,
meant to follow the entire life of a person, just like the regime institutions tried to do. Especially
from the early 1930s, when the regime became more explicit in its attempt to monopolise edu-
cation, this organisation became a bone of contention between the fascist regime and the Vatican
(Scoppola 1971, pp. 255–280). Indeed, most of the Democrazia Cristiana (Christian Democracy
– DC) leaders who ruled Italy after the fall of the regime had been raised politically within AC
and the Catholic university students’ associations.
In the meantime, anti-fascist intellectuals were also considering the issue of religion and its
role in social mobilisation (also in the context of the analysis of the development and success of
the regime). In doing so, they were often influenced by the idealistic philosophies of the time,
proposed in Italy by thinkers such as Benedetto Croce and Giovanni Gentile (the latter was
deeply involved in the regime, while the former, with his concept of “religion of freedom”,
became a point of reference for the regime’s opponents) (Croce 1965, pp. 7–40). In this context,
some left-wing and even Marxist intellectuals also started to question the possibility of analysing
reality along purely economic lines. In doing so, they sometimes reconsidered the role of faith
and organised religion. This is particularly the case with one of the main Marxist intellectuals
of the 20th century, Antonio Gramsci, who endured life imprisonment because of his role in
the Partito Comunista Italiano (Italian Communist Party – PCI) and his opposition to fascism. In
the context of his well-known theses on the idea of hegemony and the role of intellectuals, he
also studied very seriously the role of religion (often with a focus on Catholicism in Italy) not
only as a tool for the bourgeoisie’s control of people but also as the fulfilment of a need of the
human spirit. In this framework, his analysis aimed at understanding how communism could
replace religion, not only as a mobilising force but also in terms of beliefs and routines able to
give meaning to the everyday life of the common people. For example, one of his Quaderni dal
carcere (his most important work, written while in jail) is entirely devoted to AC, its history and
its organisation; among other religion-related issues, Gramsci also analysed the process that had
led the Vatican to withdraw its support of the PPI and to strike a bargain with the regime, after
the PPI’s rapprochement to left-wing oppositions and Mussolini’s clerical turn (Portelli 1976,
Gramsci 2014). Of course, this did not imply an acceptance of religion in personal and ideologi-
cal terms; indeed, Gramsci and the other communist and socialist ideologues remained fiercely
atheist in ideological terms, and anti-clerical in the context of the Italian power struggle.
This was not true in the cases of other left-wing activists and ideologues who were active
in the last phases of the fascist regime. In this period, a number of Catholics participated in
the development of the Resistenza (resistance) movement, whose major strands were however
represented by the followers of left-wing ideologies. Among the different groups of regime
opponents, new syntheses between Catholicism and Marxism also developed. The most signifi-
cant of the latter probably was the Movimento dei Cattolici Comunisti (Movement of Communist

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Catholics), created in 1943, which later became the Partito della Sinistra Cristiana (Party of the
Christian Left). Under the leadership of Adriano Ossicini and Franco Rodano, the group par-
ticipated in the armed partisan activity against the regime, and after the fall of fascism, it became
part of the PCI (where, however, this faction was mostly marginalised because of its religiosity,
at least until the 1960s) (Bedeschi 1974, Giammanco 1989). The group’s legacy was however
deeply influential on Italian politics. In the 1970s, Rodano became one of the main advisors
of the PCI leader Enrico Berlinguer and one of the architects of the party’s rapprochement to
the DC party. Ossicini was actively involved in the centre-left governments of the mid-1990s
(Ossicini 1998, Galli 2004, p. 176).

The Republic and the DC hegemony

Although the new republican constitution was a common endeavour of the different strands of
the anti-fascist struggle (including Catholics, socialists, communists and smaller liberal groups),
the new DC party, which clearly won the 1948 parliamentary elections against an alliance of
socialists and communists, became the new hegemonic political actor in Italy. This was partly a
consequence of the inclusion of Italy in the western bloc (which made a rise to power of the
left almost unthinkable), the DC’s role in including democratic institutions previously accept-
ing the fascist regime and the fact that the demise of this latter had left the party “with only
insignificant rivals to the right of the working class parties” (Lipset and Rokkan 1967, p. 39).
As a consequence of this hegemonic role, the DC developed as a microcosm of Italian society,
which included very different groups and ideologies, from right-wing Catholicism to Christian
socialism (Lyon 1967). Some scholars contend that the party did not have a unified national
organisation. Instead, it was a “confederation of factions”, nothing more than “the sum of the
organised power of the factions on the ground” (Baccetti 2007, p. 22).
Particularly at the start of DC rule, we can find in the party a very strong left-wing faction
led by Giuseppe Dossetti, an AC member and professor of law who had been a partisan and a
supporter of the republican cause. With some colleagues (including Amintore Fanfani, one of
the future leaders of the party, and Giorgio La Pira, who later became mayor of Florence), he
proposed a platform strongly inspired by ideals of social justice and the idea that a strengthen-
ing of the state might serve as an antidote against aggressive capitalism. Although he even had
some restraints about Italy’s adhesion to the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation because of his
pacifist vision, these stances were not the result of Marxist influence, but the result of a “totalis-
ing” reading of the social doctrine of the Church (a position that some regarded as “integrist”).
Paradoxically, although some of its positions were close to the ideas of the Marxist left, this fac-
tion was also less supportive of state secularism than other DC groups and was quite sensitive to
the Vatican’s concerns (Malgeri 2005). In the early years of the DC history, Dossetti managed to
become a major player within the party, becoming its vice-secretary and gathering the support
of about one-third of its cadre. Although Dossetti suddenly withdrew from politics to become
a monk in the early 1950s, some of his disciples (also including Aldo Moro, who in the 1960s
and 1970s played a major role in the openings to the left parties) later became influential DC
leaders with their faction, Iniziativa Democratica (Democratic Initiative). In the following decades,
this group, along with a more conventional “progressive” DC faction, La Base (The Base), was a
constant and significant presence in the party (Galli and Facchi 1962, Galli 1993).
As mentioned above, the party was a very complex entity, which also included powerful
conservative and even right-wing factions ill at ease with the dialogue with left-wing parties and
the plans to expand the state’s role in the economy. Between the end of the 1950s and the early
1960s – in a very tense political climate, with many actors afraid of the possibility of a military

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coup – some DC factions even coalesced to try to sabotage the projects to include the Partito
Socialista Italiano (Italian Socialist Party – PSI) in the cabinet, and to rely instead on the votes of
the right-wing Movimento Sociale Italiano (Italian Social Movement – MSI). This project, which
seemed for a while to become a reality in 1960 with the Tambroni cabinet, was however foiled
by the other DC factions, which forced Tambroni to resign (Galli 2004).
Another somewhat progressive influence on the party was instead carried out by the repre-
sentatives of Catholic trade unionism, such as Carlo Donat Cattin. Indeed, the hegemonic role
of the party in the Italian social and political systems was also made possible by the existence
of a wide associational fabric including trade unions, civic and professional associations, entre-
preneurial activities and self-help organisations that cooperated with the DC (La Palombara
1964). This system, associated with a “white” political culture, was particularly entrenched in
the north-eastern and southern regions of Italy (this latter however marked by underdevelop-
ment and a more family-related culture); while in large areas of central Italy and the developing
northern industrial cities, a “red” political culture predominated, based on the PCI (Almond and
Verba 1963, Diamanti 2009). This quasi-bipolar system, marked however by the impossibility
of a change of government as a consequence of Italy’s international positioning, prompted the
definition of Italy as a case of “imperfect bipartitism” (Galli 1966). An energetic scholarly debate
also developed around the inclusion of the country in the category of polarised pluralist party
systems (according to Sartori’s typology), criticised by some because of the largely constructive
role played by the PCI in its consociational relation with the DC (Sartori 1976, Farneti 1993).
A discussion also developed – especially after a partial downsizing of the DC since the 1960s
and the need to include the socialists in the government – around the fact that the party really
was “the” Italian Catholic party. Some scholars indeed maintained that the political unity of
Italian Catholics had indeed always been a “myth” (Pace 1995). It is true however that until the
1980s, no significant Italian party except the DC displayed an open Catholic identity. The only
partial exception was the MSI, a small right-wing party that associated a neo-fascist identity
with conservative Catholicism (although the party was not alien from neo-pagan and even anti-
clerical positions inspired by the early ideology of the fascist movement and other strands of
contemporary radical right thought) (Ignazi 1994, 2018).
In the meantime, the Catholic Church and the Catholic world were also undergoing a sig-
nificant process of renewal and change, which increased with the papacy of John XXIII (1958–
1963), who highlighted the role of the service of the Church, seemed to be open to the pacifist
movement and softened the Church’s attitude towards communism, opening the possibility of
a dialogue. In 1962, he summoned the Second Vatican Council (1962–1965), which paved the
way for a new role of the laity and religious movements within the Church, and innovated the
Church’s attitude towards religious liberty and scientific research. Notwithstanding, the Council
also showed a Church deeply divided between its conservative and integrist branches and its
progressive ones, which made it very difficult to reach a compromise on several issues. The leg-
acy of the Council and the interpretation of the documents it produced was therefore also dis-
puted, with conservatives considering them only as general and not binding suggestions (Garelli
et al. 2003, Faggioli 2012, 2016). In the following years, this did not prevent the development
of an increasing pluralism within the Church, which was mainly brought about by a new active
role of the Church in society and the development of new laity-based Catholic movements and
civil society associations. Within this associational world, a previously unknown political plural-
ism was also observable, with the development since the late 1960s of left-wing groups inspired
by the Liberation Theology thought, sometimes in open conflict with the Church hierarchies
(Tosi and Vitale 2009), and, on the opposite side, of conservative movements such as Opus Dei
and Comunione e Liberazione (Communion and Liberation – CL).This latter, particularly, became

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well entrenched in the industrialised areas of northern Italy and developed close connections
with the entrepreneurial and political worlds, becoming a powerful faction within the DC
(Giorgi and Polizzi 2015).
The party, in the meantime, had partially downsized, and in the 1963 parliamentary elec-
tions, it only garnered 38% of the votes (a considerable loss in comparison with ten years
before, when the party had nearly achieved a majority of the suffrage). The 1960s were there-
fore marked by the permanent inclusion of the PSI in government, which inaugurated the
“centrosinistra” (centre-left) era. This new coalition was initially driven by a strongly reformist
agenda, which led in a few years to the nationalisation of electricity production, the crea-
tion of compulsory middle school for boys and girls up to 14 years and the institution of
the regions (dictated by the constitution but never implemented before). However, it soon
became a victim of its internal divisions and quickly turned into a mainly tactical alliance. In
the meantime, the DC also had to face the new popularity of left-wing ideas as a consequence
of the 1968 movements and the participation in them of many young Catholics. The need to
prop up the party’s rule and to face a harsh season of right-wing and left-wing violence even
led, in the mid-1970s, to an unofficial co-optation of the PCI into the government (which
was engineered on the DC side by Moro and on the PCI side by Rodano, who had become
one of the main advisors to the new party secretary, Enrico Berlinguer), which became known
as compromesso storico (historical compromise). In 1978, however, Moro’s assassination, carried
out by the left-wing terrorist group Brigate Rosse (Red Brigades), abruptly put an end to this
experience.
That year proved a crucial turning point for the history of relations between politics and reli-
gion in Italy, and also for another major event: the death of Pope Paul VI (1963–1978) and the
election to the Holy See of Cardinal Wojtyla, John Paul II, born in Poland and fiercely hostile
to communism. His figure indeed proved central to the end of the honeymoon between the
DC and the PCI and to the promotion of conservative values among Catholics. He also played
an innovative role within the Church by further promoting the role of laity-based movements,
which flourished during his papacy: hence the nickname “Pope of the movements” commonly
associated with Wojtyla (Faggioli 2016).
In the meantime, secularisation progressed in the country, as also shown by landmark legisla-
tion such as the legalisation of divorce (1970) and abortion (1978): both upheld by two very
controversial referenda in 1974 and 1981. Moreover, although the issue of the recognition of
LGBT+ identities and rights was still taboo, openly gay intellectuals, such as Pierpaolo Pasolini,
were now part of the public discussion.The referendum on abortion, promoted by the Catholic
Movimento per la Vita (Movement for Life), proved a particularly challenging test for Italy’s secu-
larism, with a livelier debate at the civil society level than in the political system. Indeed, the
small but very combative Partito Radicale (Radical Party – PR) was almost alone in defending the
new legislation on abortion, while most political forces opposed it or (as also in the case of the
PCI) showed a lukewarm stance. Italy was also becoming more plural in religious terms (a trend
which increased in the 1990s with a flow of immigrants from Muslim-majority countries, par-
ticularly Morocco). This was also mirrored by politics, with the appointment of prime ministers
not belonging to the DC: the republican Spadolini and the socialist Craxi.This latter also signed
in 1984 a revision (Concordato) of the 1929 agreement (Patti Lateranensi) between the Vatican
and the fascist regime: among other provisions, the new document confirmed the abolition of
Catholicism as the state religion (already envisaged by the 1948 Constitution), made religious
teaching in public schools optional and made possible intese (agreements) between the state and
the non-Catholic faiths; in the same year, the first intesa was signed with the Waldensians (Giorgi
2018).

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The 1990s upheaval

The relation between religion and politics in Italy abruptly changed in the early 1990s, when
most of the Italian political ruling class was swept away by a widespread political scandal devel-
oped around bribery allegations, commonly known as Tangentopoli, and by the following popu-
lar protests. The DC was particularly involved in this turmoil, also considering that one of its
historical leaders, Giulio Andreotti, was also taken to trial because of alleged connections with
Sicily’s mafia. Although the party still got a plurality of the votes in the parliamentary elections
in April 1992 (with almost 30% of the votes), in the following months, it disintegrated. In this
context, the effects of the scandals added to the changes created by the fall of the Soviet Union,
which had prompted, since 1989, a reform of the PCI, which had turned into a centre-left
reformist party, the Partito Democratico della Sinistra (Democratic Party of the Left – PDS), and
was no longer considered by many as unsuitable to govern. Moreover, a referendum held in
1993 changed the electoral law into a quasi-majority one, which made the DC’s occupation
of the centre of the political system much more difficult, despite the party’s strenuous efforts
(Giorgi 2013).
It was so that in January 1994, the DC officially ceased to exist and adopted the name of the
PPI, after Don Sturzo’s pre-fascist Catholic party). In the meantime, however, some conserva-
tive factions of the party left it to form the Centro Cristiano Democratico (Christian Democratic
Centre – CCD), allied with the centre-right, while some progressive ones became part of the
PDS (Ignazi 2018). The most striking consequence of the demise of the single Catholic party
was however the fact that now many other political parties and political entrepreneurs (includ-
ing the post-Communist centre-left, which mostly abandoned its previous anti-clerical stances)
competed to win the votes of Catholics. Some of these, especially in the south, were won
over by the right, where the MSI had also started a process of revision, changing its name into
Alleanza Nazionale (National Alliance – AN). The main recipients of the haemorrhage of votes
from the DC were however two new parties: the Lega Nord (Northern League – LN) and Forza
Italia (Go Italy – FI).
The former was created in 1991 as a federation of northern Italian regionalist parties born in
the late 1970s and the 1980s to protest against Rome’s centralism and immigration from south-
ern Italy (Biorcio 1999). In some regions, particularly Veneto, where a “white” political culture
traditionally predominated (Diamanti 2009), they had however started to erode the DC power
base, particularly among the provincial middle class. After Tangentopoli, this trend escalated, with
the LN gaining more than 8% of the votes in both the 1992 and 1994 elections (which, how-
ever, in the second case, turned into almost one-fifth of the total seats, as a consequence of the
new electoral law), and becoming the largest party in several northern provinces.
The relation between the LN ideology and religion is a complex matter, because on the one
hand, the party strongly relied on a middle class provincial electoral basin, marked by a strong
Catholic conservatism, ill at ease with the post-Council Catholic Church (a feeling apparently
shared by some of the party leaders, as shown, for example, by the participation in 1995 of the
then president of the Chamber of Deputies, Irene Pivetti, to an atonement ritual against the
construction of a great mosque in the city of Rome) (Longo 1995). It must also be observed
that the main ideologue of the early LN, the political scientist Gianfranco Miglio, was also very
close to conservative Catholic circles. On the other hand, however, the party leadership also
showed at times contempt towards the Vatican (seen as part of “Rome’s elite”) and adopted
neo-pagan rituals and symbols (including the LN symbol itself, the “Sun of the Alps”) to try to
forge a distinctive northern Italian identity in opposition to the national state (Bertezzolo 2011,
Guolo 2011).

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As for FI, it was the creation of the media tycoon Silvio Berlusconi, who built his organisa-
tion on the structure and the cadre of his enterprises; hence the label “partito-azienda” (company
party) (Poli 2001) often used by scholars in reference to the early phases of the party. Berlusconi
put forward a pro-free-trade agenda, with references to the Catholic tradition, and was fiercely
opposed to the post-communist right. This was crucial to intercept part of the Catholic vote,
both in the developed northern regions (where it allied with the LN) and the south (where it
allied with AN). In this new centre-right coalition (which managed to win the 1994 and the
2001 elections), Catholic movements also played a significant role.This is particularly the case of
the conservative CL movement, very entrenched in the Lombardy entrepreneurial world, which
in 1995 managed to get its leader, Roberto Formigoni, elected as the region’s president (a post
he occupied for 18 years) (Giorgi and Polizzi 2015).The Catholic Church, facing this new situ-
ation, also started to play a more active role in the public sphere and public debates, especially
after the election of Camillo Ruini as president of the Conferenza Episcopale Italiana (Italian
Episcopal Conference – CEI, the organisation of the Italian bishops). Ruini supported the idea
that the Church should play an active role in national culture and public debates, and particu-
larly in the discussions on rights. Under his leadership, the Italian Catholic Church carried out
the so-called Cultural Project, which precisely aimed at widening the role of Catholicism and
the Church at the social level (Magister 2001, Damilano 2006, Ceccarini 2009). Ruini even did
not refrain from active lobbying on decision-makers when sensitive issues were at stake – as in
the case of the mid-2000s debate on the legalisation of same-sex unions (Ozzano 2015, Ozzano
and Giorgi 2016).

Religion-related debates in the 2000s

Both because of the changes in the role of religion in the public sphere engendered by the
renewal of the Italian political system and the consequences of the 9/11 attacks and the “war
on terror”, the 2000s were marked by a number of debates related to religion (or, simply, to
controversial issues framed in religious terms by relevant actors). Some of the discussions were
related to bioethics, with debates on the beginning of life (particularly in relation to the con-
troversial law, 40/2004, which put very serious limitations on both assisted procreation and
stem cell research) and the end of life (with very lively discussions on euthanasia focused on the
cases of Luana Englaro and Piergiorgio Welby); morality and sexuality (particularly in relation
to the attempts to legalise same-sex unions) and the presence of religious symbols in the public
sphere (about the presence of the crucifix in public schools and other public institutions, and
the inclusion of a reference to the Christian roots of Europe in the preamble to the draft EU
Constitution) (Ozzano and Giorgi 2013, 2016, Turina 2013, Ozzano 2015).
In many cases, however, the debates were related to Islam, the multicultural society and secu-
rity, face to face with the jihadist attacks in the West. As mentioned above, from the late 1990s,
the LN mostly dropped its rhetoric against southern Italian immigrants, vigorously opposing
growing immigration from abroad, especially when they involved Muslims. In this decade, the
party led the entire centre-right coalition in a fully-fledged crusade against new immigration
flows, mosques, the headscarf and Islamic ceremonies, such as ritual slaughtering. Alongside
right-wing politicians, a number of intellectuals were also at the forefront of this debate. Among
the most prominent was Magdi Allam, an Egyptian-born journalist who became increasingly
critical towards Islam and eventually converted to Catholicism, and Oriana Fallaci, a well-
known writer and journalist, who after 9/11 wrote a series of pamphlets against Islam, and even
provocatively threatened to blow up a mosque under construction near Florence (Talbot 2006,
Fallaci 2009, Allam 2010, Ozzano and Giorgi 2016).

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At the ideological level, the most striking feature regarding religion was the emergence of
two different political discourses based on Catholicism. On the one hand, the official position
of the Catholic Church, followed by progressive and centrist Catholic politicians, maintained
cautious support for a multicultural idea of society and the welcoming of Muslim migrants; on
the other hand, the LN and many anti-Muslim ideologues started instead to use Catholicism as
a marker for Italian/European/Western identity in the context of right-wing populist positions
strongly opposing multiculturalism and the presence of Muslims, regarded as a threat to Europe’s
identity and security. In this context, the LN positions on Islam and those on other controver-
sial issues, such as LGBT+ rights, were just different faces of the same ideological perspective,
focused on an idealised local community marked by a white, Christian and heterosexual identity,
and rejecting every sort of diversity (McDonnell 2016, Ozzano 2016).
As shown above, since the early 1990s, the post-communist centre-left had mostly dropped
its previous anti-religious discourses, and its representatives had accepted the striking of alliances
with Catholic parties. In the 2000s, this trend progressed, first with the creation of La Margherita
(the daisy), a new party with a predominant progressive Catholic identity, which also included
however liberal and socialist factions: the party proved rather successful, garnering 14.5% of
the votes in the 2001 elections (when the party leader, the former mayor of Rome Francesco
Rutelli was also the centre-left coalition leader). In the following years, however, the influence
of former Prime Minister Romano Prodi, a progressive Catholic with a long career as a state
bureaucrat, proved crucial in leading the whole centre-left coalition towards the creation of a
single, wide, reformist party. This process culminated in October 2007 with the creation of the
Partito Democratico (Democratic Party – PD), a party with a complex identity, which included
Catholic, post-communist and other types of identities and factions. In the same period, in the
centre-right, Berlusconi also managed to impose a merger between FI and AN, creating the
Popolo della Libertà (People of Freedom – PDL), a situation that seemed to suggest for a while
that Italy was going to become a two-party system. Quite significantly, Catholics deployed
powerful factions in both parties. This might also help explain both why religion- and identity-
related debates were so prominent in that decade and the weakness in some of these debates of
the centre-left coalition (where religion-related issues were often a wedge between Catholics
and post-communists), which, for example, prevented the coalition from approving a law legalis-
ing same-sex unions in the mid-2000s (Baccetti 2007, Ozzano and Giorgi 2016, Ignazi 2018).

The rise of populism

Between the late 2000s and the early 2010s, Italian politics was again significantly changed by the
effects of the global economic crisis, which prompted the rise to prominence of populist orien-
tations. In this context, in the early 2010s, the new Movimento Cinquestelle (Five Star Movement
– M5S), a grassroots-based party with an unclear position on the left-right continuum, was
particularly successful. Although this party was not significantly concerned about religion- and
identity-related issues, this was not true for the LN, which went on with its process of transfor-
mation into a fully-fledged right-wing nationalist and populist party, which culminated in 2013
with the rise of Matteo Salvini to the leadership of the party. Salvini decided to drop the north-
ern Italian roots of the LN (the name of the party also became simply “Lega”) and to adopt a
nationalist rhetoric focusing on Christian conservatism and opposition to immigration. In times
of economic crisis and the growing role of social media, Salvini’s rhetoric proved immensely
popular, making the Lega the largest party at the end of the decade, with a peak of almost 35% of
the votes in the 2019 EU parliament elections (Passarelli and Tuorto 2018, Ozzano 2019, 2020).
The Lega’s ideology, often referred to as sovranista (someone following the ideology of sover-

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eignty), now focused on Italian national identity, opposed immigration and the European Union
(with an oscillation between hard and soft Euro-sceptic positions) and proposed pro-free-trade
economic positions, mitigated however by “Chauvinist welfare” recipes. Quite interestingly, sim-
ilar political positions were shared by another right-wing party, Fratelli d’Italia (Brothers of Italy
– FdI), which came from a very different political tradition, as the heir of the post-fascist MSI
and AN. Although FdI was led by a woman, Giorgia Meloni, who partly mirrored the French
populist leader Marine Le Pen in her re-evaluation of the role of women in the public sphere,
FdI was even more aggressive than Salvini’s Lega on some morality politics issues, for example, by
consistently supporting a pro-life platform in relation to abortion (Nadeau 2018).
As for Salvini (although he openly supported conservative Christian initiatives such as the
World Congress of Families, held in Verona in March 2019), he preferred to focus mainly on
immigration. In this context, as already mentioned, religion and religious symbols represented
a crucial tenet of the Western/Italian identity affirmed by the party. During and after the cam-
paigns for the 2018 parliamentary elections and the 2019 EU parliament elections, the Lega
leader also stood out for his use of religious symbols, such as the Gospel and the crucifix, and
open religious references, during political rallies and even parliamentary debates. This choice
was harshly rebuked not only by many political opponents but also by the Vatican itself (Molle
2019, Ozzano 2019).

Concluding remarks
To sum up, the role of religion in Italian politics and political ideologies has undergone signifi-
cant changes in the past two centuries. Particularly, since World War II, it is possible to observe
two parallel processes: on the one hand, a significant secularisation of society, particularly in
terms of the loss of importance of religion in people’s daily lives and a pluralisation of the Italian
religious landscape; on the other hand, the Catholic Church is still regarded as an authoritative
institution by many Italians, and Catholic factions enjoy leverage in nearly all political parties
and coalitions.This implies the decline of religion as a political ideology in many different ways:
from right-wing populism to conservatism, to liberalism, to progressivism. Particularly, in today’s
Italy, we witness the clash of two religion-based narratives: one inclusionary, centred around
Pope Francis and progressive and centrist Catholic groups; the other, exclusionary, if not openly
xenophobic, centred around the Lega and some conservative and right-wing Catholic associa-
tions and groups.

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 18
A WORLD AWAKENING
American evangelicalism and late-war order

Robert J. Joustra

A version of this chapter was presented at the Henry Symposium on Religion and Politics in April
2019, as part of a Council for Christian Colleges and Universities/Calvin University funded collabo-
rative project with Dennis Hoover and Kevin den Dulk titled “Populists or Internationalists?” A ver-
sion was also published later in a special issue of The Review of Faith & International Affairs,
Taylor and Francis (Robert J. Joustra (2019) A Just and Durable Peace? American Evangelicals and
the Quest for Peace after WWII, The Review of Faith & International Affairs, 17:3, 68-79, DOI:
10.1080/15570274.2019.1644011).

Introduction
Far from only isolationists, the late- and post-war period (1942–1949) saw a surge in evangelical
internationalism whose effect on what we would come to call global peace and order, the very
foundation of many international organizations like the United Nations, has been enduring.The
question of that evangelical perspective and influence is the subject of this chapter. I argue that
this perspective was not always coherent and ran the gambit of pacifism, isolationism, activism,
humanitarianism, and military adventurism (Noll, Bebbington, and Marsden, 2019). If today’s
sociologists and political scientists struggle with the integrity and impact of evangelicalism on
political questions, this is for good reason (Kidd, 2019): it has long been a thin alliance of thicker
political-theological traditions, which have disagreed, and continue to disagree, on a wide range
of prudential, political questions.
I show this, first, by looking at the rise of neo-evangelicalism in the late- and post-war period,
an alliance that had only barely begun to emerge. The National Association of Evangelicals
(NAE) was founded during the war (1942), in part in counterpoint to, but still with significant
overlap with, the Federal Council of Churches (FCC). But even in this context, it is diffi-
cult to clearly separate evangelical from non-evangelical. Second, I investigate evangelicalism in
what Heather Warren calls some key Theologians of a New World Order, including such mainline/
evangelical hybrids as Reinhold Niebuhr and neo-Orthodoxy. Third, I argue that John Foster
Dulles and the FCC should count as at least a part of evangelicalism, a Council now long con-
sidered mainline, but borrowing, enlisting, and incorporating voices and perspectives that can-
not simply be expunged from the evangelical record. Finally, I look at conservative evangelical
anti-globalism in the late- and post-war period. In the process, I describe not merely the split

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between the newly minted NAE and FCC but also the divisions within those divisions (that is,
dispensational theology versus presuppositional apologetics),1 informing the final argument that
evangelicalism has always been a highly politically pluralistic movement.The rationale I offer for
this, in part in the opening but most persuasively I hope in the conclusion, is that evangelicalism
is too thin of a theological reed to sustain thick social and political theories in the world, and as
such, we should expect diversity from what is an essentially a loose alliance of deeper, sometimes
competing, often disagreeing, Christian-religious traditions.

What was evangelicalism in the late-war order?

Evangelicalism, and its many definitions, is an industry unto itself (Miller, 2020; Joustra, 2019),
but this does not mean that there is no history or no meaning to the term (Noll, Bebbington,
and Marsden, 2019). While it is true that evangelicalism is diffuse, there is no headquarters or
specific leadership and underneath its umbrella many subgroups flourish, I contend there are
several ways to capture the term definitionally.
The first, historical, draws us back to Europe in the late 1700s, where a decentralized move-
ment within Protestantism emerged around the revivals of such figures as John Wesley and
George Whitefield. These were often trans-denominational revivals, at once a factor of the per-
sonalities that drove the revivals (a not uncommon feature of evangelicalism), and the broad,
ecumenical spirit which tried to recapture certain essentials of the Christian faith.
George Marsden argues that one of the ways to understand this new expression of the
Christian faith is through the lens of “spiritual free enterprise” (Marsden, 2015). These move-
ments arose at the same time as market economies became dominant and favored the inno-
vations of charismatic personalities, enterprising leaders, and more diffuse – less hierarchal
– competitive, spiritual experiences. Mark Noll argues in The New Shape of World Christianity
that these traits of early evangelicalism also explain, in part, its effectiveness in the emerging
market economies of the developing world (Noll, 2009).
Aside from historical and sociological forces, the theological tether, if it can be called such,
that is often invoked is David Bebbington’s “quadrilateral,” include biblicism, activism, con-
versionism, and crucicentrism (Bebbington, 1989).2 The four-part emphasis does not preclude
other Christian traditions that might have each of these four elements, but it is the special
emphasis on each of these four parts that give evangelicalism its particular identity: a priority on
Scripture as the inspired and authoritative Word of God, the atoning work of Jesus Christ as
central to sinner’s salvation, the need for personal conversion to that good news, and finally the
call to spread that news, in many forms.
Yet, as interesting as some of these signposts are, it remains a little unclear how such a set of
identifying markers, historical, sociological, theological, would make for a meaningfully coher-
ent approach to global peace and order in the post-war world. Indeed, why and how would
we draw lines between evangelical activism and mainline outlooks and activism in that period?
At least part of the answer is that we would not, or at least, we would draw less dramatic lines
between what we today would call evangelical and mainline, and more dramatic lines between
what in the 1940s would have been the main point of debate and distinction: fundamental-
ism and modernism. The founding of the Fuller Theological Seminary in 1947 is illustrative
here, whose history and project Marsden tells with the simple title, Reforming Fundamentalism
(Marsden, 1987).
Fuller’s founding president, Harold J. Ockenga, saw his task as recovering an evangelical
tradition that “had been ruined by the rise of modernist or liberal theologies” at work in
America’s mainline churches and seminaries (Marsden, 2015). Ockenga himself was a mainline

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Presbyterian animated by a need to combat modernism but suspicious of separating evangeli-

calism from the broader American mainstream, including its major denominations. He him-
self founded the NAE in 1942, along with a movement Marsden describes as “evangelically
oriented anti-modernists who typically called themselves fundamentalists” (Marsden, 2015).
Ockenga used the term “new evangelicals” for the movement associated with the NAE and
Fuller, and in part because of the later work of Billy Graham, the term took on new life.
Ockenga’s opening convocation address at Fuller Seminary in 1947 on “The Challenge to the
Christian Culture in the West” laid out an ambitious project of intellectually rebuilding this
tradition.
Charles Fuller, the other founder of Fuller, represented another, less academic strand.Though
Fuller had great respect for college education, left to himself, argues Marsden, it is likely that he
would have simply founded another Bible institute, like Moody or Biola,3 not a major seminary.
His was a tradition marked more by George Whitefield and Dwight L. Moody, more entrepre-
neurial in nature, and subject to broader populist rather than academic tendencies (Marsden,
2015).
In these two men of extraordinary industry, we have at least two meaningfully related but
distinguishable strands, what Dennis Hoover calls a more cosmopolitan internationalism and
a more rooted populism (Hoover, 2009). While it would be inappropriate to separate them
completely, it is appropriate to note, amongst these early prominent post-war evangelicals,
their different emphases in understanding their traditions. Neither implied a strict separation
between mainline and evangelical. Indeed, Ockenga saw as the challenge of his day not mainline
Christianity, but rather modernism,4 for which he worked to develop a new evangelicalism to
restore the mainline churches (see also Henry, 2019). Even the NAE was less a project of sepa-
ration, in Ockenga’s mind, and more a project of restoration of what evangelicalism should be.
The accidental schismatic attempting of a project of internal reform is also, perhaps, a broader
Protestant theme (Payton, 2010; Gregory, 2012).
How, then, to think about evangelicalism in this period and its influence on late- and post-
war order? There are, I suggest, three main ways to approach this issue.
First, in the moment under study, evangelicalism and the new evangelicalism were emerg-
ing against modernism within the mainline, not over, against, and in separation with mainline
Christianity. Professed “evangelical” Christians found themselves in mainline churches, just as
professed evangelical denominations found themselves part of what would perhaps only later
come to be seen as mainline movements. To argue, then, that there were evangelicals, on the
one hand, and mainline Christians on the other, is to commit a kind of historical (and pos-
sible contemporary) anachronism: those categories simply did not exist at that time in the way
they do today. At least one influential evangelical, that is, the founder of the NAE, would not
have considered such a separation consistent with his position. When we talk about “evangeli-
cal” voices, then we must not overlook voices that were in the mainline, since the boundaries
between evangelical and mainline did not drive between institutions in the post-war period in
the way in which some assume they do today.
Second, much diversity can be noted inside even the newer evangelicalism of the Fuller
Theological Seminary. Both Fuller and Ockenga offer compatible but nonetheless meaningfully
different emphases on the kind of activism and institutions that were most needed. Ockenga
called for higher-level intellectual and cultural engagement with the trends of the day, Fuller for
the activist “gap-men” between laity and clergy, in activist service of the church. Fuller Seminary
itself is testimony that such visions do overlap in a significant way, but they are not identical, and
we can expect such differences in approach to be larger still when not addressing the focus of a
seminary but global peace and order.

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Finally, we should perhaps expect this diversity. Ockenga was unapologetically reformed/
Calvinist, and Fuller was a Baptist, and neither was anxious to abandon their specific, “thick”
theological traditions in favour of a “thinner” evangelical identity. “A theology that only features
the shared evangelical convictions,” in the words of another Fuller president, Richard Mouw,
“leaves a movement that can easily be blown about by every wind of doctrine” (Mouw 2015,
51; see also 2016, 2019). Evangelicalism needs the diversity of its thick theological traditions
underneath its thin umbrella commitments, and such thickness is where issues of theological
ethics and especially political ethics are worked out. Evangelicalism simply does not have the
political and philosophical capacity to coherently argue for one perspective regarding political,
much less global, order.
In the next section, we will review what such diversity looked like in practice in the post-war
period, focusing on both modernism and activism.

Theologians of a new world order: the neo-orthodox turn

The work of Reinhold Niebuhr is an example of the lack of agreement in evangelical defini-
tions in the post-war world. Heather Warren writes that “contrary to the charges of funda-
mentalists and evangelicals,” Niebuhr was not, in fact, “simply liberal, either theologically or
politically” (Warren, 1997, 4). Nor, Preston comments, in facing criticism from that opposite
liberal corner, was he “afraid of the Way of Jesus,” advancing only “apostasy, brazen and shame-
less” (Preston, 2012, 303).
It is true that Niebuhr represented and advanced a theological approach that fell afoul of
both modernism and liberalism, and, to a degree, evangelicalism (certainly fundamentalism).
Niebuhr’s political revisions came following theological ones, developed by European theologi-
ans like Karl Barth and Emil Brunner, after World War I. Such views were sharply critical of lib-
eralism’s belief in human progress and the Social Gospel that emerged. Niebuhr argued against
the Social Gospelers, that it was not enough to repair the systems and institutions of society.The
problem lay deeper in the human heart.
This theology made Reinhold Niebuhr an object of contempt among his formerly fellow
modernist Protestants. The focus of their anger came because of his change of mind, as many
did, on the doctrine of internationalist pacifism. One former student of Reinhold Niebuhr
complained that he had let his “basic point of view justify [him] in taking unchristian positions”
and doubted his views were “even Christian” (Preston 2012, 303). The Rev. Albert Edward Day
of the First Methodist Church Pasadena, on learning of the launch of Christianity and Crisis,
promptly wrote a check for $25 to its liberal rival, Christian Century.
Though vilified by liberal pacifists, it is still hard to make Reinhold Niebuhr fit into an
evangelical box. Niebuhr remained committed to empirical, scientific inquiry (against Biblical
inerrancy), to ecumenical and inter-faith cooperation, and he never broke with the FCC, evi-
denced by the influence he was able to exert upon its efforts for a “Just and Durable Peace.” He
remained a member of the Fellowship of Socialist Christians and was pro-labor and pro-civil
rights (Preston, 2012, 304). He was, in many theological and social respects, a modern man.
But his Augustinian recovery of sin and its social and political effects quickly put him out of
step with the modern persons with whom he had previously enjoyed close, liberal fellowship.
His first full attack on liberalism was in Does Civilization Need Religion? (1927). He charged the
liberal tradition with moral complacency and sentimental individualism, arguing such religion
was “salt that has lost its savor” (Warren, 1997, 43). For the sake of civilization in general, religion
needed to confront, not accommodate modern culture. The FCC named that book one of the
best of the year.

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When Reinhold Niebuhr felt that the mainline Christian Century no longer offered a mean-
ingful enough forum for non-liberals, he participated in launching Christianity and Crisis. Its
inaugural issue came out in February 1941 and focused on how the crisis affected the “whole
social order,” calling for new, remedial post-war arrangements. The third editorial in the issue
focused on “The World After the War,” laying the foundation for five “great problems” that
needed addressing, including tempering sovereignty to resolve international issues (Niebuhr
1941, 4–6; Warren, 1997, 97).
Niebuhr’s significance is in part because of how this neo-orthodox theology influenced oth-
ers, especially the FCC and its then-head John Foster Dulles. In February 1940, Dulles echoed
the concerns of Niebuhr in his address (“The Churches and the International Situation”) at
the Federal Council conference, arguing against absolute state sovereignty, and for a new inter-
national political system, including novel international cooperation on currency and free trade
arrangements (Warren, 1997, 99). Reinhold Niebuhr’s pivot away from pacifism was therefore
not unlike that of John Foster Dulles. Dulles’ preliminary thoughts would be captured more
robustly still in the “Commission to Study the Bases of a Just and Durable Peace” of the FCC
(1943).

A just and durable peace?

The FCC,5 the main Protestant body of advocacy in the early twentieth century, and an ecu-
menical association of thirty-two denominations (including evangelical ones), had fought for
years the drift towards America’s involvement in the Second World War. Much of its member-
ship had a hybrid pacifist and isolationist political theology, one which was seriously critical of
the force of arms and more critical still of adventurism in European wars. The effect of Pearl
Harbor, therefore, was salutary.
By 1942 the FCC had organized a petition to support the war signed by nearly a hundred
of the nation’s leading Protestant figures, and a year later, even declared that peace could only
come through total military victory (Preston, 2012, 368). The Catholic hierarchy in America,
initially quite hesitant about the war, followed suit. It seemed, for a time, that Christian America
had reached a détente on the question of internationalism and war.
But all was not quiescent in Christian America as it may seem. Indeed, writes Andrew
Preston (2012, 373),

The war should have been a time of unbridled, triumphalist nationalism. Given that
the United States achieved victory on two fronts on two separate continents a world
apart, all without suffering any physical damage itself, and given how wealthy the
nation emerged after fifteen years of war and Depression, it would not have been a sur-
prise had Americans treated world events as a total vindication of their way of life. And
of course, many if not most Americans felt exactly this way, and celebrated accordingly.
But many others did not, and most of those who questioned that the war provided
confirmation of America’s goodness or disagreed that it had come at a worthwhile cost
were religious Americans. Religious belief is often a source of dogmatic moral cer-
tainty, but it can also cause profound doubt and self-reflection, even among the most
devoted.This seems to have been the case during World War II, for a sizable number of
religious Americans did not support the war.

Aside from the war, several issues stood out as troublesome to American Christians: the draft,
the Allied strategy of total war and unconditional surrender, Japanese internment, and the use

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of atomic weapons (Preston, 2012, 376). Atomic weapons, and nuclear disarmament generally,
quickly became a celebrated cause of liberal Protestants in America. “The greatest concentration
of critical comment on the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings,” writes Paul Boyer, “came from
the churches” (Boyer, 1985, 200). In fact, writes Preston (2012, 379),“for many of them the war’s
culmination in a mushroom cloud reignited their drive for world peace.”
The shift to an apocalyptic, atomic-weapons-informed politics was one that fueled more,
rather than less, Biblical reflection. For evangelical fundamentalists like Carl McIntire, the atomic
bomb “makes seem more real the Biblical statements of the earth’s destruction” (McIntire, 2008,
132). Fortune magazine predicted that the bomb would cause a “religious awakening” and a
“reaffirmation of Christian values” across America (Boyer, 1985, 212).
So, in a sense, the geopolitical terrain also shifted the religious-political terrain.
It was within this moment in history that the FCC advanced its ecumenical agenda of a
communion of nations with striking, even startling, success. This American-led Council was in
fact so successful that its leader reported with characteristic flourish and a little exaggeration
that, “If it were not for the churches of this country, there probably would not be a United
Nations today” (Preston, 2012, 408). Whole segments of the FCC’s report found their way
into the consultation at Dumbarton Oaks (1944) and finally into the San Francisco conference
(1945), at which the United Nations Charter was adopted (Erdmann, 2005).
That leader was appointed in 1940 when the FCC established the Commission on a Just
and Durable Peace. This was yet another Presbyterian, John Foster Dulles. Like Woodrow
Wilson, Dulles grew up as the son of a Presbyterian minister. Like Wilson, Dulles experienced
the Presbyterian culture as a young undergraduate at Princeton, where, in fact, Wilson was
president during his time (see Thompson, 2015). Dulles chose international law, arguing,
“I could make a greater contribution as a Christian lawyer and layman than I would as a
Christian minister” (Preston, 2012, 385). His foreign policy credentials certainly helped. His
grandfather and his uncle had both been secretaries of state, and through their connections,
the young Dulles attended both the Second Hague Peace Conference and the Paris Peace
Conference itself.
So, when Dulles addressed the Universal Christian Council for Life and Work Conference
in Oxford in 1937, he was ready to make a passionate legal, not merely religious case, for the
ending of war. The solution, he argued, was not merely to outlaw war by “mere declaration”
but to provide other, more productive outlets for human energy (Preston, 2012, 387). He called
for the dismantling of inviolable sovereignty (just as Reinhold Niebuhr did in 1940). He called
for a federal world model. He called, in short, for the resurrection of a powerful League of
Nations. In every respect, writes Preston (2012, 387), his worldview was that of an “ecumenical
­internationalist.”
Dulles put his Christian faith at the center of this internationalism. If such peace was to be
“just and durable,” he argued, it would also have to be Christian, or at least based on Biblical
principles and could be applied more broadly (Preston, 2012, 388). He argued that international
order without Christian ethics would lack a moral foundation. This was the substance of his
argument against fascist Italy, Nazi Germany, and the Soviet Union (Dulles, 1940).
Like much of Christian America, Dulles was not a pacifist, yet he had serious doubts about
the war until the attack on Pearl Harbor. But while that attack may have encouraged Dulles’
support for the US entering the war in 1941, the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki ended
that support. War, as the atomic age made plainly clear, had become so total and so destructive
that it could no longer be tolerated.
Under Dulles, the FCC’s main goal was to arouse Christians to their responsibility for world
peace (Erdmann, 2005).This entailed drawing up an “ethical, peaceful world order that was both

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workable and palatable to most Americans” (Preston, 2012, 390). The audacity of a religious
group drawing up this kind of candid social and political framework is almost unintelligible to
the contemporary mind, but churches did it.The FCC’s Commission to Study the Bases of a Just
and Durable Peace met in New York in March of 1941, and a week after had printed 450,000
copies of a handbook.
When Roosevelt and Churchill published the Atlantic Charter in August of 1941, with its
list of eight common principles, Dulles complained that it was both “tentative and incomplete”
(Preston, 2012, 391). Challenged to provide a plan of greater depth and specificity, he did so.
The FCC launched a major book at the Rockefeller Center’s RCA Building in March 1943:
Six Pillars of Peace, which, in Dulles’ estimation, captured essential elements of Christian inter-
nationalism. These were:

1. An international organization, which makes all further principles possible;

2. Economic justice through coordinating and limiting the domestic laws of states;
3. Political reform to allow permanent forums for treaty negotiations;
4. Decolonization;
5. Disarmament;
6. The protection of individual freedoms, especially religious and intellectual liberty.
(Erdmann, 2005, 249–250)

Six Pillars was an enormous political success. As a result, the FCC met with the US president
and a range of secretaries and took part in events at both Dumbarton Oaks and in San Francisco,
where the foundations for the United Nations (UN) were laid. Pope Pius XII issued his own
program, Six Conditions of a Just Peace, which dovetailed with both the Atlantic Charter and
the FCC’s Six Pillars. The world took notice, and so, indeed, did the American public. The pub-
licity generated by the FCC through its sermons, pamphlets, and lobbying was noted by many
Americans. In a Gallup poll in 1941, “international freedom” and “reform based on toleration
and Christian principles” were the two most popular solutions for war. In April 1945, thanks
in part to the FCC, some polls recorded as high as 90 percent approval ratings in the United
States for the establishment of the UN. And when the Commission did attend the San Francisco
Conference, it proposed nine items for the UN Charter, of which four – a statement on moral
aims; codification of international law; decolonization; and a declaration of fundamental human
rights – were accepted (Thompson, 2015). Andrew Preston writes that “rarely had religious lob-
bying been so effective, or so consequential” (Preston, 2012, 408–409).
Finally, as I have sought to show, while the Niebuhr-inspired neo-orthodoxy of the post-war
FCC did have a decisive influence on the UN and its approach to peace and diplomacy, it is
also true that many evangelical Christians were less than impressed by this approach. Protestant
fundamentalists and conservative evangelicals were fierce critics. M.G. Hatcher, a fundamentalist
Baptist preacher from Iowa, argued, “Scripture does prophecy,” that the establishment of a world
government, “will make it possible for the World Dictator, the Anti-Christ, to take over control”
(Preston, 2012, 402). The UN was, in his mind, a first step to creating a “reign of suffering and
terror as the world has never known.” In addition, Rev. William L. Blessing equated the “God-
denying, Christ-rejecting, Holy Ghost-blaspheming, Bible-hating atheistic” FCC with the same
“anti-Christ world order” of the UN (Preston, 2012, 403). Finally, Rev. Dan Gilbert mounted
a protest against the evils of the UN, which he considered parallel with those of the FCC. The
FCC’s organizational structure, he argued, ignored the great company of Bible-believers who
were denominationally tied to the organization, robbing them of their autonomy. This, he said,
is exactly what the UN would do to Americans (Preston, 2012, 404).

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Conservative evangelical anti-globalism

I have saved what might be regarded as a more “traditional” evangelical story for last, in part to
challenge the historical record on what counts as “evangelicalism” (Thompson, 2015). It can be
plausibly argued that the neo-orthodoxy of Reinhold Niebuhr represents a part of American
evangelicalism, seen today in contemporary evangelical magazines such as Providence (in the
tradition of Christianity and Crisis) and Christianity Today. Just as the energetic internationalism
of John Foster Dulles and the FCC represents a part of American evangelicalism, it is the case
that they were neither wholly separate from nor always opposed to American intervention or
Christian internationalism, more generally.
However, the shorthand for evangelicalism in foreign affairs has, of late, come to mean more
of a kind of Christian nationalist anti-globalism, generically summarized in President Donald
Trump’s brand of “America First” (Whitehead and Perry, 2020). This too predates the current
president and deserves consideration in shaping evangelical approaches to global peace and
order, both before and after the war. I use the term “anti-globalism” rather than “anti-interna-
tionalism” to make the point that, especially in this account, conservative evangelical hostility
was aimed mainly at globalist, federal, state-to-state institutions, not toward missionary activism
abroad generally (Thompson, 2015, 27–47).These were, in other words, not proponents of anti-
internationalism across the board but of anti-federal political globalism.The two can overlap, but
the sentiments are not identical.
The origins of evangelical anti-globalism in the United States are therefore most obvious in
debates around the League of Nations and later resurface in common themes. Markku Ruotsila
argues that “the League of Nations controversy set the parameters for all subsequent conserva-
tive evangelical commentary on modern internationalism” (Ruotsila, 2007, 171). Indeed, the
League project, in his words, was “spawned by modern internationalism” and its notions of
immanentist progress.The League was poorly regarded by many conservative evangelicals partly
for theological reasons and partly because of guilt by association. That is, the League idea was
advanced by the “wrong sort of Christians,” rather than always being disagreed with for doctri-
nal or theological reasons (Haidt, 2013).
The Senate’s rejection of the US joining the League in 1920 was therefore a win for con-
servative evangelicals, who had fought against its adoption on their own Biblical grounds. But
what was won in the Senate was not won on the home front in American churches. Every single
nationwide ecumenical organization, with the exception of the World Christian Fundamentals
Association (WCFA), had thrown its support behind the League. What some might call an early
pattern in American conservative evangelicalism began to develop: they won the issue of the day,
but they lost the culture and eventually their own churches.6
During the interwar period,, the fracture became apparent. Politicization and polarization
split conservative evangelicalism, diluted its impact, and eventually created the force of “New
Evangelicals” (for example, Ockenga) who re-emerged from isolation, vigorously political, and
anxious to engage the major issues of their day. Liberal internationalists, for example, argued for
disarmament and the establishment of a World Court in the 1920s and 1930s, issues that some
conservative clergy also supported (Ruotsila, 2007, 173). That number would only grow after
the birth of the atomic age, when it became clear, to liberal and conservative evangelicals alike,
that the nuclear age confronted the church with a question of not only the justice of war but
the survival of the human race (see Swallow Prior, 2015).
William Bell Riley, sometimes referred to as the “grand old man of fundamentalism,”
argued that these causes were “contrary to God’s plan” because “not once has the Word
of God been considered as providing a basis for [their] procedure” and “not once has the

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l­eadership of Christ been recognized” (Riley, 1939, 18-19). Such attempts at progressive peace
were all deeply enmeshed in a kind of exclusive humanism, argued Riley, an apostasy which
put human dogma and “man-made programs” for a lasting peace at the center of history,
not the cross of Christ. The WCFA denounced the League as “atheistic” and “Bolshevistic”
arguing such plans for disarmament and a World Court would produce nothing but the
“Antichrist’s world empire” (The Christian Fundamentalist, 1929). This did nothing to dilute
liberal Protestant (and some evangelical) enthusiasm for a League structure, and conservative
evangelicals fought disarmament and the World Court as harbingers of a resurrected League,
what would be the UN.
Thus, when the FCC published its “Just and Durable Peace” and made an ecclesial case for
a new UN, conservative evangelicals saw the resurgence of just the monster they had feared.
Worse for many conservative evangelicals was that many Christian denominations, which had
opposed the League initially, now joined Dulles and the FCC in enthusiastically endorsing his
so-called Six Pillars of Peace. The United Lutheran Church, one such example, even joined as
delegates to the UN’s founding conference (Bachmann, 1997, 234).
There were many specific complaints against the UN and its proposed Charter.
First, conservative evangelicals denounced the Charter for its lack of references to God.
Debates over such a reference had been defeated by delegates from various countries, and meet-
ings, which in the past might have been opened in prayer, were not. Arguments which, in 1919,
were more anti-Catholic and anti-Semitic in tone were, admittedly, diluted, but criticisms of a
pagan plan decentered from the providence of God and unjustifiably confident in the progres-
sive, moral making powers of humankind were a parallel to criticisms of the League.
Walter A. Maier, a Lutheran Church Missouri Synod broadcaster, rejected what he called all
“anti-Scripture programs” whether those of “atheist communism” or “godless politicians” who
believed in “world control” refusing to take its root from the Word of God. How, he begged,
“can we expect anything God-pleasing from international leaders who hate our Savior?” (Maier,
1949, 51–61).
Maier’s criticisms led to a related but distinct second concern. This was about more than the
absence of God; it was about whether pluralistic projects proceeding from non-Christian roots
could, or should, ever succeed. “Only Christian civilization was capable of making the world
better,” and there could never be such a universal Christian civilization until “non-Christian and
anti-Christian leaders of the UN were converted out of their evil ways” (Ruitsolia, 2007, 178).
Efforts at reform, no matter how well-intentioned, which proceeded apart from the foundation
of Jesus Christ and the Word of God simply could not be entertained. They would lapse into
the worst sin and misery, a false revelation from the gods of progress and exclusive humanism.
Such an apologetic was not uncommon among reformed presuppositionalists. According to
Ruotsila,

it was apologetics, more than any other single influence except dispensationalism, that
helped perpetuate Christian anti-internationalism beyond the cold war, when the so-
called culture wars seized the imagination of many on the political right who until
then had fought communists and their alleged UN allies.
(Ruotsila 2007, 179)

Dispensationalists feared the coming of the Beast of the Christian book of Revelation, whose
markers they found in the nascent world state of the proposed UN, and whose resistance they
therefore owed not merely to prudential politics but to the true king, Jesus, whose thousand-
year reign was yet forthcoming (referred to as premillennial rapture theology). A good example,

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on the other hand, of presuppositionalism can be found in the work of Cornelius Van Til, profes-
sor at Westminster Theological Seminary.
Van Til based his arguments on a kind of Calvinist theology, arguing that “mutual under-
standing across the bridge of fundamentally different premises (or presuppositions) of Christians
and nonbelievers” was ultimately impossible (Ruotsila, 2007, 179). The founding point for any
Christian thought must be God, and this belief is so fundamental that it created divergent epis-
temologies, making it not only unlikely but impossible for moral and political alignment on key
questions. On the one hand, the sphere of politics, founded by God, rooted in the Scripture, was
contrasted with exclusive humanistic autonomy, the latter of which was, in his opinion, clearly at
the root of the new UN system. This, he said, would produce an inevitable “head-on collision”
between the two if they stayed true to their presuppositions (Van Til, 2008, 179–218).
These arguments influenced many, including the New Evangelicals, though it was perhaps
most apparent in what would be called Christian Reconstructionist, or Dominionist, move-
ments.7 One of its leaders, Rousas John Rushdoony, inspired by a kind of Calvinism and the
dominance of Christian beliefs in American government, called “any discussion of the United
Nations … inevitably a religious discussion, for the principles which that organization embodies
are not merely political or economic but inevitably religious.” Rushdoony argued disapprov-
ingly that the UN had developed a “new religion of humanity,” a combination of modernism,
rationalism, and liberalism (Rushdoony, 2001, 113–132).
Third, the argument of conservative evangelicals was that such a progressive plan could not
but end in tyranny. Riley argued that the UN was the “present popular plan of taking the world
over, church included, placing all in the hands of a few mortals, for remaking.” The UN, like the
League, was just “another term for the unification of ideals and thrones that must pave the way
for the coming of the Antichrist” (Ruotsila, 2007, 179).
Louis Bauman, a leading Brethren evangelist, wrote of the UN as an “impending world state”
and a “great godless organization, ostensibly to obtain ‘international peace and security’ just pre-
ceding Armageddon.” The UN was “man’s supreme attempt to bring ‘on earth peace, good will
among men,’ without the partnership of Him whom Almighty God has ordained as ‘The Prince
of Peace.’ It would fail on the rock of its godlessness” (Bauman 1950, 13-15). Carl McIntire,
author of two books on the subject – The Modern Tower of Babel and Servants of Apostasy –wrote
that the UN was “organized in hell for the sole purpose of aiding and abetting the destruction
of the free world” (McIntire 1949, 9-15; 2007, 196-199).
Rushdoony argued that the values of the UN would necessarily invoke “socialistic as well as
totalitarian” mechanisms.The UN’s new “humanistic culture [was] aimed at destroyed all others
by means of the imperialism of world law and world police,” a “crusading missionary organiza-
tion” with a “false and deadly faith” which was dedicated to using the powers of the state to
“save man.” In 1978 he called the UN the “anathema to all real Christians” (Rushdoony, 2001,
113–132).
Fourth, the charge of inter-faith relativism, where all faiths teach sufficiently similar truths,
loomed large, especially in documents like the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. The
Declaration was the product of a wide variety of religious and non-religious actors, including
Muslims, Hindus, Christians, and atheists. The idea behind the Declaration, in the words of the
Catholic philosopher of state and society Jacques Maritain, was to produce a code of rights that
the world could agree upon, “provided nobody asks us why.” Yet while Maritain’s enthusiasm
was for people supporting rights for their own reasons, conservative evangelicals saw this as
relativist proof of process: that all beliefs could produce the same practical result. The idea that
“any religion” could produce the fruit of social and political stability, as though divine revelation
was present in all world religion, was anathema. It was a mixing of pagan and Christian faiths.

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Even Christianity Today, the flagship journal of the New Evangelicals, warned such a code of
rights could lead to a “totalitarian superstate” which presumed to be “the origin of all rights”
(Christianity Today, 1957, 22). For Riley, such peace and order was offered by liberal Christianity,
political liberalism, and Soviet communism, each part of a piece of exclusive humanism from
which was emerging the anti-Christian world empire (Riley, 1939, 177).
Conservative evangelicals’ main arguments against the post-war order were rooted in both
dispensational theology and presuppositional apologetics, but no less powerful for it. Each of
these arguments continued to exert real influence over evangelicals, writ large, over the decades
to come and caused real schism amongst evangelicals themselves on issues of an international
and political character. The language, quoted at length here, is instructive. It is very hard, in
the face of dispensational theology and presuppositional apologetics, to occupy a dissenting
evangelical position, as those who quietly sided with Dulles and the FCC, or embraced neo-
Orthodox perspectives on global order, did.Yet they did exist, and continue to exist, as part of the
story of evangelicalism and global peace and order. That their existence is uneasy should follow
naturally from this account.

Conclusion
The question with which we began was that of whether American evangelicals were isolation-
ists or internationalists, and I have consistently used the case of debates around the post-WWII
international order as a practical case to illustrate their differences. This case serves us well, if
hardly exhaustively, because it was at both this moment that new/neo-evangelicalism was taking
shape, providing us a crucial window into the diversity of the movement, but also the practice of
American evangelicals in major questions of international affairs.
Surveying the diversity in the movement called evangelicalism, I have argued that there are
meaningful evangelical minorities present in both the neo-orthodox turn of Reinhold Niebuhr,
and the hugely successful but more mainline efforts of John Foster Dulles and the FCC. The
modern forms of the so-called “Christian Right” have some of their roots in conservative evan-
gelical anti-globalism, and as such, are often invoked as a shorthand for evangelicalism generally,
but this is not the whole (or correct) story. Conservative evangelicalism has indeed been a force
to be reckoned with, but even here, cohesion is not always obvious, and evangelical conservatives
are not the entirety of the movement. In fact, to read some conservative evangelicals today, in
contrast to their stated nemeses of liberal modernists in the FCC of the post-war era, it might be
surprising to know how receptive some were to various issues, including nuclear disarmament,
international peace, human rights, and world courts (Swallow Prior, 2015).This may be because
it is clear that the UN was not an embryonic world state or even a well-functioning international
body capable of adjudicating crucial global issues. But it may also be that evangelical positions,
both conservative and liberal on global and political issues, vary because evangelicalism itself is an
unsettled, thin identity, which binds together very diverse demographic, socio-economic, racial
(see especially Tisby, 2019), and theological constituencies. If this was true in the post-war era,
it is no less true today, and so terms like “evangelical” deserve more careful consideration when
applied to complex, unsettled questions of political and social order.

Notes
1 Dispensationalism is a Christian tradition that interprets scripture as providing discrete periods, or
dispensations, with different governing principles. Dispensationalists disagree on the number of stages
(anywhere from three to eight). The typical scheme runs to seven stages, and includes a future, literal

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1,000-year reign of Jesus Christ (referenced in Revelation), preceded by a Great Tribulation in which
there is a rapture of the faithful. Presuppositionalism, on the other hand, teaches that faith is the basis
for all rational thought, and only reason/action that begins with the specificity of divine revelation can
conform to the patterns of creation and law as God intends. While many Christians agree that fides et
ratio (faith and reason) depend upon each other, more radical presuppositionalists believe that rational-
ity unaided by divine revelation cannot discover truth and can only ultimately fuel idolatry.
2 David Bebbington’s famous quadrilateral is defined by (1) biblicism: the belief that the Bible is the true
and trustworthy Word of God; (2) crucicentrism: the belief that Christ alone atones for sins on the
cross; (3) conversionism: the belief that human beings need to be converted into a relationship with
Jesus Christ; (4) activism: the belief that the Gospel is not a mere matter of right belief, but of action
and effort inspired by that belief.
3 Moody was a preacher and revivalist in the late nineteenth century, whose namesake has been taken
in the Moody Bible Institute (MBI). He believed it was imperative that a generation of “gap-men”
between the laity and the clergy was essential to do activist, evangelical work. Biola was such an exam-
ple, standing for the Bible Institute of Los Angeles, intended to train just such “gap men.”
4 By modernism, these thinkers did not mean what we might today call secularism. They meant by
modernism a more liberal approach to the Bible and its authority but would not have suggested that
modernism meant abandoning the Bible altogether. Kapic and McCormack write,
Modern theology emerged … at the point at which church-based theologians ceased trying
to defend and protect the received orthodoxies of the past against erosion and took up the
more fundamental challenge of asking how the theological values resident in those orthodoxies
might be given new expression, dressed out in new categories for reflection.
(Kapic and McCormack, 2012, 3)
5 The Federal Council of Churches is today The National Council of Churches. It continues to advocate
and think about issues of international peace, including publications to that effect.
6 The same could, for example, be convincingly argued about conservative American evangelical activism
around the Scopes-Monkey Trial of 1925. The WCFA, an opponent of the League, also fought this trial,
and technically they won the trial, as the teaching of evolution continued to be banned in most American
states. But what they won in court, they lost in the culture, and eventually in their own churches.
7 Christian reconstructionism is an influential, conservative Christian movement in the United States
that advocates theonomy and a restoration of biblical laws (especially Mosaic laws) in the public sphere.
Christian Dominionism is the name for a larger group of Christian political ideologies that believe
nations should be governed by the understandings of biblical laws generally (not necessarily exact
Mosaic laws).

References
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Press.
Bauman, Louis S. 1950. “The Nations Marshalling for Armageddon.” The King’s Business, XLI. December
1950.
Bebbington, David. 1989. Evangelicalism in Modern Britain: A History from the 1730s to the 1930s. London:
Unwin Hyman.
Boyer, Paul. 1985. By the Bombs Early Light: American Thought and Culture at the Dawn of the Atomic Age. New
York: Pantheon.
Dulles, John Foster. February 1940. “The Churches and the International Situation.” As cited in FCC
Pamphlet. New York: The United States and the World of Nations, 8.
Dulles, John Foster and the Federal Council of Churches. 1943. A Just and Durable Peace: Discussion of
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and Durable Peace.
Erdmann, Martin. 2005. Building the Kingdom of God on Earth: The Churches Contribution to Marshal Public
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Gregory, Brad S. 2012. The Unintended Reformation. Harvard Press: Cambridge MA.
Haidt, Jonathan. 2013. The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion. New York
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Henry, Carl F.H. 2019. Architect of Evangelicalism: Essential Essays of Carl F. Henry. Bellingham, WA: Lexham
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Hoover, Dennis. 2009. “Evangelical Christians: The New Internationalists?” in James W. Skillen (Ed),
Prospects and Ambiguities of Globalization. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 93–105.
Editorial. “Human Rights in an Age of Tyranny” February 4, 1957. Christianity Today. https​:/​/ww​​w​.chr​​istia​​
nityt​​oday.​​com​/c​​t​/195​​7​/feb​​ruary​​-4​/ed​​​itori​​als​.h​​tml. Accessed April 13, 2021.
Joustra, Jessica. 2019.“What is an Evangelical? Examining the Politics, History and Theology of a Contested
Label.” The Review of Faith & International Affairs.Vol. 17, No. 3, 7–19.
Kapic, Kelly M. and Bruce L. McCormack (Eds). 2012. Mapping Modern Theology: A Thematic and Historical
Introduction. Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic.
Kidd, Thomas S. 2019. Who is an Evangelical? The History of a Movement in Crisis. New Haven and London:
Yale University Press.
Maier, Walter A. 1949. Global Broadcasts of His Grace. Saint Louis: Concordia Publishing.
Marsden, George M. 1987. Reforming Fundamentalism: Fuller Seminary and the New Evangelicalism. Grand
Rapids, MI: Eerdmans.
———. 2015. “How Evangelicals and Fuller are Shaped by Their Traditions” in FullerStudio. https​:/​/fu​​llers​​
tudio​​.full​​er​.ed​​u​/eva​​ngeli​​cals-​​fulle​​r​-sha​​ped​-t​​​radit​​ions/​. Accessed May 5, 2020.
McIntire, Carl.1949. Modern Tower of Babel. Boston, MA: Christian Beacon Press.
———. 2007 reprint. Servants of Apostasy. New York: Kessinger Publishing.
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Miller, Eric C. April 28, 2020. “Who defines Evangelicalism? An Interview with Mark Noll.” Religion &
Politics. https​:/​/re​​ligio​​nandp​​oliti​​cs​.or​​g​/202​​0​/04/​​28​/wh​​o​-def​​i nes-​​evang​​elica​​lism-​​an​-in​​tervi​​​ew​-wi​​th​
-ma​​rk​-no​​ll/. Accessed May 4, 2020.
Mouw, Richard J. 2015. “Toward a Full-Orbed Evangelical Ethic: The Pioneering Contribution of Carl F.
H. Henry,” in Essential Evangelicalism:The Enduring Influence of Carl F. H. Henry, ed. Matthew J. Hall and
Owen Strachan. Wheaton, IL: Crossway.
Mouw, Richard. 2016. Adventures in Evangelical Civility. Grand Rapids, MI: Baker.
———. 2019. Restless Faith: Holding Evangelical Beliefs in a World of Contested Labels. Grand Rapids, MI:
Brazos, Baker.
Niebuhr, Reinhold. 1941. “The Christian Faith and World Crisis.” Christianity and Crisis. Vol. 1, No. 1,
4–6.
Noll, Mark. 2009. The New Shape of World Christianity. Downers Grove IL: Intervarsity Press.
Noll, Mark A., David W. Bebbington, and George M. Marsden. 2019. Evangelicals:Who They Have Been, Are
Now, and Could Be. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans.
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IL: Intervarsity Press.
Preston, Andrew. 2012. Sword of the Spirit, Shield of Faith: Religion in American War and Diplomacy. New York:
Penguin.
Riley, William B. 1939. Wanted: A World Leader!. Minneapolis: By the author.
Ruotsila, Markku. 2007. The Origins of Christian Anti-Internationalism: Conservative Evangelicals and the League
of Nations. Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press.
Rushdoony, Rousas John. 2001. The Nature of the American System.Vallecito, CA: Ross House Books.
Swallow Prior, Karen. August 2015. “Nukes and the Prof-Life Christian: A conservative takes a second look
at the morality of nuclear weapons.” in Sojourners. https​:/​/so​​jo​.ne​​t​/mag​​azine​​/augu​​st​-20​​15​/nu​​kes​-a​​nd​
-pr​​o​-li​f​​e​-chr​​istia​​n. Accessed March 19, 2020.
“The Twelfth Convention of the World’s Christian Fundamentals Association.” July 1929. The Christian
Fundamentalist,Vol. 248, No. 7.
Thompson, Michael G. 2015. For God and Globe: Christian Internationalism in the United States Between the
Great War and the Cold War. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press.
Tisby, Jemar. 2019. “Are Black Christians Evangelicals?” Mark A. Noll, David W. Bebbington, and George
M. Marsden, Evangelicals:Why They Have Been, Are Now, and Could Be. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans.
Van Til, Cornelius. 2008, fourth edition. The Defense of the Faith. Louisville: Presbyterian & Reformed
Publishing Co.
Warren, Heather. 1997. Theologians of a New World Order: Reinhold Niebuhr and the Christian Realists 1920–
1945. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Whitehead, Andrew L. and Samuel L. Perry. 2020. Taking America Back for God: Christian Nationalism in the
United States. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

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RUSSIA
Orthodox Christianity

Marko Veković

Introduction
We live in a world where some of the most interesting debates are happening in the virtual
realm. For example, in March 2014, Twitter hosted a very lively and interesting debate on the
role of Orthodox Christianity in Russian politics. Speakers included Carl Bildt, a member of
the European Council on Foreign Relations, and Michael McFaul, a renowned Stanford profes-
sor. Bildt claimed that McFaul was possibly underestimating the force of Putin’s anti-Western
and “anti-decadence” line, saying that such ideas are deeply rooted in conservative Orthodox
Christianity (Marty, 2014). In other words, according to Bildt, ideology and religion in contem-
porary Russia are closely related. In this chapter, I take a close look at this relationship. The goal
is to explain how and to what extent Orthodoxy and ideology interact in contemporary Russia.
However, my starting assumption is that Orthodox Christianity, as a religious tradition, does not
have a clear ideological standpoint (for a more detailed analysis of Orthodox Christianity’s polit-
ical theology, see Papanikolaou, 2012). However, it appears that Orthodox Christian Churches
across Eastern Europe are favourably inclined towards monarchy-type political systems. This
preference for monarchs, particularly in the Russian case (Turunen, 2007), can be understood as
the product of communist rule in these countries. But when it comes to specific ideologies, it
would be wrong to try to apply any particular ideology to Orthodox Christianity, including in
our particular case: the Russian Orthodox Church (ROC). However, the ROC has often been
used as a supplement, or an asset, of different political and ideological systems in Russia. Scholars
tend to explain this process as the “ideologization of religion” (Rachik, 2009: 347). And in the
case of the Orthodox Christian Churches across Eastern Europe, the main explanations for close
relationships between different ideologies, state and Orthodoxy, can be found in the specific
historical experience, and of course, for doctrinal reasons (Pipes, 1974; Prodromou, 2004).
Growing interest in the study of religion and politics across the world (i.e., Jevtić, 2007;
Haynes, 2014; Fox, 2013;Toft, Philpott and Shah, 2011) inevitably led to a focus on how religion
and ideology mix and interact (Claval, 2015;Williams, 1996; Ingber, 1989; Martin, 2014; Bocock
and Thompson, 1985; Al-Sharif, 2009). Scholars have also looked at how they support or oppose
each other (Zaki, 2018) and how religion can be translated into ideology and vice versa (Rachik,
2009). In this chapter, I explore how Orthodox Christianity, a dominant religious tradition of
Eastern European societies, interacts with dominant ideological systems by using the Russian

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Federation, or simply Russia, as a case study. By analyzing this relationship from historical, doc-
trinal and comparative perspectives, we can see that Russia is a good example of how Orthodox
Christianity and different ideologies have interacted and co-existed throughout history.
Since the Christianization of the Kievan Rus’ in 988, Orthodox Christianity, as represented
by the ROC, became a faithful companion of the Russian state. Yet, since 988, a lot of things
have changed in Russia. For example, the state’s ideology shifted dramatically due to political
and social revolutions that the country experienced. The ROC had to adapt to these changes,
showing the political potential of one religious actor (Philpott, 2007). There are (at least) two
landmark ideologies embraced by Russia in its long-standing history. First was the imperial
ideology of the Russian empire, characterized by the notion of Moscow as the Third Rome
and Russia as the inheritor of the Byzantium empire. Even though the historical roots of the
imperial ideology are much deeper, it was the Russian official ideology for 84 years in total
(from 1833 to 1917). During this time, Church–state relations were often labelled as symphonic,
and the ROC was one of the main pillars of society (Pipes, 1974). The second Russian official
ideology was, of course, communism. Communist ideology dominated Russian political life from
1917 up until 1991, so 74 years in total. Besides other rather obvious reasons, it is a well-known
fact that imperial and communist ideology are different in the way they treated religion, and
particularly Orthodox Christianity.
After the February Revolution of 1917 and the imposition of communist ideology, religion
was banished from the public sphere, and the state was hostile towards religious communities
(i.e., Knox, 2005). After the fall of communism in the late twentieth century, Russia was looking
for a new ideology. And it is, again, a well-known fact that the fall of communism triggered a
religious resurgence not only in Russia but also across Eastern Europe as well (i.e., Evans and
Northmore-Ball, 2012). One of the social, religious and even political consequences of this was
the fact that it was religion that actually filled the ideological vacuum once communism was
gone (Knox, 2005: 99; Jevtić, 2012: 427). That is why the ROC re-claimed its position as the
dominant religious actor and started to deeply penetrate, in different aspects, the public and
political arenas. After 2000, Russia started to rise as a political power. Often portrayed as the
face of Vladimir V. Putin, the rise of Russia was characterized by the idea of the “New Russia”.
This idea relies significantly on a conservative ideology, expressed mainly through anti-West-
ernism, anti-liberalism and the notion of a specific “Russian civilization”. All these elements of
Russia’s neo-conservative ideology are both supported and approved by the ROC. However,
even though this seems to be an obvious fact, how and to what extent the ROC is ideologized
by the state remains unclear. Thus, this chapter has two main goals. The first goal is to offer a
rather brief historical perspective on how Orthodox Christianity interacted with different ide-
ologies in Russia until 2000. The second goal is an analysis of the religion and ideology matrix
in post-2000 Russia, with a specific focus on the ideologization of the ROC.

Religion and ideology in Russia through the lens of

Church–state relations: a historical perspective
Most scholars seem to agree about the relationship between Russian ideology and the ROC
in the modern era. However, the same does not apply when turning to the role of the ROC’s
influence in politics. Papkova (2011) is right, I think, to state that the mechanism, “what the
Church wants, the Church gets”, simply does not work. Turning to the Russian religion and
ideology matrix, it is clear that there is a vast body of relevant literature. What is interesting to
mention is that the literature shares one important, and perhaps rather obvious, pattern: the con-
temporary religion and ideology matrix in Russia is the product of the historical development

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of Church–state relations, supported by the doctrinal teachings of Orthodox Christianity. This

is central to understanding how the religion and ideology matrix in Russia has developed and
changed over time.We need to take a closer look into Church–state relations.The same goes for
understanding the contemporary role of the ROC: it is simply not possible to comprehend it
without being aware of the historical trajectory of Church–state relations in Russia. In my book,
Democratization in Christian Orthodox Europe: Comparing Greece, Serbia and Russia (2020), I suggest
that it is easiest to analyse Church–state relations in Russia if we divide this period into three
very broad historical phases: from the reforms of Peter the Great to the February Revolution,
the communist phase, and the post-communist phase (Veković, 2020). However, such a division
will not work for exploration of the relationship between religion and ideology in Russia, due
to the fact that Russian imperial ideology, which had strong and direct links with Orthodox
Christianity, developed long before Peter the Great (who ruled in the late seventeenth and early
eighteenth centuries). In addition, it important to note that post-communist Russia was signifi-
cantly different under the regime of Boris Yeltsin compared to that of Vladimir V. Putin. Under
the rule of the latter, the ROC became an important pillar of the ideology of the state, which
was not the case during Yeltsin’s time (Veković, 2020).
One of the first attempts towards analyzing the religion and ideology matrix in imperial
Russia can be found in a well-known and yet often criticized work by Richard Pipes.1 Pipes’
book, Russia under the Old Regime (1974), included a chapter on the ROC, describing it as the
“servant of the State”. By drawing his conclusions via both historical and doctrinal analysis,
Pipes argues that the ideology of the ROC is inherently conservative, requiring strong sup-
port from the state (Pipes, 1974: 225–226). Pipes also states that it was in the first half of the
sixteenth century when the ROC placed its entire authority behind the Muscovite2 monarchy.
Interestingly, according to Pipes, the entire ideology of the Muscovite monarchy was developed
by the clergy of the ROC, who believed that “the interest of religion and church were best
served by a monarchy with no limits to its power” (Pipes, 1974: 232). But it is important to
mention that this was not the officially accepted ideology of the state. Despite this, Pipes refers
to this system as “imperial ideology”, comprising four key aspects. These are:

1. The idea of a Third Rome. This notion is integral to the Muscovite’s political theory, defined
by the monk, Philotheus of Pskov.
2. The imperial idea. The rulers of Moscow were heirs to an imperial line that started during
the time of Emperor Augustus. This idea was developed by a group of clergymen, super-
vised by Metropolitan Macarius.
3. The rulers of Russia were universal Christian sovereigns. They were claimed to be the emperors
of all Orthodox people in the world.
4. Divine authority of all rulers. All authority was from God, and the Russian tsar, in the exercise
of his office, was God-like (Pipes, 1974: 232–233).

Pipes’s work was integral to most later studies of Church–state relations in Russia, particularly
in Western literature, including in relation to how religion and ideology mixed and interacted.
When it comes to the doctrinal reasons why the ROC accepted such an ideology, part of the
answer lies in the concept of symphonia. Symphonia represents an ideal type of Church–state
relationship in the Orthodox Christian tradition, developed based on the experience of the
Byzantium empire. Nikolas Gvosdev, in his influential work, An Examination of Church-State
Relations in the Byzantine and Russian Empires with an Emphasis on Ideology and Models of Interaction
(2001), puts emphasis on the concept of symphonia, and how it was incorporated into the politi-
cal thought and ideology of Eastern Christianity and its relationship with the state. However,

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when it comes to doctrinal reasons why Orthodox Christian Churches tend to have closer rela-
tions with the state, in my opinion, we should also discuss the organizational pattern of those
Churches. Unlike the hierarchical organization of the Roman Catholic Church, for example,
Orthodox Christianity is highly decentralized. From both historical and political perspectives,
this means that political independence of the Orthodox-majority countries is typically accom-
panied by an autocephalous, or independent, Orthodox Church. Even though it is believed that
all Orthodox Christian Churches are in one sacred and holy communion, the political real-
ity shows that they are quite separated (Veković and Jevtić, 2019). That is why their historical
development and even survival is closely related to that of the state. Consequently, it is logical
to presume that Orthodox Christian Churches would be very interested in both politics and
state ideology.
The nineteenth century was another important historical era of the Church–state relation-
ship in Russia, central to understanding how religion and ideology have interacted over time.
In 1833, the state and Тsar Nicholas I declared an official ideology – “Orthodoxy, Autocracy,
Nationalism” (правосла́вие, самодержа́вие, наро́дность). To be precise, this ideological triad
was actually introduced by Sergei Uvarov, Russian Minister of Education under Tsar Nicholas
I. Uvarov asserted the importance of Orthodoxy for the Russian state in the following state-
ment: “a people as well as a private person who does not love the faith of its ancestors, must
perish” (Anderson, 2012: 209). According to Riasanovsky (1960), the notions of Orthodoxy and
autocracy were quite straightforward, unlike nationality (1960: 38). As Laquer says, “Church was
the state church, one of the quintessential features of the regime” (2014: 72). Moreover, regard-
ing the position of Orthodoxy within the imperial ideology, Riasanovsky refers to the famous
Russian poet saying,

Russia is above all a Christian empire. The Russian people is Christian not only
because of the Orthodoxy of its beliefs, but also because of something even more inti-
mate than belief. It is Christian because of that capacity for renunciation and sacrifice
which serves as the foundation of its moral nature.
(Riasanovsky, 1960: 39–40)

Coleman also analysed this ideological triad, saying that its basic idea was to

link the Orthodox Church with the state and with evolving notions of Russian
nationality. In the eyes of the enemies of autocracy, Official Nationality would further
tarnish the Church’s reputation, but it also provided a powerful creative framework for
religious patriots who seized on the rather vague slogan and elaborated its significance.
(Coleman, 2014: 17)

But the emphasis on Orthodoxy in the state’s ideology was not only a product of the ROC’s
cultural, ideological, historical and/or political importance. It is also important to mention that
the focus on Orthodoxy, despite the fact that nineteenth-century Russia was a multi-religious
country, was a key instrument of Russian imperial uniqueness. According to Cannady and
Kubicek (2014), “underscoring of the importance of religion was partially a rejection of the
eighteenth century religious scepticism of the European Enlightenment, the dangerous product
of which was strongly on Nicholas’s mind with the revolutionary ethos already infecting Russia”
(Cannady and Kubicek, 2014: 4). As a result, the ROC was perceived as both a moral and educa-
tional shield for Western ideas. In addition, Cannady and Kubicek argue that the state managed
to secure additional control over the ROC by adding it to its ideological matrix (2014: 4). The

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official ideology of “Orthodoxy, Autocracy, Nationalism” dominated imperial Russia until the
February Revolution of 1917.
The 1917 Communist Revolution changed the face of the world. It was a political and ideo-
logical earthquake that struck not only Russia but also several other Eastern European coun-
tries in the early twentieth century. At this time, however, the ROC, like other autocephalous
Churches across Eastern Europe, was not ready to face the communist challenge. Pipes offered
an interesting explanation why this was the case: the ROC “identified itself to such an extent
with the monarchy that when the latter fell, it went right down with it” (Pipes, 1974: 223).3
When it comes to ideology and religion in communist Russia, the state seemed to have two
equally important goals. First, the state used all its powers to impose communist ideology on
society. Second, the state did its best to suppress every single notion of the past imperial ideol-
ogy because it was perceived as a threat to communist rule. Due to the fact that the ROC was
an important, and perhaps quintessential part of the imperial ideology puzzle, the state was par-
ticularly interested in suppressing its influence.4 There is a wide range of sources on the position
of the ROC under the communist regime (see, for example, Knox, 2005; Froese, 2004; Powell,
1975; Petro, 1995; Struve, 1967; Veković, 2020: 105–110). From the perspective of religion and
ideology, Orthodoxy and communism is a well-studied field. What is interesting to emphasize
here is that the time of communist rule (1917–1991) was probably the only historical period
when the ROC was not closely connected with the state, and consequently, its ideology. It is
well-known that the period of communist rule was very difficult for all religious communities
in Russia, yet the ROC suffered most for two main reasons. First, even though Russia is a multi-
religious country, the ROC is the dominant religious actor.That is why the hostility of the state
was most visible, although it does not mean that other religious communities in Russia were
spared hostility; quite the contrary. Second, the state’s specific hostility towards the ROC also
derived from the fact that the ROC was a bearer of imperial ideology, the very issue which the
communists fought against in the first place.
After the fall of communism, Russian society experienced significant changes and various
interconnected processes. Two of the most important were democratization, or liberalization,
and religious resurgence (Veković, 2020; Knox, 2005; Papkova, 2011). They were not unique to
Russia, with similar processes occurring in other post-communist societies in Eastern Europe.
However, the Russian case is of most interest to many scholars. Consequently, there is a vast body
of literature on this issue, and once again, there is not much dispute when it comes to the role
of the ROC in this period. Scholars tend to agree that a specific ideological vacuum was cre-
ated after communist ideology was abandoned. As religious resurgence brought the ROC back
into the centre of Russia’s religious mosaic (Knox, 2005), it was logical that the Church would
fill the existing ideological gap. This was again nothing new in the post-communist countries
of Eastern Europe, as different Orthodox Christian Churches did the same – for example, in
Serbia (Jevtić, 2009). Even though the ROC tried to fill the ideological vacuum, the state was
still searching for a new ruling ideology. As Laquer puts it: “After the fall of communism, Russia
was in search of a new ideology” (2014: 71). Wozniuk argues that “It is unusual for Russia to
remain for a very long time without a national ideology entailing universal claims” (1997: 195).
He contends that it was Boris Yeltsin who first called for a “new ideology that would reflect the
new state of affairs in Russia – in essence, he was calling for ‘re-imagining’ or reinventing, the
foundations upon which Russian national community is based” (1997: 195). Filatov was also on
this track, arguing that Orthodoxy was becoming the new national symbol of post-communist
Russia (1999: 138–149). And it was clear back then that if Russia was going to re-invent its ide-
ology after the fall of communism, the ROC had to be a part of this project. But the ideological
tenets of the Church did not fit Yeltsin’s picture of how Russia should look. There was no room

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for the ROC in his idea to gradually liberalize and democratize the country, and eventually get
closer to Western democracies.The ROC had slightly different ideas. According to Metropolitan
Ioann’s open letter sent to the mayor of St Petersburg in 1992, there were three main threats to
the ROC in post-communist Russia: atheists and communists, yesterday’s sworn enemies; non-
Orthodox denominations, and occult heresies and sects (Wozniuk, 1997: 198). Going back to
the reinvention of ideology in the post-communist Russia, the specific place of the ROC in this
project was practically legalized and institutionalized when the Russian 1997 Law of Freedom
of Religion was introduced. Even though Yeltsin was actually hesitant to approve this law (see
detailed analysis of this process in Veković, 2020: 110–112), it was introduced in September 1997.
This law secured the special position of the ROC and paved the way towards closer integration
of the Church and state in post-communist Russia.
In 2001, Agadjanin argued that “in Russia today, religion is considered as a form of ideology,
or it is expected to carry out ideological functions” (2001: 363). These ideological functions
during Yeltsin’s era can also be described via two vivid examples. First, was the reconstruction
of the Cathedral of Christ the Saviour in Moscow (built in 1812, devastated during the rule
of Joseph Stalin). The reconstruction was done during the 1990s and represented an important
symbolic return for the ROC and its resurgence after communist rule. According to some
sources, the reconstruction was mainly financed by the state (Knox, 2005: 119–121). Second,
the ROC and the Russian army signed a contract in 1995 for the introduction of army priests.
When the contract was signed, Patriarch Kirill said that it was one of the primary roles of the
ROC to “share and stipulate the spiritual and moral principles” within the army (Knox, 2005:
123–124).That being said, it is obvious that Russia was in pursuit of a new ideology after the fall
of communism. In this project, the state looked back into the past and tried to re-invent its ide-
ology. Thus, it was almost impossible to neglect the role of the ROC. However, ideologization
of the ROC acquired further encouragement after Vladimir V. Putin took power in March 2000.

Religion and ideology in post-2000 Russia: the re-ideologization of the ROC

When Vladimir V. Putin took power, there was a significant turn in Church–state relations in
Russia, including an ideologization of the Church, which happened after the presidential elec-
tions of 2000. Putin’s rise to power coincided with two important religious events.The first was
the final consecration of the Cathedral of the Christ the Saviour, on the very day the Romanov
dynasty was canonized. Since then, we can trace the ideologization of the ROC in post-2000
Russia, a process that is definitely not a one-way street. The state started openly using the ROC
as an instrument of political support, while at the same time, the Church did its best to impose
conservative political and social tenets, or ideology, on society. Both of these areas are well-
studied and documented.5 However, one should be aware of the fact that post-2000 Russia does
not have an official ideology. Yet, there is an obvious tendency of the state to pursue and sup-
port conservative politics, both in domestic and foreign policy, to impose and support specific
moral principles within society, as well as anti-Westernism and anti-liberalism. All of these could
fit under the umbrella of conservative ideology. And if the umbrella is in the hands of Vladimir
Putin, the very canopy is definitely made by the ROC.
To my best understanding, the ideological canopy represented by the ROC in post-2000
Russia consists of several aspects, including specific moral principles that the Church tries (quite
successfully) to impose on society, as well as a more general anti-Westernism and anti-liberalism.
By doing so, the ROC is one of the main pillars of Putin’s regime. However, one should be
aware of one crucial thing common to all Orthodox Christian Churches: by no means should
the ROC be understood as a monolithic block (for detailed analysis on this topic, see Papkova,

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2011). The above-mentioned ideological tenets are usually represented by key religious officials
and are widespread through Church-controlled media, although not necessarily supported by
all Church clergy. Another important fact is that the above-mentioned ideological tenets are
supported in the doctrinal teachings of Orthodoxy and further developed in two key docu-
ments that define the role of the ROC in Russian society: “The Basis of the Social Concept”
(2001 and “The Russian Orthodox Church’s Basic Teaching on Human Dignity, Freedom and
Rights” (2008).
“The Basis of the Social Concept” is a document that defines the political and social role of
the ROC and even the ideology of the Church. Hoppe-Kondrikova, van Kessel and van der
Zweerde sum up the main principles implemented in this document:

1. Symphonia: specific Church–state arrangement;

2. Pomesnost’: the need for a balanced nuance between the universalistic mission of the Church
and its regional/national organization;
3. Sabornost’: the notion of a community based on mutual respect between individual and
community; and
4. Bogoshelovechestvo: the dual nature of the Church (2013: 203–204).

According to Anderson (2007), this document consists of two elements that led Church–state
relations in Russia to become more integrated. He argues that these elements are shared views
towards liberalism and the role of the West in Russian society, shared both by the state and the
ROC. “Westernism” is understood as a threat to Russian values, and the possible imposition of
perceived Western values, such as democracy, is not seen as a good thing. Moreover, as religious
pluralism is one of the core values of Western democracies, from the Russian perspective, it is
understood as a security threat. The ROC’s anti-Westernism is based, according to Anderson,
on three components: the era of living under communism, anti-Westernism in nineteenth-
century imperial Russia and the historical division between Eastern and Western Christianity
(Anderson, 2007: 189). The main difference between the West and Russia is based on differ-
ent understandings of society. While Western societies emphasize the virtue of individualism,
Eastern Christian societies praise community. According to the ROC, individualism is a bad
thing for society. Furthermore, as individualism is closely related to liberalism, the ROC has a
very specific way of understanding it. The current Patriarch of the ROC, Kirill, said the follow-
ing in 2000 (in a very long but important statement):

Today there exist[s] no wall that is able to secure [the] health of the nations and
their religious and historical autonomy against the expansion of alien and destructive
socio-cultural forces or from a new manner of life that has arisen outside of all tradi-
tions and which has been created under the influence of post-industrial reality. At the
foundation of this manner of life lie liberal ideas, which have united within themselves
pagan anthropocentrism, which centered European culture at the time of Renaissance,
Protestant theology and Jewish theological thought. These ideas came to a head in the
Enlightenment in a certain complex of liberal principles. The French Revolution was
the culminating act of this spiritual and philosophical revolution, at the base of which
lay the rejection of [the] normative significance of tradition. It was absolutely no acci-
dent that this revolution began with [the] Reformation that rejected the normative
significance of tradition in the sphere of Christian doctrine. Within Protestantism, tra-
dition ceased to be the criterion of truth: personal interpretation in the study of Holy
Scripture and personal religious experience became the criteria of truth … The liberal

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idea does not call for a liberation from sin because the very concept of sin is absent in
liberalism. Sinful manifestation[s] by a person are permitted if they do not violate the
law and do not infringe upon the freedom of another person … Thus for the liberal
idea flows the generally accepted concepts of civil liberties, democratic institutions,
market economy, free competition, freedom of speech, and freedom of conscience, all
of which constitute the understanding of “contemporary civilization”.
(Anderson, 2007: 190)

The ROC’s specific anti-Westernism also has another important dimension. According to a
2017 Pew Research survey, “Religious Belief and National Belonging in Central and Eastern
Europe”, most (66%) Orthodox Christian believers across Eastern Europe agree with the state-
ment that: “A strong Russia is necessary to balance the influence of the West”. Agreement with
this statement is even higher (85%) among Russians who are followers of Orthodox Christianity
(Pew, 2017).
On the other hand, the document, “The Russian Orthodox Church’s Basic Teaching on
Human Dignity, Freedom and Rights”, is focused on the ROC’s understanding of human rights.
As Stoeckel (2017) puts it, besides the fact that the ROC “has emerged as a powerful force for
cultural, social, and political conservativism” (2017: 272), the discursive strategy of the ROC
regarding human rights changed between 2000 and 2008. She explains this change by arguing
that

It evolved from a clear-cut rejection of human rights as a Western invention to endors-

ing human rights as a concept, but utilising the concept in a way that was opposed
to the liberal and egalitarian evolution of the international human rights system. This
change was the work of the traditionalist camp inside the ROC, and it sidelined the
fundamentalists, who rejected any engagement with the topic, and the liberals, who
would have preferred a clearer endorsement of human rights.
(Stoeckel, 2016: 134)

According to Stoeckel, traditional values supported by the Church include

visibility of Christian symbols in the public sphere, opposition to all forms of lesbian–
gay–bisexual–transgender rights, restrictions on the breadth of women’s and children’s
rights, and opposition to abortion, euthanasia, reproductive and stem cell research, as
well as the defence of believers’ rights of religious expression, i.e. battle against any free
speech that can amount to blasphemy.
(Ibidem, 142)

Agadjanin explores in detail the issue of imposing conservativism and the ROC’s specific moral
principles as applied to society. He claims that this specific moral discourse is actually the key
to the Church’s agenda (2017: 3). Traditional values, which the ROC tries to impose, comprise
different elements, including emphasis on the family, anti-abortion, anti- gestational surrogacy
and in vitro fertilization,6 and tenets against homosexuality, transsexuality and same-sex mar-
riages, and juvenile courts (Agadjanin, 2017: 7–10).7 In order to resist such trends, the ROC
tried to gain support from conservative actors across the world (Ibid.). This particular aspect of
the ROC’s international work has been studied by Stoeckel (2016).The above-mentioned 2017
Pew study also had significant insight into this context. According to the Pew study, conservative
social views prevail in Orthodox-majority countries, with a particularly clear hostility towards

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homosexuality. The great majority of Orthodox Christians across Eastern Europe, including
in Russia, claim that homosexuality is wrong (85%, according to Pew, 2017), while almost as
many are against abortion. Most Orthodox Christian respondents stated that abortion should be
mostly or entirely illegal while also holding pronounced conservative views on gender norms,
agreeing that wives should always obey their husbands (Pew, 2017).
Finally, it is important to mention the issue of religious education in Russia. In terms of
the re-ideologization of the ROC, this issue cannot be neglected. As Köllner notes, in Russia,
education has always been an instrument through which the state has pushed its political-ideo-
logical agenda, particularly during the communist era (2016: 368). Religious education was re-
introduced in Russian state schools in 2010. One of the subjects is: “Foundations of Orthodox
Culture”. However, Scherrer (2003) states that this subject is not meant to analyse Russian
culture. Instead, she asserts that “it has an ‘integrating function’ to compensate for the lack of
official state ideology after the demise of state atheism” (2003: 45). Willems’s (2012) study also
showed that religious education in Russia has an “ideological construction with an educational
purpose”, as students are expected to adopt the uniform Russian tradition as their own and to
behave accordingly (2012: 35).
That being said, despite the fact that post-2000 Russia has no official religion, the ROC is
widely used by the state in support of its societal re-ideologization. Its role in this process is
marked by two important documents accepted by the Church, as well as with the imposition
of religious education.

Concluding remarks
During its history, Russia has embraced two major ideological systems: imperial ideology and
communism. As a dominant religious actor, it was logical to presume that the ROC had a sig-
nificant role to play in both. However, its political, as well as ideological, role was quite different
during the two periods. While the ROC was one of the main pillars of the imperial ideology, it
represented one of the main enemies of the communist ideology. And this was not just the case
with the ROC, but also with the other Orthodox Christian Churches across Eastern Europe.
However, after the fall of communism and the resurgence of religion and the ROC, we witness
the specific re-ideologization of the ROC.This is particularly so in post-2000 Russia, where the
ROC is one of the pillars and supporters of the neo-conservative ideology of the state.Why this
is the case is derived from both historical and doctrinal reasons.
Despite the fact that Orthodox Christianity does not have an identifiable ideology, it was
often used as a supplement or an asset to ideological systems imposed in majority Orthodox
Christian countries. From a doctrinal perspective, the political and ideological potential of
Orthodox Christianity is based on two equally important and related doctrinal concepts: sym-
phonia and autocephaly. The first concept is often used to explain the ideal type of Church–state
relationship, widely accepted by Orthodox Christian Churches. It is based on the experience of
the Byzantine empire and aims for a close relation between Church and state. Second, the con-
cept of autocephaly is related to the organizational pattern of the Orthodox Christian Churches,
which are independent and autonomous in their canonical territories. As autocephality is
directly related to political independence, we can see that Orthodox Christian Churches are
almost inseparable from the state and its development. Thus, as Orthodox Christian Churches
tend to have very close relations with the state, they are often an inseparable part of state ide-
ology. This is precisely the case with the ROC. As one of the most powerful, perhaps the most
powerful, Orthodox Christian Church, throughout its history, the ROC was closely related to the
state and its ideology. This is particularly important in the case of the Russian imperial i­deology,

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which seems to be the perfect match for these doctrinal concepts. The ROC was praised as
one of the cornerstones of the state, so it is reasonable that the ROC considers this period as a
golden age.
In this chapter, I showed that the ROC was one of the main pieces in the imperial ideology
puzzle. Even though the Russian imperial ideology of “Orthodoxy, Autocracy, Nationalism” was
officially introduced in 1833, the ideology has much deeper roots. Since the foundations of the
Muscovite monarchy, Orthodox Christianity was regarded as one of the key elements of Russian
identity. As Pipes (1974) suggests, Orthodoxy and the ROC were also vital parts of the imperial
ideology prior to 1833, an ideology based on the idea of Russia as the inheritor of the Byzantium
empire, and leader of the Christian world. According to Pipes (1974), this specific ideology was
developed by ROC clergy. However, after the February Revolution of 1917, the position of
the ROC changed significantly. Almost overnight, the ROC became a key enemy of the state.
Obviously, the Church was not ready for this major political change, nor its consequences.
Nevertheless, during communist rule, the Church kept the memory of its role and posi-
tion in imperial Russia, confident that it would eventually return to prominence. The fall of
communism encouraged this idea, particularly after 2000. This is the time when the state and
Church merged interests. Both are keen to emphasize the ideas of imperialism and how this
“New Russia” project should look much like the old imperial Russia. This project is, of course,
heavily dependent on the continuation of cordial Church–state relations, especially the contin-
ued support of the ROC.

Notes
1 This study is one of the academic cornerstones of the understanding of the Orthodox Christianity
as inherently conservative, and thus anti-democratic religious tradition. Alongside Webber’s classic
Economy and Society (1978), Pipes’ work had a vast influence on Huntington’s “waves of democratiza-
tion” (1993) and the “clash of civilizations” (1996). Later on, these will become leading sources for
describing Orthodox Christianity as an inherently anti-democratic religious tradition.
2 Muscovite monarchy is the name of the medieval Russian state, founded in 1340 around the city of
Moscow. It was preceded by the Russian Empire in 1547.
3 A very similar experience can be found in the case of the Serbian Orthodox Church. Having a strong
connection with the Serbian monarchy and its ideology, it also collapsed after communist rule was
imposed in 1945.
4 It is important to mention that it was the modus operandi not only in Russia, but in all communist
states across Eastern Europe, including Yugoslavia, Romania, Bulgaria, etc.
5 One of the very useful projects exploring the political role of the ROC in post-communist Russia,
and particularly in post-2000 Russia, is “Postsecular Conflicts” (POSEC), based at the University of
Innsbrück (Austria) and directed by Kristina Stoeckel.
6 The Holy Synod of the ROC refused the right of baptism to families with children born from sur-
rogate mothers (Agadjanin, 2017: 7–10).
7 Set of legal norms that allows state or civil bodies to interfere for the protection of children’s rights
against family violence.

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 20
RELIGIOUS FUNDAMENTALISM,
LIBERAL NATIONALISM, AND
SECTARIAN SOLIDARITY
AMONG LEBANESE
Mansoor Moaddel, Jean Kors, and Johan Gärde1

The upsurge of Islamic fundamentalism in the late 1970s indicated the decline of secular politics,
reassertion of male supremacy in different domains of social life, the rise of constraining sartorial
practices and Islamic hijab for women, and the escalation of Shia–Sunni sectarian rivalries in
the Middle East. This impact was quite strong in Lebanon, where its religion-based fragmented
social structure was particularly vulnerable to the fundamentalist pressures. The formation of
Hezbollah by the Iranian Islamic regime in the early 1980s strengthened Shia fundamentalism,
which in turn prompted the Saudis to support the Sunnis in the country. However, there has
been little systematic analysis of how fundamentalism and foreign rivalries, on the one hand, and
liberal ideology, on the other, contributed to sectarian solidarity among Lebanese. This chapter
assesses the linkages of religious fundamentalism, foreign intervention, and liberal nationalism
with sectarianism by analyzing data from a nationally representative sample of 3,039 Lebanese
collected in 2008.

Religious fundamentalism and sectarianism

Despite their diversity, the fundamentalist movements exhibited a similar set of core orienta-
tions. These core orientations consisted of a distinctive set of beliefs about and attitudes toward
whatever religious beliefs one has (Altemeyer and Hunsberger 2004). For example, the belief
in God is a religious belief. The belief in the oneness of God and the Prophecy of Muhammad
is Islamic, while the belief in the Trinitarian notion of God as Father, Son, and the Holy Spirit
is Christian. But the beliefs that one’s religion is closer to God than other religions, that only
the followers of one’s religion will go to heaven, or that the Quran or Bible is literally true are
fundamentalist beliefs because they display distinctive religious orientations rather than asserting
specific tenets of either faith. Fundamentalists tend to have a disciplinarian conception of the
deity, consider the scriptures literally true, and are religious exclusivists and intolerant (Moaddel
and Karabenick 2008, 2013, 2018).
Such attitudes were expressed by different fundamentalist movements in Islam. For example,
as the first instance of fundamentalism in the modern period, the movements that ­originated

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from the teachings of Muhammad Ibn Abdul Wahhab (1703–1792) in Arabia and Shah Waliullah
(1703–1762) in India advocated returning to the fundamentals of the faith that were practiced
by the first generation of Muslims in order to purify their religious community from the influ-
ence of other cultures, which for Shah Waliullah meant the rejection of the folkways and mores
of the Hindus, and the Wahhabis of the Ottomans and the Shia Islam (Ahmad 1967; Hourani
1983).
Although the movements that sprang from the teachings of both Muslim theologians were
defeated in the 19th century, the Wahhabis by Egyptian ruler Mohammad Ali and the other, the
British, they resurfaced in the 20th century as jamaati Islami in India and then Pakistan, an anti-
nationalist and illiberal movement led by Abul Ala Maududi, and the Wahhabi-Saud alliance.
The latter succeeded in establishing the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia in 1932. Facing challenges
successively from pan-Arab nationalism and revolutionary Shiism, the Kingdom launched a pro-
gram of proselytizing Sunni Islam, a policy that strengthened political Islam and Sunni sectarian-
ism (Ahmad 1967; Dekmejian 1994; Okruhlik 2002; Moaddel 2006). Adding to the diversity of
fundamentalism—but exhibiting similar literalist, exclusivist, intolerant orientations—was the
Society of the Muslim Brothers established in Egypt in 1928. For its founder Hasan al-Banna
(1906–1949),“Islam is a faith and a ritual, a nation…and a nationality, a religion and a state, spirit
and deed, holy text and sword” (Mitchell 1969: 232). His followers were mobilized to repel what
they considered an assault on Islam by secular intellectuals and Christian missionaries (al-Banna
1978).
Among the Shia, Fedayeen-e Islam, formed in 1944, was the first expression of fundamental-
ism, which called for a strict application of the sharia: prohibitions of alcohol, films, gambling,
and wearing of foreign clothing; enforcement of amputation of hands of thieves and veiling for
women; eliminating non-Islamic subjects from school curricula; restricting the activities of reli-
gious minorities (Kazemi 2012). Another was the Hojjatieh Society, formed in 1953 to combat
the spread of the Bahai faith (Sadri 2012). After the Iranian Revolution, the fundamentalists
were closely associated with the belief in clerical absolutism. Similar to the Saudis, the Islamic
regime launched a large-scale program of proselytizing Shi’ism abroad, particularly in Bahrain,
Iraq, Lebanon, and Yemen, where there was a sizable Shia population. It was most successful in
Lebanon, where it established the Hezbollah, which grew to become a most-powerful religious
and military organization in the country.

The sectarian system

Considerable historical and anecdotal evidence shows how fundamentalism, liberal nationalism,
and foreign interventions affected sectarianism in Lebanon, where 17 confessions are officially
recognized. Each has its own family and religious courts, the major confessions being Maronite,
Greek Catholic, and Orthodox Christians, and Shia, Sunni, and Druze Muslims. Constitutionally,
the presidency goes to the Maronites, premiership to the Sunnis, speaker of the parliament to the
Shia, and the deputy prime minister and the deputy speaker of the parliament to the Orthodox
Christians. The parliamentary seats are equally divided between Christians and Muslims, pro-
portionally between the 17 denominations.
Since the 18th century, four major changes have occurred in the pattern of confessional rela-
tions: (a) the solidification of the Druze-led Maronite–Druze alliance at the expense of the Shia
in the 18th century, (b) the decline of the Druze and the rise of the Maronites in the second
half of the 19th century, (c) the rise of the Sunnis at the expense of the Maronites in the post-
1975–1990 civil war period, and (d) the rise of the Shia and the relative decline of the Sunnis in
the late 20th century. Associated with this cyclical pattern of historical change were changes in

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regional power relations; the rise of Maronite Christians in the 19th century was linked to the
decline of the Ottomans and the rise of the French; the decline of the Maronites and the rise
of the Sunnis in the post-World-War-II period to the decline of the French influence, and the
outbreak of Sunni–Shia rivalries to the decline of Western influence and reassertion of Muslim
power in the late 20th century. In contrast to the unified Ottoman hegemony, this new Muslim
power rested on Iran–Saudi rivalries, which in Lebanon was reflected in the Saudis supporting
the Sunnis, while the Iranian regime supported the Shia (Hitti 1966; Zamir 1978; Moosa 1986;
Salibi 1988; Spagnolo 1977; Phares 1995; Nassar 1995; Yapp 1996; Makdisi 2000; Firo 2003;
Cleveland and Bunton 2009; Weiss 2009; Agoston and Masters 2009; Winter 2010; Abisaab and
Abisaab 2014).
Each cycle of change came as a result of armed confrontations between warring confes-
sions. The most gruesome were the civil wars of 1860 and 1975–1990, during which tens of
thousands of lives were lost and extensive properties destroyed, conjuring up the image of the
animality and wrathfulness of human nature that Ibn Khaldun (1967) described in analyzing
dynastic change in historical Islam. Elite rivalries, economic interests, and foreign interventions
were also important in either heightening sectarianism or contributing to intra-confessional dis-
cord (Salibi 1988; Phares, 1995; Makdisi 2000). Christians were divided between landed interests
and the Church that pushed for Greater Lebanon, on the one hand, and those who were happy
with smaller Lebanon where they enjoyed the absolute majority, on the other. Christian disu-
nity also contributed to the formation of a Muslim–Christian alliance that defeated Christian
nationalists in the 1943 elections (Phares 1995; Entelis 1979). In the midst of the civil war, there
were instances of devastating in-group clashes between armed Maronites in 1978 and 1980
(Phares 1995) and Shia Amal and Hezbollah in 1988–1989 (Norton 2007). Recently, the Sunnis
were divided between those supporting moderate politics and those adhering to fundamental-
ism, as were the Maronites who opted to ally with the Hezbollah and those who coalesced with
the Sunnis (Fattah 2007).

Explaining sectarian solidarity

Social scientists widely agree that ethnicity matters and have examined the link between ethnic
relations and such phenomena as “violence, democratic stability, institutional design, economic
growth, individual well-being, and so on” (Chandra 2006: 398). Many of these studies, however,
have been criticized for mismatching the classification and definition of ethnicity and for fail-
ure to show the importance of ethnicity “in explaining most outcomes” (Chandra 2006: 397),
including the link between ethnic identity and politics (Lee 2008).We argue that a key explana-
tory problem in the study of ethnic politics is inadequate attention paid to the phenomenon of
ethnic solidarity.
In explaining the relations of ethnicity with varied political outcomes, for example, many
consider ethnic diversity as a key concept (Morrison and Stevenson 1972; Barrows 1976),
but this diversity is measured almost exclusively in terms of such objective criteria as ethnic
fractionalization (Taylor and Jodice 1972; Reynal-Querol 2002; Fearon 2003; Campos and
Kuzeyev 2007), “ethnic dominance” (Collier 2001), “civil-war feasibility” (Collier et al. 2009),
the size of the largest ethnic or minority group, the number of ethnic groups (Ellingsen
2000), and the distance between languages as a measure of cultural distance (Fearon 2003).
Even Wimmer et al. (2009), who have gone beyond the ethnic-diversity thesis, still focus on
structural arrangements (i.e., states characterized by certain ethnopolitical configurations of
power) in explaining ethnic violence. The implicit assumption is that variation in the struc-
ture of ethnic diversity or ethnopolitical configurations reflects varying degrees of ethnic

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solidarity. Without this assumption, it would be hard to explain why members of an ethnic
group opt to participate in violence against another or the ruling regime. Sectarian solidar-
ity is thus presumed either as given—individuals act for ethnic goals where certain structural
conditions prevail—or as a derivative property of the structure of ethnic relations of the
countries experiencing conflict.
The scholars who theorized about ethnic solidarity, however, tend to conceptualize this
solidarity at the group level: as the strength of ethnic norms (Geertz 1973), kinship ties and
genetic relatedness (van den Berghe 1978), a common language or a set of shared symbols
that would facilitate in-group communication (Gellner 1964), the extent to which members
of an ethnic group are visible to one another and their political representatives (Chandra
2006) and the nature of the historical event commonly experienced by the members of an
ethnic group (Anderson 1983; Brass 1991; Eriksen 1993; Eller and Coughlan 1993). This
conceptualization may be useful for a comparative analysis across groups. At the same time,
the emphasis on such group properties may reinforce what Brubaker (2002: 164) criticizes as
the tendency to treat ethnicity “as if they were internally homogeneous, externally bounded
groups, even unitary collective actors.” To overcome this weakness and allow for groupness
(Brubaker et al. 2004) or group consciousness (Lee 2008), we conceptualize ethnic solidar-
ity on the micro-level. A micro-analytic approach is important because it not only allows
for variability in ethnic solidarity across groups and through time but also makes it pos-
sible to assess this variability in terms of individuals’ subjective judgment and ideological
­orientations.

Ideology, religious fundamentalism, and sectarianism

The historical changes in sectarian power relations were linked to such changes in ideological
relations as liberal nationalism, pan-Arab nationalism, and fundamentalism between the nine-
teenth and late twentieth centuries.

The Maronite Christians and liberal nationalism

The outbreak of the Maronite–Druze conflict in 1860 and the subsequent rise of the Maronites
paralleled the rise of liberal nationalism. Resting on the principles of the equality of all reli-
gions, the right of a people to a political community, the organization of such a community
in nationalist terms rather than religion, and a conception of history that went far beyond the
Islamic period, liberal nationalism united Christian and Muslim Arabs in a struggle against the
Ottomans’ authoritarian rule. By relaxing the norms of religious inequality hitherto practiced
under their rule, the Ottomans also contributed to the rise of this vision.The Tanzimat instituted
in 1837–1876, including the 1839 Hatt-i Sherif (Noble Rescript) of Gülhane, recognized the
right to life, property, and honor, and the equality of all religious groups before the law and the
1856 Hatt-i Humayun (Imperial Rescript) guaranteed the right of non-Muslims to serve in the
army.These and the 1870 Mejelle (civil code) changed the very concept of Ottoman society and
challenged Muslim supremacy (Lapidus 2002; Ma’oz 1968).
Setting the stage for the rise of liberal ideology and Maronite political supremacy were such
large-scale historical processes as the incorporation of the Ottoman Empire into the world
economy, the development of capitalism, changes in class relations, the interventions of the
European powers into Middle Eastern affairs, the diffusion of modern culture into the region,
the expansion of modern education, and the rise of the educated elite who were the primary
producers and consumers of modern ideas. One consequence of these changes was the accumu-

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lation of wealth by the Christian community. In Mount Lebanon in 1914, Christians enjoyed
a numerical majority, comprising 80% of Mount Lebanon’s estimated population of 400,000,
while the rest were Muslims. Wealth and demography brought resources and power to the
Christian community (Issawi 1966; Petran 1972;Yapp 1996).

Pan-Arab Nationalism and the rise of Sunni power

The liberal idea of the equality of all political voices was one of the key demands of the diverse
Lebanese groups that opposed the Ottomans. Nonetheless, the historical process that inspired
the drive toward equality also created the sectarian barriers that blocked its realization. Some
of the forerunners of this movement were among the same Christians who erected the sectar-
ian system. However, the Maronites managed to dominate politics because they were at the
forefront of the struggle against foreign rule; their political supremacy and the movement for
independence went hand in hand. But with the rise of pan-Arab nationalism after World War
II, there was a growing perception that these Maronites were too cozy with the Western pow-
ers and Israel. During the civil war, those who were fighting the Christians probably did not
view them as fellow Lebanese so much as collaborators with the “imperialists” and “Zionist
enemy”—a view that was advocated by Palestinians and the former Soviet Union. This view
was also supported by the Sunnis, who felt that they were being marginalized as a result of the
1982 Israeli invasion of Lebanon (Traboulsi 2007).
Pan-Arab nationalism, coming from both Egypt and Syria, played a significant role in galva-
nizing support for the Sunni contention for power, leading to the outbreak of the devastating
1975–1990 conflict. The 1989 Taif Accord ended the civil war, produced the Second Republic,
and reduced the power of the Maronite-controlled presidency in favor of the Sunni-controlled
Cabinet and premiership (Norton 1991; Fakhoury 2009).

Religious fundamentalism and the rise of Shia power

In the last decade of the 20th century, the fourth major shift in inter-confessional relations tran-
spired—the rise of Shia power. From the solidification of the Druze–Maronite alliance in the
18th century, to the decline of the Druze and the rise of the Maronites in the late nineteenth,
to the relative decline of the Maronites and the rise of the Sunnis in the twentieth, and finally
to the relative decline of the Sunnis and the rise of the Shia, Lebanon appeared to have experi-
enced a full rotation in the cycle of confessional power relations.
The Shia power was far below the level commensurate with their numerical superiority, hav-
ing limited access to the positions of leadership and a proper share of parliamentary representa-
tion.The size of the Sunni ruling elite was much larger than the Shia, and even the much smaller
Druze had a representation larger than their share in the population (Saseen 1990). The Shia
weakness was partly a consequence of their political fragmentation between the Baathists, the
Communists, and the Nasserites. In 1974, Shi’i cleric Imam Musa Sadr founded the Movement
of the Dispossessed. As a man of peace, Sadr established a political forum to communicate
his community’s concerns to the state. He also tried to build dialog between Muslims and
Christians and to promote a unity government (Ajami 1986). The Shia had good reasons to be
supportive of peace; the civil war was harmful to their daily lives.
The intensification of the civil war, on the one hand, and the disappearance of Imam Musa
Sadr in Libya in 1978, on the other, appeared to have promoted the militant idea of fighting
foreign intrusion and defending the Shia community. The turn to militancy was reinforced by
the Iranian Revolution, which had replaced the pro-Israeli Shah with the staunchly anti-Zionist

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Khomeini, who was too eager to provide logistical and financial supports to his followers among
the Lebanese Shia. With his assistance, Hezbollah was born in the early 1980s and began to
launch guerrilla attacks against the Israeli forces. These attacks were effective enough to force
Israeli troops out of southern Lebanon in 2000, ending 22 years of military occupation and
enhancing Hezbollah’s prestige in the region.

Assessing sectarianism among Lebanese: data and methods

These examples show the significance of ideology in shaping confessional solidarity. The avail-
ability of survey data makes it possible to evaluate this relationship among Lebanese. The data
is from a survey of a nationally representative sample of 3,039 adults (aged 18+). The face-to-
face interviews, conducted in the respondents’ residences in Lebanon in 2008, took about 50
minutes to complete (86% response rate) and was carried out by the International Center for
Organizational Development, a non-profit organization based in Beirut, Lebanon.

The variables of the study and measurement

The dependent variable: sectarian solidarity

The construct is conceptualized as inter-group prejudice, whereby individuals display more

favorable attitudes toward the members of their own group than they do toward other groups.
Sectarian individuals are those who give a greater preference to their own confession than they
do to their nationality: “do you strongly agree (0), agree (1), disagree (2), or strongly disagree
(3) that Lebanon will be a better place if people treat one another as Lebanese rather than on
the basis of their confession.” Sectarian individuals also express greater trust in the members of
their own confession than they do in the members of other confessions.The difference between
intra- and inter-confessional trust is another indicator of sectarian solidarity: “could you tell
me how much trust, in general, you have in the following groups? Is it a great deal of trust (4),
some trust (3), not very much trust (2), or none at all (1) in (a) Shia, (b) Sunnis, (c) Druze, (d)
Maronites, (e) Catholics, or (f) Orthodox?”

Trust differential for individual i in confession j1 (j varies between 1 and 6) = Trust in

his/her confessionj1 − average (trust in confessionj2, confessionj3, confessionj4, confessionj5,
and confessionj6)

The average of the two measures makes an index of sectarian solidarity, reflecting a greater pref-
erence for one’s confession than other confessions or one’s nation.

Independent variables: fundamentalism, liberal

nationalism, and foreign patron intervention
Fundamentalism is measured by four questions: “do you strongly agree (4), agree (3), disagree
(2), or strongly disagree (1) that:
I. Only good Muslims/Christians will go to heaven; non-Muslims/non-Christians will not,
no matter how good they are.
II. The religion of Islam/Christianity is closer to God than other religions.
III. Non-Muslim/non-Christian religions have a lot of weird beliefs and pagan ways.
IV. Whenever there is a conflict between science and religion, religion is probably right.
V. Islam/Christianity should be the only religion taught in our public schools.”

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These five items make a single fundamentalism factor (Eigenvalue = 2.25, Cronbach’s

alpha = 0.69). For a better description, we have used the average of the five indicators in the
analysis. This index is constructed if data on at least three of the five indicators were available.
To control the effect of religiously, a religiosity index is constructed as the average of two
variables: “(a) church or mosque attendance: apart from funerals, about how often do you go to
a mosque (church [for Christian respondents]) these days: more than once a week (5), once a
week (4), once a month (3), only on special holy days (2), once a year (1), or rarely? (b) prayer:
how often do you pray; five times a day (5), every day (4), once or twice a week (3), once or
twice a month (2), or never (1)?”
The liberal nationalism index is constructed by averaging indices of gender equality, secular
politics, secular politicians, and national identity. The gender-equality index is the average of three
questions: “do you strongly agree (1), agree (2), disagree (3), or strongly disagree (4) that (i) a
wife must always obey her husband, (ii) men make better political leaders, and (iii) when jobs are
scarce, men should have more rights to a job than women?” The secular-politician index averages
four indicators: “do you strongly agree (1), agree (2), neither agree or disagree (3), disagree (4),
or strongly disagree (5) that (i) politicians who do not believe in God are unfit to work for gov-
ernment in high offices; (ii) it would be better for Lebanon if more people with strong religious
beliefs held public office; (iii) and religious leaders should not interfere in politics?”The answers
to the third item were recoded so that higher values indicate a stronger agreement that religious
leaders should not interfere in politics.The fourth indicator asks respondents whether they con-
sider it very important (1), important (2), somewhat important (3), least important (4), or not
at all important (5) for a good government to implement only the sharia law or only the laws
inspired by Christian values.The secular-politics index averages responses to two questions: “(a) do
you strongly agree (4), agree (3), disagree (2), or strongly disagree (1) that Lebanon would be a
better place if religion and politics were separated, and (b) would it be very good (1), fairly good
(2), fairly bad (3), or very bad (4) for Lebanon to have a religious government where religious
authorities have absolute power.”
National identity. To measure identity, respondents were asked, “which of the following best
describes you: above all, I am a Lebanese (1), above all, I am a Muslim (Christian [for Christian
respondent]) (2), Above all, I am an Arab (3), or other (4)?” We created a dummy variable—
national identity—where (1) is for those who said they were Lebanese, above all, and (0) for
those who said Christian or Muslim, above all.
We constructed a liberal nationalism index by averaging these four indices (exploratory fac-
tor analysis shows that the four indices make a factor with an Eigenvalue of 1.90 and Cronbach’s
reliability alpha of 0.6). In order to retain as many cases as possible, this index is constructed
given that valid data on at least three of these four measures were available.
Foreign patron intervention. Scholars of Lebanon have linked sectarianism to foreign interven-
tion (Salibi 1988; Makdisi 2000). On the micro-level, we posit that when such interventions are
conducted in support of one confession against others, it tips the balance of forces in favour of
that confession, enhancing its capacity to extract concessions from its rivals. This in turn con-
tributes to boosting master-client relationships between the foreign country and the patronized
confession, inter-confessional mistrust, and sectarian solidarity. Foreign interventions, however,
mean different things to different religious confessions.
Given that Lebanese Shia are supported by Iran and Syria, Sunnis by Saudi Arabia, Christians
by France and the US, and the Druze sometimes relied on Iran and Syria, and sometimes on
Saudi Arabia, we constructed a series of survey questions that tap into how the respondents
from each confession view the role of these countries in Lebanon: “Some people believe that
Lebanon is experiencing considerable political problems and violence nowadays, and some of

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these problems are caused by foreign countries. In your opinion, how do you rate the role of
the following countries in affecting these conditions in Lebanon? One means very negative
and 5 means very positive: Iran, Syria, Saudi Arabia, U.S., and France.” We have constructed a
new variable that reflects the attitudes of the members of each of the confessions toward their
respective patrons such that for the Shia, it indicates variation in attitudes toward Iran or Syria,
for the Sunnis toward Saudi Arabia, for the Druze toward Iran, Syria, or Saudi Arabia, and for
Christians toward the US or France:

Foreign patron intervention = mean rating of Iran and Syria’s role if respondents are
Shia; rating of Saudi’s roles, if Sunnis; mean rating of Iran, Syria, and Saudi’s roles, if
Druze; mean rating of US and France’s role, if Christians

Control Variables

To remove the spurious effect of other variables on sectarianism, we statistically control for vari-
ables that may correlate with both the independent and dependent variables and thus confound
the results. These are as follows.
Trust in people of other nations or religion. Social scientists widely agree that trust facilitates social
interactions in different settings—family, business, religion, and politics. Trust is said to reduce
transaction costs, contribute to economic growth, help to solve collective-action problems, pro-
mote an inclusive society, foster societal happiness and a general feeling of well-being, facilitate
civic engagement, and create better government (La Porta et al. 1997, McAllister 1995; Freitag
and Bühlmann 2009;You, 2012). We created an index by averaging two interrelated measures of
respondents’ levels of trust in (a) people of another religion and (b) people of another national-
ity. They were asked whether they completely (4), somewhat (3), not very much (2), or not at
all trust (1) these people.
Xenophobia. Intolerance of or fear of outsiders contributes to sectarian solidarity. A composite
measure is constructed.The first measures the preference of having members of one’s confession
as neighbors and the mean preferences of having members of the other confessions as neighbors:

For individual i in confession j1 (j varies between 1 and 4) = Preference for members

of his/her confession as a neighbor − mean preferences in having members of other
confessions (j2, j3, j4) as a neighbor.

The other measure is based on whether respondents would like to have people from other
countries as neighbors: “On this list are various groups of people. Could you please sort out
any that you would like (1) or not like (2) to have as neighbors: French, Saudis, Jews, Iranians,
Syrians, Palestinians, Americans?” Xenophobia is the average of the two composite measures.
Engagement in oppositional politics. Engagement in political protest may undermine sectarian-
ism.We propose that those who engage in such protest tend to value self-reliance and stress per-
sonal efforts in realizing their goals (McAdam 1982; Schwartz 1973; Pierce and Converse 1989).
To construct a measure of oppositional activities, respondents were asked whether they have
done any of the following things (3), might do it (2), or would never under any circumstances
do it (1): (a) signing a petition, (b) joining in boycotts, and (c) attending peaceful demonstrations.
These three items make a factor with an Eigenvalue of 2.16 and Cronbach’s reliability alpha of
0.83. The average of these items is used in the analysis.
Demographics and confessions. First and foremost, confessional identity relates to sectarian
solidarity. Next, it has been argued that the sectarian system works to the benefit of the

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dominant classes and powerful families of the elite who are at the helm of confession-
based patrimonial political systems (Makdisi 2000; Cleveland and Bunton 2009). One’s
class position, social mobility, or access to a better-paying job would depend on one’s
connections in confessional hierarchy. Low socioeconomic status may also be sectarian
prone. People with low education are less likely to overcome the cognitive barriers to
enlightenment (Dewey 2004 [2016]; Barber 1984) and thus less capable of developing or
adopting an alternative non-sectarian vision of social order, and that the economic insecu-
rity associated with low-paying jobs is linked to prejudice toward members of outgroups
(Burns and Gimpel 2000).
We constructed a socioeconomic status index as an average of self-assigned class member-
ship, income, and education. The first is measured by respondents’ self-rating themselves as
members of the upper class (5), the upper-middle class (4), the lower-middle class (3), the
working class (2), or the lower class (1). Income is measured in terms of annual household
income coded in deciles with (1) as the lowest and (10) the highest. Education consisted of
nine categories, ranging from no formal education (1) to college education (9). Since social
class includes five categories, to constructing a single index, income and education variables
are recoded into five categories. For income: 1 = 1 + 2, 2 = 3 + 4, 3 = 5 + 6, 4 = 7 + 8,
and 5 = 9 + 10. For education: 1 = no formal education to incomplete primary school,
2 = complete primary to incomplete secondary and vocational, 3 = complete secondary and
vocational to university preparatory, 4 = complete secondary to some college, and 5 = col-
lege degree.
To assess the proposed U-shaped relationship between socioeconomic status and sectarian-
ism, a square of this index in a deviation unit is included in the analysis. The respondents’ age
is a linear variable. Gender is coded as 1 for male and 0 for female. To assess the effect of living
in Beirut, a dummy variable is created for the respondents’ residence, where it is coded as 1 for
Beirut and 0 otherwise. Finally, in order to assess variation in sectarianism by confession, a series
of dummy variables are constructed, and Greek Catholics, whose levels of sectarianism are low-
est among all the six groups are used as the reference category.

Hypotheses

In sum, we propose that sectarian solidarity is linked, among the independent variables:

I. Positively to fundamentalism,
II. Negatively to liberal nationalism, and
III. Positively to attitudes toward foreign patron intervention; and among the control variables:
IV. Positively to confessional identity,
V. Negatively to trust in people of other religions or nations,
VI. Positively to xenophobia,
VII. Negatively to political engagement,
VIII. Positively to residing in Beirut, and
IX. In a U-shape relationship to socioeconomic status.

The analysis presented below should be considered with the caveat that with cross-sectional
data, it may not be possible to advance a causal explanation. We do not rule out reciprocal rela-
tionships between some of the independent variables and sectarianism or that, in some cases,
causality runs in the opposite of the directions presented in this chapter. We thus consider the
hypothesized relationships between the independent variables and sectarianism as only one
interpretation of the empirical pattern that the data support.

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Analysis and findings

Table 20.1 shows the descriptive statistics for sectarianism index and other variables.
According to the correlation matrix shown in Table 20.2, all the independent variables have
significant correlation coefficients with the sectarianism index and are in the expected direc-
tion. The sectarianism index is positively correlated with the fundamentalism index (r = 0.378),
religiosity (r = 0.115), and foreign patron intervention (r = 0.206) and negatively with liberal
nationalism index (r = −0.369). With control variables, it is negatively linked to the index of
trust in other religions or nations (r = −0.203), political engagement (r = −0.093), and socioeco-
nomic status (r = −0.087), and positively with xenophobia (r = 0.194).Those who live in Beirut
tend to be more sectarian than those living in the rest of the country (r = 0.281). Furthermore,
reinforcing the internal consistency of the measures—the extent to which they are consistently
associated in predictable ways with other variables—is that the indices of liberal nationalism and
fundamentalism, for example, are negatively correlated (r = −0.450) and have opposite relation-
ships with other variables: religiosity (r = −0.449 vs. 0.195), the index of trust in other religions
or nations (r = 0.161 vs. −0.200), xenophobia (r = −0.297 vs. 0.101), and foreign patron inter-
vention (r = −0.287 vs. 0.291), respectively.
To evaluate the hypotheses, the parameters of a regression model are estimated, and the
results are reported in Table 20.3. The analysis of variance shows a strong main effect of all the
independent variables on sectarianism, with an F value of 74.09 and adjusted r2 of 0.34, indicat-
ing that 34% of the variation in the sectarianism index is explained by these variables.

Table 20.1 Descriptive statistics for the sectarianism index and other variables

Dependent variable: sectarianism index by confessions Independent variables: predictors of sectarianism (List-wise:
N = 2,245)

  N Min Max Mean SD

Dependent variable: sectarianism index
Shia 764 −1.00 3.00 0.915 0.729
Sunni 619 −1.10 2.20 0.579 0.476
Druze 136 −0.30 2.60 0.629 0.513
Maronite 533 −0.50 1.80 0.438 0.425
Orthodox 271 −0.60 1.80 0.427 0.532
Greek Catholic 140 −0.50 1.60 0.308 0.397
Sectarian index: all confessions 2,463 −1.10 3.00 0.623 0.599
Independent variables:
Fundamentalism index 2,851 1.00 4.00 2.520 0.606
Religiosity index 3,032 1.00 5.00 3.076 1.313
Liberalism index 2,981 .50 4.00 2.329 0.506
Foreign patron intervention 2,965 1.00 5.00 2.848 1.382
Control variables
Trust in other religions or nations 3,000 1.00 4.00 2.325 0.828
Xenophobia 2,900 0.00 1.50 .832 0.278
Political engagement 3,000 1.00 3.00 2.063 0.670
Socioeconomic status 3,016 1.00 5.00 3.13 0.831
Male 3,038 0.00 1.00 .558 0.497
Age 3,039 18.0 80.0 33.00 12.976

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 Table 20.2 Correlation coefficients between sectarianism index and its predictors

(List-wise: N = 2,245)

Trust in other religions/nations −0.203c

Xenophobia 0.194c −0.238c
Liberalism index −0.369c 0.161c −0.297c
Fundamentalism index 0.378c −0.200c 0.101c −0.450
Religiosity index 0.115c −0.089c 0.213c −0.449c 0.195c

295
Foreign patron 0.206c −0.047a 0.060b −0.287c 0.291c 0.128c
Political engagement −0.093c 0.141c −0.005 0.053a 0.013 0.083c 0.091c
Male 0.020 −0.001 −0.036 −0.128c 0.025 −0.023 0.006 0.082c
Age −0.021 0.009 0.080c −0.149c 0.013 0.213c 0.002 −0.069a 0.043a
Socioeconomic status −0.087b 0.107c −0.084b 0.215c −0.181c −0.075b −0.043a 0.089 −0.028 −0.190b
Beirut resident 0.281c .019 −0.138c –012 0.392c −0.132c 0.260 c 0.069b 0.034 0.012 0.051a
Sectarianism and fundamentalism in Lebanon

a
P < 0.05; bP < 0.01; c P < 0.001
 M. Moaddel, J. Kors, and J. Gärde

Table 20.3 Predictors of sectarianism

Predictors Standardized coefficients

Independent variables
Fundamentalism index 0.088a
Religiosity index −0.001
Liberalism index −0.247a
Foreign patrons 0.049b
Control variables
Perception and political Engagement
  Trust in other religions or nations −0.091a
 Xenophobia 0.141a
  Political engagement −0.075a
Confession
 Maronite 0.051
 Orthodox 0.049
 Shia 0.298a
 Sunni −0.036
 Druze 0.055b
Demographics
  Socioeconomic status index (SES) 0.038b
  (SES – Mean) 2 0.047c
 Male −0.002
 Age −0.050c
 Beirut 0.272a
Fѵ1,ѵ2 74.09a
Degree of freedom for Fѵ1,ѵ2 16,2228
N 2,244
R2 0.35
Adjusted R2 0.34

P < 0.01; bP < 0.001; cP < 0.05

a

Confessions and sectarian solidarity. As shown in Table 20.1, the sectarianism index varies con-
siderably across the confessions. The Shia with a mean index value of 0.915 are most sectarian,
and Greek Catholics with a mean index value of 0.308, the least sectarian. The analysis of vari-
ance across the six religious confessions shows a strong main effect of confession on sectarianism
(F5,2457 = 69.06 at P < 0.0001). The Scheffé test of multiple comparisons of the means show that
the Shia are significantly more sectarian than all the other confessions (P < 0.0001); there is
no significant difference between the Sunnis and the Druze, but both are more sectarian than
the three Christian confessions (P < 0.05), and there is no significant difference in sectarianism
between the Maronites, the Orthodox, and the Greek Catholics. From high to low sectarianism,
our findings thus show that:

Shia > Druze and Sunnis > Maronites, Orthodox, Greek Catholics

The much higher level of sectarian solidarity among the Shia may indicate a heightened Shia
pride at Hezbollah’s success in pushing Israelis out of southern Lebanon, which had increased the
popularity and prestige of the militant group among anti-Israeli Arabs in the country and beyond.

296
 Sectarianism and fundamentalism in Lebanon

0.40

0.35 0.35

0.30
0.29

0.25 0.25 0.26

0.23
0.20 0.20
0.18 0.19
0.16
0.15 0.15
0.14 0.14
0.13
0.12 0.11 0.11 0.11
0.10

0.05

0.00
1.00 1.33 1.50 1.67 2.00 2.33 2.50 2.67 3.00 3.33 3.50 3.67 4.00 4.33 4.50 4.67 5.00

Figure 20.1 The Relations of Socioeconomic Status with Sectarianism

Independent variables. All the independent variables are significantly linked to sectarianism and
in the expected direction. Fundamentalism and attitude toward foreign patron intervention are
positively, but liberal nationalism is negatively connected to sectarianism (β = 0.088, 0.049, and
−0.247, respectively).
Control variables. The index of trust in other religions or nations is negatively linked
(β = −0.091), but xenophobia is positively linked (β = 0.149) to sectarianism. These findings
show that inter-communal trust causes a decline in sectarian solidarity, while the fear of outsid-
ers enhances this solidarity.
Demographics. The socioeconomic status index and its mean square deviation are both sig-
nificantly linked to the sectarianism index (β = 0.038 and 0.047, respectively). These estimates
support a U-shaped relationship between the socioeconomic status index and sectarianism. As
shown in Figure 20.1, people with lower socioeconomic status are more sectarian than those
who fall around the middle of the distribution. The estimated sectarianism index drops from
0.25 to 0.11 as the socioeconomic status (SES) index score increases from 1 to 3 (mean SES
score). People of higher socioeconomic status are even more strongly sectarian: an increase in
the SES index from 3.00 to 5.00 is linked to an increase in the sectarianism index from 0.11
to 0.35.
Gender has no significant effect, but age is negatively linked to sectarianism (β = −0.050),
indicating that younger individuals are more sectarian. We speculate that the older Lebanese,
having gone through the horrific episodes of the 1975–1990 civil war, might have developed a
deeper appreciation of the significance of inter-confessional harmony for peace. Finally, people
residing in Beirut are significantly more sectarian than the rest of the population (β = 0.272),
and political engagement is negatively connected to the sectarianism (β = −0.075).

Conclusions
We began this chapter by discussing the significance of religious fundamentalism in promot-
ing attitudes that are unfavorable to secular politics, gender equality, and generally liberal val-
ues. We also addressed the relations of different ideological discourses with the movements for

297
 M. Moaddel, J. Kors, and J. Gärde

national sovereignty, on the one hand, and with sectarian politics and the outbreak of a historical
sequence of inter-confessional conflicts that brought into relief the current sectarian system in
Lebanon, on the other.
In trying to explain sectarian solidarity among Lebanese, however, we noted the obscurity
of the status of ethnic solidarity in the literature on ethnic politics. Ethnic solidarity was either
presumed as given or conceptualized in terms of such group properties as group norms, kin-
ship ties, common language, shared symbols, ethnic visibility, or a collective experience of major
historical events. We argued that an over-emphasis on group properties might face the poten-
tial pitfall of “groupism,” where groups are thought of as unitary actors with rigid boundaries
(Brubaker 2009: 28). To allow for sectarian solidarity to vary within groups, we formulated a
micro conception of the term as an individual preferential treatment of his/her own group vis-
à-vis other groups and the nation as a whole. Because this preferential treatment varies across
individuals, our conceptualization made it possible to link it to a host of sociological and social
psychological factors operating at the micro-level.
Drawing on contemporary history, we focused on religious fundamentalism, liberal nation-
alism, and foreign patron intervention to develop measures of these constructs and assess their
relationship with sectarian solidarity. As our analysis showed, religious fundamentalism and
favorable attitudes toward the intervention of foreign patrons—which for the Shia were Iran
and Syria; for the Sunni, Saudi Arabia; for the Druze, a combination of both; and for Christians,
France and the US—are both significantly linked to sectarianism. Liberal nationalism, on the
other hand, was negatively connected to sectarian solidarity.
In addition, there were other factors that were connected to sectarian solidarity. Some of
these factors appeared to have been operative within the Lebanese context. The first and fore-
most was the link between confessional identity and sectarian solidarity among Lebanese. This
identity may not necessarily prompt individuals to be ethnically sectarian. However, in the
context where it is associated with historical memories of sectarian warfare and the presence
of a sectarian political system, identity may be linked to sectarianism. This context is significant
because we may not expect Protestants or Catholics in the US, for example, to exhibit sectarian
solidarity, but we may expect otherwise in Northern Ireland, where there have been recurrent
conflicts between the followers of the two religious sects in recent memory. Besides confessional
identity, socioeconomic status, residing in Beirut, and engagement in oppositional politics were
linked to sectarian solidarity. Again, these factors’ connections to sectarianism are outcomes of
Lebanon’s sectarian history. That is, for different reasons, the members of the lower and upper
classes were more sectarian than the middle classes. We reasoned that people of lower socio-
economic status were less likely to overcome the cognitive barriers to enlightenment because
of low education and more likely to experience economic insecurity. Therefore, they tend to
develop a stronger sectarian outlook. On the other hand, since the sectarian system was believed
to have benefited the rich and the powerful, there was the positive effect of socioeconomic sta-
tus on sectarian solidarity; the capital city has been the scene of major inter-confessional warfare,
therefore residing in Beirut was positively linked to sectarianism. Different confessions had ties
to different foreign governments; therefore, favorable attitudes toward discriminating foreign
patrons were linked to sectarianism. Oppositional political engagements must be indicative of
stronger disapproval of the sectarian system; therefore, they tend to weaken sectarian solidarity.
Under a similar historical context, we expect that identity, socioeconomic status, residence in
the capital city, foreign patrons, and oppositional politics to be connected to sectarian solidarity.
The other factors are drawn from more general sociological and social psychological per-
spectives. We argue that higher feelings of insecurity are associated with a lower socioeconomic
status, the religious centric, exclusivist, and intolerant orientations of fundamentalism, and the

298
 Sectarianism and fundamentalism in Lebanon

anti-otherness and national-chauvinism of xenophobic individuals. We also argue that all the
above are compatible with sectarian solidarity, which is also group-centric and exclusivist. On
the other hand, people who have greater trust in other religions or nations or adhere to liberal
values of gender equality and secular politics are more strongly egalitarians than otherwise.
These people are therefore less sectarian. We propose that these linkages are generalizable to
cases of sectarian solidarity in different national contexts.
Our findings demonstrated the utility of conceptualizing sectarianism as a relational con-
struct that captures a hierarchical and group-centric view of inter-confessional affairs. It is
strengthened or weakened, depending on whether the social domains in which individuals are
involved have correspondingly similar or contrary properties (i.e., hierarchical or egalitarian,
respectively). Thus, the individual immersion in class hierarchy and adherence to a hierarchical
and group-centric view of religious fundamentalism, nation (xenophobia), or country’s foreign
affairs (i.e., favorable attitudes toward foreign patrons) all reinforce sectarianism. Equalitarianism
in these domains, on the other hand, weakens sectarianism. Based on these findings, we sug-
gest that Lebanese would be much less sectarian if the size of the middle class expands, a much
higher proportion of the population more strongly adheres to the liberal values of gender
equality, secular politics, and national identity than they do today, display as much trust in
other religions or nations as they do in their own religion or nation, abandon the religious-
centric, intolerant, exclusivist view of Christian and Islamic fundamentalism, and reject foreign
­interventions.

Note
1 Comments by Julie de Jong and Stuart Karabenick are gratefully acknowledged.

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 21
POLITICS, IDENTITY AND
RELIGION IN TURKEY
From Atatürk to the AKP

Jeffrey Haynes

In the two decades since a general election in 2002, Turkey has had an Islam-influenced gov-
ernment.1 In that election, the Justice and Development Party (Adalet ve Kalkınma Partisi,
abbreviated to AK Parti or AKP) won more than a third of the popular vote and took power.
A subsequent general election in 2007 saw the AKP win again with an improved result: nearly
half (47%) of the votes cast. In the most recent parliamentary elections in 2015, the AKP won
just under half of the seats: 295 out of 600. Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, leader of the AKP, has been
president of the country since 2014.
By 2021, Turkey had been ruled by AKP governments for two decades. Despite the fears of
some,Turkey has not developed into an ‘Islamic state’ like those in Iran, Saudi Arabia, Afghanistan
during Taliban rule (1996–2001), or the large areas of Iraqi territory controlled by Islamic State
between 2014 and 2018. Instead, during the AKP’s rule, Turkey was noted for the ‘moderation’
of its Islam-influenced government, an example of a Muslim-majority country which, the AKP
government claims, seeks to advance secularism, not to progress the position of one religious
group over others (Kandemir, 2020).
This chapter focuses on politics, identity, and religion in Turkey, surveying relevant devel-
opments in the country over a century from 1923 when Kemal Atatürk took control, to the
AKP government in 2021, a regime dominated by President Erdoğan. The aim is to examine
the relationships between politics, identity, and religion in Turkey over time in order to ascer-
tain the ideological roles of Islam, secularism, and political roles of key political actors, both
civilian and military. The armed forces are often described as the guardian of the country’s
secular national identity, a situation that has endured since the founding of the Turkish repub-
lic in 1923. The military’s secular political ideology stems, on the one hand, from the values
and policies of the country’s nationalist founder, Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, and, on the other, it
is informed by the singular insularity and self-selected guardian role of the military. The latter
is regarded as a key political institution long central to the national goal of a secular regime
(Sentek, 2020).
This chapter explains that while Islam is part of the national sense of identity, it is not the
only one: Islam competes with secularism politically. Finally, the chapter identifies a further key
characteristic of Turkish national identity, in addition to Islam and secularism: a pronounced fear
of foreigners, expressed by many Turks.

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 Politics, identity and religion in Turkey

Introduction
The AKP government has been in power since 2002 via reasonably democratic elections. It
claims to be anxious to expand religious freedom for all in Turkey. At the same time, the govern-
ment has sought to ‘de-secularise’ the country in a systematic – yet gradual and initially hesitant
– process in order to increase the public role of Islam. The context of the AKP government’s
policy in this regard is that for the last century, that is, since the founding of the Turkish republic
in 1923 following the demise of the Ottoman empire, successive governments sought to develop
a regime that has at its heart the ‘appropriate’ place of religion in the public realm. This has long
been very contentious and a key political and social issue (Haynes, 2010).
Turkey is a majority-Muslim country, with around 98% of Turks professed Muslims. Most
of them are followers of Sunni Hanafi Islam, overseen by a state agency – the Diyanet – on
behalf of the government (Gozaydin, 2021). Following the establishment of the Turkish republic
in 1923, the goal of the government was secularisation, seen as a key component of a wider
process of modernisation. It was an ideologically informed process. Like several other countries
in the wake of World War I, including Russia and Iran, where revolutionary (Russia) or reform-
ist (Iran) governments sought to kick-start modernisation in order to ‘catch up’ with the West,
Turkey’s government believed that this was the necessary way forward. It required proactively or
aggressively establishing centralised state power and vigorously limiting the public presence and
power of Islam. Like in Iran, Turkey’s post-Ottoman government sought to reform the country
and an essential step in this process, it believed, was to downgrade the public role of religion
(Ozturk, 2018).
For seven decades, that is, until the 1990s, Turkey officially sought to conform to the ideo-
logical approach of Kemalism, the brainchild of Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, Turkey’s first post-
Ottoman ruler. Atatürk was a field marshal and a ‘revolutionary’ statesman, founding ‘father’
of the Republic of Turkey, serving as its first president from 1923 until his death in 1938.
Today, Atatürk has the status almost of a ‘secular saint’ in Turkey. Atatürk believed in aggressive
and speedy secularisation, deeming that religion was redolent of tradition and that in order to
modernise and to ‘catch up’ with fast-industrialising countries in both the West and the East,
it required the forceful removal of religion from the public realm and to substitute it with the
revolutionary ideology of Kemalism (Haynes, 2009).
The coming to power of the AKP government in the early 21st century led to a new approach
to the public role of religion in Turkey. Officially concerned with joining the European Union
(EU) mainly in order to improve the country’s economic position, the AKP government sought
publicly to ‘bend over backwards’ to accommodate European demands for improved human
rights and religious freedom, including for the minority Kurds and for the Alevis, a minority
Islamic sect whose approach to Islam differs from most followers of Islam in Turkey, adherents
of the Hanafi school of Islamic law. Over time, however, Turkey’s chances of joining the EU
declined so that in 2021 there seems tacit acceptance on both sides that it will not happen
(Haynes, 2011, 2012).
In the wake of the apparent failure of the Turkey–EU talks, Turkey sought to position itself
as a strategically important regional power, looking both to East and West, while stressing its
conservative and, to an extent, its Islamic credentials. Over time, the AKP government brought
Sunni Hanafi Islam centrally back into the public realm, while the government retained a very
strong degree of religious control. In other words, the AKP’s attempts at developing a secular
regime were not necessarily accompanied by across-the-board enhanced religious freedoms
for all. Recent reports from international bodies, including Freedom House (2020) and the
United States Commission on International Religious Freedom (2020), indicate that the AKP

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 Jeffrey Haynes

g­ overnment both strongly supports Sunni Hanafi Islam, both financially and ideologically, while
allowing to a limited degree greater religious freedom for some (very tiny) religious minorities:
Jews, Armenians, and Christians – but not for Alevis or Kurds (Kandemir, 2020).
The AKP government’s approach to religious and ethnic minorities is controversial. Alevis
make up approximately 11% of the population (c. 9 million people), although some estimates
are as high as 20 to 25 million (c. 25% of Turkey’s population). They are the second-largest
Islamic entity in Turkey, with followers of Sunni Hanafi Islam the largest. Alevism is regarded
by many Sunni Muslims in Turkey as an aberrant and ‘mystical’ faith, not clearly within (‘main-
stream’ Sunni) Islam. Many Alevis, for their part, have responded to the AKP government with
suspicion, deeming that the government wishes to further official Sunni Hanafi Islam at their
expense. The Kurds are around 18% of Turkey’s population, some 14 million people, and have
fought a long campaign for greater autonomy (Sentek, 2020).
The next section looks in more detail at the political relationships between Islam, the mili-
tary, secularism, and nationalism in Turkey, in order to assess how the AKP ‘secularising’ gov-
ernment’s ideology evolved over time, in opposition to the traditionally dominant secular state
ideology of Kemalism.

Islam, secularism, and nationalism: the military and politics in Turkey

Turkey’s secularist orientations were originally laid down in the 1920s by the founder of the
Turkish republic, Mustafa Kemal Atatürk (1881–1938). Over the next century, Turkey’s political
circumstances consistently reflected two key aspects of elite preference for secularism, focused
on (1) a strongly secularising and centralising state, and (2) the armed forces’ strong political
influence.
Although Turkey first democratised in 1950, the following decades saw regular, often dra-
matic, political intrusions by the military.2 The transition from military rule in 1983 exemplified
the degree to which outgoing military regimes in Turkey consistently set the terms of their
departure from power. Post-1983 constitutional amendments eradicated some legacies of mili-
tary rule, including a ban on political activity by some former politicians and on cooperation
between political parties and some civil society organisations, including various trade unions and
professional organisations. In addition, other constitutional exit guarantees, such as the presi-
dent’s power to block constitutional amendments, automatically expired in 1989. On the other
hand, the progress of civilianisation – and hence democratic progress after 1983 – arguably had
less to do with formal constitutional change than with informal practice and adaptation. The
point is that, despite Turkey’s current status as a ‘partly free’ country in Freedom House (2020)
terminology, implying that the political system is characterised by a relatively mediocre, not a
high degree of democracy, the military still retains relatively high political salience in Turkey,
which may put in question the country’s long-term democratic viability. In sum, the long-term
structural effects on the politics of Kemalism – that is, proactive, even aggressive secularisation,
and consistent military political significance – significantly influenced the country’s political
culture and has made it difficult to develop a consistently and progressively democratic regime.
The roots of the military’s political involvement in contemporary Turkey can be traced back
to before the founding of the Turkish republic, to the time of the Ottoman empire (1293–1922).
Following modern Turkey’s founding, there were decades of often aggressive modernisation and
secularisation, initially led by Atatürk. For 15 years, until his death in 1938, Atatürk aggressively
imposed Western-style civil law in Turkey. The Turkish republic inherited from the Ottoman
empire a strong, centralised, and highly bureaucratic state that Atatürk proceeded to mould to
his own secularist vision. Believing that Turkey’s indigenous religious traditions – including,

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most importantly, Sunni Hanafi Islam – were clear expressions of backwardness, Atatürk believed
that national progress – that is, ‘modernisation’ – could only come about by emulating, absorb-
ing, and reproducing Western – especially ‘European’ – cultural values and replicating the latter’s
political culture and political institutions. This pro-Western ideological and political perspective
was henceforward promulgated in state policies and programmes, defended not only by the
politically powerful armed forces but also by successive civilian governments (Ozturk, 2016).
For decades following the demise of the Ottoman Empire, Turkey’s armed forces enjoyed
almost total control over their own processes of recruitment, training, and promotion, result-
ing in the creation of a specific military culture facilitating the development of a specific role
within Turkish society: the ‘hyper-secular’ defender of Atatürk’s revolution. The armed forces’
institutional autonomy made it impossible to manipulate the military for political purposes from
outside its ranks. In recent years it has demonstrated a profound ability to maintain its cohesion
and organisational integrity – during a period when Turkish society itself has become increas-
ingly fragmented into competing classes, ethnic entities, religious groupings, and ideological
factions. The military’s political clout was demonstrated historically by the fact that the armed
forces could – and did – close down political parties that it believed to be ‘extremist’, that is,
significantly deviating from the secularist path. This included those deemed too religiously ori-
entated, too ideologically radical, or too separatist in orientation, such as the demanding Kurds.
In addition, the military top brass periodically purged the officer corps with the aim of rooting
out those suspected of sympathising with Islamist groups or Kurdish rebels.
During the time of military political dominance, the country’s national political leaders,
inevitably supported by the military, tended to show little concern for the wishes of the national
legislature.3 This resulted in a long-term lack of horizontal accountability between parliament
and national political leaders. Consequently, civilian political leaders on occasion have sought
to make policy by decree – typically following discussion and agreement with senior military
figures. In sum, Turkey’s political culture and the legitimacy of successive regimes was strongly
moulded by the heavily politicised armed forces. As a result, Turkey became at best a limited
democracy, which failed to make clear and sustained democratic progress.
Military governments tried to overhaul the party system by manipulating electoral laws. In
1983, for example, the government introduced a statute proclaiming that a 10% national thresh-
old – and even higher constituency thresholds – was necessary for parties to take seats in parlia-
ment. The hope was that this would lead to the elimination of the most intensely ideological
parties, deemed the most ‘extremist’, and would instead lead to a ‘manageable’ system of two or
three ‘moderate’ parties, reflecting the centre ground of political competition. However, despite
this preference for ‘moderation’, in practice, there continued to be a weakening of the politically
moderate centre-right and centre-left, with a rise in popularity of ideologically orientated par-
ties, including those with strongly nationalist, separatist, and Islamist worldviews. For example,
in the 1995 elections, the Welfare Party (Refah Partisi), then the main Islamic grouping, achieved
21.4% of the vote, the ultra-nationalist Nationalist Action Party (NAP) gained 8.2%, and the
Kurdish nationalist Halkın Demokrasi Partisi (HADEP) managed 4.2%, amounting overall to
34% of the votes cast. According to Özbudun (1996: 124), this result ‘boost[ed] the combined
extremist vote share to one-third and raised the possibility that Turkish democracy [was] facing a
systemic challenge’. It also reflected the fact that some parties, including the Islamist Refah Partisi,
put in much care and attention to grassroots organisation, a strategy which paid off in electoral
success (Haynes, 1998: 141–146; Jenkins, 2008: 141–183).
These were the political circumstances that formed the background to the AKP’s electoral
triumph in 2002. Five years later, in July 2007, the AKP again won an electoral victory: this
time, it was a landslide. Competing with 14 other political parties, the AKP garnered nearly 47%

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of the total votes (in 2002, the AKP had won with just over 34% of the vote). Recep Tayyıp
Erdoğan was re-elected as prime minister, having first achieved that office in 2002. The result
paved the way for the party’s presidential candidate, Abdullah Gül, to win the presidential elec-
tion in August 2007, despite strong objections from both military and civilian secularist opposi-
tion (Freedom House, 2008). Erdoğan led the AKP to another election victory in 2011, before
being elected president in 2014, and re-elected in 2018. As noted earlier, in the most recent
parliamentary elections (2015), the AKP won just under half (49.17%) of the seats: 295 out of
600, cementing its political dominance for another parliamentary term.
There is much debate, both in Turkey and elsewhere, regarding the issue of whether the AKP
is, in fact, an Islamist party, ideologically orientated to the idea of establishing an Islamic state.
Has the AKP overtly courted radical Islamist or even simply mainstream religious sentiment?
Can we point to particular policies which demonstrate its desire to establish an Islamic state?
To consider this issue, it is necessary to examine the evolution of ideology in Turkey, as it will
enable us to delineate whether the AKP’s ‘Islamic’ influence is a fundamental component of its
wider ideological approach to governing or, on the other hand, the Islamic handle is given by
the AKP’s enemies in order to try to discredit the party to show it is deviating from the ideologi-
cal path of secularism set long ago by Atatürk.
It is very difficult, perhaps impossible, to answer the two questions objectively. On the one
hand, it is certainly the case that the AKP government has brought in changes which might
be interpreted as showing that it is ‘Islam-leaning’. On the other hand, many recent politi-
cal developments in Turkey can be interpreted as reflective of a fundamental power struggle
between ‘secularists’ and ‘Islamists’, characterised by controversies surrounding various issues,
including (1) the city government of Ankara AKP, then led by the AKP’s Melih Gokcek, tem-
porarily banned the sale of alcoholic beverages in 2005 in an area of the city where many bars
and restaurants are located. On appeal, however, the ban was lifted4; (2) the presidential elections
in 2007, won by the AKP’s candidate, Abdullah Gül; (3) the first concrete measures to reform
Article 301 of the Turkish penal code – which forbids reference to the genocide of Armenians
in 1914 – from three to two years imprisonment; (4) the AKP government’s decision to no
longer ban headscarves from universities (although initially overturned by the constitutional
court in July 2008, it is now a widely accepted practice in Turkey’s higher education institu-
tions). In addition, in July and October 2008, there was a closure case against the AKP (the
Supreme Court eventually agreed by one vote (6 to 5) not to close the party, although it did
deprive it of a considerable part of its public financing)5 and official charges against a shadowy
group known as Ergenekon,6 as manifestations of the struggle between secularists and the AKP
government (Haynes, 2010). Just as the possible closure of the ruling party would have been a
unique case in Turkish history, the charges filed against numerous personalities believed to wish
to overthrow the present government, including the self-exiled Islamic scholar and preacher
Fethullah Gülen, can also be understood as actions targeting the so-called ‘deep state’, whose
existence was allegedly revealed by the Ergenekon conspiracy and underlined by the Gülen
controversy.
The power struggle between ‘secularists’ and ‘Islamists’ reflects polarisation between the ‘new’
Anatolian middle class (many of whom are regarded as ‘Islamist’ in the sense not only that
their cultural roots are in Islam but also that their religious beliefs are central to their success
in business), strongly supportive of the AKP since its foundation in 2001, and the traditional
Kemalist ‘secularist’ establishment. This latter constituency is mainly represented electorally by
the Republican People’s Party (Turkish: Cumhuriyet Halk Partisi or CHP) and in societal terms
by the military. This polarisation implies that a monolithic image of Turkey is no longer appro-
priate – if it ever was.

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The unresolved question, however, is whether these controversial policies point to a gov-
ernment that is aiming in the long term to Islamise Turkey, or one that is ‘merely’ socially and
culturally conservative and believes it appropriate to pursue policies that are commensurate
with that goal. Public opinion research into recent voter behaviour indicates that a vote for the
AKP does not mean support for Islamism per se. Instead, strong electoral support for the AKP
over time strongly indicates that ‘bread and butter’ issues – for example, the government’s overall
economic performance and especially the availability of jobs – far outweigh in the minds of
most Turkish people religious and ideological issues. As a result, we can conclude that the AKP
is not an Islamist party but a conservative and populist entity that seeks to appeal to the mass of
ordinary Turks on political, economic, and cultural rather than religious grounds (Dagi, 2008).

Turkish national identity and secularist-Islamist relations: the EU issue

Atatürk’s desire to turn Turkey from an Eastern to a Western nation long found expression in
the desire of the country to join the EU. Europe, on the other hand, has consistently shown
significant elite and popular reservations in many regional countries regarding the prospect of
Turkey joining the Union. What of Turks’ views of the EU and, more generally, of the West?
To what extent is their view of the world influenced by a religion-informed nationalism? The
first thing to note is that there is a lack of clarity regarding how Turks, over 90% of whom
are Muslim, view the prospect of joining the EU. A 2007 opinion survey found that ‘negative
views…appear to be growing among Turks with respect to the EU and to Westerners in general.
Such negativity toward the EU is likely associated with disillusionment over Turkey’s stalled bid
to join the union’.The survey also reported that ‘the favorability rating for the EU dropped from
58% in 2004 to 27% in 2007’ (Grim and Wike, 2007). Another poll, from 2009, indicated that
‘around 63 percent of respondents believed Turkey should join the European Union’, while by
2018, fewer than half believed that Turkey should join the EU. Only one in five Turks believed
that European governments wanted their country to join the EU. On the other hand, Europe
is still an attractive destination: nearly two-thirds of Turks would like to travel, study, or work
there. Only 8% believed that relations with the EU were strong, and around two-thirds of Turks
considered that Europeans were most to blame. More than 60% of Turks believed that the
EU–Turkish migration deal of 2016 was bad for Turkey, informed in part by resentment at the
presence of around 3.5 million Syrian refugees (Hoffman, 2018). What Turkish responses might
be overall is an indication that many Turks are not particularly enamoured or trustful of Western
European countries yet recognise that joining the EU would almost certainly improve Turkey’s
economic prospects.
Overall, these findings indicate that Turks both dislike and admire Europe. It may be that
Turkey – politically, culturally, and ideologically – is not too far from the West ideationally, while
admiring some aspects of Western modernity. Why is this the case? One major factor might be
that Turks never experienced Western control, unlike most neighbouring countries. In other
words, suspicion of the EU and of the West more generally is not necessarily due to Turks’
religious, cultural, or civilisational reservations. Apart from umbrage being taken by many Turks
who believe that failure of the accession talks is due mainly to the EU’s prevarication and action,
there is another factor to consider: continuing fallout from 9/11, including the conflicts in Iraq
and Afghanistan from the early 2000s, and, more recently, the impact of the Syrian civil war and
associated refugees on relations between Turkey and the West (Haynes, 2020).
On the other hand, Turkey’s political direction and sense of national identity is a cause for
concern not only for many Turks but also for entities beyond Turkey’s frontiers. In addition, as
already mentioned, Turkey is still officially seeking to join the EU, while European countries

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continue to fear ‘Islamic’ extremism and terrorism, a concern likely to be exacerbated if Turkey
did ever succeed in joining the EU.The overarching issue is this: does Turkey have the necessary
credentials and clear signs of commitment to European norms and values, including democracy,
human rights, and religious freedom, to make the country a ‘suitable’ partner for the West? Do
such values find expression in the ideology of the ruling AKP government?
One important indication in this regard is the state of the relationship between secularists and
Islamists in Turkey. There is political polarisation between Kemalist secularists and the pro-Islam
AKP.The background is that, over the last few years,Turkey has experienced notable and continu-
ing internal political conflicts focusing on the problematic relationship between, on the one hand,
the country’s secular establishment, with its large and powerful presence in the military and, on the
other, the ruling AKP and its supporters. Many secularists regard the AKP as a ‘closet’ Islamist party,
secretly plotting eventually to impose Sharia law on the country. It is, however, important to draw
a distinction between most AKP supporters and those that might be termed political Islamists, i.e.,
people who wish to see some form of Islamic state in Turkey. Despite secularist fears, their natural
ideological home is not the AKP, whose leaders deny that the party is an Islamist party or has any
intention of becoming one, but the tiny Felicity party, which in the 2002 elections gained just
785,489 votes (2.49%), followed in 2007 by 820,289 votes (2.34%). In the June 2015 elections, it
won 2.06% of the votes. In 2021, the Felicity party had no seats in parliament and minimal politi-
cal influence – continuing a trend of political irrelevance which has now lasted for two decades.
Yet, despite a strong tradition and decades of aggressive secularisation in Turkey, Islam remains
central to the identity of most Muslim Turks, that is, the vast majority of the country’s popula-
tion. In 2006, five years after the AKP won power, religious identification for many Turks was
quite strong. Roughly half of Turkish Muslims (51%) surveyed in 2006 said they thought of
themselves first as Muslim rather than Turkish, while 19% identified primarily with their nation-
ality, and 30% volunteered that they thought of themselves as both.This represented a significant
change from just one year earlier, when only 43% of Turks identified themselves primarily as
Muslim. In addition, the percentage of Turks claiming a very or somewhat favourable opinion of
Muslims changed only minimally in the early to mid-2000s: 88% in 2004, 83% in 2005, and 88%
in 2006. Finally, the percentage of Turks saying that they are very favourable toward Muslims
generally increased from 66% in 2004 to 74% at this time (Pew Global Attitudes Survey, 2006).
Over the next few years, things changed only a little; the percentage-point change for many of
the questions is not dramatic: respondents identifying as ‘pious’ slid from 13% in 2008 to 10% in
2018, while those choosing ‘religious’ as their designation dipped only a little, from 55 to 51%.
Figures for ‘nonbeliever’ and ‘atheist’, which barely registered in 2008, are now at 2% and 3%,
respectively (Kenyon, 2019).
While there are some limited signs that Turks overall are becoming slightly less religious,
the country now appears to be less inclined to look to Europe or the West more generally for
solutions to its economic, political, or social problems, despite a high level of appreciation of
some aspects of Europe (Pew Research Center, 2017). This is not to claim that Turkey is (1)
increasingly influenced by culturally or civilisationally distinct ‘Muslim values’, which could
threaten the West’s integrity and cultural homogeneity if Turkey should ever join the EU or
more generally move closer to the West, and (2) moving closer to Islamic extremism with a goal
of ‘Islamisation’ of the West. Instead, there appear in Turkey to be two simultaneous develop-
ments that may or may not be related. On the one hand, opinion poll data show growing xeno-
phobia and, on the other hand, it may be that significant numbers of Turks regard themselves as
‘religious’. How, if at all, are the two trends related?
To shed light on this issue, we briefly compare opinion polls from 2006 and 2018. The polls
were conducted by Konda, one of Turkey’s most respected polling organisations. The 2006 poll

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surveyed over 6,000 people in half of Turkey’s 81 provinces (Biz Kimiz, 2006). The 2018 survey
involved face-to-face interviews with 2,762 people in their homes in 153 neighbourhoods and
villages in 106 districts, including the central districts of 31 provinces.The 2006 survey was titled,
‘Who Are We?’, and that of 2018 was called ‘Individualism in Turkey’. The two Konda surveys,
undertaken a dozen years apart, were among the most representative studies of Turkish society
ever completed. According to Robert Tait (2009), writing in the British Guardian newspaper, the
2006 poll found that ‘Turks are xenophobic, socially conservative people who rarely read books,
relegate women to second-class status and harbour ambivalent views about democracy’. These
views echo findings in a 2008 study entitled ‘Being different in Turkey. Alienation on the axis
of religion and conservatism’, which surveyed public opinion in 12 Anatolian cities. It was con-
ducted by Professor Binnaz Toprak of Boğaziçi University for the Open Society Institute (OSI).
Toprak’s survey supported some of the findings of the 2009 Konda survey. Toprak claimed that
for some members of Turkish society – including women, ‘Kurds, Alevis and seculars’ – expe-
rienced consistent social pressures to behave in certain ways in order to fit in with mainstream
Turkish cultural views (Pope, 2008).
The 2006 Konda survey identified opinions on three crucial aspects of Turkey’s political and
social position: gender equality, how foreigners were regarded, and the desirability of democracy.
Referring to gender equality, nearly 70% of respondents in the 2006 Konda survey believed that
wives required their husband’s permission to work outside the home. In addition, over half (57%)
believed that a woman should never leave home wearing a sleeveless top, and 53% favoured allow-
ing women judges, prosecutors, teachers, and other public servants to wear the Islamic headscarf
on duty, something to which Turkey’s secular establishment was opposed for ideological reasons
– believing that such an act was unacceptably ‘religious’, out of place in a secular society. Finally,
four-fifths (80%) thought that a woman and a man must be married in order to live together.
The 2018 Konda survey did not show major cultural differences compared to that of 2006.
However, different questions were asked in the 2006 and 2018 surveys. While an overall inter-
pretation is as a result rather difficult, it is apparent that increasing numbers of Turks believe that
both men and women have rights that are to some extent, dependent on gender. For example,
more than four-fifths of those surveyed (83%) believed it was the decision of a woman alone
whether she wore a head covering – often identified as a characteristic of a ‘pious’ woman in
Turkey. The 2018 survey also indicated that those surveyed stated that boys/men should be
patriotic first and virtuous second, while for girls/women, the order was reversed: virtuous
first and patriotic second. In sum, the results of the two Konda studies a decade apart, and both
carried out during AKP rule, suggest that the pursuit of gender equality and social progress in
Turkey is to some extent held back by continuing gender inequality (‘Individualism in Turkey’,
2018).
What of the issue of dislike of foreigners that seemed pronounced in 2009? Did this change
over time? According to the 2009 survey, many Turks believed that foreigners have designs on
Turkish territory, aiming to dismember the nation state. A fear of foreigners was also reflected
in the fact that nearly three-quarters (73%) of respondents opposed allowing outsiders to own
Turkish land or property. It may be that the opposition to foreign property ownership stems
from a preoccupation with the 1919–1923 war of independence that established modern Turkey,
which saw significant foreign interference. A century later, many Turks still appear to fear that
Turkey is constantly under the preying eyes of its neighbours, hoping to carve it up at the first
opportunity. This may be to some degree a phobic remnant of late Ottoman times, although
more research would be needed to ascertain if this was the sole or even a contributory factor in
some Turks’ views of foreigners. In addition, the role of the ruling AKP government in this issue
would benefit from further study.

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Turning to the issue of democracy, a key concern when it comes to the question of whether
Turkey is a fit country to join the EU, nearly nine out of ten respondents in the 2009 survey
(88%) agreed that Turkey should be governed by democracy ‘under each and every condition’.
On the other hand, nearly half (48%) claimed that the military should intervene ‘when neces-
sary’.7 Tait (2009) contends that this finding indicates that Turks ‘harbour ambivalent views
about democracy’. It is claimed that this shows, on the one hand, significant popular support
for a political role for the military in some circumstances, indicating that many Turks retained
reservations about the efficacy of democracy as ‘the only game in town’.8
In conclusion, the 2006 Konda survey paints a picture which, on the one hand,Turkish soci-
ety is a relatively conservative society regarding the place of women and foreigners in society.
On the other hand, the study also indicated that a huge majority of Turks are committed demo-
crats, with about half seeing a political role for the military only in extremis.

Conclusion
The AKP government, in power since 2002 via reasonably democratic elections, has stated
its intention of democratising the country, via secularism, that is, not preferring one religious
tradition over others in public policy.The AKP government’s stated aim is to increase the politi-
cal roles and power of civilian institutions and diminish those of the military. For most of the
century since the establishment of the Turkish republic, the military was a key political player,
sometimes threatening, often undertaking, military coup d’états in order to maintain both its own
societal and political position and the ‘purity’ of the country’s secular Kemalist ideology and
institutions.
We cannot justifiably conclude that Turkey is a politically and socially conservative country
built on religious values that makes it difficult to move closer to the West. While the country
is relatively politically and socially conservative, this is not due to the prominence of religious
values in politics.The ruling Islam-leaning AKP does not make concerted efforts to Islamise the
country. Instead, it appears to be ideologically committed to a secular regime, albeit one where
Sunni Hanafi Islam is privileged over other religious expressions. In other words, even though
Turkey is led by an Islam-leaning government, it does not exemplify an inward-looking politi-
cal religiosity.
Second,Turkey is a politically, socially, and to some extent culturally diverse nation of around
80 million people, which simultaneously presents several contrasting images. On the one hand,
Turkey not only indisputably constitutes an essential part of European heritage, going back to
Greco-Roman times and early Christianity (Byzantium), but also appears strongly to value
representative government and democracy, except when there appears to be a fundamental
breakdown of law and order, such as that which occurred in the 1970s when the country was
torn by extreme ideological polarisation and accompanying extremist violence involving the
secular right and secular left. At this time, many Turks welcomed a military government for the
stability and security which they felt would ensue.
Third, many Turks do not believe in full gender equality while also claiming to fear or dis-
trust foreigners. It is difficult, however, to argue that the conservative position of some Turks
is attributable to ‘Islamic values’ and even harder to demonstrate that such values are central to
the ideology of the ruling AKP. Instead, many Turks’ adhesion to unequal gender relations is
more explicable by a cultural conservatism that is also found in, for example, the neighbouring
country of Greece, with its huge Orthodox Christian majority (Tzilivakis, n/d). Approximately
97% of Greeks are Orthodox Christians. A study measuring the ‘Global Gender Gap’ published
by the World Economic Forum (WEF) in May 2005 highlighted the severity of the problems

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facing Greek women. The study assessed patterns of inequality in five dimensions – economic
participation, economic opportunity, political empowerment, educational attainment, health
and well-being. Greece ranked 50th in the study of 58 countries and Turkey ranked 57th.
However, we cannot usefully conclude that it was Turkey’s ‘Muslim values’ which explains its
even poorer position in the rankings compared to Greece, which also did very badly. In fact,
several Muslim-majority countries, including Indonesia and Malaysia, did as well or better not
only than Greece but also several other Christian-majority, EU member states, including Italy,
Malta, and Romania (Lopez-Claros and Zahidi, 2005: 9).
Fourth, fear of foreigners similarly does not seem to be clearly linked to ‘Islamic values’.
Instead, this perception may be rooted in cultural memories that go back at least to the time of
the decline of the Ottoman empire in the early 20th century when the country faced a clear
threat of foreign intervention and dismemberment. Overall, viewed through the lens of differ-
ing perceptions and understandings, it is clear that current political and social views in Turkey
do not depend upon the entrenchment of religious worldviews among Turks. Having said this,
however, it is almost certainly the case that the AKP’s electoral triumphs since 2002 suggest to
many secular Turks that the country is being increasingly affected by conservative religious and
cultural values, such as the increasing proportion of women in Turkey who regularly cover their
heads in order, it is presumed, to demonstrate their adhesion to cultural and religious conform-
ity, encouraged by some leaders of the AKP, including President Erdoğan.
In 2021, the AKP government had a strong position in the parliament single-handedly, with
just under 50% of the seats (at the high point, the AKP held 338 seats in the then 550-seat
chamber, that is, 61.45%). The party controls Turkey’s executive branch of government in the
commanding figure of President Erdoğan. Among the remaining institutions still beyond the
AKP’s control, both academia and the judiciary still feature significant numbers of non-AKP
appointees, appointed by former presidents. However, this situation will not last indefinitely. As
time goes by, attrition will mean that replacements will be required. The job of choosing them
will fall to President Erdoğan, although his status as head of state renders him officially apolitical.
After years of incomplete or at least inconclusive democratisation, Turkey is at a political
impasse. On the one hand, it seems very unlikely that military rule will return to Turkey in the
present circumstances, that is, strong civilian control under the rule of the AKP and President
Erdoğan. It appears that military rule would neither please most Turks nor find favour with the
country’s key allies in Europe, including the United Kingdom; for these reasons, in the present
circumstances, armed forces rule seems highly unlikely.
On the other hand, the national position of the military remains untouchable: It has over-
thrown four elected governments since 1960, two of them for being ‘too Islamist’. It has made
it known – for example, via the unsuccessful but serious coup attempt in July 2016 – that it
would step in if it deems that the secular order is seriously threatened. Because of this factor and
two others – that is, growing incompatibility between secularist and religious worldviews and a
significant threat to national unity posed by Kurdish demands for autonomy or independence
– it has proved impossible so far to institutionalise democracy in a manner commensurate with
full democratic consolidation.

Notes
1 The notion of an ‘Islam-influenced’ government in Turkey is captured in the following: ‘Currently…it
seems that religion has become a new or re-born element of the new Turkey and has been transform-
ing many areas such as: the media, the Kurdish issue, implementation of the rule of law, foreign policy
and gender issues’ (Yavuz and Öztürk, 2019: 1).

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2 Turkey has undergone four successful military coups, in 1960, 1971, 1980, and 1997.The most recent, in
1997, is often described as a ‘soft coup’, when the generals edged from power a government they con-
sidered Islamist, by using both public and behind-the-scenes pressure not taking troops to the streets.
3 The Grand National Assembly of Turkey (Turkish: Türkiye Büyük Millet Meclisi – TBMM), usually
referred to simply as Meclis – ‘the Parliament’).
4 Later, in 2008, the mayor of Istanbul sought to do the same thing in parts of Istanbul, with greater
long-term success.
5 The charge against the AKP to be a ‘centre of anti-secularism’ not only threatened the existence of the
governing party but was also combined with an attempt to forbid the continuous political engagement
of more than 70 of its members, including the-then Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan and the-
then President Abdullah Gül.
6 ‘Ergenekon’ or the ‘Ergenekon network’ is an alleged clandestine ultra-nationalist organisation in
Turkey with ties to the country’s military and security apparatus.
7 The powerful armed forces have toppled four elected governments in coups in the past 50 years.
8 Unfortunately, the full findings of the poll were not translated into English.

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 22
IRAN
Construction of a Shia political
ideology in the Modern Age

Alireza Raisi

Following the 1979 Islamic Revolution in Iran, analysts and pundits started to explore the
interaction of religion and politics in Iran. They examined the role of religion in mobilizing the
masses, the guardianship of jurists, the components of theocracy in Iran, and its implications for
policymaking.1 Despite these scholarly efforts, the relationship between religion and ideology
has been relatively overlooked. This chapter aims to explain the origin of a Shia political ideol-
ogy in Iran. It examines how a Shia political ideology emerged from traditional Shia thoughts
by reviewing the ebbs of flows of this journey in Iran’s modern era. In answering this question,
the chapter demonstrates the impact of ideas, factional interests, and transnational forces on the
rise of Shia political ideology in modern Iran. It argues that in pre-revolutionary time, the ideas,
particularly a leftist reading of the history of Islam, laid the ground for the rise of a Shia political
ideology. In the post-revolutionary time, however, policymaking and factional competition con-
tributed to the evolution of Shia ideology, and in a post-9/11 world, transnational and regional
power struggles impacted the ideological choice of Iranian ruling elites.
The chapter proceeds as follows. First, it briefly reviews the historical evolution of Shia
thoughts in the modern history of Iran. Then, it illuminates the impact of intellectual thoughts
on the development of Shia ideology in pre-revolutionary time. Afterwards, the chapter explains
the evolution of Shia ideology in the post-revolutionary era. Finally, it demonstrates the ongo-
ing impact of transnational and regional forces on the ideological choice of Iran’s ruling elites.

Religion and politics in Iran’s modern history

The dominant scholarly view considers the Safavid era in the 16th century as the origin of
Shiism in Iran.2 This oversimplified view, however, discounts the elements of Persian culture that
aligned with Shiism in “a land where substantial patronage awaited the Shiʿite ulema” (Algar,
2006). Shia Islam continued to lead Iran’s public life after the fall of the Safavid empire, namely
from the Afsharid to the Qajar era (1789–1925). The Shia clerical establishment played a vital
role in Iran’s constitutional revolution in the Qajar period. Although the secular intellectuals
conceptualized the underlying ideas of this revolution, the Ulama (the Shia clerics), notably
Ayatollah Naini and Tabatabai, joined the movement and were at the centre of theoretical efforts
in the revolution and later mobilizing the masses in the constitutional era.

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The Shia clerical establishment continued to enjoy pervasive influence in Iran’s public sphere
until Reza Shah’s modernization programmes (1925–1941). Reza Shah substantially limited
their influence.Yet his son, Mohammadreza Shah Pahlavi relaxed most of these restrictions. This
relaxation provides an arena for Ulama to play an even greater role in Iran compared to the con-
stitutional period that took place between 1905 and 1911. The clerical establishment expanded
its influence through the mosques and religious organizations in Iran. Religious magazines and
journals boomed in this period, and the proponents of political Islam seized the opportunity to
publicize their ideas to the general audience.3

Iran’s intellectual discourse and the evolution of Shia ideology

The left discourse and Ali Shariati
The leftist intellectuals profoundly shaped public discourse in pre-revolutionary Iran. The left
tradition, which was present since the inception of Iran’s constitutional era, dominated the entire
intellectual discourse for decades, especially after the overthrow of Reza Shah Pahlavi by the
Allied Power in 1945. Most of Iran’s intelligentsia had an affiliation with Iran’s communist parties,
called Tudeh.The influence of the leftist discourse was not limited to secular authors and activists.
Although religious groups actively opposed the communists in Iran, the leftist ideas gradually
spread and influenced the religious groups in Iran. Specifically, after the 1953 coup, some reli-
gious organizations started to adopt some elements of Marxism and integrated them into Islam
and Shia thoughts.This influence of the leftists’ view was perhaps the most significant episode in
the construction of a revolutionary Shia ideology in Iran. A key figure in this transformation was
Ali Shariati, a revolutionary sociologist whose lectures drew a large crowd of young, educated
Iranians. Historians and pundits explore and examine his life, legacy, and teaching (Saffari, 2019).
Despite debates about his influence and legacy, his impact on the 1979 Revolution is unques-
tionable, and some scholars even called him the ideologue of the 1979 Revolution.4 Despite a
lack of academic credentials, Shariati’s lectures and writings transformed the conservative Shia
thoughts into a revolutionary ideology that inspired a wide range of revolutionaries.
His ideas centred around a reformation project with the premise of returning a “true” Islam
and Shia to rescue the masses from colonialism and exploitation of the despotic and corrupt rul-
ing class. His writings can be summarized in three components: first, a critique of Islamic clergy,
second a Marxist reading of society and history, and third an anti-colonial principle of the return
to self and original Iranian culture.

Critique of clergy
Shariati utilized the political history of Shia as opposition and framed early martyrs in Islam and
Shia as revolutionary leaders. In particular, Shariati emphasized Imam Hussain, the grandson of
Prophet Muhammad who refused to pledge allegiance to a corrupt caliph and was martyred in the
Battle of Ashura in Iraq’s Karbala in October 680 AD. Shariati regarded Imam Hussain’s movement
as a manifestation of a longstanding struggle between the upper class and oppressed and called for
Muslims to imitate his uprising to overthrow the unjust and corrupt rulers of our time. Shariati’s
reading of Imam Hussain, however, did not align with the leading view in Shia seminaries on this
important episode in the history of Islam. Shia clerics, or Ulama, historically have been labelled as
conservatives who do not intend to challenge the ruling power. Instead of political activities and
opposition to corrupt rulers, the primary focus of Ulama as the guardians of the Prophet’s intel-
lectual legacy was on producing scholarly materials in Shia jurisprudence and theology.

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Imam Hussain’s movement has been at the centre of scholarly controversies for centuries in
Shia seminaries. Historians, theologists, and jurists have debated his intention and the lessons of
his uprising for Muslims. The common interpretation of Imam Hussain’s movement in the past
two centuries of Shia Islam dates back to Grand Ayatollah Mohammad Hassan Najafi (known
as Saheb-e Javaher), who argued that the Imam Hussain movement is not generalizable to other
times. Saheb-e Javaher holds that Imam Hussain’s mission to sacrifice his life is one of the divine
secrets that we cannot explicate (Soroush Mahalati, 2018).Therefore, we should not draw an anal-
ogy between our time and Imam Hussain’s era, and Shia Muslims cannot imitate his movement.
Instead of a revolutionary explanation, Ulama viewed Imam Hussain’s unique mission as
an instance of enjoining what is right and forbidding what is wrong as a principle in Islamic
jurisprudence.5 Therefore, the Imam Hussain movement was an intellectual effort to rectify
the deviances in the teachings of the Prophet, which was intensified by unjust Umayyad rulers,
namely Muawiyyah and Yazid. In the same way, Ulama highlighted other episodes in the early
history of Islam that Shia Imams rejected, such as the public calls for an uprising to overthrow
the corrupt caliphs. For instance, Imam Jafar Sadegh, the founder of the Shia creed,6 neither
endorsed nor denounced his uncle Zaid’s revolt against the Umayyad Caliphate in 740 AD. In
that critical moment, the Umayyad dynasty faced a serious challenge from several contenders,
including Abbasid. As a result, some followers of Shia Imams asked them to seize the opportu-
nity and establish the Shia ruling. Nevertheless, Imam Sadegh rejected a request from one of
the key political leaders7 in Iraq to be the new caliph after the fall of Umayyad. Rather, Imam
Sadegh focused on establishing a school of thought and training students to disseminate the
Shia doctrine.
Drawing on this tradition, Shia clerics who identify themselves as the followers of Imam
Sadegh primarily focus on spreading his teachings and avoiding direct involvement in political
infighting and activities. In the Twelver Shia tradition (unlike some other Shia branches, namely
Zaidiyya), the clergy’s primary role is to protect the doctrines of the Prophet Muhammad from
deviation. Instead of standing up against political corruption and oppression of tyrants, this
tradition tries to rectify the deviations from the teaching of Prophet Muhammad, specifically
in theology and jurisprudence, which is in line with Imam Sadegh’s role in Shia Islam. They
interpret the key concept of Velayat or the Guardianship of Imams in Shia Islam as the guardian
of Islamic society or Ummah from deviation. As a result, this dominant view in both Iran and
Iraq’s Shia seminaries downplays the political activities and leadership, especially during the era
of the occultation (which began in 869) of the hidden Imam Mahdi.8
This interpretation of Shia tradition was one of the main barriers against the creation of
political ideology in Shia Islamic tradition. Shariati, on the other hand, dismissed this long tradi-
tion in Shia seminaries as a scholastic and impractical approach that does not address the real
needs of Islamic society. He highlighted the revolutionary potentials in Shia Islam as an opposi-
tion group to fight the corrupt shahs of Iran. He interpreted the concept of Velayat and Imamat
in a fundamentally different fashion. He viewed Shia Imams as revolutionary leaders who stand
up against oppressors and rescue the oppressed from corrupt rulers (Shariati, 1969).This critique
of the Shia clerical establishment was not limited to contemporary religious settings in Iran. In
his book, Alawi Shia versus Safavid Shia, he slammed Majlesi, an important figure in the Shia
clergy, for cosying up to the Safavid Shahs (Shariati, 1971b).

Shariati and Marxism

A Marxist interpretation of society and history was another essential component of Shariati’s
thought. However, his contradictory views on Marxism baffled many political activists and

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commentators. Even the shah’s security apparatus confounded Shariati’s critique of Marxism
with his Marxist reading of Shia Islam and erroneously decided to use Shariati’s popularity to
undermine dominant Marxist views among educated Iranian youth. To clarify the complicated
relationship between Shariati and Marxism, Abrahamian (1982) differentiates between three
different interpretations of Marx in Shariati’s writings: first, the young Marx as a proponent of
dialectical materialism in philosophy who denies God and the afterlife. According to Shariati,
Marx’s atheist view has been exaggerated by communists who considered reactionary Churches
as a barrier against their socialist agenda and consequently denounced religion. Second, the
sociologist Marx who theorizes how the ruling elite and socioeconomic structures exploited
the people. Finally, the elder Marx as a politician who established a party to lead a revolution in
favour of the working class. Abrahamian argues that Shariati rejected the first and the third Marx
yet embraced the second Marx to interpret the history of Islam and Iran.
This Marxist interpretation of the history of Islam was vital in the construction of Shariati’s
Shia ideology. For Shariati, one cannot understand history and society without knowing
Marxism. Shariati interpreted the history of Islam as part of a long-term class struggle between
the oppressed and oppressors. He utilized Quranic terms such as “Mostazafin” (or oppressed) as
an element in his theory. Shariati even interpreted the story of Cain and Abel as a part of this
struggle in the history of human beings. However, a religious reformer like Shariati could not
accept the materialist assumptions of Marxism. Thus, he merely used it as a theoretical frame-
work to analyse history and society. In a long article called “Humankind, Islam, and Western
Schools of Thoughts”, Shariati denounced Marxism and Liberalism as two forms of humanism
that led mankind to futile materialism (Shariati, 1971a).
Despite the lack of consistency in Shariati’s work, it appears his fundamental assumption on
the afterlife and God contradicts the Marxist one. Some recent assessments of Shariati’s work,
such as that of Saffari (2019), considers Shariati’s use of Western theories as an instance of cos-
mopolitan localism. Despite these fundamental disagreements with Marxism, Shariati’s under-
standing of the history of Islam and Iran relies heavily upon a Marxist theoretical framework.
As explained, Shariati viewed history as a class struggle between the oppressed and the upper
class. In Shariati’s writings, Imam Hussain is central for being a religious revolutionary leader
who sacrificed his life for justice in Islamic society. Instead of an intellectual movement to rec-
tify deviances, Shariati defined Imam Hussain’s uprising as a class struggle between the lower
class and the corrupt aristocracy of the Umayyad dynasty. In this view, Umayyad allied with the
oppressive landlords to exploit the masses, and only (Shariati, 1971a) Shia Imams and a handful
of true companions of the Prophet, like Abu Zarr, stood up against this setting. According to
Shariati’s analysis, the ultimate goal of the Imam Hussain movement was to reach nezam towhidi,
a classless society with no corruption, injustice, or oppression. Shariati argued that currently,
Islamic societies suffer from the same oppression as in early Islam. Therefore, Muslims need to
restore Imam Hussain’s movement. As explained, the Shia clerical establishment emphasized the
intellectual aspects of Imam Hussain and considered it an effort to rectify deviances from the
teaching of the Prophet Muhammad. They argue that even this revolutionary moment was ten
days9 of an exception in more than 250 years of history of the twelve Shia Imams.

Shariati and anti-colonial movement

Finally, the last component of Shariati’s thinking was the anti-colonial discourse primarily influ-
enced by Frantz Fanon. As a political philosopher, Fanon’s work shaped post-colonial studies
and inspired several anti-colonial resistance movements in developing countries. Fanon was
popular among Iran’s intellectuals in the 1960s and 1970s, and his works were translated by

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Iranian students and activists. Shariati, among some others, translated Fanon’s The Wretched of the
Earth.10 Anti-colonial discourse profoundly impacted Shariati’s thinking on Iran’s intellectual
history. In particular, it influenced Shariati’s use of religion to challenge secular intellectuals and
political activists in Iran.The involvement of Western powers in the 1957 coup ignited a sense of
anger against foreign powers. As explained, Shariati rejected the third Marx and institutionalized
and bureaucratized the Marx who replaced revolutionary passion with mundane bureaucratic
settings. Drawing on his reading of post-colonial themes, he denounced communist parties of
“Europe of not helping national liberation movements in such places as Algeria, Tunisia, and
Vietnam” (Abrahamian, 1982). Influenced by Fanon, Shariati directly criticized Tudeh, Iran’s
communist party, for downplaying the important role of nationalism and return to Iran’s cultural
roots. Shariati extended this criticism to a broader context of Iran’s intelligentsia for overlook-
ing Iran’s national interests and even betraying Iran in favour of their interests or global causes.
In this context, Shariati admired Shia clergy for not signing even one treasonous colonial
agreement. This admiration of Shia’s clergy in Shariati’s writings may look contradictory to
Shariati’s critique of conservative views in Shia seminaries. However, Shariati candidly believed
in the tremendous power of the clergy in mobilizing the masses. Based on the anti-colonial
component of his thinking, Shariati viewed the Shia clergy as the last and the only rampart
against the cultural offensive of colonial powers (Shariati, 1972). Thus, according to Shariati,
the Shia clergy, as an institution, are a vital component of a revolutionary ideology, solidifying
contemporary anti-colonial resistance in Iran.
In a nutshell, Shariati was an important figure in transforming Shia thoughts into a full-
fledged revolutionary ideology. At the societal level, his Marxist reading of Shia history turned
Shia into an opposition stream seeking to stand up against oppressive rulers in Iran and beyond.
Additionally, Shariati portrayed the Shia clerical establishment as an instrument to counter colo-
nial interventions in Iran. In the post-World-War-II era, mostly dominated by communist dis-
course, Shariati’s writings created a powerful alternative for political activists. Shariati’s writings
had a profound influence on a wide range of activists, from Mujahedin-e Khalgh (Abrahamian,
1992) to religious nationalist groups and even some supporters of Ayatollah Khomeini. Shariati
also faced strong criticism from traditionalist segments of Iranian society. In addition to Shia
clergy, traditionalists like Seyyed Hossein Nasr strongly criticized Shariati. Even some secular
intellectuals like Shayegan denounced the ideologization of the tradition for failing to save its
spiritual basis. According to Shayegan (1994), the ideologization of tradition sets out tradition
in a modern framework to compete with alternative secular political ideologies, but without
knowing the fundamental assumptions of the modern worldview. These critiques were part of
Mohammadreza Shah’s broader cultural project to counter leftist views in Iran (Matin-Asgari,
2018).

Other intellectuals and the evolution of Shia ideology

In addition to Shariati, other intellectuals inspired the evolution of Shia ideology by stress-
ing the enormous political potential of Shia clergy. They initiated a modernized reading of
Shia history and situated this interpretation in the social and political debates of Iran and the
Muslim world. One of the writers that influenced the emergence of Shia ideology was Jalal
Al-e-Ahmad (1962).11 A former member of the Tudeh party who defected from communism
and returned to his religious past, he published a book Westoxfication (Gharbzadegi in Farsi), criti-
cizing Iranian intellectuals’ reliance on the Western way of life and thinking. This book became
popular in Iran, as it reflected the deep sense of disillusionment in Iranian society after the 1953
coup, which resulted from Western countries’ involvement in the overthrow of the democrati-

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cally elected prime minister, Mossadegh. In this book, Al-e-Ahmad moves beyond criticism of
Western technology and mechanization and argues that Iranian identity has been attacked by
Western identity. According to Al-e-Ahmad, this project aims to transform our identity, and
intellectuals are the agents of this transformation. Drawing from a distorted understanding of
Fardid’s reading of Martin Heidegger, the book highlights the danger of alienation from our
deep-rooted identity. The book also made another significant contribution to the construction
of Shia ideology by emphasizing the role of Shia clergy in transforming Iranian society. This
relatively overlooked assertion identified and promoted the enormous power of Shia clergy in
leading Iranian society and protecting it from alienation, which was manifested in the country’s
1979 Revolution.
Al-e-Ahmad further glorified Ayatollah Fazllollah Nouri, an anti-constitutional revolution
cleric who advocated the despotic rule of the shah in Iran,12 which was later repeated by
Ayatollah Khomeini. Although Al-e-Ahmad’s reading aligns well with the revolutionary ide-
ology in Iran, his underlying motivation in promoting the clergy’s role in leading society is
unclear. One may argue that Al-e-Ahmad intended to instrumentally use Shia clergy to advance
his ideas. Exploring his motivation and ideas are beyond the scope of this chapter.Yet, the theme
of “westoxification” became so dominant in Iran’s intellectual discourse that it has even has been
adopted and promoted by some of the state-sponsored intellectual organizations in the shah era
(Mirsepassi, 2017).

Mahdi Bazargan
Another important thinker who highlighted the role of Shia clergy and contributed to the
transformation of Shia thoughts to an ideology was Mahdi Bazargan. He was an engineer
and the co-founder of Iran’s Liberation Movement (a pro-democracy nationalist group) who
became the first prime minister of Iran after the 1979 Revolution. Before the Islamic revolu-
tion, he published several pieces arguing that religion and science are reconcilable. Additionally,
he emphasized the role of Shia clergy in revitalizing Iranian society. In his book, Resurrection and
Ideology, he advocated a greater ideological role for Islam and even proposed a council of clerics
to lead society. However, soon after the revolution, he resigned and left the revolutionary camp
in favour of a more pragmatist policy view.13 His book demonstrated the dominant view of the
1960s on the ideologization of Islam and a leading role for Shia clergy.

The Sunni Islamist and Muslim Brotherhood

Finally, Sunni Islamism also influenced the transformation of Shia Islam to a political ideology
in Iran. Although the impact of the Muslim Brotherhood on Iran’s Islamic Revolution has been
exaggerated by some Western commentators, Sunni Islam impacted some of the revolutionaries
in Iran. The Muslim Brotherhood influenced some clerics and Islamist activists who later held
important positions in Iran’s Islamic regime. Major books of the Muslim Brotherhood thinkers
like Sayyid Qutb were translated into Farsi (Unal, 2016). Some activists, like Navab Safavi, met
Muslim Brotherhood leaders in the 1950s. Navab Safavi and his group ardently advocated the
Muslim Brotherhood’s solution for fixing Islamic societies.14 Additionally, the Palestinian cause
was another significant point of attraction that drew Iranian political activists to the Muslim
Brotherhood. However, the condemnation of Shia teaching by Sunni Islamists (Jafarian, 2008,
pp. 501–509) was a major barrier in the relationship between Sunni Islamism and Shia politi-
cal Islam. As a result, some Shia clerics stigmatized the translators of Qutb’s writings in Iran
and labelled them as Wahhabi. Overall, Shia Islamists tried to keep a distance from the Muslim

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Brotherhood, which can be observed in the post-revolutionary Islamic order and the doctrine
of Velayt Faghih in Iran’s constitution (Feirahi, 2015).

The impact of ideas and interests on the evolution of

the Shia Ideology in post-revolutionary Iran
Such ideas paved the way for the rise of a revolutionary Shia ideology in the 1960s and 1970s
in Iran. The writings of intellectuals like Shariati and Jalal Al-Ahmad worked in tandem with
the revolutionary demands at the societal level and transformed Shia thoughts into a political
ideology. The 1979 Revolution, however, profoundly influenced the evolution of Shia ideol-
ogy in Iran. In addition to ideas, the interests of revolutionary factions, as well as regional and
international environments, shaped this evolution in the post-revolutionary era. Conflict and
competition between the revolutionaries and Islamists led the revolutionary factions to revise,
adjust, or adopt new elements to Shia ideology.
Additionally, the nascent political structure was permeable to domestic and foreign interfer-
ence. Islamist revolutionaries were devoid of any political party or unified organization. That
is, in the chaotic days after the 1979 upheavals, the post-revolutionary government, with no
established intelligence or security apparatus, was not able to manage conflicting forces, and
consequently, well-organized parties such as Tudeh with close ties to the Soviet Union and
its well-trained intelligence service were able to influence the political atmosphere. Moreover,
the Islamists did not have any experience in framing political issues and setting the agenda, let
alone running the administration and governmental agencies. In this environment, the left, with
strong roots in Iran’s intelligentsia and media, set the agenda and shaped the post-revolutionary
discourse. Organizations such as the Tudeh party, with several affiliates in Iran’s major newspa-
pers15 and magazines, shaped the political discourse by solidifying anti-Americanism as a key
element of Iran’s post-revolutionary discourse. In their public statements and writings, they
framed liberalism as an instrument of Western powers to steal the revolution and dominate
independent nations. This way of framing and agenda-setting was not merely limited to liberal
ideology. They even labelled the pragmatist politicians as “liberals” to stigmatize the proponents
of any diplomatic relationship with America, especially Prime Minister Mahdi Bazargan and his
administration. The prime example of this phenomenon can be observed in the 1980 hostage
crisis in Iran.The Islamist revolutionaries adopted this narrative to purge the competing factions
in the post-revolutionary era (Tabaar, 2017), which continued until the elimination of opposi-
tion in May 1981.

Religion and ideology in the post-May-1981 era

The 22nd of May 1981 was a critical juncture in Iran’s post-revolutionary history. The coalition
of Islamist revolutionary factions successfully purged the polity of opposition factions. They
included the coalition of leftist and nationalist groups who originally helped the Islamists to
overthrow the shah. The strategic use of a religious narrative was a significant element in this
process. As Tabaar argues,

Actors develop and deploy religious narratives to meet their factional and regime-level
interests, depending on their locus in the system and their subsequent threat percep-
tions. Rather than the driving force behind the behavior, religious ideas are the con-
structs of actors seeking to meet the challenges of elite competition.
(Tabaar, 2018: 3)

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The driving force behind the evolution of Shia ideology, however, was not limited to factional
interests. As explained, a leftist organization such as Tudeh set the agenda by shaping the post-
revolutionary discourse. In the post-May-1981 era, the impact of leftist organizations diminished.
The 1981 (mini-) civil war in Iran securitized the political arena. Even non-militant groups such
as the Liberation Movement faced serious restrictions. The security apparatus imprisoned their
members, and consequently, their influence diminished.
Despite the elimination of opposition forces in Iran, political competition did not fade away.
The heterogeneous nature of Iran’s ruling elites encouraged factional infighting. In the post-
1981 era, factional competition shifted to loyal groups inside the ruling elite. The revolutionary
understanding of Shia Islam and its implications in policymaking was at the heart of factional
debates in the 1980s. This competition emerged out of two fundamentally different readings of
Shia Islam: on economic policymaking and the role of government. On the one hand, a group
of young and university-educated revolutionaries, supported by Ayatollah Khomeini and his
office, planned to deliver distributive promises of the revolution through a welfare state and
expand the size of the government. Inspired by Shariati and other leftist interpretations of Shia
Islam, this group of revolutionaries (later called the Islamist left) established a fully-fledged
welfare state intended to eradicate poverty, slums, and unemployment. The primary mechanism
for implementing the welfare policies was government intervention and strengthening state
capacity (Abrahamian, 2009). They also sought to provide a social safety net for the underclass
through rationing and subsidizing bread, fuel, gas, heat, electricity, and health care for the urban
poor as well as land and housing for people in slum areas (Salehi-Isfahani, 2009). Additionally,
the post-revolutionary administration tried to eliminate the gap between urban and rural life by
implementing rural development projects in the countryside, such as building medical clinics,
schools, and piped water systems, as well as raising the price of agricultural goods.
On the other hand, a group of clerics and bazaari (traditional merchants) revolutionaries
opposed the welfare state platform by demanding a larger role for traditional commerce and the
private sector. This group, later called the traditional right (or traditional conservatives), argued
that the Islamist left’s policy platform was inspired by communism and consequently contra-
dicted Islamic law.16 This factional competition may look at first glance like a left versus right
debate of the kind that frequently occurs in modern politics. However, there was an ideological
battle over the role of Islam and Shia jurisprudence in policymaking. Instead of the socialist
vision of the Islamist left, the traditional conservatives argued that the country should be run
according to Shia practical treatise or catechism (Ressale Tozihol Masael in Farsi).17 Islamists had
already attempted to change secular laws to Sharia laws in the judicial branch by introducing
legislation such as the Bill of Qisas.18 Yet, traditional conservatives demanded a larger role for
Shia jurisprudence to counter the Islamist left. This ideological battle was primarily manifested
in economic policymaking. The traditional conservatives resorted to the Domination Principle
in shariah, which upholds the right of individuals to control their properties,19 to criticize
government intervention, and defend the private property rights of individuals. In the social
policy domain, they rejected the introduction of modern labour law by framing employee
and employer relations as the traditional hirer and he or she who is hired (or ajir and moujer)
in Shia jurisprudence. As Raisi (2020) demonstrates, Iran’s parliamentary politics is influenced
by factional infighting and national political debates. The second and third parliament after
the revolution became the centre stage of this factional competition between the Islamist left
and the traditional conservatives. Prime Minister Mousavi and his administration pursued the
Islamist left agenda, and the traditional conservatives caucus in Iran’s parliament tried to under-
mine Mousavi’s “socialist” agenda and promote the use of traditional Shia jurisprudence in
policymaking. This factional infighting temporarily went on hold when Ayatollah Khomeini

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sided with the Islamist left faction over Mousavi’s vote of confidence in 1985.20 The underlying
reason for this decision by Ayatollah Khomeini has not been sufficiently examined by histori-
ans and pundits. However, the debates around revolutionary versus conservative Islam, which
was traditionally dominant in Shia seminaries, was at the centre of Khomeini’s thinking. In
the late 1980s, Ayatollah Khomeini tried to frame a new ideological divide by differentiating
between American Islam and pure Islam. This ideological divide had two important ramifica-
tions in Iran’s policymaking. In foreign policy, “pure” Islam denounced reconciliation with the
superpowers, particularly the US. At the domestic (Khomeini, 1989) level, it highlighted the
longstanding class conflict between upper and lower class (or mastazafin), explicitly calling for
a battle between poverty and richness (Khomeini, 1989). The traditional conservative faction
had ties with some of the opponents of this revolutionary view in Shia seminaries, and some
traditional conservatives even cosied up to the Hojjatieh association, a conservative religious
group that had a fundamental disagreement with Ayatollah Khomeini’s revolutionary statements
against the shah before the 1979 Revolution. Ayatollah Khomeini publicly denounced Hojjatieh
and ordered that Hojjatieh affiliates were disqualified from holding high-rank positions in post-
revolutionary administrations (Sadr, 2014, pp. 476–478).

The evolution of political ideology in the post-Khomeini era

The post-Khomeini political setting triggered the demise of the Islamist left in Iran. The new
supreme leader of Iran, an opponent of the Mousavi administration, created an alliance of the
traditional conservatives and a group of technocrats led by President Hashemi-Rafsanjani. This
group of technocrats in charge of key positions in the Hashemi-Rafsanjani administration pur-
sued a neoliberal policy platform. Iran’s economic policies shifted from welfare and distribution
to economic growth. Much destruction resulted from the eight-year war between Iraq and
Iran, and the economic stagnation led succeeding administrations to embrace a quasi-neoliberal
policy platform. These technocrats later transformed into a pragmatist faction (Kargozaran-e
Sazandegi in Farsi), which was the main agent of the policy shift. This group of technocrats in
the Hashemi-Rafsanjani administration initiated pro-market reform policies with the Second
Five-Year Development Plan (1989–1994). The Islamist left slammed this quasi-neoliberal pol-
icy platform in the Islamic Republic’s third parliament.They highlighted the high cost of struc-
tural adjustment and market reform policies for the lower class by relying on their ideological
reading of the revolution. However, they could not sell it to the Iranian public in the next par-
liamentary election.The traditional conservatives won the fourth parliamentary election in 1992
with the promise of supporting Hashemi-Rafsanjani’s administration. Although the traditional
conservatives emphasized their agenda in the parliament, the technocrats’ policy platform paved
the way for the rise of a liberal ideology within the Islamic Republic. The coalition of these
strange bedfellows did not last even for one term in Iran’s parliament, and the conservatives did
not endorse the technocrats’ candidates in the next parliamentary election and introduced a
new coalition under the banner of Kargozaran Sazandegi.21 This liberal policy platform proposed
international cooperation abroad in tandem with market reform policies at the domestic level to
address the reconstruction of the country after the Iraq–Iran War. However, Hashemi-Rafsanjani
concluded his term with an economic crisis.22
In 1997, Mohammad Khatami, the liberal-minded former minister of culture, won the presi-
dential election by a wide margin in an election with an 80 per cent turnout. Khatami’s reform-
ist vision primarily consisted of a liberal renovation of the Islamic left plus the pragmatists’ views
on development. The Islamist left was the main part of the winning coalition in the 1997 elec-
tion. This coalition, later called the reformists, abandoned the welfare platform of the Islamist

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left in favour of a more market-oriented policy vision. The reformists won three subsequent
elections (parliamentary, city council, and Khatami’s second-term presidential election) by an
overwhelming margin. The reformists used these victories to liberalize domestic politics. They
pursued a liberalization agenda through the Iranian parliament by passing several reform bills.
However, most of this reformist legislation was vetoed by the Guardian Council for violating
Sharia and Iran’s constitution. In sum, Iran’s reformist policy platform was influenced by the
fashionable yet tenuous assumption that free markets make free politics (Kamrava, 2008).
The reformists transformed the revolutionary ideology of the 1970s to a semi-liberal ide-
ology that later made a significant contribution to the development of post-Islamism, to use
Bayat’s (2013) term. Aside from the market-oriented policies and the above-mentioned factional
interests, reformation theology was the bedrock of this transformation. In particular, Abdolkarim
Soroush was a key figure in this reformation project. Soroush was an academic and a former
member of Iran’s Supreme Council for Cultural Revolution who published articles criticizing
the basic assumptions of the “ideological” reading of Islam (Soroush, 1996). Soroush’s refor-
mation project had two important elements. First, an epistemological assessment of religious
understanding by differentiating between religion and individuals’ understanding of Islam. This
theoretical framework aimed, in particular, to undermine an ideological reading of Islam. The
second component of Soroush’s thinking was defining citizens as rightful instead of the dutiful
individuals of the pre-modern area. This critique directly challenged the way that traditional
schools of thought and Islamic jurisprudence views human beings. (Soroush, 2002) Although
Soroush later attacked neoliberalism,23 conservatives viewed Soroush’s writing as a serious chal-
lenge to the ideological reading of Islam and the rule of the Shia jurists (Velayat Faghih), and as
a result, vigilante groups disrupted his public lectures in universities.
In sum, hardliners viewed reformism as a liberal regime-change plot in Iran.24 This threat per-
ception had important ramifications for the evolution of Shia ideology in the country.Therefore,
Iran’s hardliners introduced a novel revolutionary ideology and promoted it as an unchangeable
component of the regime’s identity. Additionally, they revived the need for Islamic social science
as the theoretical component of this identity. This ideational conflict between reformists and
hardliners influenced the factional setting in Iran’s domestic and foreign policies. Additionally,
the hardliners considered reformist liberal orientation as an alternative to mobilizing the masses.
Finally, they began a campaign to eliminate the reformists from Iran’s factional politics.
The reformists could not maintain their electoral success. Conservatives won the municipal
election of 2003, which was relatively free and fair. In the next parliamentary election in 2004,
the Guardian Council barred more than 2,000 candidates – mostly from the reformist camp
– paving the way for the victory of the conservatives in that election. Conservatives also won
the 2005 presidential election, which was competitive and in which more than 62 per cent of
the electorate participated. Mahmoud Ahmadinejad won this election, promising to fight the
corrupt ruling elite and bring the oil money to the people’s dinner tables. Additionally, ideol-
ogy played a significant role in Ahmadinejad’s victory in the first round of the 2005 presidential
election (Raisi, 2019).
The 2009 disputed presidential election was perhaps the most evident example of this strug-
gle between hardliners and reformists. Key reformists were sentenced following a mass trial for
a regime-change plot and actions against the regime’s national security, and the reformist leader
was placed under house arrest. Although the hardliners successfully eliminated the reform-
ists, this factional struggle over the revolutionary ideology continued. Competitive elections
decreased the likelihood of protests (Raisi, 2021), and Iran’s ruling elite could not simply set
aside factional competition in elections, and they allowed pragmatists to run in the 2013 presi-
dential election. Hassan Rouhani and an offshoot technocrat faction won the 2013 ­presidential

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election with the reformists’ support. Rouhani’s major achievement was reconciliation and
cooperation with the international community, exemplified in Iran’s 2015 nuclear agreement.
Hardliners later resumed their campaign against Rouhani and Foreign Minister Javad Zarif for
violating Iran’s revolutionary identity.25

The impact of transnational forces and geopolitics

on the evolution of Shia ideology
Thus far, this chapter has examined the role of ideas and factional interests in the construction
of Shia ideology in the modern age. Additionally, transnational forces and regional shocks26 have
impacted the ideological choice of Iranian leaders. Iranian experts and scholars have debated the
role of ideology in Iran’s foreign policymaking since the 1979 Revolution. On the one hand,
some contend that a revolutionary ideology drives Iran’s foreign policymaking. On the other hand,
realist scholars and pundits argue that national interests and balance-of-power concerns shape
Iran’s foreign policymaking. Others consider ideology as one determinant of foreign policymaking
among many others. This chapter briefly reviews the reciprocal impact of transnational forces and
international events on the evolution of ideology in Iran.The chapter concludes that transnational
forces and regional shocks coupled with the above-mentioned threat perception of regime change
at the domestic level influenced the ideological choice of the ruling elite in Iran after 2003. That
is, external threats primarily resulted from the West’s invasion of Iraq in 2003 and domestic pres-
sure to reform Iran’s political structure promoted a novel version of revolutionary ideology in
Iran. A review of media outlets affiliated with the conservative ruling elites demonstrates a shift to
resistance to a revolutionary identity. This resistance discourse considers the liberal reformist view
as a threat to the Islamic regime. As a result, this resistance discourse27 fundamentally refutes the
reformists’ assumptions about the role of Islam in domestic and international politics.
The Iran–US relationship is a manifestation of this struggle between conservatives and
reformists. The pragmatist/reformist camp advocates a cooperative stance with Western pow-
ers. The hardliners, on the other hand, argue that US policies are an existential threat to the
Islamic Republic of Iran and cannot be trusted (Mousavian, 2012). Mousavian argues the US
response to reformists’ cooperative stance28 after 9/11, such as calling Iran an axis of evil by
President George W. Bush, seriously undermined the reformist camp and made a case for the
hardliners’ view of the Iran–US relationship. Additionally, Iran’s regional rivals utilized regional
shocks such as the Arab Spring to pressurize Iran.29 This international and regional setting fur-
ther contributed to Iran’s strategic isolation. Mesbahi’s study of Iran and the international sys-
tem framed Iran’s post-Cold-War position as strategically alone. That is, “Iran’s potential for
survival…depends on the sustainability of self-made, deliberate or inevitable, loneliness and
self-sufficiency in its national defense capacity”(Mesbahi, 2011, p27). In this setting, the main
reservoir of Iran’s national security is a culture rooted in Shi’ism, which combines the “physical
domain of security with the metaphysical dimension of life” resulting in a willingness to risk the
“normative and physical power of strategic systemic value”. (Mesbahi, 2011, p28)
The US response to Iran’s nuclear programme and regional policies promoted the strategic
use of religion, particularly in framing the resistance discourse. The hardliners previously had
framed the reformists’ cooperative nuclear policy as a sign of weakness and labelled Khatami’s
negotiating team as spies and traitors (Raisi, 2013). The US withdrawal from Iran’s nuclear deal
provided further ammunition to attack the proponents of rapprochement with the West. Instead
of reformists, the Rouhani administration and Zarif have been the new target of the hardliners’
campaign. To convince the Iranian public, they used analogies from the early history of Shia
Islam to discredit the cooperative approach to Western powers.30

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Similarly, the US response to Iran’s regional policies enhanced the resistance discourse in Iran’s
domestic policies. The Trump administration followed the pressure of US allies and withdrew
from Iran’s nuclear deal because of Iran’s alleged “destabilized behaviour” in the region. The US
allies constantly exaggerated the role of Iran after the invasion of Iraq in 2003 by framing it as a
“Shia Crescent” and the rise of a new Safavid empire. Shia Muslims, as a minority sect, have been
under discrimination for centuries.The Sunnis consider Shia Muslim as a heretical sect, and some
even have not recognized them as Muslim. This doctrine called Takfir has triggered bloody ten-
sion in the Middle East.31 In this environment, Shia rulers in Iran have held themselves responsi-
ble for protecting Shia minorities in the region (Chehabi and Abisaab, 2006). This longstanding
historical relationship between Iranian rulers and Shia minorities led some assessments to view
the Islamic Republic’s regional role in line with the shahs’ regional policies in protecting and sup-
porting Shia Muslims in the Middle East and beyond (Ataie, 2019). Additionally, Sunni counter-
mobilization (Wehrey, 2013) and the securitization of Shia by Salafis (Saleh and Kraetzschmar,
2015) has provided further evidence for mistrust in Western powers and consequently promoted
a resistance discourse in Iran’s domestic politics. In sum, the US withdrawal from the Iran nuclear
deal and the dynamics of regional rivalry helped the Iranian ruling elite to sell a resistance dis-
course and the strategic use of Shia ideology to the Iranian public.

Conclusion
The complicated power structure and evolving factional politics clouded the role of ideology in
Iran’s politics. On the one hand, some scholars and pundits tend to downplay the significance
of ideology. On the other hand, right-wing analysts overstress the ideological calculations of
Iranian leaders to frame the Iranian regime as irrational.The chapter demonstrates that religious
ideology in Iran resulted from the interaction of ideas, rational calculation based on domestic
interests, and transnational forces. Intellectuals constructed a revolutionary ideology to oppose
the shahs’ despotic rule. This revolutionary ideology was later translated into a socialist policy
platform to aid the underclass in the 1980s. Conservative clergy, however, considered this leftist
reading of Shia Islam as deviant and eclectic and eradicated it in the post-Khomeini era. The
conservative ruling elite also viewed the liberal reading of Islam as a component of a regime-
change plot and resorted to a novel revolutionary identity to protect Iran’s Islamic regime in
the 2000s. This revolutionary identity emphasizes a populist agenda at home and the resistance
discourse abroad, which resulted in an ongoing battle between the conservatives and their
opponents in Iran. In sum, religious ideology is at the centre of this uphill struggle, and the final
outcome will dramatically impact Shia ideology in Iran and beyond.

Notes
1 A review of cultural and religious explanations on Iran’s 1979 Revolution is available in Kurzman
(2009). Kadivar (1997) provides a summary of government theories on Shia Islam. Madelung (1997)
offers a review of events that shaped Shia in the early history of Islam.
2 The proponents of this view highlight the role of Shia Ulama who migrated from southern Lebanon,
Bahrain, and Qatif in suffusing Shia Islam in Iran in the Safavid era.
3 Jafarian’s survey of religious groups in pre-revolutionary Iran demonstrates the role of these journals in
disseminating political Islam (Jafarian, 2008).
4 The following studies explain the role of Shariati in the 1979 Revolution:
E. Abrahamian (1982) “Ali Shari’ati: Ideologue of the Iranian Revolution”, MERIP Reports,
A. Sachedina (1983) “Ali Shariati: Ideologue of the Iranian Revolution”, in: J. L. Esposito (ed.)
Voices of Resurgent Islam, pp. 191–214 (New York: Oxford U Press); and

325
 Alireza Raisi

M. Abedi (1986) “Ali Shariati: The Architect of the 1979 Islamic Revolution of Iran”, Iranian
Studies, 19(3–4), pp. 229–234.
5 This principle is called Al-Amr Belmarouf va Alnahyeh Anel Monkar.
6 The founder of Shia theology and jurisprudence in 702–765 AD.
7 Abou Salameh Al Khallal.
8 Shia clergy use some narratives from imams to discredit any uprising during the occultation era.
9 Shia Muslims commemorate the Imam Hussain movement in 10 days.
10 Rahnam’s biography of Shariati states that some of Shariati’s friends helped Shariati with the translation
of the book. Ali Rahnema, An Islamic Utopian: A Political Biography of Ali Shariʿati (London: I. B. Tauris,
2000)., 127.
11 As a close friend of Ayatollah Khomeini, his writings directly influenced the leader of the Islamic
Revolution.
12 Nouri identified the constitutional structure of power as heretical and was executed after revolutionar-
ies liberated the capital city of Tehran from the despotic rule of Mohammad-Ali Shah Ghajar in 1909.
13 Bazargan had refuted Ayatollah Khomeini’s stances on foreign and domestic policies and consequently
was barred from candidacy in Iran’s 1985 presidential election. He was still popular among conservative
clergy, and some of them like Grand Ayatollah Marashi Najafi objected the disqualification of Bazargan
in that election.
14 It has been summarized in the slogan of the Muslim Bortherhood: Islam is the solution to our problems.
15 For example, Rahman Hatefi the chief editor of the Kayhan daily newspaper, and a member of the
Tudeh party, was an important figure in disseminating revolutionary materials in a leading newspaper
of Iran in 1979. “Rahman Hatefi and the Bitter Humor of History”, BBC Persian, 17 January 2012.
16 Ayatollah Khomeini denounced conservative clerics for labelling Islamist left figures as communist:
Rouhollah , Khomeini: “Sahifeh Imam Khomeini”, volume 21, p. 612.
17 They have been labelled as the proponents of traditional jurisprudence (in contrast to dynamic jurispru-
dence) who believe the Quran and tradition are sufficient to govern Islamic society (Moslem, 2002, p. 49).
18 Also known as retributive justice or eye for an eye.
19 Called Ghaedeh-e Tasalot in Shia jurisprudence.
20 The Document Center of the Islamic Revolution, Ali Akbar Nategh Nouri, April 2012.
21 Kargozaran Sazandegi forged a strong minority with the remnants of the Islamist left.
22 Despite this crisis, these development programmes and welfare policies of the Mousavi administration
improved the quality of life in Iran. By 2000, 97 per cent of youth were literate, 63 per cent of univer-
sity students were women, and Iran had the lowest infant mortality rate in the Middle East.
23 In a lecture titled “Armed Neoliberalism”, Soroush criticized the fundamental assumption of neoliber-
alism. Soroush Abdolkarim, April 5, 2015, Retrieved from: https​:/​/ww​​w​.you​​tube.​​com​/w​​atch?​​v​=QaG​​​
mg56Q​​ZEI.
24 For example, see Keyhan Daily Newspaper, “An Analytical Report of the Last Mission of Reformists
to Change the Islamic Regime”, September 8, 2009.
25 These critiques can be observed in the ninth parliament discussion on Iran’s nuclear deal.
26 Regional shocks primarily refer to the 1979 Revolution, the 2003 invasion of Iraq, and the Arab Spring.
27 This resistance discourse comprises a triad of anti-Israeli stances, Iran’s nuclear program, and the sup-
port of Shia proxy groups in the region.
28 The Iran–US cooperation to overthrow the Taliban.
29 Saudi-led block has actively lobbied against Iran.
30 They used the analogy of the Imam Hassan Peace deal in the early history of Islam to show that the
US lacks commitment to any deal.
31 For example, the Massacre of Shia Muslim in Karbala in 1802.

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 23
RELIGION AND IDEOLOGY
IN SRI LANKA
Buddhism

Peter Friedlander

Introduction: religion and ideology in Sri Lanka

This chapter investigates how diverse religious ideologies and political visions of the relationship
between the state and religion have developed in Sri Lanka.The main focus is on the interaction
between Buddhist conceptions of the state and Sri Lankan politics, but in order to understand
the development of Buddhist ideologies in Sri Lanka, it is also essential to consider the ways in
which Hindu and Muslim minorities in Sri Lanka have conceptualised the possible relationship
between the state and religion in Sri Lanka.
Following Rachik, I shall consider a religious ideology as being ‘a set of ideas that refer to
religious and secular tools and accompany political actions and processes in a sustained and
systematic way’ (Rachik, 2010: 357). However, Rachik’s definition is potentially problematic in
relation to studies of Buddhism and politics. Harris (1999: 1) suggests that there has never been
a firm separation between Buddhism and politics since its origins in ancient India. Rachik also
makes another vital observation about the circumstances that led to the use of the term ‘ideol-
ogy’ in relation to religion: ‘Religion is turned into ideology when an elite is in a situation of
defending its religion against a political power’ (Rachik, 2010: 357). Following this definition,
in pre-modern societies, we may characterise religions as having doctrines, concepts or world
views, but, in situations where there are unequal political power struggles between groups who
follow a religion and political powers, the use of the term ‘ideology’ becomes increasingly
common. In the case of Sri Lanka, examples of the explicit use of the term ‘Buddhist ideology’
have only started to appear since the start of the 21st century, for instance, in relation to Sinhala
Buddhist nationalism and development studies (Hennayake, 2006: 48–49), Buddhist–Muslim
conflict in Sri Lanka (NuhmCan, 2016: 38–40) and the impact of Marxism on the Sri Lankan
monastic tradition (Deegalle, 2017). In order to explore how religion becomes ideology, in this
chapter, I focus on key instances where aspects of religion interact with political power strug-
gles in Sri Lanka. This either created systems of knowledge that are now regarded as Buddhist
ideologies or were precursors to later Buddhist ideologies.
Central to these discussions has been the role played in Sri Lankan history and politics
between contested visions of the relationship between Buddhism and the state, as a focus for
Sri Lankan identity. Buddhist visions of this relationship have existed alongside notions of how

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Hindu, Muslim, and Christian identities are also integral aspects of Sri Lankan identity. A central
issue has been whether Buddhism, the Singhalese language and Sinhala identity should be the
sole central feature of the Sri Lankan state or whether an inclusive Sri Lankan identity should
embrace the country’s Buddhist, Hindu, Muslim and Christian communities.
Discussions also need to be situated within the context of the colonial period. From the
16th century, Portuguese and Dutch colonialism challenged the status of the Buddhist faith in
Sri Lanka. However, British policy was somewhat different. When in 1815 they annexed Kandy,
the last independent state in Sri Lanka, they took from its independent rulers the role of the
patrons of Buddhism as a state religion. They then created a unified constitution for the whole
of Sri Lanka in 1833 and in 1931 adopted a constitution with no separate representations for
different religions. In the post-independence period from 1948 to 1956, an inclusive Sri Lankan
nationalism was advocated, but from 1956 onwards, there was a shift towards adopting a Sinhala
Buddhist nationalism whereby the role of Buddhism become more central in both 1972 and
1978 constitutions. The latter is the current constitution of Sri Lanka.

Buddhist models for religion and the state in India and Sri Lanka
The history of early Buddhism in India shows a complex relationship between Buddhism as a
doctrine related to spiritual practitioners searching for spiritual liberation and as a set of practices
related to the worldly well-being of people and the state.
One important formulation of this was described by Reynolds (1972) as the ‘two wheels of
dhamma’ (Reynolds, 1972). According to this, the Buddhist sangha, the community of renunci-
ate monks, nuns, and male and female novices, played three roles. First, the sangha supported its
own members in their search for spiritual liberation; second, it supported the upasikas, its male
and female lay followers; and third, it supported the state as the protector of the followers of
Buddhism. The lay followers of Buddhism supported both the Buddhist sangha and, via their
support for the state, provided Buddhism with state support. This resulted in a synergy, whereby
the sangha supported the state, and the state supported the sangha.Their mutual support provided
for the well-being of both the lay and monastic members of both the Buddhist community and
the state (Reynolds, 1972: 6–30). However, whilst most Buddhist states followed this model for
state and sangha relations, there were three models for state governance. Some Buddhist suttas
presented a model for the state in which it would be governed by a leader elected on the basis
of the ability to run the state, called the mahasamat. However, a second state model was pre-
sented in other suttas, which became the dominant model for later Buddhist states. There, the
state was governed by a divinely ordained universal ruler called a cakravārtin (Harris, 1999: 2–6).
This model posited a reciprocal relationship between the Buddhist sangha and the ruler, where
the latter protected the dharma through royal patronage of the sangha, and the sangha provided
spiritual guidance to protect the state. Harris argued that a third model for governance was
implied by some jataka stories, that is, accounts of the previous lives of the Buddha: if a ruler did
not follow the Buddhist dharma, then the people could overthrow that ruler so as to establish
a state run in accordance with the Buddhist dharma (Harris, 1999: 7–9). It should be noted that
the Sanskrit word ‘dharma’ (or Pali ‘dhamma’) has multiple meanings, including ethics, duties,
responsibilities, characteristics of phenomena, and religion. Consequently, it is not entirely clear
that discussions of dharma refer to religion alone or to broader meanings of the term ‘dharma’.
A second issue to examine is whether the ruler should patronise one religion or all. Early
Buddhist texts describe both instances in which individual rulers favour particular religions and
persecute others and where rulers patronise all religions. Overall, from epigraphic evidence, it
appears that early Indian state models did not regard it as normal for a ruler to patronise only

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one religion, such as Buddhism or Hinduism. Instead, the model was that a ruler should, in a
manner analogous to a modern secular state, patronise all dharmas, including Buddhism. The
strength of this view in the early historical Indian Buddhist governance model can be deduced
from epigraphic evidence provided in rock edicts made by Emperor Asoka (268–239 BCE). In
these, he had himself depicted as a patron of the dharma and of Buddhism, Hinduism, Jainism,
and other Indian religious traditions, such as the Ajīvakas. However, this clear indication of this
early Indian model for how a ruler should patronise all religions was only discovered in the
Asokan edicts when they were translated in the 19th century. This historical persona for Asoka
was sharply at odds with popular legendary accounts of his life, which had circulated in South
and South-East Asia. They depicted him as having been an ideal Buddhist monarch, a patron
solely of Buddhism (Gombrich, 1991: 127–136). Roberts (1994) argued that it was the latter
notion of the legendary Asokan persona based on the legends of Asoka that was a key element
in Sri Lankan Buddhist understandings of the relationship between the state and the sangha
throughout its history (Roberts, 1994: 57–72).
It is also vital to consider whether the term ‘empire’ was understood at the time of Asoka
in the same way as it is now. Thapar (1998) argues that rather than Asoka having ruled over a
unitary empire reaching from Afghanistan to South India, his polity included a centrally admin-
istered state in Northern India, as well as dependent states and independently governed states
(Thapar, 1998: 130–135).

Buddhism, religion, and the state in pre-colonial Sri Lanka

The history of Sri Lanka has often been described as having fallen into a number of periods
when different dynasties ruled Sri Lanka from a succession of capital cities. The earliest period
is often called the Anuradhapura period (6th century BCE to 11th century CE). This is now
seen in Sri Lanka as having begun in the 6th century BCE when a king called Vijaya (the
‘Victorious’) arrived in Sri Lanka along with other settlers from Northern India.This led to the
conversion of Sri Lanka to Buddhism when a mission from Asoka converted the Sri Lankan
king, Devanampiya Tissa (307–267 BCE), to Buddhism.This account of the history of Sri Lanka
is based on 4th- to 6th-century CE Buddhist chronicles, called vaṃśa (‘lineages’), including
the shorter 4th-century Dīpavaṃśa and the 6th-century Mahāvaṃśa attributed to Mahānāmā
(Gombrich, 1991, 140–142). Scholars such as Wijeyeratne De Silva (2014) have argued that this
history was one that represented, in part, 4th-century projections back into the past of Sri Lanka
that need to be seen alongside parallel projections based on archaeology, epigraphy, and external
accounts of Sri Lanka that reflect other possible views on the island’s history.
Just as the Indian Emperor Asoka has two sets of stories connected with him, based on leg-
ends and on archaeological and epigraphical evidence, so too do histories of the establishment
of Buddhism in Sri Lanka reflect two different accounts. On the one hand, archaeological and
epigraphic evidence, and later accounts by external Chinese sources, present a picture of Sri
Lanka as made up of a composite of smaller states. These included followers of both Theravada
and Mahayana Buddhist traditions, Jainism, and Hinduism. They also included many settlers
from South India who followed Buddhist, Jain, and Hindu traditions and were part of maritime
trading communities in the Indian ocean that included North and South Indians. On the other
hand, the vaṃśa traditions describe the population of the island by North Indian immigrants
who were all then converted to Buddhism when a mission was sent to Sri Lanka by Asoka
in the 3rd century BCE. A key feature of this latter history is that it provides a model for the
establishment of a centralised unitary state in Sri Lanka along the lines of the legendary model
provided by Asokan Buddhism. Kemper (1991) argued that the latter model was based on pro-

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jections back into the past from a 4th-century viewpoint based on the state then flourishing at
Anuradhapura. These accounts in the Dīpavaṃśa and the Mahāvaṃśa were intended to establish
the legitimacy of the Anuradhapura royal court by arguing for ‘two intertwined institutions –
the rajaparmparava (line of kingly descent) on one side and the theraparamparava (line of monastic
descent on the other) – that reach back to North India’ (Kemper, 1991: 33).
De Silva Wijeyeratne (2014) reinforced Kemper’s arguments whereby whatever evidence
existed about the actual pattern of settlement of Sri Lanka and its conversion to Buddhism was
side-lined by the 4th-century version of the history of Sri Lanka in the Dīpavaṃśa that became
central to Sri Lankan notions of history. Key to this was the notion of establishing a linkage
between the Asoka legend, of Asoka as a universal ruler of a unitary central state, to the lineage
of the Anuradhapura kings as heirs to a legitimate right to be rulers of a centralised Sri Lankan
state (De Silva Wijeyeratne, 2014: 17–18). We can also suggest that this nexus in the relationship
between the vaṃśa traditions and the politics involving governance from the Anuradhapura royal
court matches one of the characteristics for the development of a Buddhist ideology suggested
by Rachik, where elites are anxious about threats to their status.
A key element in the vaṃśa tradition is accounts of Sri Lanka’s past, and in particular in
the Mahāvaṃśa, with accounts of the conflicts between the Sri Lankan king Duṭṭhagāmaṇi
(101–77 BCE) and the Tamil king of Anuradhapura Eḷāra. This story became a key feature of
Sinhala Buddhist nationalism in the modern era and now acts as a kind of palimpsest on which
different perceptions of identity are overwritten by supporters of different forms of Sri Lankan
nationalism.
The next stage in the evolution of Buddhist views of Sri Lanka’s history developed dur-
ing the Polonnaruwa period (11th–14th century). The evolution of these ideas of the state
can also be seen from later Sinhala versions, such as the 13th-century Sinhala Thupavaṃśa
(De Silva Wijeyeratne, 2014: 45–48). A notable change is that the key incident in which King
Duṭṭhagāmaṇi’s victory over the Tamils is justified in the Pali Mahāvaṃśa by them not being
Buddhists. In the Sinhala Thupavaṃśa, the king is told that merit accumulated in former and
future births outweighed his acts of war (Berkwitz, 2004: 248–249). Berkwitz argued that
attempts to identify ‘the ideological content of Buddhist histories’ by scholars such as Heinz
Bechart and David Scott suggest that in the Singhalese language versions of the vaṃśa histories,
the earlier Buddhist model for the relationship between the state and Buddhism underwent a
transformation. The dharma model with two wheels was displaced by a model with three ele-
ments in it, the Buddhist sangha, the Sinhalese people as an ethnic community, and the state as a
patron of Buddhism (Berkwitz, 2004: 147–148 and Scott, 1994: 193).
There were also interactions during the 9th to 13th centuries with Hindu notions of king-
ship as practised in the Chola dynasty empire in South India and Sinhala notions of kingship
during the Polonnaruwa period. In these Buddhist notions of the cakkavati (Pali for ‘universal
ruler’), ruling through upholding the dharma was mingled with Chola Hindu notions of the
cakravārtin (Sanskrit for ‘universal ruler’) and the ruler as rājadhirājā (‘king of kings’) who became
supreme ruler by force (De Silva Wijeyeratne, 2014: 50–51). This pattern of cross-relations with
South Indian notions of polity also points to the ways in which Sinhala notions of governance
and kingship were during this period of emerging ideas about governance in India and South-
East Asia.
During the Kandyan period (1476–1815/15th–19th century), there were significant develop-
ments in ideas of how Sri Lanka was conceived of as a centralised ideal state.The arrival of colo-
nial powers, including the Dutch, Portuguese, and then the British, heavily disrupted Sri Lankan
states and the Buddhist order. On the one hand, this disruption led to the loss of the ordination
lineages of the Buddhist monastic community, and, on the other, it must have led to Sri Lankans

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becoming aware of colonial conceptions of the state. De Silva Wijeyeratne (2014) argued that the
idea of the capital as a microcosm of the state was a dominant feature during the Kandyan period.
This concept was also a model for polity in India and South-East Asia during this period. A key
element was that there was a strong interaction between the Kandyan kingdom and South-East
Asian Buddhist nations. Eighteenth-century South-East Asian Buddhist ideas about the relation-
ship between the state and the sangha also impacted the interchange of ideas between Sri Lanka
and South-East Asia. A key element was the way in which the Kandyan kingdom re-established
Buddhist monastic ordination lineages from Thailand in Sri Lanka in 1753.
Gombrich (1991) argues that the interchange between Kandy and the Thai kingdom of
Ayutthaya should be regarded as the last vital development in Sri Lankan Buddhism prior to the
British annexation (Gombrich, 1991: 166–169). I would suggest that in relation to Buddhism
and Buddhist ideology, it was also a vital stage in the development of Buddhist proto-ideologies
in Sri Lanka. This is because it answers both of Rachik’s criteria for the characteristics of a reli-
gious ideology: it is based on religious teachings and part of a conflict between a religious elite
and political power. However, as it was still not part of a process of political negotiations of power,
it remains a Buddhist world view not yet developed into a fully-fledged Buddhist ideology.

British colonialism and Sri Lankan polity (1815–1900)

British domination of the kingdom of Kandy began in 1815 following its annexation. To gain
local support in Kandy for intervention in the state, the British agreed to continue the tradition
of the state acting as patrons of Buddhism. This was the fifth article of the convention following
the British takeover. The article guaranteed that ‘the Religion of the Budhoo, its rites, ministers
and places of worship are to be maintained and protected’ (de Silva, 2003: 231). This situation
continued until the 1840s when missionaries persuaded the colonial office to sever connections
between the colonial administration and Buddhism. However, there was no rapid implementation
of this policy due to recognition at local levels in Sri Lanka that the legal positions of the prop-
erty rights of temples and their lands were unclear (de Silva, 2003: 268). Moreover, dissatisfaction
with British economic management and alienation due to the interference with the relationship
between the state and Buddhism encouraged riots in Kandy in 1848.This led to a compromise in
1852–1853 when the colonial office formally disassociated Buddhism and the state, but in prac-
tice, continued to supervise aspects of state support for Buddhism (de Silva, 2003: 281).
Emphasis on Buddhism as a protector of the state continued to be part of how inhabitants of
the former Kandyan Buddhist kingdom saw the relationship between the state and Buddhism.
Anna Blackburn’s (2010) study of the life of Hikkaḍuve Sumangala (1827–1911) examines how
Sri Lankan Sinhala-Buddhism responded following the annexation of the kingdom of Kandy
and the unification of Sri Lanka. She argues that monks such as Sumangala maintained involve-
ment in diplomacy with South-East Asian Buddhist states. He and other members of the sangha
sought to continue the former kingdom of Kandy’s linkages with such states. A key feature of
this continued pattern of patronage of the Temple of the Tooth in Kandy was that participation
in state protection rituals by South-East Asian Buddhists on pilgrimage to Kandy, seen as offer-
ing protection to Buddhist states when they returned to South-East Asia in the second half of
the 19th century (Blackburn, 2010: 143–196).

Sri Lankan Buddhist nationalist ideology in the 19th century

Buddhist nationalism developed rapidly in Sri Lanka in the latter half of the 19th century. A
key issue was debates between Christian missionaries and Buddhist monks during 1848–1873,

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which culminated in a meeting in Panadura in 1873. There, traditional Buddhist monastic lead-
ers responded to missionary attacks on Buddhism by articulating arguments against Christianity
and the British ideas of the state. Young and Somaratna (1996: 115, 226) argue that a fea-
ture of these debates was that Buddhist leaders, such as Migeṭṭuvattē Guṇānanda (1823–1890),
focused attacks on Christianity rather than expressing anti-British, anti-Tamil, or anti-Muslim
­sentiments.
A second phase of debate then took place in response to colonialism which combined anti-
Christian rhetoric with attacks on the British, Tamils, and Muslims. This is often associated
with Anagarika Dharmapala (1864–1933), whose birth name was Don David Hewavitarane.
Roberts (1997) argues that Dharmapala’s writings and rhetoric incorporated strong rhetoric,
attacking British colonialists as barbarians and singling out Hindu and Muslim communities as
opponents of Buddhism. He discussed two possible causes for this. First, the degree to which it
was at that time an aspect of anti-Hindu and anti-Muslim sentiments. Second, it may have been
a part of how Dharmapala came to understand how Buddhism had declined in India due to
Hindu and in particular Muslim attacks on Buddhism and Buddhist monuments in India such
as the Bodhgaya temple in Bihar, the sight of the Buddha’s enlightenment (Roberts, 1997). In
addition, due to his attempts to get the Bodhgaya temple returned to the Buddhists he came
into contact with Japanese Buddhists. Some of their nationalist rhetoric may also have influ-
enced him. Kemper (2015) has also shown that his understanding of Buddhist nationalism and
the development of a Buddhist ideology in relation to nationalism were to some extent influ-
enced by his various visits to Japan and his interactions with Japanese Buddhist clerics (Kemper,
2015: 116–186). Roberts also points out the ways in which Dharmapala specifically objected
to Muslim and Hindu involvement in traditional Buddhist practices in Sri Lanka. He cites an
instance when Dharmapala literally drove a party of Muslim musicians out of a procession that
was part of a ceremony in the Kelaniya temple in Kandy in 1905. This was part of his rejection
of the religious syncretism, which had been part of traditional Buddhism in Kandy and in Sri
Lanka (Roberts, 1997: 1024).
Should Dharmapala’s views be regarded as the first representative statements on Buddhist
ideology in Sri Lanka? Sri Lankan Buddhists, and some other Buddhists and scholars, do not
support such a view. They maintain that Dharmapala was a champion of Buddhism itself and
not a formulator of a distinct Buddhist ideology. Against this, scholars such as Roberts and oth-
ers have shown ways in which Dharmapala’s views could be regarded as a political ideology, in
particular in his later activities and writings where he views Hindus and Muslims as expressing
the espousal of a Sinhala Buddhist nationalism linking Sinhala ethnicity to the need for the state
to support Buddhism.

Pre-independence Buddhist nationalism and ideology (1900–1948)

The relationship between Buddhism and the state during this period took many forms, but
one prism through which it can be seen is to investigate how scholar monks and social reform-
ers like Walpola Rahula (1907–1977) agitated for the Buddhist sangha to take an active role in
social reform and engage in political activism. In a study of his life, Raghavan (2011) argues
that Rahula played a critical role in redefining the role of the Buddhist sangha in Sri Lanka.
After being the first Buddhist monk to ever enrol in a lay university, he went on to publicly
campaign for reform. He did not do this by preaching in temples but rather by distributing
pamphlets he wrote advocating reform in the sangha. Then, in the 1940s, he became involved
in the struggle for better rights for workers in plantations, which led to his imprisonment
(Raghavan, 2011: 119). After his release, he continued to campaign for reform in the sangha

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and against the role played by rich property-owning monks, and this led to the publication
in 1946 of a work in Singhalese called the Bhikṣuvāgē Urumaya (The Heritage of the Bhikkhu).
It became a fundamental text for reformists in the Buddhist sangha. He began by stating that
‘Buddhism is based on service to others’ (Rahula, 1974: 3). Raghavan points out that there was
an ambiguity in this, and in effect, he was arguing that the role of the sangha should become
service to society, including active engagement in civil society. The 1971 English translation of
this book also included the Declaration of the Vidyālaṅkāra Pirvena on ‘Bhikkhus and Politics’
of 1946, which states that

it is nothing but fitting for bhikkhus to identify themselves with activities conducive to
the welfare of our people – whether these activities be labelled politics or not – as long
as they do not constitute an impediment to the religious life of a bhikkhu.
(Rahula, 1974: 132)

This points to the fact that at the time Walpole Rahula was working on his Bhikṣuvāgē Urumaya,
the Buddhist sangha in Sri Lanka was undergoing radical reform. As a result, it became possible
for monks to be active in politics. He remained an influential figure throughout his life, and
Raghavan points to the way that his active intervention in politics led during 1995–1997 to the
defeat of attempts by the Chandrika government to make constitutional amendments to accom-
modate Tamil grievances about their situation in society (Raghavan, 2011: 128). Raghavan’s
conclusion is that Walpole Rahula’s work and his Bhikṣuvāgē Urumaya were key points in the
development towards ‘the secularisation of the sangha and its interpretation of Buddhism as
exclusively Sinhala’ (Raghavan, 2011: 129). It is also clear that in Rahula’s work at this time,
there was a consistent body of articulation of Buddhist concepts in relation to a struggle for
political power within an emerging democratic political system clearly developing.This suggests
that we can see in Rahula’s work the emergence of a distinct Buddhist political ideology.
Whilst Sinhala nationalism during the pre-independence period was moving towards
nationalism based on race and religion, Tamil nationalism’s response was focused on language
and culture and the rights of minorities. Perhaps the most outstanding Tamil political leader of
this period was G. G. Ponnambalam (1902–1977), who is remembered to this day in Sri Lanka
for his advocacy for fifty-fifty representation for minorities and the majority Sinhalese in the
government of Sri Lanka. He was from the Jaffna district and, after studying in Colombo, got a
scholarship to study at Cambridge University before returning to Sri Lanka and then practising
as a lawyer and advocate. He entered politics in 1931 and was first elected as a councillor from
Point Pedro Jaffna in 1934. In 1939 he gave a famous speech in the State Council arguing for
equal ‘fifty-fifty’ representation for minorities and the majority Sinhalese. From excerpts from
this speech, it is clear that whilst he was a Hindu, he was not proposing founding a Hindu state
but rather was concerned about the rights of the Tamil minority in Sri Lanka.

And what is the position of the Tamil community? I want to repeat that our position
is this. We are inhabitants of this country. We have lived here and a branch of the Tamil
community has lived here possibly longer than our brethren the Sinhalese. This is our
home.
(Vinayagamoorthy, 2003)

He then founded an All-Ceylon Tamil Congress Party in 1944 to further the struggle for
equal representation for the minorities in Sri Lanka. He was also able to argue this viewpoint
during three days of hearings of the Soulbury Commission on reforming the Sri Lankan

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Constitution in 1946. His basic argument to the commission was that equal representation
was the only way to avoid the danger of discrimination against minorities in Sri Lanka
(Ponnambalam, 1983).
It is clear from this that whilst Buddhist political ideologies were developing in the pre-
independence period, views from the Hindu community in Sri Lanka did not represent a
Hindu political ideology. Rather they indicate how Tamil Hindus in Sri Lanka were becoming
increasingly concerned about their civil rights as a persecuted minority under future majoritar-
ian governments.

Post-independence politics and Buddhism, 1948–1982

Sri Lanka became independent in 1948, with D. S. Senanayake as prime minister. His supporters
in government included the party he founded, the United National Party (UNP), S. W. R. D.
Bandaranaike’s Sinhala Maha Sabha (SMS) and the Tamil Congress under G.G. Ponnambalan. D.
S. Senanayake was a strong advocate for the concept of Sri Lanka as a secular state with conces-
sions for the minorities, Hindus, Muslims, and Christians alike. There were constitutional guar-
antees preventing discrimination against minorities (de Silva, 2003: 489–491). However, there
was strong pressure from all sides challenging the kind of consensus politics D. S. Senanayake
advocated. On the one hand, there was D. S. Senanayake’s Sri Lanka nationalism that advocated
reconciliation of all communities within a secular all-island polity. On the other, there were
advocates of Sinhala nationalism that advocated a view that there was a relationship between
the island of Sri Lanka, the Sinhalese language and ethnicity, and the Buddhist religion (de Silva,
2003: 496–497).
Sinhala nationalism developed out of the figures associated with the Vidyālaṅkāra Pirvena,
including Walpola Rahula. The relationship between Buddhism and politics in the ideology of
this movement were vividly depicted in two contemporaneous works. Both laid out Buddhist
political ideologies for Sinhala engagement with governance and the role of state patronage by
a Buddhist government.
First, a report called The Betrayal of Buddhism was written and published in 1956 by a com-
mittee of monks and laypeople. It argued that government support for Christian educational
institutions was part of a plan to undermine and betray the Buddhist heritage of Sri Lanka.
Stanley Tambiah (1992) argues that this was a key document showing how the Sinhala national-
ists were organising their opposition to D. S. Senanayake’s inclusive vision of Sri Lankan nation-
alism (Tambiah, 1992: 31–37).
Second, D. C.Vijayawardhana wrote a work called, in Sinhala, Dharma Vijaya, which could be
translated as ‘Triumph of Righteousness’; however Vijayawardhana also provided an alternative
English title for the work, The Revolt in the Temple (Vijayawardhana, 1953).The author argued in
favour of Sinhala nationalism, with complete identity between what in Singhalese are spoken of
as raṭa, jātiya, and āgama (country, race, and religion, respectively). Key to this vision of religion
and politics was the equating of the people of Sri Lanka exclusively with the descendants of
Vijaya, the legendary leader of the first Sinhalese to settle in Sri Lanka who arrived there on the
very day of the Buddha’s passing. Vijayawardhana began his book by asserting in the prologue
that ‘The history of Lanka is the history of the Sinhalese race’. He also equated the exact date
of this arrival of the Sinhalese in Lanka with the Buddha’s passing, which in India and Sri Lanka
was celebrated as having taken place exactly 2500 years before 1956, and due to this, he said 1956
must be celebrated as a festival of the ‘the Land, the Race and the Faith’ (Vijayawardhana, 1953:
25). In Vijayawardhana’s vision of Buddhism in Sri Lanka, he also incorporated both critiques of
the secular state as found in Marxist states and also ideas about how it was a duty of the state to

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foster Buddhism. In a section on the ‘Harmony of Religion and Politics’ (Vijayawardhana, 1953:
551–559), he argued for a system in which

The task of any government, in any country, the population of which is predominantly
Buddhist, is to harmonise the Buddha’s way of life with the every-day life of the com-
munity; or, in other words, with the functions of the state.
(Vijayawardhana, 1953: 551)

He also created a chart mapping out of the three Buddhist factors in awareness, lobha, dosa,
and moha, now often translated as ‘attraction’, ‘aversion’, and ‘delusion’, corresponding to state
functions. Attraction (lobha) related to the protection of the citizen from external and internal
threats, aversion (dosha) to justice in the legal sphere, wealth distribution, and social services,
and delusion (moha) to the education of children (Vijayawardhana, 1953: 553). It is notable that
nowhere in this vision of an ideal state is there provision for discussing minorities’ rights or of
how they contribute to governance. In sum, what he is arguing for, Tambiah suggests, is the
active intervention of the sangha in governance and their political leadership (Tambiah, 1992:
39–40).
During the period 1948–1956, Sri Lanka also experienced difficult economic challenges and
growing tensions between communities. D. S. Senanayake lost power in 1956, and a government
led by SWRD Bandaranaike took over. Bandaranaike and his Sri Lanka Freedom Party (SLFP)
rejected Senanayake’s Sri Lankan nationalism and adopted populist policies chiming with the
aims of Sinhala nationalism. There was a decisive move in favour of the Sinhalese via a bill to
make Sinhalese Sri Lanka’s only official language, effectively excluding non-Sinhalese speaking
communities, such as Tamils and Muslims, from most areas of government service (de Silva,
2003: 510–515).
In response to this, the Tamil community, as represented by the Tamil Federal Party, held
a convention in Trincomalee in 1956 in which they argued for autonomy for the North and
East of Sri Lanka and a federal constitution within which there would be parity of status
for Singhalese and Tamil languages (de Silva, 2003: 513). It is important to note that as G. G.
Ponnambala argued, the Tamil Federal Party was not arguing for a Hindu state, but one recog-
nising the rights of the Tamil community in terms of its ‘cultures, habits, customs, religions and
language’ (Oberst, 1988: 183).

Buddhism and conflict with the Tamils 1982–2009

In relation to the Buddhist conflict with the Tamil community, it is important first to consider
whether Hindu conceptions of the state impacted Tamil aspirations for a Tamil state within Sri
Lanka. We noted above that in 1956, the Tamil Federation Party advocated not a Hindu but a
Tamil secular state. After the 1983 anti-Tamil riots, the main focus of the Tamil community’s
struggle was the Tamil Tiger movement led by Velupillai Prabhakaran (1954–2009). In public
statements on religion and politics, the LTTE (Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam) publicly advo-
cated a form of secular state, and many have concluded that the key issue was not a desire for a
Hindu state, but a response to ‘Buddhist revivalism affect[ing] public policies’. This ‘threatened
the interest of the predominant Tamil minority, including its religious élite’ (Mainuddin and
Aicher, 1997: 38). Scholars, including Michael Roberts, have argued however, that it needs to be
acknowledged that their ideology reflected elements in the folk Hinduism of Sri Lanka’s Tamil
community (Roberts, 2005a, 2005b). However, Roberts’ arguments for the use of religious sym-
bolism in the campaigns waged by the Tamil Tigers do not show any direct call for a Hindu state.

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During the period when the Tamil struggle for independence reached its heights, Muslim
demands for recognition of their rights continued to develop. Some aspects of this were in
response to overall political changes in Sri Lanka, such as the Sri Lanka Muslim Congress party
leaving the People’s Alliance coalition government and joining the UNP. This was done as part
of a demand for a separate Muslim-administered district in the East (Bandarage, 2009: 176).
Moreover, such demands were accelerated by a sense amongst younger Muslims in the East that
anti-Muslim tendencies were developing in the LTTE. This led to the issuing of a separatist
resolution, the Oluvil Declaration, by Tamil students in 2003 seeking Muslim self-determination
in the Eastern region (Bandarage, 2009: 185).
The eventual military suppression of the Tamil separatist movement, which was complete by
2009, raised a number of issues for Sinhalese Buddhists about how they could justify the use of
violence in order to protect the Buddhist dharma. Tambiah (1992) addressed the issues which
came to the fore in the military campaigns between the Sri Lankan government against the LTTE
from 1983 onwards. His feelings about the challenges reflected how many lay Buddhists and
Buddhist monks felt about the violence: ‘a profound misgiving, even consternation’ about being
caught up in political violence (Tambiah, 1992: 101). He also focused on what he described as
the documentation of the ‘ideological work of certain modern monks (and their lay associates)’
aiming to create a ‘democratic, righteous, welfare-orientated Buddhist state’ (Tambiah, 1992:
169). However, he also argued that discussions of the state in Sri Lanka should acknowledge
that the concept of galactic (or mandala) polities he had himself developed for South-East Asian
states also applied to pre-modern Sri Lankan states.The key issue here is similar to discussions of
early Indian states above: we should not project back onto the past modern notions of a unitary
centralised state, but rather earlier state formations were based on central states surrounded by
multiple polities, each running their own affairs (Tambiah, 1992: 172–175). The trajectories in
Sri Lankan politics from the colonial period onwards were conditioned as well by projecting
back onto Sri Lanka’s history the vision of it as always having been a unitary state. Prior to colo-
nialism, there was a galactic state which allowed for difference in its regional forms in a way that
the centralised state model introduced during colonialism did not.
Tessa Bartholomeusz (2002) makes a notable contribution by focusing on the develop-
ment of the notion of a Buddhist just-war as a way to legitimise the Buddhist violence against
non-Buddhists. In her work, she traces the genealogy of these ideas from the vaṃśa chronicles
through the ideas of the Sinhala Buddhist nationalists to the conflict between the Sri Lankan
government and the LTTE. She argues that in Sri Lankan Buddhism, a just or holy war was
seen by many as legitimate if the use of violence was in order to protect Buddhism itself
(Bartholomeusz, 2002: 155–163).
After the defeat of the LTTE, Kent (2010) wrote a study of how individual soldiers serv-
ing in the Sri Lankan armed forces were able to reconcile their own Buddhist beliefs with
their use of violence against the Tamils in the war against the LTTE. In this, he argued that
Bartholomeusz’s analysis of just-war ideologies also need to be seen in relation to how indi-
viduals explain to themselves having to undertake acts of violence. He also argues they balance
the Buddhist notion of intentional action (cetanā) with good intention to protect the dharma
against the Buddhist understanding that such actions would result in negative karma for those
that undertook them. He points out that this then led to individuals questioning how this kind
of behaviour could be understood. He then shows how some then rationalised their actions by
remembering examples from Buddhist stories of similar incidents in which individuals accepted
negative karma for violent actions done to achieve positive goals, but others argued that vio-
lence, if carried out without anger and for positive goals, does not produce any negative results
for the karma of an individual (Kent, 2010: 164–165). In terms of Rachik’s discussions of the

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ways in which religious teaching becomes ideology, it may be relevant to inquire whether indi-
vidual and varied responses to having to commit violent acts can be called ideology. It could
be argued that whilst Bartholomeusz’s study of just-war does show how a Buddhist ideology
supporting just-war developed, at an individual level, many of those involved in armed conflicts
still experienced difficulty in reconciling just-war ideologies with their own understandings as
Buddhists.

Post-conflict dialogues and debates (2009–2014)

One fundamental issue that Sri Lanka has faced since the end of the Tamil secessionist move-
ment is the focus on the unitary state in Sri Lanka.Welikala (2016) argues that this is the central
issue: insistence on a single unitary centralised state as opposed to the formulation of a state
incorporating federal elements. Welikala asserts that there are ‘normative and historiographical
arguments of Sinhala Buddhist nationalism, for which the unitary state constitutes a central and
non-negotiable constitutional postulate’. In his analysis, he shows how the constitution of the
independent state of Sri Lanka enshrined this doctrine and how subsequent court cases upheld
the validity of this position despite arguments for some devolution of power. His argument is
that the basis of this includes both the British colonial period’s establishment of a unitary state
in Sri Lanka and the deployment of the values of the pre-colonial Sinhala Buddhist kingdoms
in contemporary Sinhala Buddhist nationalism (Welikala, 2016: 36–37). In conclusion, it may
be that in the period following the war with the LTTE, a systemic factor derived from Sinhala
Buddhist ideology is a clear obstacle to Buddhist and Hindu communities’ reconciliation.
A second possible Buddhist ideological issue is the continued growth in Buddhist ethnicity-
based politics expressed in anti-Hindu and anti-Muslim movements. Mahinda Deegalle (2006a,
2006b, 2016, 2017) has written extensively on the rise of the political party the Jathika Hela
Urumaya (JHU), founded in 2004, and on the activist group the Boda Bala Sena (BBS) established
at about the same time. The BBS came to prominence after it apparently stoked riots and vio-
lence against Muslims in Aluthgama in 2014. One approach to considering the ideology of the
BBS is to look at the public pronouncements of its founder, Gnanasara Thero (b. 1975). In an
interview with an Indian magazine in 2019, he said, ‘The Buddha said that there is no sin more
terrible than mythia drushtiya’ (Pali miccā diṭṭhi ‘false views’) and implied that his motivation was
to counter the terrorism practised by believers in false views. He denied instigating anti-Muslim
violence and riots that occurred after his public speeches. In terms of a specific ideology, whilst
he spoke about the importance of Buddhism, his focus was firmly on the Sinhalese as an ethnic
community. When questioned about reports that at a Buddhist convention in Kandy on 7 July
2019, he argued for a Sinhala parliament, he objected and said that he advocated for a parlia-
ment ‘that does not undermine in various guises the country and rights of the Sinhala majority’
(Balathasinghala, 2019). It is this kind of presentation of the ideology of the BBS which leads to
questions about whether its ideology is actually a new form of Sinhala Buddhist ideology or a
form of racial, or ethnicity-based, ideology.
Some Sri Lankan authors have also argued that the BBS might be better seen as a form of
ethnic identity politics than as an ideology based on Buddhist ideas. Izeth Hussain (1927–2017),
a prominent former Sri Lankan diplomat and civil servant, wrote in the Colombo Telegraph
that ‘that the BBS and other extremist groups can best be understood in terms of a paradigm
of racism’ (Hussain, 2014). Many of the actions of the BBS also seem to be so fundamentally
at odds with Buddhist ethics that it is difficult to see them as expressions of Buddhist ideology.
However, the same just-war rationalisations for Buddhist violence against Hindus discussed in
Bartholomeusz (2002) may now be an explanation for anti-Muslim developments in Sri Lanka.

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What is unclear is whether the ideology of groups such as the BBS is a new form of Sinhala
Buddhist ideology or further development of Sinhala ideologies related to the equation of
Sinhala ethnicity, language, and religion as forming the basis of the Sri Lankan state.
The situation in Sri Lanka further evolved with the strengthening of the power of the
Rajapaksha family after the 2020 election resulting in the two Rajapaksha brothers being prime
minister and president of Sri Lanka. However, I will not discuss this new dimension in intra-
Sinhalese politics in this chapter as it is so far unclear whether this represents the start of a new
phase in Buddhist ideology in Sri Lanka or a consolidation of existing Sinhala Buddhist nation-
alist politics.

Conclusion
This chapter has considered how Buddhist teachings and doctrines have become Buddhist
ideologies in Sri Lanka. Following Rachik, I suggested that three phases of this process need
to be considered. First, the vaṃśa chronicle traditions of Sri Lanka acted as a kind of primary
ground for and precursor to post-contemporary Buddhist ideology in Sri Lanka. Second, how
the circumstances of state formations and maintenance in the kingdom of Kandy refined the
centralised concept of the relationship between the state and Buddhism that British colonialism
encountered when it annexed the kingdom of Kandy.Third, how the debates between Buddhist
monks and lay Buddhist practitioners, such as Dharmapala, led to the development of a form
of nascent Buddhist ideology in Sri Lanka in the second half of the 19th and in the early 20th
century. These earlier developments then led, when reformers such as Walpole Rahula rose to
prominence, to modern Sinhalese Buddhist ideologies becoming fully developed. Subsequent
conflicts inside the Sinhalese community and between it and the Hindu and, more recently
again, Muslim communities, helped crystallise how Buddhist ideologies developed from the
mid-20th century onwards.This acted as a crucible that forged the current identity of Sri Lanka
from the tensions inherent in Sinhala Buddhist ideology of equating Sinhala ethnic identity, the
Singhalese language, and Sri Lanka as a Buddhist state.

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 24
HINDUISM, HINDUTVA,
AND IDEOLOGY
Abdul Shaban

Introduction
It is no exaggeration to say ‘true religions are things of the past’. This applies to all the major reli-
gions of the world.They emerged in a specific time and place as both a fresh mode of thinking and
to guide social organisation and the relation of the self to the supernatural or to God(s). Over time,
they were transformed and co-opted and now serve the opposite purpose, be it in their relations to
political power, capitalism, and violence between communities. In one of its most important appli-
cations, religion has been a tool to gain political power and build empires since medieval times via
crusades, jihads, dharma yuddhs (war for religion), or through the creation of consciousness of ‘we’
and ‘our’ and separation from ‘they’ and ‘theirs’ on the basis of beliefs. But never before in human
history and the development of global society and civilisations have countries been so divided on
the basis of religion as today (see Huntington 1996). In recent years, we have seen naked violations
of human rights in Syria (by Islamic State against Christians and Kurds), in Afghanistan (mainly
against Muslim minority groups), in Pakistan (Taliban and other sects within Islam and against
other religious groups), in Myanmar (Buddhists against Rohingya Muslims), and in Sri Lanka
(Buddhists against Hindu Tamils and Muslims). In addition to the Middle East, which gave rise to
three major Abrahamic religions – Judaism, Christianity and Islam – South Asia is another birth-
place of major religions, including Hinduism, Buddhism, Jainism, and Sikhism. India is the home
of followers of all the major religions of the world: Hinduism (79.8% of its total population of 1.21
billion in 2011), Islam (14.2%), Christianity (2.3%), Sikhism (1.7%), Buddhism (0.7%), and Jainism
(0.4%) (Census of India 2011). Beginning with the encounter with British colonialism in India
and specifically with the rise of the Indian national movement for independence in the late 19th
century, the relationship of Hindus with other religious groups has changed.
There has been a constant mixing of religion with geopolitics by far-right Hindus, which
has created an impasse for the Indian secular (sarva dharma sambhava, equality of all religions)
traditions followed by Ashoka (c. 265–238 BCE), Akbar (1556–1605 AD), and Mahatma Gandhi.
The Hindu far-right ideology called Hindutva (belief in the superiority of the Hindu race and
culture and exclusive claim to South Asian geography by its followers) poses a great threat to
Indian diversity and peace. It has opened a theatre of ideological and physical conflict between its
followers, and Muslims, Christians, and Sikhs, on the one hand, and those within Hinduism but
at the margins like Dalits and feminists, on the other. While the Bhartiya Janata Party (BJP) has

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s­ignificant moderate and centrist leaders, as a political representative of Hindutva, it has captured
political power in many states of India, forming federal or central governments during 1998–2004
and from 2014. Under the rule of the BJP, India has also seen the transformation of its foreign
policy and looming conflicts with neighbouring Muslim states.The far-right outlook and ideolo-
gies could open a theatre of conflict and war in South Asia, endangering not only peace and amity
but also Hinduism as a porous and syncretic belief system that provides continuity and sustenance
to Indian civilisation. In the above context, the chapter examines (a) Hinduism and the factors
that led to its transformation in the colonial period, (b) the ideology of far-right Hinduism and
its association with geopolitics in relation to its exclusive claims to South Asia and the Aryan race,
(c) post-colonial development, the evolution of the ideology, and its relation to India’s secular state
and constitutions, and (d) ideologies shaping social structures within Hinduism. The chapter is
divided into seven sections.The second section briefly discusses Hinduism as a religion.The trans-
formation of Hinduism and rise of the Hindu far right and its encounter with colonial modernity
are dealt with in in the third section. The fourth section deals with the rise of Hindutva ideol-
ogy, while the fifth section discusses the post-colonial development of Hindutva ideology and
implications for secularism, citizenship, and constitutional values. The sixth section examines the
social implications of Hinduism and Hindutva on social organisations with reference to foreign
religions, Dalits, and women. The seventh section concludes the chapter.

Hinduism and Hindu as an identity

Hinduism is one of the largest religions, with about 1.1 billion followers globally (Hackett and
McClendon 2017). Etymologically, the terms ‘Hindu’ and ‘Hinduism’ are derived from the word
‘Indus’ or ‘Sindhu’ (river), leading to the words ‘India’ and ‘Hindustan’. The origin of Hinduism
is associated with the mixing of various streams of people, including Aryans, coming to the
Indian subcontinent from Central Asia and the aboriginal belief system already there. Various
streams of people entering the Indian subcontinent have been discussed by Subbarao (1958),
and we will not repeat the discussion here. In ancient and medieval times, the territory to the
east of the River Indus (in the Indian subcontinent) was called ‘Hind’ in Arabic and Persian, and
the people living therein were called ‘Hindi’ or ‘Hindus’. Later this term was associated with
the cultural and religious practices of the people in the region, and those following the mix of
the geographical, cultural practices and faiths were termed as Hindus. As Amartya Sen writes,

The Persians, Arabs and the Greeks saw India as the land around and beyond the Indus,
and Hindus were the native people of that land. Muslims from India were at one stage
called ‘Hindavi’ Muslims, in Persian as well as Arabic, and there are plenty of references
in early British documents to ‘Hindoo Muslims’ and ‘Hindoo Christians’, to distin-
guish them respectively from Muslims and Christians from outside India.
(Sen 2005: 310)

Later, belief systems, such as Buddhism, Jainism, Sikhism, separated from the larger pool of
Hinduism, and what was left became known as ‘Hinduism’. Even so, within this separated
Hinduism, there exists a variety of belief systems ranging from

an eclectic range of doctrines and practices, from pantheism to agnosticism and from
faith in reincarnation to belief in the caste system. But none of these constitutes an
obligatory credo for a Hindu: there are none. There are no compulsory dogmas.
(Tharoor 2016:14)

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 Hinduism, Hindutva, and ideology

Hinduism does not require believers to follow one particular book or patterns of rituals to claim
their belonging and so identify themselves. A Hindu can be astika (believer in the soul, self, and
spirit, authority of/pious) or nastika (opposite of astikas). An asktika (orthodox) Hindu can sub-
scribe to any or a combination of any of the six schools of philosophies of Nyaya (the school of
logic), Vaisheshika (the atomistic school), Samkhya (the enumeration school), Raja yoga (meta-
physics of samkhya), Mimamsa (the Vedic exegesis), and Vedanta (Upanishadic traditions). The
nastikas or heterodox are those who follow the other three schools, namely, Buddhism, Jainism,
and the Charvaka School (essentially a materialist philosophy). The nastika are considered to
have undergone reforms that arose over time to eradicate ritualism in Hinduism. Buddhism and
Jainism emerged against the ritualism that the Brahmanic domination of Hinduism promoted.
Both Buddhism and Jainism were initiated by the Kshatriyas as a revolt against Brahmanic domi-
nations. Later on, these revolts and reforms were accommodated within Hinduism as reform
movements.
Despite Hinduism being in its origin a collection of faith system of ‘heathens’, attempts were
made to homogenise it and present it in similar ways as Abrahamic religions. For instance, the
Arya Samaj movement that started in the late 19th century attempted to portray Hinduism as
an organised religion and separate people from their syncretic practices via the Suddhi (purifica-
tion) movement. This involved requesting those practising a mix of Hindu, Muslim, Christian,
or other faiths and rituals to ‘purify’ themselves and abandon those other practices in order to
be a ‘pure’ Hindu. At the same time, Bal Gangadhar Tilak, a political leader of the anti-colonial
Indian national movement, claimed that ‘a Hindu is he who believes that the Vedas contain
self-evident and axiomatic truths’ (Merchant 2014). This was an attempt to consolidate and
homogenise the Hindus to compete with already well-defined and homogenised religions like
Islam and Christianity with their specific religious books, the Qur’an and the Bible. But this
definition of Hindu excluded nastiks – the Buddhists, Jains, and Sikhs, and those believing in
Charvaka philosophy.
Mahatma Gandhi advanced a similar opinion to that of Tilak: anyone believing in books like
the Vedas, the Upanishads, and other Hindu scriptures, as well as gods and their incarnations,
varnas (caste system) and ashrama (practices of four stages of life), and the cow as a holy ani-
mal, should be regarded as a Hindu (Tharoor 2016). However, in the 1920s, a Hindu far-right
philosopher,VD Savarkar, did not recognise it as essential to believe in the Vedas to be a Hindu.

To him, the various religious disputes within Hindu religious thought – between mon-
ism and pantheism, between Dvaita and Advaita, between the Vedas and the Upanishads
and even including agnosticism and atheism – were irrelevant to the issue of Hindu
identity. Savarkar saw ‘Hinduness’ or ‘Hindutva’ as opposed to ‘Hinduism’ as a uniting
cultural construct that underlay the identity of all those who belong to ‘Bharatvarsha’,
the ancient land of India.
(Tharoor 2016: 12)

In addition, Jawaharlal Nehru, the first prime minister of India, observed that ‘Being a Hindu
means all things to all men’ (Tharoor 2016: 12). In this connection, Alfred Lyall, a British civil
servant, termed Hinduism as a ‘“tangled jungle” full of paradoxes and contradictions, “a religious
chaos” spread all over India, difficult to comprehend and define’ (Tharoor 2016: 12).The second
president of India, Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan, termed Hinduism ‘a museum of beliefs, a medley
of rites, or a mere map, a geographical expression?’ (Tharoor 2016: 12).
Hinduism does not claim to be unique in terms of telling the truth and in its folk form gives
equal importance to all streams of thought claiming to represent the truth. This aspect of the

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religion is expressed by the Rig Veda, ‘“Ekam sat vipra bahudha vadanti” – truth is one, sages call
it variously’ (Tharoor 2016: 31).
The Supreme Court of India described Hinduism as,

When we think of the Hindu religion, we find it difficult, if not impossible, to define
Hindu religion or even adequately describe it. Unlike other religions in the world, the
Hindu religion does not claim any one prophet; it does not worship any one God; it
does not subscribe to any one dogma; it does not believe in any one philosophic con-
cept; it does not follow any one set of religious rites or performances; in fact, it does
not appear to satisfy the narrow traditional features of any religion or creed. It may
broadly be described as a way of life and nothing more.
(Supreme Court of India 1966: 15)

Because of these reasons, Hindus are largely summed up as religious residuals in the Indian sub-
continent, people not following Islam, Christianity, Judaism, Zoroastrianism, Sikhism, Buddhism,
and Jainism, or tribal religions.

Hinduism’s encounter with colonial modernity

With the rise of British colonial power in India, Hinduism, which had existed as the folk ways
of life, as an assimilation of a multitude of religious scriptures, and with innumerable gods and
goddess and rituals, started transforming itself. This happened as a consequence of British colo-
nialism and the attempt to systematise the knowledge of Indian communities and use religions
for its political administration. Colonial historians, such as James Mill, started compiling the his-
tory of India in the Hindu and Muslim periods.The division of Indian history on religious lines
by Mill (1817) was not to arrive at impartial knowledge. It was an attempt to see India through
a religious lens and to use its history to create differences between Hindus and Muslims and
assist the colonial power to rule. The population census started in the second half of the 19th
century and included classification of the population by religion and caste.The British used this
knowledge for governance, to consolidate Hinduism, and to build a new consciousness among
Hindus. The same can be said for the rise of Islamic consciousness in India (van de Veer 2002).
This classification resulted in ordering religious groups on the basis of their numbers, which
created the politics of the majority and the minority and the fear of numbers. Both Hindu
and Muslim elites, organised in the Muslim League and Hindu Mahasabha and its associates
Rastriya Swayam Sevak Sangh (RSS), sought to organise in this way from the second half of
the 19th century. The British ordering (including divide and rule) helped to control and rule
Indians.
Additionally, the colonial government also opened the Indian social space for Christian mis-
sionaries, opposed equally by Hindus, Muslims, and Sikhs (van der Veer 2002). This led Hindu
religious leaders to start movements, like Arya Samaj in 1875, to homogenise the Hindus and
bring back those who were gone to other religions or were living in syncretic traditions. Muslims
also started similar movements, and Tablighi Jama’t emerged in the 1920s to bring Muslims back
into a ‘pure’ Islamic tradition.The birth of Jamaat-e-Islami in 1941 and its rise again consolidated
the role of religion in politics in India through an attempt to homogenise Muslim identity and
speak on their behalf. In sum, the fear of Christian missionaries and technologies invented by
the colonial government by creating religious-political identity groups encouraged Indians to
fill the public sphere with religious symbols, a development that eventually led to the partition
of the country.

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Rise of Hindutva ideology

The present organised form of Hinduism has emerged as a response to encounters with colo-
nial modernity (van der Veer 2002). As an organised religion, it tramples on the liberal space.
Although many freedom fighters and even the framers of the Indian Constitution attempted
to put in place the basic foundations of a liberal constitution, today it is under threat from far-
right Hinduism (see Panthan 1997; Nandy 1988; Madan 1987; Chatterjee 1994). It is important
to note here that in the last 200 years, Hinduism transformed from porous folkways of life
and beliefs into a formidably organised form with muscular political power, driving it towards
violence. This is the opposite direction that Swami Vivekanand and Mahatma Gandhi wanted
to guide it, through acceptance of all faiths as truth and technologies of ahimsa. The Hindutva
ideology is now in conflict with other minority religions like Islam and Christianity, while
globally, it is competing to have its own space among organised religion and politics. Many far-
right Hindus connect to Indian nationalism and citizenship with both a Hindu religious hue
and ethno-nationalism. In addition, the transnational dialectics of identity and Indian diaspora
are further sharpening and shaping the far right and encouraging religious divides in India (van
der Veer 2002).
Individuals and organisations emerged in colonial India and set the scene for today’s far-right
Hinduism, known as Hindutva. The Arya Samaj movement aggressively sought conversion and
reconversion to its brand of Hinduism and the protection of cows. In 1888, when the North-
Western Provincial High Court decreed that the cow was not a sacred animal to be protected
by the state, far-right Hindus turned against Muslims and Christians (Freitag 1989). In 1893, Bal
Gangadhar Tilak initiated Ganesh Utsav (festival), which filled the public sphere in the Western
region of India with religious colour. Two other far-right Hindu nationalists,Vinayak Damodar
Savarkar (1883–1966) and Madhav Sadashiv Golwalkar (1906–1973) founded the philosophy
and ideologies of Hindutva.
Two Hindu nationalist organisations, Hindu Mahasabha and RSS, have carried forward far-
right Hindutva philosophy and ideology to the politics and common people of India in the
name of Hindu culture and Hindu pride. The Akhil Bhartiya Hindu Mahasabha was founded
in 1915 and developed into a political party in 1935, while RSS, which designates itself as a
Hindu cultural organisation, was founded in 1925 in Nagpur, Maharashtra. The purpose of
both organisations is to spread Hindutva, Hindu transnationalism, social conservatism, economic
nationalism, and right wing-populism. It is ironic that both the religio-sectarian political forma-
tions of Hindu Mahasabha and those from RSS barely opposed British colonialism, as was also
the case with the Muslim League.
Savarkar is known for his two-nation theory – Hindus and Muslims in India as two nations.
This led to their use and misuse in politics by both Hindu nationalists and the Muslim League,
resulting in the partition of the country into India and Pakistan. Golwalkar, as head of RSS, as
we will see below, boosted the rise of ethnic and nationalist Hindu pride. In addition, there were
many other RSS leaders, such as the founding father of the RSS, Hedgewar (1889–1940), who
wanted to root Indian citizens in Hindu identity, which contributed significantly to the rise of
Hindutva.
Hindutva, or far-right Hindu cultural nationalism, led to a significant distortion of the ide-
ology of Hinduism, which originally was porous, accommodative, amorphous, and based on
religious equality. The Hindu Mahasabha, the RSS, and their representatives made concerted
efforts to provide a new definition and meaning to Hinduism in the first half of the 20th cen-
tury. However, they were overshadowed by Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, popularly known as
Mahatma Gandhi, considered as the most authentic representative of Hinduism and its glorious

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tradition of accommodation, peace, non-violence, and religious equality. In fact, Gandhi had to
pay a great price for this: he was shot dead by a far-right Hindu nationalist in 1948. Next, we
discuss the understanding Gandhi developed of Hinduism, and then we examine the changes
and transformed interpretation of the same by Hindu nationalists.
As a proud Hindu and believer in equality of all religions, Gandhi defined Hinduism.

It is the good fortune or the misfortune of Hinduism that it has no official creed … If
I were asked to define the Hindu creed I should simply say: search after truth through
non-violent means. A man may not believe in God and still he may call himself a
Hindu. Hinduism is a relentless pursuit after truth.
(1994:1)

Criticising Arya Samaj’s Suddhi movement and proselytism, he further said, ‘In my opinion there
is no such thing as proselytism in Hinduism as it is understood in Christianity or to a lesser
extent in Islam. The Arya Samaj has, I think, copied the Christians in planning its propaganda’
(Gandhi 1994: 21).
However, far-right Hindu nationalists changed the traditional ideologies and belief of
Hinduism and its worldview. Though marginalised because of Gandhi’s aura and appeal, they
kept on working to develop a new worldview of Hinduism and provide it with a new ideology.
They threw away the ideologies of non-violence, coexistence, sarva dharma sambhav, and equality
of religions dear to Gandhi and rooted in Indian tradition. They provided, through an assertion
of majoritarianism, a violent ideology and a new definition of Hinduism, creating new relations
of religion with geography, politics, society, economy, race, and culture.
Among the writings that gave shape to the conceptions of Hindutva and exclusionary
Hindu Rashtra (Hindu nation) is the book, We or Our Nationhood Defined by Madhav Sadashiv
Golwalkar. Golwalkar was born in 1906 in Nagpur, became a member of the RSS in 1933, and
led the RSS from 1940 to 1973 (Islam 2006). Golwalkar gave concrete shape to the ideas of
Vinayak Damodar Savarkar, who put forward his theory of Hindu Rashtra (Hindu nation) in
his book Hindutva published in 1929. Savarkar claimed for exclusionary Hindu nationalism and
argued that a Hindu,

is who looks upon the land that extended from Sindu to Sindu – from Indus to the
Seas – as the land of his forefathers – his fatherland [Pitribhu], who inherits the blood
of that race whose first discernible source could be traced to the Vedic Saptasindhus
[Saptasindhus meant seven rivers presided by the river Sindhu, heavenly ordained land
of the Aryans] … who has inherited and claims as his own the culture of that race as
expressed chiefly in their common classical language Sanskrit … and who above all,
address this land, this Sindhusthan as his Holyland [Punyabhu] … These are essentials
of Hindutva – a common nation [Rasthra], a common race [Jati] and common civiliza-
tion [Sanskriti].
(Savarkar 1989 as quoted in Islam 2006:12–13)

It was Savarkar who mixed up geography and race and claimed the territory of the imagined
community. Golwalkar (1939) used swaraj in a different sense to Gandhi. The word ‘swaraj’
can be broken in two parts: ‘swa’ meaning ‘we’ and ‘raj’ mean governance/kingdom. Where for
Gandhi, it meant ‘self-rule’ by the people of India, Golawalkar used ‘we’ to denote Hindus,
excluding others (Golwalkar 1939: 3). He defined the geographic notion of the Hindu race

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converted into Hindu Rashtra. This geography expands from Afghanistan to Myanmar, includ-
ing Sri Lanka.Yechury (2017) calls it

distortion of both history and science. First, the entire diversity of culture, traditions,
language and customs of the peoples who inhabited India over centuries is sought to
be straitjacketed into a monolithic ‘Hinduism’. Secondly, an external enemy is created
(that is, ‘external’ to Hindus) … to whip up ‘Hindu’ consolidation.

In order to validate his geographical thesis, Golwalkar argued that those who were in possession
of this land historically were Hindus:

‘We – Hindus –have been in undisputed and undisturbed possession of this land for
over 8 or even 10 thousand years before the land was invaded by any foreign race’ and
because of this the land ‘came to be known as Hindusthan, the land of the Hindus’.
(Golwalkar 1939: 6)

It is important to note that the term used here is ‘Hindusthan’ not ‘Hindustan’. The similar-
ity is between ‘stan’ (mean country or land) with the Sanskrit word ‘sthan’ meaning place. By
the term ‘foreign race’, he means both Muslims and Christians. But Golwalkar glosses over
(a) the history of Central India and South Asia, which has been very dynamic, and one after
the another, ethnicities have made their incursions into these lands in prehistory until very
recently; (b) that there were no original residents of the lands but the accretion of the same
took place over time (Subbarao 1958); and (c) that a large proportion of the natives of what
he called the residents of these lands converted to one or other religions. The same has hap-
pened in today’s mainland India involving Hindus, Sikhs, Jains, and Buddhists. Hindu far-right
organisations use Golwalkar’s understanding to depict a map of Bharat from Afghanistan to
Myanmar. In order to justify his political understanding, Golwalkar assumes that Hindus (used
synonymously with the Aryan race by him) were the original inhabitants of Hindusthan and
did not come from anywhere else. He designates Western scholarship on migration and origin
of Aryans from somewhere near the Caspian sea as the ‘shady testimony of Western scholars’
(Golwalkar 1939: 6).
In fact, one of the major challenges before Golwalkar was to justify and weave into his story
the argument by Bal Gangadhar Tilak that Vedas originated in the Arctic. For this, he argued that,

We may agree with him that originally the Aryans i.e. the Hindus lived in the region of
the North Pole. But, he was not aware that, in ancient times, the North Pole and with
it the Arctic Zone was not where it is today … North Pole is not stationary and quite
long ago it was in that part of the world, which, we find, is called Bihar and Orissa at
the present; that then it moved northeast and then by a sometimes westerly, sometimes
northward movement, it came to its present position. If this be so, did we leave the
Arctic Zone and come to Hindusthan or were we all along here and the Arctic Zone
left us and moved away northwards in its zigzag march? We do not hesitate in affirming
that had this fact been discovered during the life-time of Lokmanya Tilak, he would
unhesitatingly have propounded the proposition that The Arctic Home in the Vedas
‘was verily in Hindusthan itself and that it was not the Hindus who migrated to that
land but the Arctic Zone which emigrated and left the Hindus in Hindusthan’.
(Golwalkar 1939: 45)

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 Abdul Shaban

This indicates that he did not give serious consideration to time, geology, and geography before
presenting his thesis on the origin of Aryans and Vedas.
Given the human implications of Golwakar’s thought, the noted author Kushwant Singh in
his review of Islam’s (2006) book, wrote that:

Golwalkar’s thinking was much influenced by Veer Savarkar. Both supported caste
system, approved of Hitler exterminating millions of Jews in gas chambers, supported
Zionism and Jewish State of Israel for no other reason other than it was forever wag-
ing wars against its neighbours who were Muslims. Islamophobia became an integral
part of Hindutva.

The ideological threads, streams, and brand of ‘Hindutva’ that Savarkar and Golwalkar developed
were later strengthened and further mythicised by their followers. To them, scientific evidence
and historical facts were less important than myth and belief. Gandhi’s ideas of a diverse and
religiously plural India have been displaced by this brand of Hindutva in recent decades.
However, the terms ‘Hindu’ and ‘Hindutva’ have also been interpreted as the identity of all
the people of the subcontinent or Bharatvarsh (mainland India). This meaning is sometimes
advocated by the RSS. Hindutva, RSS head Mohan Bhagwat claims, is an identity applicable
to all Indians:

The word [is] applicable to all 1.3 billion people who call themselves the sons and
daughters of Bharatvarsh, whose everyday life is striving towards an alignment with its
moral and ethical code and who are proud of the heritage of their ancestors.
(PTI 2020)

These thoughts about Hindus and Hindutva, though accommodative of other religious groups,
is focused on an uncritical understanding of past heritage and ideology and conflicts with both
modernity and the Indian Constitution in relation to the caste system, untouchability, women’s
social position, and mythical belief systems. It is doubtful of ‘others’and regards them as separa-
tists. In fact, this lack of trust was the root cause of the country’s partition in 1947 and the emer-
gence of Pakistan. A Muslim poet and philosopher, Mohammd Iqbal, who later aligned with
Muslim separatism because he doubted that Hindus should force their cultures on Muslims after
the British left India, wrote a poem that includes a line ‘mazhab nahi sikhata apas mein bair rakhna,
Hindi hain hum watan hain, Hindostan hamara’ (religion does not teach to hate each other, we all
are Hindi, and this is [our] country). This is very close to the interpretation by Mohan Bhagwat
and could be reworked to create accommodation and harmony between religious groups.

Post-colonial rise of Hindutva

Although Hindutva ideologies originated in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, they took
hold of Indian politics in the post-colonial period. In this section, we attempt to understand
their rise and implications.

Hindutva ideology and nationalism, patriotism, and citizenship

The far-right Hindutva ideology has now given birth to a different form of Indian nationalism
and patriotism. It believes in violent forms of assertion of majoritarianism and relegations of its
constructed ‘others’ to the margins or out of the ‘national territory’. It has revalorised and redis-

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covered the fault lines of religion, caste, and modernity. The core of far-right nationalism is the
belief that only Hindus are nationalist Indians. The loyalty of other religious groups and espe-
cially the followers of Abrahamic religions is questioned. A current circulating rumour on social
media about Muslims is that a Muslim army regiment refused to fight with Pakistan in the 1965
war (Firstpost 2020). In fact, a Muslim regiment has never existed in the Indian army. Similar
myths and propaganda exist about ‘love jihad’, that is, Muslim men marrying and converting
Hindu girls to Islam (Gupta 2009); ‘UPSC or civil services jihad’, Muslims infiltrating Indian
civil services (Shaikh 2020); ‘land jihad’ (The Wire 2017) and ‘population jihad’, that is, Muslims
dominating the Hindus demographically (Srivastava 2015). In fact, a television news channel
influenced by far-right ideology constructed a spurious list of types of jihad that Muslims are
said to be pursuing in India (Ramachandran 2020). Social media and television channels have
become important ways of spreading spurious news in order to metaphorically ‘anti-nationalise’
other religious communities and then to compromise their quality of citizenship.
There have been four forms of citizenship discourse in India since the ‘freedom movement’
emerged during British colonialism: liberal, republican, ethno-nationalist, and non-statist (Shani
2010; Shaban 2016). The Indian Constitution provides a liberal (universalistic) form of citizen-
ships to both individuals and communities via fundamental rights. In the ethno-nationalist con-
ception of citizenship, an individual can be a citizen only if his or her origin is from a specific
race, belief, or kinship. Far-right Hindutva ideologues see ‘Hindus’ as a separate nation from
other religious groups and put them as the first citizens of India and relegate followers of other
religions to the margins. The ethno-nationalist discourse in the 1940s created massive violence
in the subcontinent, and since the 1980s, with the rise of the far-right political formations, this
discourse has again taken centre stage in India.
The unity of Hindus by the far right is constructed through a binary in which Abrahamic
religions are conceived as the ‘other’. However, history shows that an othering process has also
historically worked against Buddhism, Jainism, and Sikhism as well (see Jha 2019; Singh 2017;
Ashraf 2018).
The far-right wish to convert India into Hindu Rashtra is reminiscent of what occurred
with the Islamic far-right leader, Mohammad Ali Jinnah. In fact, both Hindutva organisations
and the Muslim League were implicated in the partition of India in 1947. Accompanying vio-
lence took the lives of around 2 million persons and 14 million were made refugees (Doshi and
Mehdi 2017). A far-right Hindu extremist killed Gandhi in 1948. As Gyan Pandey puts it:

The assassination of Mahatma Gandhi in January 1948 at the hands of a Hindu extrem-
ist … seems to have brought a good deal of north India back to its senses and marked
[a] turning point in the debate between [a] ‘secular nation’ and ‘Hindu nation’.
(Pandey 1999: 614)

Unlike other militant groups who work with religious ideologies, such as Muslim fundamental-
ists in Kashmir, the Hindu far right is quite open about its aims (Banerjee 1991). In the post-
independence period, far-right Hindutva has thrown several challenges to Indian society and
polity, some of which we discuss below.
First, it has not shied away from advocating violence. In fact, with the rise of far-right
political parties, the Hindu–Muslim violence has significantly increased in India and has spread
towards more tolerant south Indian states (Shaban 2016).
Second, a massification of the far-right Hindutva ideology has led to the proliferation of vari-
ous organisations related to Hindutva culture, politics, student associations, women’s associations,
and worker associations, besides muscular organisations like Vishva Hindu Parishad (VHP) and

349
 Abdul Shaban

Bajrang Dal with their all-India appeal and linked to the RSS, different types of organisations
with the suffix of sena or vahini (literally meaning armies) like Rastriya Hindu Sena, Sri Ram
Sena (Express News Service 2018), and Shiv Sena. The latter (Shiv Sena) now shows consider-
able tolerance to diversity under the leadership of Udhav Thackery, compared to that of Bal
Thackrey during 1966–2011. There is also Durga Vahini (VHP’s women’s army), Hindu Yuva
Vahini, Karni Sena, a caste-based organisation of Kshatriyas in Rajasthan with an all-India appeal
and an ideology derived from Hindutva and far-right Hinduism. In addition, there are many
regional organisations linked to far-right ideologies, including Sanatan Sanstha with an all-India
appeal. Many workers’ unions (such as Bhartiya Mazdoor Sangh) and student wings (Akhil
Bhartiya Vidyarthi Parishad) have also emerged linked to far-right ideologies.
Third, with the rise of these organisations, especially since the 1980s, there has been a visible
rise of extremism in India’s public sphere. Social media, many television channels and newspa-
pers, and public spaces (including parks and streets) are now are filled with symbols that advocate
and disseminate far-right ideologies (Ali 2001; Mehta 2020).
Fourth, the idea of the Indian National Congress, popularised by Nehru, of the state’s equal
distance to all religions, which drew on the Western idea of secularism and neutrality, is now
problematised and stigmatised and called pseudo-secularism. The Nehruvian idea of secularism
is being replaced by positive secularism (as equal separation and interference in all religions) as
the far right see reforms in Hindu Personal Laws in the 1950s as one-sided, as they were not
applied to Muslim Personal Laws, as reflected in the Shah Bano case in the 1980s when the
Indian government was seen to side with Muslim orthodoxy. It is true that successive govern-
ments did not seek to reform Muslim Personal Law. This hurt not only Muslims who wished
to see change but also facilitated the rise of the far right. This was called ‘Muslim appeasement’
and was extended to the developmental initiatives by the government for marginalised and
underdeveloped Muslims (see Sachar Committee Report 2006 on deprivation of Muslims).This
kind of politics was termed by the Hindu far right as the Congress Party’s ‘pseudo-secularism’.
The Nehruvian idea of secularism has also been criticised by many scholars on the grounds
that it may be ineffective in a religious country like India (Nandi 1988; Madan 1987; Chatterjee
1994; Panthan 1997). Critics advocate the Gandhian secularism of Sarva Dharma Sambhava
(equality of religions) based on satya (truth) and ahimsa (non-violence) as an alternative. The
BJP claims to follow the Gandhian conception of secularism (BJP n.d.). However, the Hindutva
conception of positive secularism has been criticised by Chatterjee (1994):

‘positive secularism’ is meant not only to deflect accusations of its being antisecular but
also to rationalize, in a sophisticated way, its campaign for intolerant interventions by
a modern, positively secular state against the religious, cultural or ethnic minorities in
the name of ‘national culture’ and a homogenized notion of citizenship.
(quoted in Pantham 1997: 532)

Many far-right Hindutva ideologues also advocate for the removal of the words ‘secular’ (the
basic constitutional value) and ‘socialist’ from India’s Constitution.
Fifth, far-right Hindutva has its own agenda of manufacturing citizenship rooted in Hindu
culture, and for that, it attempts to create an alternative education system through gurukuls and
is opposed to the current modern liberal education system. In recent years, this goal was vigor-
ously adopted (Bidwai 2014), as was communalisation of public institutions (see Brass 2003).
Sixth, the Indian Citizenship Act, which is based on non-ethnic and non-religious dis-
crimination, was changed via the Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA) 2019. Muslims are likely
to be affected the most by this amendment because (a) Muslim migrants from neighbouring

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 Hinduism, Hindutva, and ideology

countries, unlike other religious groups, can now be deported to their native countries. If not
accepted by the source country, they will be put in specially designed camps, (b) a signifi-
cant proportion of Muslims (many of whom are illiterate, poorly educated, and economically
marginalised) even from mainland India may face discrimination and end up in such camps
because they may not be able to produce required documents, that is if enumeration and reg-
istration for the National Register of Citizens (NRC) are conducted. Many Muslims do not
have assets, like land and a house, registered deaths and births, or educational certificates, or
have their names on the voters’ list, which establishes chronological or historical evidence for
being an Indian citizen. Other religious groups from a similar cohort may have provisions to
apply for the new citizenship, but Muslims will not have this opportunity because the CAA
denies this possibility.
Seventh, in recent years, a number of civil society organisations working for civil liberties
and development have been banned or constrained on the alleged grounds that they have been
creating disaffection or engaging in activities that do not promote nationalism as conceived by
the Hindu far right (Trivedi 2014; Chaney 2020).
Eighth, there is a visible preference for non-governmental organisations and other civil soci-
ety groups with close links to far-right organisations (SAGAR 2020).
Ninth, far-right Hindutva ideology sees Muslims as the ‘other’; in fact, its genesis is rooted in
this. It is often insecure about the loyalty of Muslims and integration of Muslim territories into
India, despite Muslims ruling much of the country from the 11th to the 19th century, while
helping shape the coherence of India’s culture, ethos, and syncretism, and giving birth to mod-
ern Indian territorial limits and organisations. The insecurity of the far right was strengthened
with the division of the country in 1947 into India and Pakistan.This suspicion led to the repeal
of Article 370 in 2019 related to the status of Jammu and Kashmir (J&K) despite J&K being an
integral part of the country and the Union of India having signed an agreement with a Hindu
king, Hari Singh, for the special status of the state for its accession to the Indian Union in 1948.
Tenth, far-right ideology has a pretext for violence against Indian Muslims because of inci-
dents of global Islamist terrorism. Yet, Indian Muslims have not been involved in it, whether
in the Middle East, North Africa, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Afghanistan, Europe, or the USA.
Nevertheless, Islamic extremism in those countries helps the far right to justify their extrem-
ism in India. In this regard, far-right Hindutva ideologues are often prepared to ally with the
far right in Israel, Europe, and North Africa. As a result, India’s foreign policy, based on non-
alignment, is under considerable strain.

Hinduism, Hindutva, and social organisation

A distinction needs to be made between Hinduism and Hindutva. While Hinduism, like any
other religion, has its own strength and limitations with regard to the social organisation that
emerges out of a belief system, which over time can be subject to reform, far-right Hindutva
ideology implies violent justification based on social structure and ethnicity. It is much less
amenable to reform, as it is subject to glorification and manufacturing of a sense of pride in the
social structure. It is in this sense, where Gandhi’s Hinduism is reflective and that of Golwalkar
and Savarkar is non-reflective. Inherent in the Hindu belief system are some basic unifying fac-
tors that provide socio-political ideologies and shape the social structure. Some of these basic
belief systems relate to (a) purity and pollution related to foreign culture, (b) verna or the caste
system based on purity and pollution within Hinduism, and (c) the position of women. It is
considered dharma (sacred duty) and karma (ordained deed) to practice the same (the caste sys-
tem, position of women, and purity and pollution related to foreign culture). Raja Ram Mohan

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 Abdul Shaban

Roy and Gandhi advocated for many reforms in these practices and belief system. However, they
are still largely prevalent.
We have seen a rising divide in Indian society in the post-colonial period. The divide is
visible on multiple social planes but most prominent in relation to religion (especially foreign
religions), caste, and gender bases. The far-right belief system in Hinduism has not been able to
fully accommodate the culturally ‘foreign’ and treat it with equality. It associates social pollution
with foreigners, and that is why a normal relationship cannot easily be established with religions
outside Hinduism, including Islam, Christianity, and Zoroastrianism. Unlike other religions that
promote collective eating and cooking, the kitchens of Hindus have been considered very
sacred, and access to this has historically largely been denied to others. In fact, among others, this
has been a major barrier not only for varna equality and mobility but also for the assimilation
of foreigners into Hindu society.
Sometimes distinctions are made between the varnas and castes.The varnas are the four broad
categories of social structure in Hinduism: priestly class (Brahmins), warrior class (Kshatriyas),
those performing non-polluted works (Vaishyas), and untouchables (Shudras). Castes (jatis) are
those hierarchies of social groups/communities within the varnas.The origin of the caste system
is explained through (a) the origin of humans from different organs of Brahma (Olivelli 2005),
(b) racial distinctions between Aryans and non-Aryans (Goetz 1964; Nehru 1972; Burnouw
1987; Munishi 1998), and (c) occupational distinctions pursued by different categories of people.
Varnas and even jati within varnas are based on adherence to endogamy to maintain the purity
of each group.The shudras further suffer from the disability of untouchability.The varna or caste
system of Hinduism has created a social ideology linked with religion which historically pro-
duced a severe form of social and economic inequality.While reform movements in South India
and the impact of urbanisation have lessened caste ideologies, it still persists.
There are very contradictory positions of Hinduism with regard to the status of women
in society, including related to liberty and equality. Whereas on the one hand, the female is
worshipped as a goddess, on the other hand, she is also relegated to a secondary position by
some men. For instance, she should commit sati (burning herself on her husband’s funeral pyre),
remain tied to one man throughout her life, and as a widow, restrain her physical desires and
socialisation. Related to marriage, Olivelli (2005: 31) translates the Manu Smriti verses 3.13–14
as:

A Sudra may take only a Sudra woman as wife; a Vaisya, the latter and a woman of his
own class; a Ksatriya, the latter two and a woman of his own class; and a Brahmin, the
latter three and a woman of his own class.

However, social reforms since the 19th century, as well as state interventions, opposed by far-
right Hindus, are seeking to improve Hindu women’s social and economic situation.

Conclusions
Hinduism is one of the four major religions of the world, and its followers have contributed
significantly to the making of global civilisation. This chapter examined Hinduism’s political
manifestation via Hindutva ideologies and their social and political implications. The chapter
shows that (a) Hinduism as an organised religion is a product of the encounter with colonial
modernity and as a response to colonialism, (b) in its original form, it was very porous and syn-
cretic, (c) while it offered a significant range of options of belief systems, it also created a univer-
sal social structure through the varna/caste system leading to the emergence of historical, social

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 Hinduism, Hindutva, and ideology

inequalities and violence, and (d) far-right political Hinduism significantly penetrated current
Indian society. This has led to a significant rise in social and religious conflicts in India and also
has ramifications for foreign policy and alliances. Far-right Hindutva ideology, which origi-
nated in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, pitted itself against many other religious belief
systems, helping shape violence in South Asia, which Islamists could not achieve. The beauty of
Hinduism exists in its folkways of existence that made reforms and syncretism possible.The satya
(truth, all religions as true) and ahimsa (non-violence, tolerance) attributed by Mahatma Gandhi
and Swami Vivekananda to Hinduism and Indian culture were derived from the folkways of
Hinduism. The new far-right Hindutva that is organised and politicised Hinduism is the anti-
thesis of Gandhian understandings.
Far-right Hindutva shows a potent association of religion with geography and territory
or the imagined space of Aryavarta. For peace and tranquillity to develop in India, Hinduism
requires another Swami Vivekanand or Gandhi and/or reinterpretation of the term ‘Hindu’ and
‘Hindutva’, which, so far, has not been the case by leaders and office-holders of the Hindu far
right (PTI 2020).

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 25
ISRAELIZATION OF JUDAISM
David Ohana

This chapter studies the dialectical tension between Judaism and Zionism. How did Zionism
mould perceptions and images that were formed in the Jewish past, and to what extent were
these Jewish themes reflected, modified and crystallized in the national culture of the State of
Israel? This study brings up constituent topics such as messianism, utopianism, memory, ter-
ritorialism, along with the critics that threatened to undermine the Zionist appropriations and
constructs. Thus, in addition to concrete utopian plans and redemptionist territorial views, this
study discusses the fundamental critiques of messianism penned by Gershom Scholem and Jacob
Talmon and the non-territorial perceptions of the Levant by the essayist Jacqueline Kahanoff.
This study ends with the nationalization of the Negev (Israel’s desert), the vision of the “old
man” who proclaimed statehood in 1948, as shown by David Ben-Gurion’s funeral and the
symbolic memory of his grave in the desert. In its attempt to acquire historical legitimation,
Zionism appropriated themes and myths from the Jewish past, yet, these appropriations were
modified as they selectively culled elements that suited the national allegory. This study opens
with Ben-Gurion’s messianic vision and comes full circle with his death in 1973, thereby fram-
ing the question of how Judaism was nationalized.
The nationalization of Judaism took many different forms, beginning with the nationaliza-
tion of messianism by Theodor Herzl, the founder of the World Zionist Organization, and David
Ben-Gurion’s founding of the State of Israel. This includes the nationalization of utopia as seen
in the Million Plan; the nationalization of the basic themes of the Jewish religion such as the sac-
rifice of Isaac, the collective adoption of figures like Nimrod, the upgrading of national figures
like Herod; and the nationalization of the land by the devotees of the Greater Land of Israel and
their supporters in the Israeli academic world since 1967. This nationalizing tendency was criti-
cized by Scholem and Talmon, who wished to disassemble the national-messianic synthesis that
had been present from Ben-Gurion (in its secular form) to the national-religious movement
Gush Emunim. Parallel with the radical nationalism of the “hills” of Judea and Samaria, a more
conciliatory form of nationalism was proposed: that of the “sea” (the Mediterranean Option)
and of the “desert” (“Going south” to paraphrase Fredrick Turner’s (1983) thesis), both of which
were antithetical to the integral nationalism.
The question underlying this study is, did the Zionist movement and the State of Israel wish
to create something new in history or did they wish to create a stepping-stone to normality?
This question is connected with the model presented by the two founding fathers, the “Jewish

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Prometheuses,” Herzl and Ben-Gurion, who were involved in messianism, which was and still is
the basic question with regard to Zionism and Israel. What kind of messianism did they want?
Was it an apocalyptic messianism that envisaged the creation of a new world and a new spe-
cies, or (as it is more reasonable to suppose) a Maimonides-type messianism in which the world
would carry on as usual in the days of the Messiah (for if there is no subjugation of the Jews
by others, there is no difference between the moulding of time and working on normal life
(Schulte, 2015, 79–97))? In other words, what type of redemption did Zionism have in mind:
the type of the Messiah, son of David or the type of the Messiah, son of Joseph?
The founder of the Jewish state wrote about the prophet of the Jewish state: “Herzl was
indeed like a Messiah since he galvanized the feeling of the youth that Eretz Israel was achiev-
able” (Ben-Gurion, 1970, 43). Herzl had sketched quite an elaborate plan for a state in his book
The Jewish State (Der Judenstaat, 1896) and added details in his utopian novel Altneuland (Old-
New Land, 1902). Already in his appearance at the First Zionist Congress, Herzl was described
as a Messiah by the Zionist Jewish journalist Mordechai Ben-Ami: “It was as if the Messiah, the
son of David, stood before us” (Ben-Ami, 1914, 692). Two years earlier, Dr Reuben Bierer had
informed Herzl that the Chief Rabbi of Sofia considered him to be the Messiah (Lowental,
1958). The Reverend William Hechler, a committed Christian Zionist, believed it was God’s
will that he was “in a position which enabled me to bring to the attention of certain people of
importance the messianic vision of the Jewish leader” (Herzl, 1929, 51).These testimonies, from
that time, strengthen the evaluation of the historian Arthur Hertzberg that “messianism is the
essence of Herzl’s stance, because he proclaimed the historical inevitability of the Jewish State in
a world of peaceful nations” (Hertzberg, 1973, 46). The same position was held by the historian
Robert Wistrich, who thought that “it is difficult to avoid the feeling that Herzl’s intense sense
of Zionist mission did have some latent messianic features, even though he never spoke publi-
cally in this vein” (Wistrich, 1999, 321–338). Herzl’s self-testimony could be said to confirm, to
a certain extent, the position of these two historians. His self-testimony was described by the
author Reuben Brainin as follows: at the age of twelve, he dreamt a “wonderful dream” about
being like Moses, the “King Messiah” (Brainin, 1919, 17–18).
Nevertheless, Herzl’s vision was, as a matter of fact, a program of political imagination. In
the context of the Jewish condition in the late 19th century, Herzl’s political utopia was impor-
tant because it enabled Jews to start viewing the idea of a Jewish state as feasible and doable.
Ben-Gurion, no doubt, continued Herzl’s vision but shifted it onto a much more concrete and
realistic path: a detailed and concrete plan concerning various operational aspects of the envi-
sioned Jewish state, aspects that would materialize in one way or another after the establishment
of the State of Israel. The political revolutionary spirit which prevails in Herzl’s writings was
transformed into an almost-real state plan by David Ben-Gurion.
The Zionist utopias, including concrete utopias such as the 1942 Million Plan, belong to a
long utopian tradition in Western intellectual history going back to the beginning of the mod-
ern era. As a secular messianic movement, Promethean and modern in nature, Zionism rebelled
against religious messianism and was attracted to utopianism (Elboim-Dror, 1993). The history
of the messianic idea in Zionism is umbilically linked to the various attempts to create Zionist
utopias. The early utopian tendencies in Judaism, which moulded Western culture, were an
inspiration for modern Zionism. The Zionist utopias, each of which dreamt in its own way of
the future character of a Jewish state, although closely connected to the messianic vision, which
was generally passive, proposed concrete plans of action within a historical reality. An outstand-
ing example of the nationalization of the utopian idea was Ben-Gurion’s Million Plan.
Israel’s first prime minister’s plan for a fast mass Jewish immigration to Palestine during
World War II envisioned an imaginary transfer of a million Jews to Palestine in a year and a

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half. The Million Plan was formulated with the help of a big team of experts, professionals
and scientists in what is known as the Planning Committee. The aim of this study is to pre-
sent three new approaches. First, the analysis of the Million Plan from several interconnected
perspectives will start by viewing the event as marking the beginning of the establishment
of a new socio-political order, which Zionist historiography calls mamlakhtiyut (Statism or
Etatism), usually linked to the establishment of Israel a few years later. Second, it will explain
the event as a new stage in the relationship between the political and professional-scientific
establishments in the Zionist movement. Third, it will mark the Million Plan as represent-
ing a new phase in the development of David Ben-Gurion’s political theology and a further
fusion of his political and theological visions. The Million Plan is a pivotal event in “imagin-
ing” the Jewish state and in secularizing the theological concept of messianism as a “site of
fusion” in which the political and the theological were fused through the introduction of
modern science and technology. As in the case of other ideological revolutionaries in the
20th century, Ben-Gurion’s political theology and his attraction for social engineering went
hand in hand (Barell, 2014). In the revolutionary Million Plan – which was formulated five
years before the establishment of the State of Israel – one can trace elements of Ben-Gurion’s
modernistic and technological outlook and his secular messianism, which was the core of
his political theology.
Beyond the messianic myth, myths can simultaneously perform many functions. They may
indeed provide legitimation for existing social and political practices, for a dominant elite, social
group or national ideology. Most myths are, to some degree, narratives which seek to anchor
the present in the past – and the Zionist myths do not differ from this pattern. Myths seen in
this light, as a special kind of narrative, as symbolic statements or frames of reference which give
meaning to the past, are not necessarily false or harmful examples of pseudo-history. Their true
significance more often lies in what they can tell us about the ways in which a particular nation,
political group or set of individuals seek to organize its collective memory and to establish a
distinctive identity. One of the chief Jewish (and universal) themes in Israeli culture is the myth
of the sacrifice of Isaac. Here we shall use the transformation of that story in Israeli culture and
politics as a case study for the nationalization of Judaism.

The nationalization of the Akkedah

The Jewish theme of the Akkedah, which is biblical and religious in its origins, has found
expression in Israeli poetry and art, which is predominantly modern and secular. Ruth Kantun-
Blum, a Hebrew poetry scholar, has concluded from her research into the treatment of the
Akkedah in modern Hebrew poetry that “modern Israeli writers have increasingly rediscovered
the ambivalence of Jewish existence and the enormous complexity of Jewish identity. The con-
dition of the Jews may have changed, but not the Jewish condition” (Kartun-Blum, 1995, 201),
and with regard to Israeli art, the cultural critic Gideon Ofrat writes,

The story of the Akkedah in Israeli art is a story in itself. Among us, the Akkedah has
become a national symbol representing the tragedy of the fate of the Jewish people in
general and the fate of our sons in particular. Very often, the Abrahams are bereaved
parents and the Isaacs are the fallen.
(Ofrat, 1996, 315–323)

Ofrat enumerated four stages in the genealogy of the Akkedah in Israeli art. In the 1920s, it was
pogroms and acts of terrorism; in the Holocaust and the War of Independence, the figure of the

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bereaved father Abraham, the personification of the suffering people, came to the fore; between
the Six-Day War and the Yom Kippur War, the ram was seen as representing hope for the future
or disappointment that redemption was so long in coming; and in the first war in Lebanon, one
saw the younger generation’s criticism of their leaders (identified with Abraham), who sent the
young people (identified with Isaac), to be sacrificed in the war.
In the period of pioneering and settlement in Eretz Yisrael, the poems about the Akkedah
(for example, in the poetry of the Third Aliyah) expressed the collective experience of a shared
fate and a mystical sense of the Jewish destiny. The secularization of Hebrew culture, first in the
Jewish cultural revival at the fin de siècle in Europe, and then in the first waves of immigration to
Palestine, nationalized the story of the Akkedah and changed the emphasis from a relationship
to a God who gave orders to the relationship between history, or the state, and the Israeli citizen,
and finally to a person’s relationship to himself.
Natan Alterman, who wrote the poem “On the Boy Abraham,” at the height of the Holocaust,
related to the Akkedah by describing the boy Abraham looking at his mother and seeing a knife
stuck in her heart, “Mummy, mummy / I won’t sleep in bed like other boys / because I saw you
in bed / Mummy, mummy, you were sleeping – with a knife in your heart.”
Following the slaughter of his parents, the boy Abraham hid in the room under the stairs. In
the poem, Alterman replaced the name “Isaac” with the name of “Abraham,” who foresaw his
sacrifice, which was the path to redemption. This was a clear reference to the development of
the nation from the Holocaust to resurrection, the change from the passive generation slaugh-
tered in exile to one that began to be responsible for its life in Israel (Laor, 2013, 264–308).
Chaim Guri, a representative of the “Palmach generation,” the first generation of the State of
Israel, “corresponded” with Alterman in his poem “Yerushah” (Inheritance): “Isaac, as the story
goes, was not sacrificed… / But he bequeathed that hour to his offspring. / They are born /
With a knife in their hearts” (Guri, 1972, 28).
Isaac, the young fighter, sacrificed himself in the War of Independence, and his father
identified himself with the generation of the sons. Likewise, in the poetry of Amir Gilboa,
also of that generation, Abraham feels himself to be sacrificed: “It’s me who is slaughtered,
my son, and my blood is already on the leaves.” The secular national history inherited the
Jewish religion, and this was expressed by passing the torch of the Akkedah from the father
to his son in the State of Israel. This was no longer the ultimate test of faith in God as seen
by Søren Kierkegaard but a continuing national credo that was a test of belonging to the
state and authentic commitment to the country. The test was now in participation in Israel’s
wars and was not on the metaphorical Jewish Mount Moriah. This time, the Akkedah did
not conclude with a “happy end” but with offering the son as a sacrifice to the national
Moloch.
Someone who criticized the Akkedah in 1948 was the writer S.Yizhar, who said in his book
Yemei Ziklag (Days of Ziklag):

I hate our father Abraham who went to sacrifice Isaac. What right did he have to do
this to Isaac? He should have sacrificed himself! I hate God who sent him to do this
sacrifice and closed off all his options and only opened up the way to the Akkedah. I
hate God because Isaac was only material for an experiment between Abraham and
his God.
(Smilansky, 1958)

After the War of Independence, the subject of the national Akkedah underwent a process of
individualization and gained a psychological significance relating to the private person. An

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example is T. Carmi’s poem “Isaac’s Fear,” which serves as a bridge between the “Palmach gen-
eration” and the “generation of the state”:

Last night I dreamt that my son did not return. / He came to me and said: / When I
was little and you were, / You would not tell me / The story of the binding of Isaac, /
To frighten me with the knife, fire, and ram,
(Carmi, 1968, 46)

The commanding God is replaced by a woman who gives orders, a beloved woman who takes
the father away from his son. The fear of betrayal, a basic human fear, also becomes Abraham’s
fear, and that is the main subject of the poem. Here we see a sacrifice of the father and the son
by the woman. Here there is also an actualization of the Bible into Israeli daily life, and the poet
quite naturally uses materials from Jewish tradition in order to express his private feelings.
Other Israeli poets, apart from Alterman, Guri, Binjamin Galai and Carmi, such as A. Hillel,
Yehiel Mar and Tuvia Rubner, continue to adapt the Jewish material of the Akkedah to the con-
temporary Israeli reality.Tuvia Rubner, in his poem “Voices,” stresses the motif of continuity, as if
the Akkedah was a prolonged internal process without any mobilizing significance and without
any drama. It represents the existentialist phase of a modern secular Israeli trapped in cyclical
time, that makes use of the only dialogue that takes place between Abraham and Isaac. Instead of
God and Abraham, the heroes of the Jewish myth, Rubner focuses on the relationship of father
and son, but this is not a metaphysical father but the actual father, Abraham.
The subject of the sacrifice became a major issue in the plastic arts from the beginning of the
1940s, and this was very much due to the influence of the sculpture of Yitzhak Danziger. Two
of his pupils, Mordechai Gumpel and Kosso Elul, have said that their teacher called one of his
sculptures “The Sacrifice of Isaac.” The scholar Tamar Manor thinks that

the idea of the sacrifice of Isaac also occurred to Danziger in connection with the
sacrifice of the fighters that preoccupied him in those years…Danziger chose the sac-
rifice of the ram as a symbol of the sacrifice of the fallen. The title “Sacrifice of Isaac”
reveals a conscious connection between the sacrifice and the Jewish-national myth of
sacrifice and redemption.
(Manor-Friedman, 1996)

Examples of paintings of the Akkedah in the period of the War of Independence are Moshe
Tamir’s works “Ram” (1949) and “Sacrifice” (1951), in which the ram resembles one of the
fighters.
At the same time, secular Israeli culture also contemplated the parallel between the Akkedah
and the crucifixion. This parallel was present in the paintings of the ewe-lamb by Menashe
Kadishman, in the inclusion of Mary in the painting of the Akkedah by Shmuel Bonneh, in
the paintings of the Pietà by Naftali Bezem, in the drawings of Shoshana Heimann and in the
“Paintings of the Mother” by Avraham Ofek. While in the plastic arts, there was a tendency
to identify the Akkedah with the crucifixion, Hebrew poetry avoided this analogy. The reason
for this was perhaps that plastic art was regarded as a “foreign implant,” universalistic and non-
Jewish, while poetry was different in being connected with the national language, Hebrew.
In the Six-Day War in 1967, the myth of the Akkedah was again prominent. Shraga Weill of
Kibbutz Ha-Ogen, who lost a son, made a series of seven prints of the Akkedah that were per-
sonal in nature and non-theological. In the triptych he painted five years later, he did not depict
the tragic event itself.Yigal Mossinson also lost a son in the war, and in his play Shimshon (1968),

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the father asked, “Why your only son? Why your son whom you love? Aren’t we deceiving
ourselves and Isaac whom we bring every day to sacrifice?” In the War of Attrition, which took
place for three years after 1967, the poet Eli Alon protested: “When Abraham received the order,
he knew there would be a miracle…but today, what belief do we have?” In the Yom Kippur
War in 1973, Shmuel Bonneh painted Abraham clad in armour, and the angel and the ram are
absent from the picture. Bonneh related: “After the Yom Kippur War, the idea of a story came to
me, in which father Abraham was in battledress on the battlefield and tried to bring healing to
the wounded soldiers” (cited in Ofrat, 2011). One may recall that according to Jewish tradition,
the original Akkedah took place at dusk on Yom Kippur. In connection with this, the Akkedah
paintings by Shmuel Bak, Naftali Bezem and Mordechai Ardon are particularly noteworthy.
In the catalogue of the exhibition “Jewish Experience in the Art of the Twentieth Century,”
Avram Kampf wrote: “The struggle for existence brought the reality of the ancient myth of the
Akkedah to the knowledge of the Jews of our time.”
Yigal Tumarkin is known from his paintings in the 1980s to be an artist particularly critical
of the Akkedah. In his opinion, God went from his role of being a redeemer to being a slaugh-
terer. The artist, who maintained that the function of art was to smash idols and destroy myths,
was very preoccupied in his works with the Akkedah and the crucifixion. His sculptures, which
protested against the empathy for the Akkedah myth of the artists and poets of 1948, represented
the anguish of the victim, his rebellion against the Israeli destiny involving endless war. Another
well-known slayer of sacred cows is Uri Lipschitz, who made four etchings on the subject of the
Akkedah. He summarized his work as follows:“In fact, every one of my paintings is the Akkedah.”
The normality of Israeli daily life replaced memories of the Holocaust and the wars, and the
subject of the Akkedah underwent a linguistic transformation through being assimilated into the
spoken tongue. Israeli Hebrew gradually began to succeed biblical Hebrew. An example of this is
a poem by David Avidan ridiculing the mythology both of the Akkedah and the crucifixion by
making the sacred texts into a musical: “The binding of Isaac / a diversionary action, / early igni-
tion. / The crucifixion, / a dress rehearsal / late ignition. / Musical version” (Avidan, 1964, 25).
In his de-mythologization of the Christian interpretation of the Akkedah, Avidan, in his terse
way, criticizes the idea of the Akkedah as a prefiguration of the crucifixion. Here the Akkedah
is a rehearsal for the crucifixion in the musical, and this time Jesus is a double of Isaac. Likewise,
Meir Wieseltier, in his poem “A Story About Isaac,” made a de-mythologization of the Akkedah.
They were joined by Avot Yeshurun: “We have a problem of a Sacrifice of Isaac. For us it comes
out as a father has mercy on children. For you it comes out as a father has mercy on himself.”
The next stage in the Israelization of the Akkedah was irony and de-mystification, as, for
instance, in Yehuda Amichai’s poem, “The True Hero of the Akkedah,” “The true hero of the
binding is the ram / Who didn’t know about the other people’s conspiracy. / He sort of volun-
teered to die in Isaac’s place. / I want to sing a song in his memory” (Amichai, 1971, 21).
Amichai’s intention was to show that the whole thing was a fraud and that the only victim
of the Akkedah was the ram, from whose horns shofars were made. As one may recall, at Rosh
Hashana, the blowing of the shofar is associated with the ram which was sacrificed, a reminder
of God’s promise and of the people that were sacrificed throughout history as part of the pro-
cess of redemption. Amichai laughs at the transcendental and brings it down to the level of the
everyday, and out of a tradition he makes a conspiracy. In this Bakhtinian carnival in which the
heroes of the Akkedah play their parts, the only victim is the ram.
The climax of bitter protestation at the sacrifice of the sons in the State of Israel is to be
found in Hanoch Levine’s poem in his play Malkat Ha-ambatia (The Queen of the Bathtub):
“My dear father, when you’re standing at my graveside / Old and very solitary / And you see
how they inter my body in the dust, / Just ask my forgiveness, father” (Levine, 1987, 92).

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The son who demands a stock-taking from his father derides the national rhetoric by ask-
ing the father to recognize his responsibility for the death of his son. This scene in which the
son speaks to his old and weary father from the depths of the grave is perhaps the most tragic
in the Hebrew poetry about the Akkedah. Another playwright, Avraham Raz, turns the tale
of the Akkedah on its head in his play, Israel Shefi’s Independence Night (1969), by showing Isaac
sacrificing Abraham.
Following the war in Lebanon in 1982, the artists again dealt with the Akkedah, and the
best-known amongst them is Menashe Kadishman. He created a real grave in order to con-
trast it with a lamb, an innocent victim, which is not so different from a ram. In the exhibition
“Catastrophe,” given in the Jerusalem Theatre in 1984, he made a painting called “Akkedah” on
a canvas four-and-a-half-metres long in which a lamb is depicted next to a dog preying on a
corpse. A year later, as a reaction to his son’s conscription into the army, he exhibited a sculpture
entitled “The Sacrifice of Isaac” in the Jewish Museum in New York (it was later moved to the
forecourt of the Tel Aviv Museum).This sculpture, constructed of Cor-Ten steel, was in the form
of a ram’s head, the head of the victimized son and a wailing woman. The artist Motti Mizrachi
reacted to the war by presenting sketches in a work called “The Opera,” which he produced
together with the composer Arik Shapira. Mizrachi, who created a theatrical display of puppets,
spoke with the voice of the sacrificed: “We the sacrificed don’t ask, don’t hesitate and don’t
retreat. Our mouths are full of song!”
Parallel with the identification with the myth of the Akkedah both in Israel’s wars and in the
non-heroic operations carried out by Israel at the beginning of the 20th century, satire con-
tinued to undermine the myth as if to demonstrate the vitality and normality of Israeli culture.
The Akkedah featured in two television programs: in Ha-hamisha ha-camerit in the 1990s and
Ha-yehudim ba’im in 2014. In the first program, a moment before Abraham intended to knife
his son, he heard a commanding voice declaring, “Abraham, lay not thine hand upon the lad.”
Suddenly, a corpulent man wearing a skullcap appeared on the scene, a well-known Israeli film
star who specialized in thrillers! In the second program, a one-act play, “The Sacrifice of Isaac,”
was presented, in which Isaac fails to take on the persona of God and asks to be treated with
respect and to be allowed to go to the Jebusites’ parties.
The story of the Akkedah in Israeli art carries on a dialogue with the Bible in which there is
also a confrontation with the Israeli political reality. This story, with its three constituents – art,
tradition and politics – does not depict a vital myth but a passive view of the world. Israeli cul-
ture in its dealings with the Akkedah does not proclaim a happy end. The shofar of redemption
fashioned from a ram’s horn and blown on the Temple Mount in Jerusalem in 1967 no longer
proclaims redemption but the sacrifice of the sons in endless wars.
The genealogy of the myth of the Akkedah in poetry and art follows the stages of the Israeli-
Jewish dialectic. Sometimes it is emphasized, and sometimes it is suppressed. This dialectic pre-
serves the glowing embers of Jewish culture that contain traditions, images and symbols. Thus,
it is not a petrified Judaism that is preserved, but a dynamic and dialogic Judaism that is formed.
The biblical words, metaphors and discourse are examined and interpreted in the praxis of
Israeli daily life, and in this way, Israeli culture reveals its roots in Jewish tradition. A.B.Yehoshua
gave a good description of this process:

The Akkedah comes back to us as a basic motif in our society. It constitutes a kind
of basic symbol in our culture that will remain with us for thousands of years. That is
what is wonderful and frightening about cultural symbols.
(Yehoshua, 1971)

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The political use of ancient myths

The dichotomy between the monotheistic Jewish myth represented by “Abraham” and the
heroic and aesthetic myth of the Hebrew rebirth exemplified by “Nimrod” found expression in
the revolt of the Hebrew Tze’irim (young intellectuals) at the turn of the 19th and 20th cen-
turies. The awakening of the Jewish national consciousness at the end of the 19th century that
resulted in the birth of Zionism also changed the attitude of many Jews to the ethos of heroism.
The progenitors of the Hebrew rebirth no longer concerned themselves with the intellectual
traditions of the rabbis and scholars, hassidim and cabbalists but were inspired by the “Nimrods”
– heroes, brandishers of the sword who cultivated a “muscular Judaism” (Ohana, 2012, 122–178).
Nimrod and Herod, two men of impressive appearance, were hunters who opposed the Jewish
ethos. Both their origins non-Jewish: Nimrod came from Ethiopia and Herod was of Edomite
origin. Both figures are associated with despotism, conquest, building and cruelty. The exhibi-
tion “Herod – the Last Journey of the King of Judea,” which took place in the Israel Museum in
2013, stood at the intersection of the museum.Yitzhak Danziger’s sculpture “Nimrod,” the most
significant work of art created in Israel, stood opposite the largest and most impressive archaeo-
logical exhibition given in the museum since it was founded, which bore the name of Herod.
The Zionist archaeological urge to find an affinity between the biblical past and the new
Israel gained encouragement from David Ben-Gurion, who said that “In the general field of
Jewish studies, Jewish archaeology will take its rightful place, for all its findings bring our past
into the present and confirm our historical continuity in the country” (cited in Feige & Shiloni,
2008). Biblical archaeology in Israel, which has focused on excavations in Jerusalem, Nablus,
Beit El, Beit Shean and Lachish, has sought to create a justification for Zionism by throwing a
bridge between heroic ancient history and modern territorial nationalism. In this way, archaeol-
ogy becomes ideology; moreover, it becomes myth. In order for the Herodian and Nimrodian
myths to preserve their vitality, they must, like all myths, exemplify an “inner dialectic” in a plas-
tic form: it must strengthen certain elements that are required and repress those that do not have
the necessary function. The “new discourse” on Herod and Nimrod suits the nationalization of
the heroic and the muscular spirit by creating a favourable view of them and by glorifying their
artistic and architectural projects facilitates their return to a central position in the life of the
historical land of Israel.
In 2016, three years after the “Herod” exhibition in Jerusalem, the exhibition “Bar Kokhba:
Historical Memory and the Myth of Heroism” was held in the Eretz Israel Museum in Tel Aviv
(Turel, 2016). At the entrance and exit of the exhibition, a short film was shown of a kinder-
garten in which the children sang Levin Kipnis’s famous song, “There was a man in Israel/ His
name was Bar Kokhba…He was a hero/ He yearned for freedom” (Kipnis, 1971). The song
relates how Bar Kokhba overcame a lion, a victory that metaphorically exemplifies the national
consciousness of the modern Jews, which cultivated for its own purposes the idea of the heroism
of Bar Kokhba, who rebelled against the Roman Empire. It was one more national hero in the
restorative pantheon of Zionist heroism (Aderet, 2016).This restorative allusion was intended to
glorify Zionism as a political movement that renewed the Jews’ national freedom at the end of
the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th.
The tragic outcome of the rebellion would have caused a national trauma in any normal
people, and indeed, the negative view of the Bar Kokhba revolt in Jewish tradition until the rise
of Zionism testifies to the historical trauma among the Jewish people throughout the whole of
their exile from their land (Marks, 1994). An attempt to get to the roots of this trauma requires
a study of the theoretical literature on historical traumas, which has gained momentum in the
last few decades. Basing themselves on the pioneering work of Freud and Jung, psychologists,

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historians, cultural critics and political theorists have broadened the investigation of collective
national and social traumas (LaCapra, 1994; Leys, 2000; Caruth, 1995).
By nature, intellectuals are critical and hence tend to deconstruct national myths.The leading
scholar of the history of religious messianism and the leading scholar of the history of secular
messianism both broadened the scope of their investigations – the first, Gershom Scholem,
extending them into the history of Sabbataianism and the second, J.L. Talmon, into the French
Revolution. Both reached a similar conclusion: they recognized, as Scholem put it, “the pro-
found truth relating to the dialectics of history…whereby the fulfilment of one historical
process leads to the manifestation of its opposite. In the realization of one thing its opposite
is revealed” (Ohana, 2010, 66–73; 2017, 223–246). The two great Israeli historians of ideas
plumbed the depths of one of the most fascinating and at the same time tragic manifestations
of la condition humaine: the human challenge of bringing the heavenly city down to the vale of
tears and the price that men have to pay for their messianic passion. Talmon saw Scholem’s field
of expertise, Sabbataianism, as a historical precedent that contained a warning for the future of
the State of Israel.Talmon declared: “I am very afraid of the time when we sober up and experi-
ence Sabbataian disillusionment with all that involves” (Talmon, 1970). Ten years later, in 1980,
Talmon repeated this warning in his final article, addressed as an open letter, to the Israeli Prime
Minister Menachem Begin: “Is it an escape into a world of mythological thought patterns and
emotions whose classical example may be found in Sabbatianism?” (Talmon, 2015). Scholem
was asked, “about his [Talmon’s] fears that a spirit of religio-national messianism has taken over
parts of the Israeli population.” Scholem answered:

Well, I agree with Talmon on this. I am less optimistic than Talmon about the power
of professors to influence events. But as an analysis of the facts, I think he is quite right
that the use of religious ideas is a most harmful and senseless thing in politics.
(Howe, 1980, 53–57)

Talmon and Scholem were not just historians who analysed the abstract messianic idea but were
also intellectuals who examined messianism as a paradigm through which one can decipher
modern and current politics, Israeli and worldwide. My aim is also to explore Talmon’s and
Scholem’s predictions about the price of messianism in theory and practice through the mes-
sianic dialectics and dynamics.
The young Talmon’s “structural search”, to use Claude Levi Strauss’s concept, was fulfilled in
secular Zionism. History was not a mere accumulation of events but a structure, a non-human
a priori mechanism that directs and controls events and their inner logic. It was a morphologi-
cal form, as Oswald Spengler would have said, or, as Carl Schmitt put it in Political Romanticism
(1919), “The idea of an arbitrary power over history is the real revolutionary idea” (Scmitt,
1986). Unlike these two German thinkers who affirmed impersonal structures, Talmon and
Scholem adopted a “structuralist explanation” but, at the same time, undermined it. They for-
mulated the Sabbataian code of “messianism through sin” and “redemption through destruc-
tion,” but they also warned of the nationalization of messianism. Talmon and Scholem were
committed and critical intellectuals who did not wish to throw out the Zionist baby with
the bathwater. The subject of messianism was close to their hearts because it was their way
of revealing conceptual and historical dialectics. Talmon decided at the height of his maturity
to investigate Jewish history and consequently sought the blessing of the “rabbi” Scholem. In
1972, in a letter to Scholem, Talmon described his plan to write a trilogy about modern Jewish
history in a universal perspective (Ohana, 2008, 169–188). This letter testifies to the mutual
admiration of these two historians from the Hebrew University in Jerusalem and shows their

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common scholarly interest in the messianic phenomenon, in its historical dialectic and in the
price to be paid for it.
The nationalization of messianism has not left the Israeli agenda. The new Jewish literature
dealing with the study of messianism has almost attained the status of Torah studies in Israel.
Almost half of Scholem’s work was on messianism, and it is no surprise that this subject was
chosen as the one to be discussed on the study day for his 80th birthday. Moshe Idel suggested
that one should not speak of a single messianic ideal or a single Zionist ideal (Idel, 2012, 22–53).
Scholem’s focus on apocalyptic messianism was connected first and foremost to his Zionist
outlook and the national feeling that moulded his life and thought, as well as his professorship
and the thoughts of his academic successors. Linking up the teacher of messianism from the
Hebrew University with his pupils who went to the messianic right raises a series of questions.
Do not the leanings of the professors Rivka Schatz, Josef Ben-Shlomo and Yehuda Liebes from
the messianic right reflect messianic materials they studied with Scholem, or perhaps the writ-
ings of Rabbi Abraham Kook? Was Scholem responsible for creating a messianic atmosphere
that encouraged his best pupils to join the ideological camp of the messianic right? How can
one explain the contradiction between Scholem’s need to separate messianism from Zionism
and his pupils’ need to form a marriage between them?
It is fascinating to examine Scholem’s three outstanding pupils who share their professional
and academic training under Scholem and their Zionist-messianic outlook characterized by a
total faith in the Greater Land of Israel. Is it by chance that these three favoured pupils with a
defined outlook were conspicuous for political ideas that tended to the messianic right? What
was Scholem’s role, if any, in moulding their political path? Does the content of the master’s
teaching – mysticism, not rationality, Rabbi Shimon Bar-Yohai, not Maimonides, messianism,
Sabbetaianism, the threefold affinity between language, mysticism and nationhood – suggest a
deep influence? Did his political position, opposed to that of these pupils, expressed first in the
broad humanism of the “Brit Shalom” and then in his condemnation of the Sabbetaianism of
the young people of Gush Emunim, testify to his lack of influence on their rightist political
outlook, or was his deep influence on their mental landscape seen in the deep undercurrents
of consciousness that reached down into the groundwaters of myth? If Scholem sought living
myth in the form of Kabbala in order to revitalize conservative rabbinic Judaism, his “children”
sought living myth in the Greater Land of Israel in order to revitalize Zionism. The three pupils
were scholars of Kabbala and messianism who imbibed the elevated atmosphere of Jerusalem
and formed their messianic outlook in the euphoria following the Six-Day War. From the sev-
enth day onwards, a national and sacred particularism overcame the universalism of democracy
in their outlook. The sanctity of the land and the supremacy of its Jewish citizens ruled out any
principle of civic equality. The theological ethos that permeated their scholarship penetrated
their way of thinking and produced a messianic philosophy of history. They abandoned the
dialectic of their teacher, who had sought all his life to find an equilibrium between the noble
messianic idea which pursued him from above and the dark sphere of the historical reality in
which he was careful not to be caught.
An example of a moderated anti-messianic nationalism can be found in the Mediterranean
attitude (some will call it “the Mediterranean utopia”) that was developed in Israel in the last
two decades. The ideology of the melting-pot wished to make the Zionist outlook and the
settling ethos with its native secular outlook and modern Western orientation into an Israeli
identity with clearly defined limits. In contrast to this, the Mediterranean option offered a
broadened Israeli identity with cultural mobility, a connection with tradition, many voices and
intellectual and linguistic interchange.The early appearance of the writer and essayist Jacqueline
Kahanoff ’s (1917–1979) polyphonic voice was in contradiction to the hegemonic Israeli culture

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– Eurocentric, secular, socialist and masculine – in the country’s first two decades. Her essays and
short stories were liminal in that they disregarded borders, blurred polarities such as East–West,
hegemonic–“other”, and possessed a hybrid quality of reciprocity, stratification, variety, lack of
dogmatism and played down the “oppositional” (Kahanoff, 2005). Kahanoff played an active role
in the debate on Israel’s Mediterranean identity. As a precursor or as an intellectual personage,
Kahanoff may become a criterion for an understanding of the different forms of identity in
Israel’s culture-in-the-making, of questions of East and West and the intermediate areas, and of
the place of Israel in the Mediterranean geo-cultural space.
Kahanoff could serve as an imaginary speedometer to gauge the speed at which the ship of
the Mediterranean identity of the Israelis has sailed. In the 1950s and 1960s, it was a refreshing
Levantine breeze in the hegemonic Western-secular-socialist intellectual climate that prevailed
in Israel at that time. At the end of the 1990s, it was connected to the Mediterranean renais-
sance resulting from the winds of peace emanating from the Oslo Agreements between Israel
and the Palestinians (1993) and the Barcelona Agreement between the European countries and
the countries of the Mediterranean (1995). In the second decade of the 21st century, Kahanoff
had a new efflorescence with the publication of her works in English, the extension of academic
research on her writings and the emergence of an intellectual and cultural debate about her
contribution to the discourse on the Mediterranean identity, the Levantine space, the feminist
consciousness, immigration, post-colonialism, multiculturalism and transnationalism (Kahanoff,
2011). Her legacy was especially debated by the “Mediterraneans” and the “Levantines.” The
former saw her as a reinforcement, particularly in her promotion of a hybrid identity and dia-
logue between East and West, between Europe and the Levant, while the latter saw her as one of
the original thinkers who, very early on, proposed the Levantine identity as the sole possibility
for the Israelis to become integrated into the area.
Already in 1935, at the ninth Zionist Congress, Ben-Gurion called for the Mediterranean
option: “The Mediterranean is the bridge between Eretz-Israeli and Europe, and we must have
a strong part in this” (Ben-Gurion, 1972, 402). After 20 years, he added and wrote about Israel
as a Mediterranean country and concluded: “The sea is not a desert of water, as many people
think” (Ben-Gurion, 1954, 8). Towards the end of his life, Ben-Gurion settled in the desert at
Kibbutz Sede-Boker. He planned his grave so it would be in the place where Moses led Israel
out of Egypt. On 3 December 1973, Ben-Gurion was buried alongside his wife Paula on the
cliff overlooking Wadi Zin. The funeral was a formative event in the history of the state. The
state bade farewell to its foremost leader, and in so doing, created a sacred national site, a destina-
tion for secular national pilgrimage. However, in achieving this, the state established a symbolic
centre that was far removed from the political, social and demographic centre. Ben-Gurion’s
grave is a central symbol of Israeli mamlakhtiyut, but at the same time, it gazes with perpetual
criticism at Israel’s abandonment of the pioneering ethos and the dream of causing the desert
to bloom. Ben-Gurion inserted a clear and personal voice into a national ceremony, thereby
undermining its rationale – the rationale of nationalizing a leader in order to highlight national
motifs in keeping with the outlook of that generation. One might say that even before the state
nationalized the funeral ceremony of Ben-Gurion, Ben-Gurion nationalized it himself.
Ben-Gurion’s choice to be buried in the desert, like his choice to live in the desert, expresses
an ambiguity. On the one hand, according to the pioneering view, the desert is a virginal place
devoid of history, a space where the future is meant to be written. On the other hand, it relates to
the nation’s ancient history and its formative period, to the ancient myths that were a central ele-
ment in forming the Israeli ethos. According to the biblical narrative, on their journey to the Land
of Israel, the Children of Israel passed by Wadi Zin.There is no decisive evidence that this wadi is
indeed the place where the nation passed, not to mention the fact that contemporary archaeolo-

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gists cast doubt on the veracity of the historical account of the Exodus. One might say that even if
the name is accurate, this would indicate that the Negev – and certainly Ben-Gurion’s burial site
– is located outside the land of Israel, on the way to it. It would seem that Ben-Gurion’s aim was
to connect with the ancient myth, which he himself had laboured to nurture, through connecting
with the Bible and, within the Bible, with the subject of the Exodus in particular. From a mythical
point of view, the founding father of the Hebrew renaissance looks out from the precipice to the
place where the Children of Israel passed on their journey towards the land. In other words, the
reason for the choice of location went beyond family, community or political considerations; it
was a means of connecting to the founding myth of the nation. As he attempted to do during his
life, in his death, too, Ben-Gurion defined himself symbolically as part of the monumental history
of the Jewish people according to the version that he himself established, ignoring the questions
entailed in the social and political – and even physical – reality of his own time. The fact that the
funeral happened to take place so soon after the Yom Kippur War symbolized the coming of age
of Israeli society as it took leave of its founding father (Shapira, 2014). Ben-Gurion’s funeral may
also be seen as a symbolic ceremony of transition of the Israeli nation from an ideological, mobi-
lized, collective society to a privatized, polarized one devoid of a common vision.
In conclusion, orchestrating Herzl’s and Ben-Gurion’s secular messianism with subsequent
readings of Zionism that eventually digressed from it, or rather intensified national and territo-
rial visions, changed the traditional meanings of Judaism. And yet, these lineaments are brought
forth along with spatial perceptions of the Jewish national home, perceptions that transcend
political borders and political theologies. Discussed side by side with the critiques penned by
intellectuals such as Scholem and Talmon, these events do not necessarily follow one another
but rather unfold almost simultaneously, thereby exposing the meaning of Zionism as a modern
nationalization of Judaism.

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Page numbers in bold denote tables, in italic denote figures

Abbé Gregoire 13 Ben-Gurion, David 356–358, 363, 366–367

abortion 72–73, 87, 131, 141, 217, 222–223, 227, Beyer, Peter 25–26
231–233, 235–236, 236, 238–239, 240, 253, Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) 3, 138, 149,
257, 280–281 341–342, 350
Abrahamic religions 9, 20, 126, 128, 155–156, 341, Bible, The 12, 55, 63, 70–71, 124–126, 138, 167–
343, 349 168, 229–230, 232, 262, 266, 271n2, 271n4, 285,
Afghanistan 131, 188–189, 302, 307, 330, 341, 343, 360, 362, 367
347, 351 Biblical Witness Fellowship 9
African-American 54, 65, 165, 167 Brainin, Reuben 357
Akkedah 358–362 Brown, Callum 42
AKP see Justice and Development Party Brown, Wendy 32
Algeria 95, 106, 143, 188, 318 Buddhism: Asokan 330; Cambodian 199; Chinese
Allianza Nazionale (AN) 141, 254–257 204–205; Imperial-Way 207; Japanese 205–207;
Alt-Right 164–165, 169–174 Mahayana 198, 202, 204; Nichiren 206; Sinhala
Alternative for Germany (AfD) 100, 145 332; Sri Lankan 332, 337; Thai 199; Theravada
Amichai,Yehuda 361 198–199, 201; Tibetan 203–204; Zen 207
anarchism 153, 156, Buehrens, John 10
Anglicans 12, 14–15, 147, 165, 216 Burchardt, M. 27–28
Arab Spring 109, 112, 115, 117, 188, 324, 326n26 Burma see Myanmar
Arab Uprising 2 Byrne, Julie 15
Arminius, Jacobus 12
Asad, Talad 24, 27, 30–32, 191 Call to Action (CTA) 14–15, 17, 21
Atatürk, Mustafa Kemel 302–307 Callan, James 14–15
atheism 18, 37–48, 281, 343 Calvinists 12, 41, 263, 269
Avalos, Hector 47 Canada 30, 229–230
Avidan, David 361 Caribbean 1
Ayatollah Khamenei 18 Carlebach, Schlomo 17
Ayatollah Khomeini 18, 290, 318–319, 321–322, Carmi, T. 360
325, 326n11, 326n13, 326n16 Casanova, José 24–29, 32, 94–95
Catholic Charismatic Renewal Movement 15
Baggini, Julian 47 Christian Right 2–3, 46, 164, 166, 168, 173, 211,
Bangladesh 30, 351 216–217, 221–222, 229, 270
Baptists 12, 71, 165, 222, 232, 263, 266 Christianism 55, 60, 62, 149, 211–221, 224
Beit-Hallahmi, B. 81–82 Church of Antioch 15–16
Ben-Ami, Mordechai 357 Cimino, Richard 9, 14–15, 17

369 
 Index

civil rights 10, 20, 165, 263, 335; American 43, Fetullah Gülen 19–20, 306
165, 167 France 13, 29–30, 57–58, 95–96, 97, 99–100, 140–
Clinton, Hillary 171 141, 143, 145–146, 169, 213–214, 216–217, 219,
colonization 55, 60, 72, 197–198 291–292, 298
communism 1–4, 46, 78, 80, 88, 142, 169, 207, Freedom and Justice Party (FJP) 2, 116
228, 250, 252–253, 268, 270, 274, 277–279, French Revolution 13, 16, 44, 279, 364
281–282, 318, 321 Fukuyama, Francis 2, 79, 212
conservatism 1, 4, 99, 113, 141–142, 169–170,
172, 222–223, 227, 230, 238, 254, 256–257, Gandhi, Mahatma 203, 341, 343, 345–346,
309–310, 345 348–353
COVID-19 31–32, 55, 174 Gange, Andre 47
cultural Christianity 44, 100–101, 149, 217 gay rights 10, 131, 227, 229
cultural shifts 95, 99 Geiger, Abraham 16
Germanic Christianity 172
Dawkins, Richard 45–47 Germany 12, 16, 32, 95, 97, 99, 101, 128, 167, 169,
de Boton, Alain 47 214–216, 221, 265
decolonization 143, 266 Gervais, W.M. 43
de Kadt, Emanuel 9, 20 Giddings, L. 43
Diller, Jeanine 39 global challenges 24, 30–31, 33–34
Dunn, T.J. 43 Gray, John 38, 45–46
Dworkin, Ronald 47 Guri, Chaim 359–360

Eagleton, Terry 45 Hadj Abdou, Lelia 74, 142, 144, 148

Eastern Christianity 275, 279
Eastern Europe 72, 78–79, 82–83, 87–88, 95–96,
98–99, 98, 101–103, 139, 142, 145–147, 166,
223, 273–274, 277, 280–281, 282n4
Egypt 1–2, 109–113, 115–116, 126, 154, 178,
181–184, 186–189, 255, 286, 289, 366
Egyptian Current 116
Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood 106, 108–114,
116–117, 187
Egyptian People’s Committee for Support of the
Palestinian Intifada (EPCSPI) 115
enlightenment 13, 25, 29, 39, 44, 82, 154, 181, 183,
276, 279, 293, 298, 333
Ennahda 2, 109–111, 113–117
equality: gender 19–20, 31–32, 58, 65–66, 69–75,
145, 291, 297, 299, 309–310; political 168; racial
165–166; religious 345–346; spiritual 168; of
women 16
Erdoğan, Recep Tayyip 3, 19, 71, 302, 306, 311, 312n5
ethics 40, 62, 70, 83, 114, 123–125, 130, 134, 255,
263, 265, 329, 338
European Christianity 146
European Court of Human Rights 32
European Union (EU) 45, 74, 83–85, 101, 145–146,
150n6, 219, 221, 255–257, 303, 307–308, 310–311
evangelical Protestantism 72, 227–228, 230, 232
evangelicalism 227–228, 230, 232, 240, 260–263,
267, 270; American 227–230, 240, 267;
Brazilian 229; global 227, 229–230, 240
Eybel, Josef 13
fascism 4, 57, 95, 99, 101, 130, 141, 219–221, 223,
249–254, 257, 265
feminism 13, 38, 58, 66, 69, 71–73, 133, 173, 220,
341, 366
Hall, Stuart 124
Harris, Sam 42–43, 46
Hart, David Bentley 39
Hashemi-Rafsanjani, Akbar 322
Hashemi, Nader 18–19
Hawley, George 164, 170, 172–173
Haynes, Jeffrey 1, 3, 91, 96, 177, 273, 303,
305–307
Hertzberg, Arthur 357
Hervieu-Léger, Danièle 11
Herzl, Theodor 55, 356–357, 367
Hill, P.C. 124
Hinduism 21n2, 28, 126, 158–159, 330, 336,
341–346, 350–353
Hindutva 1, 3, 63, 198, 341–343, 345–346,
348–353
Hitchens, Christopher 38, 46
Holocaust 17, 38, 61, 95, 358–359, 361
Hood, R.W. 124
Hoover, Dennis R. 229–231, 260, 262
Hurd, Elizabeth Shakman 28–31, 55
Hyman, Gavin 41
Idel, Moshe 365
immigrants 4, 11, 13, 60, 96, 101, 144, 146–147,
149, 169, 253, 255, 330
India 1, 3–4, 28, 30, 63, 69, 71, 126, 129–130, 138,
149, 203, 286, 328–333, 335, 341–353
Indonesia 18–20, 28, 69, 192, 311
international relations 69, 177
Iran 1, 4, 18, 20, 129, 131, 134, 287, 291–292, 298,
302–303, 314–325, 325n2, 325n3, 326n22,
326n28, 326n29
Islamic fundamentalism 9, 19, 285, 299
Islamic Republic Party (IRP) 2

370
 Index
Islamism 1–2, 4, 46, 106–110, 112–115, 117, 129,
144, 181, 183, 185–186, 213, 307, 319, 323
Israel 4, 9, 17, 20, 51, 56–57, 59–61, 63, 67, 112, 138,
143, 167, 188, 289, 348, 351, 356–359, 361–367
Italy 1, 4, 40, 72–73, 95–96, 97, 99, 138, 141,
144, 148–149, 213–214, 216, 223, 247–254,
256–257, 265, 311
Jainism 126, 330, 341–344, 349
jihadism 110, 185, 187, 189–190, 192, 255
Jordan 106, 109–110, 112–113, 115, 117, 191
Joustra, Robert J. 260–261
Judaism 9–11, 16–17, 46, 51–52, 59, 126, 143, 155,
158, 198, 341, 344, 356–358, 362–363, 365, 367
Justice and Development Party (AKP) 3, 138, 302
Kahanoff, Jacqueline 356, 365–366
Kartun-Blum, Ruth 358
Khan, Reza 18
Kitcher, Philip 47
Klassen, Pamela 13
Koltun-Fromm, Ken 16
Kurds 303–305, 309, 311, 311n1, 341
Kuru, Ahmed 28–30
Kuwait 106, 111, 186
Latin America 1, 20, 132, 139, 227–235, 233–235,
238, 239, 240–241, 241n2, 241n5, 241n6,
242n7
Lebanon 106, 129, 154, 285–287, 289–292, 296,
298, 325n2, 359, 362
Lee, Lois 38
Levine, Hanoch 361
liberal: Christianity 168, 270; Islam 18–21;
nationalism 53, 56, 285–286, 288, 290–291,
293–294, 297–298; Protestantism 11–13, 18, 20,
265, 268; religion 9–10, 18, 20–21, 91, 96
Liberation Theology 10, 14, 20, 132, 231, 252
Libya 106, 186–187, 192, 289
Libyan Islamic Fighting Force 190
Loisy, Alfred 13
Lutherans 12, 133, 148, 215, 232, 268
McAnulla, Stuart 46
Mahabharata 126
Mahmood, Saba 30, 56, 68
Manor-Friedman, Tamar 360
Marx, Anthony 57, 94
Marx, Karl/Marxism 3, 44–45, 53–54, 56, 110,
140, 153, 155, 200, 250–251, 315–318, 328, 335
May, Todd 47
Meijer, Roel 107, 113, 115–116, 177, 191
Meillassoux, Quentin 38
Melkonian-Hoover, Ruth 227, 231
Mendelssohn, Moses 16
Methodists 12, 147, 232, 263
Middle East and North Africa (MENA) 1–2, 70,
109, 188
371
migrants 58, 65, 73–75, 143–146, 148–149, 202,
215, 223–224, 256, 350
Million Plan 356–358
Minkenberg, Michael 91–92, 95–103, 141–143,
145–146, 149
Moaddel, Mansoor 285–286
Modi, Narendra 21n2, 71
monotheism 38–39, 43–48, 66, 131, 140, 156,
179–180, 191, 363
Morocco 2, 106, 110–113, 115, 190, 253
Muhammadiyah 19
Myanmar 4, 129, 197–198, 201–202, 207–208,
341, 347
National Council for the Syrian Revolution and
Opposition Forces (SOC) 116
National Democratic Party of Germany (NPD)
95, 100
nationalism/nationalist: Buddhist 1, 4, 197–199,
201–202, 204, 206–209, 328–329, 331–333,
337–339; Christian 3, 55, 167, 173, 211,
214–216, 219, 223–224, 267, 287; cultural 101,
345; ethno- 101, 129, 201, 222–223, 345, 349;
Hindu 3, 69, 138, 208, 345–346; ideology 2, 82,
130, 209, 332; Indian 345, 348; pan-Arab 286,
288–289; Sinhala 328–329, 331, 333, 337–339;
Sri Lankan 334–336; Tibetan 204; ultra 197–
198, 202, 206–208, 305, 312n6; see also liberal
Nazism 13, 80, 130, 167, 171, 265
Nepal 2, 202
Netherlands 3, 10, 12, 15, 20, 27, 30, 32, 58, 97,
100, 141, 143, 145, 148, 215–216
Nietzsche, Friedrich 46, 168
Nigeria 129
Ofrat, Gideon 358, 361
Ohana, David 363–364
Omer, Atalia 59, 62
Opton, Frank 11
Orthodox Christianity 87, 149n2, 172, 273–276,
280–282, 282n1
Ozzano, Luca 149, 255–257
Pahlevi, Mohammed 18
Pakistan 20, 129, 286, 341, 345, 348–349, 351
Palestine 51, 57, 357, 359
Palestine Liberation Organization 61
Parker, Rebecca Ann 10
Party for Freedom (PVV) 4, 100, 143, 145, 150n5,
219–220
Party of Justice and Development (PJD) 2,
110–112, 115–117
party politics 114, 117, 142, 201
Peace, Timothy 143, 145, 147
Pence, Mike 3, 70, 72
Pentecostalism 9, 20, 68, 71, 217
Peru 2, 229, 232, 233–237, 239
Philippines 63, 129, 154
 Index
Pim Fortuyn List 4, 100, 102, 143–144
Pinker, Steven 45
Poland 1, 3, 57–58, 78, 93, 98, 101, 103, 142–143,
145–147, 215, 223, 253
political ideology 52, 61, 63, 78, 80, 92, 139, 177,
183, 228, 232, 257, 302, 314, 316, 319–320, 322,
333–335
political manifestations 352
political science 139, 218, 231, 254, 260
Pompeo, Mike 3
popes 3, 13, 15, 156, 218, 247–248; Benedict XVI
16, 73, 132; Francis 14–15, 73, 133, 148–149,
257; John Paul II 15, 132, 253; John XXIII 14,
20, 252; Paul II 73; Paul VI 253; Pius IX 247; Pius
X 13, 249; Pius XI 13; Pius XII 13, 130, 266
populism 1, 4, 45, 58, 65–66, 71, 75, 91–92,
98, 102, 106, 130, 138–149, 149n2, 150n3,
171–173, 211–212, 214–224, 228, 230, 238, 241,
256–257, 262, 307, 325, 336, 345
Prophet Muhammed 127, 131, 156, 178–180, 185,
191, 315–317
prophets 16, 21, 123, 129, 140, 158, 185, 192n3,
218, 247, 344, 357
Quran/Qur'an 70, 127–128, 131, 134, 160, 178,
180, 183–184, 219, 285, 317, 326n17, 343
Rabasa, Angel 19–20
racism 10, 54, 56, 62, 91, 93, 95–97, 99, 101, 131,
141, 164–166, 168–169, 171–173, 183, 214, 338
Rahman, Fazlur 20
Raisi, Alireza 321, 323–324
Rauschenberg, Walter 12
Reformation 18, 25, 58, 98, 128, 158, 216, 279,
315, 323
refugees 60, 101, 145–146, 148, 215, 230, 307, 349
religious: fundamentalism 44, 285, 288–289,
297–299; groups 3, 28, 38, 46, 70, 72, 74, 79,
115, 147–148, 217, 240, 266, 288, 302, 305, 315,
322, 325n3, 341, 344, 348–349, 351; nativism
93, 96, 99–100, 103
Remonstrants 12
Reynolds, Frank 329
Reynolds, Susan 40
Robinson, John 12
Roman Catholic Church 3, 10–11, 13–15, 20, 44,
148, 276
Romanian Orthodox Church (ROC) 83–85
Russia 4, 78–79, 82, 85–88, 215, 273–282, 282n4,
282n5, 303
Russian Orthodox Church (ROC) 72, 83, 85–88,
273–280
Russian Revolution 45
Salafism 4, 20, 177–192, 192n3, 325
Saudi Arabia 110, 129, 131, 134, 186–188, 190,
286, 291–292, 298, 302
372
Schachter, Zalman 17
Schmitt, Carl 62, 99, 140, 169, 364
Scholem, Gershom 356, 364–365, 367
Scott, Joan Wallach 32
sectarian solidarity 285, 287–288, 290–293, 296–299
sectarianism 285–288, 290–294, 294–295,
296–287, 296, 297, 298–299
secularism 4, 18, 23–30, 32–33, 45–46, 56,
58–60, 62, 69, 75, 94, 130, 145, 166, 181,
212–214, 216–218, 220–221, 223–224, 247,
251, 253, 271n4, 302, 304, 306, 310, 312n5,
342, 350
Shaban, Abdul 349
Sheikh, Naveed S. 177, 187
Shia/Shi'a 18, 20–21, 128–129, 285–287, 289–292,
294, 296, 296, 298, 314–325, 325n1, 325n2,
326n8, 326n9, 326n27
Sikhism 126, 341–342, 344, 349
Simons, Greg 78–79, 86
Social Gospel Christianity 10
Soroush, Abdolkarim 20, 323, 326n23
Southern Baptist Convention 165
Soviet Union 45, 78–79, 85, 254, 265, 289, 320
Spain 40, 57, 73, 96, 97, 98, 145
Spencer, Nick 40–41, 219, 222
Spencer, Richard 55, 170–173
Spencer, Robert 213
Spengler, Oswald 167, 169, 364
Spruit, Herman 15
Spruit, Meri 15
Sri Lanka 1, 4, 129, 154, 197, 198, 201–202,
207–208, 328–339, 341, 347
Sufi 20, 158–159, 178, 180, 182, 185, 187
Sunni 3, 18, 20–21, 128–129, 177–181, 285–287,
289–292, 294, 296, 296, 298, 303–305, 310,
319, 325
Supreme Court of India 344
Syria 106, 109–110, 114–116, 182, 185, 187, 289,
291–292, 298, 307, 341
Syrian National Council (SNC) 116
Taliban 302, 326n28, 341
Talmon, Jacob 356, 364, 367
Taylor, Charles 24–27, 29–30, 94, 213, 287
Tearfund UK 31
Teilhard de Chardin, Pierre 14, 133
Testament: New 125–126, 165; Old 21, 126, 165, 167
Thailand 4, 198–201, 207, 332
Tobias, Saul 198
transnational 73, 198, 203, 209, 228–229, 231, 241,
314, 324–325, 345, 366
Troeltsch, Ernst 12
Trump, Donald 3, 45, 55, 57, 63, 72, 74, 171, 173,
214, 222, 228, 241, 267, 325
Tunisia 2, 106, 108–114, 116, 192, 318
Tunisian General Union of Students 115
Tunisian Human Rights League (LTDH) 114–115
 Index
Turkey 3–4, 18–19, 71, 138, 302–311, 311n1,
312n2, 312n6
Unitarian Church 11
United Lutheran Church 268
United Nations (UN) 260, 265–266, 268–270
United Nations Security Council 31
United States (US) 1–4, 11–13, 15–16,
20–21, 28, 30, 43–47, 55–58, 65, 67, 69,
72, 95, 103, 140, 164–167, 169, 172, 183,
188, 214, 222–223, 227–232, 240, 241n1,
250, 264–267, 271n7, 291–292, 298, 322,
324–325, 326n30, 351
United States Commission on International
Religious Freedom 303
Universal Declaration of Human Rights 32, 269
universalism 10, 16, 52, 92, 168, 279, 349,
360, 365
US Agency for International Development
(USAID) 228
Valls, Manuel 32
373
Vatican 14–16, 20, 73, 95, 132, 141, 148–149, 218,
221, 247–254, 257
Veković, Marko 275–278
Wahid, Abddurahman 18
War: Cold 1–3, 78, 187, 228, 268, 324; First World 60,
98, 129, 263, 303; Second World 1, 3, 42, 57, 95,
101, 129, 166–167, 257, 264, 287, 289, 318, 357;
Six Day 359–360, 365;Yom Kippur 359, 361, 367
Wesley, John 12, 261
Western Christianity 57, 145, 211, 220, 279
Western Europe 11, 25–27, 82, 96–100, 97, 102,
141, 145–147, 223, 307
White Christianity 55–56, 60–61, 165, 167, 256
Whitmarsh, Tim 39–40
Wilson Woodrow 265
Wilson, Erin K. 24–26, 28, 30–31
Wistrich, Robert 357
Wohlrab-Sahr, M. 27–28
World Health Organization (WHO) 31
World Vision International 31
Yehoshua, A.B. 362