The Western Populist Right in 2020: A Purported Clash Between the Public Good and Individual Rights

The discourse revolving on the protection and enhancement of supposedly imperiled individual rights is a fixture of conservative actors across western democracies. The Covid19 pandemic represented an occasion for such actors to increase the deployment of said discourse, in order to lament citizens’ rights curtailments on the part of an intrusive state apparatus. This presentation focuses on the cases of Italy and the United States to highlight similarities and differences of the exploitation of the rights talk from crucial right-wing political actors and supportive media or interest groups. Since the beginning of the pandemic, we have witnessed an exponentially growing deployment of the narrative based on allegedly threatened religious freedom and freedom of speech. These claims, analyzed in conjunction with the populist, authoritarian, ethno-nationalist agendas of such political actors, cast a light on a transnational populist religious right whose development should be closely monitored.

Evangelical Worship

Almost invariably, media stories with the word evangelical in their headlines are accompanied by a familiar stock photo: a mass of middle-class worshippers with eyes closed, faces tilted upward, and hands raised to the sky. Yet, despite the fact that worship has become symbolic of evangelicalism’s identity in the twenty-first century, it remains an understudied locus of academic inquiry. Historians of American evangelicalism tend to define the movement by its political entanglements (the “rise of the religious Right”), and academic trajectories (the formation of the “evangelical mind”), not its ecclesial practices. Theological scholars frequently dismiss evangelical worship as a reiteration of nineteenth-century revivalism or a derivative imitation of secular entertainment (three Christian rock songs and a spiritual TED talk). But by failing to engage this worship seriously, we miss vital insights into a form of Protestantism that exerts widespread influence in the United States and around the world. Evangelical Worship: An American Mosaic models a new way forward. Drawing together insights from American religious history and liturgical studies, and putting both in conversation with ethnographic fieldwork in seven congregations, this book argues that corporate worship is not a peripheral “extra” tacked onto a fully formed spiritual/political/cultural movement, but rather the crucible through which congregations forge and negotiate the contours of evangelicalism’s contested theological identity.

Misguided Ancients

Although the ancient Greeks and Romans have long been appreciated as foundations for Western civilization, for these textbooks, the Greeks’ philosophy, gods, and immorality tar them as godless humanists. Nonetheless, the Greeks and the Romans allow these curricula to introduce several key social, political, and moral arguments. They assess whether ancient civilizations implemented the “family values” of the political right as it emerged in the 1970s. Thus the Greeks were commendable in excluding women from the public sphere and the Romans for their strong patriarchal families. But Rome fell when it failed to maintain family values. These textbooks disparage the Romans to downplay their influence on the American founding. Furthermore, the rise of Islam reveals the presence of Satan in the world. These curricula’s repudiation of the classical tradition reflects not only contemporary concerns of the religious right but also American anti-intellectualism.

The Righteous Right

When these curricula narrate recent history, they document the firm alliance between the Republican Party and the religious right. The two groups shared common concerns about such issues as the sexual revolution, drug culture, and the welfare state. From his first venture into national politics in 1976, Ronald Reagan proved to be the ideal candidate for both groups. Evangelicals believed that, under Reagan, the federal government would leave education to local authority. These curricula herald the successful presidencies of Reagan and George W. Bush in furthering the agenda of the Christian right—advancing Christianity and capitalism. They claim that Republicans advance Christian values and American power; Democrats undermine both. These curricula judge the rest of the world on how well they conform to these ideals and support American interests. Because the historical narrative is virtually identical to the history of the religious right, recent history is their story.

The Limits of Possibilities of Religious Politics: The Case of the Tehreek-i-Labbaik in Pakistani Punjab

Historically, despite the tremendous influence exerted by Islam on public life, religious parties and organisations have historically failed to do well at the ballot box, receiving an average of only 6% of votes cast in elections since the 1980s. Focusing on the case of the Tehreek-i-Labbaik Pakistan (TLP), a new Barelvi political party and social movement that has campaigned on the emotive issue of blasphemy since being formed in 2015, this article argues that the clientelistic, patronage-based nature of democratic politics in Punjab, coupled with factionalism and competition within the religious right, continues to play a role in limiting the electoral prospects of religious parties. Nonetheless, as was seen in the General Elections of 2018 in which the TLP outperformed expectations, there are particular circumstances in which the religious parties are able to make electoral breakthroughs. While the TLP was able to make effective use of populist rhetoric to garner some genuine support for itself, this article argues that the organisations sustained campaign of protests over the issue of blasphemy fed into broader efforts by the military establishment and opposition political parties to destabilise and weaken the government of the PML-N prior to the 2018 elections.

A Theory of Political Backlash: Assessing the Religious Right’s Effects on the Religious Field

A growing body of evidence suggests that the rise in religious disaffiliation can be partly attributed to a political backlash against the Religious Right. Yet the concept of “political backlash” remains undertheorized, limiting our ability to evaluate how backlash against the Religious Right has impacted the religious field as a whole. This article develops a general account of how political backlash against a radical actor can impact participants within a given field, distinguishing between broad backlash, narrow backlash, and counter backlash. It then applies this framework to the case of the religious field. An analysis of available evidence suggests that backlash against the Religious Right has had ripple effects beyond the rise of the “nones,” including a rise in “spiritual” identification, positive attention to the “Religious Left,” depoliticization of liberal religion, and purification and radicalization within the Religious Right itself. This article encourages religion scholars to connect dots between trends that have not been understood as related, and deepens our understanding of the relational nature of religious change. More generally, it offers a framework for understanding how backlash against radical actors can shape entire fields.

The Trocadéro

This chapter takes for its focus the high point of the Parisian musical season in 1900: the ten state-sponsored concerts officiels of the 1900 Exposition Universelle de Paris. As had been the case in 1878 and 1889, the goal of these concerts was to promote specifically Republican ideals through music. Yet in 1900, these ideals had transformed into a secular construction of Frenchness that absorbed Catholicism as a foundational trait of national identity. Although the Church was not represented in any official capacity either on the musical planning commission or on the concert programs themselves, the repertoire performed throughout these concerts created a narrative that centered around a sense of reconciliation between Church State. The carefully crafted vision put forth by the State relied heavily on transformations of the Church for the formation of a cohesive Republican identity such that the Church was present in its displays, theaters, and concerts in a way not seen in any previous Exposition. In the heart of Paris, the Trocadéro hosted a significant amount of explicitly religious music that, when mediated through actors deployed through the state apparatus on an international stage, transformed the Church into an integrated facet of French Republicanism that could be proudly displayed to the Exposition’s international audiences. These concerts functioned not as nostalgic emblems of a Revolutionary past nor as attacks against the political and religious right, but, rather, as a site of transformation at which the Republic co-opted Catholicism as an indispensable aspect of its own French identity.

The Science Wars Go Public

In the 1990s, the Science Wars moved from the academic world into the public arena, further widening the gulf between critics of science, who argued that science was a socially empowered belief system or ideology, and defenders of a more traditional view of scientific knowledge. The critics of science were alienated by scientists’ insistence on promoting scientific knowledge as archaeological-ontological rather than interpretational-epistemological. They became actively hostile to the practice of science as well as to the putative knowledge that scientists produced, denouncing both as ideological, patriarchal, sexist, racist, and pretenders to truth. The religious right responded with its own critique of science by arguing that creation science was just as legitimately science as evolutionary theory, but successive court decisions rejected this interpretation. The implications for how we are to understand the nature of scientific knowledge remain profound for formulating effective science-based public policies.

The rise of the post-religious right: Christianism and Secularism in the French Rassemblement National

This article investigates Western European right-wing populists’ ambiguous relationship with religion and secularism using the example of the French Rassemblement National (RN). Drawing on social cleavage theory, survey data and elite interviews with RN leaders, French mainstream politicians and Church authorities, it finds that the RN employs Catholicism and laïcité as cultural identity markers against Islam to mobilise voters around a new identity cleavage between liberal-cosmopolitans and populist-communitarians. However, instead of a rapprochement with Christian policy positions, ethics and institutions, this article finds that the RN is becoming increasingly secularist in its policies, personnel and electorate. This finding is of significant relevance for the broader populism and religion literature not only because it suggests the centrality of right-wing identity politics for populist parties, but also because it challenges traditional assumptions about the relationship between right-wing populism and religion by providing evidence that in Western Europe the former is increasingly dominated by its ‘post-religious’ wing.