Religion as Paradigm of Authority, Hierarchy, and Equality − On Programmatic Linkages between Religious Patterns of Thought and Illiberal Politics

The political recourse to the normative heritage of religions is apparently both, open for the justification of various regimes and appropriate to amalgamate even contradictory ideas, values, and institutions which seem to be irreconcilable at a first glance. Proceeding from this general discernment, the paper will demonstrate how the most renowned theoretical approaches from the history of political ideas (e. g., Rousseau, Tocqueville, Habermas et cetera) suggest religious patterns of thought as an intellectual guide to a complex hybrid between democratic and authoritarian principles, a hybrid that could be subsumed under the concept of ,illiberal democracy‘. To grasp this argument, the political impact of religion is reconstructed as a more or less consistent paradigm of legitimizing authority, hierarchy and equality at the same time, which promises, on the one hand, moral orientation in liberal democracy but shows a noticeable affinity to illiberal politics on the other. In the latter respect, it will be argued that religion can easily be adapted by right-wing populists in order to underpin their political rhetoric and programs such as anti-pluralism, nationalism, ideologizing images of genders due to natural law, or even racism. Hence, the dual purpose of the paper is to clarify the ambivalent role for democracy religion is basically attributed within the history of political ideas, and to argue to what extent religion’s characteristic oscillation between authority, hierarchy, and equality provides some perfect ingredients to legitimize the illiberal form of democracy the right-wing populist agenda usually propagates. On that elaborated theoretical and historical basis, we will finally get an approach to outline both, the strategic role of religion within the conceptual framework of illiberal and right-wing political doctrines as well as the rather subtle nuances of religion’s attractiveness for illiberal and right-wing political actors.