Religion and Illiberal Politics: Concepts, Patterns, and Conditions

Growing perceived immigration and security threats, and the social challenges of the recent economic crisis have filled and seen the rise of populist right-wing parties and movements in Europe as well as across the Atlantic. This trend poses one of the major challenges to contemporary liberal democracies, which ought to rely on the normative consensus of granting freedom-, equality-, and minority rights and protecting them against exclusionist discrimination. Exclusivist illiberal politics divide not only political parties and their electorates but also parts of the civil society, religious institutions in particular. While the Christian Right in highly religious US epitomizes the linkage between religion and illiberalism since the 1980s, systematic research about how religion challenges the liberal order in more secularized Europe is still rare. To fill this lacuna, our contribution investigates the mechanisms, conditions, and effects of the linkage between religion and illiberal politics. Proceeding from a nuanced theoretical and conceptual clarification of the so far vague understanding of “illiberal politics”, we identify three such mechanisms: (1) Populist right-wing and/or religious-nationalist actors use religion as means to construct a nationalist identity based on an image of Christianity that suggests unity against Islam as the other. (2) In defence of a naturalist hierarchical order and a homogeneous society, conservative or fundamentalist religious and non-religious actors find common ground in opposing permissive policy approaches related to family pattern, definition of life and death as well as education. In some cases, (3) right-wing actors even apply liberal equality principles, gender equality in particular, against Islam as the „illiberal other“. Each of these political-religious linkages is not novel in principle. New is their simultaneous occurrence across Europe with the effect that religion becomes (again) a source of political legitimation. Moral-political norm diffusion, massive migration and refuge as well as increasing precarization are conditions, which provide opportunities for otherwise less visible illiberal religious views and actors.