Religion and Illiberal Politics: Cases of Actors, Ideologies and Identity Narratives

This paper provides and systematic overview about carious case-studies in Europe dealing with the interaction between religion and illiberal politics. Religion plays in a double-fowled sense an increasingly relevant role: As reservoir for constructing or re-imagining a nationalist genealogy (Bruce 2003), and in terms of actors and religious interpretations or ideologies. As to the first, in their recent edited book, Mazouki, McDonnell and Roy convincingly show that more often then not right-wing populist actors tend to hijack religion. Whereas populists talk about identity and Churches about faith, religion bears the potential to serve populist identity politics. At the same time, however, as noted by Jose Casanova (2006), the impact of secularization provides the Churches opportunities to emerge and enter the social and political discourse. And Grzymała-Busse examined in her comparative contributions on the role of the Churches to what extent they can maximize their policy influence (Grzymała-Busse 2012, 2015); in morality politics often in an illiberal way (Hennig 2012; 2015). In more general terms, growing perceived immigration and security threats, and the social challenges of the recent financial and economic crisis have filled and seen the rise of an alliance between religion and illiberal politics. Within this context, the guiding questions for an overview of the mentioned case studies are: 1. How and why do illiberal actors use religion? Case studies explore pattern of nationalist identity politics in the context of migration/cultural pluralization. 2. How and why do religious actors ally with illiberal actors? Case studies explore the linkages between religious and non-religious actors to defend a homogeneous hierarchically structured society. 3. Why and under which conditions do illiberal religious and/or political actors cooperate?