“Whoever is not against us is for us” Sectarianization of politics in Hungary

Sectarianization of politics may be familiar to us primarily from the literature on Middle Eastern states seeking to explain political and state actors mobilize religious identities to gain political advantages (see Hashemi et al., 2017), but the age of post-truth and post-ideology suggests us that the term can be a helpful analytical concept elsewhere too. Finkel and his colleagues (2020) adapt sectarianism to understand identity-based, tribal conflicts or affective polarization in democracies, describing it as a “tendency to adopt a moralized identification with one political group and against another (…) the foundational metaphor for political sectarianism is religion, which evokes analogies focusing less on genetic relatedness than on strong faith in the moral correctness and superiority of one’s sect.” (Finkel et al., 2020: 533) Accordingly, we define political sectarianization as a dynamic process in which an incumbent and dominant political actor mobilizes quasi-religious beliefs, myths, and rites and seeks to determine the civil religion for the political community in order to legitimize their politics and delegitimize other political forces. This process results in a sharp identity, belief, and emotion-based demarcation between “true believers” and “non-believers.” Utilizing the cross-fertilization of different disciplines, such as the theories of religious dimensions of politics (Gates and Steane, 2009; Gentile, 2005, 2006; Gray, 2014; Maier, 2007; Nyirkos, 2021; Payne, 2005), sociological, socio-psychological, and anthropological research on new religious movements (Bromley, 2006; Lewis-Tøllefsen, 2016) in this article, we will examine, how sectarianization can become dominant in modern democracies. Our theoretical discussion is illustrated with contemporary developments in Hungarian politics. We do not approach the role of religion in the contemporary political landscape from the perspective of identity/populist politics or the mobilization of religious communities (see Hungarian case: Bozóki and Ádám, 2016; Lamour, 2022; see in more general: Marzouki et al., 2016; Tepe et al., 2022; Yilmaz and Morieson, 2023; Zúquete, 2017). Instead, we focus on religious phenomena in political communities, specifically, how political sectarianism can be examined by looking at the community around a political actor in terms of the function of religion. The paper argues that sectarianism can explain phenomena in modern politics determined by populism, identity- and emotion-based polarization that no other theoretical/analytical framework can explain comprehensively, such as the internal group and legitimation dynamics. The article dismisses the negative and pejorative connotations of the concept of sectarianism that often appear in public and academic discourse in order to highlight two crucial empirically observable dynamics behind the phenomenon: the organizational (Weber 1985; Loader and Alexander, 1985) and symbolic (Durkheim 1969, 1995; Westley, 1978) aspects. We show four central elements of political sectarianization: staged or manufactured charisma (symbolical condensation of myths and beliefs), exclusive but voluntary community (conversion and ex-communication), controlling collective beliefs and behaviors through political rituals, and providing intellectual and emotional stimuli (propaganda/indoctrination, love bombing).