Polarising the ‘Christian West’: ‘Us’ and ‘Them’ in European Far-Right Parties’ Rhetoric

Despite large-scale secularisation and far-right parties’ predominantly non-religious electorate in Europe’s Christian-cultural context, these parties politicise religion to promote their right-wing agenda. In regions with a Christian legacy, far-right parties frame their political discourse in religious terms to claim the importance of Christianity as part of Western identity and thereby appeal to ingroups and demarcate outgroups. While Muslims are arguably one of their main negative targets in Europe, the instrumentalization of Christianity to establish group boundaries remains underexplored. This article addresses this shortcoming, arguing that far-right parties make systematic use of religious appeals to Christianity as a unique demarcation marker, I argue for a distinguished ingroup from outgroup. A conservative reading of Christianity is deployed to not only identify the ‘otherness’ of Islam, but also to stigmatize culturally liberals as incompatible with their broadly Christian-framed ingroup. Using parliamentary data from ParlEE, ParlEE V3, ParlEE V4, and ParlSpeech V2 (2009-2019) across eight European countries, I employ a pre-trained language transformer to perform automated text classification on religious markers in the political communication of far-right parties. The results indicate that religious group appeals co-occur with both inclusive and exclusive rhetoric in the speech data from the country contexts studied. When deploying religious language these far-right parties inclusionary mention Christians in 8 per cent of the total sentences, and exclusionary mention Muslims in 16 per cent and far less culturally liberals (1 per cent). By this, the study adds novel insights to the understanding of the far-right parties’ puzzling religiously framed rhetoric in their mobilisation strategies by showing first, the role of religion in addressing different groups and, second, that these patterns differ for far-right parties compared to the way other parties mention religious groups.