Cultural Christianity as a Secular Resource for Illiberal European Identity Constructions

The paper refers to the ambivalence of secularisation in order to explain why Cultural Christianity can show both a liberal and illiberal character. These two faces of Cultural Christianity are most of all due to the identity functions that not only faith-based religion but particularly a culturalized version of religion entails. Proceeding from this, it should be demonstrated how Cultural Christianity can turn into a concrete illiberal marker of identity or resource for illiberal collective identity. Moreover, the argument focuses on the link between right-wing nationalism and Cultural Christianity from a historical-theoretical perspective and illustrates the latter with the example of contemporary illiberal and selective European memory constructions including a special emphasis on exclusivist elements and Anti-Muslim politics. Hence, the main goal of the paper is to explain why Cultural Christianity, as a rather neutral expression of secularised religion in a post-secular society, is also appropriated for illiberal purposes. To that end, it is argued why the persistence of a non-faith-based reference to Christianity has to be seen in the context of the ambivalent nature of secularisation, which in turn is an expression of the ambivalences of modernity in Europe and beyond. To explore how Cultural Christianity is susceptible to illiberal and (post-)nationalist propaganda, two standard perspectives are proposed: First, the demand-side, which entails looking at data in order to understand to what extent we can observe linkages between a non-religious self-identification with Christianity and illiberal ideologies such as nationalism or Islamophobia; and, second, the supply-side perspective within a market where identity “products” are on the rise. Here, three major frames can be identified through which Cultural Christianity is mobilised for illiberal purposes: The illiberal Christian-Occident frame, the illiberal gender frame, and the illiberal heritage frame. Whereas these three frames represent a classical empirical social scientific approach, the third perspective involves a deeper historical-theoretical analysis of the illiberal Occident frame along the lines of Europe as an – historically somewhat paradoxical – example of selective identity constructions.