Across diverse political contexts, religion has become an increasingly visible resource in populist and authoritarian mobilization. This joint-session seeks to develop a comparative framework for understanding how leaders, parties, and movements employ religion in political appeals, ideological projects, and mobilization strategies. It examines how religion shapes belonging and exclusion, moral boundaries, collective identities, and perceived threats. Bringing together empirically grounded papers, the session seeks to advance theoretical debate and illuminate variation across political, religious, and regional contexts. It welcomes research on how religious actors and communities mobilize to deepen, challenge, resist, or reverse polarization and populist and authoritarian political projects.
A growing body of scholarship has examined how religion manifests itself in populist politics in diverse and often contradictory ways. Studies on Western Europe have shown how populists ‘hijack religion’ (Marzouki et al 2016) employing a ‘civilizationist’ concept of religion (Brubaker 2017) to draw battle lines against Islam. Recent studies focus on regions outside Europe (Tepe/Chekirova 2022; Fitzgerald et al 2024), examining how religion influences the policy positions, political communication, and electoral campaigns of populist actors. However, what is missing is a comparative framework to understand how populism mobilizes religion and why its political salience varies across contexts.
The session aims to bring case studies and theoretical contributions into dialogue to develop a comparative understanding of how populist actors’ religious mobilization takes different forms across contexts. Both theoretical and empirical contributions are welcome. Case studies should engage theoretical debates, while theoretical contributions should draw upon cases to demonstrate the scope, limits, and comparative applicability of their arguments. By blending theoretical contributions and empirical studies from different countries and regions, the session aims to develop a broader framework for understanding how populist actors employ religious discourse, authority, identity, and institutions. Possible configurations may include religious nationalism, religious communalism, civilizational populism, and other hybrid or regionally distinctive forms.
Ultimately, the session lays the foundation for a special issue on varieties of religious mobilization, developing a framework explaining how institutional, socioeconomic, and historical contexts shape religion’s role in populist politics—and when it fosters democratic cooperation or fuels exclusion, polarization, and authoritarian rule.
- Brubaker R (2017) Between nationalism and civilizationism: the European populist moment in comparative perspective. Ethnic and Racial Studies 40, 1191–1226.
- Fitzgerald, J, A D Lokmanoglu, D Salles, and R M Santini. 2024. Heaven Holds a Place for Those Who Pray: Instrumentalizing Religion and Disinformation in the 2022 Brazilian and 2023 Turkish Presidential Campaigns. The International Journal of Press/Politics 31(2): 417-443.
- Marzouki N, McDonnell D and Roy O (eds) (2016) Saving the People: How Populists Hijack Religion. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
- Tepe, S and A Chekirova. 2022. Faith in Nations: The Populist Discourse of Erdogan, Modi, and Putin. Religions 2022, 13(5), 445.
1: How do populist actors select, reinterpret, and mobilize religious ideas, traditions, and institutions?
2: How do populists engage with religious authorities, organizations, and communities?
3: How do populists define the nation, the “people,” or the moral community they claim to represent and protect?
4: Which religious, ethnic, political, sexual, or social groups are portrayed as threatening or undesirable?
5: Which groups and constituencies respond to particular forms of religious discourse by populist actors?
1: Religious narratives and tropes as populist strategies
2: Populists' positions toward refugees, immigrants, and religious minorities
3: Religious-populist appeals as a means of democratic cooperation versus polarization and authoritarianism
4: Populists' perception and treatment of sexual and gender minorities
5: The demand side: voters and religious-populist appeals
6: Populist actors and their relations with faith-based organizations
7: Populism and religion in different religious and global contexts
