Untangling Radical Right Religious Politics: The Role of Populism

• In Event: Religion, Populism, and Geopolitics

Abstract

Since the rise of the Populist Radical Right (PRR) in the 2010s, scholars have focused racism, ethnonationalism, and xenophobia. Yet Evangelical and Catholic nationalism formed a crucial element of the PRR in the US, Spain, and Brazil, among others, even when PRR did not appear to follow the moral commitments of these ethos. Radical right populists like Trump, Bolsonaro, Meloni, and Orbán frequently invoke religiously tinged concepts like gender ideology and anti-trans panic despite lacking strong ties to religious organizations or movements. And it remains unclear how typically insular religious communities overcome their suspicion of outsiders to work with other radical right currents (e.g. ethnonationalism) who may not share their views and practices.
In this paper, I present a new conceptual schema of radical right religious politics. It divides religious political narratives and ideologies into four separate (but not mutually exclusive) currents: conservatism, dogmatism, nationalism, and populism. Conservatives are not necessarily motivated by religion but by resistance to change, which may including opposing challenging religiously-inspired traditional norms. Dogmatists are committed members of right-leaning churches and thus open to populists on shared policy grounds, but their insularity, distrust, and puritanism limits their ability to participate in broader radical right movements. Nationalists lack the insularity of dogmatists because they are driven to impose religious values through state policy, but they share fervent doctrinal commitments that create similar difficulties with movement politics. Finally populists are those who believe that elites have been coopted by a stateless cabal that seeks to undermine national unity through the spreading of divisive ideas (e.g. critical race theory, gender ideology) and thus better dominate the “true people” of the country.
Of the four, I argue that populism is central (and as of yet understudied) to understanding the intersection of religious and radical right politics because only the populist current allows for the participation in a broader radical right populist movement. By focusing attention on identifiable (if fictional) hostile agents, it allows populism’s “us vs. them” mentality to demote concerns about conformity or purity and keep individuals with amenable attitudes motivated and active. I use an original observational survey to test this schema. The paper also introduces observable implications of the approach and suggests future lines of inquiry based on them.

Author

• Matthew Rhodes-Purdy, Clemson University