The Many Faces of Christianism -- Part 4: Populism and Religion

Continued from Part 3

Comments on Populism and Religion: Why the Twain Will Always Meet by Petr Kratochvíl [1]

In this essay Petr Kratochvíl argues that liberal democracy is under threat from populism, and that populism is linked in various ways with religion, even when it doesn't appear to be. 

He explains that, "By liberalism, I generally understand the large group of theories that are concerned with the limits to the scope of state power and the related defence of individual and collective rights of citizens." I can go along with that. 

But I'm sceptical when he claims that "liberalism is a core element of the hegemony on which the global order is built". I think Samuel Huntington came closer to the truth of that when he ascribed it to: (1) the social and class relations of the West, with the rise of cities and commerce, and the dispersion of power in Western societies between estates, monarchs and secular and religious authorities, and the development of state bureaucracies; (2) the technological invention of the means of ocean navigation for reaching distant peoples and (3) the development of the military capabilities for conquering those peoples. As he put it: "The West won the world not by the superiority of its ideas or values or religion (to which few members of other civilizations were converted) but rather by its superiority in applying organized violence. Westerners often forget this fact; non-Westerners never do".

 Kratochvíl's next point, however, I believe is accurate: that liberal democracy is threatened by populist movements that wish to uncouple liberalism from democracy. They want simple majoritarianism. An example in South Africa, where the Bill of Rights prefaces each clause with "Everyone has the right to....", is populist majoritarians who want it changed to "South African citizens have the right to..."

That was also a feature of Afrikaner Nationalism, which claimed to be based on Christian Nationalism. Within the perceived boundaries of the "Afrikaner nation" it was very democratic, and very illiberal. There were to be no restrictions on the power of parliament (in Afrikaans, "volksraad"="people's council") which was there to exercise the "volkswil" (people's will) unrestricted by any liberal notions like bills of rights. The sovereignty of parliament was almost an article of faith. But Christian Nationalists were also authoritarian, and regarded Christian Nationalism as essentially anti-democratic.

Kratochvíl sees two kinds of links between populism and religion. The first is that religious groups may form an alliance with populists because they share some common aims or values. Religious leaders could therefore encourage their supporters to support populist movements. The second kind of link is deeper, though perhaps less visible -- that a populist movement tends to be a quasi-religious entity. It is marked by a return of the sacred, and the political world is reenchanted. "The populist redemptivism directly or indirectly draws on the chiliastic conviction of the end of time, the coming of the Antichrist and the fight of the just against the hosts of Satan." And also "populist movements are much more frequently built upon the principle of charismatic leadership, verging on a cult, rather than the bureaucratic authority which is typical for mainstream political parties."

Populist movements are also characterised by an emphasis on the return of the natural (common sense) and the return of the past. They hold out the promise of a past golden age, when everything worked, even though the remembered past is often a sanitised version of the actual past.

In thinking about all this I'm reminded of a book I read 60 years ago, The Secular City by Harvey Cox, in which he said:

We should oppose the romantic restoration of the sprites of the forest. It may seem pleasant at first to reinstate the leprechauns, but - as Hitler made all too clear - once the Valkyries return, they will seek a bloodthirsty revenge on those who banished them. We should also be wary of any attempt to resacralize politics. Political leaders and movements should never be granted any sacred significance, and all efforts to use public authority to support traditional religious beliefs or the quasi-religious beliefs of ideological secularism must be resisted.

 Kratochvíl would probably agree with most of it, except the last bit about "the quasi-religious beliefs of ideological secularism". He regards the distinction between sacred and secular as important for liberalism, and suggests "secularism" as one of the positive values promoted by liberalism. Cox, however, made a distinction between secularization on the one hand, which he said was a process that was compatible with, and indeed initiated by the Christian worldview, and secularism on the other, which he said was an ideology with quasi-religious characteristics.

So I see liberal democracy, and the threats to it, somewhat differently from Kratochvíl. I don't see the main threat to it as populism, but rather as authoritarianism, which Kratochvíl doesn't mention. And that threat comes from within as well as from without. The US is often referred to by journalists as "the leader of the Free World" -- I assume that by the "Free World" they mean the liberal-democratic countries of the world -- but recent arbitrary arrests by secret police (the masked members of ICE) and resulting detention without trial show that the US is decidedly unfree and authoritarian.

Of course its current government doesn't claim to be liberal, rather the opposite. I think the UK still regards itself as a liberal democracy, but the recent arrests of people protesting against genocide and charging them with "terrorism" shows that the "liberal democracy" label is no longer securely attached. A few years ago, when the UK parliament was debating detention without trial, most of the UK news media were speaking of advocating detention without trial as "the moral high ground". In the present the UK also has by far the highest number of people who have been prosecuted for things they said online.

I think Kratochvíl has missed a couple of important points here.  I believe that in the Christian faith there is an important difference between authority and authoritarianism, and between tradition and traditionalism, and between secularisation and secularism, and we need to be talking more about those. 

 

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Notes and References 

1. Populism & Religion, in van der Pol et al 2025:17