Populism and Religion: Toward a Global Comparative Agenda

Comparative Sociology 20 (2021) 317–343 C OMPARATIVE SOCIOLOGY brill.com/coso Populism and Religion Toward a Global Comparative Agenda Efe Peker Assistant Professor of Sociology, School of Sociological and Anthropological Studies, University of Ottawa, Canada [email protected] Emily Laxer Assistant Professor of Sociology, Department of Sociology, Glendon College, York University, Canada [email protected] Abstract Although the populism-religion relationship is increasingly recognized in the literature, the focus has predominantly been on Western cases. This article proposes analytical tools for global comparisons. First, drawing on the ideational, performative, and strategic approaches to populism, the authors articulate how populists deploy religion in each category. Existing works have not engaged with these dimensions conjointly. Second, the authors employ this tridimensional conception to operationalize the “covert” and “overt” modes of religious populism identified in the literature. They hold that a populist movement comes closer to the former (“sacralizing the political”) or the latter (“politicizing the sacred”) depending on the extent to which it mobilizes religions in its ideas, performances, and strategies. Third, the authors exemplify these ideal types via two pairs of case studies: France and Québec (covert), and India and Turkey (overt). Finally, the authors consider how religious populisms elsewhere stack up on this spectrum, and discuss future themes for comparative research. Keywords populism – religion – comparative political sociology – nationalism – far right © Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2021 | doi:10.1163/15691330-bja10037 318 1 Peker and Laxer Introduction The globally increasing prominence of religion in social and political life since the 1980s has been extensively discussed in social scientific scholarship (Berger 1999; Toft, Philpott, and Shah 2011). Coinciding with this development has been the rise of right- and left-wing populist politics around the world, with transnational dimensions (Moffitt 2016; Norris and Inglehart 2019). While religious revival and populist resurgence have separately received abundant attention in the literature, the study of their relationship is only beginning to make headway, with recent works focusing on conceptual considerations (Arato and Cohen 2017; Palaver 2019; Yilmaz and Morieson 2021; Zúquete 2017), European populists’ interactions with religion (Brubaker 2017a; Marzouki, McDonnell, and Roy 2016; Schwörer and Romero-Vidal 2019), the religious affiliations of Trumpism in the US (Gorski 2017; Whitehead and Perry 2020), and edited volumes featuring diverse case studies (Courau, Abraham, and Babić 2019; DeHanas and Shterin 2020). Despite this burgeoning literature and the gradual inclusion of non-Western cases such as India, Indonesia, Brazil, Turkey, and the larger Middle East (Hadiz 2016; Jaffrelot 2019; Moddelmog and dos Santos 2020; Yilmaz 2018), substantive works remain concentrated on populist articulations of Christianity in Europe and the US. For all the repeated emphasis on the global rise of religions and populisms, a broader comparative perspective that considers regional and religious variations beyond the West has yet to be achieved, though works surveying a more comprehensive set of cases are beginning to emerge (Yilmaz, Morieson, and Demir 2021). This article offers to advance the analytical toolkit required to facilitate comparisons of religiously inflected populisms on a global scale. The study of Western religious populisms, to be sure, has already initiated a fruitful comparative agenda. Marzouki, McDonnell, and Roy’s Saving the People (2016) showed that virtually all right-wing populists in the West exploit Christianity as a nativist identity marker against Muslims in particular, even as the rapport with faith, doctrine, religious networks, and the Church establishment remain commonly weak. Brubaker (2017a) further noted internal variations within Christian populisms, namely between the putatively liberal and secularized “Christianism” of Northern and Western European populists and the more direct anti-Islamism of East Central European populisms and Trumpism. While neither variation significantly relies on religious doctrine, the involvement with Christianity is more palpable in the latter as a mobilizer of socially conservative groups and policy agendas (Haynes 2020). Indeed, Donald Trump may lack any semblance of religiosity, but Evangelicals have endorsed him against the evils they attribute to secularist and socially liberal values, as well as Islam (Gorski 2017). Comparative Sociology 20 (2021) 317–343 Populism and Religion 319 While successfully shedding light on particular manifestations of the populism-religion nexus, the Western comparative outlook is in need of broadening to account for the wider range of ways that religions and religious groups are deployed by populist political actors. The Western experiences are neither homogeneous nor can they be taken as universally illustrative. Europe, for example, is one of the most secularized regions in the world, and the majority of its right-wing populists have never held national power, though their electoral successes at municipal, regional, and supra-national levels have been significant (Mudde 2009). In the US, where religion plays a much more salient role in public life, Trump’s religious rhetoric has been tenuous at best, and his alliance with religious groups mostly conjunctural (Whitehead and Perry 2020). Various other forms and degrees of religious populism are likely to be found elsewhere, such as movements and leaders mobilizing Islam in Turkey and Indonesia, Buddhism in Myanmar and Sri Lanka, Christianity in Brazil, Judaism in Israel, and Hinduism in India and Nepal. Avoiding a “West and the Rest” essentialism, a comparative outlook is necessary to empirically study the variegated and culturally/geographically specific displays of the populismreligion nexus. Taking a step in this direction, we turn in the first section to the three main theoretical approaches to populism the literature offers, which highlight the ideational, performative-stylistic, and political-strategic aspects of the phenomenon. These approaches identify populism, respectively, as a set of ideas and discourses (Hawkins et al. 2019), as an affective-performative repertoire and style embodied by leaders (Moffitt 2016), and as a strategy of mass mobilization and political organization (Jansen 2011). Rather than providing an exhaustive review, or prioritizing one approach over the other, our goal here is to maintain an integrated perspective that considers the wide range of characteristics ascribed to populism. We then systematically articulate how populist politics can involve religion and religious groups in each of the three interlinked categories. Exploring the broader spectrum of intersections matters, as the religious populism literature has not so far considered these three dimensions together.1 To inform the comparative agenda in the subsequent section, we then apply the threefold conception of the populism-religion nexus to the “covert” and “overt” modes of religious populism identified by Zúquete (2017), which he bases on the “sacralizing the political” and “politicizing the sacred” distinction made in earlier works. The former concept has been applied to regimes that 1 Existing works either take the ideational approach (Zúquete 2017), the stylistic approach (DeHanas and Shterin 2020), or a combination of the two (Brubaker 2017a). The politicalstrategic approach, to our knowledge, has not been explicitly utilized in this literature. Comparative Sociology 20 (2021) 317–343 320 Peker and Laxer consecrate their rule and institutions via a covert aura of religiosity, without borrowing directly from actual theological content (Gentile 2006). The latter concept has been reserved for populisms that overtly invoke traditional religious doctrine and themes for self-legitimation (Linz 1996). We complicate this typology and clarify its analytic purchase by uncovering how political actors in settings complying with each variation engage the discursive, performative, and strategic elements of populism. We ascertain that a populist movement falls closer to the covert kind (sacralizing the political) if its mobilization of traditional religions in its discourse, performance, and/or strategicorganizational affiliations is more latent or indirect; and to the overt variety (politicizing the sacred) if such mobilization is more manifest or direct. The distinction is meant to serve as an heuristic device to comparatively assess variations across cases. In the empirical section of the article, we demonstrate the discursive, performative, or strategic-organizational dimensions of “sacralizing the political” with the cases of France and the Canadian province of Québec, and exemplify “politicizing the sacred” through a study of India and Turkey. The cases have been chosen in accordance with our appraisal of their proximity to the ideal types. Our comparison shows that while religion was mobilized as an implicit/ explicit ethnic identity marker in all of these cases to define “the people,” the discursive and performative utilization of traditional religio-cultural resources and symbols is feebler in France and Québec. Moreover, the second pair displays political-strategic characteristics that are absent in the first, especially in the grassroots connections, institutional reconfigurations, and agendasetting opportunities that are reinforced by religion. In the final section, we reflect on how other Western and non-Western cases would measure up on the overt-covert continuum. Our objective is not to determine quantified, precise locations, but to offer a relational assessment. We conclude with a note on the scholarly as well as the sociopolitical significance of investigating the populism-religion nexus, and highlight future themes of comparative research in this domain. 2 Theoretical Framework 2.1 The Multiple Dimensions of Populism The contemporary scholarship on populism is in disagreement as to the phenomenon’s key constitutive features, leading to divergent research priorities. Agreed upon by most is that all populisms construct a juxtaposition between a virtuous, underprivileged, and homogenous “people” and a corrupt, Comparative Sociology 20 (2021) 317–343 Populism and Religion 321 self-serving, and power-wielding “elite.” The purpose of political mobilization should be to fulfill the will of the former, which is thought to be hindered by the institutionalized power of latter. Beyond this general characterization, various approaches argue that populism can be further distinguished by its specific set of ideas, performative political style, or mobilization strategy. The list is not exhaustive,2 these items often coexist and interrelate in empirical research, and even their classification lacks full consensus (especially in relation to the work of Laclau, 2005).3 The ideational approach upholds a minimalist definition, highlighting the framing of a moral cosmology based on the good “people” and the evil “elite.”4 Rather than adhere to a particular classical ideology such as socialism or conservatism, populist politics can selectively articulate these in a chameleonic manner (Bonikowski and Gidron 2016; Hawkins et al. 2019; Mudde 2009). In addition to anti-elitism, populists are also anti-pluralist, as they define the “people” in an exclusive way to render other groups and contenders to power ultimately illegitimate (Müller 2016). This is why (especially right-wing) populisms add a third element to the vertical imagery: dangerous “others” on the bottom – such as immigrants and minorities – who are not of the “people,” but work in tandem with the “elite” at the top to undermine the “people’s” general will (Albertazzi and McDonnell 2008). It is important to underline here that the literature recognizes the highly interwoven nature of populist and nationalist ideational frameworks. Populism’s vertical, top-down antagonism of “elite-people-others” often overlaps with nationalism’s horizontal dichotomy of “insider-outsider” (De Cleen and Stavrakakis 2020). Brubaker (2020) has proposed to construe the nationalist “insider-outsider” distinction as integral to the populist discourse to speak of a national-popular moment in the singular. Populists ambiguously amalgamate the meanings of the “people” as ethnocultural group (ethnos), socioeconomic underdog (plebs), or politically sovereign community (demos) to 2 A fourth approach is the socioeconomic perspective, which defines populism by macroeconomic policies that are deemed “irresponsible” in that they favor of short-term wealth redistribution via government overspending to please constituencies (Dornbusch and Edwards 1991). Beyond the discipline of economics today, this approach has largely lost support in the social sciences. 3 Ernesto Laclau’s influential work on the topic has been identified within the ideational approach (Hawkins et al. 2019), the political style approach (Moffitt 2020), or as a separate category (De la Torre 2018). 4 The ideational perspective is divided into scholars who view populism as an ideology (Mudde 2009) or a discourse (Bonikowski and Gidron 2016). The latter group is inspired by Laclau, and shares commonalities with the political style approach. This is why, Moffitt (2020), for instance, merged the two into what he calls the “discursive-performative approach.” Comparative Sociology 20 (2021) 317–343 322 Peker and Laxer forge diverse overlaps with the “nation.” The “elites” and “others” can thus be discursively framed as on top and bottom as well as outside (internal outsider if national, external outsider if extranational) (Brubaker 2020; see also Adam and Tomšič 2019). Going beyond mere rhetoric, scholars in the second approach emphasize populists’ affective political style and symbolically mediated communication and performance. Populist leaders not only discursively construct the “people;” they also appeal to and embody that signifier through a series of carefully selected performative repertoires (Moffitt 2016). These include “bad manners” such as transgressive language and uninhibited “folksy” conduct that accentuate populists’ distinction from the “politically correct” elite. Socioculturally, populists flagrantly personify the “low” in their “demeanors, ways of speaking and dressing, vocabulary, and tastes displayed in public,” contrasted with the composed and distant “high” of the elites (Ostiguy 2017, 78). This highly mediatized cultural performance also helps demarcate the “people” from the minority “others,” who are supposedly alien to such local values. Rather than their ideas or style, the political-strategic approach brings to the fore populists’ mobilization capacities and modes of political organization (Barr 2019). For some in this group, populism can be distinguished specifically by its personalistic leadership model that seeks to bypass formal institutions to win/exercise power via direct and unmediated mass support (Weyland 2001). Others more broadly shed light on populists’ diverse grassroots mobilization and organizational practices, such as their plebiscitarian relationship with their followers, involvement in party politics and elections, institutionbuilding, and affiliations with social movements (Jansen 2011). 2.2 The Populism-Religion Nexus How does religion become implicated in the exercise of populism as discourse, performance, and strategy? Zúquete (2017, 445) defines religious populism as “a form of populism that shares its conceptual centre but reproduces it in a specific religious key or fashion.” DeHanas and Shterin (2020, 4) maintain that populism is by definition religious in the Durkheimian sense of rendering the “people” sacred against its profane enemies. Rather than narrowly identifying a populist subtype or broadly understanding religion as inherent to populism, we operationalize the concept of populism-religious nexus, which we view as a relational analytical instrument to empirically study the various ways and degrees in which religion becomes involved with populist politics. Drawing on the three main approaches discussed above, a religiously inflected populist movement would thus invoke/associate with religion/religious groups either in its set of ideas, performative political style, mobilization strategy, or Comparative Sociology 20 (2021) 317–343 Populism and Religion 323 a combination thereof. Below, we discuss these three dimensions with a view to teasing out and systematizing the various intersections of populism and religion. Ideationally, a key role ascribed to religion is as a nativist identity marker that contributes to defining the “people” as ethnos – that is, an ethnoculturally distinct group differentiated from the “others.” Here, religion becomes one demarcating element of “ethnopopulism,” often deployed alongside nation, civilization, and race (Vachudova 2020). Works on European right-wing populisms, which mostly articulate Christianity not as belief or practice but as an anti-Muslim ethnonational or civilizational identity, fit this primary definition (Brubaker 2017a; Marzouki et al. 2016). At a minimum, religion plays a boundary-making role to evoke a shared ancestry and a nativist conception of groupness with relatively limited reference to religious doctrine (Delehanty, Edgell, and Stewart 2019; Schwörer and Romero-Vidal 2019). A closely related, but analytically distinct, ideational category that builds on the first concerns populists’ discursive deployment of specific cultural resources religion offers, which other ethnic identity markers cannot. These may include the sacralization of the “people” against its internal and external enemies, mythical imagination of its history and memory as one of “chosenness,” moralization of its cause via a Manichean good-evil dichotomy, inspiration of a mission of salvation in the face of decadence and impending disaster, and the ascription of messianic qualities to movement leadership (Arato and Cohen 2017; Palaver 2019; Zúquete 2017). In short, populists can find in religion a much-needed ethical narrative to fill the empty signifier “people” and reinforce their often-chameleonic rhetoric of fear and urgency. At the stylistic level, the emphasis is on how populists actually frame and perform religion as an identity marker and shared cultural resource. In their political style, populists can embed religious language, tropes, attitudes, clothing, rituals, and ceremonies in various ways (DeHanas and Shterin 2020) with a view to symbolically “thickening” their ideational framework. Higher levels of religiosity/religiously-defined groupness in a given polity would allow for firmer forms of boundary-making and more direct incorporation of religioustheological resources. Besides marking ethnos against the “others,” another crucial performative aspect of religion can be the populist leader’s personification of the “people” as plebs – or the sociocultural “low” (Ostiguy 2017) – against the secular/multicultural elites that are disconnected from popular attitudes that embrace religion. Finally, in terms of political strategy, religion can supply indirect or direct assistance for populist mobilization and organizational capacities. This may range from receiving external backing from religious groups, such as evangelical Comparative Sociology 20 (2021) 317–343 324 Peker and Laxer Christians’ endorsement of Trump (Gorski 2017), to a populist movement being the political branch of a larger religious network, evidenced by Narendra Modi’s party’s embeddedness in the Hindu nationalist Sangh Parivar (more on this later). Even in Europe, where populists are shunned by the Church establishment and have weak ties to religious organizations, Christianity has been increasingly used as a mobilization asset in election campaigns (Schwörer and Fernández-García 2020). Additionally, in conformity with the definition of populism as a personalistic political strategy (Weyland 2001), religion can be a facilitator for inspiring unmediated mass support for the cult of leader, sanctifying him/her as the charismatic embodiment of the “people” as demos – the possessor of the general will. More broadly for populists in power or in opposition, religion can be deployed as an agenda-setting and institution-building tool to make/influence public policy, affecting domains as diverse as education, family relations, welfare, healthcare, international relations, and intra- or inter-state conflict (Fox 2004; Grzymała-Busse 2016). 2.3 A Comparative Outlook In empirical research, the ideational, performative, and political-strategic aspects of populism are not as neatly divided as the categorization sketched out above suggests. Likewise, the exemplified enunciations of the “people” as ethnos, plebs, or demos are not mutually exclusive. Populist ideas, performances, and strategies closely interconnect and regularly overlap,5 which would also logically apply to the populism-religion nexus. For instance, at the height of the Black Lives Matter protests in June 2020, Donald Trump’s controversial bible-holding photo op at St. John’s Church in Washington can be analyzed not only as a religiously inflected populist performance, but also as promoting a nativist idea of the “people” as white-Christian as well as strategically executing “law and order” in a time of unrest. Despite their interplay during particular events, the analytical distinction between the three components of populism can prove useful in assessing the populism-religion nexus in both cross-regional and cross-religious perspectives. Based on the ideational, performative, and strategic aspects of populism, a spectrum of geographically and culturally specific intersections are conceivable, where populists can engage with local religious ideas, ritualized customs, 5 Scholars like Brubaker (2017b) and Moffitt (2020) lump the first two together to construe populism as a “discursive and stylistic repertoire” or a “discursive-performative” phenomenon. Likewise, Ostiguy (2017) underlines the close affiliation of the populist performative style with its ideational framework and political strategy. Comparative Sociology 20 (2021) 317–343 Populism and Religion 325 and organizations in distinct ways and to differing degrees. Understanding the diverse ways that these components of populism intersect complicates and brings further specificity to Zúquete’s (2017) differentiation between “overt” and “covert” manifestations of religious populism, which we view as a valid starting point for comparisons across cases. Zúquete refers to the overt kind as “politicizing the sacred” and the covert variety as “sacralizing the political.” We suggest that the extent to which individual cases fit into these broad categories depends in significant part on the discourses, performances, and strategies employed. Both “politicizing the sacred” and “sacralizing the political” have a longer history in the social sciences that predate their association with populism. The former denotes a process whereby political actors mobilize traditional organized religions to explicitly invoke religious doctrine and themes to legitimize a particular political regime or social order (Linz 1996). This is the more commonly studied aspect of the politics-religion relationship, manifesting especially in religious nationalisms that instrumentalize faith (Grzymała-Busse 2019). The latter rests on a wider conception of religion. Rather than draw on organized religions necessarily, political leadership implicitly consecrates otherwise secular political institutions and imageries as holy arbiters of morality and justice. Politics here gets re-enchanted by being ascribed a sanctified and missionary character, underpinning democracies (civil religion in the US) or totalitarianisms (political religion in Nazi Germany) (Gentile 2006). Sacralized politics reproduces religious forms in secular ways – through re-interpretation of ceremonies, symbols, myths, etc. –, but it may also syncretically incorporate actual theological content from traditional religions (Payne 2008). The literature thus predominantly identifies sacralizing the political in cases where there is overall a weaker connection with traditional religions; in politicizing the sacred, an established religious tradition is more substantially articulated and advanced.6 However, in practice, these two manifestations of the populism-religion nexus can be difficult to distinguish, because they “intertwine and cross-pollinate” (Zúquete 2017, 446) and at times conjoin in “a complex process of hybridisation” to appear as “different aspects of the 6 “Sacralizing the political” has been mostly reserved for otherwise secular cases such as Jacobinism in the French Revolution, early twentieth-century totalitarian regimes, and contemporary right- and left-wing populists in Europe and Latin America, respectively (Maier 2007; Zúquete 2007). “Politicization of religion” has been applied to study cases such as the rise of Islamist politics in the Middle East, Catholic mobilization in Europe, and Hindutva in India (Bose 2009; Altınordu 2010). Adaptations of Zúquete’s distinction also exist. For instance, Yilmaz and Morieson (2021) refer to the overt variety as “religious populism” and the covert version as “identitarian populism.” Comparative Sociology 20 (2021) 317–343 326 Peker and Laxer ‘same’ phenomenon” (Griffin 2008, 14). In other words, the distinction is idealtypical, and there are overlaps: covertly religious populisms also make use of traditional religions and the overt varieties also seek to consecrate secular power; the difference is one of degree as much as it is one of kind. Recognizing this, and with a view to specifying the precise processes and conditions that constitute overtly and covertly religious populisms, we consider how cases broadly aligned with each category engage elements of discourse, performance, and strategy. We suggest that a populist movement comes closer to the covert kind (sacralizing the political) when the mobilization of traditional religions in its discourse, performance, and strategic-organizational affiliations is more latent or indirect. By contrast, the overt kind (politicizing the sacred) applies to populist cases that rally traditional religions in more manifest and direct ways in one or more of these three dimensions. In order to put this comparative approach to work, we now turn to our case studies. 2.4 Case Studies 2.4.1 Covertly Religious: Sacralizing the Political Empirical examinations of populists’ covert use of religion to define the “people” have thus far focused primarily on Western European settings in which populists draw on elements of Christian identity to generate public discomfort with religious minorities, especially Islam (Marzouki et al. 2016). France is a paradigmatic example. In that setting, the populist right has led the charge against Islamic religious symbols by sacralizing the political through two seemingly contradictory strategies: the covert deployment Catholicism as an identity marker and the elevation of secular public values to a status of sanctity. In order to expand the scope of analysis beyond Europe, we compare the case of France to that of Québec, the majority French-speaking Canadian province that has, over the last two decades, witnessed similarly politicized campaigns to prohibit (especially Islamic) religious signs in public spaces and institutions. Although the two settings share a history of Catholic Church dominance and a strong contemporary commitment to secularism, we emphasize that Québec’s unique position as a minority nation within Canada also informs the strategic significance of religion in demarcating the boundaries of the “people.” In France, the Islamic veil controversies that began in 1989 culminated in the banning of “ostentatious” religious signs in public schools in 2004. Citing laïcité (or state secularism) as the basis for the ban, the French government later responded to the debates surrounding the Islamic niqab and burqa by outlawing in 2010 facial coverings in public spaces. Over the subsequent decade, the Islamic signs conversation has expanded to include calls for additional restrictions in educational and occupational settings, as well as tightened security Comparative Sociology 20 (2021) 317–343 Populism and Religion 327 measures around Muslims in response to the series of Islamist terrorist attacks the country faced since 2015. In Québec, following two failed referenda in 1980 and 1995 to achieve sovereignty from Canada, some nationalist parties and politicians have sought continued resonance by raising concerns over immigration and religious diversity, calling for differing degrees of restriction on religious signs and practices. Sparked off with the “reasonable accommodation” debates in the mid-2000s, the continuous disputes over the visibility of minority religions produced a series of legislative actions to result in Bill 21 in 2019. The bill formalized laïcité as a main governmental tenet and banned religious signs for all government employees in “positions of authority,” including police officers, judges, prosecutors, and schoolteachers, among others. Throughout these episodes and beyond, French and Québécois populist discourses have leaned on implicit references to the Catholic heritage of “the people” in order to ethnically and culturally differentiate it from minority “others.” Yet due to these polities’ own conflictual histories with the Church and the rapidly declining contemporary levels of religious affiliation, the populist articulation of Catholicism has taken on highly secularized, identity-based forms rather than invoking belief or practice. Today in France and Québec, although about half and two-thirds of the population declare themselves nominally Catholic, respectively, regular attendance to Church remains less than 10% and secularism is widely embraced as a national value (for a detailed comparison, see Mielusel and Pruteanu 2020). Resonating with this socio-historical context, the populist engagement with Catholicism has been “Christianist” and “civilizationist,” falling in line with the Northern and Western European cases identified in the literature (Brubaker 2017a; Moffitt 2017). Christianism commits to secularism and putatively liberal values – such as philosemitism, gender equality, gay rights, and freedom of speech – against the illiberalism it ascribes to Muslim immigrants. Civilizationism frames Islam as defying Western Judeo-Christian civic culture and its attendant nationhoods. In France, the main right-wing populist force to deploy such rhetoric has been the Front National (FN, renamed Rassemblement National in 2018). Throughout the 1990s and 2000s, the party gradually augmented its profile thanks to its relentless anti-Muslim agenda, which drove mainstream parties to imitation and harder stances on the question, resulting in the laws of 2004 and 2010 and other measures since (Nilsson 2019). Québec, by contrast, does not have a characteristically populist party; instead, populist strategies are played out more diffusely across the provincial political scene. Stoking fears about minority religions was initially spearheaded by Action démocratique du Québec (ADQ) in the mid-2000s, and resulted in attempts to legislatively restrict religious signs to varying degrees in the decade that followed: by the Comparative Sociology 20 (2021) 317–343 328 Peker and Laxer Parti Québécois (PQ) in 2013, Parti liberal du Québec (PLQ) in 2017, and Coalition avenir Québec (CAQ) in 2019. Under the leadership of its founder Jean-Marie Le Pen, the FN invoked religion in ways more consistent with politicizing the sacred, citing Christian scripture as a way to brand itself the party to represent France as a “moral community” – and thus portraying Islam as dangerous for national salvation. As late as 2002, the FN election documents talked about restoring the Catholic roots of France (Almeida 2017). However, after 2007, and especially with the leadership of Marine Le Pen that officially began in 2011, the FN has fully embraced laïcité as an anchor for its condemnation of Islamic religious signs. Since then, the FN has been using religion covertly to frame Catholicism as the bedrock of, and indeed the driving force behind, contemporary secularism (Roy 2016). Often blending the two, Marine Le Pen has defined France as having “Christian roots secularized by the Age of Enlightenment” (Le Point 11 September 2016). Likewise, in a section of its platform entitled Laïcité : une valeur au coeur du projet républicain (“Laicité: a value at the heart of the republican project”), the FN claimed that “Christianity was for a millennium and a half the religion of most, if not all, French people. It is normal that this fact should profoundly mark the French landscape and national culture. French traditions cannot be disregarded” (Front National 2012). More recently, the FN 2019 European Union (EU) election manifesto invited European nations to “protect our identities to project us into the future, affirm our values of civilization in the face of Islamism” (Rassemblement National 2019, 8, 9). Such mixture of religious and secular themes is likewise abundant in Québec, and is recognized as by scholars the “patrimonialization” of Catholicism in the province (Zubrzycki 2016). This process involves the resacralization of traditionally Catholic symbols, institutions, and practices as secular markers of the Québécois nation that distinguish the province from the rest of Canada. For instance, the crucifix hanging in the Québec provincial legislature since 1936 – removed by the laïcité bill in 2019 – has long been defended across the political spectrum as representing Québec’s unique national heritage, not religion. Catholic prayers in municipal council meetings were upheld by a Québec court in 2013 as compatible with secularism, interpreted as a patrimonial practice (later overturned by the Canadian Supreme Court). Between 1995–2020, successive governments spent a total of about $350 million through the Québec Religious Heritage Council to preserve and maintain Catholic-patrimonial buildings and artifacts in the province. In the last decade, all legislative proposals to restrict religious signs – the PQ’s failed Charter of Values in 2013 that envisaged prohibiting public employees from donning “ostentatious” religious symbols, the PLQ’s Bill 62 in 2017 that forbade face covering for citizens Comparative Sociology 20 (2021) 317–343 Populism and Religion 329 receiving a government service, and the CAQ’s aforementioned Bill 21 in 2019 – featured language to make sure that the emblematic or toponymic elements of Québec’s cultural heritage (namely, Catholic) would not be affected. Patrimonialization, in short, allows invoking Christian roots to demarcate the “people” without allusion to actual religious content. For Marine Le Pen, quasi-religious symbols are also critical to ritualized performances. Every year on Labor Day (May 1st), Le Pen upholds the tradition of delivering a speech in front of a monument commemorating Jeanne d’Arc, the iconic warrior-come-Catholic Saint, revered for her role in fighting the British in the Hundred Years’ War. Jeanne d’Arc, however, is rarely referred to directly as a religious saint in these speeches. Instead, she appears as a figure of a modern resistance and symbol of an embattled nation. Yet, the message is clear: Catholicism is indispensable for the French national consciousness. In publicly expressing their religious faith, Muslims offend that sensibility and confirm their non-belonging to the “people” – it is thus not a coincidence that Le Pen has notoriously compared Muslim prayers in the street to the Nazi occupation of France in World War Two (France 24 2015). Over the last decade, her party has proposed an array of measures to marginalize Islam, including extending the 2004 ban of religious signs in schools to universities and all public spaces, shutting down certain mosques, removing halal options from school cafeterias, and banning the “burkini” from France’s beaches. Sacralization also takes place via ostensibly secularist discourses and imageries in both polities. One such example was the advertising of the 2013 Charter of Values in Québec. Though it never became law, the PQ government’s promotion of this bill as protecting the “sacred” value of secularism has shaped subsequent populist framings of the issue. Government pamphlets widely displayed on public billboards at the time read: “Churches, synagogues and mosques are sacred. The religious neutrality of the state and the equality of men and women are also sacred. We believe in our values” (Assemblée Nationale 2013). During the passing of the CAQ’s 2019 bill, Premier François Legault characterized laïcité not as a legal principle, but as “an approach that respects our history and our values … because that’s how we live in Québec” (Journal de Québec 31 March 2019). It is based on this conception that the government also introduced a “Values Test” for new immigrants, which defines laïcité as a value of fundamental public significance that distinguishes Québec from the rest of Canada. In France, Le Pen has similarly highlighted that “laïcité is sacred, yet … successive governments turn a blind eye while Islamists hold entire neighborhoods” (Twitter 10 April 2019). Former President Nicolas Sarkozy sacralized the secular school when he said, “when I enter a mosque, I remove my shoes. When Comparative Sociology 20 (2021) 317–343 330 Peker and Laxer a young Muslim girl enters school, she must remove her headscarf” (L’Obs 2003). Emmanuel Macron, the current President, recently made a “declaration of love for laïcité” as “a French value of which we must be proud.” He added: “I want you to love laïcité as I love it: passionately,” because “laïcité is sacred. It is a sacredness or a non-theocratic philosophical spirituality” (Opinion Internationale 17 February 2020). In early 2021, Macron’s government prepared a comprehensive security bill “to strengthen the principles of the Republic” to target associations and mosques deemed suspicious. The comparison of France and Québec thus reveals broad similarities in populists’ covert use of religion to elicit public discomfort with Muslim immigration beyond Europe. Through a blending of Catholic and secular tropes, political parties and leaders in both settings have deployed religiously inflected ideas, performances, and political strategies to sacralize the political with a view to justifying the restriction of Islamic religious signs and rights. While explicit reference to religious ideational content is avoided, secularized “Christianism” helps define the “people” in nativist terms as sacred, stigmatizes the “others,” legitimizes populist movements as the sole arbiters of morality and justice, and characterizes “elites” as dissociated from the true values of the core community. In this framework, any internal/external opposition to the restrictive agendas against minority religions – be it through the national courts, other parties and media, the EU (in France), or federal Canadian multiculturalism (in Québec) – are affronted as illegitimate intrusions to the general will. 2.4.2 Overtly Religious: Politicizing the Sacred In India and Turkey, Narendra Modi’s Indian People’s Party (BJP) and Tayyip Erdoğan’s Justice and Development Party (AKP) have been deploying religious themes even more abundantly and substantively than their North Atlantic counterparts. Discursively, the BJP and the AKP talk of the “people” in ethnoreligious terms to denote the Hindu and Sunni Muslim majorities. The “elites” are defined as the politicians and intellectuals centered around the Indian National Congress (INC) and the Republican People’s Party (CHP) – the prosecular parties that established the modern Indian and Turkish republics in 1947 and 1923, portrayed as alien to the pious values of the “people.” In BJP’s India, the “others” are characterized as non-Hindu minorities, primarily the Muslims, depicted as colluding with the INC at home and Pakistan externally. In AKP’s Turkey, the “others” show more variation depending on the conjuncture, but often feature a combination of Kurds, Alevi Muslims, and the Jewish and Armenian minorities – all potential suspects to be in anti-national plots. Comparative Sociology 20 (2021) 317–343 Populism and Religion 331 For both parties, the culturally secular segments of the population that do not support the BJP and the AKP are also placed to the “others” category. Unlike Le Pen and Legault who rarely speak about their faith and are known to be non-practicing Catholics, Modi and Erdoğan employ carefully crafted rhetoric and performances to cast themselves as the embodiment and natural representatives of Hinduism and Sunni Islam. Modi often begins his speeches with the slogan Bharat Mata Ki Jai (hail mother India), which personifies the country as a Hindu goddess; he exclusively attends Hindu temples and sacred sites, and through the aggressive use of social media, he immerses himself in Hindu mythology and iconography to propagate an image of himself as a selfless ascetic (Rai 2019). Likewise, Erdoğan regularly uses Islamic language and references and makes a public display of his attendance to prayers and other observances. In his party circles, he has been characterized as a “second prophet” and “the messenger of Allah,” with one MP claiming that “even touching him is a form of worship” (Gürhanlı 2018, 65–66). Going beyond a mere ethnic identity marker in both cases, politicization of the sacred nurtures a cult of personality around the populist leader through the direct incorporation of Hindu and Islamic themes. Such discourses also help highlight the religious “people” and their leader as plebs against the secular and rich “elites.” Modi often brings up his background as a poor yet pious tea seller, claiming that the establishment “cannot stand a chaiwala as the PM” (YouTube 31 March 2019). Erdoğan similarly refers to himself as a “humble servant,” adding that the privileged groups “cannot intimidate this fakir [meaning “poor” as well as “ascetic”]. I will continue to say what is Hak (meaning “right” as well as “God”) (Cumhuriyet 9 March 2018). The performances carried out by these leaders during the reclaiming of two contested religious sites in 2020 – namely, Ram Janmabhoomi and Hagia Sophia – exemplify their politicization of the sacred. Ram Janmabhoomi is a traditional Hindu pilgrimage site in Ayodhya believed to be the birthplace of the god Lord Rama, which was replaced by the Babri Mosque in the 16th century by the Mughals. Hagia Sophia was a Byzantine cathedral in Istanbul dating to the 4th century, which served as a mosque for about five centuries after the Ottoman capture of the city in 1453. In 1935, the CHP government transformed it into a museum. For Hindu nationalists in India and political Islamists in Turkey, salvaging these two sites has been a regular mobilization tool. In 1992, Hindu nationalist militants destroyed the Babri mosque, and about 2,000 people died in the clashes with local Muslims. In 2019, finally caving to pressures from Modi, the Supreme Court of India ruled for the building of a Hindu temple at the site. In 2020, after a long legal battle, the Turkish Comparative Sociology 20 (2021) 317–343 332 Peker and Laxer Council of State similarly gave the green light for Hagia Sophia’s reconversion into a mosque, which Erdoğan finalized instantly with a presidential decree. In a televised religious ceremony in Ayodhya on 5 August 2020, Modi laid the foundations of the new temple, Ram Mandir, and offered prayers lying facedown on the ground with hands outstretched. He performed Bhumi Pujan, a customary ritual to seek the blessings of the goddess Bhuma Devi for the new site. Donning his golden-colored traditional kurta, Modi then gave a speech starting with “Hail Lord Rama,” and continued in a triumphant tone to talk of “a golden historic moment” that restored India’s glory. He added that “Lord Rama is the foundation of our culture; he is the dignity of India,” and cherished that the holy site has finally “become free from the centuries-old chain of destruction and resurrection” (Indian Express 5 August 2020). In Istanbul, the Friday prayers that officially reopened Hagia Sophia as a mosque on 24 July 2020 witnessed a similar televised performance. Following the march of thousands of supporters heading to the mosque with the chants “Allahu Akbar” (God is Great), Erdoğan opened the day by reading verses from the Koran, wearing his prayer cap. The Director of Religious Affairs then delivered his Friday sermon with a sword in his hand. In his long speech on the matter days before the ceremony, Erdoğan talked of the awakening of national sovereignty, made references to Prophet Mohammad and cited multiple religious poems and stories. He also blamed the CHP government for “betraying history” by turning the mosque into a museum, and wished “my God to protect our country and humanity from this mentality forever” (Haber Türk 11 July 2020). At the political-strategic level too, the Indian and Turkish cases manifest more direct affiliations with religion and religious groups in their organizational, institutional, and policymaking agendas. A unique element the Indian case presents is that rather than being an independent party, the BJP is the political front of a much older and partially opaque religious movement named Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS). Founded in 1925 as a paramilitary volunteer group, the RSS has been the main carrier of Hindu nationalism (or hindutva) in India, banned in three different occasions due to its involvement with violence (including the Babri Mosque riots of 1992). With about six million committed members today, the RSS leads Sangh Parivar, a family of several dozen entities ranging from trade unions and occupational organizations to news and communication networks, religious associations, think tanks, student unions and educational bodies, and social service providers. These organizations endorse the ideal of Hindu Rashtra, a state with Hindu characteristics, promoting divisive rhetoric and policies for the primacy of the Hindu Comparative Sociology 20 (2021) 317–343 Populism and Religion 333 majority. The BJP rest on this vast network of grassroots hindutva organizations, and Modi himself received his politico-religious coaching in the ranks of the RSS (Jaffrelot 2019). In Turkey, although the AKP is not embedded in an overarching organization like the RSS, it has been organically affiliated with various Sunni Islamic orders and communities since its foundation. Rooted in the political Islamist Millî Görüş (National Vision) movement of the 1970s, where Erdoğan himself was formed, the AKP has featured a wide coalition of religious orders – including the numerous branches of the Naqshbandi order, and until their ultimate falling out in 2016, the Gulenist movement. In ideological alliance with the AKP, these communities have received substantial economic favors over the years, while their members have taken leading government positions at local and national levels (Cornell and Kaya 2015). That the BJP and the AKP are religiously inspired political parties deeply entrenched in Hindu and Sunni Muslim networks directly affects the scope and nature of their populist policymaking. While in the French and Québécois examples cited above religion comes up mostly in laïcité debates vis-à-vis the Muslim minority, in Modi and Erdoğan’s hands it is used to set a wider range of policy agendas to transform politics and society in closer association with Hinduism and Islam. One such example is Modi’s Citizenship Amendment Bill (CAB) of 2019 and the national implementation of the National Register of Citizens (NRC). The NRC requires everyone to provide documentation to prove their citizenship, and the CAA grants citizenship to undocumented groups except Muslims – the combination of which paves the way to possibly deprive millions of Muslims of Indian citizenship (Wagner and Arora 2020). Meanwhile, anti-conversion laws are spreading in BJP-controlled states to prevent Muslim and Christian proselytizing, and beef bans are on the rise amongst an escalation of “cow vigilantism,” namely the mob lynching of individuals suspected of slaughtering or trafficking cattle. Textbooks are being rewritten to mix history and religious myths to depict Muslims as an alien force, and the INC as a failure to protect Hindu interests since Independence (Gudavarthy 2018). In foreign policy, moreover, Modi’s “India first” approach has systematically antagonized Pakistan to highlight himself as the protector against Muslims, portrayed the INC as an extension of British colonialism, and boosted an image of India as a Hindu civilization and nation in the international stage (Wojczewski 2020). In Turkey, Erdoğan has been aggressively pushing Islam in a series of policies to realize his openly declared intention to “raise a pious generation.” Especially in the last decade, education policy has been overhauled through Comparative Sociology 20 (2021) 317–343 334 Peker and Laxer the Islamization of the national curriculum, the boosting of Imam-Hatip Schools over secular ones, the proliferation of Quran courses, and the increasing of government support for Islamic foundations (Yilmaz 2018). Likewise, the Directorate of Religious Affairs (Diyanet), the official state institution founded in 1924 to manage Islamic services, was tasked with a new mission of proactively integrate Islam into every aspect of social life. Between 2008 and 2021, Diyanet’s budget rose from 2 to 13 billion liras. As the AKP’s flagship institution, it now runs a TV, radio, and a hotline offering Islamic guidance, and through various protocols with ministries and municipalities, it provides “religious enlightenment” for women, families, and youth in line with the government’s ultraconservative vision of society (Adak 2020). In international politics, finally, Erdoğan fancies himself the protector of the Islamic civilization against Western-Christian powers – an image he painstakingly crafts at home – and implements a belligerent, religiously colored neo-Ottomanist foreign policy with ambitions of regional leadership (Özpek and Park 2020). These examples suggest that compared to France and Québec, religion in India and Turkey serves conjointly as a discursive, performative, and mass mobilization medium for a larger variety of policy agendas. 3 Discussion and Conclusions Sacralizing the political and politicizing the sacred have been identified as distinct expressions of the populism-religion nexus. Yet, as others have observed, the distinction is largely ideal-typical, as overlapping engagements with religion exist in practice. Recognizing this, our objective has been to bring clarity to the distinction between sacralizing the political and politicizing the sacred by considering how cases that broadly conform to each category manifest along the discursive, performative, and strategic registers. We have shown that while the former feature traditional religions more latently and indirectly in their discourses, performances, and strategic-organizational affiliations, the latter lean more manifestly and directly on religion in one or more of these three dimensions. In France and Québec, invoking Catholic origins helps mark the “people” as ethnos, but rather than investing in religious symbolism or conservatism, populist discourses and performances elevate public secularity to a status of sanctity. Accompanying identity-based Christianism, laïcité in these polities is rendered a national-civilizational value that needs safeguarding against the religion of the “others” and the negligence of the “elites.” Strategically, while affiliation with Catholic organizations remain weak, the Comparative Sociology 20 (2021) 317–343 Populism and Religion 335 blending of Christianism and laïcité often gets translated into votes through policy agendas restricting the rights of (especially Muslim) minorities. In India and Turkey, the use of Hinduism and Sunni Islam as ethnic identity markers against the “others” is inundated by stylistic gestures involving religious language, tropes, and ceremonies. Such performances “thicken” populist discourses to equate piousness with the “people” and glorify the leader as its modest yet sanctified incarnation. These also appeal to a plebian identity against the secular and wealthy “elites” – which is a less palpable sociocultural dichotomy forged in the French and Québécois cases. Regarding political strategy, the BJP and the AKP are directly linked to, if not embedded in, religious organizations such as the RSS and the Naqshbandi. Relatedly, the religiously informed policy agendas they pursue are more extensive, seeking the wholesale conservative transformation of society in line with purported Hindu and Sunni Muslim values at the expense of minorities and dissenters. The four cases also confirm that the vertical rhetoric of populism, and its various involvements with religion, are inseparably linked to the horizontal discourse of nationalism (Brubaker 2020; De Cleen and Stavrakakis 2020). The different modes of deploying sacredness to bolster the “people” – as ethnos against the “others” or plebs against the “elites” – are simultaneously accompanied by its characterization as a self-governing demos vis-à-vis groups that are identified as non-national. The French RN, for instance, demonizes the EU as a threat to national sovereignty, blaming it for the inflow of Muslim immigrants. The CAQ in Québec promotes laïcité as a national antidote to the permissiveness of Canadian multiculturalism towards religious minorities. The BJP in India exacerbates tensions with Pakistan to bolster the idea of a Hindu nation and further stigmatize Muslims at home. And the AKP in Turkey regularly antagonizes the EU and the US to inflame Islamic national sensibilities against the Christian West and emerge as the guardian of Muslims. In all of these instances, there is an implication that those external to the nation are in a natural alliance with the domestic “elites” and/or “others.” Utilizing religion in multi-layered ways can thus reinforce the interweaving of populist and nationalist discourses. How would other cases stack up on the covert-overt spectrum? On the sacralizing the political end, French and Québécois cases sit comfortably with the cluster of secular Christianism identified in Northern and Western European populists – such as those in the Netherlands, Belgium, Switzerland, Austria, Sweden, Denmark, and Norway (Brubaker 2017a; Moffitt 2017). The rising profile of nativist parties and repertoires in these countries is also based on a post-Christian conception of the “people” that putatively cherishes Comparative Sociology 20 (2021) 317–343 336 Peker and Laxer liberal-progressive values against the presumed obscurantism of the Muslim “others.” In France and Québec, historical and linguistic specificities allow for integrating a single concept, namely laïcité, as an additional populist mobilization tool, which is not readily available in other cases. A closer look within this cluster would demonstrate the various ways and proportions in which Christian and secular identities are combined to sacralize the populist cause. Cases like Poland, Hungary, Brazil, and the US reveal a different picture. The ruling Law and Justice Party (PiS) in Poland directly rallies Catholicism to run an aggressive campaign against abortion, leftists, and LGBTQ+ rights while the Church fully backs the government on these issues (Gwiazda 2020). Constructing similar enemies, Viktor Orbán’s Hungarian Civic Alliance (Fidesz) recognized “Christianity’s nation-building role” in a constitutional amendment, jeopardized minority religions’ legal status in the 2012 Church Law, and fostered close bonds with the historical Christian churches (Ádám and Bozóki 2016). Both parties rouse anti-Semitism. In Brazil, Jair Bolsonaro’s authoritarian conservatism is hand in glove with Evangelical and Catholic organizations to fight the “Christianphobia” led by “cultural Marxists” and proponents of “gender ideology” (see, for instance, Payne and Santos 2020). In the US, references to Christianity and hostile assessments of Islam peaked in the speeches of Donald Trump, typically used “to afford a biblically consonant interpretation of his presidency” (Hughes 2020, 4825). Such rhetoric was complemented by symbolic gestures like his bible-holding photo op, dealings with Evangelical leaders and groups, and conservative social agendas to muster a Christian nationalist base (Whitehead and Perry 2020). To varying degrees, these examples come a step closer to politicizing the sacred on the spectrum due to their more visible recruitment of religious discourse, imagery, policy agendas, and organizations – repertoires that are honed in India and Turkey. Comparable forms can be found in populist political parties and mass movements that routinely instrumentalize traditional religions in other geographies. Examples include the Jewish populism of Shas and Likud in Israel (Porat and Filc 2020), the Islamic Defenders Front in Indonesia and Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt (Hadiz 2016), the Buddhist radicalism of Bodu Bolu Sena (BBS) in Sri Lanka and Ma Ba Tha in Myanmar (Gunasingham 2019), far-right groups in the Balkans (Stojarová 2013), and populist appeals to ethnoreligious identities in Africa and Latin America (Madrid 2008; Resnick 2017). Polities and regions where the intertwining of religion and nationalism has created fault lines for communal tensions would be expected to facilitate the overt expressions religious populism (Gorski and Dervişoğlu 2013). While it has not been the purpose of this article to offer an explanatory model for the variegations of the populism-religion nexus, multiple interrelated Comparative Sociology 20 (2021) 317–343 Populism and Religion 337 factors and themes can inform future comparative studies. First, high rates of religiosity/religiously-defined groupness would likely furnish more opportunities for manifest forms. That populists in Western Europe operate in highly secularized societies – and do not have to court a large conservative voter base – arguably allows them to engage with Christianity in much less direct ways than Trumpism in the US (Haynes 2020). Second, the situation of religious minorities, real or imagined, would also seem crucial, although not straightforward. In Latin America, where Christian belonging is much higher than in Europe, nativism has not habitually antagonized religious minorities. Framing here is more important than mere demographics: Islam is virtually non-existent in Poland and Hungary, but it is still the number one public enemy (Pickel and Öztürk 2018). Third, the culturally specific resources that respective world religions offer for populist articulation deserve attention. Religious traditions provide particular “contact surfaces” and rifts for political agendas (Künkler, Madeley, and Shankar 2018), which implicates dissimilar groups and policy issues. Abortion and evolution, for instance, are not key populist talking points in India; neither is cow trafficking in Brazil. Fourth, legal-institutional contexts matter. The state’s relationship with majority and minority religions take different forms in secular/religious and democratic/authoritarian regimes, which would potentially fashion distinct populist schemes that mobilize religion (Soper and Fetzer 2018). Relatedly, whether populists are in power or in opposition alters strategies (Pappas 2019), and the transnational links and inspirations between them require investigation, which would apply to populists employing religion. Fifth, and finally, in addition to the religiously inflected right-wing populisms that are more widely investigated, how left-wing populisms interact with the sacred remains a relatively underexamined field. The distinction can have significant consequences for the inclusive/exclusive articulations of religion, especially regarding the treatment and rights of minorities (Huber and Schimpf 2017). Further empirical research is needed to shed light on the populism-religion nexus in these and other dimensions, and enhance the comparative framework presented in this article to investigate its ideational, performative-stylistic, and political-strategic aspects in various geographies. 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