AS EUROPE heads towards this May’s EU elections ultra-conservative and Far-Right parties look set to make significant gains. Religion, long thought dead as a factor in secularising Europe, has played a surprising part in the rise of many of these parties.
Church attendance continues to decline but “Christianity” has been energised as an identity marker given popular concerns about Islamic immigration and the rise of the “cultural Left”. “Christianity” is thus attractive as a voter mobilisation tool to alt-Right opportunists.
A number of essays in this collection elucidate, however, that the situation is not as simple as an instrumentalising of religion. Conservative Christians who feel left behind by cultural change and increasingly unwelcome in mainstream parties are also becoming more politically active along faith lines.
Conservative Christians sometimes form strategic partnerships with illiberal politicians who accommodate their policy positions. The increasing sophistication of their organisation, networking, and political interface parallels America’s older religious Right — actors from which have provided mentoring and resources.
The voter base that Churches can mobilise directly is small. Yet, for politicians, there can still be advantages to such alliances.
Recruitment via conservative Churches gives parties a highly motivated activist network — a point made well in the study of Hungary’s small (Pentecostal) Faith Church, co-written by Ármin Langer, Zoltán Ádám, and András Bozóki.
Church ties also lend respectability to alt-Right parties seeking to connect with middle-class voters. Sonja Angelika Strube’s essay on Germany highlights the surprising role of kath.net (a website financed by Aid to the Church in Need and the Legionaries of Christ) as “the most important German-speaking bridging medium . . . introducing Catholics to New-Right media, content, and positions . . . and, since 2013, to the AfD”.
In Eastern European and/or Orthodox countries, strong connections between Churches and “hard-Right” politics are nothing new. The chapter on Ukraine (by Denys Brylov, Tetiana Kalenychenko, and Pavlo Smytsnyuk) gives an alarming sketch of longstanding synergies between Orthodox and Greek Catholic hierarchs, on the one hand, and far-Right militia leaders, on the other.
Nevertheless, new dimensions are added by internationalisation of Rightist discourse via the internet and translation software. Likewise, in-person networking in forums such as European summits of the US-based World Congress of Families: the Moscow Patriarchate’s support for WCF’s 2010s European outreach (see Kristina Stoeckl’s Russia chapter) raises questions about how far “heating up” the culture war may serve Kremlin strategies for increasing social and, therefore, political polarisation in NATO states.
The two best chapters in this collection are those by Marietta van der Tol (Netherlands) and Anne Guillard and Tobias Cremer (France).
Van der Tol’s study of the interaction of Dutch Reformed Christianity, party politics, and radical discourse reveals that, while conservative Christians have vulnerabilities to far-Right wooing, their intellectual traditions and church institutions also offer powerful resources for “course correction”. There is no simple linkage between holding and publicly advocating conservative morality, on the one hand, and hostility to liberal democracy and civic pluralism, on the other.
The essay on France shows how the older “inoculation” offered by Catholic practice against far-Right sympathy in France is beginning to break down. The cause hinges on three interlocking factors: a sense of abandonment by (Centre-Right) Les Républicains; concurrent adoption of a “Christian-civilisational” discourse by Rassemblement National; and French bishops’ retreat from the public square amid an internal crisis.
Van der Tol’s and Guillard/Cremer’s nuances are welcome in a volume in which some contributors use the designation “far-Right” (and cognates) too freely to label ideas, people, and institutions. The authors of some chapters (Italy, Lithuania, and Spain) seem to struggle with the legitimacy of Churches’ having any voice in the public sphere — preferring that they should address only their own congregants.
The danger that this approach poses is flagged ably when the essay on France notes that embrace of the far Right by some Catholics has occurred precisely because “important parts of the French episcopate . . . were drawn to what Rob Dreher has called the Benedict option”, which entails “largely abandoning aspirations to shape society as a whole”. Radical secularists should, perhaps, be careful what they wish for.
The Revd Alexander Faludy is a freelance journalist based in Budapest.
The Christian Right in Europe: Movements, networks, denominations
Gionathan Lo Mascolo, editor
Columbia University Press £38.99
(978-3-8376-6038-8)
Church Times Bookshop £35.09