‘Right-wing politics needs a spiritual anchoring.’1 Leading with this line, Maximilian Krah, the Alternative für Deutschland’s top candidate for the 2024 European elections, spoke of Christianity as a real ally for the far-right move- ment. Krah made a poisoned kind of marriage proposal to Germany’s churches. Yet, he ended up frustrated: for you simply cannot count on the ‘contemporary churches,’ which are today, like so many institutions of modern society, in a desolate condition. Still, Krah’s attempt to embrace this identity shows that it is not enough to interpret the New Right only in a sociological or party-political sense. Rather, the Christian religion represents a central question in the strategy of today’s right-wing populisms.
Two scenes
On 19 May 2019, right-wing populists from eleven EU member states gathered in front of Milan’s Duomo to launch a new movement, designed to rally forces across Europe. The main speaker was Italy’s then-Interior Minister and leader of the Lega, Matteo Salvini, who – with a rosary in his hands – commended himself and all those present to the ‘Immaculate Heart’ of the Blessed Mother Mary. It is important to know that Italy was consecrated to the Immaculate Heart of Mary by Pope Pius XII in 1942 during the war. Right-wing Christians know the basic idea: The visions of the children of Fatima say that Soviet Russia will spread its false teachings throughout the world and that the Church will be persecuted. Then the apparently devout Salvini taunted the Pope. ‘I also say this to Pope Francis, who just today spoke again of the need to prevent the deaths in the Mediterranean. … The government is bringing the number of deaths in the Mediterranean down to zero — with pride and Christian spirit.’
Another scene, from Dresden in autumn 2020. Anti-Islam movement PEGIDA brought up to 50,000 people to walk through Dresden chanting slogans. The abbreviation ‘PEGIDA’ calls it a both ‘patriotic’ and ‘European’ movement, for a Christian ‘West’ opposed to ‘Islamisation.’ The black-red- gold painted crosses carried along at the PEGIDA events are surely a disturbing declaration of this faith. The location is itself remarkable: In the state of Saxony that includes the city of Dresden, about 80 percent of the inhabitants are non-religious. Saxony is also one of the most secularized regions in the world. Although there are hardly any foreigners, yet here it seems that the fear of ‘Islam’ has strong mobilizing force.
God Wills It?
The Islamist attack on the World Trade Centre in 2001 and the banning measures against the far-right National Democratic Party (NPD) before the German Federal Constitutional Court were a turning point. So far, the extreme right-wing scene had been more neo-pagan and explicitly anti-church. But now parts of the New Right began to consciously refer to the Christian religion, as counterposed to Islam. The right-wing publicist Caroline Sommerfeldt is convinced that Islam is forcing a defensive struggle: ‘Against allahu akbar, only deus vult helps ... Jihad gives birth to equivalent reconquista impulses.’ This part of the right takes up the battle cry of the medieval crusaders (deus vult – God wills it) in response to the Islamist use of Allahu akbar and strives to drive out Muslim conquerors like the Spaniards who ended their presence in Iberia in 1492.
In Western Europe, two trends are emerging in this regard. First, the rise of radical and populist right-wing currents, which have in common the fact that they put national identity in the foreground. Second, a recourse to the religion of Christianity. Interestingly, this recourse to the language of faith and religious identity takes place in countries that are themselves strongly secularized. Unlike in the USA, where there is a close connection between right-wing fundamentalist Christians and churches and the Republican Party, right-wing populist forces in Western European countries are generally rather unmoored in congregations. Geert Wilders and his Party for Freedom (PVV), for example, do best among secular voters in the Netherlands. In Denmark, despite its traditionalist vibe, 98 percent of supporters of the radical right-wing Danish People's Party said that they rarely or never have contact with the church.
After the failure of the neoliberal state, right-wing populists, political nationalism and religion are entering into a sinister alliance worldwide. In Brazil, India, Israel, Russia or the USA, a national and nationalist religion is becoming a widespread theme on the far right. This does correspond with neoliberal ideas, insofar as the old class divisions between top and bottom are covered up with questions of national identity and migration. The Leipzig Authoritarianism Study shows that resentment against those who are perceived as ‘different’ has increased. 40 percent of East Germans say that in their view Germany is ‘overrun by foreigners’, and 23 percent of West Germans also agree with this statement. Until the end of the twentieth century, the political conflict revolved around the demand for a fairer distribution of the wealth produced within the nation states and to combat inequality between social classes. But now there is a dispute about the questions of which ethnic, religious or social groups have a place in the ‘homeland.’
Ethnopluralism has thus become the central concept on these no-longer-fringe elements of the political right. What is meant is not multiculturalism, but the complete opposite. Ethnopluralism does not argue in biological terms but cultural ones. It is about exclusion and fantasies of the expulsion of people who are understood as ‘not belonging’, according to culturally racist principles. Basically, it’s about a kind of global apartheid. Maximilian Krah underpins this völkisch-ethnic homogeneity with religious identities: ‘Islam belongs to Saudi Arabia. Confucianism to China. Hinduism to India. Buddhism to Myanmar. Orthodox Christianity to Russia — and it is good’. All people are to remain in their God-assigned place. Right-wing Christians are united by their concern about the dissolution of the international order. Islam is considered an enemy of the Christian West and migration is considered a violation of the order of Creation. In an open letter, the executive committee of Christians in the AfD speaks of the ‘existence of different, separated peoples as a community of descent and blood.’
When the New Right refers to religion, they are not concerned with the actual substance of holy texts or religious faith, but with identity and belonging. Religion serves the identitarian demarcation and rejection of the Islamic ‘other.’ Therefore, the reference to the religion of Christianity is not a sign of a resurgence of religion. It is about the question of how identity can be redefined in times of individualisation, secularisation and globalisation.
The Religion of Islam
While in the USA Evangelical Christians enter an alliance with politics in order to enforce their central basic convictions, such as on the abortion issue, Western European right-wing populists refer to Christianity as a politically mobilizing marker of identity. Then Geert Wilders or Le Pen can stand up for the rights of the LGBT community (against Islam): a position which would be almost unthinkable in the USA. Marine Le Pen speaks of an ‘identitarian secularism’: only those who are white and Catholic are true French.
When PEGIDA sings Christmas carols in Dresden during the Advent season, Christianity becomes a tribal religious mixture of Christmas tree and Christmas stollen. Ultimately, it serves as an identitarian demarcation from others and strangers. The hijacking of Christian traditions, symbols and language pays no heed to the foundations of Christian doctrines or ethics. The religion of Christianity becomes a white tribal religion.
In 2024, the German Bishops' Conference spoke out against right-wing extremism and the AfD as its parliamentary representative in clear words. It warned with impressive urgency: ‘Ethno-nationalism and Christianity are incompatible’. It did not stop at this sharp demarcation but spelled out the consequences:
Right-wing extremist parties and those that proliferate on the fringes of this ideology can therefore not be a place of political activity for Christians and are also not electable. The dissemination of right-wing extremist slogans – including racism and antisemitism in particular – is also incompatible with full-time or voluntary service in the church’.
It seems that the churches have learned from their failures and aberrations in the Nazi regime. After the Catholic Bishops' Conference declared the AfD ‘unelectable’ for Christians, the spokesman for religious policy of the AfD parliamentary group in Saxony-Anhalt, Hans-Thomas Tillschneider, played the dissenter:
This Catholic Church is an institution completely addicted to the secular, deeply distant from God. … True faith in Jesus Christ, on the other hand, is no longer compatible with membership in this rainbow church. Therefore, the AfD parliamentary group calls on all true Catholics to leave this Catholic Church for the salvation of their faith! True faith does not need this church!
But there’s also other, more eccentric ways of dealing with the Nazi past, and creating a gospel of resistance to alleged (‘woke’, progressive) totalitarianism in the present. The former AfD MEP Joachim Kuhs refers to the ‘Barmen Theological Declaration,’ with which Protestant Christians formulated their resistance against the Nazi regime in 1934:
We — Christians of all denominations — need more courageous confession and no adaptation to political-ideological reveries. As Christians, we must stand up against the state disregarding the rights of its citizens and wanting to turn the churches into the puppets of an unchristian ideology. And we as Christian citizens must fulfil our duty and show the red card in elections to such an ideology.
Hence New Right Christians present themselves as resistance fighters against a modern, plural and individualistic society. They do not merely represent conservative thinking with an extra populist edge. Rather, they take up right-wing extremist ideas, casting modern liberalism as an ally of Islam, the foreign invaders to be fought in today’s culture war.
Sadly, the Left is too often blind to religion and its political effectiveness. That is why it hardly notices that sociological or political interpretations of the New Right are often inadequate, for want of recognition of this issue. For the secular New Right, too, religion is a central category for the formation of an identity and for sharply distancing itself from Islam. The religion of Christianity serves to establish an ethno-national identity. It guts Christianity of its universalist and humanistic contents and reprogrammes it into a militant völkisch-tribalistic religion for whites.
1 Maximilian Krah, Politik von Rechts, Schnellroda: Antaios, 2024, p. 30