Interdisciplinary Journal for Religion and Transformation in Contemporary Society 5 (2019) 312–330 brill.com/jrat Who Leads Leitkultur? How Populist Claims about ‘Christian Identity’ Impact Christian-Democrats in Western Europe Ernst van den Hemel Humanities Cluster, KNAW Oudezijds Achterburgwal 185, 1012 DK Amsterdam, The Netherlands [email protected] Abstract A widely shared but understudied characteristic of the rise of right-wing conser- vative populism (the New Right) is the emphasis on religious-cultural identity of the West. Using phrases like ‘Judeo-Christianity’, ‘Christian values’, or ‘Christian Leitkultur’ a variety of political actors have claimed that religious-cultural identity needs to be safeguarded and enshrined in policy. As this frame is gaining traction, the question arises what this emphasis on the public importance of religion entails for those who tend to see themselves as the guardians of religious-cultural identity. In par- ticular this article focusses on the challenges this development creates for Christian Democratic political actors. On the one hand the emphasis on the importance of ‘christian traditions’ resonates with the historical position of christian democrats, on the other hand, there are im- portant differences between traditional christian democracy and how the New Right speaks of religion. The main aim of this article is to outline how the rise of the New Right has created a contestation about what it means to represent christian cultural identity. Keywords populism – postsecular – Christian democracy – Judeo-Christianity © Ernst van den Hemel, 2020 | doi:10.30965/23642807-00502003 This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the CC BY-NC-ndDownloaded 4.0 License. from Brill.com10/01/2021 05:29:02PM via free access Who Leads Leitkultur? 313 1 Introduction “Truth is right-wing. God is a right-winger.” This statement by Thierry Baudet, the electorally successful leader of Dutch populist radical right1 party Forum voor Democratie (FvD), fits in a pattern that is widely gaining traction in Western Europe: populist radical-right movements flirt with references to (Judeo-)Christianity and claim to be the defenders of religious-cultural iden- tity in times of immigration and cultural relativism. This article is about how within secular societies such as those of the Netherlands, Belgium, Germany and France populist references to religion shape insiders and outsiders. Although claims about the intimate links between religion and national, ethnic or racial identity have played a part in the discourse of the far-right since its beginnings, the discourse of parties such as FvD does not easily fit classical religious-political registers. The varied attributions to ‘Christian cul- ture’, ‘Judeo-Christian tradition’ or ‘Christian values’ as well as their apparent distance from any institutionalized forms of religion have frequently led schol- ars and journalists to conclude that these references to religion should be seen as opportunism, incoherent rabble-rousing or empty rhetoric, in short, hardly material to be seriously studied. As parties such as Alternative für Deutschland in Germany, Front National in France, Vlaams Belang in Belgium and Partij voor de Vrijheid and FvD in the Netherlands continue to make headway how- ever, this dismissive attitude is starting to make way for a sense of wonder: what to make of this return of religion in political discourse? How does this relate to ‘real’ religion? If these movements pride themselves on the secular ac- complishments of Western culture why do they simultaneously use a religious framework to describe secularity (as opposed to more secular frameworks such as, say, Enlightenment)? What makes populist religion attractive in con- temporary secular societies? In order to provide at least some answers to these questions, this article builds upon the insight by Roy and others by insisting that populist refer- ences to religious-cultural identity constitute a more complex and historically significant phenomenon than is often acknowledged.2 I expand upon their framework by stating that in order to productively approach and understand these populist claims about religion we need to see it not as a rupture, or as a 1 I use the definition ‘populist radical right’ coined by Cas Mudde in Mudde 2007: “political parties with a core ideology that is a combination of nativism, authoritarianism, and popu- lism”. Mudde 2007, p. 26. 2 Roy 2007, Marzouki/McDonnell/Roy 2016. JRAT 5 (2019) 312–330 Downloaded from Brill.com10/01/2021 05:29:02PM via free access 314 van den Hemel ‘hijacking’ of categories but rather as an influential reintroduction of historical identifications in a changed religious cultural context. Using Charles Taylor’s notion of the ‘social imaginary’,3 I argue that populist movements re-use earli- er registers of religious-cultural Leitkultur. The contemporary postsecular mo- ment, in which both the boundaries between religion and secularity as well as the role of who gets to speak for religion and its place in conceptualizations of shared culture is set adrift, fuels the success of populist religion. Of course, in order to understand these shifts and continuations in imagi- nations we need to zoom in on the particular political constellations of each Western European context. For instance, Germany has a completely differ- ent history with regards to conservatism, confessional politics and the place of religion in society compared to, say, France. As a result, claims about the ‘Judeo-Christian West’, though common across Western Europe, play out differently in each of these contexts. Front National’s decision to speak of ‘Judéo-Christianisme’ constitutes a specific in French political history, includ- ing the trajectory of laïcité, the antisemitic roots and constituency of Front National, and its connection to conservative Catholicism. In the Netherlands, for instance, a particular history of state-sanctioned religious pluralism called verzuiling (pillarization), a dominant national-religious register which has his- torically been associated with Calvinism, and a far-right party which, unlike Front National, does not have its roots in conservative Catholicism but rather in secular liberalism, the phrase ‘Joods-Christelijk’ has distinctly different lay- ers we would need to unpack in order to understand what makes these move- ments successful in rallying electorates behind a religious-cultural framework. I will limit myself in this article by focusing on the rise of populist religion in the Netherlands. I will situate populist religion in both contemporary and historical wider contexts involving typically Dutch shapes of secularization, pillarization and the backlash against a (presumed) leftist dominance. In particular I will argue that the claims concerning religious-cultural values by the populist radical right arise should at least in part be seen as a continua- tion of, and a follow-up to, discourse that is traditionally seen as guardians of religious-political discourse, in particular that of the Christian Democrats. Summarizing things a bit too crudely perhaps, my argument is that populist religion is the continuation of confessional politics. First, I will sketch how the rise of anti-Islam political discourse in the Netherlands went hand in hand with the rise of religious imagery to describe the dominant national cultural identity of the Netherlands. I will subsequently 3 See for an elaborate series of studies on the theory and practices of social imaginaries esp. Alma/Vanheeswijck 2018. DownloadedJRAT from 5 (2019) Brill.com10/01/2021 312–330 05:29:02PM via free access Who Leads Leitkultur? 315 highlight how the scholarly and journalistic reception of these claims have by and large insisted on an image of the populist radical right as an inherently ‘empty’ form of doing politics. As a result, commentators and scholars tend usually not to place populist references to religion in a larger historical narra- tive concerning religion and Leitkultur in the Netherlands. Contra such inter- pretations which emphasize populism as a disruption of normal ways of doing politics, I will argue that populist religion revisits religious-political registers. I will conclude by providing a hypothesis that populist religion constitutes a continuation of confessional politics in the Netherlands, albeit under post- secular mode. 2 Populist Religion in the Netherlands: a Mix of Secular and Religious Identifications When religion is mentioned in the histories of the rise of the religious radi- cal right in the Netherlands, it is frequently in association with the staunch criticism of Islam. More particularly, the rise of populist politicians such as Pim Fortuyn, Geert Wilders, and more recently, Thierry Baudet, is brought into direct connection with newcomers who allegedly insist on clinging to their religion in their new secular surroundings. The advent of the religious migrant supposedly generated malcontent in the secular Western-European country of the Netherlands. However, if we take a closer look at the role of religion things are considerably more complex. The populist radical right’s discourse on reli- gion shows not a simple secular opposition to the religion of the newcomer, religion rather plays a considerably more important role in the construction of the national self for the populist radical right. In the following section I sketch how, from the rise of the first populist radical right party in the Netherlands in the 21st century, the Lijst Pim Fortuyn, religion played an important role. Pim Fortuyn, in perhaps his most famous work, De Verweesde Samenleving (The Orphaned Society),4 famously argued that Islamic culture is incompatible with “Dutch culture”. One of the most famous sayings of Fortuyn would be to call Islamic culture “backwards”. A superficial reading of Fortuyn’s book would indeed affirm the aforementioned opposition of secular Dutch society and the “outdated value system” of religious newcomers which is “inherently incapable of participating in a secular society”.5 A closer look however would see that al- though the secular character of the Netherlands is praised, this does not mean 4 Fortuyn 2002.