Tobias Cremer, a PhD candidate at the University of Cambridge, speaks with Mark Melton about the role religion plays in populist movements in Europe and the United States.
They discuss how populists on the streets of Dresden carried oversized crosses, but when asked the vast majority of protestors self-identified as irreligious or atheist. Instead of believing in the basic Christian tenets as American evangelicals would understand them, most European populists cling to a cultural Christian identity without believing the theology. According to Cremer’s research based on numerous interviews, the populists claim they and their society are Christian because they have a church in their town instead of a mosque, not because they attend church; they are Christian because they are not Muslim.
In contrast, he found most Christians in Germany and France who practice the faith regularly shun the populist parties, and attending church was a strong indicator against supporting parties like the Alternative für Deutschland (Alternative for Germany, or AFD) or Rassemblement national (National Rally, formally known as the National Front).
Cremer and Melton further discuss how evangelicals’ support for Donald Trump is different, how the two-party system in the United States creates a different outcome when religion and populism mix, what happens to believing Christians in European populist movements, why and how those European movements support Israel and left-wing causes, how the movements react to Islam, and why American and European churches are different.
Rough Transcript
Mark Melton
Welcome back to the Foreign Policy ProvCast. My name is Mark Melton and I am the managing editor for Providence. And I am joined here today with Tobias Cremer, and he is going to talk today about his research for his PhD at the University of Cambridge talking about religion and populist movements in Europe and the United States. So first off, thank you so much for coming in today.
Tobias Cremer
Yeah, thank you so much for having me, Mark. Really great pleasure.
Mark Melton
My first question is, how did you get interested in this field?
Tobias Cremer
It’s a good question. It really goes back to a couple of things. So, I grew up in Germany, as the son, grandson, great grandson of Lutheran pastors, actually. So, I think the faith aspect has always been important to me, but I always studied politics. On the political side, I worked with MPs in Germany, and actually eventually ended up working a bit with the German Foreign Ministry, particularly on religion diplomacy. So, I actually was more on the international affairs and religion side of things. But I did the Masters at the Kennedy School at Harvard, just 2015 to 2017. So just when all the populist movements started coming up, so we had the Trump campaign in the United States, we had the Brexit referendum in the United Kingdom, we had the rise of AfD in Germany, the migration crisis, etc. And one thing that just stood out to me was how many, many of these parties were referencing religion, the Judeo-Christian West, Christian identity in their rhetoric, and especially a lot of my left wing, liberal friends, were all saying, “oh, this is the religious right returning. This is the emergence of a religious right, even in secular Europe and a secularization of politics.” And one thing that was just interesting to me was that that didn’t necessarily ring true with my own experience of going to church, of knowing people in church, of being very much working with a lot of faith leaders. And so, I started looking a bit closer. And it turned out that the image is much more muddled, a bit more complicated than many of these narratives would suggest.
Mark Melton
You spoke earlier this week at Providence Social Hour, and you gave some examples of how we can see some of these religious symbols in different political parties. And so could you give a couple examples…
Tobias Cremer
Yes, absolutely. It’s an absolutely fascinating development. If you look, for instance, in Germany, you had the Pegida movements, the Patriot of Europeans against the Islamization of the Occident, running around through Dresden carrying oversized crosses, singing church hymns, carrying candles and really proclaiming the Occident is a very Christian idea in Germany. So it’s this ‘das christliche abendland,’ the Christian Occident, so really making reference to this Christian identity. In France, you have the Front National running around, the veneration of Joan of Arc, who’s a Catholic saint and really speaking about ‘Catholic France’ and France’s ‘Catholic identity.’ You even have in Italy, people like Matteo Salvini, who only a couple of years ago self-identified as a neopagan, suddenly bring out a crucifix and speaking about how it’s about the Christian Catholic identity of France. And then obviously, in the United States, probably much more common, less unexpected but perhaps a little bit surprising that somebody like Donald Trump, who did not stand out as a significant churchgoer before, started talking about the war on Christmas and Christian identity, Steve Bannon similarly.
So, you really had this reference in a lot of movements to Christian identity in societies that many expected actually to be if not secularized in Europe, at least on the path towards further secularization.
Mark Melton
So, the people who are in the streets of Dresden carrying these huge crosses, are these practicing Christians, or how would they self-identify?
Tobias Cremer
So that’s absolutely fascinating. There were a couple of surveys taken of these demonstrations in Dresden, where you had people running around with these oversized crosses. And over 80% of them self-identified as a religious atheist. And there is actually a trend that we can see throughout Europe. So, for instance, the AfD in Germany scores about double as high among atheists or irreligious voters as among Protestants and Catholics. In France similarly, the Front National or the Rassemblement National, which is what it is called now, tends to perform better, significantly better either amongst atheists or Catholics who don’t go to church. So nonpracticing, so to speak, cultural Catholics. And the same is true throughout Europe, where things such as church attendance actually turn out to be one of the strongest predictors against voting right-wing populist movements. Now, of course, the United States is extremely different because the Trump president did so extremely well. Amongst white evangelicals, he did better than both Mitt Romney and George W. Bush, in that voting group. And he actually also did pretty well amongst Catholics and even mainline Protestants in particular, the wide, wide component of these groups. But one interesting trend was that, even for him during the primaries, he actually did best amongst those primary voters in the Republican Party, who don’t go to church. So, he did about double as well in 2016, during the primaries amongst people who never go to church as compared to Republican primary voters who go to church more than weekly, or at least weekly. So, you really see that as an interesting dynamic going on.
Mark Melton
So, during your talk earlier this week, you explained why we see these populist movements happen in various countries at the same time. So, could you kind of give an analysis of why is populism surging now?
Tobias Cremer
Yeah, no, absolutely. And it is fascinating, because really, in almost every Western European country when I was looking at [okay] studies to do, I really had the big choice, you could do it with almost every western country. There were a lot of different theories out there: some were saying it’s about economics, some were saying, this is a religious backlash against secularism, etc. More and more, we find… I find the hypothesis in my research and more and more other researchers are also coming to the conclusion that what are we actually seeing here is the rise of right-wing populism, primarily as a response to the emergence of a new social cleavage, about the question of identity, about the question of ‘who are we, who is the other, what is national identity?’ How do we define us and the other? Maybe very briefly, for all of those who had better things to do in their mid 20s, than to do a PhD in politics, social cleavages are the main social devides within a society that define the political system, shape with the political system, and particularly define the political parties that populate it because they redefine themselves in relation to the social divides.
And traditionally, for the last almost 100 years or so, but at least 50 years, we actually had two dominant social cleavages in Western societies with on the one hand, the economic cleavage, these are questions on the one hand between the free-market economy and then the command economy: questions about economic redistribution, about taxation, about what is the role of the state. If you like to think of it in these terms, this is the class war that has been defined in relation to which political parties have defined themselves.
And then you had a second social cleavage that is really about social issues and moral issues. This is about questions such as abortion, church-state relations, etc, etc, which is on the one hand between social conservatives and social liberals. And as a result, for most of the 20th century, our system was dominated by questions like that. And you basically could map, if you think of it as a two-by-two matrix with on the one hand, the culture wars, and then on the other hand the class struggle, you could map most parties pretty straightforwardly in this two-by-two matrix. Now what is interesting is that the same is not necessarily true for these new populist movements, the national populist movements, because very often they actually end up on both ends of both cleavages. So, we see that with regards to economics, where yes, there are a lot of like neo-liberal, right-wing populist parties, especially in Northern Europe or the early AfD, or thinking about the Tea Party movement. But more and more, we also see quite a lot of anti-trade, a lot of protectionism. And even in Europe in particular, but even some of the rhetoric of the Trump campaign, we see quite a focus on welfare, redistribution, etc. So the Front National is perhaps today more socialist on many welfare issues than the Socialist Party in France. So really, it’s not necessarily about economics. Perhaps even more surprising, particularly to an American audience is that the same seems to be true to an extent about the moral cleavage that many national populist movements actually say, you have some conservative ones, of course, but you also have a lot of them saying ‘we are the real defenders of gay rights,’ like […] saying that… you have some of them saying “we are the real defenders of women rights, we are the real defenders of Laïcité, of secularism, of church-state separation, etc, etc.” So that is really interesting that even on the social issues a lot of them don’t really care much about abortion, etc, etc. Again, the States is a bit more complicated. But even here, we could see that perhaps the early Trump campaign was less concerned with some of these issues than other things. Indeed, when we look at the polling, when we ask why would you vote for one party or the other? It looks more and more that the questions like economic questions and social questions are increasingly trumped by questions about immigration, national identity, national culture, who are we, who are the other. These are really identity questions, identitarian questions, and this is really this new divide emerging between on the one hand, a more traditional, not necessarily traditional, but a more confined view of who are we, who is the other, like focusing on traditional group identity markers, such as ethnicity, culture, territory, history, language. These are really group identity markers, a more of a communitarian idea of identity. And then, on the other hand, the universalist globalist idea of diversity, etc. that, interestingly, also allows group identity but primarily for minority groups. So, their group identity is accepted, whereas for majority groups it’s really a focus on individualist form of identities that is really, to an extent delegitimizing some of the traditional group identities. And there’s a lot of literature coming out about that at the moment in the UK. Some of you might have heard about David Goodhart’s distinction between the ‘Somewheres’ and the ‘Anywheres.’ Other talk about globalists and nationalists, about communitarians and cosmopolitans. But what is really interesting is that, if you look at the party systems, the traditional parties were really defined in relation with the traditional cleavages, but not necessarily with a new cleavage. So as a result, most of them actually ended up on the cosmopolitan side of things where pro-immigration, focusing on these individualistic ideas of how do we define us and the ‘I’ as compared to the other. And it is really now, by making national identity and immigration the centerpiece of their agenda, that many national populist movements move into that and define them themselves primarily in relation to this new identity cleavage. And almost something of a new identity politics of the right, that like the identity politics of the left, primarily focus on this group identity markers of race, ethnicity, culture, even sexuality, but says we are defending the rights of the majority rather than that of the minority. It somewhat reverses it.
Mark Melton
You said that this new identity is very much in opposition to Islam, specifically. And that is kind of this idea of like, ‘I know who I am when I know who I am not.’ So, a lot of these groups have latched on to, you know, ‘we are Christian, because we are not Muslim.’ And so, do you want to speak about what some of the people you’ve interviewed have said, on this topic?
Tobias Cremer
Exactly right. That, especially in Western Europe, which is a very secular place these days, you have new studies coming out, saying that actually, very soon, in many Western European countries, Christians will be a minority, even just cultural Christians. And it’s interesting that in these secular countries, the references to religion have come back. But they are really focused, as you mentioned, on the question of identity. It is Christian identity as a cultural identity marker. Religion is really in this context of identity politics, they’re focusing on religion as ‘who are we, who is the other,’ and if you think of right-wing populist worldview, what is defining that is basically a triangular relationship between the good, the pure, the homogeneous people, the ‘us,’ and then a set of two ‘others.’ On the one hand, the internal other, that’s the secular corrupt elite. And that’s actually the same for left wing populists as well. They have a binary distinction between the ‘us’ and the external corrupted elite other. But right-wing populism is interesting, because this third external other, which is and that is increasingly defined less in ethnic, and national and cultural terms, but much more in civilizational religious terms. So, if you had a couple of decades ago in Germany, far right parties that were against immigration, or that they were for national identity, they would say “oo, the other was the Turk,” in France it would be the Moroccan, in the UK it might have been the Pakistani. Now what is interesting is that this external other is redefined as the Muslim. It’s the Muslim immigrant, etc, and is absolutely fascinating. This doesn’t necessarily mean in any way return of religion to many of these countries. Actually, secularization keeps on going. On the contrary, this is really about turning religion into a group identity marker. This is about religion as a form of belonging much more than religion as a form of belief. And as you mentioned, I do a lot of interviews. So I’ve done about 120 elite interviews these days, with right wing populist leaders, church and faith leaders. And then, on the other hand, mainstream politicians. And one question that I do ask almost all of them is, “what does Christian identity actually mean to you? If you speak about Christian identity, what, what is that coming from?” And it’s absolutely fascinating that when I asked this question to faith leaders and mainstream politicians, both conservative and progressive, they will start talking about theology. They tell me about the Trinity, the resurrection of Christ, how you model your personal life after Christ’s teaching. But when I asked the same question to some of the national populist leaders, and particularly European ones, they start talking about culture and identity, they start talking about history, they start talking about territory, they start talking about, really this idea of Judeo-Christian culture, as a way of belonging.
And interestingly, almost all of them-again this is particularly true for Europe but also to an extent in the United States-they start talking about religion, about Islam. So, they are saying. “We are Christian because we have a church in the village instead of a mosque. We are Christian because we have Sundays off not Fridays. We are Christian because we say, ‘Happy Christmas’ and not necessarily ‘Happy Ramadan.’ We are Christian because we are not Muslim.” So, it’s really through the negative definition of the other, that now Christianity comes in as an analogous cultural identifier of the ‘us.’ So that is, as I say, a development that’s really, really interesting, this dissociation of belief and belonging.
Mark Melton
As you were talking, I was thinking, in fact, I even wrote down another question here. My own personal background, I come from Mississippi, so the buckle of the Bible Belt. Growing up and people asking, like, ‘what church do you go to?’ is a very common question. And like people from outside the area would feel insulted initially. And I think sometimes they might just get used to that question. But I then lived in Europe for a couple of years did my grad work there, I taught in France, and completely different situation, and kind of like religion and culture, being more integrated than like religion and actual theological faith. And like, one example was, being in France, I arrived, I think, on a Saturday and Sunday morning, I was like, “I don’t have any toothpaste.” And so, I go out and I’m like looking for a store to get some toothpaste, and they’re all closed. And I’m like, no one in this town is like in church, but, “what’s going on here?” And I saw that there. And then also talking to people with how-and I think I might have brought this up on podcast before and I’m working on an article now that I’m going to kind of mention this-but talking to people of like, they’re like, “Oh, I’m very Catholic but I’m also an atheist.” And what they meant was, in their national identity, they separated themselves from other nations that were more culturally Protestant, because like, “well, I’m Catholic, I went to mass a couple of times. But I don’t believe in God.” And so yeah, I definitely saw that distinction between coming from Mississippi to living in Scotland and France. And so would you like to go ahead and speak about how is America different in all of this?
Tobias Cremer
Yeah, yeah, no that is absolutely a great, great observation of what is happening in Europe in many ways. In German, we even have a term for that. We call it ‘Kultureller Christin”, which is really ‘Cultural Christian,’ which means you don’t necessarily believe in God at all. You don’t go to church; you might not even be a member of a church. But you are culturally Christian, because this is… as one AfD leader put it, “this is the religion of our fathers. This is the history…” And there is, I don’t remember in which book it was, but like a quite famous quote of people saying, oh, an Orthodox and a Lutheran coming together in Eastern Europe afterwards, after the fall of the wall, and they’re saying, “well, yeah, we are both atheists, but we still can’t live together because I’m a Lutheran atheist and you’re an orthodox atheist,” really emphasizing this cultural part and you really have that a lot in Europe. Actually, one thing I might mention if that’s all right, just with regards to some of the things people told me. So I could give you like a number of quotes. As I said, when I asked these people about how do you actually define Christian identity, a lot of the people are also very open about that. So you would expect maybe in the United States that people would say, “I’m a Christian,” even if they don’t necessarily believe because it’s what expected. But in Europe, I think it’s so accepted to be just culturally Christian, they’re very open about that. So, one leader in the AfD, for instance, told me that in the AfD the consensus is that when we say Christian Occident, we mean it in historical and cultural terms rather than in theological terms. It’s about defending our culture against other civilizations and the threats of Islam.
Another leader said, “it is rather unusual to talk about faith at all in the AfD. If we talk about religion, it is about Islam and Islamization because of the immigration crisis.” The same is true in the Front National where people told me very openly that the religious question will necessarily be central but it will be in relation to the question of political Islam, and that is only in relation to political Islam, then the question comes up of how do we define ourselves. And when we define ourselves, well, then Christian history is just unavoidable. But this again, as you mentioned, it’s something cultural, something historical, rather than [well-lived] faith. And if you dig a bit deeper in some of these European movements, you even see a lot of anti-Christian currents coming up that are saying, “well, we like this cultural historical idea but we don’t really like the theology at all.” So, we have this one AfD person who taught me that internally, there are many people in the AfD who awkwardly say they’re Christian and that Christianity is extremely important to them, but who internally always fought the Christians in the party and really wanted to destroy us the Christians in the party, because for them, Christianity was really religion from the Near East that does not fit into Germany. Again, other people told me about a strong atheist faction, in the past they were saying like, “Christianity is a religion of the weak. It’s too welcoming to strangers.” And similarly, in France, you have a lot of people telling me that actually it’s the secularist wing that is running things these days. There’s a strong atheist movement who are actually saying, “well, we support Christianity primarily because it’s almost a dead religion in some ways.” They’re saying, “well, we are fine with Catholicism in the public sphere, like having Catholicism around because Catholicism, in their view, is inherently secular to the extent that they don’t dare practicing their faith in public anymore. So, it’s really the idea of like having this cultural Christianity, but they are very much opposed to the idea, for instance, of Catholic Bishops speaking out about politics. So really, this idea of a cultural Christianity much rather than a lived faith with real political implications. And if you start thinking of it in these terms, then it also starts making sense that so many of these parties do embrace religious language, religious symbols, Christian symbols, etc, in the rhetoric, but at the same time, combine this not necessarily with church teaching, but very often quite secular policies. So, it then really starts to make sense to have the Front National venerating a Catholic saint-Joan of Arc-while at the same time, being very, very secularist in their attitudes towards religion, trying to push religion out of the public sphere. It starts to make sense to have Pegida carrying crosses through Dresden, through secular Dresden, while at the same time, the AfD has perhaps the worst relationship with the churches, of all parties and then the most secular electorate. And it starts to make sense to Geert Wilders in the Netherlands, talking about the Netherlands should be a Christian culture, but virtually defying most church teachings from refugees to gay marriage to abortion, etc.
Now, the United States is of course, very different from that in many ways, as you say. Here traditionally, it’s less of a cultural identity because you have so many different denominations, there’s no one Christian, one denomination that’s the all-state’s religion that is just associated with American history as ‘American religion’ as Catholicism is in France or Lutheranism is in Germany. And you definitely wouldn’t find anybody, or at least I haven’t found anybody, who has as openly in the administration would embrace or in the GOP would embrace the secularist stances as some of the European colleagues that many of these people are associating with. So, if you look at the Trump campaign run, people like Steve Bannon has now left. But he was saying, “that is our movement,” the Front National in France, the AfD in Germany, similarly, we just had a meeting of national populism in Rome where a lot of figures of American conservatism are saying, “well, this is our movement.” So, there’s a certain level of self-association. But yet it is important to emphasize this is not to the same extent true in the United States. However, even in the United States, we may be seeing some inklings of that, maybe some early parallels emerging. Because if we look a bit closer, it’s really not just the President’s personal demeanor that is often criticized that undermined some of the Christian credentials of the GOP. But also, if you look a bit more closely, unlike other earlier Republican candidates, President Trump actually barely references Christian values and theological faith. I mean, he’s very open about that he’s not big on theology. And it’s really interesting that he’s saying, “well, I might not be one of you, but I’m fighting for Christian identity.” So, he’s much rather about the fight for being allowed to say Christmas, the war on Christmas, then perhaps, on the commandments of Christ. And what’s very interesting during the prayer breakfast, just this year, where you had Arthur Brooks, the former president of the AEI giving, I think, a fantastic speech on ‘love thy neighbor, love thy enemy,’ in particular, trying to use Christian values for reconciliation and the president going up and saying, “well Arthur, I don’t agree with you on that. But I’m fighting for Christian identity of this country.” So, you do also see a bit more of that development in some of the rhetoric that we are seeing.
And perhaps also interesting is, again, at a much smaller level, but a certain emergence of Islam becoming a significant external other. That is interesting, because in the United States, you actually have almost no Muslim immigration and Muslims that are in the United States are extremely well integrated, actually, above average earners, very, very highly educated, etc. and tend to very much identify with the United States, unlike what is happening in Europe, in many ways. And still, you had some of the rhetoric, not necessarily just of the President, but people around him in the early campaign, the Muslim ban, etc, etc, you have Sharia bans, in states that are very unlikely to be overrun by Muslims anytime soon. So, this has been also interesting, some of the rhetoric of Steve Bannon saying that we have to defend the Christian West against the civilizational fight against the Islamic other. So really these developments are there, again, the United States much softer, much smaller, it’s a subpart of the conservative movement. It’s not a majority, necessarily. But I talked to a lot of people in the Republican Party and they’re saying, “these are people who weren’t there before and now they’re in the room.” There might not be a majority in the room, there might even be that much, but they’re in the room and somebody invited them and this is now around. So, we do see this development.
Actually, maybe one interesting note on that is that a lot of people actually tell me instead of having this movement being pushed by the Christian right it’s actually very often faith leaders in the Christian right within the administration. They’re the moderating voices, in particular, on questions such as identitarian questions such as immigration, race relations, and things that are, in this way, national identity, they tend to be much more moderate on many of these issues, and actually push for prison reform, push for immigration reform, etc, etc. So, we do see, it’s maybe more a party internal fight in the United States, than in Europe, where these people would have their own party.
Mark Melton
Obviously, the United States is also a two-party system. And so, for Christians, you know, it’s either the Republicans or the Democrats, whereas in Europe, like I’d have one German friend who’s Christian, who would never vote for AfD is very, very devout. In fact, meeting him when I was living in Europe was the first time I was like, oh, there’s actually like, evangelical Christians here, you know, kind of my ignorance of the continent before going there long term. But to kind of speak to that for a second, you talked about this during the talk and I think that seemed to explain really well of why the United States or one reason why the United States is so different. Another reason is probably, as you alluded to earlier, the type of Islam that’s in America is very different than from Europe. My understanding is in the United States it is… if you are coming from Pakistan and other countries, it’s difficult, it’s expensive to actually come here. And so, the ones who do come here tend to be more fluent and better educated, whereas in Europe, it’s easier to get into the country. And so, you have more of a working-class immigrant. And so, can you speak to that of like, how does the two-party system kind of help differentiate the United States from Europe?
Tobias Cremer
Yeah, yeah, actually, very briefly, because otherwise I’ll forget that. But very briefly, talk on the Muslim immigration because that is absolutely fascinating. If you look there’s a lot written by people like José Casanova at the Berkeley Center Georgetown. A lot of scholars say the main reason why Muslims are so much better integrated in the United States than in Europe, on the one hand, might be demographics, etc. But the really important part is that America is first of all, a country of immigrants. So, it’s like you can be American. There’s not one national ethnicity attached to it. But also, because it’s much more open to religion and Muslims tend to be on average more devout, more open in their religious practice and also want to practice in the public sphere, because Islam is a religion that is not just so separated from the public sphere as some other religions might be. And in the United States it’s been seen for a very long time to be a positive if you’re a person of faith, and so it’s very welcoming. Whereas in Europe the problem when I talk to Muslims there, they are not saying the problem is that Europe is too Christian, they’re saying that Europe isn’t Christian enough. Secularism is actually more hostile to Muslim immigration in many ways than a predominantly Christian culture, because you have a welcoming of most faith because people understand that you’re religious, and want to practice and talk about your religion in public. So, I think that is actually something that is very often forgotten, especially if you talk to a lot of my own liberal friends who think like, “oh we have to help these Muslim immigrants and therefore let’s push religion and Christianity out of the public sphere to make them feel more welcome.” But actually, when you talk to many Muslims, they are saying, “no, no, no. We want we want religion to be public and open. We can actually much better debate and talk to some of our Christian brethren than to somebody who is entirely against religion.” And that is a really interesting development. So, you see that also on the evangelical side, as I’m sure you are aware, many of the very conservative evangelicals are actually working very closely with Muslims because they can respect each other for having a faith and being committed to their face.
The second bit was about the party system, and that is, as you say, I think absolutely crucial to understand the role of the party system, because as you say, we have in Germany or France, Christians, especially practicing Christians, just don’t vote for these parties at all. it’s a very strong association. As I said, church attendance is one of the strongest predictors for against voting national populist parties. And the main reason for that is I mean, a lot of people like to think it’s because if you’re Christian, you are maybe a better person and are less xenophobic, less scared about immigration, all these Christian values. That might play a role but at least we don’t necessarily see it with the numbers. So, when it actually comes to just attitudes, most Christians are about as open to foreigners, as xenophobic, as authoritarian as most of their secular neighbors. It doesn’t necessarily change that much.
There’s a lot of debate about that, but there’s no clear, clear way one way or the other. However, Christians in Europe tended to be associated or still tend to be associated with the political party of Christian democracy, of conservative parties. That really, we’re saying we’re defined with a moral issue, the traditional moral cleavage if you if you think back to that. So, they were just unavailable. If there’s a Christian alternative, if there’s a proper Christian alternative available in the political system, these voters will go for that because they want Christian values and Christian identity ideally, and it is really only if that alternative is not available for many people, then they will say, “Oh well if I have the choice between a party that is secular, both in its rhetoric and in its values and then I have another party that might actually be relatively secular in a lot of their values, but at least they pay lip service to Christian identity,” they’ll go with the latter.
And you could see that very, very strongly in Europe. For instance, in France, where it’s a very interesting voting system, where in the first… it’s a two-round system, so in the first round you vote for your candidate and then the second round is a runoff between the two strongest candidates. In the first round we saw the same thing, a vaccination effect almost of religion against voting for the right-wing populist Front National. So Marine Le Pen was running then. In the first round, did about double as well amongst French atheists as she did amongst French Catholics and in particular, churchgoing Catholics. And the churchgoing Catholics really voted about 55% for the Conservative candidate Francois Fillon, who overall only got 20%. So really disproportionately going for the traditional conservative Catholic candidate. However, because they only got 20% overall, in the second round this option wasn’t available. And then many Catholics in France were confronted with what they perceived as the choice between the pest of an identitarian and anti-immigrationist Marine Le Pen and the cholera of a secular, very liberal Emmanuel Macron.
And then this vaccination effect or religion basically broke down and Catholics voted almost as much for more independence, they voted for Emmanuel Macron. So really, we see this disappear and again in the United States, as you alluded to, it’s really interesting that we seem to have a similar dynamic because, as I mentioned earlier, during the primaries Trump wasn’t the first choice of most Christian voters. If confronted with the alternatives of Marco Rubio, Ted Cruz, Jeb Bush, etc, etc, most churchgoing Republicans actually went for these candidates. And it was only once these candidates were eliminated that they really flocked to the president because they perceived, the other alternative of-what they perceived as a very secularist Democratic Party that became more secular, especially with Hillary Clinton’s campaign then-as just a poor alternative it’s not an alternative. This this lack of alternatives really plays into that, so the behavior of the other parties is really, really important, whether they present themselves as a Christian alternative.
Mark Melton
And to kind of keep the topic on Donald Trump for a second. You know, as you describe him and as I see him, and as you describe these different dynamics in Europe, in the United States, it seems to me, looking at it this way, that Donald Trump seems to be more in line with European populist thinking than he does with American Christians’ thinking -in the sense of this view of populism. Like would you agree with that? Or do you see Donald Trump possibly being more aligned with them?
Tobias Cremer
No, I think this is definitely an interesting question. I think we to also be able to allow for individuals to change. I think it was very clear in early 2016 during the primaries that he was much closer to the European style of populism. He didn’t reference Christianity, like Christian values, much. I mean you had the famous reference to the two Corinthians, etc. And I also talked a couple of people that were saying early on that there wasn’t really much faith advice going on. It was pretty much only very late into the debate that that came into it. So that he was not, so to speak a creature of the Christian right. He didn’t come out of this movement. This was about something different. His focus was on immigration, his focus was on national identity. These were like the identitarian issues that played into it. However, once the primary ended then he was making a real effort to get these Christian voters in, and I think that is a really important difference between Europe and the United States. In the United States, Christian right I think is always a bad word, but the conservative Christians are such an important part of the Republican coalition, it’s a very important voting bloc that you have to take them into account. And what I hear is that in many ways the President has done so.
So, I’ve talked to a lot of faith leaders who said they were initially critical and most of their friends were initially critical. You had surveys among evangelical leaders, where it said over 95% of them were against Trump during the primaries. But he invited them in to talk to him and said, like “what do I need to do to please your constituency?” And when you talk to them, they would also say he delivered on a lot of these things. So, I think there is a transactional relationship in some ways, but one must also admit in many ways he is delivering on a lot of these issues, which is very different to a European right-wing populist. So, he might still not be a converted Christian, but he’s delivering on many of these issues. Now the risk is, of course, what do you have to give up in return if it is transactional? I mean the debate is out, but one question is of course always, who’s changing more? Are the evangelical leaders changing Trump into a traditional conservative, a George W Bush kind of a compassionate conservative? Or are many of them also changed into more of a more radical, combative idea of Christianity being less about love thy neighbor but more about fight by enemy?
Mark Melton
And for Donald Trump, he has to… if he wants to win reelection, his victory was so narrow in 2016, he cannot lose Christians, so he has to deliver to retain their vote, it seems to me. And so maybe that’s just another part of the two-party system and that’s a very narrow, like if he could have won lopsided, I think things might have been different, but of course, that’s hypothetical.
So, there’s not a lot of practicing Christians in these populist movements in Europe, but there are some, correct? What experience do they have participating in these movements? Are they accepted or is there an anti-religion-even though they’re using the symbols-and anti-Christian atmosphere? And are there people who experience these Christians as they’re referencing these crosses and Christian symbols and then converting to Christianity because of their association with the movement?
Tobias Cremer
Yeah, so that is in particular, the question very important for Europe and it’s very interesting. If you look at some of the movements… So, for instance, the early Afd was initially not founded as a particularly populist movement. It was actually a very much upper middle-class sort of professors’ movement. And given that Christianity is becoming very much of a upper middle-class thing in in large parts of Europe, there were actually a lot of Christians in that party initially, because they were saying the German Christian Democrats are not conservative enough on things like gay marriage and abortion, etc, etc. And they wanted a more conservative Christian party. So, their political behavior was more informed by the two traditional cleavages, the economic and the social cleavage and many of them were then Christians in the party. However, they told me that really after a couple of years as the party started to pick up these identitarian topics and anti-immigrationism, nationalism to a large extent, they got a whole new electorate come in and also a whole new membership come in that often was much more secular because it tended to be a very different demographic, a much more working-class demographic, which especially in Europe is very, very much secularized. And they would also bring in some of the people who are really nationalist to the extent that they’re so nationalist they’re atheist and actually quite critical of Christianity. So, I talked to some people who are telling me, well, that internally, you had a lot of people saying, “Christianity is a religion of the weak. Christianity is not a real religion for Germany or it’s not a real religion for France. It’s a Semitic religion from the Near East. It’s almost a Nietzschean way-if you think of Nietzsche-a slave religion, a slave mentality, because it’s really for the weak and we need to be strong and we need to… it’s also a very gendered way of speaking. We need to have like a masculine and muscular Christianity or like identity and Christianity is weak and feminine.” So that is an interesting development and you also have a lot of atheists in these parties who just said, “we don’t need that.” So, I talked to a lot of people who actually told me that yeah, they were pushed out of the party, that they were almost silenced, that if you are openly Christian and also practice your faith you know you’re going to have like half of the party against you, you will never assume the really important offices. Some people even left the party because they were saying they weren’t allowed to talk about these things publicly. So that’s a really interesting development. I think it’s largely due to a development of voting behavior where that is very often overseen, in particular in academic circles that tend to be more liberal, is that we are seeing a schism in many ways, amongst right wing voters: between on the one hand, the traditional right that tended to be more Christian in many ways that, broadly speaking, was composed of the more churchgoing, more educated middle classes that remain committed to church teachings, would attend Church frequently, would be socially conservative but also open to immigration and attached to traditional conservative parties. The Country Club Republican, if you want to think of it in American terms.
And then you also have compared to that, a new more post-Christian right emerging that is much more consisting of more working-class voters and that combines often before voted progressive parties -social democrat in Europe and democratic in the United States- that really combines more secular values with a certain form of cultural nativism and national populism that actually tends to be very much secularized also in their attendance. They are often alienated from institutions, in particular from religious institutions, these people don’t necessarily go to church at all and therefore have also little allegiance to church teachings. They are more progressive on social issues, but much more conservative, so to speak, on issues such as immigration and they don’t have the same attachment to traditional conservatism and are much more open to national populist movement. And I think that that is driving that to a large extent.
Mark Melton
So, have there been many conversions? That’s a question I know I’ve heard Americans ask in this context because it would seem that if they are dealing with these symbols of Christianity, then maybe they might come to faith because of it.
Tobias Cremer
Yeah, so I’ve heard that question a couple of times and I’ve talked to a lot of people in these movements. And they were saying, as you said, the identitarian movement is now embracing Christianity… but as I say, more of an identitarian way of ‘this is the way of ordering society.’ And I’ve asked whether there are conversions and what I’ve been told is that it is minimal, absolutely minimal. That it is really a cultural thing, and partly I think that might be due to the fact that there are very few practicing theological Christians in these parties. There are Christians who do believe in God, but the culture in these parties is much more secular. So, I think as a result you won’t necessarily have the same conversion to faith itself, given that you don’t necessarily have the same level of faithful Christians in these parties. I’m not necessarily sure whether the same is true more or less in the United States, but again, I talked to a couple of people and most of them are telling me there are very, very few conversions because it’s just not about that actually. On the contrary it’s more acceptable to be secular because you get the secularist as part of the movement of conservatism or nationalism. You have it increasingly that people are more open about saying “I don’t go to church, I’m a cultural evangelical.” That is a whole new concept that is emerging at the moment because the very definition if you ask the National Association of Evangelicals, “What is an evangelical?” It’s somebody who lives their faith, who practices their faith, who goes to church at least once a week, very often significantly more often. And the idea of a cultural evangelical who is culturally evangelical but doesn’t practice the Christian faith is a whole new concept.
But you see it more and more. A lot of people in service will say, “ooh yes, I identify as an evangelical, but I don’t pray, I don’t go to church.” And so, it’s almost the idea of a Christian nationalism. It is not really about Christianity as a faith. It’s about Christianity as an identity. But this becomes more acceptable than it used to in many ways. So again, we might be witnessing the slow emergence of a post-Christian right, rather than a return of a theological Christian right?
Mark Melton
So how do Christians in Europe react to the AfD and other groups using the religious symbols?
Tobias Cremer
Yeah, so it’s a really interesting development there because Christian, especially the Christian leadership in Europe, was from the beginning quite hostile to this nationalism. Perhaps the most outspoken public critics of the Front National, and the Afd in the German and French public sphere. The same is true in Italy where the Pope basically has a personal fight with the Lega Nord, the Salvini movement and where I think now Salvini is running around with a T shirt saying “Benedict is my Pope.” Although Pope Benedict would definitely not want to hear that, but almost questioning the authority of the Pope and saying, “we are more Catholic than the Pope.”
So, the Catholic Church, the institution of the church, both Protestant and Catholic in Europe have been extremely critical of them. In Germany they would even exclude AfD politicians from debate. There is no [code] so far of clergy associating with the Afd, but there isn’t even the discussion where they would be permissible to have clergy that is Afd-affiliated. So quite extreme, they would go out and demonstrate against Afd conferences, with slogans saying “our cross has no hooks,” with reference to the swastika, etc, etc.
What is interesting, however, is there’s a real debate going on within the churches about the risks of that. Because on the one hand it has a real impact, because surveys show and the churches are self-aware that this really creates a social taboo amongst Christians. So, part of the reasons why Christians in Europe don’t vote for these parties is because it’s really unacceptable in church. If you go to church on a Sunday and everybody around you tells you it is unacceptable to vote for a not Christian party, and as a Christian you ought not to embrace these values. Then it’s a really high social cost to run around and say, well, “I’m in this, I’m anti-immigration, etc, etc.” And you can even see a Pope Francis effect in France, which is really interesting. So, whenever Pope Francis says something, pro-immigration and anti-populism you see among French church attendance the openness towards immigration pop up and the voting intentions for Front National go down. So that’s a very interesting development.
However, the problem of this social taboo is that on the one hand it has the risk of politicizing religion, so the fear that then at some point they might start saying, “well, it’s actually just liberal ideology that is driving this” and you hear that accusation for a lot of Christian leaders in the United States who criticized the Trump movement. And then they are accused of just being liberals and politicizing and wrapping their views into Christianity and they accuse the other side of doing exactly the same thing. But it is a real risk of politicization. It’s also really a risk that this social firewall cuts both ways and that Christians who might have been in these parties, who have doubts about these parties because of some of the anti-Christian, or secular backlash in these parties can’t find their way back. And it’s also not necessarily very coherent with Christian virtues and values to say these people are not permissible or acceptable. Love thy neighbor even if they are a right-wing populist.
So, I’ve been talking to Christian leaders in Europe, and they are saying in order to avoid that, they try to stop talking about politics. They tried to stop talking about really just immigration from a political bid or like contradicting the policies, but waiting, trying to fight right wing populists on their own ground. So, to an extent waiting for national populists to reference Christianity, to reference Christian identity, to use Christian language, use Christian symbols and then come out and say, “talk theology.” And so, how do you theologically defend that? What do you actually mean by Christian identity? And then they are really on their own ground, and then they usually are much more, on the one hand, respected because people say like, “well, if it’s theology, the church is allowed to talk about that, it’s not politics. And also, because their theology often is… obviously they are theologians so they know what they’re talking about.” So, it’s been really interesting. You had some members of the Afd or the Front National promoting relatively interesting theological interpretations of Scripture, where they’re using that for their own aims. So, I came across the idea that ‘love thy neighbor’ is meant geographically. So, if you love thy neighbor that means you love yourself, you love your family, you love your nation but not those Syrians. They’re really far away, that isn’t your neighbor. You don’t need to love them. And really, the idea that because you love thy neighbor, you have to love the nation more than other nations. So really prioritization of this. Another one which I heard was the Good Samaritan parable being rephrased, saying, “well the Good Samaritan yes, he helped the stranger, yes he helped the foreigner, but he helped the foreigner in their own land. He didn’t take him home to his own country, but he helped him over there. So therefore, the Good Samaritan is actually an example that we shouldn’t allow foreigners in our country. We should help them over there where they don’t bother us.”
And then of course you get Christian bishops and theologians come out and say like “well, that’s a very unorthodox reading off these two commandments.” And I think on the theological ground they’re saying this works much better because they avoid the politicization effect. And it’s actually an interesting development that in the United States, in spite of religion or Christianity being very much debated… for instance when we had the recent Christianity Today editorial, there was afterwards much debate of the politicization of religion and how Christianity Today doesn’t speak for Christianity and then on the other side, how the President’s Faith Advisory Board doesn’t speak for Christianity, but there was actually very little talk about theology. It was like very, very little talk about theology itself. It’s more of a political trying to claim one way or the other.
Mark Melton
What role does like either anti-Semitism or support for Israel play in these European populist movements?
Tobias Cremer
Now that’s a really fascinating question, because we see so much change in that. So, if you go back to traditional far right and right-wing populist movements in Europe, these parties at least often have a quite anti-Semitic history. The Front National was founded by many people who were associated with the Pétain regime that collaborated with the Nazis. Jean-Marie Le Pen, the founder and for several decades, leader of the Front National, denied the Holocaust and that was pretty normal. The precursors of the Afd, like earlier, far right parties in Germany, also would be quite anti-Semitic, so the European far right tended to be very anti-Semitic. And in this way, also very different to the United States where you didn’t have to the same extent, an anti-Semitic, far right, at least not in the Republican Party.
What is interesting now is that as the external other shifts from-back in the days, the foreigner but also the Jew, to the Muslim-now they’re saying, “well, we are the real… No, our enemy’s enemy is our friend. So, we are the pro-Israel, pro-Jewish party because the anti-Semites are the Muslims. The anti-Semites are the left-wing people.” And to be fair, if you look into many European countries, you do have anti-Semitism coming in many ways from some Muslim immigrants and you have anti-Israel positions usually coming from the political left. So we do see a rather odd realignment going on. And you now have a Jewish Front National, you have a part of the Front National, you have a sub organization that’s the Jewish Front National, you have the Jews in the Afd as a sub-organization. So they really focus on that. The question, to what extent the anti-Semitism that may still be there has really gone away entirely, or whether that’s a change in rhetoric, is an interesting question, but it’s actually an interesting parallel to the references to Christianity. They are saying, “well, we are Christian because we don’t like Muslims.” It’s a similar way in which they say “we are Pro-Israel because we don’t like Muslims.” But to what extent this is really a deep conviction that the State of Israel is legitimate, and that Judaism has a real part to play in their societies, I can’t speak to that, but there are a lot of people who doubt that.
But it is like maybe to add on this one last thing, it’s really interesting and I think there are a lot of Americans might have to at least think twice, because the test, whether another movement in Europe is kosher-whether if you are an American Conservative, you can cooperate with a European party-has for a long time been and still is, what’s that party’s position on anti-Semitism? What’s that party position on Israel?
And as a result, I talk to a lot of people here and they were saying, “well, no, these parties like the Afd in Germany, the Front National in France or whatever, actually are very much acceptable friends of us because they’re pro-Israel. But then again it might not be the same pro-Israel sentiment that you have in evangelical circles in the United States. It might come from a rather different set of motivations.
Mark Melton
And so, I have one last question. I don’t know, I feel like we covered a lot… I don’t know if there’s anything else at you, but.
Tobias Cremer
Please do feel free to talk about, because I know, I can talk about this for hours.
Mark Melton
Well, I was going to say, I was going to ask this question and it may be spliced in somewhere, but if there’s anything else I didn’t ask or didn’t cover?
Tobias Cremer
I mean, maybe one of the reasons why we don’t see this taboo effect in the United States, because it is actually quite interesting that if you talk to a lot of faith leaders in the United States, they’re now more open to the Trump administration because they’re delivering on many of the things.
But they are still much more critical of the president, particularly, of a lot of his rhetoric than rank and file evangelicals or Republicans in general. So there’s a real almost disconnect, between Christian and even white evangelical leaders, and in even clergy on an average level and the average population -average Republican voters. However, they don’t talk to the same extent, they don’t create the same social taboo.
So we have a similar development as in Europe. We have a church leadership that is very critical of national populism that is much more pro-immigration and very critical to some of these radical overtones that focus on Christian values rather than Christian identity. It is actually similar in Western Europe and North America even in white evangelical circles. However, the difference is that in Europe these authorities speak out and create something of a social taboo against voting right wing populism, whereas in the United States most church leaders who are critical of the President actually remain pretty silent.
You have some people speaking out. You had Russell Moore earlier on the Christianity Today article, you have some Catholic bishops speaking out. But they don’t speak out to the same extent, or at least this vaccination effect doesn’t seem to be there to the same extent, which on the one hand is of course because the Republican Party itself is much more in line with the conservative Christian agenda. But you could still imagine them speaking out whenever the President does something rather unchristian and really focus on policies, which they also don’t do. And I think that is largely result, on the one hand of structure. There is no authority. In the same way, there’s no clear… if you if you want to call Christianity in America, whom do you call? There are a lot of numbers. In Germany, if you want to call Christianity in Germany, you have two phone numbers: You have the President of the Conference of Catholic Bishops, and you have the President of the Protestant Federation. These are two people, and they speak for 99% of German Christians.
In France, you just call the senior Cardinal, Catholic Cardinal, it’s the same, because primarily it’s almost all of them are Catholic, of the Christians. In the United States you can even find 50-60 very high-level faith leaders. You can have a Russell Moore, you can have a Christianity Today, you can have a Pope all saying this is unacceptable. You’ll immediately find 200 other leaders-Christian leaders-who will say the exact contrary. So, there’s no clear… because American Christianity is so much less hierarchical, so much more diverse. And also playing into that is that I talked to a lot of Christian leaders and they were saying part of the reason why they don’t speak up is that in the United States it’s much more… politics often drives the choice of the church or the denomination more than is the case in Europe. So many Americans are much more open to switching their church or switching their denomination, if this is something, if the clergy disagrees with them politically. So, a lot of clergy are telling me, well, they disagree with many, many things that they would like to speak out, but they are worried that if they do that people will just leave. And that again is an interesting difference to Europe where part of the whole thing of being Christian is almost being told off every Sunday by your clergy, so there’s much more than acceptance of authority, whereas I think in the United States it’s more Democratic in some ways, but then also the risk of politics driving faith rather than faith driving politics.
Mark Melton
A bit more consumerist, maybe in the US.
Tobias Cremer
Perhaps, yes.
Mark Melton
As you were talking, I was thinking about, I remember reading during my grad school days, years ago, a European writer wrote an article about how people who are left wing or right wing, if they are in a church and then that church is associated with right-wing or left-wing politics then they’ll leave. But as I was reading it, I felt like there was a disconnect because in my experience I don’t hear from the pulpit anything political, very often. It’s usually at least the churches I go to, Bible-centric, it’s Scripture, spiritual-centric, theology-centric. Very, very rarely do I hear anything get political. In my current church I hear occasionally stuff about, you know, like pro-life issues, but it’s not the Republican, it is, “this is an issue.” And same thing with like religious persecution. They’re not saying one party or the other, they’re just bringing up the issue. And I think sometimes people who aren’t in the church kind of think that the pastor is up there saying, “Vote Trump.” And I’ve never heard that per say. But that being said, I’ll be in the congregation and I’ll sit next to someone and they have like elephants on their tie around election season, you kind of know what’s happening. Or you’re in small groups, or you’re in community groups -whatever you want to call it in your church organization- and within those conversations, you do see more of a political socialization, of learning politics from the people around you, even though you don’t hear from the pulpit. And so my question is, so you’ve mentioned, like Russell Moore, you’ve mentioned Christianity… Christianity Today, right? Yeah, and their impeachment article. But these are people who their primary job isn’t in the pulpit. So, when you mention how being told off every week in a German church -that might be an interesting experience- but are they being told… Are people in the congregation being told not to vote for the AfD from the pulpit? Or is it these like the two numbers that you’re supposed to call the two big leaders in Germany who speak for Christians in Germany, are those the main ones telling people off? Like does that make sense?
Tobias Cremer
To an extent. It’s not necessarily just telling people of it’s more really, you’re made questioning your conscience. So that is much more I think… it’s meant to be slightly uncomfortable. You supposed to like, almost “what would Jesus do in this question?” Sometimes I think the most explicit I’ve heard referencing to voting behavior is that they say the alternative for Germany is not an alternative for Christians. But that is very exceptional. Usually in German churches, you won’t ever hear somebody vote this party or this party. The interesting bit in Europe is that there’s a clear already social taboo anyways in society against far-right parties, because Germany in particular because of our history. So usually the churches say, and particularly German church with its history of collaboration with Nazism and the Confessing Church speaking out against Nazism, so everything that is far right and smells off: neo-Nazism. Anyway, even if it isn’t -the AfD is no neo-Nazi party, it definitely isn’t- but there are some illusions or some legitimization of some of the thoughts that might go on there. There might be some Neo Nazis in that party. There’s a strong taboo around it and basically what the churches do, they reinforce social taboos in society. So, in this way, it’s seen as something different than traditional party politics, almost like a state of emergency. Saying, “well, we don’t tell you to vote social democrat or Christian democrat, conservative, progressive,” but they’re saying, “this is a party that shouldn’t be there to a large extent because this is rhetoric that is beyond what is acceptable in our democratic order.” And so I think this is the ‘telling you off’ and in this respect might not be actually too dissimilar to the United States.
I think what is different in the United States is that because the populist movement is now a part of mainstream Republicanism, is part of an overall party that in no way… the Republican Party is not a right-wing populist party, definitely not, but it’s now part of that, so you can’t really criticize that part. It’s really difficult to criticize that part without criticizing the party as a whole. So, if you had a different voting system, you might have a Steve Bannon party, so to speak and maybe churches will be more open to speak out against that because they’re pro-immigration, etc, etc. And so I think that definitely plays into it. But maybe to also say something positive. I don’t want to proceed as too negative on American churches, as you say, one of the big things is actually in a society that is so polarized, churches are one of the last institutions where you can have a Democrat sitting next to a Republican and worship together. And that is particularly happening in the mainline churches where you really have many congregations that are 50-50. And there it’s really important not to say, “well if you are a Trump voter go that way, or if you are a liberal, go to another place,” but actually keeping them in, keeping the current conversation going, which is another reason why the German churches have actually said, “we should be the place where everybody feels comfortable and where we talk about some of the fears about immigration, etc.” So actually, the AfD voters are very welcome to be there, but we want to talk to them about theology and talk to them on a parish level. So what they’re doing very often is like the top-level people will say the AfD is not acceptable, but the clergy individually might say from the pulpit, “their policies are not very Christian, but let’s talk about it and really try to extend an invitation and create spaces where you can talk about any fear you have and really recreate church as welcoming spaces that do talk about it, but in a welcoming way.”
Mark Melton
Well thanks again Tobias for coming in and speaking with us for a while, both in this podcast and also during our Social Hour, which I recommend for listeners if you’re interested in actually seeing him talk, go to YouTube and the website. We have the videos there and yeah, well thank you so much again.
Tobias Cremer
Yeah, thank you so much for having me.