Religious immunization to populism: Christian voters and the populist right in Germany, France and the US

In all three countries under consideration right-wing populists have recently made ostentatious use of Christian language and symbols. In Germany the anti-Islamist Patriotic Europeans against the Islamization of the West (PEGIDA) paraded oversized crosses in Germany's national colours at their demonstrations while the right-wing populist Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) inserted the defence of Germany's Judeo-Christian heritage into its party manifesto and claimed to be the ‘only Christian party left in Germany’ (Focus 2017). In France the Rassemblement National (RN, or Front National (FN) until 2018) challenged the rules of laïcité by pushing for nativity scenes in public spaces, just as the RN's rising star Marion Maréchal-Le Pen praised France's status as the ‘fille ainée de l’Église’ (the oldest daughter of the Church) (Roy Reference Roy2019).Footnote ³ In the US, President Trump styled himself as the defender of Christian America by famously posing with a Bible in his hand in front of a Washington DC church after security forces had used tear gas to clear his path through peaceful Black Lives Matter protestors (Bennett et al. Reference Bennett, Cahlan, Davis and Lee2020).

Given this centrality of Christian symbolism in right-wing populist rhetoric, many observers have assumed close ties between conservative Christianity and the populist right. Some have argued that the latter's rise is a ‘cultural backlash’, resembling America's religious culture wars of the 1980s and its expansion to Europe; others that right-wing populism's electoral success is largely driven by ‘white Christian Nationalism’ (Althoff Reference Althoff2018; Norris and Inglehart Reference Norris and Inglehart2019; Whitehead and Perry Reference Whitehead and Perry2020). However, several studies, focusing on the motives, strategies and policies of right-wing populist leaders and movements, have added a new layer of complexity by arguing that right-wing populists’ references to Christianity are primarily a reflection of a culturalized but largely secular ‘Civilisationism’ (Brubaker Reference Brubaker2017), and that right-wing populists ‘hijack’ Christianity (Marzouki et al. Reference Marzouki, McDonnell and Roy2016) as an exclusivist identity-marker against Islam without necessarily embracing Christianity as a faith.

The cases of Germany, France and the US seem to support such claims, as a new generation of German, French and American right-wing populists pair cultural references to Christian heritage with secular policy stances. The AfD, for instance, is one of Germany's most secular parties in its leadership and membership (Elcott et al. Reference Elcott2021). It has openly attacked Germany's churches over their welcoming of refugees, demanded the abolition of church privileges in taxation or education and pushed for an overhaul of Germany's church-friendly constitutional settlement of ‘benevolent neutrality’ (Cremer Reference Cremer2018; Elcott et al. Reference Elcott2021; Heimbach-Steins and Filipović Reference Heimbach-Steins and Filipović2017). Similarly, in France the RN has remained absent from the Catholic grassroots demonstrations against gay marriage, while styling itself as the main champion of a strictly secularist reading of laïcité, and defender of women and gay rights against Islam (Almeida Reference Almeida2017; Perrineau Reference Perrineau2017; Roy Reference Roy2019). Even in the US, where the Trump administration sought to balance clashes with America's churches on immigration and race relation by catering to the Christian right on social issues, observers have argued that Trumpism has been primarily driven by the rise of a ‘post-Christian right’ which is less socially conservative but more radical in its opposition to immigration, Islam and racial equality (Beinart Reference Beinart2017; Carney Reference Carney2019; Kaufmann Reference Kaufmann2018). Given this apparent tension between right-wing populists’ religion-laden rhetoric and some of their seemingly less-Christian policy positions, the question arises how these parties’ politics are perceived by the Christian communities in Germany, France and the US.

At first glance a review of election results, survey data and existing quantitative studies suggests a high degree of variation across the three countries. In the US, Christians – and white Evangelicals in particular – appeared to be among Donald Trump's most loyal supporters: 81% of white Evangelicals and strong majorities of white Catholics (64%) and other Protestants (58%) voted for Trump in 2016 (Smith and Martinez Reference Smith and Martinez2016) and continued to support him throughout his presidency (Schwadel and Smith Reference Schwadel and Smith2019). By contrast, in Western Europe scholars have identified a historical ‘religion gap’ or ‘religious vaccination effect’ among Christian voters against voting for right-wing populists (Arzheimer and Carter Reference Arzheimer and Carter2009; Dargent Reference Dargent2016; Immerzeel et al. Reference Immerzeel, Jaspers and Lubbers2013; Montgomery and Winter Reference Montgomery and Winter2015; Siegers and Jedinger Reference Siegers and Jedinger2021). In Germany this hypothesis dates back to Catholics’ disproportional rejections of Nazism in the 1930s and found further expression in Christian voters’ rejection of far-right parties after the war (Falter Reference Falter1991). An examination of recent election data suggests that this dynamic also applies to the AfD. As illustrated in Figure 1, the latter has significantly underperformed among Catholics and Protestants in all European, state and federal elections, and in a recent analysis Pascal Siegers and Alexander Jedinger (Reference Siegers and Jedinger2021: 149) confirmed a ‘religious immunity to populism’ among Christians in Germany. In France, the FN/RN similarly performed historically significantly worse among churchgoing Catholics compared with other parts of the population (Dargent Reference Dargent2016; Perrineau Reference Perrineau2014). In the 2012 presidential election, for instance, only 4% of practising Catholics chose Marine Le Pen compared with 18% of the general population (Du Cleuziou Reference Du Cleuziou2019: 312). Pascal Perrineau concluded that ‘the nationalist drive that feeds the far right in France always stumbled against the block of practising Catholics who yield far less to the temptation of the FN than most other parts of the population’ (Perrineau Reference Perrineau2014: 39). Adding to the image of complexity, the religious immunity hypothesis in France was recently called into question during the presidential election of 2017, in which 38% of Catholics voted for Le Pen, compared with only 34% of the overall population (IFOP 2017).

Figure 1. AfD Results in Germany by Religious Affiliation (in %)

Yet, in spite of this high level of variation on the surface of electoral outcomes, a closer inspection of German, French and American Christians’ attitudes and sociodemographic backgrounds reveal a more uniform development underneath: namely a growing schism between the traditional religious right and a new secular right. In the US, the 2016 GOP primary results, for instance, showed that Donald Trump's earliest and most solid supporters were not the most pious, but religiously unaffiliated voters. Throughout the primaries Trump performed twice as well among those Republicans who never attend church (57%) as among frequent church-goers (29%) (Carney Reference Carney2019: 121). Moreover, studies found a growing attitudinal divergence between the Trumpist electoral core and conservative Christians, with Ruth Melkonian-Hoover and Lyman Kellstedt stressing that between 2011 and 2018, just as anti-immigrant sentiment surged among Trump's base of secular conservatives, American Evangelicals ‘increased their support [for immigration] over time’ (Ekins Reference Ekins2018; McAlister Reference McAlister2018; Melkonian-Hoover and Kellstedt Reference Melkonian-Hoover and Kellstedt2019: 58). Benjamin Knoll found that frequent religious practice was strongly correlated with more openness towards immigration among Catholics and Mainline Protestants (Knoll Reference Knoll2009), a finding that was confirmed by Ekins, who suggested that for all denominations ‘religious participation may have a moderating effect on politics, particularly on matters of race, immigration, and identity’ (Ekins Reference Ekins2018: 25).

This observation is symptomatic of a more comprehensive shift towards internationalism in many US Christian communities since the 1990s as a result of their global engagement and racial diversification (McAlister Reference McAlister2018). Contemporary American Catholicism, for instance, owes much of its vitality to the influx of non-white and especially Hispanic believers and although less noted in the literature, similar demographic trends have taken hold within America's Evangelical community (McAlister Reference McAlister2018). By contrast, studies show that Trump's core base of working-class white people have undergone a process of rapid secularization in recent years (Carney Reference Carney2019; Wilcox et al. Reference Wilcox2012), leading to the emergence of a growing number of non-practising ‘cultural Evangelicals’ who might culturally identify as ‘Christian’ or ‘Evangelical’, but are increasingly dissociated from churches, congregations and evangelical beliefs. Like their European counterparts, these non-practising ‘cultural Christians’ often prove more sympathetic towards right-wing populist positions and candidates than their churchgoing brethren (Campbell and Putnam Reference Campbell and Putnam2011; Ekins Reference Ekins2018; Knoll Reference Knoll2009). Peter Beinart suggests that this was because ‘when cultural conservatives disengage from organised religion, they tend to redraw the boundaries of identity, de-emphasizing morality and religion and emphasising race and nation’ (Beinart Reference Beinart2017).

The German and French case studies seem to substantiate such claims. In Germany, for instance, scholars have shown that after the AfD's ideological transformation from a bourgeois Eurosceptic party to an anti-immigration, right-wing populist party in 2015, its core constituency shifted from disproportionately well-educated, upper-middle class, socially conservative and often church-affiliated voters, to a new electorate of less educated, working-class voters who held more secular attitudes (Arzheimer and Berning Reference Arzheimer and Berning2019). In fact, Marianne Heimbach-Steins and Alexander Filipović (Reference Heimbach-Steins and Filipović2017: 150) observed that the post-2015 AfD shared ‘a striking similarity in social structure with the votership of the (left-wing populist) party die Linke’, with both electorates found to be disproportionately ‘narcissistic’, ‘nostalgic’ and ‘pessimistic’, as well as disproportionately irreligious (Gaston and Hilhorst Reference Gaston and Hilhorst2018; Siegers and Jedinger Reference Siegers and Jedinger2021).

In France, the context of the anti-gay-marriage Manif pour Tous demonstrations in 2013 showcased a similar chasm between the Catholic bourgeoisie and the RN. Although observers had often assumed that the Manif pour Tous and its political successor organization Sens Commun were essentially ‘an anti-gay marriage Tea party French style’ fuelled by the far right (Du Cleuziou Reference Du Cleuziou2019; Stille Reference Stille2014), the RN's leadership remained markedly absent from the Manif pour Tous (Nouvel Observateur 2016). Moreover, the Catholic base that drove the demonstrations often turned out to be diametrically opposed to the RN's electorate in terms of attitudes and sociodemographic background. Although socially more conservative, France's practising Catholics were, for example, more sympathetic towards migrants and Islam than the French in general (Geisser Reference Geisser2018; More in Common 2018). By contrast, Olivier Roy observed that ‘in terms of moral values [the electorate of the RN] is more liberal’ (Roy Reference Roy, Marzouki, McDonnell and Roy2016: 90, 2019). Moreover, devout Catholics and the electorate of Marine Le Pen came from opposite ends of the social ladder, with the RN electorate consisting primarily of young, rural, male and working-class voters, whereas the contrary is true for France's practising Christians, among whom women, the elderly and well-off city dwellers are overrepresented (Mayer Reference Mayer2016; Perrineau Reference Perrineau2017). The fact that French congregations are becoming increasingly multi-ethnic and multicultural creates further tensions with the RN's ethno-nationalist tendencies (Fourquet and Le Bras Reference Fourquet and Le Bras2014).

Taken together, these observations suggest that under the surface of varying electoral results, in all three countries there is a growing attitudinal and sociodemographic divergence between practising Christians and right-wing populist movements. This finding is in line with demographic trends such as the rapid secularization of the white working class in Western countries and might help us understand the observation of ‘religious immunity’ to the populist right in Germany, France and even in the 2016 GOP primaries in the US. It fails to explain, however, why after the GOP primaries American Christians diverged so strongly from their German and French brethren in their support for the populist right, or why French Christians’ religious immunity appeared to wane in the 2017 presidential elections. To explore additional factors determining this support, the next two sections shift from the analysis of voting behaviour and attitudes to an examination of the role of elite actors in the political and religious sphere.

(A lack of) Christian alternatives: mainstream parties’ role in strengthening religious immunity to populism

The factor most commonly considered in the literature in this context is the role of right-wing populists’ political competition. Studies have emphasized the centrality of mainstream parties (especially conservative or Christian democratic parties) for religious immunity (Arzheimer and Carter Reference Arzheimer and Carter2009; Montgomery and Winter Reference Montgomery and Winter2015; Siegers and Jedinger Reference Siegers and Jedinger2021). The underlying argument is that this immunity is indirect, resting on the mechanism that, in countries with strong Christian democratic parties, Christian voters are simply ‘not “available” to these (right-wing populist) parties, because they are still firmly attached to Christian Democratic or conservative parties’ (Arzheimer and Carter Reference Arzheimer and Carter2009: 985).

The comparison of the German, French and American cases confirms the importance of mainstream political parties. In the case of Germany, for instance, scholars have argued that the existence of a powerful Christian Democratic party (the CDU/CSU), which maintained ownership over key Christian issues and provided a political home for Christian voters, is a key explanatory variable for the strength of the religious immunization effect (Siegers and Jedinger Reference Siegers and Jedinger2021). This hypothesis was echoed by senior German politicians and church leaders. Former CDU general-secretary Hermann Gröhe, for instance, argued in our interview that ‘it is certainly also a task of the CDU to provide conservative Christians with a political home’ and, as a result of it fulfilling this role, ‘social debates such as those surrounding gay marriage have not been turned into a “culture war” in the same way as in other countries’ (Interview Gröhe 2018). Similarly, the then president of the Conference of German Bishops, Cardinal Marx, emphasized that historically ‘many Catholics have often had a close bond with the CDU/CSU but going beyond this and further to the right has never been imaginable for Catholics’ (Interview Marx 2018).

Yet, while continued loyalty to the CDU/CSU may have made many Christian voters unavailable to the AfD, a factor that has often been overlooked in the literature is the analogous role played by other German mainstream parties. Thus, although the CDU/CSU is regarded as the primary party for Catholic voters, the Social Democrats (SPD) and Greens have often offered political homes for German Protestants (Siegers and Jedinger Reference Siegers and Jedinger2021; Siegers et al. Reference Siegers, Franzmann and Hassan2016). Siegers and Jedinger (Reference Siegers and Jedinger2021: 163) hence found that ‘Protestant identification with the Social Democrats results in a similar immunization effect against the RWP [right-wing populist] vote as Catholic identification with the Christian Democrats’. This may partly be due to their relative refraining from engaging in left-wing identity politics, which helped block the AfD's attempts to reshape the debate in identitarian terms and to repoliticize religion as a cultural-identity marker (Bornschier Reference Bornschier2012). Another critical factor may be that, unlike other Western European mainstream left parties, which have embraced increasingly secular politics and rhetoric, Germany's SPD and Greens largely resisted such trends. As former Bundestag president Wolfgang Thierse (SPD) put it during our interview: ‘So far, secularists and atheists have not gained the upper hand in the SPD. … This has also not shifted in the last few years, even in light of the AfD’ (Interview Thierse 2018). Similarly, Katrin Göring-Eckardt, then parliamentary leader of the Green Party, emphasized that there have so far been no tendencies towards secularist reactions to the AfD's religious references in her party ‘because what the AfD is doing there is so dubious that it is not taken seriously by us’ (Interview Göring-Eckardt 2018). Germany's centre-left parties’ continued openness to religious voters seems, thus, to have amplified religious immunity to right-wing populism by providing religious voters with electoral alternatives to the Centre-Right.

A look at France suggests that the lack of such alternatives might help explain the apparent erosion of the religion gap in the second round of the 2017 presidential elections. At first glance French Catholics appeared to have a fixed political home in the centre-right Les Républicains (LR), just as German Catholics had in the CDU/CSU. Although this association is less straightforward in contemporary France, because the importance of laïcité effectively meant that, as LR MP Xavier Breton put it, ‘in France we don't have a Christian democratic party and if we had one they wouldn't talk about it’ (Interview Breton 2019),Footnote ⁴ studies show a historically ‘strong orientation towards the right among Catholics, particularly the practising ones’ (Dargent Reference Dargent2016: 20). Initially the 2017 presidential election seemed to confirm this rule when in its first round 46% of practising Catholics and 55% of the most frequent churchgoers cast their vote for the LR candidate François Fillon, compared with only 20.1% of the general population (IFOP 2017). Yet, while this support demonstrated Catholics’ continued attachment to the centre right, it also epitomized a new dilemma for Catholics. For Catholics’ turnout was insufficient to enable Fillon to enter the second round of the presidential elections. In France's bipolar political system, this posed a predicament for Catholic voters: being no longer numerous enough to sustain the LR as one of France's top two parties, they were forced to look at political alternatives. However, unlike in Germany, the French centre left had historically often defined itself in opposition to the church; and while there had been a resurgence of a Christian socialist tradition in the 1980s (epitomized by figures such as Jacques Delors), recently, anti-clerical tendencies had re-intensified with the advance of secularization, the repoliticization of laïcité and the legalization of gay marriage (Fourquet Reference Fourquet2018).

In light of the Parti Socialiste's (PS) own crushing defeat in the 2017 presidential election and near annihilation in subsequent elections, one might think that its secularist tendencies could be of lesser concern for Catholics. However, as PS MP Dominique Potier noted in our interview, the socialists’ secularist current did not disappear after the election defeat; ‘by contrast they rather joined the new En Marche movement’ (Interview Potier 2019). Given the emerging bipolarity between Emmanuel Macron's La République en Marche (LREM) and the RN, a secularist turn of Macron's party under the influence of this influx would significantly dampen its prospects of replacing the LR as Catholics’ political home and alternative to the RN. At the time of the interviews, such a development was no foregone conclusion. Indeed, many Christian leaders still expressed great hopes for Macron, referencing his upbeat remarks about religions’ positive influence in society and initial hints at a more inclusive reading of laïcité. Yet interviewees also reported that recent developments had stifled many such hopes. Jean-Louis Bianco, the president of the observatory of laïcité, for instance, emphasized that although ‘Emmanuel Macron had more liberal positions … there was a strong laïcard influence (within the LREM)’ (Interview Bianco 2019). LREM MP Françoise Dumas similarly confirmed that in the debate ‘between a more liberal Anglo-Saxon conception [of state church relations] and a much more secular conception framed by the law of 1905, the president has now ruled: It's the law [of 1905] pure and hard’ (Interview Dumas 2019).

Given the LREM's parallel shift towards more libertarian positions on social issues such as embryo research, assisted suicide, surrogacy and assisted reproductive technology for gay couples, many Catholics felt confronted with what Sens Commun president Christophe Billan described as a choice between the ‘chaos’ of the RN and the ‘decay’ of Emmanuel Macron's socially liberal agenda (Interview Billan 2019). Certainly, frequent churchgoers still disproportionately supported Macron's LREM during the 2017 and subsequent elections (IFOP 2017), suggesting the religious vaccination effect's limitation to the most faithful, rather than its complete erosion. However, the weakness of the French centre right, combined with a perceived lack of alternatives, is likely to further delimit religious immunity in France.

Party loyalty and a perceived lack of alternatives also emerge as key factors in shaping Donald Trump's ability to attract many initially sceptical Christian voters in the US – albeit in different ways. For one, rather than strengthening faith-based inhibitions against right-wing populism by binding Christians to a competitor party, American faith voters’ long-standing attachment to ‘God's Own Party’ (Campbell and Putnam Reference Campbell and Putnam2011) helps explain why many Christians voted for Trump during the general election even if they had opposed him during the primaries. Indeed, white Evangelicals were the most likely group to say that they supported Trump, mainly because he was the Republican nominee (38% of them gave this reason, compared with 28% of GOP voters in general and 13% of irreligious Trump supporters) (Smith Reference Smith2016). Just as ‘group loyalty is the stronger motivator of opinion than ideological principles’ (Barber and Pope Reference Barber and Pope2019: 38), for many Christians, party loyalty seemed to supersede faith-based objections to Trump.

However, while party loyalty may help understand why many traditionally Republican faith voters fell in line during the general election, it is insufficient to account for the significant number of Christian voters who had voted Democrat only a few years earlier but changed sides in 2016. More than 10% of Mainline Protestants, one in five Catholics and a third of white Evangelicals who had voted for Obama in 2008 migrated to the Republican candidate in 2016 (Smith and Martinez Reference Smith and Martinez2016). For these voters, even more important than loyalty to the Republican Party (positive partisanship) seemed to have been their rejection of the Democratic alternative (negative partisanship) (Abramowitz and Webster Reference Abramowitz and Webster2018; Pew Research Center 2019). Pew Research found, for instance, that among Catholic, Evangelical and Mainline Protestant Trump voters, Trump's single most attractive feature was that ‘he is not Hillary Clinton’, with 76% of white Evangelicals citing this as a ‘major reason’ for supporting Trump in 2016 (Smith Reference Smith2016). Trying to understand this alienation from the Democratic candidate, some observers have pointed to underlying sexism and personal animosity against Hillary Clinton, others to animosities towards minority candidates due to white Christian nationalism (Silva Reference Silva2019; Whitehead and Perry Reference Whitehead and Perry2020). These factors historically played an important role and certainly did so again in 2016. However, most leaders interviewed for this study stressed that even more important were Democrats’ lack of faith-outreach and the impression that Christian voters were no longer welcome in the Democratic coalition.

Insiders like Eric Sapp, who had advised hundreds of Democratic candidates on faith outreach, described how, after 2012 ‘we were suddenly hearing from all these campaigns we were working with that “if we do faith outreach any longer, we don't stand a chance of getting any money from the central party”’ (Interview Sapp 2019). Instead, he explained that suddenly ‘our candidates were being attacked as “Democrats in name only” by the leftists who argued that the party needed to get rid of them’ (Interview Sapp 2019). Former Obama White House official Michael Wear similarly observed that Democratic faith outreach ‘ultimately failed’ less because Christians weren't receptive, but rather ‘due to forces within the party that were completely against any sort of detente or plural view of Christianity and politics’ (Interview Wear 2020).

Joe Biden's presidential campaign of 2020 specifically sought to change such perceptions, making it, as the campaign's faith outreach director Josh Dickson explained, their ‘first principle to make people of faith feel valued and respected in the democratic coalition, that is to show them that they are not seen as “deplorables” but as a central part of our platform’ (Interview Dickson 2020). To this end, the campaign made faith and morality a prominent part of Biden's platform; from campaign groups such as ‘Believers for Biden’, through TV advertisements targeting faith voters, to what Dickson described as the ‘perhaps the most faith driven democratic convention in decades’ (Interview Dickson 2020). While this strategy did not fundamentally reverse faith voters’ traditional alignment with the Republican Party, it enabled Biden to make decisive inroads in key battle states and to overcome some of the negative partisanship that had lost Hillary Clinton so many religious Obama voters. With 24% support among white Evangelicals, 52% among Catholics and 49% among white Mainline voters, Biden received similar levels of support from these groups as Barack Obama in 2008 (24%, 54%, 45%, respectively), making him one of the most popular Democratic candidates with faith voters in recent decades (Pew, AU, AP/Votecast).

Taken together the three case studies underline the critical importance of mainstream parties’ behaviour in shaping Christians’ electoral responses to right-wing populism. Thus, while traditional party alignment with the centre right made German and French Christian voters unavailable to the populist right, it boosted Donald Trump's support in the 2016 election. Meanwhile the presence (or lack) of electoral alternatives on the centre left either amplified religious immunity (as in Germany), or convinced Christian voters that the populist right was the lesser evil (as in France and the US). However, interviewees such as Josh Dickson also repeatedly hinted at another key factor in understanding Christian voters’ attitude to the populist right, stressing that ‘faith leader engagement has been huge for us … to amplify the voices of faith leaders that support us in these communities has been critical’.

The churches’ social firewall: faith leaders’ role in legitimizing or tabooing right-wing populism

The role of faith leaders in shaping right-wing populists’ ability to co-opt religion for political gain is an important factor, yet it is often overlooked in the literature. Specifically, faith leaders’ willingness and ability either to condone and legitimize, or to challenge and socially taboo right-wing populists’ religious references seems to correlate directly with the strength of religious immunity (Cremer Reference Cremer2021). Scholars have long emphasized the importance of social taboos in determining social and political behaviour in general, and in voters’ reaction to right-wing populist movements in particular (Douglas Reference Douglas2003; Haidt Reference Haidt2012; de Jonge Reference de Jonge2019). Eric Kaufmann, for instance, describes how the erosion of the ‘bounds of acceptable debate over immigration can set off the spiral of populist-right mobilisation’ (Kaufmann Reference Kaufmann2018: 218). Elite actors play a crucial role in either maintaining or eroding such social bounds. Scholars have, for example, pointed to mainstream parties or the media as central actors in establishing social taboos around right-wing populists through a cordon sanitaire of non-cooperation or non-reporting (Heinze Reference Heinze2018; de Jonge Reference de Jonge2019). Church leaders may play a similar role within congregations through public statements, sermons and social norm setting. Moreover, such taboos may be particularly powerful in religious communities, because of religious institutions’ traditional role in defining social norms and because religious individuals tend to be more susceptible to social taboos than their secular neighbours (Haidt Reference Haidt2012).

The German, French and American case studies seem to confirm this hypothesis. In Germany, the churches’ consistent and unambiguous public opposition to the AfD has been credited with creating a strong ‘social firewall’ in religious communities against the populist right (Cremer Reference Cremer2021; Elcott et al. Reference Elcott2021; Püttmann Reference Püttmann2016). Thus, although initially not opposed to a new right-wing party, Germany's churches soon became one of the AfD's most prolific adversaries by clearly positioning themselves in the pro-immigration camp and shouldering much of Germany's refugee aid. They publicly argued – with explicit slights directed at the AfD's reference to Christian identity – that ‘our Christian identity is particularly evident when every person who seeks refuge in our country receives humane treatment’ (Deutsche Bischofskonferenz 2016) or that welcoming refugees and immigrants is a ‘commandment of Christian responsibility’ (EKD 2015). Moreover, both the Protestant and Catholic church leadership condemned AfD rhetoric as ‘hate speech’ (Deutsche Bischofskonferenz 2016) and declared the positions of the AfD leadership to ‘stand in profound contradiction to the Christian faith’ (Evangelisch.de 2018).

Given this clear public demarcation, the notion that disaffection to the AfD may have become associated with significant social costs among church members is intuitive and was strongly supported by interviewees. The president of the Protestant National Synod, Irmgard Schwätzer, observed that ‘the difference in electoral behaviour is, above all, a result of the continuing social influence and moral authority of the churches’ (Interview Schwätzer 2018). Likewise, the director of the Protestant Academy in Berlin, Christian Staffa, argued that, due to the church leadership's clear positioning, ‘acting on right-wing attitudes is “blocked” differently as a Christian. [A Christian] knows that: “if I act on these attitudes, I'm really part of ‘them’ [the populist right] and somehow I know that's wrong”’ (Interview Staffa 2018). The representative of the Catholic Bishops’ Conference to the federal government, Karl Jüsten, concurred, arguing that Catholics were less likely to vote AfD because ‘the Church and its leadership have openly taken a clear-cut position in rejecting this ideology’ (Interview Jüsten 2018). These assessments were confirmed through outside perspectives such as that of Thomas Krüger, the president of the Federal Agency for Civic Education, who pointed to an ‘inner resilience (among Christian voters), created by the clergy and their relatively clear positions against right-wing populism’ (Interview Krüger 2018). Indeed, even former AfD officials like Marcus Pretzell explained that many Christians within the AfD struggled, ‘precisely because they are Christians, they actually have a very hard time with the AfD … These conservative Christians are very sensitive to warning calls and social taboos’ (Interview Pretzell 2018). Other AfD interviewees explained that the ‘exclusions’ and ‘accusations’ they experienced through the churches have discouraged the AfD from further attempts to associate itself with the churches or to use Christian symbols (Interview Hampel 2018; Interview Meuthen 2018; Interview Schultner 2018). Instead many AfD leaders publicly distanced themselves from earlier pro-church positions, called on party members to leave the ‘system churches’, denounced the churches as ‘red-green filth’ or ‘asylum lobby groups’, and redefined the AfD as ‘not a Christian party’ (FAZ 2016; Hofmann Reference Hofmann2019).

While Germany's churches thus successfully challenged the AfD's religious references in the late 2010s, for decades France's Catholic church was no less pronounced in its public opposition to the FN/RN. With repeated interventions, warning Catholics that the FN's positions were ‘incompatible with the Gospel and the teaching of the church’ (Cardinal Decourtray, cited in Le Monde Reference Le Monde2002), individual clergy denying FN politicians the holy sacraments, and ubiquitous sermons against the FN, the institutional church appeared committed to maintaining a strong social taboo (Senneville Reference Senneville2015). When in 2002 Jean-Marie Le Pen first qualified for the run-off of the presidential elections, the bishops even broke their traditional laïcité-imposed silence on party politics and issued a statement urging Catholics not to vote FN (Lesegretain Reference Lesegretain2017; Ricard Reference Ricard2002). As in Germany, this social taboo appears to have been a key explanatory variable for the ‘religion gap’ historically observed in France. Indeed, research shows an ‘institution effect’ and a ‘Pope Francis effect’, through which whenever church authorities publicly speak out in favour of immigration or against the populist right, sympathies with the latter decreased among practising Catholics in France (Geisser Reference Geisser2018: 12; More in Common 2018). Interviewed RN officials confirmed such dynamics, with Marion Maréchal-Le Pen reporting that ‘the social taboo around the FN continues to exist in parts of the population and in particular among Catholics’ (Interview Maréchal-Le Pen 2019) and Gilbert Collard specifically singling out the norm-setting role of bishops, saying: ‘It's conformism: they have demonized us and it has worked’ (Interview Collard 2019).

However, in the second round of the 2017 presidential election Catholic authorities seemed to cease making use of this authority. Unlike in 2002 and in contrast to their Protestant, Muslim and Jewish colleagues, in 2017 the Catholic hierarchy gave no voting instructions against the FN, but referred voters to ‘their own discernment’ (Ribadeau Dumas Reference Ribadeau Dumas2017). This decision crowned a gradual process of demobilization in the church's position vis-à-vis the FN/RN since 2015, when the bishop of Toulon first broke the traditional cordon sanitaire by inviting Marion Maréchal-Le Pen to speak at his diocese's summer academy.

However, the findings from the interviews suggest that this shift in tone was not necessarily due to a change of attitude among senior clergy, who privately remained in unison in their rejection of the RN. Bishop Rougé stressed that ‘the FN is still a neo-pagan and atheist right, and it is also a highly secularized working-class right – even some sort of a revisited communism, all of which has no affinity with Catholicism at all’ (Interview Rougé 2019), while his colleague Archbishop Wintzer confirmed that ‘overall the activists of the FN know very well that the bishops of France are not favourable towards the FN’ (Interview Wintzer 2019).Footnote ⁵ Instead, the church's new quietness appeared driven by a broader reconceptualization of its relationship with politics: away from the vision of a broad national church and towards a minority church that seeks to save the Christian community by distancing it from secular society (Dreher Reference Dreher2017; Fourquet Reference Fourquet2018; Roy Reference Roy2019). As Bishop Rougé put it, given ‘our marginalisation in society … today the question of our relation to politics is rather secondary in the priorities of the church. Today we are rather mobilized for the advance of faith’ (Interview Rougé 2019).

Yet, even if the reasons for the church's shift towards a more apolitical mentality were primarily demographic or theological, the erosion of non-practising Catholics’ religious immunity to the RN suggests that its consequences may be highly political, undermining the social taboo around the RN in two crucial ways. First, directly, by discouraging clergy from using their authority to criticize the RN, thus giving especially cultural Catholics who might be less aware of their leaders’ private reservations, the impression that the RN was indeed ‘dédiabolisé’. And second, indirectly, by further separating religion from politics, and thereby implicitly undermining the church's moral authority in political issues in general. This risk was highlighted by Bishop Stenger, who emphasized that ‘one of my hypotheses for why the taboo [around the FN] is blowing up is that religion is increasingly being privatized; … so more and more Christians feel able to separate their conscience from the Gospel during the elections’ (Interview Stenger 2019). In the long run, some interviewees cautioned that such developments may contribute to a situation in France similar to that in the US, where US faith leaders’ inability or unwillingness to create a social taboo around Trumpism appeared as a key variable in understanding the lack of religious immunity there.

As in France, the results from interviews with US faith leaders suggest that this comparative lack of social taboos around right-wing populism is not necessarily a result of the faith leaders’ affinity with Trumpism. On the contrary, the interviews with members of America's religious ‘establishment’ (including most white Evangelical leaders) suggested that they were overwhelmingly critical of Trumpism. The vice president of the US Conference of Catholic Bishops, Archbishop Vigneron, for instance, reported that ‘many of the Bishops are more critical of Trump … and I think members of the active religious communities, like the Jesuits, the Mercy Sisters etc. are perhaps the most critical’ (Interview Vigneron 2019). Mainline Protestant leader and Auburn Seminary president, Katharine Henderson, stressed that ‘Trump does not represent the Presbyterian church at all’ (Interview Henderson 2019), and the then editor-in-chief of the Evangelical flagship newspaper Christianity Today, Mark Galli, added that ‘all these leaders of what I would call establishment and mainstream Evangelical organizations are very much anti-Trump’ (Interview Galli 2020). Privately, even members of Trump's own Faith Advisory Board admitted their scepticism, with one stressing that ‘there were 16 candidates in the Republican primary. Donald Trump was my 17th choice’.

In trying to understand why faith leaders’ scepticism did not translate into the same social taboo among their flock as had been the case in Germany or France, interviewees stressed two factors. First, that the decentralized structure of the American religious landscape limited Christian leaders’ ability to ‘speak for Christianity’ publicly in the way their French and German counterparts could. Thus, while America's religion-friendly separation of Church and State has created a religious marketplace full of diversity and vitality, the same diversity also means that no single set of leaders can speak with the level of authority for American Christianity as, for instance, an alliance of Protestant and Catholic bishops could in Germany or France (Campbell and Putnam Reference Campbell and Putnam2011; Cremer Reference Cremer2021). Such dynamics were exacerbated by an accelerating crisis of religious hierarchies in America (Chaves Reference Chaves2011; Olson Reference Olson2008). The president of the Institute for Religion and Democracy Mark Tooley emphasized that ‘one of the explanations for Trump's success’ was that especially among Protestants ‘the big story in American religion is the collapse of the denominational traditions and the decentralization of religion in America’ (Interview Tooley 2020). Former co-host of the National Prayer Breakfast and Republican Congressman Randy Hultgren similarly stressed that ‘with regards to Evangelical faith leaders there really isn't a Billy Graham right now, so it's a little bit more diffused as to who the leaders of faith are’ (Interview Hultgren 2020), while conservative commentator Pete Wehner observed that nobody knows ‘who is the most prominent Mainline leader these days’ (Interview Wehner 2019). Religious freedom activist Stanley Carlson-Thies argued that this lack of authority and deference was particularly strong in Protestant denominations, because ‘we don't have the Pope or somebody who can stand above it all’ (Interview Carlson-Thies 2019). However, even Catholic interviewees reported an erosion of institutional authority, leading one of them to conclude off the record that unlike in France, you cannot see a strong ‘Pope Francis effect’ against Trump in the US. Given this lack of formal hierarchies and prominent leaders, it was comparatively easy for Trump's White House Faith Advisory Board to legitimize Trumpism in the eyes of many faith voters even if most of the Evangelical ‘establishment’ remained critical.

Amplifying on these structural limitations to American faith leaders’ ability to be heard, the second key factor highlighted was a reported lack of willingness to speak out against Trumpism. Indeed, surveys show that half of American pastors felt limited in their ability to speak out on moral and social issues, and that only one in five (21%) felt comfortable speaking out about specific political actors (Barna Reference Barna2019). During our interviews, faith leaders confirmed that Trumpism was a particularly delicate topic, with Pete Wehner emphasizing that ‘in my experience, many pastors who are conservative politically are alarmed and worried about Trump, but they don't speak out’ (Interview Wehner 2019). While some interviewees traced this silence back to theological, historical and external factors, most emphasized concerns about running into conflict with congregants or donors as key reasons. Evangelical leader Rob Schenck, for instance, explained that in America's marketplace of religion ‘it's very difficult for Evangelical clergy to speak up, particularly if you are compensated within these systems, if your livelihood depends on it. So, self-preservation is why these [anti-Trump] voices have quieted’ (Interview Schenck 2020). Jackie Johns from the Pentecostal Theological Seminary reported that ‘religious leaders in conservative churches who opposed Trump were very quickly marginalized to the point that if they were pastors, many of them lost their churches, or if they kept their churches, they lost large portions of their congregation’, making ‘most conservative clergy who are opposed to Trump so fearful of taking a stance against Trump that we don't know who they are’ (Interview Johns 2019).

Taken together, these structural limitations significantly reduced American faith leaders’ ability and willingness to challenge and taboo Trumpism in the same way that their German and French counterparts challenged and tabooed the AfD or RN. Put in the context of findings in the literature about the ‘self-fulfilling spiral of populist-right mobilisation’, in which the erosion of social taboos increases the populist right's vote share, which in turn further erodes social taboos (Kaufmann Reference Kaufmann2018), the silence of American faith leaders emerges as a crucial factor in accelerating many American Christians’ ‘conversion’ to the populist right, whereas German and French faith leaders’ outspoken opposition had a significant impact in bolstering Western European Christians’ religious immunity to right-wing populism.