Chapter 14 analyses the Trump campaign’s relationship with religion in more detail. Based on the material gathered in several dozen elite interviews with political and religious leaders it shows how in the context of an identitarian turn in American politics, the Trump campaign appealed to America’s tradition of white Christian nationalism and forged an alliance with a subset of Christian leaders. However, it also shows how, while doing so, the Trump campaign and administration increasingly departed from America’s civil religious tradition, clashed with Christian doctrine on identitarian issues, and embraced a more identitarian and transactional approach to Christian institutions, indicating less the resurgence of the Christian right in American politics than its erosion and gradual replacement by a more secular but no less radical populist and identitarian right.

Chapter 6 analyses the Alternative für Deutschland’s (AfD) use of religious themes in more detail. Relying on several dozen elite AfD leaders, mainstream party politicians and religious authorities in Germany, it shows how the AfDs renewed reference to Christianity is not necessarily representative of a return of religiosity to society, but rather of the attempt of a comparatively secular party to employ Christianity as a secularised national identity marker against Islam. In particular, AfD policies and ideas of Christian identity are revealed to stand in strong conflict with traditional Christian doctrine as formulated by the German Protestant and Catholic churches, the AfD’s leadership and membership to be disproportionately irreligious, and its attitude towards religious institutions to be characterised by a strong anti-clerical sentiment and hostility towards the system of ‘benevolent neutrality’. All of this suggests that the self-proclaimed ‘defender of the Christian Occident’ might, in fact, be Germany’s most secular party.

Chapter 10 examines the French far rights references to both Catholicism and laïcité in greater detail. Based on several dozen interviews with right-wing populist politicians, mainstream party representatives and faith leaders it reveals how the French far right rediscovered both religion and secularism as political wedge-issues and cultural identity markers against Islam. However, instead of a rapprochement with Christian policy positions, ethics and institutions, Chapter 10 finds open clashes between the Rassemblement National and Zemmour on the one hand and Frances Catholic Church on the other over social policy, the populist right’s identitarian conception of Christendom, and its secularist reading of laïcité, all of which suggested a further secularisation of Christian symbols in the hands of the populist right rather than a Catholic revival in French politics.

The landscape of contemporary religious ecology is presented in this article as a variety of responses to disenchantment and what Lynn White identified as the theological roots of environmental ruin (Biblical divine transcendence and human exceptionality). The various positions are mapped in terms of those who deny divine transcendence and make nature, either as actually or only potentially infinite, the highest (pantheists); those who deny divine unicity and return to a pre-Christian, “enchanted” nature (neo-pagans); and those who defend in various ways the ecology of the Biblical account of creation (Jewish, Muslim, and Christian monotheists).