Photo: Courtesy of Anthony Tahlie
Posted: Wed Jul 09, 2025 6:34 am
The most recent upheavals in Europe have produced a new cohort of political parties taking up the banner of Christianity as part of identity politics.
The financial crisis of 2007-2008 and the migration crisis of 2015-2016 created “in large sectors of public opinion a general feeling of decline and triggered a climate of fear and suspicion against globalization, liberalism, foreigners. … In short, against the very idea of an open society, ”said Iacopo Scaramuzzi, author of a book on how populists have used Christianity.
“All of these politicians quite suddenly started to use Christianity and Christian symbols in a very instrumental way, in order to reassure their constituents,” he added.
Man creates god
The politics of these new movements often have little to do with faith. Populist politicians are rarely devotees; in many cases, they don’t even have a traditional family: Trump and Salvini are divorced; Meloni is a job function email database single mother. And in Europe at least, their constituencies are increasingly secular.
Embracing religion is often less a matter of faith than of nostalgia. They “recognize Christianity as a common language, an aura of tradition, a comfortable memory of a golden past, when there was no European Union, no same-sex marriage, no Muslims in the city,” said said Scaramuzzi.
Jesus, he says, is reduced to “an identity marker”.
Whether Jesus is thought to be on the right or on the left usually depends on his position on the political spectrum. A recent study in the United States has found that when it comes to politics, man creates god in its image rather than the other way around.
The researchers asked those interviewed to imagine what Jesus would have thought about contemporary issues. Christian Republicans imagined a Jesus who tended to be against redistribution of wealth, illegal immigrants, abortion, and same-sex marriage; while the Christian Democrats thought he would have held much more liberal views, favoring charity towards migrants rather than, say, opposition to abortion.
The financial crisis of 2007-2008 and the migration crisis of 2015-2016 created “in large sectors of public opinion a general feeling of decline and triggered a climate of fear and suspicion against globalization, liberalism, foreigners. … In short, against the very idea of an open society, ”said Iacopo Scaramuzzi, author of a book on how populists have used Christianity.
“All of these politicians quite suddenly started to use Christianity and Christian symbols in a very instrumental way, in order to reassure their constituents,” he added.
Man creates god
The politics of these new movements often have little to do with faith. Populist politicians are rarely devotees; in many cases, they don’t even have a traditional family: Trump and Salvini are divorced; Meloni is a job function email database single mother. And in Europe at least, their constituencies are increasingly secular.
Embracing religion is often less a matter of faith than of nostalgia. They “recognize Christianity as a common language, an aura of tradition, a comfortable memory of a golden past, when there was no European Union, no same-sex marriage, no Muslims in the city,” said said Scaramuzzi.
Jesus, he says, is reduced to “an identity marker”.
Whether Jesus is thought to be on the right or on the left usually depends on his position on the political spectrum. A recent study in the United States has found that when it comes to politics, man creates god in its image rather than the other way around.
The researchers asked those interviewed to imagine what Jesus would have thought about contemporary issues. Christian Republicans imagined a Jesus who tended to be against redistribution of wealth, illegal immigrants, abortion, and same-sex marriage; while the Christian Democrats thought he would have held much more liberal views, favoring charity towards migrants rather than, say, opposition to abortion.