Review of The Godless Crusade

THE GODLESS CRUSADE: Religion, Populism and Right-Wing Identity Politics in the West by Tobias Cremer, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2023, 335 pp., £29.99 (paperback), ISBN 978-1-009-26214-9

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Godless Crusade attempts to understand how politics, culture, and religion come together in the right-wing populist movements exemplified by PEGIDA in Germany, Marine Le Pen in France, and Donald Trump in the US. The use of religious and specifically Christian language and symbolism has been a salient commonality across these otherwise disparate groups. Drawing upon 114 interviews conducted over several years, Cremer hypothesises that such religious expression is primarily a ‘cultural identity marker’ (31), effectively casting the faith of the populists as being in actuality no faith at all. Thus Godless Crusade at its core inverts the Schleiermacherian formula – not justifying religion to its cultured despisers but rather defending it from the depredations of its uncultured admirers.

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Rebutting the view that right-wing populists’ identification with Christianity is a manifestation of religious atavism, Cremer sees the phenomenon not as a resurgence of belief but rather as the emergence of a religiously coded form of identity politics. In this connection Cremer takes the cultural dichotomy of globalism and nationalism – described in David Goodhart’s The Road to Somewhere (2017) as an opposition of ‘somewheres’ and ‘anywheres’ – and theorises it as a new kind of social cleavage, one which is furthermore rapidly gaining in political significance over traditional cleavages such as between the urban and the rural. To this theory of social cleavages Cremer appends the use of economic metaphors, identifying demand-side and supply-side factors of the new populism – a schematic division by which Cremer pins responsibility for the growing appeal of right-wing ideas and rhetoric on secularising forces across the trans-Atlantic West.

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Indeed, secularisation is the culprit of Cremer’s story; so too is Cremer’s use of the concept one of Godless Crusade’s weaknesses. Again and again the explanatory onus is put on the erosion of traditional faith, whether this means pointing to the reinvigorated political saliency of laïcité in France or rising levels of religious disaffiliation among working class whites in the US. But although Cremer early on acknowledges the virtual impossibility of defining religion per se, secularisation and the secular are invoked over and over in starkly binary senses. That Cremer does not engage with the large theoretical literature on secularisation and postsecularisation (despite drawing upon the work of José Casanova) is a pity because his topic provides vivid examples of the secular West’s many lacunae and ambivalences. Debates on how to interpret the ‘rise of the nones’, for instance, have been energetic and productive in recent years, with whole new areas of research and journals such as Secularism & Nonreligion emerging around these questions.

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Scholars of all stripes will find Cremer’s national case studies profitable as standalone reading, apart from their roles in the overall thesis. These nationally focused chapters vary in degree of focus, with a relatively strong thread of argument in the case of Germany set against more thematically segmented reflections in the case of France, for example, but each nonetheless presents a rich and detailed portrait. The book as a whole is less cohesive. The broader theoretical claims require a strict religion–nonreligion dichotomy that is hard to sustain against any appreciation of the Jamesian varieties of religious experience. More specifically, Cremer points again and again to ‘Christian institutions, doctrine and values’ (50), as though these were either monolithic or amenable to summary description. And the firm, unqualified distinction between religion and culture that Cremer invokes will tend be regarded with suspicion by those versed in recent cultural theory. It is not at all clear how religion used as a cultural identity marker ceases therefore to be religion.

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In proposing that religious establishments (on the supply-side) may help erect ‘social firewalls’ against the spread of right-wing populism among the faithful (261) or ‘inoculate’ them against its appeal (108) – theses that Cremer demonstrates positively in the case of Germany and negatively in the case of France – the book wends towards tendentiousness. Here too Cremer’s ambitious trans-Atlantic approach produces difficulties. The many generical references to ‘the churches’ (213), for instance, seem to reflect a German viewpoint that sits uneasily in both Anglophone and Francophone contexts, which have no functional equivalents of the Evangelische Kirche Deutschlands. Cremer points to pandenominational groups in the US as potential vectors of such influence but – in view of the relatively low religious literacy and Constitutional prohibition on religious establishment in the US – it seems unlikely that many even among US churchgoers would know organisations like the National Council of Churches or the National Association of Evangelicals by name (20). Looking beyond the existing devout, it is implausible to suggest that anything like a religious establishment now exists in the US. As Ross Douthat of the New York Times observes (himself a devout Catholic), young American strivers are not trying to break into the WASP establishment because they do not know what it is. Although mainline denominations in Europe will have a greater claim to self-identify as arbiters of Christianity, owing to the comparatively weaker influence of evangelicalism, it is not clear that Cremer’s prescriptions are realistic even for European societies in 2023.

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Godless Crusade will be of interest above all to ecumenically minded political observers. Religious conservatives whose views align with establishment churches will likely applaud Cremer’s efforts as will liberal readers interested in draining religion of its political potency. For political scientists and scholars of religion the book will be a useful guide to recent mutations in religious expression among right-wing movements. But readers with faith commitments different to Cremer’s may struggle to see the difference that Godless Crusade emphasises between establishment Christianity and the populists’. Cremer would have been on firmer ground in saying that right-wing populism more and more defines a fault line across different precincts of Western Christianity rather than painting everything to one side of that line as merely ersatz.

Stevan Veljkovic
Faculty of Theology and Religion
University of Oxford
stevan.veljkovic@theology.ox.ac.uk

07 August 2023