Religious nationalism threatens liberal democracy around the world, at least according to many critics. Its leaders are said to include India’s Narendra Modi, Hungary’s Victor Orbán, Turkey’s Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, Brazil’s Jair Messias Bolsonaro, and America’s Donald Trump. In the United States, the phenomenon is often called “Christian nationalism” and, we are assured by its polemical and academic critics alike, it poses “an existential threat to American democracy.” 

Donald Trump, a twice-divorced playboy who never asks God for forgiveness, doesn’t have time for prayer, and rejects Jesus’s admonition to love your enemies, seems an odd person to lead America’s Christian nationalists. But, as Tobias Cremer explains in his important new book The Godless Crusade: Religion, Populism, and Right-Wing Identity Politics in the West, he represents today’s religious nationalists far better than someone who actually adheres to traditional Christian doctrines and practices. 

The Godless Crusade considers the rise of religious nationalism in Germany, France, and the United States. Cremer grounds his analysis in survey research done by others and “exclusive interviews with 114 populist leaders, key policy makers and faith leaders” in these three countries. His central conclusion is that “the new right is increasingly driven by a more secular but no less radical identarian struggle for Western Civilization: a godless crusade in which Christianity is turned into a secularized ‘Christianism,’ an ethno-cultural identifier of the nation and a symbol of whiteness that is increasingly independent of Christian practice, beliefs, and the institution of the church.”

After three introductory chapters, Cremer turns to his case study of Germany. Many European countries saw the formation of populist anti-immigration parties in the 1970s, but Germany’s Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) came into existence only in 2013. Initially, the party advocated for free markets and restrictions on abortion, sexual freedom, and gay rights. In 2015, in response to the influx of nearly 1,000,000 Islamic refugees, party members replaced its leaders with new ones who prioritized restricting immigration. 

AfD’s leaders occasionally reference Christianity, but according to Cremer the party’s “interpretation of ‘Christianity’ is primarily informed through a cultural, or even territorial, idea of Christendom and an opposition to Islam rather than a positive embrace of Christian values, beliefs, and institutions.” In a striking epigraph to one chapter, he quotes AfD president Alexander Gauland’s explanation: 

We do not seek to defend Christianity in any religious sense, but as a traditional way of life in Germany, as a traditional sense of home. Christianity is only a metaphor for the customs inherited from our fathers. 

Not only does AfD refuse to defend Christianity, statements by party leaders reveal an “explicitly anti-Christian undercurrent within the party.” Only one in three AfD parliamentarians identify as Christian (compared to 54% of all members of Parliament), and the party receives far more electoral support from irreligious voters than Protestants or Catholics. 

AfD has achieved some electoral success, but according to Cremer it is limited by two important factors. First, Germany’s Christian Democratic Party explicitly reaches out to religious voters, and unlike left-of-center parties in other western democracies, leftist parties in Germany have not “embraced increasingly secular politics and rhetoric.” Thus, religious voters feel they have welcoming alternatives to the AfD.

Perhaps more important, the Protestant and Catholic churches in Germany have been resolute in their opposition to AfD. Indeed, church leaders “directly attacked the AfD’s reference to religion as ‘perverted,” condemned its rhetoric as ‘hate speech,’ and declared the positions of its leadership to ‘stand in profound contradiction to the Christian faith.’”

The best-known right-wing party in Europe is Jean-Marie Le Pen’s Front National (FN), which was founded in 1972 and renamed Rassemblement National (RN) in 2018 under the leadership of Marine Le Pen. This French political party was originally a neo-fascist fringe movement that “included die-hard monarchists, former Vichy supporters and Nazi-collaborators” that attempted to appeal to Catholic traditionalists but which was never especially interested in religion. 

Marine Le Pen became FN’s leader in 2012. She removed open racists from leadership positions and shifted the party from focusing on race to culture. FN began to portray globalization and immigration as threats to French civilization, an important feature of which is Catholicism. And yet, under Marine Le Pen’s leadership the party abandoned its opposition to abortion, largely remained neutral on same-sex marriage, and defended “gay and women’s rights” as necessary to oppose Islam. 

Over the past fifty years, French bishops have largely remained out of politics. But they made an exception to this rule between 1972 and 2017 when they vocally opposed FN. They repeatedly warned “Catholics that the FN’s positions were ‘incompatible with the gospel and the teachings of the church’” and individual clergy denied “FN politicians the holy sacraments, priests refused to baptize Le Pen’s granddaughter, [and they preached] ubiquitous sermons against the FN and their positions.” Catholic leaders interviewed by Cremer are critical of RN as well; for instance, one bishop called it a “neo-pagan and atheist right [organization] . . . which has no affinity with Catholicism at all.” Nevertheless, in 2017 they retreated from their public criticism of the party, perhaps because they feared losing even more adherents (less than 2% of the population regularly goes to Mass). 

America remains far more religious than either France or Germany, but the phenomenal rise of the “nones” (from 16% of the population in 2007 to 29% in 2021) suggests that this may cease to be the case. Since the 1980s, many Americans with active religious lives (e.g., those who attend church, pray, etc.) have been attracted to the Republican Party because of its stances on cultural issues such as prayer in school, same-sex marriage, and abortion. In the 2016 presidential primaries, these voters overwhelmingly favored Jeb Bush, Ted Cruz, Marco Rubio, and Ben Carson, candidates who presented themselves as devout Christians and who embraced conservative values. 

During the primaries, Trump’s “most solid supporters were religiously unaffiliated voters (57%), whereas frequent churchgoers were the least supportive (29%).” His campaign featured only cursory “remarks about abortion, gay marriage, or religious freedom, and instead focused on ‘building a wall’ against immigrants, issuing a ‘Muslim ban’ and monitoring American mosques.” At the end of the day, Trump’s opponents divided the religious vote, and a twice-divorced playboy became the presidential nominee for what has been called God’s Own Party. 

Many religious Republicans who voted for other candidates in the primaries helped Trump to win the presidency in 2016. An important reason for this outcome is that these voters saw the only other viable alternative party and presidential candidate as being overtly hostile to their convictions. Although many progressive Christian leaders were critical of Trump, many conservative religious leaders who may have opposed his candidacy declined to criticize him, perhaps for fear that they would lose followers or their jobs. And, of course, Trump’s promise to appoint pro-life justices did much to sway these voters. 

Throughout his presidency, Trump used religious language and images to help reinforce support from religious Republicans. But he often did so in a ham-handed way, such as when he had Black Lives Matter protestors forcefully removed so that he could be photographed holding a Bible in front of St. John’s Episcopal Church in Washington, D.C. 

Cremer persuasively demonstrates that Germany’s and France’s far-right parties are dominated by irreligious people who utilize Christian images and language to help justify the defense of their respective civilizations, which they believe to be threatened by globalization and immigration. These parties are kept in check by other parties that are attractive to religious citizens, and by opposition from Protestant and Catholic leaders. Although Trump’s campaign and presidency: 

remained more closely aligned with conservative Christianity than RN in France or the AfD in Germany, the overall trajectory was the same: towards a gradual secularization of America’s right and the ‘culturalisation’ of Christianity in the context of the new right-wing identity politics that has fused with a secularized form of white Christian nationalism. 

Scholars have produced numerous articles and books focusing on religious nationalist movements in individual countries, but Cremer has performed a valuable service by comparing them in three nations. One can only hope that his excellent study spurs other scholars to compare religious nationalist movements in additional countries, including countries where most citizens do not identify themselves as Christians. 

The Godless Crusade offers a persuasive argument that nationalist identity movements are on the rise in Germany, France, and the United States. Although these movements often appropriate Christian language and symbols, they are best understood as secular rather than religious movements. Cremer suggests that those of us who favor relatively open immigration and pluralism have cause to be concerned about such movements, but fortunately he avoids the rhetorical excesses of the many critics who contend that such movements are bringing countries such as the United States to the brink of fascism.