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The gods are once again at play in the public square. Around the globe, political claims are being advanced in the name of religion. Speaking in the Rose Garden on a spring day in 2024, President Trump declared that “we’re bringing religion back to our country, and it’s a big deal.” In the American political calendar, it was National Prayer Day and the most profane president in American history was announcing the establishment of the Religious Liberty Commission. Given the context and the identity of its members — who oddly include Dr. Phil and a former Miss America — it is reasonable to suspect that “religious liberty” does not mean the freedom to practice religion but the freedom to impose religion. Liberal criticisms of the politicization of religion, of the establishment of religion in the corridors of power, are bizarrely denounced as an attempt to suppress religion. This is all part of a global phenomenon — the remarriage of religion and politics. Their second marriage, you might say.

For a while it seemed that the crosier had been successfully divorced from the sword and religion had been evicted from the halls of power. Secularism has spoken in triumphalist tones for a long time. In 1902, for example, William James surmised that “religion is probably only an anachronism.” Half a century later, the American sociologist C. W. Mills predicted that “in due course, the sacred shall disappear altogether except, possibly, in the private realm.” Such confident predictions were spectacularly wrong. Now the gods are back and they are carrying not only a crosier and a holy book, but also a flag and even a gun. 

Four buildings

In December 1992, a horde of Hindu nationalists tore apart the Babri mosque in Ayodhya. This followed more than a decade of incitement by the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), targeting the 500-year-old mosque built on what Hindus regard as the birthplace of the god Ram. In the subsequent riots more than 2,000 people were killed. In 2024 the country’s president, Narendra Modi, who is also the leader of the BJP, consecrated a vast, flashy temple for Lord Ram on the site. His speech at the event had the theatrics of a religious sermon, but its content was unadulterated Hindu nationalism. The event, as Modi’s biographer summarized, marked “an era when the prime minister is the high priest of Hinduism, blurring all lines between religion and politics on the one hand and between religion and the Indian state on the other.”

Religious nationalism doesn’t just blur these lines of separation, it rejects them categorically. The wedding of religion and nationalism is not a marriage of convenience, but a union of conviction. They are not distinct notions glued together merely by political expediency, though the political rewards of religion are not lost on the unifiers. For religious nationalists, religion is nationalist and nationalism is religious. It is a fusion rather than a conjunction. 

The magnificent Hagia Sophia in Istanbul is an epitome of Byzantine architecture and one of Turkey’s grandest landmarks. For Turkey’s Islamists, however, this is not enough. In 1934 the medieval building, which had previously served as a Byzantine church and after the Arab occupation was converted into a mosque, was given a new and nonreligious identity as a museum by decree of Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, the founder of modern Turkey and a devout secularizer. But Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s Islamist government has reversed Atatürk’s secularization of the space despite legal obstacles and widespread opposition. For Erdoğan, the religious reclamation of the building was “a resurrection,” replenishing the nation’s spirituality and its “spirit of conquest.” Erdoğan described it as “a symbol of the re-rising of our civilization’s sun.” 

Erdoğan went on to claim that the Islamic character of the building, its mosqueness, was the foundation of Turkish sovereignty. 

Converting Hagia Sophia into a mosque . . . is no less a right of the Republic of Turkey than its flag, its capital, its adhan [call to prayer], its language, its borders, and its eighty-one provinces. 

In other words, questioning Turkey’s Islamism is tantamount to challenging its borders — an assault on its sovereignty. Erdoğan emphatically claimed “the Turkish nation’s right to the Hagia Sophia,” as if such a collective right is denied when the structure serves as a national museum. To express Turkish greatness, the historic landmark must be imbued with religious significance. The ancient structure, with all its glory and its history, is not enough. It must function as a Muslim shrine. (Does French pride in the cathedral of Notre Dame rest on Sunday Mass?) 

“The resurrection of Hagia Sophia heralds the liberation of the al-Aqsa Mosque,” Erdoğan declared. The shrine atop the Temple Mount in Jerusalem is another hotbed of religious nationalism. For over a century, nationalist Muslims and Jews have been quarreling over the site, regarding it as the Archimedean point of political legitimacy, of national sovereignty. “He who rules the mountain rules the land,” say the Jewish zealots. In their twisted worldview it is not the mountain that matters, but the deity to which the mountain is enshrined: in the Jewish tradition, the binding of Isaac took place on that peak. (And as a historical matter, the First and Second Temples, the centers of ancient Judaism, stood there.) In the Islamic tradition, however, the Prophet ascended from the same summit to heaven. Religious nationalism is now at the heart of the incessant strife between Israelis and Palestinians, as territorial conflict is increasingly becoming a holy war. It is also the driving force behind the government’s anti-liberal constitutional overhaul that has been tearing Israel apart in recent years. And the increasingly regular anti-Palestinian pogroms on the West Bank are motivated by a profoundly religious chauvinism.

In India, Turkey, and Israel, to choose three especially explosive examples, religious nationalism now dominates politics. The ruling coalitions in all three countries are firmly controlled by religious nationalist parties. But even where it is not organized in designated parties, the toxic cocktail of faith and flag is reshaping politics. Dissolve to Capitol Hill on January 6, 2021. A journalist who filmed the pro-Trump riot against the Constitution later recalled: “The Christianity was one of the surprises to me in covering this stuff, and it has been hugely underestimated. . . . Christian nationalism is the driving force and also the unifying force of these disparate players. It’s really Christianity that ties it all together.”

Obviously that insurrection had many causes, but there is no gainsaying the prominence of a certain strain of American Christianity among them. Many of the insurrectionists believed they were, in their own words. “taking America back for God.” Some waved the “Appeal to Heaven” flag, which has become a symbol of Christian nationalism. (It has been posted outside the office of House Speaker Mike Johnson and at one point it flew over Justice Samuel Alito’s vacation home). Some of the rioters knelt in prayer just before storming the building or they conducted prayers inside the chamber afterwards. The night before, General Michael T. Flynn rallied the crusaders using highly charged religious rhetoric, as did a host of other online preachers and prophets. (Supporters of Jair Bolsonaro, who ransacked Brazil’s Supreme Court, Congress, and presidential palace shouting “God! Homeland! Family! Freedom!” were running on the same theocratic fuel.) 

In the ancient world, overrunning holy sites was an assertion of victory. By imposing their might on the gods of the vanquished, the winners showcased their triumph and hoped to bury the losers’ spiritual identity under their own. These days, the gods are overrunning many of the bastions of secular power. Rather than rendering unto Caesar what is Caesar’s, their militant Christianity wishes itself to be Caesar.

State of denial

This unanticipated revival of providential politics is too often scanted. Critics are slow to voice condemnation, sometimes for fear that criticism will be mistaken for bigotry. In 2014, as the Islamic State was gaining ground and committing all sorts of atrocities, President Obama bluntly declared that “ISIL is not Islamic.” Soon after September 11, Salman Rushdie wrote in the Washington Post that “these are tyrants, not Muslims.” 

Two decades later Rushdie was stabbed multiple times by an Islamist fundamentalist. He lost an eye, but not his life. In the book that he wrote after the event, he grappled with the motives of his attacker. He recalls the stabbing of another writer almost a century earlier. In 1938, as Samuel Beckett was walking with friends near the Porte-d’Orléans in Paris, a pimp with the fable-ready name Prudence tried to mug him. Beckett shoved the assailant, who lunged back at him and stabbed the young writer in the chest. At the trial Beckett confronted his attacker and asked him why he did it, to which Prudence replied, “Je ne sais pas, monsieur. Je m’excuse.” (“I don’t know, sir. I’m sorry.”) 

But the two stabbings are hardly the same. Beckett’s stabbing was an act of senseless violence. The assault on Rushdie was no such thing: it was a premeditated and planned assault, driven by a very specific religious motive, one that had been inspired by a religious ruling in 1989, when Ayatollah Khomeini issued his notorious fatwa against the writer. That is not senseless violence. It is political violence and religious violence, just as the jihadis who took down the Twin Towers were both tyrants and Muslims and the mad mob that destroyed the Babri Masjid in Ayodhya were both tyrants and Hindus. The Jewish terrorists rampaging villages in the West Bank and murdering civilians in Gaza are both political thugs and religious zealots. We must describe reality correctly.

This applies not only to homicidal terrorists. Scholars also tend to dismiss the religious motives of right-wing extremists. In 2004, in his influential What’s the Matter with Kansas?, Thomas Frank cast religion as a mere accoutrement: “The leaders of the backlash may talk Christ, but they walk corporate.” As if religion is, to borrow the old Marxist term, always epiphenomenal, and can never serve as a sufficient cause or a sufficient explanation. Frank’s confident pronouncements — “Abortion is never halted. Affirmative action is never abolished. . . . It may never bring prayer back to the schools.” — have not aged well. Analyzing the current populist backlash, some scholars assert that “the Christian identity claimed by populists is not Christian” or that “Christianity is embraced not as a religion but as a civilizational identity.” This is much too neat. The political reputation of Christianity will not be saved by looking away from some of its actual consequences. 

Now, it is true that in some contexts, particularly in Northern and Western Europe, talk of Judeo-Christian values, of “the Judeo-Christian tradition,” (a collocation of breathtaking historical obtuseness, especially when cited by the descendants of Jew-haters) is deployed primarily to exclude Muslims — as a social weapon, not a religious weapon. Bigots do not need religion for their hatreds. It is also true that some contemporary theocrats — Catholic integralists, Dominionists, and Ultra-Orthodox Jews — are not necessarily nationalists. Still, the energy and the intensity of providential politics in our era derives from its fusion with belligerent nationalism. Religious nationalism is not reducible to nationalism. 

Classic nationalism aimed to supplant religion, which seemed to be in its death throes. And besides, faith and ritual were ill-suited to hold together diverse and modernizing societies. Many national founders — Bismarck, Mazzini, Atatürk, Ben-Gurion, Nehru, and even Gandhi in his way — were openly antagonistic to religion. But religious nationalists have their own version of their secular nationalist pasts: they insert devotional vocabulary and sentiment into their definition of the nation (which is why, despite their zealous nationalism, they often diminish their secular founders). 

Again, the tendency to discount the religiosity of political phenomena, especially when they are repugnant, has become a marker of civility, as if identifying religious influence is a form of religious intolerance. Yet whatever the etiquette of acceptable political speech, surely one must be tolerant and truthful. In the West, certainly, religion and political power have not been incompatible since Constantine; and the theocratic antiquities of Judaism and Islam are plain in their respective sources. If anything, they — religion and group identity, religion and nationalism, religion and power — have what Goethe called an elective affinity, a tendency to find each other and go together. 

The implicit logic of the reductivist view, it seems, is that since these are political currents, they are, by definition, not genuinely religious. This view assumes a categorical distinction between religion and politics — which is precisely what the new ecclesiocratic reality seems to refute. The liberal aspiration to separate politics from religion has mutated into an analytical presupposition that religion and politics are mutually exclusive. But history complicates the tidiness of such a demarcation. It was precisely as a recoil from the wars of religion in early modern Europe — from the disastrous effects of religion’s penetration of politics — that European liberalism was born.

Religious nationalism is a real phenomenon and a distinct one. It is not just xenophobia — or some variety of capitalism — embellished with ecclesiastical baubles. It may talk culture, but it walks Christ. It ought to be understood in its own terms, not distorted by ideological presumptions about how religion should manifest itself. 

The providential state

For religious nationalists, divorcing religion from the state is tantamount to emasculating both the religion and the state. Religion without a state is crippled and a state without religion is empty. Religion without a state is crippled because ecclesiastical ambitions can only be fully realized by worldly power, which is regarded as the historical proof of a religion’s truth. A state without religion is empty because the whole point of the state is to realize a divine purpose. Civitas terrena exists to serve civitas dei. 

For some, this sacralization of the state rests on a messianic vision. Some American evangelicals clearly take the “City on a Hill” quite literally, and the religious fervor of that understanding is exactly like their faith in the Sermon on the Mount, from which that ideal originates. The state, in this case the United States, is nothing less than a vessel of salvation. Some see Trump as a modern Cyrus, the heathen Persian emperor anointed by God to deliver the Israelites from the Babylonian exile, according to the prophet Isaiah. The Patriarch Kirill, the current leader of the Russian Orthodox church, invokes similar tropes to describe his tyrannical leader. Vladimir Putin, he teaches, is part of God’s plan to restore “Greater Russia.” Likewise there are febrile rabbis who have anointed Netanyahu a messianic figure. Religious Zionism, which used to be more diverse and less irrational, is today premised on a messianic conception of the Jewish state as the climax of a sacred history; its secular architects may have thought that they were creating a vehicle of political emancipation, but in fact they were being steered by God’s invisible hand to construct the chariot of redemption. According to political messianists, salvation is not an other-worldly spiritual affair, but a historical project. Its avatars are not individual souls but flesh-and-blood collectives. Whether it is bringing about the Rapture, reinstating the Kingdom of David, or establishing the Caliphate, it takes place terrestrially, in this world, and it is thoroughly political.

Most religious nationalists, however, are not messianic or eschatologically inclined in this sense. For them, religion requires temporal power because it requires a political community of faith, a civic order shaped by divine dictates; and it requires this for its vindication in the eyes of its believers. At the National Prayer Breakfast in 1993, President Clinton declared: “It is important to reaffirm that in this nation where we have freedom of religion, we need not seek freedom from religion.” He was quoting from a popular book by Stephen Carter, a Yale legal scholar, which argued that the liberal separation of church and state trivializes religion because religion is “a tradition of group worship.” The philosopher Richard Rorty, a devout atheist, rejected this argument. Even under a Jeffersonian separation of church and state, he contended, religion can still include group worship. “Our family or love lives are private, nonpolitical and non-trivial,” he wrote. “The poems we atheists write, like the prayers our religious friends raise, are private, nonpolitical and non-trivial.”

Rorty’s criticism is well taken, but it addresses Carter’s words, not his intention. Like Clinton, he overlooked Carter’s point, which was not that religion requires community, but that its aims and values should be reflected in political arrangements and expressed in public debate about them. The issue, in other words, is not freedom from religion, but religion’s public role. It is religion’s social and political ambitions that are trivialized by its relegation to the private sphere. 

While nonbelievers cannot live freely in a theocracy, the religious can exercise their faith in a liberal state. Setting aside a few civil regulations and laws (such as the French restrictions on religious attire in public institutions or the American ban on polygamy), believers would be hard pressed to list religious practices that they are precluded from performing. Liberalism was designed to guarantee “liberty of conscience.” Even in a Jeffersonian dispensation, therefore, religion may be encountered throughout the public square. But the new ecclesiocrats, even though they sometimes invoke the label of religious liberty, that is, the freedom to practice one’s religion without hindrance, are really intent on establishing the political authority of religion or, to be more precise, of a particular religion. 

Theirs is certainly not the only conception of religion available, but neither is it a recent invention or a fabrication. It is not unusual for religious traditions to regard the state as the secular arm of spiritual power. Abrahamic religions, at least in their canonical forms, place politics squarely within their purview. Religions make claims on civic life. They aspire not just to publicly practicing religion, but to shaping society through public institutions. The idea that religion can be a private matter is a Protestant novelty (though the most rigorous argument for the protection of personal belief from the compulsion of the state was made by the Jewish religious philosopher Moses Mendelssohn in his book Jerusalem), and one that, as we can readily see these days, struggles to maintain a foothold even among Protestants. The orthodox view sees the state as the body and religion as the soul. The state is the hardware, the Gospel is (or should be) the software. 

Though nonpolitical interpretations of most religions certainly exist, and some strains of American Christianity have wearied of the corruptions and seductions of politics and have come to prefer “the Benedict option,” the dominant traditions undeniably regard the state as a sphere of religious activity. Whether one endorses it or not, theocrats such as the Harvard legal scholar Adrian Vermeule, who advocate the enforcement of religiously grounded moral norms, have a solid ecclesiastical leg to stand on. Such claims can be justified in terms of sacred truth or by the demands of individual piety. One cannot live a fully Christian, or Hindu, or Muslim life in a secular state, it is said, because each of these religions makes claims on public life and civic institutions and has chosen to include political power among the fulfillments of spiritual life. The freedom to publicly express one’s faith — a miracle, by the standards of all our political and religious histories — is not enough. The ecclesiocrats also demand the authority to shape public affairs.

Both messianic and non-messianic versions of political religion subscribe to a providential conception of politics — to the idea that political institutions should serve as instruments of divine purposes. For messianists, this means facilitating a divine plan. For non-messianist theocrats, this means seeking religious fulfillment in the state. For messianists, politics is a redemptive enterprise. For non-messianists, religion is nonetheless inescapably political. A secular state is a stale and sterile thing, and a depoliticized religion is impoverished, debilitated, thwarted. 

As I say, these notions are not novel in orthodox religion and neither is the aspiration to reshape politics in light of them. But in recent years they have moved from the wings to center stage. What gives them broad reach and turns them into a potent political current is their ability to harness the rising tide of nationalism. Religious nationalism couches the imperatives of faith in the nonecclesiastical notions of culture and identity. 

Religion’s Cultural Turn

In 1925, John T. Scopes was prosecuted in Tennessee for violating the Butler Act, which made it illegal “to teach any theory that denies the story of the Divine Creation of man as taught in the Bible.” The prosecution argued that teaching evolution would undermine faith and lead to moral decay. In 2001, when Judge Roy Moore had a 5,000-pound monument to the Ten Commandments installed in the state capitol of Alabama, and adamantly refused to remove it, he did not appeal to the Holy Spirit but to the spirit of the nation: “This is not a nation established on the principles of Buddha or Hinduism. Our faith is not Islam. What we follow is not the Koran but the Bible. This is a Christian nation.” (A lawsuit in Federal court followed, the monument was declared unconstitutional, Judge Moore refused to move it, and he was suspended from the bench.) 

These days theocracy marches chiefly under the banner of culture and identity. Americans hear that they are “a Christian nation” with increasing frequency and increasing volume. This is an Americanized version of the sentiment professed by that high priest of European Christian nationalism, Viktor Orbán: “We must protect our Christian traditions in order to keep Hungary Hungarian.” The preamble to Hungary’s revised constitution from 2016 officially enshrines this religious basis of national identity, stating: “We recognize the role of Christianity in preserving nationhood.” The aim of religious observance is not to salvage souls, but to preserve a Volksgeist.

In a similar vein, Narendra Modi described the provocative Hindu shrine in Ayodhya as “a temple of national consciousness.” Its erection atop the ruins of a mosque is an expression of “unwavering faith in Indian culture.” The former Polish president Andrzej Duda argued that abolishing religious instruction would “remove an inalienable part of Polishness,” while Jarosław Kaczyński, leader of the country’s anti-liberal Law and Justice party, claimed that the church must have an authoritative position because “the foundation of Polishness is the Church and its teachings.” On this view, abortion must be banned because it is inconsistent with Poland’s Catholic character. Israel does not operate public transportation on the Sabbath, even though more than seventy percent of the population supports doing so, not because God prohibited the practice but “because it is a Jewish state.” 

In America, banning abortion, gay marriage, pornography, and no-fault divorce, limiting access to contraceptives, and eliminating sexual health education, while introducing bible study and school prayer — all of these policies are pushed on the basis of the country’s purported Christian essence. When these Christianizers describe the United States as a Christian country, they are not speaking sociologically. It is true, as an empirical matter, that most of the citizens of the United States are Christians — yet the liberal dispensation of the First Amendment, its religious neutrality, is based not on numbers, on how many Christians live in the country, but on principles. 

All this marks a seminal shift. The previous generation of conservatism pushed for a small government which would create a framework within which individuals would be free to live as they chose. “The conservative looks upon politics as the art of achieving the maximum amount of freedom for individuals that is consistent with the maintenance of the social order,” Barry Goldwater wrote in The Conscience of a Conservative. Despite occasional conservative collaboration with theocrats and religious nationalists, the latter remained marginal. The intellectual guides of mainstream conservatism were libertarians such as Friedrich Hayek and liberal conservatives such as Michael Oakeshott. Its political messengers were “small government” establishment figures such as Nixon and Thatcher. This conservatism conceived of itself as an heir to Enlightenment values of universalist humanism, rationality, and individual freedom. 

The current crop of reactionaries sometimes still brands itself “conservative,” but sets itself up in ardent opposition to liberalism and the Enlightenment. Far from the prudent and reflective temperament of Burkean conservatism, they wax revolutionary, aiming to upend established norms and institutions, both foreign and domestic. And at the heart of this shift, of their certainty, stands religion. Or rather, the political role of religion. Their intellectual guides include theistic thinkers, God-hearing prophets, and revivalist preachers, and their political agents are religious nativists. But their arguments are unabashedly identitarian. 

Senator Josh Hawley recently told a crowd of supporters that it is not religious liberty that binds Americans together, but religion. “Most Americans share broad and basic religious convictions. Theistic, biblical, Christian . . . these are things . . . that make us a nation.” Therefore, “conservatives must defend our national religion and its role in our national life.” Promoting Christianity in public affairs, preferring Christians as their rulers, shaping laws in line with “Christian values” — these are all defended by the claim that America was founded as a Christian nation. 

Even theocrats who are not particularly nationalist turn to the rhetoric of identity. When he was still a cardinal, Joseph Ratzinger often spoke about secularism, or failing to “embrace our own heritage of the sacred,” as a denial of “the identity of Europe.” The insertion of religion into politics is imposed not in the name of divine decree but as a demand of identity. Tradition is anchored not in revelation or metaphysical truth, but in fidelity to culture. “It is not a matter of believing in God or not,” according to Yoram Hazony. “It’s a matter of whether you honor the traditions of your nation.” Patrick Deneen stresses “the priority of culture” and advocates “preserving the commonplace traditions of a polity.” The new ecclesiocrats are post-theological. Metaphysics is subordinate to history and culture takes the place of revelation.

They do not argue that gay marriage should be banned because it is “so abominable in the sight of God, that He destroyed the cities of Sodom and Gomorrah because of this terrible sin,” as Jerry Falwell did. That is to say, their claim is not theological, but cultural: that homosexuality — like all significant extensions of equality and revisions of social mores — erodes the old, that is religious, values which underpin our culture. Their claims are not doctrinal and the express aim of many of them is not to impose dogma, ritual, or clerical rule. Instead, they stake the validity of religious principles on their indispensability for preserving a certain national character. Patriotism, and of a very exclusivist sort, is their surrogate for piety.

The fatal conceit

Theocracy’s cultural turn disarms its opponents. After all, it was liberals and the left who wove culture and identity into the fabric of politics. In the latter quarter of the twentieth century, multiculturalism and communitarianism emerged as supplements to liberalism, insisting on the importance of culture and communal associations to human flourishing. Initially, these were proposed primarily as footnotes to liberal political theory, stressing the need to protect minority cultures against assimilationist pressures. Communitarian thinkers stressed the role of ends and values inherited from unchosen cultural and religious associations, and championed the importance of communal cohesion and shared political culture for liberalism itself. 

It was not long, however, before these friendly amendments, offered as a balm, hardened into a blade. Repurposed by reactionaries, the liberationist promise was replaced with conservative retrenchment. Rather than defend the plurality of cultures and encourage free engagement with one’s own, they chose to dwell on obligations and boundaries — obligations of fidelity and boundaries to protect the kinds of cultural engagement that conform to the standards of fidelity. 

An example of this slippery shift can be found in the work of Alasdair MacIntyre, the most sophisticated among the communitarian thinkers of the previous generation. While liberals were talking about “being the author of one’s life story,” MacIntyre argued that “the key question for men is not about their own authorship; I can only answer the question ‘What am I to do?’ if I can answer the prior question ‘Of what story or stories do I find myself a part?’” These stories are dictated to us by tradition: we are born into these stories, we do not choose them. “I find myself part of a history and that is generally to say, whether I like it or not, whether I recognize it or not, one of the bearers of a tradition.” From this almost banal proposition MacIntyre derived a stifling imperative — to “[sustain] those traditions which provide both practices and individual lives with their necessary historical context.” To sustain them, and then to reproduce them. The cultural buffet turned into ancestral force-feeding.

It is a small step from this conservative mandate to the idea that the state should enforce at least some of these traditions. Imposed customs and traditions, which John Stuart Mill saw as “despots” stifling individual self-development, are for Patrick Deneen guardrails which “protect the stability and order that most benefits ordinary people.” As such, they can be shoved on individuals against their will (creating “a non-voluntarist cultural landscape,” as he slyly puts it), not only because they serve their “real” interests but in the name of “defend[ing] a preeminent role of cultural institutions.” Although he acknowledges that this is a form of the tyranny of the majority, Deneen exonerates it as “benign” and “deeply democratic,” apparently because — whether the objectors recognize it or not — these cultures are their own. That is all we need to know. This is reminiscent of Rousseau’s notion of forcing people to be free, which liberals, from Benjamin Constant to Isaiah Berlin, regarded as a prelude to oppression. 

Such a culturally authoritarian development was invited by the conservative communitarianism of the previous generation. If culture is a manacle rather than an invitation — an inherited diktat to which one must submit rather than a legacy that one is free to inflect and make one’s own — then a good society is one that encourages, even if it does not compel, submission rather than autonomy. For the new ecclesiocrats, freedom means the freedom to revere and obey. In the words of Project 2025, “Our Constitution grants each of us the liberty to do not what we want, but what we ought.” Viktor Orbán calls this “Christian liberty” — the liberty to obey what the state determines to be “our” Christian heritage.

It is hard to overlook the irony of such conservatism being advocated in the name of the Abrahamic religions, whose founders — Abraham, Jesus, and Muhammad — were all rebels. Each of them broke away from their tribes and turned against their inherited creeds; each of them founded a heterodoxy. Irony aside, the main point — the crucial gambit — is the usurpation of the living, unfettered, and open-ended notion of culture by a rigid, foisted, and thoroughly “non-voluntarist” concept of tradition. 

Culture is essentially dynamic, plural, and contested. It evolves with shifting experiences, changing demographics, novel ideas, and advancing technologies. It is an invitation, not a mandate — a plenitude, not a doctrine — which is why it is consistent with individual freedom. Under the label of “tradition,” however, it hardens into a single dogmatic thing, a sealed package bequeathed from the past, to which one must assimilate and which one must pass on completely intact. In this way culture shrinks into an imperative and identity becomes a spiritual straitjacket. 

This invites a fatal conceit: casting themselves as culture’s sole guardians, the new ecclesiocrats anoint themselves its exclusive arbiters. Why are the imagined “family values” of the Puritans a more authentic part of American heritage than the sexual revolution and civil rights? (Because they happened earlier?) What makes Orthodox Judaism, detested by many of Zionism’s founders, more of a Jewish expression than the secular Hebrew culture that they created? Is Erdoğan’s Islamism more Turkish than Kemalist secularism? Under the cover of cultural density, the self-proclaimed apostles of the nation are imposing their own version of a multifaceted collective heritage on all the rest. And they do the same with identity. In heterogenous societies there cannot be one settled version of national identity. There is never a single answer about what it means to be an American, a Turk, or a Hindu. National identity is an open question which always receives multiple answers. By politicizing it, the ecclesiocrats seek to foist their interpretation upon their society and delegitimize all the others. As Orhan Pamuk nicely put it, “they are taking away the pride of being both Muslim and secular simultaneously.” This is what identity politics looks like when it moves from left to right. 

The enemy within, or us

If theocracy’s cultural turn makes it harder for liberals to confront it, it makes it easier for different kinds of theocrats to band together. For despite its cultural lingo, religious nationalism is grounded in religion. Although it is evangelized in folkish terms, its only claim to supremacy is its divine provenance. This is a bait and switch — the terrestrial notion of identity is the bait and the transcendent authority of the supernatural is the switch. This allows religious nationalists to make common cause with theocrats who may not be nationalists (such as Dominionists and Catholic integralists). Their shared aim is to tear down the wall of separation between church and state. 

Enlightenment secularism proposed a momentous distinction between a crime and a sin. That is, between an offense against society and an offense against God or tradition. The new ecclesiocrats sneak God back in by making what they regard as deviance from tradition an offense against society. This maneuver also identifies the enemy. When Erdoğan turned the museum into a mosque he was fighting not the crusaders but “internal Byzantines,” as he calls his opponents. He was sending a message to secular Turks such as Pamuk. Those who oppose his policies are not only turning their backs on Allah, they are traitors to the nation, and in effect to themselves: “may Allah not test this nation again with those who are hostile to its values.” And Pamuk got the message. The conversion of Hagia Sophia, he said, “simply means that we don’t respect Kemal Atatürk’s secularism anymore . . . But I am also a Turkish citizen and I am, like many millions of people who are secularists, against this. Unfortunately, our voices are not heard.”

Orbán, who once advocated “illiberal democracy,” now full-throatedly advocates for “Christian democracy” and identifies the enemy accordingly: 

When they attack Christian culture they are also attempting to eliminate Europe. They want to take our life from us and exchange it for something that is not our life. In return for the life we have lived up to now they are promising one which is new and more enlightened.

“They” are not the Muslims, but the liberal secularists (whether they are believers or not), those who aim to replace a cherished form of life with new and modified and “more enlightened” life-forms. If Hungarian culture is indeed limited to Orbán’s Christian culture, then all the other Hungarians in Hungary are a Westernizing fifth column. If national identity is fixed and specific, then all those who stray from it are traitors to themselves and to the nation. Poles who are pro-choice aim “to destroy Poland,” according to Kaczyński. Liberal Israelis “have forgotten what it means to be Jewish,” Netanyahu once whispered in the ears of a revered rabbi. Describing secular Europeans, Ratzinger used an extraordinary phrase: he called them “apostates to themselves.” Treachery and apostasy — national betrayal and religious rebellion — merge into the cardinal sins of self-doubt and self-negation.

The current surge in authoritarian politics cannot be understood apart from the rise of religious nationalism. However cynical authoritarianism’s instrumental exploitation by some of its leaders, their popular support draws from deep wellsprings of religious and nationalist fervor. The revolt against the secularization of politics has been revived not as theocracy but as nationalism (and never mind the long history of liberal nationalism). It claims not the mantle of the prophet but of the nation-builder, summoning culture and identity rather than divine decree — but all the while its theological ambitions persist, as does the threat that it poses to free societies. 

No, the new ecclesiocrats are not aiming to revive the Inquisition. They do not generally demand ritual observance or public declarations of faith, nor do they openly aspire to clerical rule. Their goal, rather, is to sculpt the architecture of power by the cast of their creed. They arrogate to themselves the authority to shape laws, civic institutions, and cultural and public spaces irrespective of democratic choice and unhindered by constraints of fairness and toleration. And, most importantly, they claim the power to determine who belongs to the polity and who does not, who gets to count as a real American, a genuine Turk, a true Jew, and who is merely a guest, or worse, a backstabbing interloper. And they do so by invoking religious authority. This may not be your grandmother’s religion, but it is one of the principal forms that religion now takes. To counter it, an equally principled commitment to the secularization of politics — which emphatically includes the freedom of religion — is indispensable. A free society should not infringe on personal belief, but it cannot disregard providential politics and exclusivist designs upon power. No faith is owed political power, regardless of the number of its adherents in the society. Tolerating the intolerant is a recipe for tyranny. 

“History,” Thomas Jefferson wrote in 1813, “furnishes no example of a priest-ridden people maintaining a free civil government.” The return of the gods into the halls of earthly power always happens the same way: it is never the gods who occupy the offices, but only those who presume to speak for them. In his Rose Garden speech, President Trump, with all the guilelessness of his ignorance, laid it out: “They say separation between church and state . . . I said, ‘All right, let’s forget about that for one time.’” But one time may be all it takes.