The Godless Crusade considers the rise of religious nationalism in Germany, France, and the United States
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 Christi...
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.
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.”
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