God in Government: Assessing the Modern Intersections and Implications of Religion and Secular Politics
Illustration by Matthew Weldon
Genesis: in the Beginning, Religion and Politics:
The entwinement of religion and politics is nothing new. In the 1960s and 1970s, scholars of religion proposed the widely accepted secularization theory which stated that the role of religion in modern society will eventually decline in influence and importance. Secularism is a worldview that is concerned with separating religion from various aspects of human life, especially within politics. In politics, secularism is a way of organizing a state and its society in relation to religion and belief. The three common core principles of secularism are institutional separation, freedom of belief, and no discrimination on the grounds of religion.
The secularization theory proposed three pillars. The first pillar prophesied that religion would lose state support. The second pillar predicted that religion would retreat into the individual, private lives of followers due to loss of public presence.The final pillar theorized that religion would lose public relevance and perhaps even vanish having lost state support and faced privatization. Many scholars such as Peter Berger and David Martin have since renounced this once widely acclaimed theory due to how relevant religion is in today’s debates and wars.
While religion’s often negative influence on politics is self-evident in theocratic states, the increasing entrenchment of religion within secular states serves as a constitutional and undemocratic threat. This article seeks to demonstrate how religious lobbying and the recasting of religion as culture delivers on this threat. Religion is unifying for many individuals and communities. Within politics however, religion has hijacked the public policies of secular states and is used as a divisive tool to further and uphold exclusionary fundamentalist agendas that are unrepresentative of its demographics nor its constitutional duty of secularity and preventing the abuse of power.
Religious Lobbying:
Religious Interest Groups (RIGs) often claim that their politicking brings two benefits to society: the first being the protection of religious liberty and second being the enhancement of democratic participation. It is indisputable that these two benefits are indeed essential and beneficial. However, the actual results of RIGs in politics show a much more complex and contradictory reality.
The Protection of Religious Liberty Under RIGs:
As mentioned, the first often cited benefit of RIGs is the protection of religious liberty. However, in reality, this benefit has not been consistently achieved. When a RIG successfully influences policy, it respects the religious liberties while simultaneously being aligned with the motives of the RIG – which ultimately, like most mainstream RIGs, is to have their religion reflected into legal frameworks. The permeation of a given RIG’s faith into public policy and law, gives power to that RIG. This isolates and marginalizes the religious perspectives of non-adherents since this process emphasizes the RIG's religion with regards to laws, at the expense of other religions or those who do not identify as religious. Thus, while the religious liberty of the RIG and its followers has been protected and promoted by the transformative power they hold, the citizens who do not share the same views have been done a disservice. For example, in 2022, Texas enacted a near-total abortion-ban that prohibits abortions as early as six weeks due to the Texas Heartbeat Act and makes no exceptions for rape or incest. This decision has been explicitly acknowledged as a faith-driven outcome as it requires every Texan to abide by a religiously-based law regardless of whether or not they adhere to that particular faith. The often radical power of RIGs generates a scenario in which RIGs, who are often unrepresentative of the population “seize” the government and steer public policy from public interest, to instead align with their faith. When this happens, nations begin to diverge from characteristics of a liberal democracy such as individual rights, diverse viewpoints, and pluralism, and instead gravitate towards a nation representative of illiberality.
Enhancement of Democratic Protection under RIGs:
As for the second claimed benefit for RIGs, due to the expansive quantitative reach of RIGs, they are used to imply that democratic participation is enhanced since a large segment of the population has a voice. For instance, RIGs represent nearly 60 per cent of the American population. It has been consistently observed however, that members are often disengaged, unaware of lobbying activities, and that decision-making is driven by senior officials. This creates the illusion of broad democratic participation but, in reality, this benefit actually leads to political disengagement of members, masks intra-religious dissent, causes policy and positional drift, and risks legislative capture. Ultimately, this deception furthers an unconstitutional departure from secularity and an undemocratic neglect for minority voices as democratic participation. Ironically, despite claiming to benefit democratic participation, RIGs may actually pave the way to undermine the voices of minorities, a leading sign that democracy may be endangered.
Religious Lobbying in America:
Money trails from RIGs play an undeniable role in lawmaking and policy such as moral-based legislation regarding abortion bans, including week-limits and whether or not there are exceptions for rapes and/or incest. Groups such as Priests for Life, Friends Committee on National Legislation, Women’s Christian Temperance Union, and American Jewish Congress have collectively spent over USD $350 million annually attempting to entrench religious values into the law. The quantitative and qualitative significance of RIG transactions cannot be ignored because when they are successful, all citizens are obliged to comply with a particular faith-based perspective, regardless of whether or not they believe in it. Making this occurrence more concerning is the number of registered religious advocacy groups dramatically increased from 38 in 1970 to 215 by 2010 in D.C. Despite this accelerating growth in the number, personnel, and financial expenditure of RIGs, their operational impact and institutional design have remained mostly unscrutinized by legal scholars. Instead of advancing advocacy, RIGs embed faith into common law and highlight the fragility of secularity when money is involved.
Religious Lobbying and the Overturning of Roe v. Wade:
For the last two decades, anti-abortion activists like the National Right to Life Committee and Americans United for Life have drafted anti-abortion model legislation and have lobbied continuously for their cause. A more recent example of the National Right to Life’s model legislation was their 2022 proposal to ban abortion and criminalize “aiding and abetting an abortion.” Coordinated political pressure from these groups’ promoted the limitation of abortion access and informed trigger laws in 13 states. Another example of this occurrence is the Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF), an American conservative Christian advocacy group. Its lawyers have won 15 Supreme Court victories, including the overturning of Roe v. Wade, allowing employer-sponsored health insurance to avoid birth control, rolling back limits on government support for religious organizations, protecting the anonymity of donors to advocacy groups, and blocking pandemic-related public-health rules. According to ProPublica’s nonprofit explorer, the ADF’s revenues have tripled from USD $38 million in 2012 to USD $104 million in 2022. The ADF played a vital role in the overturning of Roe v. Wade as it helped craft the model bill that became the Mississippi abortion ban that overturned Roe.
RIGs involved in the 2022 overturning of Roe v. Wade lobbied not just to have a voice in the debate, but more importantly to influence the outcome. This outcome has the power to affect countless lives, including the 63 per cent of American adults that want abortion to be legal in all or most cases according to a survey done by the Pew Research Center in 2024. In 2021, prior to the overturning of Roe v. Wade, 61 per cent of Americans supported abortion. Additionally, this overturning has proved to be lethal since physicians say the laws have been worded so vaguely that they lack the clarity on whether or not they can intervene and are fearful of the associated criminal penalties. This has led to delayed medical care and the death of several women including Porsha Ngumezi, Josseli Barnica, and Nevaeh Crain. In Louisiana, misoprostol, used for medication-abortion and other lifesaving purposes has been reclassified as a controlled substance. This reclassification is even more concerning when one considers the fact that it is used to keep patients from bleeding out, a leading cause of postpartum mortality. Controlled substances cannot be kept in emergency carts – mobile units that are stocked with essential medications, equipment, and supplies that can be easily accessed by medical professionals during critical care emergencies and where mere seconds are important when saving a life, the ramifications can be deadly. Furthermore, in Texas, these laws may be impacting the maternal mortality rate. The Gender Equity Policy Institute found that between 2019 and 2022, the rate increased by 56 per cent the state outlawed abortions. During the same period on a national scale however, the rate increased by only 11 per cent.
The same benefits that RIGs preach come at the price of millions of Americans being unheard and endanger the nation's ability to be considered a liberal democracy that runs on pluralism, individual autonomy, and a secular public sphere. Furthermore, it raises questions as to how structural integrity towards a country’s constitution or its neutrality towards religion can be upheld when faith is involved so heavily and oftentimes is the basis for public policy?
The Secular Smokescreen: How Populism Rewrites Religion as Culture:
Emerging in the 2000s, the fourth wave of populist radical right parties in Europe increasingly integrated religion into their discourse. Fratelli d’Italia (FdI) in Italy and Vox in Spain exemplify this by instrumentalizing Christianity for national identity narratives.
Both are non-confessional states with Catholic concordats, which are formal agreements between the Pope, representing both the Roman Catholic church and a state which aims to regulate church-related or ecclesiastical affairs within that country. These pacts have the force of international law and often address topics such as the appointment of bishops, religious education, and church property. For this reason, Catholicism is granted symbolic wright, and so the states, though secular, are still moderate about it. Both Fratelli d’Italia (FdI) in Italy and Vox in Spain use Christianity to appeal to their ideas of national identity and mold it. Both parties culturalize Christianity in attempts to entrench it within the national identity, serving these parties with a way to maintain a facade of being secular, whilst selectively excluding other religious denominations and perceiving it as a threat. This culturalization transforms secularism from a principle about state neutrality and religious freedom into a tool for majoritarian cultural dominance which erodes true pluralism.
Navigating Secular Italy and Spain: Culturalized Christianity and Christian Secularity:
The integration of religion in secular Italy and Spain is explained by understanding religion culturally as heritage as opposed to belief. This culturalized religion makes these two countries Christian because its inhabitants are serving as an identity marker rather than a theological creed or as a religious practice.
This sort of “secular Christianity” allows religious symbols to be reinterpreted as cultural artifacts. This kind of secularization aka camouflage of religion as culture allows these countries to more easily integrate religious tradition into the definition of its cultural identity. Parties can use this cultural use of religion to promote secularity when it comes to being more inclusive of other religions, whilst defending and maintaining Christian values since they are a part of the culture’s heritage. For example, since culture is not a religion, it can demand public privileges for Christian traditions, such as the public celebration of religious holidays such as Easter, without challenging state neutrality and secularity as in the West. Moreover, it licenses the restriction of the religious practices of other religions, such as the banning of burqas in Denmark without contradicting their commitment to religious freedom. For instance, Marine Le Pen, a far-right French politician can propose banning Muslim prayer in the streets and compare it to the Nazi occupation of France in World War II whilst simultaneously admitting that religious manifestations are traditional and rooted in local culture. Ultimately, religion is used as a scapegoat to pursue selected religions at the costs of others while using religious narratives to justify this. One religion is validated since its part of the culture’s history and heritage whilst others are not included at the same level since the country is “secular”.
Additionally, references to Christianity in speeches, although alluding to Christianity-based values, do not serve as a reference to Christian moral precepts, but rather a reference to Italian and Spanish traditions and customs. Ultimately, within the discourse of these parties, since Christianity is neither a creed, a cult, a system of moral precepts, nor an institution, defense of Judeo-Christian values are upheld whilst celebrating secularity as an achievement of European civilization.
Using this culturalized Christianity, secularity actually plays a role in their strategy of differentiation from Islam. To right-wing populist parties, Islam is a religion alien to the West, not only due to the differences in its practices, but more significantly because it is currently and historically unable to experience the process of secularization that defines the West. It should be noted that the concern of these parties is not about Muslim religious practices per se, but rather is focused on the visibility of Islam in public. Increasing visibility threatens the secularity that is so significant to them. Thus, secularism is sacralized and both parties embrace Christian secularism, selectively excluding Islam whilst affirming the Christian identity. FdI, for example, opposes "aggressive secularism" and defends Christian symbols, warning against "ethnic replacement” due to denying Judeo-Christian roots and culture.
Despite national disparities, religion is salient for the FdI and Vox. Both are advocates of Christian secularism and their cultural appropriation of religious doctrines and symbols enable them to legitimize illiberal policies under cultural defence such as the burkini ban. Consequently, religious discourse and populist tenets are fused together. If secularism can be reimagined to further certain, seemingly non-secular agendas, what implications does this hold for the fragility of true secularism elsewhere?
The Takeaway: The Secular Should Be Kept Secular
When secular countries turn their backs on the parts of their constitution that address secularism and religious freedom, their ability to serve all of their populations equally is significantly reduced and minorities become unprotected, which should not be happening within a liberal democracy. Moreover, it suggests that priority is not given to the prosperity of the nation’s residents, but is rather given to bolstering an agenda instead. Furthermore, this raises questions about the future of secularism and religious freedom. Secularization theory prophesied the erosion of religion from public policy due to growing secularism. But, is it actually the other way around - are secularism and religious freedom the real victims in danger of erosion? If action is taken to make secular actually feel secular, how should that be done?