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Religion and the Rise of Populism
Populism is on the rise around the world. Since 2016, with the US presidential election and the Brexit debate in the UK, populism has taken a central place in global discussions on democracy. This book aims to correct the oversight that, although religion has played a key role in populism in many countries, it has been curiously neglected in recent academic debates. The authors use case studies from around the world to provide global insights into this issue. The first part of the book focuses on the West, with authors exploring the important role of Anglican voters in the Brexit referendum; rural and pre-millennialist American support for Donald Trump; and the rise of political rhetoric on Muslims in Germany, Switzerland, and Austria. The book then moves beyond the West to consider leaders and political parties in Turkey, Macedonia, Greece, Kyrgyzstan, and Kazakhstan. The authors consider varied populist types, from more established ‘ruling populists’ to young upstart movements. This wide-ranging volume redefines the concept of populism as a political style that sets a ‘sacred people’ apart from its enemies, providing a timely yet grounded account that will stimulate further research and public debate. It was originally published as a special issue of the journal Religion, State & Society .
134 pages, Hardcover
Published July 23, 2019
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September 28, 2025
My review:
Five stars for "medicinal value" (topic importance).
Religion and the Rise of Populism (2019) is a rather challenging read. I've read my share of dry books and this one's right up there. Each article gets into the weeds with the internal politics and religions of a different country or group of countries. There are lots of political party names and acronyms I hadn't heard before and couldn't remember after a few pages - a glossary would help. Fortunately it shouldn't be long before AI-enabled ebook readers will build glossaries automatically, but we're not quite there yet.
Kudos to the contributors for being brave enough to challenge the seeming gentlemen's agreement to analyze politics in terms of anything but religion. In my United States, there's a kind of unspoken rule that you don't question anyone's faith. But that becomes a severe handicap when the ruling party is shaping policy on the basis of faith claims rather than evidence. To borrow a legal term, when religion stops being purely private and individual it waives privilege, or should.
The Notes on Contributors section indicates that most are sociologists or political scientists. The writing style is different than what I'm used to, as it is virtually devoid of psychology and critical analysis of the subjects' actual beliefs. Instead it's just mostly a detached description of what the various parties and groups are called and some of their externally observable and quantifiable activities.
Reading this book reminded me of the old behaviorist school of psychology, which focused mostly on externally observable behaviors of experimental animals, while largely ignoring the inner workings of minds - or even denying the mind's relevance. This is strange to me, since the contributors write articles full of fact claims, statistics, history, and so on, as if they believe an objective reality exists and it is accessible to humans. And yet the people they are writing about are acting at least in part on the basis of provably false beliefs - or at the very least, beliefs that are far from being proven true.
For starters, the diversity of religions and sects, each one making claims that contradict the others, proves that they cannot all be correct. At most one religion could be correct in its claims that contradict the claims of other religions. This means that all, or at best all but one, religion must assert false claims. Which in turn means the great majority of religious believers must believe falsehoods. To the degree that religious beliefs motivate political behavior, we can be nearly certain the behavior is motivated by belief in falsehood.
For the flavor of populism I'm most familiar with - Trumpism - whole books have been written about the false claims of Trump and his authoritarian followers. For just a partial listing, see: Donald Trump and His Assault on Truth: The President's Falsehoods, Misleading Claims and Flat-Out Lies (2020). So in my view, the most interesting aspect of the unholy alliance between Trumpism and Christianity is the role of misbelief. Why do some people fall for Trump's lies? As well as for the lies of Christianity. This book barely hints at it, by noting the inverse correlation between support for populist politics and educational attainment. Generally speaking, the farther people get in school, the more capable they become of critical thinking, and the less susceptible they are to political appeals optimized for uncritical thinkers.
Thus to a rough approximation, we could say the rise of populism depends on the existence of a large pool of people who can fall for the demagoguery of populist politicians. Generally these are people who don't know what's in books like Critical Thinking: The Art of Argument (2014). The continued persistence of religion also depends on people whose critical thinking games are weak.
But if you only read this book, you might not have any idea that tens of millions of Trump voters believe the Creation Museum and Ark Encounter give them reliable facts about science and history.
I don't think there's evidence that people have suddenly gotten stupider. Large numbers of poeple - majorities, in fact - have always been susceptible to misbeliefs. What's changed recently - in the US, anyway - has been the ability of Trump to weaponize the background rate of stupidity. This book could have been a comparative study of misbeliefs in populist movements around the world. I don't know enough about populism outside the USA to be sure, but if the American variety is any guide, there must be a lot of crazy counterfactual beliefs in other populist movements.
If, as I suspect, populism rests on a foundation of falsehoods, it's hard to imagine an effective response to populism without correcting those factual and logical errors. And that could be very difficult. You can't talk a person into being smarter any more than you can talk them into being taller. You might be able to get them to do a bit more with the level of smarts that they have - that's what education tries to do - but you can't really increase a person's raw cognitive horsepower yet. Much as you usually can't take a person with no athletic ability and turn them into an Olympian. For that we will need breakthroughs in the technology of human enhancement, which might be decades or centuries in the future (if the habitable world will last that long).
Books on the science of human intelligence difference (such as In the Know: Debunking 35 Myths about Human Intelligence (2020)) emphasize that people of high intelligence often have difficulty understanding what life is like for people of low intelligence. This is an example of the psychologist's fallacy - the fallacy of trying to understand another person's mind in terms of one's own mind. The contributors to this volume are highly educated, and are thus quite unlike many of the folks who make up the faiths and political movements they study.
David Levy in chapter 5 might be committing that fallacy, when he casts about for some rational explanation for why people would vote to have less freedom. Maybe Levy is being too generous when he assumes that everybody is cognitively able to understand what their rational self-interest actually is. For starters no human is entirely rational, not even the most educated and intelligent. At best, humans can be boundedly rational. And as you go down the IQ distribution, generally speaking, the ability of people to be rational becomes increasingly bounded and/or compartmented. A person of modest intelligence can be rational when it comes to learning not to stick metal forks into electrical outlets, but their rational capacity takes a holiday when they listen to Fox News.
The dearth of rationality is experimentally demonstrable by presenting people with simple tests of reasoning ability, such as the Wason selection task (which about 90% of people fail) and the cognitive reflection test. Levy points out that his fellow political analysts struggle to explain why people would vote against their own interests. The psychologist's fallacy would suggest that this struggle results from the smart observer being unable to comprehend what it is like to be less smart. If you're smart enough to recognize Trump for the con-man he is, it may be nearly impossible for you to imagine how this could not be equally obvious to everyone.
If this book is a fair reflection of the field(s), my advice to sociologists and political scientists would be: read all the psychology you can, especially evolutionary psychology, differential psychology, psychometry, biopolitics, and the psychology of misbelief. The contributors to this volume don't seem to have ventured far in those directions yet.
Five stars for "medicinal value" (topic importance).
Religion and the Rise of Populism (2019) is a rather challenging read. I've read my share of dry books and this one's right up there. Each article gets into the weeds with the internal politics and religions of a different country or group of countries. There are lots of political party names and acronyms I hadn't heard before and couldn't remember after a few pages - a glossary would help. Fortunately it shouldn't be long before AI-enabled ebook readers will build glossaries automatically, but we're not quite there yet.
Kudos to the contributors for being brave enough to challenge the seeming gentlemen's agreement to analyze politics in terms of anything but religion. In my United States, there's a kind of unspoken rule that you don't question anyone's faith. But that becomes a severe handicap when the ruling party is shaping policy on the basis of faith claims rather than evidence. To borrow a legal term, when religion stops being purely private and individual it waives privilege, or should.
The Notes on Contributors section indicates that most are sociologists or political scientists. The writing style is different than what I'm used to, as it is virtually devoid of psychology and critical analysis of the subjects' actual beliefs. Instead it's just mostly a detached description of what the various parties and groups are called and some of their externally observable and quantifiable activities.
Reading this book reminded me of the old behaviorist school of psychology, which focused mostly on externally observable behaviors of experimental animals, while largely ignoring the inner workings of minds - or even denying the mind's relevance. This is strange to me, since the contributors write articles full of fact claims, statistics, history, and so on, as if they believe an objective reality exists and it is accessible to humans. And yet the people they are writing about are acting at least in part on the basis of provably false beliefs - or at the very least, beliefs that are far from being proven true.
For starters, the diversity of religions and sects, each one making claims that contradict the others, proves that they cannot all be correct. At most one religion could be correct in its claims that contradict the claims of other religions. This means that all, or at best all but one, religion must assert false claims. Which in turn means the great majority of religious believers must believe falsehoods. To the degree that religious beliefs motivate political behavior, we can be nearly certain the behavior is motivated by belief in falsehood.
For the flavor of populism I'm most familiar with - Trumpism - whole books have been written about the false claims of Trump and his authoritarian followers. For just a partial listing, see: Donald Trump and His Assault on Truth: The President's Falsehoods, Misleading Claims and Flat-Out Lies (2020). So in my view, the most interesting aspect of the unholy alliance between Trumpism and Christianity is the role of misbelief. Why do some people fall for Trump's lies? As well as for the lies of Christianity. This book barely hints at it, by noting the inverse correlation between support for populist politics and educational attainment. Generally speaking, the farther people get in school, the more capable they become of critical thinking, and the less susceptible they are to political appeals optimized for uncritical thinkers.
Thus to a rough approximation, we could say the rise of populism depends on the existence of a large pool of people who can fall for the demagoguery of populist politicians. Generally these are people who don't know what's in books like Critical Thinking: The Art of Argument (2014). The continued persistence of religion also depends on people whose critical thinking games are weak.
But if you only read this book, you might not have any idea that tens of millions of Trump voters believe the Creation Museum and Ark Encounter give them reliable facts about science and history.
I don't think there's evidence that people have suddenly gotten stupider. Large numbers of poeple - majorities, in fact - have always been susceptible to misbeliefs. What's changed recently - in the US, anyway - has been the ability of Trump to weaponize the background rate of stupidity. This book could have been a comparative study of misbeliefs in populist movements around the world. I don't know enough about populism outside the USA to be sure, but if the American variety is any guide, there must be a lot of crazy counterfactual beliefs in other populist movements.
If, as I suspect, populism rests on a foundation of falsehoods, it's hard to imagine an effective response to populism without correcting those factual and logical errors. And that could be very difficult. You can't talk a person into being smarter any more than you can talk them into being taller. You might be able to get them to do a bit more with the level of smarts that they have - that's what education tries to do - but you can't really increase a person's raw cognitive horsepower yet. Much as you usually can't take a person with no athletic ability and turn them into an Olympian. For that we will need breakthroughs in the technology of human enhancement, which might be decades or centuries in the future (if the habitable world will last that long).
Books on the science of human intelligence difference (such as In the Know: Debunking 35 Myths about Human Intelligence (2020)) emphasize that people of high intelligence often have difficulty understanding what life is like for people of low intelligence. This is an example of the psychologist's fallacy - the fallacy of trying to understand another person's mind in terms of one's own mind. The contributors to this volume are highly educated, and are thus quite unlike many of the folks who make up the faiths and political movements they study.
David Levy in chapter 5 might be committing that fallacy, when he casts about for some rational explanation for why people would vote to have less freedom. Maybe Levy is being too generous when he assumes that everybody is cognitively able to understand what their rational self-interest actually is. For starters no human is entirely rational, not even the most educated and intelligent. At best, humans can be boundedly rational. And as you go down the IQ distribution, generally speaking, the ability of people to be rational becomes increasingly bounded and/or compartmented. A person of modest intelligence can be rational when it comes to learning not to stick metal forks into electrical outlets, but their rational capacity takes a holiday when they listen to Fox News.
The dearth of rationality is experimentally demonstrable by presenting people with simple tests of reasoning ability, such as the Wason selection task (which about 90% of people fail) and the cognitive reflection test. Levy points out that his fellow political analysts struggle to explain why people would vote against their own interests. The psychologist's fallacy would suggest that this struggle results from the smart observer being unable to comprehend what it is like to be less smart. If you're smart enough to recognize Trump for the con-man he is, it may be nearly impossible for you to imagine how this could not be equally obvious to everyone.
If this book is a fair reflection of the field(s), my advice to sociologists and political scientists would be: read all the psychology you can, especially evolutionary psychology, differential psychology, psychometry, biopolitics, and the psychology of misbelief. The contributors to this volume don't seem to have ventured far in those directions yet.
Displaying 1 of 1 review