Visible Religion and Populism: An Explosive Cocktail

Populism frequently uses the visibility of religious majorities and minorities as polemically charged references in the political controversy about cultural identity. Visible signs are evoked as positive identity markers and representations of the fiction of a homogenous society. The visibility of religions coming from an immigration background is more likely to be attacked as an invasion of foreigners who do not fit in the frame of an imagined authentic model of cultural unity. As the debates on the construction of mosques and minarets in European cities show, Islam becomes a synonym of differences perceived as problematic. Depending on the political agenda, invisible and quiet religions are preferred to the visible and politically more demanding ones. However, the opinions for or against a high degree of visibility are not necessarily shared within the religious communities. Their members can ask for discrete individual practices or for a strong collective presence in the public sphere. Populist discourses try to argue against manifestations of ostentatious visibility and use this fight as a platform for identity-driven propaganda that is interested in the exclusion of those who are considered as the threat to the well-being of the “people”. The visibility of religion thesis has to be dealt with carefully in the context of right-wing populism because of the toxic effects of all kinds of identity politics in the political as well as in the religious sphere. The conventional implications of the public–private split must be rearticulated in a context in which secularism is challenged by the return of visible religion and by the emergence of political ideologies playing with the fire of strong and exclusivist identity claims that are in conflict with ideals of tolerance, pluralism, and diversity management.