Perceived Threat, Reactive Identification, and Religious Change: Right-Wing Secularization in Germany, 1999–2017
Corwin E. Smidt
Round 1
Reviewer 1 Report
Comments for author File: 
Comments.pdf
Author Response
I would like to thank the two reviewers for their helpful feedback. I would also like to thank the editor. I here describe how I have addressed the reviewers’ comments below.
Reviewer 1
Reviewer 1 asks that I provide justification for the coding of the ideology variable. I now provide this justification in the 8th footnote on page 10. Very few respondents categorize themselves as either 9 or 10 (perhaps due to social desirability bias, though I do not speculate about the reason in the article). Even among AfD supporters, 5, 6, 7, and 8 are each individually more common self-assessments than 9 and 10. I explain the fact that there are very few cases for both categories 9 (50 cases) and 10 (102 cases), whereas 5 is by far the most common self-assessment with 1,465 cases. While the coding scheme I employ provides a greater range of opportunities for someone to be classified as right-wing, I think it is the most appropriate coding scheme because of the distribution of the ideology variable. With the coding scheme employed for this dataset, there are 1,705 left-wing cases, 1,465 moderate cases, and 1,553 right-wing cases.
The reviewer asks that I provide justification in the form of a footnote for my foreign domination variable. This justification can now be found in the 9th footnote on page 11. In my view, it is a better decision to combine these responses rather than analyze them separately because they come from the ALLBUS dataset in which two of the three metrics of religiosity (the dependent variable I present in relation to fear of foreign domination) are contained in the International Social Survey Programme module, which is a subsample of the ALLBUS dataset. Combining the responses thus assures that there are enough cases to conduct the analysis.
Author Response File: Author Response.pdf
Reviewer 2 Report
The author argues that security came to be part of East German identity during the long period of communist rule. In consequence, politically conservative East Germans have responded to external threats not with reactive religiosity but with reactive nonreligiosity. The hypothesis is plausible, the analysis is reasonably persuasive, and the work is highly accomplished. The comments that follow are offered as reflections for the author to consider rather than as criticisms that must be addressed.
In relation to East Germany as an exception, I recommend:
Jörg Stolz, Detlef Pollack, Nan Dirk De Graaf (2020) Can the State Accelerate the Secular Transition? Secularization in East and West Germany as a Natural Experiment, European Sociological Review 36(4): 626–42. https://doi.org/10.1093/esr/jcaa014
Wallis and Bruce (1995) discussed the way that religion can persist when it helps to promote cultural defence or cultural transition. Interestingly, the East German situation is arguably one where nonreligion serves a defensive function. See:
Roy Wallis, Steve Bruce (1995) Secularization: The Orthodox Model. In The Sociology of Religion. Edited by Steve Bruce, pp. 693–715. Aldershot: Elgar.
The author contends that “this is the first article to find a period of right-wing secularization in any context.” That might be correct, but there are interesting developments elsewhere that could be cited without detracting from the potential uniqueness of this contribution. For example, highly Islamophobic populist movements in the Netherlands have been led by people like Pim Fortuyn and Geert Wilders, who view Muslim immigration as a threat to Dutch secular society. They claimed to be defending progressive values (rather than traditional Christian values) in the face of a reactionary foreign ideology. It is an open question whether such rhetoric actually promoted secularization or merely appealed to people who were already suspicious of religion. It is interesting, though, that nativist campaigns are not necessarily based on Christian nationalism (as in Hungary, for example). At least in much of western and northern Europe, they can now exploit a general antipathy to religion.
The author presents the hypothesis based on symbolic threat dynamics as an alternative to secularization and religious economy theories. I doubt that many people outside a few scholars educated a couple of decades ago in the United States still regard the market model as a serious contender in explaining religious change. Conversely, it is simplistic to assert that “the claims of secularization theory are also incongruous with the religious revival of other Eastern Bloc nations.” On the contrary, the paradigm suggests that the level of religious involvement is connected with the degree of modernization. Religion had obviously been suppressed by communist governments, and when those rulers fell from power, one would expect religion to rebound to a level that was more consistent with the nature of those societies.
One would usually suspect that socio-economic status is relevant, and immigration might have been perceived to be a greater threat by East rather than more prosperous West Germans. It is good that the author has been able to test and reject this conjecture. There is also a difference rooted in socialization, however. Vergangenheitsbewältigung – the struggle to overcome to past – was profoundly important in West German education, society and politics, at least since the 1960s. Social surveys consistently show exceptionally low levels of chauvinism, and the German response to the refugee crisis of 2015 is indicative of the sense of public responsibility. East Germany arguably did more in the immediate post-war period to distance itself from the Nazi period, but these efforts were top-down and at the individual level there is less self-consciousness about the need for tolerance.
Minor points
p. 5: “The State harassed pastors and congregations, published defamatory articles [‘on’ or ‘about’, not ‘of’] religious leaders”
p. 7: It might be better to refer to “net migration” (immigration minus emigration) rather than “a migrant surplus”, which might be misunderstood as evaluative statement.
Author Response
I would like to thank the two reviewers for their helpful feedback. I would also like to thank the editor. I here describe how I have addressed the reviewers’ comments below.
Reviewer 2
Reviewer 2 says that their comments “are offered as reflections for the author to consider rather than as criticisms that must be addressed.” For this reason, I have made edits based on some of the reviewer’s comments, though these edits do not address all of the reviewer’s comments. The reviewer, for example, suggests that I consider several different articles and chapters. Among the articles recommended for consideration, I believe that the Stolz et al. 2020 article most directly relates to the front end of my article. For this reason, I cite Stolz et al. 2020 on page 2.
The reviewer believes that I am correct when I say that my article is the first to find a period of right-wing secularization, though the reviewer also believes that there are developments in other contexts that I could mention to temper this position without diminishing the novelty of the contribution. I have decided to include the example of the relatively secular rhetoric of Geert Wilders in the Netherlands (see 3rd footnote on page 3) as a related development, but also emphasize the ways in which this example is distinct from my findings (i.e., it has not been demonstrated that this rhetoric has caused secularization among right-wing populists).
In the final paragraph, the reviewer offers some thoughts on religious economy theory, secularization theory, “the struggle to overcome the past” in West German education, and East Germany distancing itself from the Nazi period (along with the lack of self-consciousness about the importance of tolerance). These are all interesting thoughts that can likely lead to fruitful directions for future research, though I do not think I can neatly incorporate all of these details in the present paper. I suspect that these may be some of the details which the reviewer put forth only “as reflections. . . rather than as criticisms that must be addressed.” It may be worth keeping these details in mind for future work, though I do not address all of these points in the present article.
Finally, there are two minor edits that the reviewer suggests I make. First, the reviewer suggests that I change “of” to “on” in a sentence on page 5. The reviewer also suggests that I change “migrant surplus” to “net migration.” I have made this change (see page 7).
Author Response File: Author Response.pdf
