Bringing gender and religion in: Right-wing networks and “Populism and Civil Society”

In this contribution, Andrew Arato and Jean Cohen’s Populism and Civil Society is confronted with current gender studies research on populism. This research mainly focuses on right-wing populism and highlights strong links between right-wing populists and the religious right, which are to a large degree organized by “anti-gender,” a stance both against social constructivist notions of gender and against basic gender rights, especially in the fields of reproduction and of LGBTIQ concerns. Against the backdrop of this literature, I argue that in Populism and Civil Society, right-wing populist anti-gender politics are not addressed in a way that takes account of their full complexity; and that these politics furthermore suggest to treat right-wing populism and left-wing populism as phenomena that do not only differ in content, but also in form.

Populism is haunting our world, particularly its right-wing versions.Against this backdrop, Andrew Arato and Jean Cohen's Populism and Civil Society is a timely and important book.Moreover, it is a demonstration of how critical social and political theory is put to its best possible use, namely to help us understand what is at stake these days.The book addresses no less than the logics, the dynamics and the conditions for success of current forms of populism.And it does so by looking at populist movements, parties, governments, and regimes, respectively, by discussing the relation of populism and constitutionalism; and by thinking about democratic alternatives to populism.Against the backdrop of this focus, it makes perfect sense to assess populism in general, irrespective of whether it is employed by the left or the right: for what interests Arato and Cohen the most are populisms' institutional implications for liberal democracy, including liberal democracy's continuous democratization.In this regard, the authors attribute negative implications particularly to authoritarianism, to "an authoritarian logic" (Arato and Cohen 2022: 3).And such a logic can indeed stem from very different political programs and ideologies, from varieties of populism across the political spectrum.
In the following, I will confront Populism and Civil Society with a view on populism that departs from another analytic starting point, namely empirical research from the transdisciplinary field of gender studies.It goes without saying that gender studies bring gender into populism research.Interestingly, bringing gender in often leads to also bringing religion in.This is due to a strong concern of gender studies scholars with current forms of right-wing populism, and strong links between right-wing populists and the religious right.And it is precisely gender, or rather "anti-gender," a stance against both social constructivism regarding gender in general and any form of progressive gender politics in particular, that most often provides for the connection between the populist and the religious right (cf.Kováts and Poim 2015).I will come back to this below.
Cohen and Arato have themselves addressed the nexus of populism and religion in a Constellations article that predates the new book for a number of years: their "Civil Society, Populism and Religion" (Arato and Cohen 2017).Already in this article, the authors pursue their interest in understanding, and criticizing, the nature of antidemocratic logics.They locate such logics in populism as well as in politicized religion, which to them represent "the dark side of civil society" (ibid.: 283).Regarding the precise relation between right-wing populism and religion, they point to both tensions, due for instance to differing positions regarding secularism, and to affinities, like a shared preference for a Manichean imaginary (ibid.: 290f.).Furthermore, Arato and Cohen mention mutual hijacking.They report that on the one hand, "populists hijack religion and turn it into a useful tool for their friend/enemy identity politics," particularly a Christian vs. Muslim one (ibid.: 290).Using the example of Trump, they show that on the other hand the evangelical religious right has hijacked right-wing populism, to the effect that Trump has become their Trojan horse (ibid.: 292).
Gender only plays a minor role in this account of the complex relation of populism and religion.In passing, Arato and Cohen mention that conservative Christians team up with populist politicians in order to reassert traditional patriarchal family values (ibid.).They remain skeptical, however, that such forms of cooperation will prove to be a sustainable political strategy and not ultimately backfire, as the content of such right-wing politicalreligious collaborations may cause disapproval or even disgust among-particularly young-religious believers with more progressive and democratic theological and political views (ibid.).
Looking at the gender studies literature on populism, especially recent case studies of European countries (cf.e.g., Kuhar and Paternotte 2018; Hennig and Weiberg-Salzmann 2021; Strube et al. 2021), Arato and Cohen's skepticism regarding the chances of such pro-patriarchal cooperations is rendered as slightly too optimistic-as their observation of mutual hijacking by actors of the religious and the political right turns out to be all too prescient.In fact, such hijacking has in the last years taken place repeatedly, and not only when the religious actors were evangelical.The Catholic and various Christian Orthodox churches are politically engaged in this regard, as well.One example is Hungary, where an alliance between political authoritarianism and Christian religious fundamentalism feeds on a decidedly reactionary stance of the Catholic Church, which on a number of topics follows illiberal Orbán rather than the pope; Orbán's once anti-clerical Fidesz party, for its part, turned to Catholicism a good decade after its establishment for the purpose of constructing a national identity based on Christianity (Perintfalvi 2021: 177-197).In neighboring Serbia, another good example, homophobic and anti-Western discourses connect particularly well.This is due to the fact that a recognition of LGBTIQ rights is among the EU accession conditions; which leads to political conflict on the national level between a pluralist, EU-oriented camp on the one hand, and a nationalist camp influenced by Slavophile discourses and the Serbian Orthodox Church on the other hand (Navratil 2021).
As mentioned above, the link or symbolic glue (Kováts and Poim 2015) between religious and political actors in all these cases is gender, or rather anti-gender discourse.The term anti-gender serves as a semi-open signifier here to unite engagement against basic reproductive rights, especially the right to abortion, as well as against basic LGBTIQ rights.And in fact, both religious and political actors produce polemical discourse against the idea that gender is a social construct, and they label feminism, gender studies, and nondiscriminatory sex education as ideological, nonsensical, and wrong.In doing so, they reinforce the belief that the traditional family model was natural rather than a manifestation of patriarchy and heteronormativity.And being able to agree on this content, they manage to bridge political discontent on other issues.The Catholic bishops in Germany, for instance, generally oppose the political right.Anti-gender, however, offers both camps a chance to unite, namely through their anti-abortion and their prevalent antiqueer stances (Strube 2021: 52).
It is important to stress that anti-gender works as symbolic glue in two other ways.First, it links right-wing actors of different countries.Since right-wingers are usually nationalist and therefore not exactly inclined to internationalism, this is by no means trivial.Second, anti-gender discourse functions as an ecumenical force that includes churches that usually stay away from such alliances, such as Russian Orthodoxy.
And something else seems important.The anti-gender discourse, as well as the national and international networking that it has facilitated, is far from new and recent, but goes back at least three decades.It first developed in the mid-1990s around the United Nations World Conferences on Human Rights in 1993 in Vienna, on Population and Development in 1994 in Cairo, and particularly on Women 1995 in Beijing, when the Vatican, the Iranian government and several other actors of the religious right united against the term "gender" in the final platform, as well as against the idea of equal gender rights (Baden and Goetz 1997;Wichterich 1996).
Since then, such politico-religious alliances have become stronger and stronger, and finally institutionalized.Today, we are confronted with large lobby organizations like the International Organization for the Family, which unites evangelical forces from the U.S., the Russian Orthodox Church and right-wing European Catholics; the organization is engaged in world-wide national level lobbying against abortion rights and same-sex marriages, and since 1997 regularly runs a huge convention called World Congress of Families (Stoeckl 2021).Furthermore, there are highly effective political campaign networks like the pan-Christian Agenda Europe, which also targets basic human rights in the realms of sexuality and reproduction, like abortion rights and LGBTIQ rights, by lobbying both in Brussels and with national governments throughout Europe and beyond (Datta 2018).
Coming back to Populism and Civil Society, I would first like to argue that what Agenda Europe, its various partner groups and all those other religious-political networks on the right and far-right of the political spectrum target, is something slightly different, namely something more severe, than those aspects of "culture" that Arato and Cohen mention in the last chapter of their book.This last chapter contains a section on "The Cultural Gap: Status Deficits and the Renewal of Social Solidarity" (Arato and Cohen 2022: 209-212), which is probably the most obvious section of Populism and Civil Society to turn to when looking for a connection to the gender studies literature mentioned above.On these pages, the authors suggest responses to "status anxieties involving gender, race, religion, and nationalism," and to this end recommend what they call reframing or counter-framing: "to take seriously the concerns about family, community, and […] patriotism articulated by those who fear status losses not only individually but also for their group and to frame them in ways that converge instead of clash with liberal principles of individual autonomy, plurality, inclusiveness, equality, justice, and fairness."(ibid.: 211) For Arato and Cohen, counter-framing is an alternative to the two left standard responses to the status anxieties they refer to, both of which they qualify as inadequate: a "counter-politics of victimhood" that cannot escape reproducing populist friend-enemy logics of resentment on the one hand, and attempts at refocusing the attention to material inequality and socio-economic redistribution while "casting status and identity issues as derivative and distracting" on the other hand (ibid.: 209).The policy issues that Arato and Cohen mention with regard to counter-framing are ones that are likely to find broad common support indeed, and therefore undeniably seem like adequate candidates for reframing: basic family support like paid parental leave, universal daycare, and adequate payment for care-givers, as well as core principles of gender equality like a reduction of the gender pay gap (ibid.: 212).
The anti-gender lobby groups that are closely linked to right-wing populism target other issues, however: namely basic reproductive rights and the legitimacy of queerness.And I would like to argue that these issues are different from the ones mentioned by Arato and Cohen.On the one hand, they seem even more fundamental with regard to, among other things, individual autonomy and equality.Furthermore, their legitimacy seems to be contested more deeply, to a degree that sometimes they are even labeled as moral issues.I completely agree with Arato and Cohen that these issues should be framed in terms of "universalistic principles and general values" (ibid.: 211).Reproductive rights like the access to save abortions should indeed be seen as basic human rights.Furthermore, for LGBTIQ people, both the legality and the legitimacy of queerness are a question of the possibility of a life in human dignity.
The problem is, however, that such universalistic framing is unlikely to convince potent religious actors like the Vatican and many evangelical churches.Such actors qualify abortion and queer love and life as illegitimate-and oftentimes express outright disapproval of both abortions and non-heterosexual desire and unions.The same holds for the transnational antigender coalitions these religious actors are part of, together with lobby groups and right-wing populist parties and governments.What's more, the latter actors engage in universalistic counter-framing themselves.Agenda Europe, for instance, suggests to employ a Natural Law argumentation instead of a theological rhetoric for justifying the restrictions of basic rights that they seek (Datta 2018: 11).Other actors refer to parental rights, a right to life from the moment of conception, the best interest of the child, but also the freedom of religion and the freedom of speech in these regards (Denkovski, Bernarding, and Lunz 2021: 42f.).Democratic reframing efforts on the terrain of universalistic principles therefore cannot not compete with right-wing reframing efforts on the same terrain.
Against this backdrop, I hold that the current entanglement of right-wing populism, gender, and religion is both too serious and too complex to treat it as something that was mostly about the cultural conservatism, and possible anxieties about status loss, of citizens whose basic reproductive rights, whose possibility of public expression of their gender, and whose mere possibility of a family life that they find normal (for instance, since they are allowed to marry their partner and adopt children) are already met.By this I do not want to imply that the mentioned anxieties weren't a serious issue that needs to be addressed in an intelligent way, both in the realms of theory and of politics.They are-and they should not turn people into the arms of right-wing populist parties.Still, I hold that the current entanglement of right-wing populism, gender, and religion does not only challenge constitutional democracy as a principle and an institutional constellation.It is also an outright attack on basic gender rights-particularly of women and of so-called sexual minorities.And this attack, it seems, cannot be warded off by universalistic counter-framing and a rejection of friend-enemy logics.It comes in a universalistic frame itselfand it emanates from long-term networking and lobbying on the global scale.
One could argue, now, that a book on populism that primarily looks at populism's institutional implications for liberal democracy instead of its repercussions on gender politics does not need to address this attack on basic gender rights.But I would contest such a view.First, because basic rights are among the things that liberal democracy should always attempt at guaranteeing.Second, because the attack on basic gender rights seems to be a crucial feature of current populism.However, only of its right-wing versions.This, in turn, suggests to treat right-wing populism and left-wing populism as phenomena that do not only differ in content but also in form.The right-wing versions are part of global religious-political anti-gender networks.And these networks pose particular, and particularly serious challenges.