By Deiniol Brown
Dr Mathew Guest is Professor in the Sociology of Religion at Durham University’s Department of Theology and Religion and is currently the Chair of the British Sociological Association’s Religion Study Group. Dr Guest has conducted research on a wide range of topics in the sociology of religion, including on the relationship between religion and late modern forms of politics and social order. Dr Guest’s research includes examination of the changing relationship between evangelicalism and populism in the US, especially in the context of the rise of Donald Trump and the wider shifts he represents. His most recent book ‘Neoliberal Religion: Faith and Power in the 21st Century’ looks in particular at neoliberal logic and the evolution of religious authority in relation to politics. In this interview, we discuss the relevance of Trump’s re-election to religion and politics, the underlying theories of how religion and politics interact in the contemporary world, and the evolving nature of religion as a knowledge claim.
In 2012 you wrote a chapter in the Book ‘Religion and knowledge: Sociological Perspectives’ on the dynamics of religion in the age of the internet. How has your understanding of religion and knowledge changed since this was published?
This book was published in 2012, before the election of Trump, before social media had grown to the size it is now, and before events such as the Covid pandemic. I would definitely write something different now and have changed my perspective on this topic in the intervening years.
Regarding how religion and knowledge has changed, the post-truth phenomenon has emerged and become massively consequential since 2012, and the current debate on religion and knowledge needs to include that. The idea of post-truth – that the previously conventional sources of truth and information have become radically destabilised, that they are legitimately treated as objects of suspicion rather than trusted as routes to knowledge or social order – has moved from the margins and into the mainstream, not least via social media. This has changed a whole host of social phenomena, including shared assumptions about what (and who) can be relied upon and the forms that scepticism can legitimately take. As part of this shift, politicians have become less bound by the norms that defined public discourse in earlier times.
In your article ‘From Protestant Ethic to Neoliberal Logic’ you discuss how the ideas associated with neoliberal economics have come to shape the activities of religious groups. How are religious organisations, such as evangelical groups, unique in their utilisation of this and how does this impact society differently compared to its expression via commercial businesses for example?
The influences of neoliberal economics and logic are global and complex and have exerted a huge influence on non-economic realms such as politics, education, and of course religion. The logic of markets, consumption and competition are found everywhere, and we shouldn’t really be surprised that they are appearing in religious organisations.
However, neoliberalism emerges in many different ways in different religious contexts. Protestant evangelicalism has co-opted neoliberal logic more directly than most religious organisations, which reflects the argument Max Weber first advanced in 1905, about the protestant ethic enabling the emergence of capitalism. While not without its problems, Weber’s analysis has enduring power, and is still relevant to our understanding of religion today. Our observation of neoliberal assumptions within religious phenomena is arguably a continuation of what Weber identified over a hundred years ago. I believe this alignment of religion and economics has become more complex, more wide-ranging and more unpredictable, but the expressions we can witness across a range of religious movements can still be illuminated by revisiting Weber’s influential essay.
In a book chapter ‘Evangelicalism and Politics’, you compared American and British evangelicalism in their orientation to politics and argued that American politics is much more driven by moral questions than the UK. Has this most recent election in the US been fought more on moral issues or economic concerns?
In this most recent election, we are very much in uncharted territory. In 2016, the evangelical vote strongly supported Trump, and in the 2020 election this became even stronger. Trump has been willing to use the levers of power to defend the interests of Christian conservatives. Maybe thirty years ago evangelicals would be more interested in the moral calibre of individual politicians, but increasingly they are focussing on the policies rather than the people. There is also a change of focus for US evangelicals. Evangelical votes in the US are usually bound up in a small number of moral issues, such as abortion for example. However, in this most recent election, I think it was more about economic interests than anything else. There is probably a residual trust in Trump from Christian conservatives because of their perception that he protected their values during his first term, so he may have been able to take the evangelical vote for granted at this election. There was definitely more rhetoric around economic issues from Trump, but there were so many different events in the campaign that it is difficult to follow specific messaging. There may also be the question of misogyny and racism in the way that America voted; this can’t be discounted, but it’s also bound up in a complex range of issues and so precise drivers of change are tricky to distinguish.
In recent years, and definitely in the context of the US, it seems like there has been a growth in religious rhetoric from younger generations on the right of politics, have you observed this?
Yes, religion has increasingly become used as an identity marker that is connected to the populist right, and Christianity in the US has become a marker linked to white Christian nationalism. However, this rhetoric is much more to do with ethnonationalism than piety, and therefore denotes more of a political than a religious movement.
Has Trump in some ways driven a revival of Christian nationalism in the US and worldwide, rather than merely using its sentiments in his electoral politics?
In recent years there has been a much stronger inclination from politicians to weaponise identity politics for political gain. This invites a polarised rhetoric that certain forms of religious conviction can be easily attached to because of their tendency to make sense of the world using dualistic language – good and evil, truth and falsity, light and darkness. Politicians are also more blatantly strategic and transactional in their politics; more liable to change their minds for electoral reasons.
In populist politics, for example, a strict sense of right and wrong is often used because it is simple and straightforward, and produces dramatic stories and rhetoric. This drama is mirrored in the morality of religious literature, with its dualisms and sometimes severe language about judgement and destiny. Populist politicians also borrow the moral legitimacy of religious movements by aping styles of discourse commonly associated with religious conviction. I think this has also been enhanced by the leaning of politics towards secularism in recent decades, especially in western capitalist nation states, and this, together with a more general disillusionment with liberal democracy, has created space for the emergence of new religiously charged political movements.
To return to an earlier point, this is also bound up in the post-truth phenomenon which introduces a completely new paradigm in which to do politics. There has been a ramping up of strategic language and, in some cases, blatant lies in political discourse, destabilising an already uncertain set of ideas, loyalties and reference points for public life. We can see how religious discourse has been warped by this post-truth phenomenon and its entanglement with political interests, perhaps especially in the USA.
How do you, as an academic, contend with religion as a knowledge claim, and a metaphysical understanding, whilst attempting to rationally analyse these issues in relation to politics?
I’m a social scientist, and therefore I deal with religion in the same way that I deal with other human behaviour, such as that concerning family or education, so this isn’t something I have struggled with. However, whilst working in a department of theology and religion, alongside theologians, textual scholars, philosophers of religion and church historians – you are often confronted with aspects of religion that the social sciences often tend to dismiss or neglect. Working in such a multi-disciplinary environment helps guard against more reductive or dismissive perspectives that might see religious phenomena as always marginal, or even illegitimate objects of scholarly enquiry. And we do need to make sure we take religion seriously in the social sciences because there are serious consequences when we don’t, as we have seen.
Do you think there is something wrong with how scholars and commentators understand the role of religion in politics, and how can we rectify this?
We need to take religion seriously, and not just the ideas and beliefs of religious traditions, but the actions that follow on from or emerge in association with those ideas. The mistake that scholars sometimes make is to treat these ideas – whether expressed as beliefs, doctrines or teachings rooted in ancient texts – as significant, but only as ideas. But when these ideas are held as religious convictions, they often have practical consequences – not always in a predictable or obvious way, but to treat them as abstract indulgences is to overlook an important dimension of religious identities. Social scientists sometimes try to explain the actions taken by religious people as driven by non-religious motivations, such as the search for identity or compensation for feeling neglected, marginalised or disempowered. These social-psychological factors are important, but not the whole picture. The religious underpinnings of people’s actions are important and often ignored; you can’t necessarily boil down these actions to non-religious factors. Bringing it back to Weber, his theories were very good at capturing this, especially the alignments of thought, principle and action that arise from religious and non-religious contexts, but which converge with often unexpected results for human life.
Religion in fact can have a big impact on how people live their lives, how they vote, how they conduct relationships and bring up their children. Religious identity needs to be taken more seriously in its material impact on people’s lives, even in societies where its public visibility is limited or unacknowledged. And in societies that have witnessed a renewed alignment between religious and political interests – like the USA, but also in parts of continental Europe and elsewhere – these factors are even more important. In countries in which right-wing populism has taken hold, for example, failing to understand how religious identities contribute to the momentum behind these movements could have serious consequences for the maintenance of healthy democracies.
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