Are Christians more likely to be Islamophobic than other citizens? Drawing on a new study of attitudes in France, Germany, the Netherlands and the UK, Kai Arzheimer finds that Islamophobia has no link to a person’s religiosity but is strongly linked to nativism and authoritarianism.
Over the last 25 years or so, the rise of the far right across Western Europe has been accompanied by a striking rhetorical shift: some of these parties now brand themselves as defenders of “Christian values” against an alleged Islamic threat.
This development was unexpected. Unlike in the US, where there is an “irreconcilable link between Christian teachings and the… far right”, many far-right actors in the region have secular, anti-clerical or even neo-pagan roots. Western Europe is one of the most rapidly secularising regions in the world, and far-right voters in particular have generally little interest in religion. Therefore, the faith of immigrants and their descendants should not be such a big issue.
One prominent explanation for this apparent paradox is that far-right parties use Christianity primarily as a cultural marker that is devoid of genuine religiosity but facilitates the “othering” of Muslims as a cultural out-group. This discursive strategy has been labelled Christianism and is well documented and researched.
But surprisingly little is known about the connections between religiosity, Islamophobia and populist far-right ideology at the individual level in Western Europe. Existing studies look only at how religiosity influences voting for far‑right parties, or how it relates to anti‑immigrant/Muslim prejudice, without linking religion to broader far‑right attitudes.
In a recent study, I set out to test whether and how anti-Muslim prejudice in Western Europe correlates with Christian religiosity and far-right ideology. The results, based on large‑scale survey data from Britain, France, Germany and the Netherlands, show no substantial relationships between personal Christian religiosity on the one hand and both Islamophobia and the broader far‑right mindset on the other. Conversely, Islamophobia in Western Europe is strongly linked to nativism and authoritarianism.
Are Christians more likely to be Islamophobic?
The analysis draws on four large, nationally representative online surveys conducted under the auspices of the SCoRE project. Data were collected after the 2015/16 refugee crisis, a period of heightened salience for both religion and immigration.
The surveys were specifically commissioned for the project and provide instruments for an unusually fine-grained measurement of core far-right attitudes (nativism, authoritarianism and populism). Together, they comprise almost 75,000 respondents. The samples were confined to nationals of the four countries. To avoid ambiguities, the adherents of non-Christian religions were removed, while respondents who have no sense of belonging to any religious group were retained in the analysis.
The four countries were selected because they are traditionally Christian but have sizeable Muslim minorities, ranging from 6 per cent (Germany) to 9 per cent (France) of the total population. All four are rapidly secularising, with church-going Christians comprising only between 15 per cent (Netherlands) and 22 per cent (Germany) of the population.
At the same time, they differ in their denominational traditions, historical and current state-church relations, and the extent to which far-right parties employ Christianist strategies. If similar correlational patterns were observed in these countries, the results should therefore generalise well to other Western European nations.
Using Structural Equation Modelling (SEM), I simultaneously estimate the relationships among five latent constructs: Christian religiosity (church belonging and attendance); Islamophobia (measured with two items from the Imhoff and Recker scale); nativism (perceived cultural/economic threat from immigrants); right‑wing authoritarianism (submission, aggression, conventionalism); and populist attitudes (anti‑elite, pro‑people sentiment). The model fit is very good in the German samples and good to acceptable in the other countries. All items display substantial and significant loadings on their factors.
Core findings
The most striking result is the absence of any substantive link between personal religiosity and Islamophobia. Across all four countries, the covariance between religiosity and Islamophobia is practically zero.
By contrast, Islamophobia shows a robust and positive association with both nativism and authoritarianism. These correlations hold in Britain, France, Germany (both West and East subsamples) and the Netherlands, suggesting a common West European pattern.
Religiosity also exhibits only weak ties to the three core far‑right dimensions. The strongest link is a modest positive correlation with authoritarianism in France, while the other associations are negligible or slightly negative.
In short, people who attend church or identify with a Christian tradition are not systematically more (or less) nativist, authoritarian or populist than their secular counterparts. Conversely, people who hold nativist and authoritarian views are often also Islamophobes, and vice versa.
What are the implications for the Christianist strategy?
These empirical patterns dovetail neatly with the “Christianist” narrative described at the outset: far‑right actors have crafted a discourse that portrays Christianity as a potent symbol of “western civilisation” and Islam as a threat to “our” cultural identity.
My findings imply that Christianism may work precisely because it decouples genuine religiosity from anti‑Muslim prejudice. By presenting Christianity as a cultural reference point rather than a lived faith that demands humility, universalism and compassion, far‑right parties can appeal to a broad electorate that is increasingly secular, yet receptive to nationalist and anti‑immigrant messages.
Importantly, Christianism makes it possible to bring these messages across without resorting to overt racism, which is more stigmatised than professing beliefs in the superiority of one’s culture. In this respect, the West European far right’s pseudo-religious appeals fit well into an even broader framework of “civilisational populist” narratives that employs transnational elements of the national culture to construct an unbridgeable divide between “us” and “them”.
At the same time, the specific structure of West European micro-level belief systems also helps to explain why no genuine, electorally relevant religious far-right parties exist in this region. Unlike in the US, where certain strands of (white Christian) religiosity are closely linked to racism and hostility towards immigrants and Muslims, there is no viable attitudinal base and hence no demand for this specific combination of ideologies.
In the light of these results, it is easy to see why (some) West European far-right parties have added Christianist narratives to the mix. It remains to be seen whether their appeal to voters is greater than that of the related civilisationist strategies such as “femonationalism” and “homonationalism”, and whether Christianism remains feasible at all in an increasingly secular environment where religious leaders often turn against the far right.
For more information, see the author’s recent study in Research & Politics (available open access).
Note: This article gives the views of the author, not the position of EUROPP – European Politics and Policy or the London School of Economics. Featured image credit: Alexandros Michailidis / Shutterstock.com
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