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Hello, and welcome to Humanities Matter, brought to you by Braille. I'm Lee Chungreco, and this week we'll be looking at key issues in the field of humanities. Today we're speaking with Joshua Ralston. He's a reader in Christian Muslim relations at the University of Edinburgh, and his most recent monograph is Law and the Rule of God, a Christian engagement with Sharia.
And we're speaking with Ulrich Schmeedel. He's a lecturer in theology, politics, and ethics at the University of Edinburgh, and his most recent English monograph is The Claim to Christianity, responding to the far right. He's also the series editor of Political and Public Theologies, also published by Braille. Their latest book is The Spirit of Populism, Political Theologies in Polarized Times.
Welcome to you both. Thank you. So how did this project come about, and how long did it take to accomplish this? The book came out of a conference that we co-hosted at the University of Edinburgh, Joshua and I.
So it was a conference under the same title, and we brought together two research centers that we have at the University of Edinburgh. One is the Centre for Theology and Public Issues, so it's mainly focused on the role of religion in the public sphere, really with a bit of focus on Christianity. And the other center or network that we have at Edinburgh is the Christian Muslim Studies Network. And we felt that these are in a way when we look at the role of religion in the public sphere nowadays, these are in a way, the two centers that make sense in addressing populism, because on the one hand half, especially in the European discourse, the constant appeals to Christianity and the Christian heritage of Europe that is somehow defining who is in it to his outgree.
And on the other hand, it is being brought in as the kind of outside or the dangerous element, the threat and so on. So we thought joining the expertise of these two centers and the network and the people surrounding it, the people who belong to these two networks, that would be the ideal starting point to address something like populism. So then we organized a conference at Edinburgh, it was a fairly large conference with lots of international guests, and then we felt that during that conference, what emerged for us more and more was this is actually a volume. So it was less that we brought a focus on what we didn't put a straight jacket in a way on people, so you need to write about this and this and that.
It was more like it actually emerged naturally at a conference, there were some threats of the conversation we felt, this actually works together really nicely. And so let's put something together. That took quite a long time after that, not only because of the pandemic made everybody slow or stopped a lot of things, but also because what we did is in a way communicated a lot by email after that conference and sort of put people in touch with each other saying, oh, your chapter actually closely interrelated that chapter. He ordered two manuscripts so you can refer to each other and so we try to keep thinking after the conference, so it was not just people presented their conference paper and we put it in the book.
It was more like the conference was the starting point really for conversation that then turned into this book. You begin this volume by noting that populism has become a buzzword. What do you think people believe populism is and how does that differ from the way academics define it here? It's a buzzword in the sense that you find it in lots and lots of different contexts and conversations and that means sort of academic conversations on the one hand but also non-academic conversations and commentary on politics that is going on.
And so you've got a very broad spectrum of just people drawing on populism and with that comes a very broad spectrum of definitions. So in a way, I think it's not straightforward to say this is what people are, people are on the street, they believe populism is. And this is what the academics think populism is. I think it's actually much more models than that because a lot of what is happening on the streets is influenced by what's happening in the seminal room and by as well.
But so, in the academy, you've got a very broad spectrum again of definitions. So in the normal starting point is always to say, okay, populism comes from the Latin world, populism means the people. So populism has to do with politics in the name of the people. But then people itself has so many meanings.
And I think that is something that comes quite clearly through in the scholarship. So if you look at scholars who work on left-wing populism, then you see people define it as something that stands against the oligoshes. If you wish to, it's people as a demos, it's a political category and you get a vertical opposition, that's the people against the oligos, those high up. And if you then look at scholars of right-wing populism, it looks quite differently.
So they say, yeah, populism is about the people. But people is here used against the other, in a way, whoever that other might be. And so you've got people not as demos, but as ethnos. So it's more cultural or civilizational, if you wish, a category rather than a political one.
And so what you then get is a horizontal opposition between, you say, insiders and outsiders. And so, you know, by starting two different kinds of populism, you get two very different definitions of populism. One scholar has to find it as a repertoire, which is a definition that comes through again and again and again in our book. There are lots of different contributors to Rawans.
And the idea that it's a repertoire of different meanings that somehow pertain to the people without immediately saying what is meant by this. And rather saying what is actually interesting is that nothing in particular is meant by it. But rather that the target keeps sort of moving throughout. The key thing that you get out of this or what our book can show is that the difference between the street and the seminar room is maybe not as big as we might want it to be or as we might think it is.
Because I think in the end, scholars are confronted with very similar questions. People are confronted with, namely, in the normative questions. In the end, if you study populism, you don't really get out of thinking normatively as well. So not only describing what is going on, how are things, but also thinking about what should it be like, what ought to be the case in the future.
So you have to make some judgments in a way, some evaluations about things. And I think scholars often like to say they're neutral and that a distance from what is going on in politics. But I think several chapters in the book can show that this is actually not the case. That scholars are, whether they like it or not, quite often really involved in making normative judgments as well.
So let's talk about this metaphor of the hijacked faith. How does the distinction between the legitimate and illegitimate owners of religion frame the way populace view the world? Well, the hijacked faith is really one of the key metaphors that you find in both places, again, so you find it in politics, but also in the study of politics. So if you're getting on the street and in the seminar room, and interestingly, you can trace that metaphor back to George W.
Bush's statement after the 9-11 terrorist attacks. So he said about the terrorists that they had hijacked a great faith. Meaning Islam, of course, these terrorists weren't real Muslims. They had hijacked Islam for their political purposes.
And so that metaphor, the hijacked faith, has kind of taken on a life of its own. And you now find it in debates about populism, but it is a really tricky one because it sort of assumes the face is a little bit like an airplane, like something that is just out there. And can either be on or off course, something good or something bad, but is in itself a fixed thing. But that's not what you see when you actually look in the field.
Religion is something that's always embodied and embedded in different contexts. It's not a stable thing like an airplane. And so you actually have to look at this metaphor quite carefully. And then it comes up in the field itself.
So I think one example would be the debates about increased immigration in Europe, which is for a lot of the populist right there. For a lot of the populist right wing parties or protesters, that is one of the topics, one of the hot topics. And so they would say, no, we need to keep our borders close. We don't want more immigrants in here.
And one example, or one reason they would bring, one argument they would bring is to say because Europe is Christian or has at least their Christian or Judeo-Christian heritage. And if we bring in all of these refugees, that will change who we are. We need to defend it against, well, of course, who is the against, who is the other that's Islam. If you talk about the Judeo-Christian heritage of Europe, that needs to be defended against Islam.
Then the churches come in, and quite a few, not all of them, but quite a few actually supporting the resettlement of refugees, accommodation, accompaniments and so on. And then the churches would say, what these populists say about Christianity is not correct. These populists have hijacked Christianity. Christianity is all about helping our neighbor regardless of faith.
But then the populist response to this would be, no, no, no. We have not hijacked Christianity. We are saying what Christianity is actually about, namely the identity of Europe as something that has a Christian, Judeo-Christian heritage. The churches have hijacked it for their political agenda of opening the borders.
And so the metaphor of the hijacked faith is put to use in a way on both sides in the field. So instead of buying into that metaphor as a scholar, we found that it's in a way better to look at what is going on here and say that we actually see a struggle for Christianity in this case. You could play that through with other religions. But what we have here is a struggle for the definition of Christianity.
And you have people laying claim to Christianity from different ends of the political spectrum. Anger has motivated many of the populist movements we're seeing today from Trump to Brexit. How are anger and sovereignty as to secularized theological concepts? And actually maybe before you get into that, can you just break down what you mean by a quote secularized theological concept because that phrase feels a bit like an oxymoron?
If you look at populism, as well as responses to populists, you see a lot of anger, right? Anger about society, anger about immigration, about economic policies. But then you also see people who are against certain populist movements being angry that populists have broken the social code or betrayed the religion. So one of our essays by Vincent Lloyd tries to look at how we might think about populism through anger.
And he does this by drawing on a longstanding idea in the field of political theology that much of politics in the West at least are secularized theological concepts. That may seem oxymoronic, aren't secular and theology the opposite. But in political theology, scholars try to look at how actually the formation of secular ideas are actually interwoven with longstanding theological concepts. So we'll give you one example.
In Christianity, as well as in Judaism and Islam, God is considered to be a sovereign, to be the king. So for instance, in the Hebrew Bible, at first when the people of Israel are wanting to form, they don't have a king. And it's only because God sort of acquiesces to people's desires that they're given a king. So this idea that God is a sovereign or a king is central to Jewish Christian and Islamic ideas.
And what political theology notes is that many of these concepts, what it means to be a community, a tonement, sovereignty, come from a deep theological background. But they've been transformed. We might even say they've migrated into politics. And sovereignty is one example of this.
This is most famously associated with a controversial scholar named Carl Schmidt who wrote during the Weimar Republic, so the period between World War I and World War II in Germany. And he makes this argument. But we can think about this maybe in more concrete terms about ideas of a tonement. So here in the United Kingdom where both Orish and I are working, we're having a big argument about whether or not the Boris Johnson and his government have broken the rules.
Do the rules apply to the leader? Where is work and where is the party? It looks in some ways that this has nothing to do with religion. But there's built into this a lot of anger and questions about do the leaders have to follow the same rules as the people.
And what we see according to political theology is that this isn't just a secular debate, but it's also not just a religious debate, but the concepts and terms are kind of interwoven together. And what political theology seeks to do is to show the ways that theology or religion might be hiding in plain sight in things that we already think are secular. Another example that we can see is the deeply religious or ritual ways that the attack on the Capitol building on January 6th of last year in the United States played out. There were crosses, there were prayers, but they weren't just Christian.
They also involve certain allegiances to the United States. And so what we see going on there is a weird amalgamation of theology and secular politics that we think political theology can shed light on, especially when it comes to populism. Because populism often draws on longstanding ideas about religion, about who belongs in a community, about who is in and who is not in that relate both to community formation, but also have roots in religion and Christianity especially. So to use an example or a way to use how have populist tried to let's say excommunicate British citizens who happen to be Muslim because they don't fit into the right community.
Those are some of the themes that we're sort of looking at. And our essay, the first chapter by Vincent Lloyd looks at how anger itself can be deployed in a variety of ways, both for good in terms of anger at injustice, anger at economic deprivation, but also the way anger can be used to justify a whole host of different social and political arrangements. So we've talked about climate change many times on this podcast, in fact we've dedicated an entire series to it. But what is the second threat, this quote spiritual climate change and what can be logens do to combat it?
Yeah, this metaphor for the spiritual climate change comes in in a chapter in our book by Matias Martinson, he's a professor of theology in Sweden. And in a way, I think it's quite clever metaphor because it says that what's happening in politics and the role of religion in politics is some sort of subtle shift happening. And it's a bit like climate change in a way that the consequences are devastating, but we don't see it immediately every day. It's something significant but sort of subtle in our everyday lives.
And he describes it in a way the shift is how people appeal to religion in a new way when it comes to politics and that is as identity markers. So he says that Christianity and his focus is particular Europe and then particularly Sweden and Hungary. And the two countries he compares and what that appeals to religion and how they work in these two countries. And he says Christianity is fundamentally ambiguous there.
So it's moving more to the political center, like the claim to power is there. And it's trying to make precisely this contrast that we've talked about now a few times to say like Christianity goes with the insider, non-Christianity. And that's in most cases Islam goes with the outsider. So we're marking an identity, I think people versus non-people Christians versus non-Christians.
And in that kind of appeal to religion or Christianity in this case, we're losing track of other questions that Christianity would have been interested in or that would normally be connected to Christianity. And also, spiritual questions about who am I? Where do we come from? Why does this all make sense?
Like all of these and sort of you can say classics, the allotted questions fall more and more into the background. And what you get is like Martin calls a faith as a monument. So you get this monumental identity marker that you can sort of carry with you and say I sent for this without actually engaging in any of the more detailed and difficult spiritual questions that are normally connected to. Religious traditions like Christianity.
And scholars have found different ways of describing this to some would say it's Christianism versus Christianity, but like Islam is versus Islam. Others say this is about belonging versus believing. So populist politics is about belonging but actually has no faith in God. And so it's a that's another way of putting it's a thin appeal to religious tradition rather than a fig one that engages in all of these.
And in his chapter, my guess is critical of these ways of describing it because he says in a way, if we describe it like that, then we do the same thing just on a different level. We again prop up our idea of the thick Christianity that's all about believing and so on. We prop that up as a monument. So we're doing in a way the same thing that criticizing just on a slightly different level.
And from that he moves into if we can't do that, or if we shouldn't be doing that as theologians. That's why he's talking about the role of the theologian and all of this. And then what should we do? And his response is an interesting one.
So he says in a way we need to focus on the potential that religions or Christianity in his case in particular have for fostering sonarities. And actually I've looked at the chapter earlier and he actually writes the only reason for continuing to work as a theologian under the current conditions. And that's how he sets out the only reason for him to continue to do this is so that we can point out that there are different meanings to Christianity. Christianity is not just about identity.
It's also that also always or almost always has been that. But there's so much more to it. And our role as theologians would be to bring out these other meanings so that we don't get bogged down in one particular one. And rather see the variety of Christianity.
And for him that is very much connected to rethinking theology in the context of society that is characterized by the pluralism of religions. I think that's something that runs through our volume, but also through this chapter in particular is to think through how do we make sense of this from the perspective of different faith traditions. So traditionally you can set the theologians of each tradition work on a problem and maybe later they need to talk to each other. So firstly the Christians sorted out for themselves, Muslims sorted out for themselves, Jews sorted out for themselves and then they need later.
But in a way society doesn't work like that. We're too late if we do it like that because the actual problems and populism is a good example. It's always already mixed like it's almost every statement about Christianity in populist politics is also one about Islam, even if Islam isn't mentioned. And every statement that they make about Islam is also one about Christianity even if Christianity isn't mentioned.
So it's from the beginning entangling different religions. And so our response needs to be one that from the beginning entangles different religions. And that's sort of the drive of its chapter. And I think that the volume overall is trying exactly that.
So we were very keen on having Muslim, Jewish, Christian and also people from no faith writing in that chapter. So that the book overall brings together these different perspectives. And it's also the series that the book is the first one in a new series with braille published with political and public theology comparisons, coalition's critiques. So this new situation of highly pluralistic, in terms of religion, highly pluralistic Europe or American context, but I should continue to do that.
What requires us to do theology in a pluralistic way in the broadest sense? I think we have to look into exactly the details of what would that look like? And what should it look like? And we don't have an answer for all of this, but we have a starting point here.
I think with that book to say, okay, let's look at this from the angles of different face traditions and no face traditions and see where common threats evolve. What can you learn from comparing different things? What can we learn from putting forces together so building correlations? And I think that was very much the thrust of this chapter overall.
Yeah, and I think just following up on Orish to play out the analogy a little bit more with climate change. It is populism, political theology, religious pluralism, secularism. These are also global realities that face all of us. So we can, while our book is focused primarily on Europe and North America, you can also talk about populations in the Philippines or in Brazil or in China or in India.
It's a global phenomenon, just like climate change, but in each different place, it impacts it in different ways. So you need to have enough depth to understand the difference of how religious traditions, political traditions are going to be intersecting in different ways that are both global and also natural and national. If you take a comparison to COVID-19 responses, COVID-19 was clearly a global phenomenon and different nations tried to address it. But there was also a sense that even if your country was doing well, so on, so to speak, in early phases of COVID-19, the fact that it was a global phenomenon meant that the pandemic was a global phenomenon.
And so you had to think both very specifically, but also with global dynamics. And I think our work is trying to do something similar with populism. We're looking primarily at the West, but aware that this is a global phenomenon, and we're inviting in the final chapter for other people in different places to carry on that work to analyze their own countries, religious traditions, and political traditions to think about how populism and political theology might come to bear in those contexts. That's Joshua of Ralston and Ulrich Schmeedel.
Their latest book is The Spirit of Populism, Political Theologies and Polarized Times. Thanks again to you both. Thank you for having us. You are listening to the Humanities Matter podcast.
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