There is a certain type of political bore who bangs on about "Christian values" as if he has just returned from a personal briefing with the Almighty, when in fact the last time he crossed a church threshold was for a wedding buffet and a quick moan about the parking. He likes to present the far right as the last line of defence for Christian civilisation, all solemn duty and moral backbone. The trouble is that the evidence says otherwise, which is always awkward when a whole identity has been built on sounding certain in the comments section.
Across Western Europe, researchers have found no positive relationship between religiosity and voting for populist radical right parties. None. In some cases, regular church attendance is linked to lower support. Practising Christians are often under-represented among far-right voters. So the grand army of churchgoing patriots exists mostly in the imagination of men with flags in their profile pictures and very little else going on. The people actually sitting in pews every Sunday are apparently not queuing up for the politics of grievance and scapegoating.
This does rather spoil the theatrical nonsense. Because the far right absolutely loves Christianity, provided it can be kept safely at the level of branding. It likes churches as scenery, not as institutions full of inconvenient teachings about loving thy neighbour, showing mercy, feeding the poor and generally behaving in a way that makes xenophobic ranting look a bit cheap. Christianity, in this mode, is not a faith. It is a badge. A logo. A bit of heritage trim bolted onto a rather nasty machine.
And that is the real joke in all this. The loudest defenders of "Christian civilisation" are very often not defending Christianity at all. They are defending a tribal identity dressed up in religious language. They want the architecture, the hymns at Christmas, the vague sense of civilisational superiority, and none of the moral obligations. It is Christianity with the engine removed and the bonnet polished. All showroom shine, no mechanical content.
Political scientists even have a name for the mismatch - the "religion gap". Far-right parties talk incessantly about Christianity, yet practising Christians tend not to flock to them. One explanation is almost comically simple. If you actually belong to a church, you are more likely to be embedded in a real community, exposed to actual moral teaching, and less susceptible to the sort of bilious nonsense that blames foreigners, liberals, Muslims or Brussels for every irritation from potholes to damp weather. It turns out that meeting actual human beings may be bad for ideological hysteria. Who knew.
So when some chap starts droning on about how the far right is the natural home of Christian Europe, what he usually means is that he likes the cultural packaging. He likes crosses on war memorials, nativity scenes, old cathedrals and the general smell of inherited legitimacy. He does not mean he is off to evensong, helping at the food bank, or wrestling seriously with the Sermon on the Mount. That would be a different matter entirely, and a good deal less useful to the politics of permanent resentment.
In short, the far right does not so much represent Christianity as cosplay it. It borrows the costume, waves the props about, and hopes nobody notices that the congregation has gone elsewhere. Which, according to the research, it largely has. The whole thing is a bit like one of those "fully restored" classics advertised by an optimist. Lovely paint, sparkling badges, a lot of talk about heritage, and underneath it all, not much evidence that anyone has opened the bonnet in years.
Sources include comparative research published in Party Politics on Western Europe, LSE analysis of the "religion gap", and European Social Survey-based work in Social Science Research showing Christians are often less likely to back the populist radical right.
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