Over the last few months, I have been part of a group of CTEWC ethicists exploring the problem of political populism. So far, it has been a particularly complex intellectual journey, entailing an attempt to understand a concept that does not fit easily into any particular ideology or context. While the most obvious contemporary expressions of populism fit into the rhetoric of the far Right—authoritarianism, racism and xenophobia, rationalised by an appeal to Christian fundamentalism—historically, populism can fall across classical ideologies ranging from left to right.
In some cases, like Peronism in Argentina, it can embrace both Left and Right, causing fragmentation and conflict and culminating in political disasters like the 1976 coup.
In addition, the exploration of populism reveals a deep internal theoretical division among theorists. There are those like Cas Mudde, who see populism as a ‘thin ideology’ that builds on existing ideologies of Left or Right; those like Ernesto Laclau, who view populism as primarily performance politics (an echo, perhaps, of the old Leninist rhetoric of ‘propaganda of the deed’); those like Kurt Weyland, who define populism as a phenomenon describing charismatic, one-person leadership politics appealing to a plebiscitarian (as opposed to parliamentarian) approach to governance; and those who consider populism to be an expression that articulates the discontent of those economically marginalised and left behind by both economic and socio-cultural change.
Crossing these approaches, and largely missing from the literature, is what I would consider a particularly African dimension to all of this: the definition of opposition and enemy in terms that might be put in shorthand as ‘tribe’. Cases like the Rwanda genocide in the 1990s highlight how horrifically this can end. But this is not uniquely African; if anything,the re-emergence of populism has revealed tribalism’s deep multiculturalism.
What holds all of these definitions of populism together is the sense that populism rests at its base on a concept of ‘Us’ (the People, the good guys, the excluded majority) versus ‘Them’ (the Others, the villains, the allegedly evil elite). Under such circumstances, political contestation becomes not so much a debate over policy as an existential struggle for survival.
The moral dimension of this is obvious.
Those who are in the populist camp are the virtuous; those who are outside are vicious. The latter are literally the Others who, if I may use a recent political myth as metaphor, eat cats and dogs, who threaten to replace ordinary citizens (the ‘Us’). And many of them, according to the populist rhetoric, are the religious Others too.
My last observation emphasizes and amplifies why I believe the current debate over populism goes beyond questions of political preference and practice and into the realm of Christian religious ethics, and, indeed, why the discussions of our CTEWC group really are matters of moral urgency rather than intellectual exercises. In so many situations, the markers of Us versus Them are expressed in religious terms: Christians versus Muslims, religious persons versus secularists, even religiously-based definitions of ‘civilization’ versus barbarism. Whether such ‘civilization’ actually believes in the religion is, in many contexts, neither here nor there; it is, rather, an idea that is weaponized to promote the particular brand of populism that is invoked by its proponents. Faith, thinly (if at all) held, is less an actual conviction and more a religion instrumentalised in the service of ideology.
For Christian ethicists, as for genuine religious ethicists of any stripe, the latter should be of particular concern: politics mobilizing religion for political ends. We have seen this in many scenarios. We have seen religious communities cave to this logic, both in the past and in the present. Nazism in the 1930s captured the Protestant Church through the German Christian Movement and deeply compromised Catholicism through the 1933 Concordat. Reformed Christianity in South Africa became apartheid at prayer, embracing an ideology of Christian Nationalism—a term that is gaining currency in certain countries today.
Yet such moves to hijack Christian faith in the past were resisted. The Confessing Church and Catholic dissent challenged Nazi Christianity; Catholics and Protestants in South Africa formed an ecumenical alliance that contributed to apartheid’s downfall. And, at its best, Christianity has challenged, and continues to challenge, ideologies of tribalism and divisiveness in many countries to this day.
Our challenge as ethicists is to resist the current wave of populism, to renounce the short term ‘art of the deal’ that seduces us, and to see beyond the cynical manipulation of divisiveness posing as religious values.