Religion and populism have become dirty words in progressive circles, but despite common assumptions, their combination could serve as a resource for the sort of democratic renewal many societies need.

There is plenty of evidence to support the view that religion and populism are bad enough in themselves and even worse when combined. The so-called “Christian-Democracy” of Viktor Orbán’s Hungary, widespread support of Donald Trump by white evangelicals in the United States, the Hindu nationalism of Modi, and the Islamo-Kemalism of Erdoğan are all examples that seem to prove the point. Perhaps as a result, most journalistic and academic work on populism focuses on nationalistic, often anti-democratic strains that conflate the people of God with a Volk or nation imagined in homogeneously ethnic or racial terms.

As true as this all is, there is no inherent relationship between religion and anti-democratic forms of populism. In fact, historically, it was the interaction of religion and democratic populism that generated some of the most vital moments of democratic change in the modern era. And there’s reason to believe they could do so again today.

In early modern Britain, the Diggers and Levellers combined populist and religious elements to advocate for the end of private property and a restoration of Eden when the earth was a “common treasury”. Two centuries later, during the industrial revolution, the Chartists and later the early Labour movement combined popular piety with a commitment to God-given human dignity and fellowship to fight against capitalist exploitation. As did the populist movement in the US of the 1870-90s, which laid the foundation for the reforms of the progressive era.

The American populists mixed the language of Methodist camp meetings and Baptist revivals to generate a powerful rhetoric with which to challenge the over-concentration of “money power”. “The spirit of avarice is devouring the great heart of this nation,” the Republican congressman from Alabama Milford Howard declared in 1895, lamenting that his contemporaries had lost “all fear of God and love for their Fellow-men”.

In the late 1960s, this blend of Christian morality and capitalist critique came to characterize Martin Luther King Jr’s leadership of the civil rights movement. King, too, showed that religion and populism could be joined in the pursuit of democratic ends – especially in the Poor People’s Campaign he helped launch, which sought to bring working-class whites and blacks together to agitate for greater economic justice.

Decades later, the “third wave” of democratic revolutions in the late 1980s and early 1990s were religious and populist revolutions. Solidarity in Poland, which overthrew communism, combined Roman Catholicism and populist rhetoric to achieve its aims. As did the “People Power” revolution that overthrew the Marcos dictatorship in the Philippines. An important element of the anti-apartheid movement in South Africa, the United Democratic Front, also combined religious and democratic populism.

Rather than identifying the people of God with the nation, these kinds of “prophetic populism” identify the people with the oppressed from any nation. Exemplifying this today is the Argentinian teología del pueblo, a key influence on Pope Francis. Following the teología del pueblo, Francis distinguishes his position from both the clerical and authoritarian right and the revolutionary, Marxist left, to emphasize God’s special concern for the least, the lost and the last.

It’s a populism that, in Francis’s words “includes all peoples and individuals in their full dignity, enjoying as brothers and sisters the marvel of creation”. Other contemporary examples of this kind of prophetic populism include the Moral Mondays movement and revived Poor People’s Campaign, led by Rev William Barber II in the US, and the Mass Action for Peace led by Christian and Muslim women in Liberia.

Religiously and democratically, these movements are polar opposites to the sort of nationalistic populism embodied by Trump. Theologically speaking, ideologies like Trumpism are idolatrous: they sacralize an earthly thing – the nation-state – and ultimately end up legitimizing the sacrifice of humans, nature and the integrity of faith itself to a worldly project of political salvation. Trump is elevated to a Christ-figure who will redeem the “true” or “real” people to the exclusion of all others. In prophetic populism, by contrast, the people are seen as a force that can break the bonds of domination so that all may flourish, especially the weakest and marginalized. The people become a beacon of democracy for all peoples.

The history of prophetic populism shows that the union of religion and populism doesn’t necessarily lead to either rule by clerics or the assertion of one faith over all others. Instead, the marriage of popular piety and democratic populism can defend plurality, and help end the concentration of power in the hands of the plutocratic, technocratic or bureaucratic few. At a time of growing inequality, when differences between religious communities and progressive elites seem to pre-empt democratic solidarity, a politics of the common good that neither disdains religious voices nor demonizes those without religious commitments could be a truly radical force.