Written by: Adam Riggio

We progressives, as is sadly typical in human history, face powerful enemies. Openly fascist and quietly fascistic political parties and strongmen control some of the most powerful states on Earth. I want to focus today on a fascist political movement that is flourishing across the world, the peculiar flavour of authoritarianism whose blistering moment in the sun is cresting in the 2020s.

What Is Religious Nationalism?

Not every authoritarian country today is a religious nationalist. Central Asia and much of the Arab world remains dominated by absolute dictatorships, each of which also has different aspects of military rule or the fusion of military, political party, and governance institutions. The same goes for monarchies and dictatorships scattered throughout Africa.

The fascism of religious nationalism is an ideology by which there is only one political party or movement that can legitimately rule the country, because it has an exclusive mandate from the divine. Here’s a list of the countries whose governments are dominated by political parties with a religious fascist ideology. It will show you the diversity of the movement, but also the common principles that bind their global alliance together.

Vladimir Putin’s Presidency began as a project to restore the union of state, military, and party, the authoritarian model of the USSR. But his second tenure as President in 2012 saw him strengthen this authoritarianism by uniting the Orthodox Church with party, military, and state. Putin’s government began educating Russians to think of themselves as expressions of their homeland. It’s more than territory: the unity of the Russian people and homeland was the history of Orthodox Christianity itself shaping the lands and people of Russia and Ukraine.

A particular religious history and heritage is the principle that unifies the lands of a country with its people, because the culture and history of its people create the country itself. So the only legitimate rulers of that country are the people and political party whose political program is to maintain and strengthen that unity of people, faith, and country. No other political program can be legitimate, because all other politics would break that unity.

That’s the principle that makes Vladimir Putin the divine will of Russia itself. The religious nationalist version of the fascist principle is unity through the strength of bonds among people, land, and faith, as expressed in a single leader whose will is law. The legitimacy of his will as law is as that which guides how the divine erupts into reality through the union of people, faith, state, and party.

Leaders and political parties who govern their countries along this principle of ideology include most notably: the United States under Donald Trump’s Republican Party, Brazil under Jair Bolsonaro’s ALIANÇA Party, India under Narendra Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party, Israel under Benjamin Netanyahu’s Likud, Poland under Andrzej Duda’s Law and Justice Party, and Bolivia under Jeanine Áñez’s Juntos Party.

Lines of Fascist Solidarity Across Religions

But I’m not here just to diagnose the opposition that we progressives face. I’m here to come up with strategies, find ways to break the alliances and solidarities that unite the fascists of religious nationalism across the world. One recent gesture is very telling about how religious nationalist leaders and movements build global alliances among each other.

Since he began taking the COVID-19 pandemic seriously, Donald Trump has pushed a fairly common malaria drug, hydroxychloroquine, as a supposed miracle cure. (I’m leaving aside that his corporate empire includes a company that manufactures the drug; his corruption is an obvious keystone of his governance, but is separate from the ideology of which he's a figurehead.) Narendra Modi recently announced that India would drop the heavy export restrictions on hydroxychloroquine. Jair Bolsonaro wrote him a letter of thanks. But look at what that letter included.

“Just as Lord Hanuman brought the holy medicine from the Himalayas to save the life of Lord Rama’s brother Laksmana (sic), and Jesus healed those who were sick and restored the sight of Bartimeu, India and Brazil will overcome this global crisis by joining forces and sharing blessings for the sake of all peoples.”

— Jair Bolsonaro, writing to Narendra Modi

The Christian extremist Bolsonaro is writing in the religious language of Hindu extremist Modi to express solidarity. This message means more to the relationship of the two countries than the exchange of any snake oil medicines. It’s a sign of respect and a gesture of alliance from one religious nationalist to another.

Their religions hold utterly different doctrines, but they ally in uniting their nations under the banner of a national religion. The blessings to which Bolsonaro refers are given to each person through the vessel of its national religion. The leaders of those nations have the right to share those blessings because they express both the people’s will and the people’s divinities.

The fact that one of those people’s religions is Christianity and another’s is Hinduism makes little difference, because the divinity that their movements express are proper to the character of those nations.

Laws of Earthly, Material Justice

I won’t pretend to have exhaustively defined the full extent and details of religious nationalist fascism. Understanding an ideology takes a lot more work than a 1000-word essay. But we progressives can use a short analysis to begin narrowing down precisely what we stand for, in opposition to the fascist juggernaut of our times.

First and foremost: Our loyalty is to the dignity of a human life lived well, no matter nation, religion, or caste. The most important condition of that dignified life is the health of the ecosystems whose stability sustains the processes on which our prosperity depends.

Prosperity should be shared among all people according to their need. If someone profits greatly from business while people in the communities that raised him and provide his home live mired in suffering and poverty, his riches are an insult to humanity. There is no natural rank of caste or race where some people are inherently more deserving of riches and dignity than others.

Your own prosperity or poverty, your happiness or poverty, has nothing to do with the favour of God, as extremist Evangelicals believe. If God favours anyone, he favours those who act from dedication to justice so that our world becomes better than it has been in the past. There can be no reward in our lives, or in whatever afterlife you like to imagine, for those favours except the greater prosperity and happiness of the world itself.

The injustices of our civilization, as they exist in the present and have settled over history, must be corrected. We must help uplift those who are oppressed and suffer under our unjust systems of colonialism and exploitation of common people. This must be done with the humility of someone indifferent to praise and fame.

The righteous are not remembered for their work, and that must not matter if we are to be righteous. What matters is that the work is done.