The Masks of the Political God is a unique contribution by professor of political science Luca Ozzano to studies of religion in party politics. The added value of this important contribution resides in the combination of three aspects: its case selection covers main world religions; it relies analytically on five types of religiously oriented parties proposed by the author in his earlier publications; it studies comparatively religion-related political cleavages during four decades since 1980.
No previous study has combined these three elements. Comparative studies with cases from world religions have focused on other themes (e.g. Mark Juergensmeyer's books The New Cold War and Terror in the Mind of God on worldwide rise of religious nationalism and religious terrorism). Comparative studies on religion in party politics have been limited to selected geographic/cultural regions and have mostly used theoretical frameworks (e.g. populism, nationalism) that do not tackle the question of religion in party politics as straightforwardly and comprehensively as does this volume.
The book starts with three theoretical chapters. After discussing the study of religion in party politics from perspectives of democracy (Chapter 1) and political cleavages (Chapter 2), it presents the typology of religiously oriented parties (Chapter 3). The author has published widely and is an established expert not only on these themes but is a renowned scholar also of religious fundamentalism and religious populism, both of which constitute important dimensions in this study.
Theoretical chapters are followed by five chapters of case studies. Case studies deal with different religious traditions and geographic/cultural region such as India (Buddhism/Hinduism), Israel (Judaism), Italy (Catholicism), Turkey (Islam, country with established tradition of democracy), United States (Protestantism) and Tunisia (Islam, recently democratized Arab country).
Instead of the traditional binary concept ‘religious versus secular party’, the author approaches religion in party politics by exploring five types of religiously oriented parties, which allows him to map connections to religion also in parties whose main identity, ideology and agenda is not about religion.
The relationship of religiously oriented parties to democracy is dependent on the type of party, but also on the type of secularism that structures the field of politics in a local context.
The Nationalist and Fundamentalist party types are the ones most in tension with democracy (pp. 50, 52–53). Yet the kind of religiously oriented party that endures negative stigma (p. 19) or is considered an anti-systemic party (p. 2) depends also on the type of secularism that characterizes political system. This secularism is not a cleavage that organizes party competition, but is a feature of the general political system (and political culture) that defines the structure of party politics and legitimate participation within it.
Secularism at the level of the political system has particularities in each case study of this book. In Turkey during the 1990s and in Islamic countries in general Islamist parties were often excluded from politics. The Italian Catholic party transformed itself into the Christian Democratic party probably also in order to avoid stigmatization that would occur, when a party has a too obvious and strong connection to the Catholic Church (p. 117).
Similarly, secularisms defining political systems differ also in the United States, Israel, and India. As a result, parties that would be categorized as Religious Nationalist or Fundamentalist are legitimate parts of party politics in Israel but need not be legitimate in other cases (other democracies).
The federal state is another feature of the political system (and therefore also part of the workings of its secularism) that goes together with variations in the ways cleavages interact. In federal states – particularly in India (p. 107), less so in the United States – most interaction among cleavages takes place on the local rather than the national level.
In all cases studied, the new right-wing populist parties are on the rise everywhere (p. 155). Ozzano interprets this finding as a manifestation of a new cleavage of libertarian−universalistic vs traditionalist−communitarian proposed by Bornschier (Reference Bornschier2010). In his view, this does not amount directly to politicization of religion or religious vs secular cleavage. In all cases studied, religion is increasingly associated with nationalist, identity-driven, and civilizational stances because of the rise of right-wing populism. For typical right-wing populist entrepreneur religion is not relevant as a practice or system of belief, but ‘only as an identity marker in the context of a right-wing populist identity based on a traditionalist-communitarian worldview’ (p. 212). Sometimes, as demonstrated by examples of Benjamin Netanyahu and Matteo Salvini, they avoid being identified purely as ‘religious’ (p. 107).
Religious orientation often overlaps with class cleavage. The overlap is particularly strong in the case of Turkey, where ‘social justice side in capital vs labor cleavage has mostly been politicized by Islamist and center-right conservative parties’ (p. 138). In most other cases left-wing parties have been the main actors politicizing the class cleavage.
As a rule, religious orientation overlaps with center-periphery cleavage. Here again Turkey has offered an exception, because the first electoral victories of Islamist parties in the 1990s were in larger Turkish cities (p. 146), which is not typical for conservative parties, who gain support mostly from peripheral rural regions (p. 55).
In the case study of Israel, the author uses case-specific cleavages such as hawks and doves, ethnic cleavage between Ashkenazi vs Sephardic Jews, religious nationalist and ultra-Orthodox cleavage as a case-specific intra-religious cleavage. To the extent that each case requires a conceptual framework of its own, the use value of typologies and theorization of interaction of cleavages presented in theoretical chapters becomes diminished. Particularly the distinction between hawks and doves could have been integrated into the general conceptual framework, because orientation toward conflict (and pluralism) was a dimension used throughout the study.
Lastly, among the five types of religiously oriented parties, the Progressive party type is the most interesting category. In comparison to other types – where the most successful has been Conservative type, most often discussed is Religious Nationalist type, most religiously oriented is Fundamentalist type – Progressive parties with religious orientations have been relatively marginally studied in previous scholarly works. The most successive examples are parties Meimad (Israel) and Margherita (Italy), and Jimmy Carter as the president of United States.
According to Ozzano, religiously oriented politicians and parties with a ‘progressive’ identity face specific challenges (p. 164). Their parties run mostly on a secular platform and identification with religion or religious convictions may alienate them from the electorate. (For example, Carter was personally against abortion in principle, while his party and its electorate were mostly in favor). Secular leftist circles may not approve of religious ‘progressive’ ideologies (p. 57).
Scholars studying religion in party politics benefit from both the theoretical and the empirical chapters of the volume. The typology of religiously oriented parties (first published by Reference Ozzano and CavatortaOzzano in 2013 jointly with Franscesco Cavatorta, fully presented and used in this volume) is a useful tool for comparative study of religion in party politics; the chapters on democracy and political cleavages present a state-of-the-art overview of recent scholarship and of the main empirical trends. From the selected case studies we gain the insight that besides using useful typologies, we need to consider carefully also contextual particularities.
