Crisis and the Remaking of Religious Authority

Several books in this issue examine what happens when religious actors enter politics after periods of large-scale crisis and structural breakdown: the reworking of religious authority under the constraints of governance. Patrick Haenni and Jérôme Drevon’s (2025) Transformed by the People: Hayat Tahrir al-Sham’s Road to Power in Syria, reviewed by Shimaa Hatab, frames the rise of Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham as “a seminal case study in revolutionary state-building and ideological realignment under conditions of extreme duress.” As Hatab notes, the book describes Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham’s ideological evolution “as an act of adaptive legitimacy rather than theological reform,” to the extent this “jihadi-turned-nationalist movement” has even reached out to Sufi actors and minority religions in Syria. What drives this transformation is the burden of rule itself. The book highlights that “The politics of rebel governance cannot be separated from the sociology of ideological realignment, and…even the most radical movements, once compelled to govern, are inevitably transformed by the societies they seek to command.” Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham’s religious foundations and political practices are thus mutually reshaped through its administrative responsibilities and deep entrenchment among its constituents.

Similarly, during post-World War II democratic reconstruction in Europe, religion shaped how societies responded to and rebuilt from war and moral collapse—the subject of a Critical Dialogue between Rosario Forlenza and Bjørn Thomassen, on the one hand, and Brandon Bloch, on the other. Forlenza and Thomassen’s (2024) Italy’s Christian Democracy: The Catholic Encounter with Political Modernity posits that Christian democracy “offered a comprehensive alternative to liberal, conservative, socialist, and fascist ideologies by anchoring secular politics in Catholic-inspired ideas of personhood, dignity, and subsidiarity” following the brutalities of the Second World War. Bloch’s (2025) Reinventing Protestant Germany: Religious Nationalists and the Contest for Post-Nazi Democracy reinforces this argument from a different angle. As reviewers Forlenza and Thomassen note, the book highlights that “postwar democracy in West Germany emerged not simply through rupture but through ideological and cultural adaptation”—a shift toward what Bloch describes as a “Protestant Rechtsstaat ,” marked by Protestant norms and institutional mandate. Bloch does not portray “this transformation as a seamless or cynical and opportunistic shift, but rather as a contested, morally ambiguous and deeply intellectually fraught process, marked by both genuine innovation and strategic amnesia” (see Critical Dialogue exchange, this issue). Religious nationalism in Europe did, thus, not disappear after 1945 but was selectively reworked under the pressure of defeat and delegitimation.

Religion, Nationalism, and Political Community

If crisis and political insecurity often transform religious authority by posing new demands of governance, they can also reconfigure the boundaries of political community. Several books in this issue examine how religion functions as a key idiom through which nationalist projects—democratic and illiberal alike—are articulated, legitimated, and contested. Thomas Tweed’s (2025) Religion in the Lands That Became America, reviewed by Matthew Avery Sutton, highlights that civil religion, “functioning as an alternative to an established church, became ‘the first language of American nationalism,’ enabling patriots to frame political projects in general rather than specifically Christian terms” (p. 198). While religion can facilitate national integration, contemporary politics has once again put into focus its exclusionary potential. Religion and Congress: The Intersection of Faith and Politics (2025), edited by David A. Dulio and Colton C. Campbell and reviewed by Seth C. McKee, sheds new light on how partisan loyalty during the first Trump presidency was structured by religious demography. It finds that “fealty to this president is…better explained by the share of evangelical constituents that members of Congress represent, as opposed to whether they themselves self-identify as evangelicals.” Religion under Trump’s presidency has been mobilized to cast political opposition, secular elites, and many minority groups as threats to the nation.

This boundary-making logic is also at the heart of Luna Sabastian’s (2025) Fascism in India: Race, Caste, and Hindutva, the focus of a review symposium in this issue. Contributor Ashutosh Varshney highlights that through rigorous research and theorization, Sabastian convincingly shows that “Hindu nationalism is a fascist ideology.” In her symposium contribution, Nitasha Kaul elaborates on the ideological views of Vinayak Damodar Savarkar, a key figure in twentieth-century Hindu nationalism. She highlights that one of the Sabastian’s most important contributions is her claim that “Savarkar’s Hindutva project sought not merely Muslim subjugation as second-class citizens but their incorporation, refusing to recognize the limit of even a completely subjugated ‘minority’.” Religion here structures nationalism through an expansive but coercive logic of belonging—one that demands assimilation while denying recognition and equality.

Importantly, religious boundary-making can trigger, justify, and even normalize violence. In God’s Warriors: Religious Violence and the Global Crisis in Secularism, reviewed by Mark Juergensmeyer, Nilay Saiya argues that contemporary religious violence often stems from majoritarian religious nationalism rather than marginalized extremism. Drawing on cases across religious traditions, including Christian, Hindu, and Buddhist movements, he shows how dominant communities recast political belonging as a moral hierarchy in contexts where secular frameworks have weakened, enabling exclusion and violence to be framed as necessary acts of protection. Güneş Murat Tezcür’s Liminal Minorities: Religious Difference and Mass Violence in Muslim Societies, reviewed by Mohammed Hafez, similarly shows how religious stigmatization, when combined with political resentment that often arises when dominant groups feel status reversal, can result in assaults on religious minorities. The books discussed here all highlight how religious boundary-making operates as a powerful mechanism that renders exclusionary practices and violence against perceived outsiders intelligible, if not justified.

Religion after Secularization: Worship, Substitution, and Moral Authority

Other books turn from religion’s entanglement with governance and exclusionary nationalism to further investigate its transformation under conditions of secularization. Rather than treating secularization as the disappearance of religion, these works examine how religion persists, including through new objects of devotion, institutional forms, and epistemic authorities. William T. Cavanaugh’s (2024) The Uses of Idolatry, reviewed by Sam Han, emphasizes that modern politics has not become “disenchanted but rather misenchanted.” One of the central claims of the book is that “we still live in a world of worship—it just simply doesn’t take place in churches,” as Han explains. Worship has shifted from the explicit adoration of God to the implicit veneration of human-made objects, generating “commodity fetishism, ritualized nationalism, and faith in the ‘invisible hand’ of the market” (p. 2). Religion, from this perspective, persists as a structuring logic of meaning, linking new experiences of transcendence to acts of loyalty and sacrifice that are embedded in ostensibly secular practices like mass consumerism.

Paul Seabright’s (2025) The Divine Economy: How Religions Compete for Wealth, Power, and People—the subject of a review symposium—offers additional insights by arguing that “religious movements are a special kind of business” (p. 8). In his symposium contribution, Jeffrey Haynes elaborates on Seabright’s central claim that religious movements function as organizational platforms through which religious leaders accumulate and exercise power—be it political or popular power. What distinguishes this account from earlier market or rational-choice approaches is its focus on how religious authority is reorganized under conditions of secularization, pluralism, and institutional competition. Seabright argues that religion is increasingly structured by organizational incentives and competitive dynamics that emerge as inherited forms of authority weaken. These developments do not merely coexist with secularization, but they are, in part, responses to it, compelling religious actors to compete for attention, loyalty, and legitimacy in environments marked by diversity and uncertainty.

A more skeptical perspective on religion amid secularization appears in Christian Smith’s (2025) Why Religion Went Obsolete: The Demise of Traditional Faith in America, reviewed by David Hollinger. Smith argues that the decline of traditional religion—“religious groups that have existed for multiple generations; that have established practices, doctrines, organizational structures, and cultures” (p. 2)—reflects not indifference to religious meaning but the ascendance of alternative epistemic authorities. He posits that “science has ‘won’ not by destroying religion’s capacity to support morally upright behavior…but rather by delivering the empirical goods on how the world works.” While many contributors to this issue would likely question whether science has ultimately “won,” Smith highlights an important point: In some contexts, crisis and modernization do not yield religious reconfiguration, but decline or possibly displacement, including on an individual level, without functional equivalence. In fact, a multitude of sometimes conflicting dynamics typically exist in parallel: religious adaptation, reconfiguration, decline, and displacement are not mutually exclusive but, more often than not, mutually reinforcing processes.

Securitization, Counterterrorism, and the Moralization of Power

If religion’s transformation can be traced through markets and changing sources of epistemic authority, it can also be reconfigured through state security initiatives and coercive governance. Contexts of political insecurity can transform state power itself into a moral regime that echoes religious forms of authority, loyalty, and sacrifice. This dynamic is analyzed in Marie Breen-Smyth’s review essay, Counterterrorism and Its Consequences, surveying work by Richard English (Does Counterterrorism Work?, 2024), Fiona de Londras (The Practice and Problems of Transnational Counter-Terrorism, 2022), and Guendalina Simoncini (Counterterrorism in Transition: Post-2011 Tunisian Democracy and the War on Terror, 2024). Breen-Smyth argues that counterterrorism has evolved into “a raft of restrictions on freedom, military interventions, wars, [and] judicial and extrajudicial processes,” becoming a durable mode of governance, as opposed to an exceptional response mechanism. Counterterrorism functions as a legitimating framework allowing states to justify repression, polarization, and authoritarian consolidation in the name of security. Crisis, in this context, does not suspend normal politics; it reorganizes it around moralized claims of protection and necessity.

The moralization of security is also a central theme in Simon Polinder’s (2025) Towards a New Christian Political Realism: The Amsterdam School of Philosophy and the Role of Religion in International Relations. Reviewer Annette Freyberg-Inan describes Polinder’s core intervention as the development of a “theologically prompted secularism” that embraces “the autonomy of politics and the primacy of the state.” Drawing on the concept of the katechon—a restraining force that delays catastrophe—the book shows how religious ideas can legitimate expansive state authority precisely by withdrawing overt theological claims. In fact, security regimes derive moral authority not by invoking religion directly, but by presenting the preservation of order as an ethical imperative in itself. Read alongside Breen-Smyth’s analysis, Polinder’s account helps explain why counterterrorism so readily becomes a normative order: it is grounded in a secularized moral logic that authorizes exceptional power in the name of preventing existential collapse.

Resisting Radicalization: Exploring the Nonoccurrence of Violent Extremism (2025), edited by Morten Bøås, Gilad Ben-Nun, Ulf Engel, and Kari Osland, offers additional insight into the social consequences of securitized governance. Rather than treating religion as a primary driver of violence, the volume shifts attention to the conditions under which violence does not occur. As per reviewer Mikael Naghizadeh, the volume rightly emphasizes that much existing scholarship “has obstructed our awareness of the fact that most people are not radicalized, even in areas that provide fertile ground for radical ideas” (p. 15). The book instead foregrounds the role of local communities, religious leaders, and informal moral authorities in fostering social resilience, all of which can be weakened by counterterrorism policies. Read alongside Breen-Smyth and Polinder, Resisting Radicalization underscores that religion often functions as a social infrastructure, and its erosion through securitized governance can trigger immense instability, including civil conflict, war, and authoritarian governance. All three works ultimately show that security becomes a moral language through which loyalty is demanded, suspicion institutionalized, and dissent disciplined. Counterterrorism thus takes on moral and symbolic functions long expressed through religious frameworks: defining good and evil, authorizing sacrifice, and legitimating extraordinary power.

Religion, Democratic Backsliding, and Authoritarian Consolidation

This review issue also offers important insights into how religious ideas, practices, and authorities are reworked, both amid and in the wake of crisis, and how those reconfigurations matter for democratic resilience and decline. Democratic backsliding is rarely justified as a rupture with democratic norms. Instead, it is framed as a moral necessity—an effort to restore order, protect the community, or avert an existential threat. The books reviewed illuminate how religion supplies key resources for this framing: ethical languages of sacrifice and duty, narratives of collective identity, and claims to transcendent legitimacy. Guendalina Simoncini’s study of how counterterrorism was mobilized as a moral imperative to “protect” the post-2011 democratic transition in Tunisia—only to become a vehicle for the consolidation of authoritarian rule—is a prime example.

At the same time, contributors in this issue reject simple equations between religion and authoritarianism. They show that religion can also sustain democratic reconstruction, mediate political compromise, and anchor resistance to repression. Rosario Forlenza, Bjørn Thomassen, and Brandon Bloch’s studies of postwar Europe, for instance, demonstrate how Christian democratic and Protestant traditions were reshaped through experiences of defeat and moral collapse to support democratic transformations. In a similar manner, Mona El-Ghobashy’s review essay Political Regimes in an Egyptian Mirror shows how, after the 2011 Egyptian Revolution, religious institutions and moral vocabularies were deeply entangled in democratic governance, as various Islamic actors struggled for power and legitimacy.

By tracing religion’s reconfiguration across governance, nationalism, secular authority, and security regimes, the issue contributors also help explain why contemporary autocratization so often proceeds incrementally rather than dramatically. Crisis becomes permanent, emergency measures become routine, and moralized claims of protection displace procedural accountability. Religion, in these settings, is neither simply instrumentalized nor simply displaced. It is woven into the justificatory architectures of power that sustain democratic erosion while preserving the appearance of moral order. Thus, democratic decline today requires taking the role of religion seriously—not as a singular cause, but as a field of meaning through which crisis is interpreted and political authority reconstituted. This issue invites scholars to move beyond asking whether religion is compatible with democracy and toward analyzing how religious ideas and practices shape the moral horizons within which democracy is defended, hollowed out, or transformed.