Between Purpose of Life, Mockery and Nostalgia. How Christianity
Unties and Divides the Far-Right on the Ground
Such diagnoses for the far-right are mostly based on public programs or politician´s positionings and therefore drawn from a highly mediated discourse. What remains unclear is to what extent Christian ideas become really meaningful among the many new local groups of the far-right and their everyday identity formation. How does Christianity as a diffuse marker or “host ideology” really make sense on the ground to articulate the conflict of the far-right?
In my paper, I introduce the concept of affective boundary-making to sharpen the focus on precisely these diffuse, but experience-based processes of collective meaning-making. Drawing from group discussions, I use the concept of affective boundary-making to explore the meanings and functions of Christianity for new local groups from the German far-right movement: groups from the party Alternative für Deutschland (AfD), the anti-Muslim network Pegida and the transnational youth organization Identitarian Movement. I present three contrasting cases: Christianity for local groups becomes meaningful as a source for purpose of life, as mockery and as nostalgia to express identity and conflict. The cases show how multifaceted and also controversial Christianity is on the ground for a collective identity of the far-right: Christianity unifies as a secularized cultural force, but beyond that commonality, fundamentally different concepts of identity and conflict appear. My findings point to the limits of mobilizing through Christianity and ethnopluralism as key concepts of the far-right.