Closed religions: transformative hegemony-building of right-wing populism in institutions and discourse of religious traditions
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| Year of publication | 2024 |
| Type | Appeared in Conference without Proceedings |
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| Description | The complex impulses of the current socio-economic conjuncture, mainly the weakening of institutional constraints and the legitimization crisis, manifest themselves in the rise of right-wing movements that contest the liberal hegemony and put forward the paradigmatic understandings seeking a reconfiguration of intra-state power relations. Precisely these broader dynamics initiating a process of re-establishing authority based on an exclusivist collective subject introduce an opportunity to challenge the general destabilization of religious authority and mediating structures with the elevation of centrifugal individualism accompanying the neoliberal economic model. Attempts to embrace this new role are necessarily leading to fragmentations within traditions and resignification of universalistic moral visions consistent with counter-hegemonic efforts hailing the turn to sovereignty, control, and protection. The process will be presented in the context of provisional results of a discursive analysis of elite political and religious figures, party programs, think tanks, congregations, and initiatives affiliated with dominant Christian traditions of two nation-state contexts, the United States and Poland. This transformative dynamic will be demonstrated in cases, where religious and political actors identify and advocate certain models within the public-private nexus to address social crises while interpreting key concepts of autonomy and security in terms of political metaphors of ideological forms. The comparison of culturally distinct promissory imaginaries and abductive explanations can enrich the thriving research field in important ways. Primarily, focusing on networks of interdependencies between the political, economic, and religious interest groups and the convergences of their meaning patterns can move beyond the hitherto mostly instrumentalist understandings of religion in contemporary political culture. Examining religious authorities in the novel scheme of power can help assess the paradoxical situation of weakening religious institutions and reconstruction of the religious component more holistically, bypassing a simplified, contentless conception of religious identitarianism which is becoming reductive shorthand for thorough empirical observations. |
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