Chapter 1
In: The Spirit of Populism
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Abstract
Studies scrutinizing the significance of religion for populism are still scarce, but one metaphor has been adopted across almost all of them—the metaphor of the hijacked faith. This chapter sketches the nexus between metaphor and method in the study of populism, before it introduces the contributions to this compilation. Ulrich Schmiedel suggest that there are structural similarities between populist references to religion and the study of populist references to religion. A logic that can be traced back to Carl Schmitt lurks in the distinction between the legitimate and the illegitimate ownership of ‘religion’ that is drawn by the metaphor of the hijacked faith. There is a political theology in populism. This political theology needs to be interrogated, both in populism and in scholarship on populism, because it contains normative assumption that secretly structure both analyses and assessments of politics.