Chapter 19 The Orthodox ‘Unorthodox’: From Populism to Pluralism

In: The Spirit of Populism
Authors:
Ryszard Bobrowicz
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Johanna Gustafsson Lundberg
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Abstract

During the last decade the link between religion and right-wing populism has been underlined by scholars, viewing the latter as a form of ‘religious backlash’ and encouraging progressives to fight back. However, by setting the religious against the secular, these arguments, paradoxically, have contributed to the development of populism—by enforcing what Ryszard Bobrowicz and Johanna Gustafsson Lundberg describe as “religious divisionism” in this chapter. This chapter begins by discussing the emergence and significance of such a binary viewpoint in the political sphere. In the first section, the authors discuss which role religious divisionism plays in the growth of populist movements. The second section explores the persistence of religious divisionism in public debates as exemplified in the controversy stirred up by the Netflix show Unorthodox, especially in the Swedish context. In the final section, by analyzing the concept of radical plurality and by introducing insights from Scandinavian Creation Theology, the authors show that the tools for reframing the debate can be found in both secular and religious sources.

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The Spirit of Populism

Political Theologies in Polarized Times

Series:  Political and Public Theologies, Volume: 1

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