This introduction broaches the question of how naturalism rose to dominance in the modern West. Naturalism in this context is understood as a rejection of belief in the supernatural. This distinctive feature of Western modernity is at odds, not only with its own religious past, but also with what has been true for virtually all other cultures. Whereas it was once impossible not to assume the existence of the supernatural, this has now become one option among others, and one that is typically thought to be lacking in rational support. The book seeks to account for this unique historical development in two related ways. First, it explores the histories of the two key terms in this understanding—‘belief’ and ‘supernatural’—showing how they came to take on their present meanings in the modern period. Second, it shows how advocates of naturalism necessarily subscribe to a progressive view of history that can vindicate the adoption of these two categories in their modern sense.

This chapter considers how the exceptionalism of Western naturalism was given legitimacy through an appeal to narratives of progress. These narratives were indebted to a Protestant model that divided history into two periods—one in which miracles were genuine, followed by another in which they were not. The latter was associated with fraudulent Catholic miracles. Protestants also understood the Reformation as having ushered in an age of light after a period of medieval darkness. Eighteenth-century philosophes generalised and extended this argument, contending that the miracle reports from all historical periods were fraudulent. History could now be divided into an earlier period characterised by a naïve credulity in relation to miracle reports, followed by a more mature phase of history during which there was increasing recognition of the falsity of miracle reports. These same eighteenth-century thinkers also arrogated to themselves the mantle of enlightenment. The progressivist histories characteristic of the early social sciences and endorsed by advocates of scientific naturalism were doubly indebted to religious models since they also drew upon providential or eschatological notions of historical directionality. This raises the question of whether their progressivist philosophy of history is problematically dependent upon covert theistic assumptions.

This concluding chapter briefly considers the puzzle of why belief in the supernatural is endemic in certain times and places but not, for the most part, in modern Western Europe. It explores a range of theoretical possibilities: salience; the theory dependence of observation; the effects of language, concepts, cultural conditioning; and what might be called cultural and scientific myths and liturgies. It then moves to a brief consideration of how the general thesis of the book relates to other ‘modernity stories’, including those of Charles Taylor, Brad Gregory, John Milbank, and Alasdair MacIntyre.

Chapter 13 analyses how profound socio-demographic changes in America have contributed to a shift from the faith-driven culture wars of the twentieth century to a more secular identity politics between liberal cosmopolitans and populist communitarians in the twenty-first century. This trend appears closely linked to the rapid decline of American Christianity, which along with globalisation, individualisation and rapid ethnic change has led to an identity crisis in parts of the white working class. Given the relative unresponsiveness of the traditional party system to this development, Donald Trump succeeded in capitalising on this crisis of identity through a ‘hostile takeover’ of the GOP by the alt-right, and a gradual ‘Europeanisation’ of the American right, which shifted from a faith-based social conservativism to a more identitarian and populist white identity politics.

Chapter 17 ends with an exploration of the generalisability of this book’s findings, their limitations and potential for new research. It also returns to a fundamental challenge that right-wing populists’ religiously laden identity politics poses for Western societies. Namely, that instead of being just the latest iteration of religious opposition to secularisation, these developments point to a question of post-religious politics itself: what can still unite us in a society in which sources of social connectedness such as class, shared understandings of history, national culture and religion have lost most of their universal appeal and in which parts of the population are left in a profound crisis of identity? Who are ‘we’? Who is the ‘other’? As these questions drive a split between cosmopolitans and communitarians, right-wing populists have recognised a gap of representation and offered their own remedy: an ethno-cultural identity politics based on sweeping ideas of Western civilisation, in the context of which Christianity has become a secularised idea of ‘Christendom’ dissociated from Christian values, beliefs and institutions. Yet, faith leaders and mainstream parties also still have a tremendous influence over which role religion will play in liberal democracies. While the godless crusade may be well under way, its destination and success are yet to be determined.

Based on the theoretical foundations established in Chapter 2, Chapter 3 presents the book’s overall argument. In response to the research questions formulated in the Introduction it makes four key claims. First, that far from being the result of reignited religious culture wars, the surge of right-wing populism in the West has been driven by the emergence of a new identity cleavage between cosmopolitans and communitarians. Second, that to capitalise on this new divide, right-wing populists employ references to Christianity in the context of a new brand of white identity politics as a secularised cultural identity marker, but often remain distanced from Christian values, beliefs and institutions. Third, that this strategy tends to be most successful amongst irreligious voters or non-practising ‘cultural Christians’ whereas practising Christians often remain comparatively ‘immune’ to right-wing populist appeals. And fourth, that the existence and strength of this ‘religious immunity’ against the populist right critically depends on the availability of a ‘Christian alternative’ in the political landscape and on churches’ and faith leaders’ willingness and ability to create a social taboo around the populist right. These four claims constitute the theoretical cornerstones of this book’s overall argument and serve as an underlying structure for each empirical case study.

In Part IV (Chapters 12–15) the final case study of this book explores the relationship between right-wing populism and religion in the USA. It begins in Chapter 12 by discussing the historical background of the First Amendment, American civil religion, and the country’s history of white Christian nationalism and religious culture wars. Specifically, Chapter 12 shows how America’s civil religious tradition had historically been able to act as an important source of integration and prophetic criticism in American politics in spite of repeated challenges from white Christian nationalism on the one hand and secularist tendencies on the other. However, this chapter also explores how this integrative potential has been profoundly challenged by the rise of a new secular identity cleavage that increasingly superseded America’s old religious culture wars and prepared the grounds for the right-wing populist and identitarian politics of Donald Trump.

The Introduction sets the scene, formulates the questions the book will seek to answer and provides a brief overview of the general argument. It begins by taking the reader through an exploration of the paradoxical expressions of the relationship between right-wing populism and religion within Western democracies in recent years, laying the foundation for the way in which the book will challenge several widespread assumptions about the role religion has to play in populist politics today. During this foundational stage, the four guiding questions that structure and drive the thesis of the book are thus established: What are the social and demographic roots behind the rise of right populist movements and their new brand of identity politics in Western democracies? How and why does religion feature in right-wing populist rhetoric and strategies? How do Christian communities react to national populists’ religiously laden rhetoric? And what is the role of mainstream parties and religious leaders in shaping the relationship between religion and right-wing populism? After establishing these question, the book proceeds to briefly outlining the books general argument and overall structure.

After briefly surveying the treatments of Byzantium in early modern western European and Balkan literature, the chapter proceeds to explore, more pointedly, the Enlightenment approaches to the Greek antiquity and the Byzantine phenomenon in western Europe, Russia and the incipient national history-writing in the Balkans. Attention is paid to the key role played by Western philhellenism in the construction of the Greek national ideology with its cult of ancient Greece, by the contemporary Bulgarian relations with the Greeks in the construction of the Bulgarian historical narrative about the corrupting Byzantine influence, and by the Latinist school in Transylvania for the Romanian narrative about the Greek ‘theft’ of the Roman empire from its rightful heirs.

The concluding chapter sets out some of the key themes to emerge from the book. It recalls the influence of the various groups of actors who gave meaning to the Abortion Act, emphasising how the Act was shaped over time in a complex process of negotiation, dispute, revision and consolidation. We locate the Act within the shifting contours of a country undergoing a demographic revolution, exploring how it shaped and was shaped by processes of secularisation, the decline of discursive Christianity and an enhanced role for science in ordering understandings of the world, changing norms of gender, family and disability, shifting ideas of medical authority and changing technologies.

Chapter 2 is a reflection on how people in Western societies seem to struggle to understand the ongoing place of religion, which means that they also and perhaps particularly struggle with the idea of a divine revelation and the possibility that there is anything more than the immanence of the world. The average person growing up today – whether or not he or she is religious in some way – inhabits the world as a secular reality. That person might have links to a religious community, might have a sense of openness to the transcendent and might name that transcendence 'God' in ways that are shaped by the tradition of that community. Any commitment to transcendence will be challenged, however, not only in the face of the encounter with multiple other beliefs and worldviews, and not only because something like Charles Taylor's 'immanent frame' overwhelms the social imaginary, but also in the face of the radical interruption and forgetting of traditional symbolic networks on which particular religious systems and their communities depend. The injunction to remember that is at the heart of the three Abrahamic religious traditions simply no longer comes to mind in the once-Christian West.

While the Toleration Act provided significant legal protection that made the lives of Dissenters much easier, it also sparked a new and difficult process whereby differing parties jostled to secure their place in public religious life. The greater confidence of Dissenters in expressing their religion publicly, combined with the desire of Church interests to limit Dissenting influence, served to stimulate contests over religion on a local level. Chapter 2 explores the key effects of this on print, parish politics, attitudes to the physical presence of meeting houses, and inter-denominational relations at funerals and burials. Ultimately, disputes over the place of Dissent within the public religious landscape resulting from the settlement of 1689 acted to keep issues of religious difference alive in new ways, even as the embers of Restoration persecution burned out. As the concluding section of this chapter emphasises, considering the prominence of such disputes may help us to reconsider the place of the first half of the eighteenth century within longer narratives of the privatisation of belief.

The secularisation paradigm, the notion that religion faded into irrelevance in the post-Enlightenment era, has long defined perceptions of Romantic religiosity and religious art. From this perspective, art – in particular, the phenomenon of art-religion – served to fill the void left by the retreat of religion, offering new secularised forms of transcendence to replace those once offered by conventional religious art. This chapter aims to overhaul our received picture by arguing that rather than usurping the place of religion, art-religion serves as its dynamic continuation. It reveals the porous nature of the boundaries between religious art and art-religion in early Romantic thought, examining key texts by Schleiermacher, Wackenroder, and Tieck. It then demonstrates how a similar logic of recuperation and reinvention is at work in Romantic music, drawing on examples ranging from quasi-liturgical music to the monuments of absolute music. The chapter culminates with an exploration of what are arguably the most complex, multilayered examples of Romantic art-religion in the musical sphere, Liszt’s Christus and Wagner’s Parsifal.

The practice of criminal justice in western and central Europe was more violent between 1400 and 1600 than before or afterwards, but sensational propaganda produced during this period exaggerates the prevalence of torture and execution. Many criminals evaded justice altogether and most defendants who were caught and brought to trial were subject to quick and relatively merciful justice. Fines, short prison sentences and banishment were far more commonplace than brutally painful execution rituals. As early as the seventeenth century, the practice of both torture and execution declined, the result of changes in Christianity, the growing confidence of secular states, and concerns that inflicting pain was inherently abusive. Enlightenment authors such as Voltaire and Beccaria, who insisted on judicial reform in the late eighteenth century, grossly distorted the actual practice of criminal justice in their own era in ways that have allowed historians to assume that criminal justice in the pre-modern period was more violent than it actually was.

The concept is broached of mid-twentieth-century British Christianity as in a battle, comprising five core zones of engagement. These were: the struggle of conservative religionists to impose upon the people ignorance about sex; the effort of licensing authorities to control leisure venues; the struggle between churches and their agents against Humanists, secularists, agnostics and atheists over the theocratic stranglehold of moral law; the contest waged by Humanists to release the Christian grip upon moral and ethical broadcasting at the BBC; and, with the collapse of the conservative moral regime in the 1960s, the discreet tussle erupting between the Church of England and the Roman Catholic Church for the baton of moral leadership. These struggles undergird the book’s key interventions – to enlarge religion in cultural history, reasserting the reality of secularisation in the British establishment and pinpointing Humanists as the pioneers in progressive medical legislation. Reviews follow of existing narratives of the 1950s and 1960s in transatlantic and British historiography, emphasising the importance of parallel North American experience in the history of sex and religion.

This chapter argues that the British 1880s sees the emergence of powerful forces of political idealism, sceptical of evangelical calls to religious salvation but offering, instead, uplifting forms of ‘discursive Christianity’ in which high-minded routes to social salvation draw on Christian ideals but are modified to address the social problems of the day. The play of such a diffused Christianity is examined in the fiction of William Hale White (‘Mark Rutherford’). It then examines how George Gissing, with his commitment to realism in the novel, faces the aesthetic challenge of representing, authentically, political idealism, as expressed through polemic and forms of speech-making. Gissing’s solution is an ‘impersonal’ mode of presentation and an increasingly satiric treatment of vocal performance. Gissing’s scepticism about the limits of oratorical performance is seen as symptomatic of a wider artistic disenchantment with the strategies of Victorian high-mindedness, as in the satiric proto-modernism of late Hardy. In the light of the modernist diffusion of aesthetic and cultural detachment from the ethical and political imperatives of late-Victorianism into the inter-war period, it falls to later twentieth-century criticism to re-start serious evaluation of the innovatory character of the interplay of social, political and aesthetic life in the British 1880s.