(Roughly) Daily

Authoritarian leaders who play the religious card are not mere hypocrites, Suzanne Schneider suggests; there’s something far more troubling going on…

Viktor Orbán reportedly does not attend church. Benjamin Netanyahu eats at non-kosher restaurants. New York libertine Donald Trump lacks all manner of evident religious virtue.

Yet it is a fact that today’s crop of aspiring authoritarians invoke religious themes and symbols, despite not being strict adherents to their respective traditions. Of course, there is nothing new about the opportunistic use of religion by politicians. The scholars Garret Martin and Carolyn Gallaher have remarked that ‘Orbán’s use of religion is no different from Ronald Reagan’s embrace of Christian evangelicals in the late 1970s.’ According to these explanations, such figures cynically appeal to religion, despite not being true believers. Given this purported sincerity deficit, a conversation in this register toggles between accusations of hypocrisy and instrumentalism. How can such obviously corrupted figures claim to speak on behalf of a Christian or Jewish nation? And how can voters who claim to be animated by religious values be so blind?

Tempting as it is, the hypocrisy diagnosis does not quite map onto the emerging social landscape. There is instead a deeper and more interesting shift occurring in the world toward a new post-liberal or illiberal order of religion and politics. Understanding the nature of this transformation enables critics to break out of the cycle of allegations of hypocrisy or inconsistency, and to grasp an emergent worldview that is both coherent and deeply troubling…

Read on for her (troubling) explication: “An unholy alliance,” from @suzy_schneider in @aeonmag.

For the Washington Post‘s examination of the global tilt toward authoritarian nationalism: “Leaders of democracies increasingly echo Putin in authoritarian tilt” (gift article, so no paywall).

Apposite: “When the Hindu Right Came for Bollywood” (“The industry used to honor India’s secular ideals—but, since the rise of Narendra Modi, it’s been flooded with stock Hindu heroes and Muslim villains…”)

* Albert Einstein (also attributed to Gandhi)

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As we take the measure of the metamorphosis, we might recall that it was on this date in 1789 that John Jay was sworn in as the first Chief Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court. A founding father (co-author of The Federalist Papers with Hamilton and Madison, and President of the second Continental Congress), he had previously served as the young nation’s Secretary of Foreign Affairs (in which position he helped negotiate the Treaty of Paris), as the first Secretary of State, then as Governor of New York.

Jay was an ally of Hamilton, a proponent of a strong national government. While Governor of New York, he presided over a state constitutional convention in which religious tolerance was enshrined… within limits: he succeeded in adding special provisions for Catholics to the constitution’s article on the naturalization of foreigners. Under Jay’s amendment, aliens were required to take an oath of allegiance to the state that included renunciation of all allegiance and subjection to “all and every foreign king, prince potentate and state, in all matters ecclesiastical as well as civil.” Scholars suggest that the persecution of Jay’s Huguenot ancestors by the Catholic Church and his adherence to traditional Whig views identifying Protestantism with liberty and Catholicism with oppression, foreign influence, and sedition motivated his actions.

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