Is ‘weaponized’ religion a threat to democracy?

While Americans seemed as politically divided as possible on January 6, 2021, the day that hundreds of insurgents stormed the Capitol, David Elcott believes many more threats to democracy are in the offing.

On that day, a cluster of insurgents lifted a wooden cross with a banner that proclaimed “Jesus is My Savior, Trump is My President.” For Elcott, professor of practice in public service and leadership at New York University’s Wagner School of Public Service, the message crystallized what he calls the intoxicating intersection of religion and politics in America.

“The Republican representatives in Congress and in the states are using religious identity as an incendiary dog whistle,” he says. “What they’re fomenting— maximal chaos—is only in its infancy.”

In a newly published book Faith, Nationalism, and the Future of Liberal Democracy (Notre Dame Press, 2021), Elcott argues that religion is being “weaponized” by self-defined illiberal movements to justify restrictions on liberty and marginalization of minorities around the world.

He and his co-researchers cite the Trump-era “Muslim ban” and the assaults on Middle Eastern refugees in Germany and France, among other examples. Festering since the Second World War, religion is increasingly fused to a xenophobic hyper-nationalism, he writes.

Trained in political psychology, Middle East affairs, and Judaic studies, Elcott works to enhance understanding of non-violent civic engagement and activism that crosses religious, ethnic, and racial lines. He has conducted training for grassroots advocates and civil society in the US, Indonesia, Palestine, Uganda, and Germany, and is faculty director of the Advocacy and Political Action specialization at Wagner. The book grew from interviews in evangelical communities around the US in the years before Trump’s 2016 election.

For spiritual leaders in every faith, the appropriate response to today’s “reactionary reflex” is for them to use the authority of the pulpit’s capacity to foster “the best protection for religious freedom and personal liberty”—liberal democracy, Elcott says. He notes that a coalition of more than 100 evangelical clerics joined in an open letter condemning the role of “radicalized Christian nationalism” in fueling the mob’s attack on Congress. The letter called on Christian leaders to take a public stand against racism, Christian nationalism, conspiracy theories, and political extremism.

Here, Elcott talks about what else may help diffuse the zealotry that has captured the imagination of an ever-growing number of Americans:

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