Today’s radical right actors in Western democracies present themselves as the true defenders of the Christian identity of their country, Europe, or the Western world as a whole – but in an illiberal, often anti-liberal way. The paper investigates which kinds of Christian identities are involved, connects them to broader political and cultural changes and assesses their relevance for democratic development in Western Europe, North and South America. It does so in three steps. First, the paper critically discusses various approaches and labels in the literature addressing this phenomenon of a new civilizational crusader role of the far right and suggests distinguishing between authentic Christian and para-Christian identities. It then moves on to address the role of secularization and religio-cultural pluralization as well as patterns of party and electoral competition. Thirdly, the paper elaborates the illiberal Christian narratives of radical right actors and connects the macro-changes discussed earlier with the kind of narratives that are propagated, arguing that para-Christian narratives on the far right dominate in more secular contexts while more authentically religious Christian nationalism is prevalent in less secularized societies. The paper concludes by discussing the relevance of this finding for the quality of democracy in the three regions.
