As many of us grapple with the new world “struggling to be born,” attention increasingly turns to phenomena that appear new—or newly consequential. One of these is the apparent “return” of religion to public life, both in the secularized societies of Europe and North America and in more historically “religious” societies across Asia, Latin America, the Middle East, and Africa. This “return” manifests itself in very different ways: in the digital congregations and online prayer rooms that proliferated during the COVID-19 pandemic; in the incorporation of Buddhist symbols and rituals into fashionable yoga studios; and in interfaith solidarity initiatives responding to war and poverty.
Yet religion has also become increasingly visible within illiberal political projects: in Christian nationalism in the United States, Catholic integralism and anti-gender mobilization in Europe and Latin America, Hindu civilizationism, the Russian state’s defense of the Orthodox world, religiously framed campaigns against LGBTQ+ rights in parts of Africa, and the political mobilization of Shi’a martyrdom in Iran. Apocalyptic language now circulates across borders, as well as between religious movements, Silicon Valley visions of civilizational collapse, and political projects promising national rebirth.
Scholars of religion have long been critical of describing these developments as a “return.” Since at least the 1990s, the classical secularization thesis—the expectation that modernization would necessarily lead to religion’s decline—has been subjected to sustained criticism. To continue speaking of religion’s return in 2026 may therefore seem both outdated and analytically misleading, since it presupposes an earlier disappearance that has, in fact, never occurred. There is now broad agreement among specialists that religion never simply vanished: neither under colonial “civilizing missions,” industrialization, Cold War modernization, nor the later global ascendancy of liberalism. Its present visibility should instead be understood as part of processes that have been unfolding, although with different speed and intensity across the globe, for decades.
New Series of Essays: Conceptual Foundations
The new essay series at the Illiberalism Studies Program examines the changing interaction between religion and liberalism: how religious traditions and identities are being transformed as the liberal arrangements that have regulated them lose legitimacy, and how these transformations are becoming intertwined with present-day contestations of liberal scripts.
But what is “religion”? Modern statecraft, colonial governance, scholarly comparison, and liberal law brought diverse traditions and practices under the common category of “religion,” treating them as bounded and internally coherent communities, represented by identifiable authorities and formally equivalent before the law. The category is therefore not neutral (and we do not treat it as such): fitting diverse practices into the mold of “religion” often reflected Eurocentric assumptions rooted in European Christian history. The familiar classification of Christianity, Islam, Judaism, Hinduism, and Buddhism as the major “world religions” illustrates, for instance, both the analytical and ethical problems associated with the very idea of existence of world religions, and of the World Religions Paradigm in general.
The category [of religion] is therefore not neutral […]: fitting diverse practices into the mold of “religion” often reflected Eurocentric assumptions rooted in European Christian history.
In this series, “religion” refers provisionally to historically situated traditions, practices, communities, symbols, and forms of authority through which actors invoke and mediate an order that exceeds immediate political and social arrangements. Such an order may be understood as divine, sacred, but also ancestral, natural, or traditional, sometimes civilizational. This capacious definition does not classify every appeal to nature or civilization as religious. Rather, it directs attention to how particular orders acquire sacred or transcendent authority and come to shape collective life in the context of liberal hegemony.
As the contributions in this series show, religion is not inherently anti-liberal or illiberal. Religious ideas and institutions have contributed to the development of liberal traditions. Yet liberalism—and, in different ways, nationalism and socialism—has also frequently come into tension with religion as an institution, a source of authority, and a body of moral norms. Like other modern political projects, liberalism has often sought to regulate religion and subordinate religious authority to the state. It has done so by recognizing religion as a protected but bounded sphere of social life.
The relationship between religion and liberalism has therefore often been narrated through the concept of “secularization.” Yet the term brings together several processes that do not necessarily coincide: the differentiation of the state, science, and other social spheres from religious institutions; the privatization of religion; and the decline of religious belief and practice. Correspondingly, what is described as “desecularization” may refer to renewed personal devotion, the growing public authority of religious institutions, or the reintroduction of religious norms into law and politics. These processes need not move together. Religious participation may continue to decline even as religious symbols acquire greater political authority.
This critique has rightly stressed that concepts like secularization, and consequently desecularization, have been developed primarily to describe affluent post-industrial democracies in the Global North. Yet even within these societies, secularization followed different trajectories, as the longstanding debate about the comparability of the United States and Western Europe demonstrates. Therefore, rather than assuming there has ever been a universal liberal-secular settlement, this series takes the position that there, instead, has been a wide range of historically connected but distinct arrangements for separating and relating religion, state, law, and society. The ideas of “multiple modernities” and “multiple secularities” provide important comparative frameworks for this approach.
In general, the series is organized around three related questions. First, how do religious actors and ideas challenge liberal norms and institutions? Second, how have religious formations themselves been shaped by liberal forms of governance, and what happens to them when those arrangements are resisted? Third, how does the weakening of liberal pluralism affect the boundaries and relationships among religious traditions?
Together, these questions shift attention from whether religion is “returning” to how its relationship with liberalism is being reorganized. Religious actors may challenge liberal norms, but contemporary religious formations have themselves been shaped by liberal institutions and categories. As these arrangements are contested, both religion’s relationship with the state and the boundaries among religious traditions may change. The series examines these transformations across three interconnected levels: personal, national, and global.
Interconnected Levels
1) Religion and the Unsettled Individual
At the personal level, the series examines how religions provide ways of living through the uncertainties associated with the crisis of liberalism. As defined above, religion invokes an order exceeding immediate political and social arrangements. For individuals, such an order can provide moral languages through which to distinguish good from evil; a sense of historical and geographical embeddedness; ways of confronting vulnerability, death, and an uncertain future; and communities, rituals, calendars, and rhythms that organize everyday life. These functions help explain the appeal not only of established religious institutions, but also of spiritual movements, online religious communities, hybrid forms of belief, and individualized religious practices.
For individuals, [religion] can provide moral languages through which to distinguish good from evil; a sense of historical and geographical embeddedness; ways of confronting vulnerability, death, and an uncertain future; and communities, rituals, calendars, and rhythms that organize everyday life.
Religion does more, however, than supply resources and services to individuals. Practices such as prayer, fasting, study, and religious dress cultivate relationships and obligations that cannot be understood as products of personal choice alone. Religion can therefore challenge a central liberal conception of the person: the autonomous individual who chooses their commitments and remains their ultimate author. The series asks what alternative forms of personhood and agency emerge when individuals understand themselves as accountable to inherited traditions or transcendent authorities. These alternatives become politically significant when they shape everyday norms concerning dress, child-rearing, family, work, and proper conduct. Liberal norms are thus contested not only through doctrines, but also through everyday practices grounded in alternative sources of moral authority.
Such projects are not inherently illiberal. Yet they may become entangled with illiberal politics when moral distinctions are converted into hierarchies of social worth, historical embeddedness into civilizational essentialism, or religious belonging into unequal access to rights and political membership. The series therefore examines both the belonging that religion provides and the exclusions it can produce. Because individual practices are shaped by institutions, markets, digital platforms, and transnational networks, personal searches for meaning can become part of wider, national political struggles over social and moral order.
2) Religion and the Crisis of the Liberal State
At the national level, the series examines how religion becomes involved in struggles over the authority of the liberal state. This crisis concerns more than the state’s declining capacity to govern. It also raises questions about who should provide for society, define legitimate forms of belonging, and interpret the nation’s past and future. Religious actors participate in all three struggles by identifying the causes of the crisis and presenting themselves as sources of moral authority and practical solutions.
First, religious organizations may assume functions that states appear increasingly unable or unwilling to perform. They provide welfare, education, humanitarian assistance, and social belonging where public institutions are perceived to have failed. Some strands of post-liberal political thought, for example, question whether procedural rules and market relations alone can sustain political community without deeper moral traditions. Religious provision can respond to genuine social needs, but it can also transfer public authority to actors less accountable or governed by exclusivist moral frameworks. Catholic hospitals in the United States, for example, provide essential care but restrict reproductive treatments in accordance with Church teaching—even where they are the only local provider. Nor do religious organizations necessarily challenge the economic arrangements that contributed to the crisis. For instance, some forms of Prosperity Christianity, as practiced both in the Global North and South, sacralize wealth and entrepreneurial success rather than offering an alternative to capitalism.
The struggle between liberalism and religion concerns the state’s power to define legitimate religion and political belonging.
Second, the struggle between liberalism and religion concerns the state’s power to define legitimate religion and political belonging. Liberal governance has long shaped the religious field by deciding which communities receive legal recognition and public legitimacy. It has also made some religions more visible than others: a nation’s majority religion may be framed as synonymous with culture, while minority traditions remain marked—and sometimes racialized—as mere “religion.” The crucifix can thus be defended as cultural heritage in Italian schools, while Islamic symbols are treated as matters requiring regulation. Elsewhere, governments reshape national belonging more explicitly: Russia privileges Orthodoxy and selected “traditional religions,” while India has introduced religious restrictions for those seeking citizenship. The crisis of liberalism therefore involves not only religious challenges to the state, but also state-led efforts to use religion to redefine national identity.
Third, these struggles concern who can interpret the direction of history. Liberalism has often presented political time as a process of progress: societies modernize, individual rights expand, religion becomes less authoritative, and institutions become more rational and inclusive. Many contemporary religious and illiberal movements reject this narrative. They describe the present through decline and restoration, sacrifice and redemption, civilizational struggle, or moral apocalypse.
Here, apocalypse refers not only to a theological prediction of the end times, but also to a political structure. It turns disagreement into an existential struggle and makes gradual reform appear inadequate. Such thinking is not exclusive to religious movements or the political right: ecological, anticolonial, and progressive movements may also present the present as a decisive threshold requiring radical change. What distinguishes these projects is the source of authority they invoke and the futures they make imaginable. As these narratives circulate across states, religious traditions, and digital networks, national struggles over authority and political time become connected to competing visions of a global order.
3) Religion after Liberal Universalism
At the global level, the series examines how religion participates in struggles over the principles that should organize the international order. As Western power and the legitimacy of liberal institutions weaken, political actors increasingly present liberalism not as a universally available framework, but as the historically particular worldview of Western societies. Religious traditions and civilizational narratives can consequently become languages of sovereignty and resistance to Western domination.
Religious traditions and civilizational narratives [have] consequently become languages of sovereignty and resistance to Western domination.
Not all challenges to liberal universality, however, have the same political meaning. Civilizational projects may defend a world divided into culturally bounded normative orders, often granting powerful states the right to exercise authority within their presumed spheres of influence. Postcolonial states may also challenge Western dominance, but from a different position: they seek greater equality and the right to participate in defining universal norms. Religion can provide a language for both projects—legitimating civilizational hierarchy in one context while supporting anticolonial solidarity and demands for justice in another.
The emerging conflict is thus not simply between liberal universalism and religious particularism. Religious actors can advance universal claims of their own. Actors drawing on Orthodox Christianity, Catholicism, Islam, Pentecostal Christianity, Hindu traditions may offer competing accounts of humanity and justice. Some seek to replace liberal universality with civilizational plurality and sovereign difference; others imagine transnational moral communities that cross state and civilizational boundaries. This series therefore approaches the changing global order as a contest among competing universalisms, as well as a struggle between universalism and particularism.
The series also wishes to examine how these particular visions of order travel through humanitarian assistance, education, pilgrimage, tourism, and popular symbols. States and religious institutions use these channels to build influence across borders, but their messages are interpreted and reshaped by local actors. This circulation connects the three levels: personal commitments link individuals to national and transnational projects, while global struggles reshape religious institutions and everyday practices.
Religion and Illiberalism
In sum, liberal institutions helped shape modern religions as bounded communities centered on individual belief and represented by recognized authorities. As these arrangements lose legitimacy, the result may be not only more public religion, but different forms of religion. Some actors reject liberal categories; others adapt or strategically use them.
Religion and illiberalism intersect through disputes over authority, belonging, and universality, but neither necessarily entails the other. Religion can legitimize hierarchy and exclusion, but it can also support solidarity, anticolonial resistance, and criticism of state power. Illiberalism, in turn, can be secular or technocratic. The relationship is therefore reciprocal: religions are reshaping the crisis of liberalism, while liberalism has already shaped the religions now challenging it. The new series follows this changing relationship from everyday religious practice to national politics and the international order, asking not only what is breaking down, but also what new ways of living together may emerge.
Gulnaz Sibgatullina is an Assistant Professor for Illiberal Regimes at the University of Amsterdam and a member of the Illiberalism Studies Program Paris branch.
Image made by Alberto Polimeni using “Church, Mosque, Synagogue; Jerusalem,” by Obendorf licensed under CC0 1.0.
