Javier Benegas (b. 1965) is a Spanish political analyst and writer, co-founder of the Spanish daily Vozpópuli, of which he was opinion director, and founder of the think tank ThinkAct, as well as editor of the political and sociological analysis journal Disidentia.
Eastern European countries’ attachment to Christianity is often interpreted as evidence of their cultural backwardness. Beyond these countries, for many European politicians and citizens, modernity implies the renunciation of certain beliefs, most notably religion. Modern Europe is, in theory, essentially empirical, and its direction is subject not to the particular beliefs of individuals, but to evidence-based politics. Consequently, citizens, for their own good, must renounce their beliefs and submit to the rule of experts.
Democracy thus becomes a soft, allegedly enlightened totalitarianism. Formally, European democracies retain their institutions and their function of representation. Citizens are still called to the polls to choose between different alternatives, but in practice politics becomes an extraordinarily complex matter reserved for an elite of experts. Universal suffrage does not disappear, but between elections, citizens’ participation is co-opted by increasingly secretive parties and expert committees that impose their criteria. Within this dynamic, any electoral result that goes against the status quo is interpreted as a mistake to be corrected; the citizens have voted wrongly and the active forces will have to commit themselves to reversing this mistake.
It is not surprising, then, that there is a growing disaffection with the democratic order on the part of many European citizens. But this disaffection has less to do with democracy itself than with the rise of an epistocracy that has distorted it. People feel that they have lost control over politics and, consequently, over their lives, that civil society is vituperated by a system of representation that is increasingly closed and disconnected from citizens’ beliefs, concerns and preferences. For their part, elites associate this mood with resistance to change, progress and modernity from ignorant and reactionary citizens.
It is in this context that religion becomes particularly relevant. For the elite that co-opts many of Europe’s democratic institutions, religion is an anachronistic belief that is of no use in developed societies; indeed, it is seen as a superstition incompatible with the evidence-based politics that embodies true progress. It is no longer that religion and politics should be separated and religious beliefs restricted to the private sphere. It is that politics must penetrate the private sphere of individuals and expel religion from there too, so that the state is not just the way in which society decides to organise itself, but much more: a substitute religion that shapes society and whose clerics are the politicians and pundits.
It is against this vision of the state that the attachment to religion takes on particular importance. The European elites’ attempt to identify such an attachment in Eastern European countries with cultural backwardness has nothing to do with considering faith as a superstition incompatible with alleged empiricism. That would be the excuse. For the ruling elites, Catholic Christianity is not simply an alternative ideology, but a series of organisations operating outside the controlling aegis of the state.
Shocking though it may be, history repeats itself. I would like to say that this Europe of politicians and pundits seems to act in a similar way to communist societies, since, as was the case then, political society aspires to dominate the civil sphere. Thus, in the era of Soviet totalitarianism, the role of the Christian churches behind the Iron Curtain was to counterpose their own normative concepts to those promoted by the communist regimes. For their part, the communist regimes devoted their efforts to limiting the access of „society” to this different vision. This parallel should give us food for thought. And, above all, to reflect on whether, after all, religion properly understood and not as vehemence, defends and embodies civil society better than the government of experts.
Javier Benegas (b. 1965) is a Spanish political analyst and writer, co-founder of the Spanish daily Vozpópuli, of which he was opinion director, and founder of the think tank ThinkAct, as well as editor of the political and sociological analysis journal Disidentia. He is a regular contributor to various Spanish media, both in the press and on radio and television, and is a prominent contributor to The Objective. He is the author of the essays Sociedad terminal: La comunicación como arma de destrucción masiva (2007) [Terminal Society: Communication as a Weapon of Mass Destruction], co-author of Catarsis. Se vislumbra el final del régimen (2013) [Catharsis. The end of the regime in sight] and author of La ideología invisible: Claves del nuevo totalitarismo que infecta a las sociedades occidentales (2020) [The Invisible Ideology: Keys to the New Totalitarianism Infecting Western Societies] y Vindicación (2022) [Vindication].
