Pious Populism: Theorizing Religion as an Embodied Practice in Rightwing Populist Politics

• In Event: Theorizing the Populist Moment

Abstract

Post-Laclauian approaches examine populism as a feature of mass politics, in situations of crises, or in conjunctures when institutionalized politics fails to represent the emerging social cleavages. Moving beyond instrument/identity binaries, these approaches show that by articulating previously disconnected dimensions of social identities, populist mobilizing and organizing practices generate resonance with lived experiences. Separately, Foucauldian approaches to religion as an embodied practice point to mechanisms of disciplinary power in self and social formation processes, which remain underspecified in post-Laclauian literature. Integrating insights from both literatures provides a new framework to study religion’s role in rightwing populist politics, elaborated through an ethnographic case study from Pakistan. Amid global forces of economic neo-liberalization and racialization of Islam, a new Islamist party articulates the protection of the Islamic Prophet’s honor as the primary political conflict between pious Muslim masses versus liberal elites, blasphemers, and Western patrons. Drawing upon a 15-month ethnography, I introduce the notion of pious populism that centers lived experiences of extra-legal rule in urban slums to explain how party organizers re-define the process of becoming a pious Muslim as that of becoming an anti-blasphemy activist and a self-reliant person. By examining how slum men articulate a rightwing populist modality of piety through practices of political and economic self-reliance, the paper shows how populist politics shapes pious and neoliberal visions of social class and masculinity. By integrating practice- and articulation- based theories of populism with studies of religious piety, the paper contributes to literature on religion’s role in rightwing populism.

Author

• Umair Rasheed, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign