Religious rhetoric fuels right-wing politics from Vance to Putin

J. D. Vance describes his Catholic baptism as resistance to moral decay and seeks to align the U.S. state with Roman-Catholic doctrine, echoing earlier conservative Catholic thinkers. Donald Trump, despite his evangelical base, adopts Vance’s hard-line stance on immigration and foreign policy, framing it as a moral order. Vladimir Putin, supported by the Russian Orthodox Patriarch, uses the church to legitimize a revival of imperial ambition and to reject secularism.

Scholars such as Volker Weiss and historians note that these leaders draw on the anti-liberal ideas of Carl Schmitt and Alexander Dugin to construct a friend-versus-foe narrative. The article argues that this religious-political alliance is spreading to other regions, including Catholic-influenced parties in Poland, Italy and France, and to non-Christian movements that similarly reject secular liberalism.