DOI: 10.1111/johs.12369 R E S E A RCH AR T I C L E Historical Sociology and Secularisation: The Political Use of ‘Culturalised Religion’ by the Radical Right in Spain Rafael Ruiz Andrés1,2 Abstract The critique of the theory of secularisation has favoured the emergence of a series of concepts for the analysis of contemporary socio‐religious transformations, such as ‘culturalised religion’. These categories constitute, in turn, an opportunity to rethink the process of secularisation from the perspective of historical sociology. Against this background, this article carries out a theoretical analysis of the ambiguities of secularisation in Spain from which a cultural approach to religion (‘culturalised religion’) emerges and its potential connection to the expansion of the radical right‐ wing party Vox, which became the third‐largest party in Spain's parliament in the 2019 national election. After analyzing this interrelation between ‘culturalised religion’ and the radical right on the basis of statistical sources, discourse analysis and bibliographical sources, the article concludes by stressing the importance of historical sociology for understanding phenomena like ‘culturalised religion’, which take us out of the binomial logic that has marked part of the interpretation of secularisation (revival of religions vs decline of the religious) and introduce us into the multiple interactions between the historical past and sociological reality. INTRODUCTION From the 1960s onwards, a short and profoundly accelerated cycle of secularisation occurred, especially sharp in the context of Western Europe (Joas, 2014; McLeod, 2007). However, more than 60 years after this milestone, the horizon of the disappearance of religion has faded or at least it has been considerably delayed in the face of the 1Department of Applied Sociology, Faculty of Political Science and Sociology, Complutense University of Madrid, Madrid, Spain 2Institute of Religious Sciences, Complutense University of Madrid, Madrid, Spain Correspondence: Rafael Ruiz Andrés, Political Science and Sociology, Institute of Religious Sciences, Complutense University of Madrid, Madrid, Community of Madrid, Spain. Email: rafaelruizandres@ucm.es Funding information: R&D project, Grant/Award Number: MCIN/AEI/10.13039/501100011033; ERDF, Grant/Award Number: PGC2018‐ 099909‐B‐I00. This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. © 2022 The Authors. Journal of Historical Sociology published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd. 250 - J Hist Sociol. 2022;35:250–263. wileyonlinelibrary.com/journal/johs https://doi.org/10.1111/johs.12369 https://orcid.org/0000-0002-9667-3052 https://orcid.org/0000-0002-9667-3052 mailto:rafaelruizandres@ucm.es http://wileyonlinelibrary.com/journal/johs http://crossmark.crossref.org/dialog/?doi=10.1111%2Fjohs.12369&domain=pdf&date_stamp=2022-05-11 persistence, emergence and transformation of new and old religiosities even in Europe, the most secularised space in a global landscape that continues to claim to be religious (Berger, 1999). Precisely in the old continent, but not exclusively there, and within the broader political amalgam of the term “populism”, a series of radical right‐wing parties have burst onto the scene and have steadily increased their presence in recent years, reaching between 15% and 20% in some of the major European countries (Spain, France, Italy) (in Alho, 2020). The connection (and the apparent paradox) between the two phenomena is precisely that this political sector has taken up (or increased) the use of the religious element in the political sphere in a certain number of countries that are among the most secularised worldwide. The observations made up to this point, of an introductory nature, relate above all to ideas that today, after years of debate on the renewed presence of political theology (Zúquete, 2017) and criticism of secularisation, can be considered common in academic discourse. Beyond these ideas, there is a horizon of research on the meta- morphoses of religions in the (post‐)secular context, the re‐articulations of their presence and discursivities (Astor et al., 2017, p. 2), which has generated a myriad of terms in recent decades trying to explain the nuances of sec- ularisation: “belongers not believers”, “believers not belongers” (Davie, 2006, p. 275), “pilgrims” (Hervieu‐ Léger, 1999) or ‘footloose religiosity’ (Joas, 2014), among others. Within the multiple socio‐religious realities that underlie these concepts, three main vectors stand out as ones that have attracted the most attention for analyzing the European case: firstly, religious pluralism, which includes realities as diverse as the plurality of religious de- nominations and the emergence of spiritual but non‐religious profiles; secondly, the permanence of the so‐called “traditional religions”; thirdly, the recreation of a religiosity understood primarily through a cultural perspective (Voas, 2009). This ‘culturalised religion’ refers to manifestations of the perception of religious expressions, symbols and practices that are perceived or portrayed as ‘“culture” rather than “religion”, despite its ongoing links to “traditional” religious forms’ (Astor & Maryl, 2020, p. 210). This article focuses on an exploration, from the perspective of historical sociology, of “culturalised religion” based on the case of Spain and in an attempt to understand the emergence of a cultural religious narrative in the political sphere in the context of the growth of the Vox party. Therefore, after a review of the contribution of historical sociology to the analysis of religious metamorphoses represented by concepts such as “culturalised religion”, I will explore the ambiguities of secularisation and its potential connection to the emergence of the radical right in recent years based on the existing literature, particularly that of the Spanish case (Aladro & Requeijo, 2020; Santamarina, 2021; Turnbull‐Dugarte, 2019), and the analysis of both texts and statements by Vox between 2014 and 2021, and a complication of news about this political party. These sources will be triangulated with statistical data mainly from the Pew Research Center (2018) report, Being Christian in Western Europe and the Survey on Social Trends, published by the Spanish Center for Sociological Research (Centro de Investigaciones Sociológicas), in November 2021. The text concludes with the observation that, from a socio‐ historical perspective and through the theoretical opportunity provided by terms such as ‘culturalised religion’, the ambiguities of secularisation and the emergence of a cultural Christian discursivity in the public sphere do not constitute contradictory dynamics, but rather interacting realities within the broader spectrum of socio‐ religious transformations in contemporary times. HISTORICAL SOCIOLOGY AND RELIGIOUS TRANSFORMATIONS IN THE CONTEMPORARY WORLD Beyond the theoretical reflection, the plethora of concepts that have burst into the debate on secularisation not only allow us to shed light on the interpretation of the sociological present but can also and should provide us with new paths for the always unfinished exploration of the past and its traces in the present. This approach comprises both the core of historical sociology, the origin of the same Weberian sociological perspective on the interaction between religions and modernity (Abrams, 1994, p. 2; Giddens in; Subrt, 2012, p. 403), and the reference point for RUIZ ANDRÉS - 251 the analysis of contemporary socio‐religious transformations after the critique of secularisation theory in recent decades. However, and despite this convergence in origin, the sociological and historical study of contemporary religious transformations have followed parallel rather than convergent paths. On the one hand, the debate on secularisation has been carried out primarily by sociology, using a limited historical focus and, above all, excessively grounded in statistical projection (Dobbelaere, 1999, p. 236). On the other hand, historical studies of religions in contemporary times have privileged the study of concrete trajectories based on a mistrust of the major conceptual frameworks used by the sociology of religions (secularisation, modernity, etc.). Faced with these simultaneous trajectories, the critique of secularisation theory since the 1980s has opened up the opportunity to re‐examine recent history and study the causality of processes (Barkey, 2009, p. 713) in order to discover a more complex past of secularisation than that sometimes depicted by secular myth (Turner, 2010, p. 651). This is confirmedby the sociologist Pérez‐Agotewhenhe points out that, from the critique of secularisation, two paths open up for analyzing the past: genealogy andhistorical sociology (in Pérez‐Agote, 2018, p. 2). In parallel to this “socio‐ historical” opportunity to nuance secularisation, the different conceptual categories that have emerged in recent decades, such as “culturalised religion”, provide the theoretical framework for this journey between the past and present, which also benefits from the contributions that historical sociology provides for this endeavour. Firstly, historical sociology offers the necessary interdisciplinarity for the analysis of “social change” in general (Calhoun, 2003) and for the study of religions in particular (Díez de Velasco, 2005). In this respect, if the sociology of religions provides concepts for interpretation (Calhoun, 2003, p. 384), sociology gains concreteness, diachrony and synchrony from the historical approach. In turn, this interaction between sociology and history enables an ongoing analytical dialogue between structure (interpretative framework) and the social and intersubjective meanings provided by historical actors (Barkey, 2009, p. 715; Somers, 1995, p. 136). Secondly, the conceptual revision of the sociology of religions in contact with historical sociology introduces temporality and moves our study away from the “temptations” of evolutionism or historicism (Holton, 2003, pp. 31– 32), which are common in approaches to secularisation. The explanation of socio‐religious change from temporality implies consideration of two fundamental issues. The first is the importance of analyzing the dynamics, inertias and continuities theorised by Mahoney (2000) in his reflection on “path dependence”. At the same time, and against the temptation to always look at the present from the past, it also introduces us to the reality of historical contin- gencies, particularly represented in the “trigger events” (Remaud, 2015, p. 65): those concrete circumstances of a present that activate a whole series of changes and reinterpretations of the past itself. This understanding of the past–present interaction leads to the recognition of the multiple threads of continuity woven between the two, but also of the moments of rupture, of the irruption of novelty and of the struggle between different visions of the world (Gorski, 2003, pp. 110–111). Thirdly, narratives emerge from these ruptures and permanencies (Cloet, 2017), which are not only a reflection of change, but which also possess agency within the socio‐historical dynamic itself. The term “culturalised religion” underlies this force of narratives in contemporary society and particularly, of the trajectories and reconfigurations of cultural and collective memory, forcing us to be attentive to these different levels interacting in the sociological present (Olick, 2010). Finally, historical sociology frames the study of religions. In the discipline of the study of the past, the historical is the concrete, the encompassing and specific. For this reason, an approach to religious metamorphoses from the perspective of historical sociology implies the recognition of similarities and differences between contexts, even between relatively homogeneous frameworks such as Europe. These similarities and differences, again, refer not only to present circumstances, but also to past ones: each of the different “starting points” of the secularisation process conditions the development of the process and the narratives that emerge from it (Pérez‐Díaz, 2008, p. 2), and therefore, the concrete meanings of terms such as “culturalised religion”. From these analytical keys, I will now look at the whys and hows of “culturalised religion” and its potential connection to the recent rise of the far right in Spain. To this end, I will consider both the long evolution of the 252 - RUIZ ANDRÉS process of secularisation, from which emerges the “magma of the meanings” (Castoriadis, 1997) that shape “cul- turalised religion” and the particular events, questions and discourses that have boosted its political presence in Spain. THE AMBIGUITIES OF SECULARISATION AND THE EMERGENCE OF “CULTURALISED RELIGION” As in other countries in the European context, the religious question forged a division between “two Spains” at the end of the nineteenth century, one that saw national identity as intrinsically linked to Catholicism (nacionalcatoli- cismo) (Botti, 2008), and the other that aspired to a modernist and secularising project for Spain. Franco's victory in the Civil War imposed a National‐Catholic regime (1939–1975) that was not definitively overcome until the dic- tator's death (1975), the proclamation of the non‐confessional nature of the State in the 1978 Constitution and the approval of the Law on Religious Freedom (1980). Nevertheless, and despite this political imposition of Catholicism until late in the twentieth century in Spain, since the 1960s, and coinciding with the experience in other countries, the process of secularisation also began to accelerate in Spain, which has become one of the most rapidly secularised countries in Europe (Pew Research Center, 2018). For example, as the above‐mentioned report points out, “5% of adults in Spain say they were raised with no religion, while 30% now fit this category, a difference of 25 percentage points”, data that can only be compared in Europe with those of Belgium, the Netherlands, Norway and Sweden (Pew Research Center, 2018). However, the story has not been that simple. In parallel with the loss of the importance of God in everyday life (Pew Research Center, 2020), the continued increase in non‐religious profiles, the fall in attendance at religious services, etc., the different statistics and studies reveal the persistence of Catholicism in Spanish society. Not only of continuity, but also of religious metamorphoses, which are seen in the multiple ways of “being Catholic” in Spain today (González‐Anleo, 2008). From the ambiguities of the process of secularisation in Spain, one can understand two a priori paradoxical realities that we will analyze in this section: (a) The consolidation, at the end of the twentieth century, of a primarily cultural approach to Catholicism during the process of secularisation in Spain, which constitutes a sort of “magma of meanings” for the emergence of a culturalised religion. (b) Its potential patrimonialisation by a particular group, the far‐right party Vox, at the beginning of the twenty‐ first century. (a) Despite the temptation to think of secularisation as a linear and expansive dynamic, this process has had multiple levels and rhythms (Voas, 2009). Even in the first decade of the twenty‐first century, and after more than 40 years since the beginning of the acceleration of secularisation in Spain, the reduction in the percentage of Spaniards who were practising Catholics (which in 2000 was 32% (in Comas, 2006)) had not been accompanied by the same intensity of decrease in the participation in the “strong moments” of Catholicism (weddings, baptisms, communion and funerals). Catholic weddings represented 75% of the total in 2000 (López, 2018), the percentage of children baptised in 2001 still amounted to 65% (in Ceberio, 2002) and in 2000, 83% of Spaniards declared themselves to be Catholic (Comas, 2006). In this way, different analyses at the end of the twentieth century pointed out that Catholicism had become a sort of “cultural imaginary”, a form of symbolic capital (Díaz‐Salazar, 1988) made up of a whole series of “islets” that can be “activated” in a matter of seconds and in the strangest scenarios, without affecting or being affected most of the time by the rest [of the life]’ (González‐Anleo, 2017, p. 265). In short, at the turn of the millennium, the process of secularisation had generated a strong contrast between highly secularised habitus (Bourdieu, 1990) and social RUIZ ANDRÉS - 253 imaginaries (Taylor, 2006, pp. 37–39) that continued to be impregnated for the majority of the population – albeit in different intensities – by Catholicism (Ruiz Andrés, 2022). This blurred religious presence – diffused religion (Cipriani, 2017) or fuzzy religion (Voas, 2009) – constituted the substratum on which the notion of “culturalised religion” and its interpretation of religion in cultural and/or identity terms emerged. At this point, we cannot ignore the fact that the question of identity is one of the most relevant issues in contemporary society (Fukuyama, 2018). Faced with this quandary, religions appear not only as bearers of a creed or an experience of faith, but also as an answer to the identity issue, as a factor of “strong identity”, in the words of Martha Nussbaum (2013, pp. 32–33). As Astor and Maryl (2020, p. 212) note, constituted and pragmatic culture converge in identity, and – in turn – so do the dynamics that enhance “culturalised religion”. During the process of secularisation, belief has been increasingly disassociated (although neither necessarily nor entirely) from a sense of cultural belonging, a reality that is most evident in the 12% of Spaniards who declare themselves “religious but not spiritual” (Pew Research Center, 2018, p. 112) or in the simultaneity between the constant decrease in religious practice and the popularity of religious cultural and folkloric traditions. In the same society that has been undergoing a strong process of secularisation, more than three million people are part of one of the 10,000 Holy Week brotherhoods (Europa Press, 2015), a “religious” reality that involves different motiva- tions that go beyond religion. In the interviews published in El País with three young atheist cofrades (members of the brotherhoods) in 2018, the individual denial of Catholicism did not contradict the positive recognition of the character of this religion as a cohesive cement of the group and as a feeling of belonging, linked to emotion and esthetic experience (in Sánchez & Cantó, 2018). This privileged cultural and identitarian relationship of Spanish society with Catholicism – which can be framed in G. Davie's (2006) category of “vicarious religion” – has also been legally reinforced during democracy. In the text of the constitution itself, on which the democratic structure is articulated (1978), the Catholic Church is the only religion explicitly mentioned among all the denominations (16.3 of the Spanish Constitution) (Astor et al., 2017, p. 7). However, if this question could seem to be of a mere historical or anecdotal nature, the fundamental and dif- ferential issue has been its development, which has ensured that the Church has had a legal status distinct from that of the other religious denominations and protected by international agreements with the Holy See, signed in 1979. As several researchers have recognised (Griera, 2020, p. 321), the end of Franco's National Catholicism has been followed by the survival of an implicit “banal Catholicism”, that is, the existence during the last decades of a sort of “light preference” for Catholicism within a democratic framework on the part of the public administration, which would (at the same time) legally shield the culturalised and vicarious religion experienced by a large part of Spanish society. To this banal Catholicism, we should add the permanence in some relatively small but significant social sectors of National Catholicism, those who have maintained a harsher view of the connection between national identity and Catholicism after Franco's death and during the entire democratic period, as Santamar- ina (2021) points out. In light of the above, it is easy to understand that this widely shared substratum of “culturalised religion” prevented its “patrimonialisation” by particular groups during the last third of the twentieth century, because, in a certain sense, it was from the whole of society, despite the non‐confessional nature of the State and the progressive social secularisation. (b) In recent decades, however, its scope has been gradually limited, allowing the dynamics of “patrimoniali- sation” of a “culturalised” Catholicism that, while still widely shared, also participates in the dynamics of social and political polarisation of the first period of the twentieth century. In addition to the expansion of religious pluralism, particularly at the turn of the millennium, one of the main consequences of the intensification of the secularisation process since the first decade of the twenty‐first century has been the further erosion of cultural religion through the process of “exculturation” (Hervieu‐Léger, 2003). The relative indifference of parents towards religious practice but not towards cultural Catholicism is being trans- formed into a greater lack of interest in both issues in their children (Pérez‐Agote, 2010, p. 49). At the same time, the permanence of Catholic culture gradually crumbled: if in 2000, three out of every four marriages were 254 - RUIZ ANDRÉS celebrated according to the Catholic rite in Spain, this figure fell to 20.8% in 2019 (Bastante & Ordaz, 2021) and self‐identification as Catholic has fallen to 55% of the total population, according to the CIS barometer in October 2021. This trend, if confirmed in the long term, could support Joppke's (2018) idea about the transitory nature of “culturalised religion”, as an intermediate stage between a more religious and more secularised society. However, in the current context it is more appropriate to point out that the space for “culturalised religion” has shrunk, but neither has it been eliminated as a dynamic nor has it become a minority phenomenon. If among young people, the most secularised generational cohort, only 42.4% declare themselves Catholic (compared to 51.5% who opt for non‐religious positions) (González‐Anleo, 2017, p. 245), the percentage of practitioners is reduced to 10.3% (González‐Anleo & López‐Ruiz, 2017, p. 243), which points (once again) to a large sector of young Catholics who understand their relationship with this religiosity primarily in terms of identity. This reduction has taken place simultaneously with the re‐politicisation of the religious question during the first decade of the twenty‐first century. While the end of the twentieth century in Spain saw the spread of the Catholic vote between the left and right of the political spectrum (Montero et al., 2008), in the first decade of the twenty‐ first century a whole series of events converged to mark a “change of cycle”. One of the milestones of this shift was the election that led to the victory of the socialist José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero in 2004, whose electoral pro- gramme already revived the debate on bioethical and sexual questions during the campaign. As Cordero (2014, p. 14) points out, the reactivation of the religious vote in the 2004 general election was reflected in the fact that non‐ believers showed a predicted probability of voting for the Socialist Party (Partido Socialista Obrero Español, PSOE) of 57 points, while among practising Catholics it dropped to 35 points. During Zapatero's government (2004–2011) there was an evident tension between the measures taken by the executive, which deepened controversial issues with Catholicism (in vitro fertilisation, abortion, etc.) and the reaction it generated in part of Spanish society, particularly evident against the same‐gender marriage law (2005) and the abortion law (2007) (Aguilar, 2013). As a result, this period saw a more intense reactivation of the religious vote dynamic (Cordero, 2014; Montero et al., 2008), which led to the use of the religious question in political claims, as evidenced by the emergence at this time of a series of associations and platforms, usually outside the institutional Church. Particularly relevant has been Hazte Oír (created in 2001), an anti‐abortion association that has generated a Europe‐wide structure with Citizens Go, or the Asociación de Abogados Cristianos (Christian Lawyers Association, formed in 2008), inaugu- rating a trend that culminated with the appearance of Vox in 2013, although it was still a minor force at that time in the political scene in Spain. THE IRRUPTION OF THE RADICAL RIGHT IN SPAIN AND THE POLITICAL ARTICULATION OF “CULTURALISED RELIGION” During the first years of its existence, Vox obtained results of little relevance, a trajectory that marked an important contrast with the expansion of the radical right in Europe at the time (Turnbull‐Dugarte, 2019). However, since 2018–2019, Spain has witnessed the exponential growth of Vox to become the third most voted political force in the November 2019 elections (3,640,063 voters, 15.09% of voters). The emergence of parties that have been generically described as populist, in which we could include Vox, can be explained by several factors, ranging from material‐economic conditions (specifically in Spain, the aftermath of the deep economic crisis of 2007 (Borreguero, 2019)) to other non‐material factors. In the case of Spain, and due to its convergence with the expansion of Vox, the Catalan crisis of 2017, where there was a failed attempt at secession, acted as a “triggering event” that has favoured the growing questioning of identity to occupy a more relevant space in public debate. Around that time, the different issues that acted as a sort of “magma of cultural and identity meanings” during the democratic period have converged with a political discursivity such as that of Vox, which, as can be seen in RUIZ ANDRÉS - 255 other examples of populism, places a fundamental emphasis on the construction of an “us” with which it competes for the meaning of “the people”. In this regard, and as Aladro and Requeijo (2020, p. 209) point out, in this “us vs them” narrative, Vox highlights its opposition to the different nationalisms that coexist within the same unified Spanish nation‐state (with the exception, of course, of Spanish nationalism), feminism, Muslim migration and the political left. Focusing our perspective on the role of “culturalised religion” in the construction of this discursivity, the “we imagined” serves to recompose an essentialist notion of the whole of the community, in the case of “culturalised religion” on the basis of the link between Catholicism and Spain through the idea of “vicarious religion” and underpinned by the aforementioned permanence of “National Catholicism” in certain social sectors. Deeply significant in this respect was Vox's launch in the April 2019 election campaign from Covadonga, a Marian shrine with popular roots and the alleged place where the so‐called “reconquest” of the Muslim population began. In Covadonga, the religious symbol was subsumed before Vox's ideology of returning to an “Alive Spain” that re- covers the spirit of the reconquest against its enemies. “We are not going to apologise for our history or symbols”, said Santiago Abascal, leader of Vox, in his Covadonga speech (in Carvajal, 2019). It is the proclaimed return of the perennial Spaniard, of an everlasting “we” that exceeds the real national “we” (Villacañas, 2015). This recovery of Don Pelayo and pride in the symbols and history of Spain (Carvajal, 2019) is, in turn, positioned against the “enemies of Spain”, among them, and particularly relevant to this article, (a) the progressive policies of recent decades and (b) the threat of Islam, two “enemies” that at the same time reveal this party's use of “culturalised religion”. (a) Under the label of the “progressive dictatorship”, Vox classifies a whole series of realities ranging from left‐ wing parties, LGTBI and feminist collectives, to global elites, exemplified by the multimillionaire and philan- thropist Soros (Bocanegra, 2020), whom Vox leader Santiago Abascal (2018) accused on his Twitter account of being one of the “most sinister characters of today”. All of them are seen as forming a sort of “globalist” alliance, which, among its various goals, would have the objective of eroding the cultural and moral foundations of Europe and Spain, as has also been put forward by the radical right in other countries. As Vox points out in its “Agenda España”, an obvious response to the 2030 Agenda, “the globalist agendas aim to turn the European Union into a huge bureaucratic apparatus far removed from the interests and needs of the member states and given over to a globalist agenda that betrays Europe's history, tradition and Christian identity of Europe” (Vox, 2021, p. 33). Like in other European far‐right cases, Vox strengthens its potential attractiveness through an “aura of rebellion” against the “globalist” system, which is reinforced through its opposition to the hegemonic media in Spain (Hernández & Fernández, 2019). In the face of this threat, Vox sets itself up as the defender of the “community” (Redacción, 2019) and of “ordinary people” (Jansen, 2011, p. 84): a stance which, beyond theoretical proclamations, is evident in a whole series of statements in which this party presents itself as the defender of threatened “Spanish” traditions. Thus, in a non‐legislative proposal, Patricia Rueda, spokesperson for Vox in the Tourism Commission of the Congress of Deputies, stressed the need to ‘promote the protection of Spanish popular traditions, and has referred specifically to religious events, such as Holy Week celebrations and bullfighting events “as an integral part of the tourist value offer in the face of the attacks of progressivism and globalism”’ (in Vox, 2022). As can be seen in the previous declarations, this melting pot of “Spanish traditions”, whose enhancement was included in the 19 points of nego- tiation for the support of the center‐right government (Ciudadanos‐PP) in Andalusia in 2019 (Fariñas, 2019), would be made up of customs that, although widely accepted by some sectors of the Spanish population, have been more explicitly questioned and polarising in recent years, such as bullfighting or hunting (increasingly rejected due to the growing awareness of animal rights in the youngest cohorts of the Spanish population) or the network of pro- cessions, pilgrimages and Catholic traditions, which are the backbone of the cultural identity of a large part of Spain's regions and localities. 256 - RUIZ ANDRÉS The latter, despite their wide acceptance, have also been a source of controversy. Firstly, because of the kind of “excesses” during the Partido Popular (PP, conservative) governments that have put certain uses of the “cultu- ralised religion” in the media spotlight, such as the awarding of the Silver Cross of the Guardia Civil by the Ministry of the Interior to the Virgen de los Dolores de Archidona (Málaga) in 2015, or the revival by the Ministry of Defence in 2018 of the traditional raising of the flagpole at half‐mast for the death of Christ between midday on Holy Thursday and the night of Easter Sunday. All these issues, moreover, have been increasingly rejected by a secularist claim that has gained visibility in recent decades through platforms such as Europa Laica (founded in 2001), but (above all) have aroused controversy in a society with a growing number of citizens who have expe- rienced the “exculturation” of Catholicism. Amid the aforementioned increasing polarisation between a more conservative Catholicism and a more secular left (CIS, 2021), Vox stands against the supposed secularism of the left (Aladro & Requeijo, 2020), aiming to engage with most conservative Catholic voters. In this strategy of defending “the traditions” in the face of the “progressive dictatorship”, Vox's position against everything that is related to gender questions, sexual and reproductive rights, the so‐called “trans law” or euthanasia, links up with an important sector of Catholicism whose religious identity has been determined by the centrality of these debates and which Pérez‐Agote (2012, p. 168) describes as “traumatised Catholicism”. As the party points out in its “Agenda España”: “The culture of death promoted by the globalist elites is a frontal attack on people's dignity and life. Abortion, euthanasia and the commodification of people's bodies violate basic principles that must be defended” (Vox, 2021). With its attitude towards these issues, Vox once again presents itself as the “non‐cowardly right”, connecting with the disaffection of some Catholics towards the Popular Party for not reversing in essence the legislative progress made by Rodríguez Zapatero during Mariano Rajoy's absolute majority government (2011–2015). In this sense, Vox has taken up the call to defend the “culture of life” against abortion and more recently, euthanasia (Vox, 2020), while at the same time presenting itself as the vanguard against what it describes as “gender ideology”, contrasting it with the traditional family (Vox, 2019). In this particular respect, Vox's stance converges with the position of some Catholics and bishops in Spain, as well as with the discursiveness of the pa- pacies of John Paul II and Benedict XVI (Pichardo & Cornejo, 2015, pp. 184–185). However, Vox goes beyond it in its belligerence, especially during Francis' pontificate, in which, although the underlying theoretical question continues in the formulation of previous pontificates, the Vatican's attitude has been nuanced in its articulation on this matter (Dillon, 2018). Vox's denunciation of the so‐called “gender ideology” has not only not ceased, but has also constituted one of its most prominent media arguments, as well as a continuous pressure “to the right” on the Popular Party in its attempt to attract the Catholic vote, as seen in the proposal to create a “parental pin” in Madrid and Murcia, which would imply the possibility for parents to exclude their children from receiving certain educational content, especially gender and sexual content, for considering it “ideologising”. This last point of Vox's discursivity, in which its claims to connect more clearly with a defence of “traditional religion” rather than with a culturalised approach, constitutes one of the main differences with other cases of the far right in Western Europe, and brings the Spanish party closer to the far right of Visegrad, which refers to the group of countries formed by Hungary, Poland, the Czech Republic, and Slovakia, as well as to some political sectors of Latin America, a continent with which Vox wishes to connect through the idea of the “Ibero- sphere” (El Haddad & Leon, 2021), also included in its “Agenda España” (Vox, 2021). Finally, Vox's appropriation of the Catholic factor against the “progressive and secular dictatorship” has also activated awareness of the importance of the Catholic vote for the left at the beginning of the twenty‐first century, showing a certain willingness to break this dichotomy that Vox is trying to exploit. Despite the aforementioned conservatisation of the religious vote during the first decade of the twenty‐first century, ideological dispersion is currently still more pronounced among Catholics than among the rest of the religious and non‐religious profiles in Spain (CIS, 2021). According to a recent CIS study, the Socialist Party was the second most chosen option by practising Catholics (20.9% of practising Catholics said they voted for it) in the 2019 general elections, behind the traditional conservative party, the Popular Party (voted for by 28.9% of Catholics) and well ahead of Vox (8.1%) RUIZ ANDRÉS - 257 (CIS, 2021). In this regard, different analyses have underlined that the attraction of this left‐wing Catholic vote is behind the recent visit to Pope Francis to Yolanda Díaz, Second Vice‐President of the Government and one of the leaders of Unidas Podemos, the party to the left of the social‐democratic PSOE (Espartero, 2021). Yolanda Díaz's gesture would thus tie in with the self‐critical sectors of the left that have increasingly pointed out that the religious neglect of the Spanish left is also behind the polarisation and growing conservatisation of the Catholic vote (Fernández Liria & Alegre, 2014). (b) The opposition to Islam is one of the vectors generally shared by the European radical right (Forlenza, 2019, p. 135; Roy, 2019), as well as one of the fundamental perspectives of its re‐reading of the “Christian identity of Europe”. In fact, the start of the twenty‐first century was the moment when Islam increasingly became a social and political “issue”, where different researchers observe the clearest emergence of Christian conceptualisa- tion in these spaces, contrasting with the previous primacy of paganist signs in the European radical right (Brubaker, 2017, p. 1198). In the case of Vox, rather than a shift from paganism towards cultural Christianity, what we find is a re‐articulation of the hard link between Spain and Catholicism, which, even after Franco's death, has continued throughout the democratic period, as mentioned above (Santamarina, 2021). Whatever the origin of this shift, Islam in contrast has turned, for these sectors, into the great “otherness” of what it means to be European, as Vox has constantly underlined through warning about the danger Islam poses to Western civilisation (in García, 2020; Aladro & Requeijo, 2020, p. 218). This is why, in the words of Joppke (2018, p. 238), if these parties form a “Christian club”, it is so much so insofar as they constitute a Christian club against Islam and consequently, this Christian “we” has more cultural than religious implications (Brubaker, 2017, p. 1199). This reading, in the case of Spain, would potentially connect with the 37% of the population who, according to the Pew Research Center (2018, p. 21), think that Islam is incompatible with Spain's national values and with whom Vox wants to connect by making migration, especially Islamic migration, an “issue” (Castro & Mo, 2020). As in other European cases, the use of this Christian civilisation vs Islam binomial has a fundamental vector in the issue of migration, especially considering both Spain's fragile border situation with North Africa, which pro- voked a crisis with the Kingdom of Morocco in May 2021, and Spanish history, marked for more than 700 years by the presence of Islam on peninsular soil. For these reasons, the concept of “invasion” becomes an essential axis for Spanish far‐right discursivity (Aladro & Requeijo, 2020, p. 218). In this sense, and according to the study by Hernández and Fernández, in Caso Aislado, a website with an ideological line close to Vox, the main topic in its information (30%) is based on anti‐migration news, followed by 16% of news of an anti‐Catalanist content. Among the many examples found in this respect in Vox's discursivity, it is worth highlighting the production, in 2015, of a video recreating an expropriation of the Mosque of Cordoba and the Giralda in Seville, now Catholic cathedrals, in favour of the Islamic community; the media coverage of a false news item about an alleged arrival of North African migrants with the description of 5,000 soldiers of Allah (Maldita.es, 2020); Vox's support to the date of the surrender of Granada – the end of the so‐called “Reconquest” – should become the new Andalusia Day (Efe, 2019), or the denunciation of the supposed alliance between Islamists and the supporters of Catalan inde- pendence (Ramos, 2020). Through this positioning vis‐à‐vis Islam, Vox not only connects with the rest of the European radical right, but also opposes to a use of “culturalised religion” that has been promoted by different public and cultural entities during democracy: the recreation of “the Spain of the three cultures” (Astor et al., 2017, p. 14). Even if this historical interpretation is more or less mythical, what is certain is that in recent decades an alternative reading of “cultu- ralised religion” has spread in Spain, based on tolerance between Jews, Christians and Muslims in medieval Spain. In contrast to this approach, Vox claims that the history of Spain is essentially defined exclusively by its relationship with Catholic culture, a reading in which the emergence of “culturalised religion” links again with the permanence of National Catholicism. From this mixture of National Catholicism and culturalised religion, Vox justified its proposal for the cross to be considered as an asset of cultural interest in Spain in 2021 as follows: “The Christian Cross is the 258 - RUIZ ANDRÉS main symbol of Christianity as a religious belief of a third of the world's population and is also linked, regardless of beliefs, to the history of Spain” (in Redacción religión, 2021). CONCLUSIONS: FROM THE AMBIGUITIES OF SECULARISATION TO THE USE OF “CULTURALISED RELIGION” BY VOX After the socio‐historical investigation we carried out into the ambiguities of secularisation from which “cultu- ralised religion” emerges in Spain and the use of the latter in the discursivity of the Vox party, it is worth returning to the initial question. From a historical sociological perspective, what is the relationship between the irruption and expansion of Vox and the contradictions underlying a process of secularisation understood in a broad sense? For this purpose, concepts that have appeared from the growing critique of secularisation theory in recent decades, such as “culturalised religion”, allow us not only to understand the present, but also to rethink the past of secu- larisation from a historical sociological perspective. The existence in the same context of a process of “exculturation” and the possibility of understanding religion in cultural terms – processes experienced simultaneously by different actors during the process of secularisation in Spain (Astor & Maryl, 2020) – has favoured a double dynamic. On the one hand, the expansion that the cultural approach to religion still possesses in Spanish societ. allows this party to reach through “culturalised religion” a broad swathe of Spanish society that participates in one way or another in it, while connecting with the remnants of National Catholicism. On the other hand, the fact that increasingly fewer people embrace this “culturalised religion” enhances the process of appropriation (“hijacking”, in Marzouki et al., 2016) of cultural religious discursivity by Vox, despite occasional signs of a certain awakening of interest in the religious question in some social groups on the left end of the political spectrum. Vox's discursiveness is not exclusively aimed at the most mobilised and conservative Catholic sectors, on which it tries to capitalise by including in its discursive elements that pertain to a more traditional vision of religion, notably the defence of the “culture of life” and the opposition to what is conceived as “gender ideology”. Nor does it simply constitute an anachronistic return to a National Catholicism, which, however, has persisted throughout the democratic period and connects with the ideological foundation of this political party. Vox takes these bases and expands them to a potential broader spectrum, making use of “culturalised religion”. With this wider cultural discursivity, it aims to reach all those sectors most sensitive to the possibility of identity conflict and worldviews, and for whom a certain notion of “culturalised religion” forms part of their social imaginary, intermingled with debates on customs, the migration issue and the Catalan conflict, regardless of their religious belief or practice. As previously mentioned, and according to different studies (CIS, 2021), Vox is not the favourite choice of practising Catholics in Spain. While the preference of practising Catholics would be for the traditional conservative party in Spain, the Partido Popular (see Rojo, 2019), various studies suggest that Vox attracts a vote certainly more religious on average compared to national left‐wing parties (CIS, 2021), but above all it captures a vote concerned with issues of identity and culture (Griera in Conde, 2020). Following the words of José Antonio Zamora (2019, p. 88), “the potential for the expansion of the extreme right is to be found in the so‐called extreme‐center, not in the strict extremes of the ideological spectrum”. In other words, in those sectors that are not normally polarised, and in this case not being especially religious, but which can become agitated by the debates that are currently on the political chessboard. In light of the above, the dynamics of “culturalised religion” allow Vox to delve into this dissociation between strict belief and belonging, to present a religious notion from a cultural/civilisational prism, thus connecting with sectors that in one way or another have also experienced this dissociation (non‐practising Catholics, “belongers not believers”), thereby expanding the sector of voters from the practising sector to broader segments of the popu- lation. To do this, it uses a “culturalised religion” that connects the dilemmas of identity in the twenty‐first century, the ambiguities of the process of secularisation that began in the 1960s with a discursive cultural memory of long RUIZ ANDRÉS - 259 duration (Botti, 2008). This crossing of times and memories in the present constitutes a point of interest for further exploration of “culturalised religion” in Spain from a socio‐historical and memory perspective. In this interaction between secularisation and Vox's use of culturalised religion, it can not only be said that it has a reactive position towards secularisation, nor that it simply assumes, through “culturalised religion”, part of the dynamics of secularisation itself, but rather that it could also have an active role, as Olivier Roy (2019) points out. The populist use of religiosity could in turn itself potentially accentuate secularisation and exculturation insofar as this appropriation of the religious factor by populists favours the process of polarisation through the increase in the strong reticence provoked in young and progressive sectors by the link between Christianity and the extreme right (Roy, 2019). In brief, from a socio‐historical perspective and through the theoretical proposal of concepts such as “culturalised religion”, secularisation and religious metamorphosis, whether these are understood in spiritual or cultural terms, not only cease to be opposites, but become realities in constant interaction in the historical past and the sociological present, as well as a space of possibility to continue with the agenda of critique of secularisation on the part of historical sociology (Gorski, 2003). ACKNOWLEDGMENT This publication is part of the R&D project "Modernity and religion in 20th century Spain: between consensus and rupture" (funded by MCIN/AEI/10.13039/501100011033/ and ERDF [PGC2018‐099909‐B‐I00] A way of doing Europe, P.I.: Dr. Julio de la Cueva). DATA AVAILABILITY STATEMENT The data that support the findings of this study are available in 1) Centro de Investigaciones Sociológicas; 2) Pew Research Center at 1) https://www.cis.es/cis/opencms/ES/index.html 2) https://www.pewresearch.org/, reference number 1) Estudio 3343; 2) May 29, 2018, “Being Christian in Western Europe” & July 20, 2020, “The Global God Divide”. These data were derived from the following resources available in the public domain: 1) http://datos.cis.es/ pdf/Es3343creenciasMT_A.pdf 2) https://www.pewforum.org/2018/05/29/being‐christian‐in‐western‐europe/ & https://www.pewresearch.org/global/2020/07/20/the‐global‐god‐divide/ ORCID Rafael Ruiz Andrés https://orcid.org/0000-0002-9667-3052 REFERENCES Abascal, S. (2018) Soros es uno de los personajes más siniestros de la actualidad. Impulsa el tráfico de seres humanos con sus ONGs, y ha sido colaborador del golpe separatista. Sánchez se hace amigos de todos los enemigos de España y de Europa. 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