Rosario Forlenza
Institution: Luiss University
Rosario Forlenza is an Associate Professor of History at Luiss University. His research interests include democracy and authoritarianism, political revolutions, nationalism and the politics of memory, politics and religion, and the Cold War. He is the author of Italy’s Christian Democracy: The Catholic Encounter with Political Modernity (Oxford UP, 2024, with Bjørn Thomassen) and On the Edge of Democracy; Italy, 1943-1948 (Oxford UP, 2019). Currently he is working on the global history of Christian Democracy and on the totalitarian experience in interwar Russia, Italy, and Germany.
Reflections Upon “Civilizationisms”
By civilizationism I understand the constellation of images, symbols, and meanings that political forces use to underpin the present order with historical and mythical foundations. I am particularly interested in the intersection of religion and civilizationism around the ideas of decline and re-birth, and in how religion has been reconfigured in modern political discourse, not as a theological commitment, but as a marker of civilizational identity.
My 2017 article, The Politics of the Abendland, traces the postwar reinvention of the “Christian West” (Abendland) as both a cultural and spiritual bulwark against fascism, Nazism, and communism. The article shows how Catholic political actors mobilized religious symbolism to reconfigure Europe’s identity after the devastation of World War II. This religiously inflected civilizationism did not merely promote Christianity as a private faith but re-inscribed it into the body politic as the defining mark of European belonging. This project served to morally reorient Europe after the collapse of fascism, to frame the Cold War as a spiritual struggle, and consolidate a sense of cultural unity rooted in religious heritage. Religion in this context was not only about belief and practice but also about anchoring political order and cultural continuity.
I intend to build on and extend this analysis by identifying how essentialized notions of civilization continue to inform contemporary European politics. Today, civilisation operates in Europe as an ideology that fuses religion, culture, and identity into a singular narrative of civilizational struggle, often pitting a Judeo-Christian or Christian-secular “West” against an Islamic “Other.” Religion, under this paradigm, functions not as a site of pluralistic expression but as a boundary marker for inclusion and exclusion. This is evident in the rise of illiberaldemocracy, which invokes “Christian civilization” as a defense against perceived cultural threats, particularly from Muslim communities and migrants.
In civilizationist rhetoric, religion is instrumentalized not to promote spiritual renewal, but to structure political identity and justify hierarchies. Civilizationism thus represents a shift from religion as belief, to religion as culture and, ultimately, to religion as ideology. This shift is deeply consequential: it erases internal religious diversity, forecloses dialogue, and often legitimates exclusionary or xenophobic policies under the guise of cultural preservation. By critically engaging with these frameworks, we can better understand how religious traditions are mobilized in contemporary identity politics, and how civilizational narratives continue to shape both national and transnational imaginaries.