Political Theology & the Crisis of Contemporary Democracy

The political manipulation of faith in contemporary neo-populisms

Plenary Session, Pontifical Academy of Social Sciences

April 15, 2026. Casina Pio IV, Vatican City

Introduction

One of the most telling signs of the historical moment we are living through is the growing difficulty in clearly articulating the relationship between Christian faith and political life. For several decades, it seemed that the dominance of secular humanism, scientism, and the global spread of the liberal paradigm had rendered such questions a thing of the past. However, history has once again demonstrated its capacity to surprise us. The crisis of contemporary democracy, the erosion of institutional mediations, cultural fragmentation, increasing polarization, and the emergence of left- and right-wing neo-populisms have brought certain fundamental questions back to the forefront: What happens when politics ceases to be understood as a penultimate, limited activity oriented toward the temporal common good, and begins to present itself as if it could offer redemption in history? Moreover, what happens when the Christian faith is used as a force for political mobilization to achieve that very purpose?

The issue is not marginal. In fact, some recent analyses of Latin America and the emerging world already acknowledge, without mincing words, that alongside corruption, social injustice, authoritarianism, polarization, and neo-populism, the “political manipulation of faith” also appears as one of the most significant challenges of the present. This observation is no small matter. It means that the current democratic crisis not only compromises the legal order or the functioning of institutions, but reaches the deepest level of culture, the collective imagination, and the religious dynamics that dwell in the hearts of peoples.

Therefore, it is not enough to denounce the irrationality of extremism or to lament the weakening of democratic consensus. We must go deeper and ask ourselves about the kind of absolutization of politics that reappears in many contemporary movements; about the way in which the category of “the people” is distorted when captured by binary logics; the way in which religion becomes, at certain junctures, a cultural emblem, an instrument of combat, or a means of legitimizing projects of power; and, above all, the need to develop an adequate “theology of the political” that, without dissolving the specificity of faith or privatizing it, allows for a truly free, historically fruitful, and democratically humanizing Christian presence.

Our intuition is as follows: the contemporary crisis of democracy favors the emergence of neo-populisms that tend to reactivate particularly flawed forms of political theology; these forms operate by absorbing faith into the logic of conflict and power, turning Christianity into an identity-based ideology or an instrument of mobilization. In the face of this, the decisive intellectual and pastoral task consists in recovering a “theology of the political” that, by affirming the distinction between the order of grace and the temporal order, makes possible a new Christian presence capable of contributing to the regeneration of democratic life.

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