This book aims to understand the European political debate about contentious issues, framed in terms of religious values by religious and/or secular actors in 21st century. It specifically focuses on the Italian case, which, due to its peculiar history and contemporary political landscape, is a paradigmatic case for the study of the relationships between religion and politics. In recent years, a number of controversies related to religious issues have characterised the European public debate at both the EU and the national level. The ‘affaire du foulard’ in France, the referendum on abortion in Portugal, the recognition of same-sex marriages in many Western European States, the debate over bioethics and the regulation of euthanasia are only a few examples of contentious issues involving religion. This book aims to shed light on the interrelation between these different debates, as well as their broader meaning, through the analysis of the paradigmatic case of Italy. Italy summarizes and sometimes exasperates wider European trends, both because of the peculiar role traditionally played by the Vatican in Italian politics and for the rise, since the 1990s, of new political entrepreneurs eager to exploit ethical and civilizational issues. This work will be of great interest to scholars and students of a number of fields within the disciplines of political science, sociology and law, and will be useful for courses on religion and politics, political parties, social movements and civil society.

This Special Issue provides diverse multidisciplinary entry points that convey the multi-layered complexity of the interactions between radical right populism, gender issues, and religious questions. It fills a gap in the scholarship dealing with the political and social manifestations of radical right populism. From a theoretical point of view, the connections between radical right populism and gender and between radical right populism and religion, respectively, have received growing scholarly attention. The present Special Issue bridges these separate lines of inquiry, concentrating on how issues of gender and religion are jointly addressed in radical right populist discourses. The articles in this Special Issue provide the first in-depth and comparative understanding of the entanglements of gender and religion in radical right populist ideology, explore the active role of religion in the populist discourse, and invite to combine the analysis of the political sphere with the analysis of occurrences in the broader society.

Over the last decade, many scholars have explored the thesis of the mediatization of religion proposed by Hjarvard and how mediatization has impacted religious authority. While some scholars have underlined the increasing opportunities for marginalized religious actors to make their voices heard, others have explored how mediatization can also result in the enhancement of traditional religious authority or change the logic of religious authority. Against this background, in this paper, I focus on Christian LGBT+ digital voices in Italy to explore how they discursively engage with the official religious authority of the Catholic Church. The analysis adopts Campbell typology of religious authority. It highlights the complex balance between challenging and reaffirming traditional religious authority, and points out the role of the type of digital community in exploring the effects of the mediatization of religion.

Scholars describe Global North feminisms as mostly ‘secular’ and often opposing religion. Contemporary feminist intersectional movements seem to offer different approaches able to overcome distances and articulate the role of religion in feminist emancipatory practice. This contribution explores the complex role of religion in intersectional feminist movements, drawing on the experiences of religious-feminist and secular-feminist women in Italy. The results highlight that religious women are increasingly part of feminist intersectional movements. Nonetheless, religious inequalities are often overlooked, and religion triggers ambivalent reactions, often resulting in a process of othering minority women.

In the Manichaean discourse of the radical-right populist parties, both religion and gender play a role in the discursive process of ‘othering’. At the same time, on some occasions, populist discourse also mobilises Christianity and gender equality against immigrants, which has been interpreted through the frames of hijacking or instrumentalization. In this paper, I advance two arguments: first, I illustrate the relevance of the literature on secularisation to finetune the analysis of the entanglements of populism, religion and gender, to overcome the ‘hijacking’ frame; second, I make a plea for a socio-constructivist perspective, which pays attention to how the actors make sense of their religious-political engagement and try to avoid paternalistic interpretations. Empirical analysis focuses on the discourse of the supporters of Matteo Salvini, the leader of the Italian radical-right populist party Lega Nord, on Instagram, showing the intersections of religion and gender.

This contribution focuses on the migrant women’s portraits that emerge in the Italian press. This discursive arena is dealt with by paying attention to what is taken for granted in the discourses about migrant women and their reproductive rights and behaviours. The analysis is based on a dataset of 634 newspapers articles, published between June 2005 and July 2012, and include both partisan, non-partisan, and religious press. It highlights the culturalization of migrant women, mainly portrayed as victims, and points to the high risk of xenophobic manipulation and political instrumentalization of migrant women’s rights