The seemingly unstoppable rise of populism has caught observers by surprise. Donald Trump's US election victory, the Brexit referendum in Britain, and President Erdoğan's emboldened power in Turkey are just three of the many cases in which populism has radically altered the tenor of contemporary politics. In these three examples, religion seems to have played a significant role, yet is often overlooked. In this special issue, we aim to provide a corrective to the general neglect of religion in academic work on populism. The contributors to this special issue shed light on roles of religion in the three populist cases already mentioned as well as in an array of other examples of populist discourse and action, stretching from Germany to Kyrgyzstan. In this brief introductory piece, we draw on key existing works and the case studies included in this issue to suggest useful ways of approaching the intersections of religion and populism. Roles of religion in populism Despite the dearth of work on religion and populism, two prominent social scientists, Olivier Roy and Rogers Brubaker, have recently written on these themes. In Saving the People: How Populists Hijack Religion (2016), Nadia Marzouki, Duncan McDonnell and Oliver Roy offer a balanced look at the intersection of populist movements and democratic politics in country case studies which include the US and Israel, alongside eight European nations. Published too early in 2016 to take into account Donald Trump's election victory or the results of the Brexit referendum, the book includes a chapter by Olivier Roy on the Front National (FN) in France (Roy 2016a) and his conclusion to volume (Roy 2016b), both of which are particularly insightful and relevant to the theme of this special issue. Roy (2016a) demonstrates how the FN instrumentalises Christianity in its politics, yet often finds itself at odds with the institutional Catholic Church. An amalgam of secularist, Christian, and pagan currents, the FN tends to see the Church as too liberal on issues of immigration, and yet, interestingly, too conservative on family values and sexuality. The FN can therefore dismiss the Church as an element of the loathed French establishment. In doing this, it simultaneously taps in its own 'Christian' identitarian narrative while upholding the strong anti-clericalism that undergirds French laïcité. In his conclusion, drawing on this and other cases from the volume, Roy remarks that for populist parties, 'religion matters first and foremost as a marker of identity, enabling them to distinguish between the good "us" and the bad "them"'
