(RNS) — A report on the state of reproductive rights presented to journalists, policy wonks and activists in Brussels on June 26 begins with a quote from the 15th-century general and military theorist Raimondo Montecuccoli: “To wage war, you need first of all money; second, you need money; and third, you also need money.”
The 158-page report, “The Next Wave: How Religious Extremism Is Reclaiming Power,” follows in meticulous detail the flow of money as it moves from reactionary advocacy groups, think tanks and strategic litigators masquerading as philanthropies — the modern equivalents of the wealthy royal houses and their priestly hierarchies of Montecuccoli’s day — into groups waging war on women’s equality and related causes.
Compiled by the researcher Neil Datta and his team of experts at the European Parliamentary Forum on Sexual and Reproductive Rights, a network of European lawmakers committed to advancing gender equality and sexual and reproductive health, the study follows similar reports published in 2018 and 2021. It shows substantial growth over a relatively short span of time in a broad-based movement opposing not only sexual and reproductive rights, but access to comprehensive health education and LGBTQ+ rights.
Between 2019 and 2023, the report finds, the equivalent of $1.18 billion flowed into 275 frontline groups on the attack. The EU countries contributing the largest amounts were Hungary ($172.7 million), France ($165.7 million), the United Kingdom ($156 million), Poland ($90.7 million) and Spain ($66.4 million). In addition, funding from Russia effectively doubled from $42.9 million in 2019 to $86.7 million in 2022; spending in Europe by U.S. Christian right groups averaged $22 million per year.
“The Next Wave: How Religious Extremism Is Reclaiming Power” report cover. (Courtesy image)
Much of the money flowing into the movement came from private sources, but some represents a transfer of public funding into sectarian groups. About half of the money went into advocacy and messaging organizations. The rest went into what the report labels “anti-gender” services — work done by grant-making groups, think tanks, legal advocacy and miscellaneous other campaigns.
As the EPF report notes, Russia’s principal strategic goal in supporting these causes is to infiltrate right-wing political parties and movements in Europe and then to steer their activism in ways favorable to Russian state interests. The Russian regime also helps right-wing European actors reinforce its own brand of Christian nationalism in their countries.
Its report cites a document, identified as a Mandate, that emerged from an influential March 2024 gathering of the XXV World Russian People’s Council (WRPC) titled “The Present and Future of the Russian World.” Overseen by Moscow’s Patriarch Kirill, the leader of the Russian Orthodox Church’s leader, the gathering aims to guide Russia’s political class as well as the Russian Orthodox Church on policy issues. The new Mandate “referred to Russia’s international role as ‘the ‘Restrainer,’ protecting the world from evil and from the ‘onslaught of globalism and the victory of the West, which has fallen into Satanism,’” the EPF report said.
The Mandate also “refers to the Russian aggression against Ukraine as a ‘Holy War,’’ and states that the borders of the ‘Russian world’ are ‘much wider than the state borders of both the present-day Russian federation,’” according to the report.
According to the EPF report, the Mandate also declared that “the fight against abortion should be placed at the center of all state policy” along with the “cleans(ing) of the destructive ideological concepts and attitudes, primarily Western ones.”
By 2024, according to the EPF report, nearly all Orthodox churches, particularly those with ties to the ROC, had become active in anti-rights mobilization.
The American groups that turned up in the report due to their involvement in Europe are some of the same ones that have aggressively pushed Christian nationalist ideology on the home front. The Alliance Defending Freedom, which played a key role in overturning Roe v. Wade and defended discrimination against a gay couple in the Masterpiece Cake Shop v. Colorado Civil Rights Commission case, has become a major player in European litigation, crafting “freedom of speech” cases, for instance, out of the harassment of women outside reproductive health clinics in the U.K.
Other U.S. groups active in Europe include 40 Days of Life, which stages anti-abortion harassment activities; the Heritage Foundation, which forges partnerships with conservative European think tanks; and Heartbeat International, whose “crisis pregnancy centers” offer some forms of support for pregnant women while dissuading them from seeking abortions.
The funding for most U.S. activism in Europe, according to the report, can be traced to a handful of hyper-wealthy individuals and families, such as members of the DeVos and Prince families, the Walters family, the Uihlein family, the Green family, the Eldred family and the Koch brothers.
However, as Datta noted in Brussels, “We can’t just blame Americans. A lot of money is coming from European sources.”
Much of this support, the report notes, is from a cadre built from old European money and titles. “Dozens of archdukes, countesses, princes, and princesses appear as avid supporters of religious extremist causes which may at first appear exotic until one understands that this involvement demonstrates a continuity going back to a past almost forgotten in 21st century Europe,” Datta writes.
These aristocrats bring “a generalized distain for democracy and liberal values, a worldview based on religious legitimation for inherited social, political, and economic inequality; and being part of a vast, transnational and endogamous network,” which Datta describes as an “Aristo-clerical network.”
In France, private foundations controlled by Catholic families with generational wealth invest heavily in anti-abortion and other conservative political causes. Similar patterns are evident in Germany, Spain, Hungary, Austria and the U.K. Though lacking a native aristocracy, the U.S. has the next best thing in Leonard Leo and Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito, both of whom have connections with far-right European aristocrats such as Princess Gloria von Thurn und Taxis, the widow of one of the largest landowners in Germany who has close connections with former Trump adviser Steve Bannon.
Stacks of currency. (Photo by Mufid Majnun/Unsplash/Creative Commons)
But in recent years, a nouveau riche elite has emerged in the technology sector. “Tech bros” such as Elon Musk and Peter Thiel, along with Fredrik Wester in Sweden and Marek Spanel in the Czech Republic, have become significant funders of conservative activism, along with other oligarchic business leaders such as Lőrinc Mészáros, who owns Hungary’s MHB bank and is a longtime associate of Viktor Orbán, and Guillaume de Thieulloy, whose organization, Fonds de dotation GT Editions, finances digital infrastructure for ultra-conservative Catholic media in France, along with far-right political parties.
Some reactionary groups have learned to siphon money from public sources as well, typically from sympathetic illiberal national and regional governments. This state money goes to favored think tanks, advocacy groups and service providers that in turn bolster their own political legitimacy. Hungary and Poland were leaders in this sector, but regional governments in Spain and elsewhere have developed the same patronage model.
Facilitating this fusion of reactionary political parties with reactionary religion has been the rise of what Datta calls “ChONGOs,”—church-based non-governmental organizations. These groups typically pretend that they are offering scientific or fact-based information and services, though in reality their aims are to promote a certain theological vision of the proper order of society.
Honed to a sharp edge in the U.S. and Russia, the illiberal ideas and methods deployed across Europe are also being exported to Africa and beyond. What is most disturbing, perhaps, is the use of massive propagandistic operations of the sort pioneered by America’s authoritarian movement.
“This isn’t a backlash or a culture war,” Datta states in the report. “It’s a strategy.”
(Katherine Stewart writes about the intersection of faith and politics. Her latest book is “Money, Lies and God.” The views expressed in this commentary do not necessarily reflect those of Religion News Service.)