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AbstractThe study of political religion has focused on how religious structure and substance came to permeate grand political ideologies such as fascism and communism. The relevance of various relatively veiled forms of religion in modern day-to-day democratic politics has been undervalued and we therefore fail to appreciate to what extent, and how religious structure and substance have also penetrated conventional democratic politics. As a result, we do not comprehend that it is the progressive abolition of "quasi-messianism" in politics that is currently causing the existential problem of democracy, namely massive political disaffection. Quasi-messianism concerned the visionary anticipation of a better world that is attainable, here and in the distant, yet foreseeable future. This promise accorded politics an enchanting quality. Quite down-to-earth political ventures got charged with an inspiring and imaginative sense of purpose, direction, and meaning, but equally with this-worldly catalysts, which, in contrast to the political-religious grand utopias, were operational and practical. In this quality, some mass political projects or elite missions developed a capacity to enchant the political elite and the public alike. Hence the thesis that it is the disenchantment of politics, which lies at the heart of the contemporary phenomenon of waning political allegiance.

Christian democracy is still posing theoretical problems of definition and empirical puzzles of classification and interpretation. Analyses based on secularization theory produce puzzles and anomalies and have little to offer as explanations for the variation in Christian democratic power mobilization. Empirically, this article focuses on Christian democracy in The Netherlands and offers an explanation of the party's decline in the 1990s and its remarkable recovery. From this, lessons are drawn for further theory-building on party and party system change, and on Christian democracy. It seems that modern Christian democratic politics is evolving as neither religious nor secular, but as a version of unsecular politics.