In early 2016, Liane Bednarz noticed a surge in far-right rhetoric on her Facebook news feed. One trend was particularly unsettling: Many of the authors were people she’d met in Christian circles over the years. Bednarz had been watching certain German Christians drift beyond conservatism and into far-right populism since 2013, but she was struck by how explicit their rhetoric against Muslim immigrants had become. She began to investigate the phenomenon in earnest, and in April 2018 published a book called Preachers of Fear: How Christians of the far right are undermining society and the churches. Numbers of refugee arrivals had dropped to pre-crisis levels, but the fiercest debates about the definition of German identity, it seemed, were just beginning.

Bednarz’s book describes a small segment of Germany’s self-identified Christian community, but her perceptions were just as relevant on Sunday, when members of Germany’s largest far-right party announced the formation of a new group called "Jews in the AfD." Like self-identified Christians of the far right, the group represents a small minority of Jews in Germany—though official data on their reach is limited. The roughly 250 German Jews who hastily organized a protest in Frankfurt dwarfed the new group’s 19 founding members, who met in Wiesbaden. But the group is predictably attracting more media attention than its small number warrants—a consistent trend that has given similar groups outsized influence over voters, Bednarz told me. Members of both groups claim a viable conservative party does not exist outside the AfD, though so far more conservatives seem to have rejected the far right than joined it.

Bednarz and church leaders I interviewed across Germany in August were careful to draw a line between conservatism and the type of racism and xenophobia that go beyond the reasonable scope of political variation within the Christian faith. Bednarz said many church leaders had expressed their private struggle to refute far-right rhetoric, which often couches bigotry in theological terms familiar to even casual Christians. The latest preventive move by the Evangelical Church in Germany was to ban AfD politicians from speaking at the next Kirchentag, Germany’s annual “Church Day,” which addresses contemporary issues in Church and society.

Ulrich Schmiedel, a theologian and migration expert at the University of Edinburgh, told me that the appeal to Christian culture typifies one of Germany’s “two Christianities”—distinct camps that he says came into sharper focus during the migrant crisis. This simplistic breakdown does not capture all Christians, he added. Those he calls “believers” actively “welcome the stranger,” while “belongers” emphasize the preservation of identity. Schmiedel said theological arguments might be made for both sides, though “believers” more closely align with orthodox interpretations of scripture.

Preserving German identity appears important to many self-described Christians in Germany, regardless of their political party. A recent Pew Research Center study found that 73 percent of church-attending Christians say having a German family background is very or somewhat important to being truly German, compared to 46 percent of non-practicing Christians and 35 percent of religiously unaffiliated Germans. Thirty-one percent of German Catholics and 19 percent of Protestants say they feel like strangers in their own country due to the number of Muslims. Angela Merkel’s Christian Democratic Union was founded in 1945 in large part to preserve Germany’s Christian identity in light of demographic fears, but its policies have changed significantly over time to account for growing diversity. The AfD claims to fill the gap between what the CDU once stood for and what some of the party’s conservatives still want.

The thrust of Bednarz’s book is that “belonging” can mask a political orientation less rooted in orthodox Christian faith than in fear of outsiders. “They’re not necessarily preaching hate,” she said of far-right politicians, “though some of their statements are hateful. First and foremost they preach fear—a fear being overtaken by Muslims.” Schmiedel agreed: “Far-right Christians have recognized that Christianity can actually be used against Islam,” he said, “so it’s become a sort of identity marker. It’s more about belonging than believing, and the faith itself is not necessarily the most important thing. The important thing for them is the identity of Europe that Christianity signifies.”

Anette Schultner, former leader of the group “Christians in the AfD,” told me she rejects the idea that her political positions are rooted in fear. She faced off against Bednarz on this very issue at “Church Day” in May 2017, on a controversial panel about the feasibility of being both a Christian and an AfD member. “When you’re conservative in a country with Christian roots,” she told me, “you think: Where do our values come from?” She said she initially joined the party to help “stabilize” it, and to give abandoned conservative Christians like her a party for which they could confidently cast their votes. “I thought it would be a win for both sides,” she said. The public backlash against the party’s radical wing ultimately proved too much to bear, Schultner told me, and she left the party in August 2017.

Xenophobia cloaked in Christian symbolism has been especially pronounced in parts of East Germany, where church attendance is ironically Germany’s lowest. “East Germans on the right wing sometimes use Christian symbols to defend their tradition,” said Bettina Naumann, pastor and coordinator for refugee projects of the Evangelical Church in Bavaria. “But for a lot of them, this tradition is no longer their own. When you take East Germans to church—I’m talking about people from families that haven't had any sort of connection to the church for two or three generations—they’ll find it interesting, but sometimes they don’t even know what the cross means.” To some on the far right, she said, the cross represents German culture and its history of opposition to Islam more than the Christian gospel and values.

Naumann, who grew up and studied in Soviet-occupied East Germany, told me the cause of far-right sympathy stems in part from this sort of deficient Christian formation among those who identify as Christians, as well as an enduring sense that the region has been left behind ever since the jarring unification of East and West. She laments that a subset of East Germans’ nostalgia for a closed society has seeped into some churches. “This is painful for me and many of my colleagues because we fought for an open society,” she said.

Fear of cultural retreat tends to be more veiled in much of West Germany, where the official churches, which are strongly pro-immigrant at the leadership level, have more influence. But this thin veil has begun to fall in areas where the AfD made gains in the polls. The Christian Social Union, the long-leading party in Bavaria, has made controversial overtures to right-wing voters in the run-up to this Sunday’s pivotal state election. Markus Söder, the Bavarian premier and a former member of the Bavarian Protestant Church’s state synod, recently mandated that crosses be displayed in public buildings across Bavaria. “I’m surprised that we talk about tolerance for other religions and don’t dare stand up for our own religion,” he said in April.

Top officials in the Catholic and Protestant Churches publicly denounced Söder’s claim that the cross is more a cultural symbol than a religious one, in a confrontation between church and state that is rare in Bavaria. But with AfD leaders’ regular criticism of Germany’s official churches as left wing, the church leaders’ rebuke likely had little impact on right-wing voters.

Bednarz said far-right parties often resort to cult-like methods, saturating media outlets with “Christian” rhetoric that becomes more palatable with repeated exposure. “Far-right politicians try to act less harmless than they really are,” she said. “Many times they’ll say, ‘Oh, we’re just conservatives.’”

Bednarz used the example of how the abortion issue gets linked to hardline immigration policy. “Many orthodox Christians are understandably drawn to parties that speak out against abortion,” she said. “But through repeated exposure to nationalistic rhetoric by right-wing populist parties and movements, some fall prey to the radical position that the high number of abortions is dangerous because it reduces the relative demographic strength of native Germans.” Once these competitive stakes are established, it is not a far leap to supporting restrictions on religious freedom for Muslims.

Christian factions in modern Germany have been much more entangled with far-right political ideology than Jews, who found themselves at the mercy of radicalism-turned-extremism under the Nazi regime. But in the wake of the migrant crisis, neither community seems completely immune from the pull of the far right. Religious labels offer reputable covers for the same simple ideology, built on preserving national culture to the exclusion of immigrants and religious minorities. Why some religious people radicalize—out of fear, deficient religious formation, a sense of political homelessness, or exposure to shrewd rhetoric—may be clear, but how to prevent it continues to elude the fellow faithful.