This Week In Religion and Politics

Transcript 43 lines

Cold Open Stats Overview Paper Walkthrough free_promo

Cold Open

Davis When does a community value become a political weapon instead of just a shared tradition?

Jenny I mean, the second it starts deciding who counts as “one of us,” and who gets punished for not performing it, but how do you show that shift is real and not just vibes?

Davis I keep thinking about how it moves from a phrase your aunt says at dinner to something that shows up in a council meeting, and then suddenly it’s bylaws and permits and what you’re allowed to say in public.

Jenny Okay, but how do you prove the internet did that, like the amplification wasn’t already happening offline and the posts are just the receipt after the fact?

Davis Because in places like West Sumatra you can watch a local moral idiom get boosted online and then walk straight into formal policy deliberations, and that’s why we’re doing this—welcome to This Week In Religion and Politics on paperboy.fm.

Stats Overview

Davis Quick map of the week: we scanned about four hundred twenty papers, and only fifty-six made the cut for our religion-and-politics filter. Those fifty-six papers come from about a hundred nine unique authors across thirty-three countries, so the pipeline’s wide even when the topic gate is tight.

Jenny And that tight gate matters, because fifty-six out of four-twenty is like one in eight. What was the filter doing most of the work here—was it courts and speech rules, or was it the “religion as legitimacy engine” angle that knocked most papers out?

Davis Method-wise it’s lopsided: thirty-four of the qualified papers are tagged qualitative, and only four are surveys. Qualitative just means close-up evidence like interviews, field notes, and reading texts, and it fits a week where the story is about who gets to belong and who gets policed, not just how many people clicked a box.

Jenny But with only four surveys, we should be careful about claiming “the public thinks” anything. If most of this is case-based—ten case studies and seven historical analyses—how often are these papers triangulating, like pairing interviews with documents or a second site, so it’s not one loud example?

Davis The author mix is interesting too: about twenty-six first-time authors—meaning their first-ever paper we can see—plus fifty-four emerging researchers, and twenty-nine experienced. That’s roughly three-quarters new-ish voices, which can mean fresh questions, but it also means methods and definitions might be all over the map.

Jenny Theme sweep: “brainwashing” shows up four times, and “race” and “Orientalism” are right behind at three each, with postcolonial studies in the mix too. That’s basically our through-line in keyword form—religion getting used to certify who’s legitimate, and then race and East-versus-West stories deciding whose speech counts… but I want to know if those labels are being used carefully, or as a shortcut to say “those people are irrational.”

Paper Walkthrough

Paper 1 Algorithmic Morality and Local Value Anchors: How ABS–SBK Mediates Digital Populism in Indonesia’s Regional Politics

Davis Alright, let’s get into the papers, starting in West Sumatra, Indonesia, with “Algorithmic Morality and Local Value Anchors: How ABS–SBK Mediates Digital Populism in Indonesia’s Regional Politics.”

Davis It’s about how a local moral-religious phrase—ABS–SBK, basically “custom is grounded in Islamic law, and Islamic law is grounded in scripture”—travels through social media and then shows up inside actual regional policymaking.

Davis The plain claim is simple: online moral outrage doesn’t just stay online; in this case it gets boosted, picked up by media, and then translated into policy language by local institutions.

Davis Their jargon for it is “local-value-anchored digital populism,” meaning a populist “people versus elites” vibe that’s anchored to a specific local moral code, so it can be repeated and recognized fast in algorithmic feeds.

Jenny Okay, but how do they show it’s the online amplification pushing policy language, and not officials just using ABS–SBK anyway because it’s already the default in West Sumatra?

Davis They do it with digital discourse analysis and online trace mapping—so they track posts from key figures, the user interactions around them, then follow how news coverage echoes the same moral-emotion framing, and finally match that phrasing to official documents and deliberations.

Davis The recurring pattern they point to is affective then institutional: a moral-emotion burst online, amplification through media gatekeeping, then uptake by local authorities and customary councils into initiatives or regulations, with ABS–SBK acting like the bridge term that makes it legible as “legitimate” governance.

Davis Big limitation though: it’s one regional case built from online traces, and they don’t give a clean sample-size frame for the social media corpus, so it’s strong on mechanism and triangulation, but not a universal map you can just paste onto every province.

Jenny I can feel the “illiberalism through institutions” thread clicking into place here, because the algorithm isn’t passing laws, but it is helping decide which moral frame gets oxygen until it’s basically pre-written for the bylaw draft.

Jenny And for anyone trying to predict policy shifts, the practical move is kind of unglamorous: watch which phrases are getting algorithmic lift, then check if the same words start appearing in meeting notes and official PDFs, because that’s the moment the vibe becomes governance.

Paper 2 From Sacred to Silenced: Blasphemy and Censorship in Post-dictatorship Greece (1974–2019)

Jenny You just said “the vibe becomes governance,” and this Greece paper is like the speech version of that.

Jenny It’s called From Sacred to Silenced: Blasphemy and Censorship in Post-dictatorship Greece (1974–2019), and it tracks how a law on the books and a church in the room can still narrow what people dare to say.

Jenny Plainly: Greece kept criminal blasphemy until two thousand nineteen, and the authors argue that even after repeal, the same conservative coalition can keep censorship going through pressure, not just prosecutions.

Jenny And “blasphemy law” here just means the state treating offense to the sacred as a punishable public act, which turns religious hurt into a legal boundary for art, satire, and critique.

Davis Okay, but what’s the cleanest example they give where the law changed in two thousand nineteen and the silencing still happened anyway?

Jenny They build it by stitching cases across nineteen seventy-four to two thousand nineteen—court files and statutes, specific cultural blowups, and interviews—so you see the pattern: church actors and allied far-right groups mobilize, and then parts of the state like police or bureaucracies end up doing the practical restricting.

Jenny The limitation is the same thing that makes it readable: it’s case-driven, not a count, so we don’t get a frequency table for how often censorship succeeds, just a well-supported mechanism for how it works.

Davis That mechanism feels uncomfortably durable, like “illiberalism through institutions” but with the institution being an informal stack: clergy, street groups, and whoever controls permits or policing.

Davis And the takeaway’s kind of brutal for reformers: repealing the blasphemy statute in two thousand nineteen is necessary, but if the enforcement muscle just relocates into social pressure and administrative choke points, the speech boundary barely moves.

Paper 3 Family, Faith, and Nation: The Roberts Court and the Global Pivot Against Legal Liberalism

Davis You just said “informal stack,” and that’s the perfect bridge, because this next paper says the stack isn’t just Greek, it’s global.

Davis It’s called Family, Faith, and Nation: The Roberts Court and the Global Pivot Against Legal Liberalism, by Tom Ginsburg and Aziz Huq in the Boston College Law Review in twenty twenty-six.

Davis Plain version: they argue the U.S. Supreme Court’s culture-war turn is part of a worldwide legal shift, not just a weird American election story.

Davis Their core claim is that the Roberts Court is elevating “faith, family, and nation” as constitutional values over individual autonomy, and that same move shows up across places as different as the U.S., Britain, Taiwan, South Africa, Argentina, and India.

Davis They call it a “global phase shift” in public law, meaning the baseline assumptions of what rights are for and who the law protects are tilting in a similar direction across countries, even when the local politics look nothing alike.

Davis And they’re explicit that there isn’t one master cause; they point to multiple diffusion channels where legal ideas travel through courts, advocacy groups, and executive actions, like how they note Trump-era executive orders amplifying the same family-faith-nation frame alongside the Court’s doctrine.

Jenny Okay, but when they say “global phase shift,” what would count as evidence the U.S. is actually an outlier and they’re over-reading a vibe from a few headline courts?

Davis They’re doing comparative legal analysis, basically a structured side-by-side read of doctrines and institutional moves across those countries, looking for recurring mechanisms like rights getting reframed as threats to social order or national identity.

Davis So the evidence is pattern-matching across multiple jurisdictions rather than a dataset, and they lean on the fact that you see similar results emerging from different court systems and political histories, not just U.S.-style partisan capture.

Davis But the big limitation is baked in: these comparative narratives can show a family resemblance, yet they can’t cleanly prove which mechanism caused which country’s turn, because influence and timing are hard to pin down with legal texts alone.

Jenny That lands for me as “illiberalism through institutions” with a passport, where the institution isn’t just one court but a network that swaps arguments across borders.

Jenny And it’s a little bleak, because if the playbook is portable, then a win in one country doesn’t stay local, but at least it makes the practical takeaway clear: anyone fighting for liberal rights has to organize like the other side does, transnational and strategic, not just case-by-case at home.