Faith Under Political Pressure
This week’s papers ask what happens when religion becomes a test of loyalty, legitimacy, or belonging. Across pandemics, elections, reformations, and culture wars, the through-line is power: who defines the moral order, and how boundaries of belonging are drawn.
- Pandemic rules exposed which religious groups could shape public debate and which had to adapt from minority positions.
- Exclusionary politics can mobilize integrated minorities rather than silence them, shifting participation and party choices.
- Religious language often polices belonging by marking some people as loyal, deviant, or dangerous.
Crisis reveals religious power
Religion and State in a Time of Crisis
Poland’s pandemic response shows how state health restrictions interacted with Catholic dominance and the minority positions of Orthodox Christians and Jehovah’s Witnesses.
Religion in Canada during COVID-19
Canada’s case tracks how Catholic, Protestant, Muslim, and Jewish communities adapted to COVID-19, especially through online rituals and “hybrid church.”
Boundaries of belonging
Treason and dissimulation in the Henrician Reformation: Leonard Grey and the polarisation of politics in the Irish Pale, 1534–40
The Henrician Reformation in Ireland is recast as a struggle over Christian moral order, treason, dissimulation, and competing Tudor and papal sovereignties.
Light Against Darkness: Rhetoric and the Struggle over LGBTQ+ in Israel
The study of Israeli conservative rhetoric shows how theological language and appeals to family and nation frame LGBTQ+ identities as deviant or threatening.
Outsiders at the Ballot Box: Integration, Discrimination, and Muslims’ Electoral Behavior in Europe
A survey experiment among Muslim Turks in Germany finds that anti-Muslim social and political exclusion increased intended participation, solidarity, and left-wing vote intentions.
Analyzing of Religious and Cultural Conflicts in West Java
West Java’s religious and cultural conflicts highlight the promise and limits of mediation through the Religious Harmony Forum, especially around neutrality and authority.
Summary written from this week's papers and fact-checked against their abstracts.
Episode
2026-06-08 – 2026-06-15
47 papers
Covered in this episode
Papers:
Outsiders at the Ballot Box: Integration, Discrimination, and Muslims’ Electoral Behavior in Europe
Religion and State in a Time of Crisis
Ambedkar’s Renunciation and Re-imagining of Religion: Tracing the Horizon of Religiosity Among the Contemporary Dalit ‘Public’
Light Against Darkness: Rhetoric and the Struggle over LGBTQ+ in Israel
+16 more
Transcript 26 lines
Cold Open
Jenny
When people feel singled out or rejected, do they usually step back, or do they show up louder?
Davis
I want to say they step back, but sometimes getting pushed out tells you exactly where the door is, and exactly who should be standing there with you.
Jenny
That's where my instinct gets checked, because a study of Muslim Turks in Germany found anti-Muslim exclusion made people more ready to vote, more loyal to their own community, and more open to the left, especially when they were already deeply integrated.
Davis
So exclusion didn't just weaken belonging; it redirected it, and that's our thread today, from crisis to texts to institutions remaking who counts...welcome to This Week In Religion and Politics on paperboy.fm.
Stats Overview
Jenny
This week the feed gave us 361 hits, and 47 made the cut, meaning they actually fit religion-and-politics rather than just brushing past it. Those 47 papers come from 85 authors across 27 countries, so the volume is smaller than the search pile but pretty wide in people and places.
Davis
And the qualified pile is up, even if only a little. Last episode had 45 qualified papers; this one has 47, up 2 papers, or about 4 percent, and the shape is very qualitative: 32 qualitative studies, 6 case studies, and 4 historical analyses.
Jenny
The weird part is the funnel. Query hits fell from 728 to 361, down 367, or about 50 percent, while qualified papers still rose, so I’d ask whether the search was tighter, or whether this week’s topics were easier for the review step to recognize.
Davis
The author mix also shifted. Unique authors rose from 72 to 85, up 13, or about 18 percent, while countries dipped from 28 to 27, and the tiers are young: 24 first-time authors, meaning their first-ever paper in the metadata, 38 emerging authors, and 23 experienced researchers.
Jenny
Geographically, India leads with 6 papers, China has 4, and Poland and Korea have 3 each. That matters because the country spread is almost flat, but the author count is up, so the growth looks more like more people writing inside a similar map than a big expansion of the map.
Davis
Theme-wise, identity shows up 3 times, then COVID-19, Poland, Buddhism, Catholicism, political participation, cultural conflict, and secularization each show up twice. That fits the through-line: religion and politics here aren’t fixed camps; they’re systems getting remade by crisis, belonging, institutions, and old texts put under new pressure.
Paper Walkthrough
Paper 1 Outsiders at the Ballot Box: Integration, Discrimination, and Muslims’ Electoral Behavior in Europe
Jenny
Alright, let's get into the papers with Outsiders at the Ballot Box: Integration, Discrimination, and Muslims’ Electoral Behavior in Europe, a two thousand twenty-six study by Odelia Oshri, Reut Itzkovitch-Malka, Guy Mor-Lan, and Shaul Shenhav on Muslim Turks in Germany.
Jenny
The surprising result is simple: anti-Muslim signals didn't make people pull back from politics. After seeing videos about anti-Muslim hate-crime reports or far-right electoral gains, Muslim Turkish respondents reported more intended political participation, stronger in-group solidarity, and more support for left-wing parties.
Davis
Did they measure real votes, though, or people's intended political behavior right after watching the videos?
Jenny
It's intended behavior, and the method was a survey experiment, meaning the researchers randomly showed different respondents different videos so they could isolate the effect of those exclusionary signals. That gives them strong causal evidence, but the boundary is real: this is Muslim Turks in Germany, not every Muslim minority in Europe, and not verified turnout at an actual ballot box.
Davis
That makes the practical takeaway sharper, not softer: parties and civic groups should treat public rejection as a mobilizing event, especially for integrated minorities who may be looking for protection. It fits this week's thread that exclusion redraws belonging, because the people expected to be least pulled into ethnic voting were the ones who moved together.
Paper 2 Religion and State in a Time of Crisis
Davis
That last paper was about public rejection pushing Muslim Turks in Germany toward protection at the ballot box, and this one flips the setting from voters to institutions. In Religion and State in a Time of Crisis, M. Kołodziejska, Sławomir Mandes, Magda Ostrowska, and Katarzyna Rabiej-Sienicka ask what Poland's COVID rules revealed about who actually gets heard when religion meets the state.
Davis
Their plain finding is that crisis did not level the field. Looking at three groups in Poland, the Roman Catholic Church, the Polish Autocephalous Orthodox Church, basically Poland's self-governing Orthodox church, and Jehovah's Witnesses, they argue that Catholic dominance shaped the public conversation and left minority groups with less room to press their own needs.
Jenny
How do we know this is about Catholic-state power, though, rather than just three communities making different health choices under the same pandemic rules?
Davis
They use data from the RECOV-19 project and treat Poland as a qualitative case study, meaning they read the groups' adaptations closely instead of trying to produce a big statistical average. The evidence is strongest because it compares all three major religious actors under the same state restrictions, but the limit is real too: this is Poland's pandemic moment, with Poland's very specific Catholic-state relationship.
Jenny
So the practical point is pretty concrete: don't write emergency policy as if the biggest church can speak for the whole religious field. If institutions manage pluralism, meaning who gets real public space to practice and argue, then a crisis is exactly when minority channels need to be explicit, not improvised after the Catholic hierarchy has already set the terms.
Paper 3 Ambedkar’s Renunciation and Re-imagining of Religion: Tracing the Horizon of Religiosity Among the Contemporary Dalit ‘Public’
Jenny
That line about the biggest church setting the terms travels pretty far, because Manjur Ali's 2026 paper, Ambedkar’s Renunciation and Re-imagining of Religion, asks what happens when the dominant religious order is not just crowded out, but morally rejected from below.
Jenny
The case is Uttar Pradesh, and the finding is that Ambedkar's critique of Brahmanic religion still shapes how a contemporary Dalit public talks about belief, dignity, and politics. Dalit here means communities historically pushed to the bottom of the caste order, and Brahmanic religion means a caste-ranked Hindu authority built around Brahmin texts and traditions.
Davis
Who exactly counts as the Dalit public here, and how did Ali hear or observe their religiosity rather than just reading Ambedkar back onto them?
Jenny
Ali defines the Dalit public as Dalit people who are politically aware and fearless in narrating their struggle for a share in the state's development project. The method is qualitative and case-study based, meaning he interprets Ambedkar's writings alongside Dalit interactions with Hinduism and with Buddhism as Ambedkar's alternative moral framework, but the limit is important: this is Uttar Pradesh and a specific politically conscious public, not every Dalit community in India.
Davis
The practical takeaway is sharp: if you're working on caste, religion, or policy, religious critique isn't a private side belief you can bracket off. In this paper's version of religion changing from below, rejecting a religious order becomes part of political agency, because Buddhism isn't just a new label here; it's a moral language for refusing humiliation.
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