Faith Moves Through Political Systems
This week’s papers follow religion into the practical machinery of politics: media trust, school curricula, penal codes, diplomacy, and liberation politics. The common thread is not belief alone, but how sacred stories and institutions help organize public power.
- Religion appears less as private belief than as a public filter for trust, citizenship, and political fear.
- States and movements repeatedly translate sacred language into lessons about obedience, unity, or resistance.
- Disinformation research is now asking what faith institutions can do, not only what platforms should do.
Belief and the information war
Polarization as a moral regime in Brazil: religion, trust, and disinformation in dispute
A Brazil survey links religious identity to media trust, fact-checking, and fake-news sharing among Lula and Bolsonaro supporters.
The role of Christian churches in curbing disinformation in contemporary Nigeria's representative democracy
It argues that Christian churches have a democratic role to play in curbing disinformation in contemporary Nigeria, while noting the challenges.
Religion as civic discipline
Buddhist Studies as a Mechanism for Citizenship Construction in the Thai State, 1960–1992
It shows Thai Buddhist education from 1960 to 1992 as tied to state development goals, anti-communism, and ideas of good citizenship.
Ley, religión y poder: un análisis sociológico del machismo simbólico en el nuevo código penal del Talibán (2026)
It reads the Taliban’s new penal code as a political-legal instrument using religious interpretation to institutionalize patriarchal domination.
Sacred stories, public power
From Scripture to Soft Power: Cultural Narratives of the Bible in International Relations Scholarship
It examines how biblical narratives function as cultural resources in international relations, shaping identity, geopolitical discourse, and soft power.
The role of Brueggemann’s ‘prophetic imagination’ in neo-prophetism and South African politics
It asks how neo-prophetic churches in South Africa might use prophecy to critique contemporary political structures.
The Mighty Trembling Before the Weak
Its reading of Exodus frames Pharaoh’s fear of Israel as a study in how political power can turn insecurity into oppression.
Islamic Liberation Theology and Hajj as a Revolutionary Manifesto: A Comprehensive Analysis of Ali Shariati's Thought
It presents Ali Shariati’s interpretation of Hajj as a move from private ritual toward a symbolic politics of human liberation.
Summary written from this week's papers and fact-checked against their abstracts.
Episode
2026-06-15 – 2026-06-22
81 papers
Covered in this episode
Papers:
Polarization as a moral regime in Brazil: religion, trust, and disinformation in dispute
The Gospel of Meritocracy: Christian Nationalism, Economic Position, and Americans’ Beliefs About Getting Ahead in Life
Ethnic Polarisation, Political Pressure and the Structural Limits of Faith-Based Peacebuilding in South Sudan
Repentance Made Visible: Embodied Holiness and the Forging of Religious Identity in the Repentance and Holiness Movement, Kenya
+16 more
Transcript 26 lines
Cold Open
Jenny
When you hear a rumor from someone you trust, what makes you check it before passing it on?
Davis
Honestly, the messenger does half the work for me; if it's my pastor, my aunt, or the friend who's usually right, I feel the guard drop before the facts arrive.
Jenny
Same, which I hate admitting, because media trust sounds like a personal habit until you see it sitting inside church ties, party loyalty, and who feels authorized to explain the country.
Davis
And that's where this week gets sharp: in a survey of 1,100 Brazilians, evangelical supporters of Bolsonaro showed the lowest trust in media and the highest sharing of disinformation, so belief isn't just private here; it's part of the relay system...welcome to This Week In Religion and Politics on paperboy.fm.
Stats Overview
Davis
Quick map before the papers. We screened eight hundred fifty hits, and eighty-one papers made the cut, from one hundred forty-seven authors across forty-five countries. So this week is not a tiny corner of religion and politics. It's a wide weather system.
Jenny
And the cut list jumped hard. Last episode had forty-seven qualified papers. This one has eighty-one, up thirty-four papers, or about seventy-two percent. I don't want to overread that as a field-wide surge, though. It could be indexing, timing, or just a noisy publication week.
Davis
The top of the funnel jumped even more. Query hits went from three hundred sixty-one to eight hundred fifty, up four hundred eighty-nine, or about one hundred thirty-five percent. The themes explain some of the feel: religion leads, then secularism, then Buddhism, with identity and social justice close behind.
Jenny
Geographically, this is broader too. Unique countries rose from twenty-seven to forty-five, with Indonesia at five papers, and Vietnam, the United States, and Uzbekistan at three each. But the methods skew close-up: forty-four qualitative papers, meaning evidence from words, documents, interviews, or observation, plus nine case studies and eight surveys.
Davis
That matters for the through-line. These papers mostly watch religion operating in public life: trust, citizenship, authority, conflict. And the author pool is fresh. Of one hundred forty-seven authors, sixty are first-time authors, meaning their first-ever paper in the metadata, fifty-eight are emerging, and twenty-nine are experienced.
Paper Walkthrough
Paper 1 Polarization as a moral regime in Brazil: religion, trust, and disinformation in dispute
Jenny
Alright, let's get into the papers with Polarization as a moral regime in Brazil, by Erivelto Amarante in Observatorio, from twenty twenty-six. The study asks a very practical question in Brazil: when people decide which media to trust, are they just acting like Lula or Bolsonaro voters, or is religious identity doing some of the sorting too?
Jenny
The headline is that religion and party identity work together. In a survey of eleven hundred people, evangelical Bolsonaro supporters had the lowest trust in traditional media and the highest reported sharing of disinformation, while Catholic and evangelical Lula supporters looked more stable and more critical in how they handled news.
Davis
So how did Amarante separate religion from ordinary party loyalty? Because Bolsonaro support alone could explain a lot of media distrust in Brazil.
Jenny
That’s the key evidence check, and the design is built around that split. The survey compares Lula supporters and Bolsonaro supporters, then compares Catholics and evangelicals inside those camps, across three behaviors: trust in traditional media, fact-checking, and sharing fake news, which here just means false political claims passed along as if they were true.
Jenny
So the claim isn’t evangelicals equal disinformation. It’s that, in this Brazilian political moment, evangelical identity combined with Bolsonaro alignment seems to create a stronger moral filter, meaning people judge information by whether it fits their community’s sense of truth and legitimacy.
Davis
That feels like the first big marker for the episode’s thread on belief sorting citizenship. If you’re designing anti-disinformation work, eleven hundred survey responses are enough to say you can’t just drop better facts into the room; you have to understand the trust community those facts are entering.
Paper 2 The Gospel of Meritocracy: Christian Nationalism, Economic Position, and Americans’ Beliefs About Getting Ahead in Life
Davis
That moral filter point carries straight into the United States, because The Gospel of Meritocracy asks whether Christian nationalism shapes how Americans explain success.
Davis
Perry and Upenieks find that people who more strongly endorse Christian nationalism, meaning the belief that America has Christian foundations and should preserve them, are more likely to say hard work is what gets you ahead and less likely to credit luck, family wealth, knowing the right people, race, or sex. And the pattern is especially clear among middle- to higher-earning Americans, which is the sharp part: the belief system can make advantage feel earned.
Jenny
Were people reporting their beliefs about success, or did the surveys show anything about actual mobility?
Davis
They were reporting beliefs, using two nationally representative surveys in the United States, so the evidence is strong for what people say about meritocracy, meaning the idea that society rewards effort and talent. But it doesn't prove whether hard work or privilege actually caused anyone's economic position, and self-reports can flatten a lot of messy family, school, race, and labor-market history.
Jenny
So the practical move is not to start with a spreadsheet on inequality and assume everyone shares the same story about fairness. This fits the belief-sorts-citizenship thread: if success is framed as morally deserved, then policy about wages, taxes, schools, or safety nets is already walking into a sacred account of who earned their place.
Paper 3 Ethnic Polarisation, Political Pressure and the Structural Limits of Faith-Based Peacebuilding in South Sudan
Jenny
That line about fairness being almost sacred makes this South Sudan paper hit harder, because here the institution trying to calm conflict is carrying the conflict inside itself. The paper is called Ethnic Polarisation, Political Pressure and the Structural Limits of Faith-Based Peacebuilding in South Sudan, by Alapayo Manyang Kuctiel Nhiera, Abraham Kuol Nyuon, and A. Mattijo.
Jenny
The plain finding is blunt: the church's biggest barrier to peacebuilding wasn't first donors, or weak offices, or even outside politicians. It was ethnic polarization inside the church itself, with beta equals negative point five-two, meaning that in their model this factor had the strongest link to lower peacebuilding effectiveness.
Davis
If the church is part of the social fabric, how did the researchers define peacebuilding effectiveness, and how much weight can we put on that number?
Jenny
They used a systematic multi-method study with two hundred forty-seven participants across Juba, Jonglei State, and Central Equatoria State, then grouped the barriers into four clusters. Internal ethnic polarization came first, then external political pressure and targeted violence against clergy at negative point four-four, donor dependence at negative point three-one, and capacity or coordination problems at negative point two-seven; together those clusters explained fifty-eight percent of the variation in reported peacebuilding effectiveness, which is a strong pattern, though it still comes from specific South Sudanese regions and faith-based settings.
Davis
So the takeaway is uncomfortable but useful: don't ask a church to be a neutral arbiter before asking whether its own leadership and grassroots networks are split by ethnicity. This fits the Institutions Under Pressure thread, because the pressure isn't only coming from the state or armed actors; it's also coming through the relationships that make the church powerful in the first place.
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