This Week In Religion and Politics

This Week In Religion and Politics

Where pulpits, courts, parties, and movements collide, this show follows the research behind the headlines on faith, power, identity, and democracy.

Subscribe Free Sample

Religion’s political boundary lines

Across campuses, state policy, civic theory, and community organizations, the week’s papers ask who gets to define legitimate religious belonging. Together, they suggest that political institutions and religious actors often reshape each other, especially in plural societies.

  • Religious identity becomes politically salient when it is used to mark insiders, outsiders, loyalty, or threat.
  • States do not just manage religion; they can define citizenship, moderation, and acceptable public faith.
  • Faith-based organizations and communities can move between service, outreach, civic engagement, and moral formation.
States define public religion
Laicidad como proyecto político de ciudadanía desde el Estado en América Latina: su instrumentalización en tres países (México, El Salvador, Bolivia)
It traces Latin American laicidad across Mexico, El Salvador, and Bolivia, from church-state separation toward rights-based recognition of diversity.
The Indonesian Goverment's Romanticization of Local Culture in Religious Moderation Indicators: A Critical Discourse Analysis
It argues Indonesia’s religious moderation policy disciplines religious expression by making “accommodation of local culture” a state-backed standard.
Civil Religion and Political Freedom in Rousseau’s Social Contract
It rereads Rousseau’s civil religion as a democratic choice by a sovereign people rather than simply coercion or toleration.
Loyalty, boundaries, and belonging
Political Loyalty in Modern Islamic Thought
It argues mainstream Muslim thought can support multiple loyalties while also examining how loyalty discourses construct enemies of Islam and Muslims.
RELIGION AS A BOUNDARY BETWEEN “US AND THEM’ AND “US AND OTHERS”
It shows how religion in post-conflict Kosovo can become a boundary between “us” and “them,” tied to political legitimacy and national narration.
The Politicization of Radicalism Issues and Its Impact on Social Harmony in Multicultural Societies: An Analysis of Interfaith Student Perspectives in Kendari
It studies how radicalism discourse is politicized among interfaith students in Kendari and how such politicization affects multicultural campus harmony.
Religious communities in public life
Between Da'wah and Politics: A Study on the Role and Local Political Participation of Muslimat Nahdlatul Ulama
It examines Muslimat Nahdlatul Ulama women working across da'wah and local political participation amid concerns over women’s legislative representation.
Principles of Religious Moderation in Christianity: A Critical Analysis of Challenges and Social Realities
It analyzes Catholic and Protestant ideas of religious moderation and the challenges of putting them into practice in a pluralistic society.
Summary written from this week's papers and fact-checked against their abstracts.

Episode

2026-06-22 – 2026-06-29
59 papers
Covered in this episode
Papers: The Politicization of Radicalism Issues and Its Impact on Social Harmony in Multicultural Societies: An Analysis of Interfaith Student Perspectives in Kendari How education shapes divergent identity responses to discrimination: Experimental and observational evidence from Muslim immigrants in Germany Politically Salient Events May Modulate Effects of Naturalistic Psychedelic Use on Support for Partisan Violence Laicidad como proyecto político de ciudadanía desde el Estado en América Latina: su instrumentalización en tres países (México, El Salvador, Bolivia) +16 more
News: More Americans say religion is gaining influence, but most want churches out of politics, survey finds (christiandaily.com) Faith Under Censorship! Morena's Member of Parliament Would ... (ground.news) China: Detention of church leaders signals intensifying attacks on religious freedom (amnesty.org) +7 more
Transcript 27 lines

Cold Open

Jenny When leaders say they are protecting harmony, how do you tell whether they are actually making room for everyone?
Davis I think you look at who has to translate themselves first, because a policy can quiet public conflict and still make one group prove it's harmless.
Jenny That's my worry with any official harmony checklist: once the state grades moderation, local customs can stop being lived culture and become evidence in a file.
Davis But I don't want to throw out every peacekeeping rule, because sometimes shared rituals really do keep neighbors from turning suspicion into violence.
Jenny Right, and this week that tension runs through trauma, memory, and an Indonesian test where fitting local culture may decide whose piety counts as acceptable...welcome to This Week In Religion and Politics on paperboy.fm.

Stats Overview

Davis This week, the feed is broad but thinner at the top: 816 papers analyzed, 59 qualified for the show, 125 unique authors, and 46 countries represented. So the map got slightly wider, even while the final stack got smaller.
Jenny That drop is the first thing I’d question. Qualified papers fell from 81 to 59, down 22 papers, or about 27 percent, while total hits only fell from 850 to 816, just 4 percent. So did the field go quiet, or did the search pull in more work that didn’t really match religion and politics this week?
Davis The country count nudges the other way: 45 last episode, 46 now, up one country, or about 2 percent. That says this wasn’t a narrow-week problem. It was more like a wider geography with fewer papers that clearly hit the through-line: who gets to define belonging when religion, identity, rights, and the state all claim the common good.
Jenny Method-wise, this is a qualitative week. Thirty-three papers use qualitative methods, compared with 5 case studies, 4 surveys, and 4 interviews. Plain translation: most authors are reading texts, institutions, communities, or events closely, not mainly counting a large population.
Davis That fits the themes. Religion and religious moderation each show up 4 times, pluralism, identity, and human rights show up 3 times each. So the practical question isn’t just what people believe; it’s how governments, schools, courts, and communities decide which beliefs count as civic and which get treated as a problem.
Jenny The author mix is also young. Out of 125 authors, 48 are first-time authors, meaning their first-ever paper in the metadata, 51 are emerging, and 26 are experienced. That’s about 79 percent first-time or emerging, which makes me excited, but also cautious: I’d want to see which of these findings hold up when the same questions get tested across more places and methods.

Paper Walkthrough

Paper 1 The Politicization of Radicalism Issues and Its Impact on Social Harmony in Multicultural Societies: An Analysis of Interfaith Student Perspectives in Kendari

Jenny Alright, let's get into the papers with one from Indonesia called The Politicization of Radicalism Issues and Its Impact on Social Harmony in Multicultural Societies. Taufani Taufani and colleagues look at campus politics in Kendari, Southeast Sulawesi, where calling someone radical can move from safety language into campaign-season ammunition.
Jenny The basic finding is that the label itself can damage trust. In interviews with sixteen students from eight campus-based religious and sociopolitical organizations, students said radicalism talk was often used to discredit opponents, and that pushed religious and cultural groups into more defensive, identity-based camps.
Davis How did the researchers tell the difference between real concern about extremism and a political smear?
Jenny They used in-depth interviews, meaning long guided conversations, with students from groups including KAMMI, HMI Dipo, HMI MPO, IMM, PMKRI, a Hindu student organization, GMKI, and Gema Pembebasan. The evidence is that informants across those different groups described the radical label creating stigma, social distrust, and less freedom to show religious or cultural identity in public, but this is still a small qualitative campus study, so it's a close-up rather than a national estimate.
Davis That makes the practical takeaway pretty sharp: anti-radicalism language needs clear standards, not just whoever shouts it loudest before an election. It fits that Moderation as Statecraft thread too, because the state or campus can say it's protecting harmony, but the tool can still teach people to fear their neighbors.

Paper 2 How education shapes divergent identity responses to discrimination: Experimental and observational evidence from Muslim immigrants in Germany

Davis That fear-your-neighbors point carries right into this one, but now the question is what people do with that pressure inside their own identity. Osman Suntay and Constantin Ruhe call it How education shapes divergent identity responses to discrimination, and they're looking at Muslim Turkish immigrants in Germany.
Davis The headline is not, discrimination makes Muslim immigrants more religiously attached, full stop. In a survey of one thousand four hundred fifty-six Turkish immigrants, higher educated people strengthened religious in-group identification, meaning attachment to their own religious community, when they perceived discrimination, while lower educated people tended to pull away from that group identity.
Jenny But if the experiment didn't show a positive average causal effect, how much weight should we put on the observational pattern?
Davis That's the right caution. They combined a survey experiment, where discrimination was primed to test a causal nudge, with observational analysis, where they compared people's reported discrimination and identity strength in the real world; the observational side supports the usual positive link, but the experiment doesn't show that same positive effect on average, so the strongest claim is the education split, not a universal discrimination response. And the cleanest limitation is scope: this is strongest for Turkish immigrants in Germany, not every Muslim minority in Europe.
Jenny So the policy lesson is pretty practical: don't build integration programs around one imagined minority reaction. This is Identity Under Pressure in a very literal way, because the same discriminatory signal can make one person hold religious identity closer and another step back from it.

Paper 3 Politically Salient Events May Modulate Effects of Naturalistic Psychedelic Use on Support for Partisan Violence

Jenny That caution about causal claims matters here too, because this next paper is a giant measurement story with a very weird twist: Politically Salient Events May Modulate Effects of Naturalistic Psychedelic Use on Support for Partisan Violence.
Jenny The plain version is that psychedelics didn't point in one moral direction. In twenty-one thousand nine hundred ninety US adults at baseline, the people whose most intense psychedelic experience landed on the Fourth of July were associated with lower support for partisan violence, meaning less acceptance of political violence against the other side, while experiences near party conventions or closer to Election Day were associated with higher support.
Davis So are we seeing something about psychedelics, or something about the kind of person who uses them on politically charged dates?
Jenny That's the key question, because this was longitudinal, meaning they followed people over time, but it was still observational, meaning nobody was randomly assigned to take psychedelics on Independence Day. Twelve thousand three hundred forty-five people completed the follow-up, five hundred five reported psychedelic use, and only nineteen said their most intense experience was on the Fourth of July, so the sample is large overall but the headline subgroup is tiny, self-reported, and not causal proof.
Davis The practical takeaway is pretty concrete: if therapists, retreat leaders, or researchers talk about set and setting, they can't stop at the room and the playlist. This paper says the national mood may be part of the setting too, which fits our Evidence and Labels thread because even the label on the day, Independence Day, convention week, Election Day, may shape what people think their experience means.

free_promo

Paperboy.fm This is the free version of the podcast. Subscribe at paperboy.fm to access a dozen different paper review podcasts for five dollars a month.

Other Episodes

2026-07-20 2026-07-13 – 2026-07-20
69 papers
2026-07-13 2026-07-06 – 2026-07-13
51 papers
2026-07-06 2026-06-29 – 2026-07-06
81 papers
2026-06-22 2026-06-15 – 2026-06-22
81 papers
2026-06-15 2026-06-08 – 2026-06-15
47 papers
2026-06-08 2026-06-01 – 2026-06-08
45 papers
2026-06-01 2026-05-25 – 2026-06-01
58 papers
2026-05-25 2026-05-18 – 2026-05-25
57 papers
2026-05-18 2026-05-11 – 2026-05-18
43 papers
2026-05-11 2026-05-04 – 2026-05-11
50 papers
2026-05-04 2026-04-27 – 2026-05-04
56 papers