Empire, elections, and religious authority
This week’s papers treat religion in politics as a set of channels: brokers, media systems, churches, diplomatic practices, and digital networks. The through-line is practical power—how sacred language and religious institutions move through politics, and where authority fails to mobilize people.
- A prominent preacher’s endorsement does not necessarily translate into electoral mobilization.
- Several religion-politics papers are also media stories, from majoritarian spirituality in India to digital Kashmir narratives.
- Church institutions appear as political actors in education, social services, and diaspora work, while Buddhist institutions are examined in relation to diplomacy and interstate relations.
When authority meets elections
Political Communication Brokerage and Election Law Compliance: The Role of Socio-Religious Values and Environmental Ethics in Tambak Lorok
It matters because it links election-law compliance to political brokerage in a vulnerable fishing community where environmental issues are politicized.
Religious Authority Fails to Mobilize Voters in Indonesian Local Politics
It matters because a prominent preacher’s endorsement in Kampar did not mobilize voter support, challenging easy assumptions about religious authority.
Modernisasi Islam dan legitimasi politik di Suriah pasca-konflik: Analisis wacana politik-keagamaan Ahmad al-Sharʿa
It matters because al-Sharʿa’s post-conflict Syrian discourse blends Islamic vocabulary with modern governance concepts to construct political legitimacy.
Media becomes the pulpit
Mediatisation of a New Imperial Spirituality in Contemporary India
It matters because it argues that Indian media alignment with government promotes a majoritarian spirituality centered on Narendra Modi.
Transformasi Politik Islam dalam Merespons Konflik Pakistan–India di Era Digital
It matters because it tracks how digital technology changes Islamic political legitimacy, solidarity, and mobilization around the Kashmir conflict.
Religious institutions and state power
Illiberal modernity and non- state actor agency: the Hungarian Reformed Church’s role in contemporary Hungary
It matters because it presents the Hungarian Reformed Church as an active non-state actor partnering with Orbán-era state projects, especially in education, social services, and diaspora work.
Buddhism in Russian-Mongolian Relations: Past and Present
It matters because it examines how Buddhist ideas and institutions shape Russian-Mongolian cultural, political, and diplomatic practices.
Beyond Innocence, Towards Ambiguity: Developing a Political Theology of Coloniality
It matters because it challenges theology’s claims to innocence by making Christianity’s political ambiguity central to thinking about coloniality.
Summary written from this week's papers and fact-checked against their abstracts.
Episode
2026-06-29 – 2026-07-06
81 papers
Covered in this episode
Papers:
Polarization and Political Violence: When Polarization Turns Violent
The role of partisan news and political parasocial relationships in shaping meta‐perceptions: Cross‐national evidence
Selective Secularism and the Governance of Religious Diversity in German Case Law: A Case-Illustrative Socio-Legal Analysis
Nepali Political Secularism as Majoritarian Secularism: A Critique to Bhargava
+16 more
Transcript 27 lines
Cold Open
Jenny
Can watching the other side’s favorite news actually make you dislike them less?
Davis
My instinct says no, but people get oddly close to anchors and commentators, so maybe the surprise isn't the channel, it's the weird little relationship.
Jenny
I'm suspicious of calling any partisan news healthy, but the study that grabbed me finds people in the US, and in one Israeli ultra-Orthodox media case, made less hostile guesses about what the other side thought of them after watching media from outside their camp.
Davis
And if media can soften what we think they think, while polarization only turns dangerous under certain conditions, then religion and politics this week are all about context...welcome to This Week In Religion and Politics on paperboy.fm.
Stats Overview
Jenny
This week starts big: about twelve hundred search hits, narrowed to two hundred on the semantic shortlist, and eighty-one qualified papers from one hundred sixty-four authors across thirty-five countries.
Davis
That eighty-one is up from fifty-nine last episode, so about a thirty-seven percent jump, and the center of gravity fits the through-line: religion leads with eight papers, then political theology and ethics at four each, so we're seeing symbols, institutions, and moral language all in play.
Jenny
The wider search pool jumped even more, from eight hundred sixteen hits to one thousand one hundred ninety-seven, up about forty-seven percent, while authors rose thirty-one percent, so my question is: did the field actually surge, or did religion-and-politics keywords just catch more adjacent work?
Davis
The author mix says it's not only the usual names. Out of one hundred sixty-four authors, fifty-four are first-time paper authors, meaning first-ever paper in the metadata, sixty-nine are emerging, and forty-one are experienced, so three quarters are not in the established bucket.
Jenny
But geography tightened. Countries fell from forty-six to thirty-five, down about twenty-four percent, even as Indonesia had eleven papers and Turkey had seven, and that makes me wonder whether this week is more clustered in a few national conversations than globally spread.
Davis
Methodologically, qualitative work dominates with thirty-eight papers, plus twelve case studies; qualitative means researchers are interpreting interviews, texts, or cases rather than mainly counting survey responses. That helps explain the feel of the week: context is doing the political work.
Paper Walkthrough
Paper 1 Polarization and Political Violence: When Polarization Turns Violent
Jenny
Alright, let's get into the papers with J. Kopstein's Journal of Democracy essay from twenty twenty-six, Polarization and Political Violence: When Polarization Turns Violent. The setup is bracing but not fatalistic: polarization doesn't automatically become bloodshed.
Jenny
Kopstein says the danger comes when several things stack up at once: personal hatred across camps, fear of demographic change, fear of losing political control, and a state that stops enforcing equal protection, meaning it doesn't protect every group by the same rules. He works through cases from ancient Alexandria, Russian pogroms, lynching in the American South, Hindu-Muslim riots in India, and Charlottesville in twenty seventeen.
Davis
So what would we actually need to see before saying polarization itself is turning into violence, rather than just saying people are furious online and scared at rallies?
Jenny
His answer is to look for survival politics, where a group starts treating control of the state as the difference between safety and extinction. The evidence is qualitative case-study work, so it's comparing historical episodes to find a pattern, not running a prediction model; that makes the support useful but limited, because it can flag conditions better than it can tell us which crisis comes next.
Davis
That changes the takeaway for me. Don't just measure anger in public opinion polls; watch whether police, courts, and local officials still enforce equal protection, because Charlottesville didn't become a pogrom in this telling because institutions held, and most polarized societies still stay peaceful.
Paper 2 The role of partisan news and political parasocial relationships in shaping meta‐perceptions: Cross‐national evidence
Davis
So after that warning about not mistaking angry polls for violence, here's a paper about the perception layer underneath those polls: The role of partisan news and political parasocial relationships in shaping meta-perceptions.
Davis
The counterintuitive finding is that seeing the other side's partisan media was linked with less hostile beliefs about what the other side thinks of you. Meta-perceptions just means your guess about their view of your group, like whether Democrats think Republicans see them as immoral, or whether secular Israelis think ultra-Orthodox Israelis look down on them.
Davis
Study one surveyed two thousand seven hundred seven adults in the United States, and both Republicans and Democrats who reported more exposure to outgroup partisan news reported less negative meta-perceptions. Study two surveyed nine hundred sixty-nine Israeli adults, and the cleaner finding there was narrower: exposure to ultra-Orthodox news media was tied to less negative meta-perceptions among secular and ultra-Orthodox respondents.
Jenny
How did they separate real attitude change from people just reporting nicer answers because a survey made them think, yeah, I probably shouldn't sound so suspicious?
Davis
They didn't prove attitude change in the causal sense; these were three surveys, not an experiment that randomly assigned people to watch a channel for a month. But study three, with seven hundred sixty-one U.S. adults, replicated the Democrat-side pattern and tested political parasocial relationships as a mediator, meaning the link partly ran through one-sided bonds people felt with political media figures, like feeling you know a host who is actually talking to millions.
Jenny
That makes the practical takeaway less cute than just, watch your enemy's cable news. It says cross-exposure might work when a real person on the screen feels credible enough to puncture the monster image, which fits our Symbols Do Not Vote Themselves thread: the symbol isn't magic, the relationship around it does the work.
Paper 3 Selective Secularism and the Governance of Religious Diversity in German Case Law: A Case-Illustrative Socio-Legal Analysis
Jenny
That line about the relationship around the symbol doing the work carries right into this next one. Zakaria Sajir’s paper is called Selective Secularism and the Governance of Religious Diversity in German Case Law, and it asks how German courts handle minority religious claims when the state says it’s being neutral.
Jenny
The plain finding is that Muslim and Jewish practices seem to fare better when courts can translate them into state-friendly goals. Selective secularism, here, means the law sounds neutral, but the baseline for what counts as ordinary is already shaped by older Christian-centered institutions. The five German court decisions cover Muslim prayer and halal food in prison, Islam-coded public performance in urban space, minority mediation in criminal justice, and male circumcision as a Muslim and Jewish ritual controversy.
Davis
So when a court says it’s just protecting order, or welfare, or ordinary prison routines, whose idea of ordinary is doing the work?
Jenny
Sajir answers that by doing a socio-legal analysis, which means reading the legal reasoning alongside the social setting that makes some claims look normal and others look disruptive. The cases came through the CUREDI database, and they’re ordinary court decisions, meaning regular courts rather than a big constitutional ruling. The limit is real: five cases can show a pattern, but they can’t stand in for all German religion law.
Davis
The practical takeaway is pretty concrete for an advocate asking for halal food in prison or defending a ritual practice: don’t only say, this is our religion, also show how the accommodation serves order, repair, bodily integrity, or child welfare. That fits the Secularism with a Center thread, because neutrality isn’t empty space here. It has furniture already in the room, and this five-case study is enough to make you notice the layout, even if it’s not the whole house.
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