Faith keeps remaking political authority
This week’s papers show religion less as a fixed voting bloc than as a flexible language for power, legitimacy, national identity, and moral duty. Across Iran, Brazil, Indonesia, and a shared campus in Israel, the key question is how sacred claims become public authority.
- Religious authority can stabilize regimes, but routinized charisma may also leave lasting legitimacy gaps.
- Faith-based voting blocs are built through alignment with changing political landscapes, not only top-down strategy.
- Sacred texts and institutions keep shaping debates over war, social order, race, and national belonging.
Legitimacy and Islamic authority
Political Theology and the Logic of Power: A Political-Theoretical Analysis of Contemporary Iranian Politics
It connects Iran’s post-1979 political order to Weber, Schmitt, and Machiavelli, focusing on how the regime manages a continuing legitimacy crisis.
Reconstructing the Concept of Khilāfah through Muhammad Abed al-Jabiri's Bayānī and Burhānī Epistemology: Insights for Contemporary Indonesia
It revisits khilāfah debates in Indonesia by asking how textual and rational interpretation shape claims about Islamic political authority.
Etika Politik dalam Film Sang Kiai Perspektif Fiqih Siyasah
It uses the film Sang Kiai to examine Islamic political ethics such as trust, justice, deliberation, honesty, and protection of the people’s interests.
Religion as national politics
From Opportunity to Alignment: Bolsonaro, Evangelicals, and Brazil’s Changing Political Landscape
It argues Bolsonaro’s evangelical support emerged through adaptive alignment with Brazil’s changing religious and political environment, not a one-way campaign strategy.
Catholic Racial Democracy: Social Imaginaries and Anti-Protestantism in Interwar Brazil
It shows how interwar Brazilian Catholic anti-Protestant publications helped popularize racial democracy by contrasting Catholic racial harmony with Protestant-sanctioned racial segregation.
ہندو مذہبی متون اور عسکری تصورات: تاریخی و معاصر تناظر میں ایک تفصیلی تحقیقی مطالعہ: HINDU RELIGIOUS TEXTS AND MILITARY CONCEPTS: A DETAILED HISTORICAL AND CONTEMPORARY ANALYTICAL STUDY
It traces ideas about war, duty, kingship, caste, and warriorhood in Hindu texts, then links them to modern Hindu nationalism.
Belief in public life
Conspirituality: Predicting COVID-19 Conspiracy Beliefs Using, Spirituality, Purity, and Political Orientation
It examines how spirituality, moral purity, and political orientation relate to COVID-19 and general conspiracy beliefs.
One Campus, Many Voices: Religious Socialization Among Palestinian Female Students in a Shared Jewish–Muslim Academic Space
It examines how Palestinian–Muslim women navigate religious identity and belonging inside a Jewish-majority academic institution in Israel.
Summary written from this week's papers and fact-checked against their abstracts.
Episode
2026-07-06 – 2026-07-13
51 papers
Covered in this episode
Papers:
From Opportunity to Alignment: Bolsonaro, Evangelicals, and Brazil’s Changing Political Landscape
Conspirituality: Predicting COVID-19 Conspiracy Beliefs Using, Spirituality, Purity, and Political Orientation
Farm Animal Welfare on the Mind and Meat in the Diet: Who Are These Consumers?
Media Framing, Corporate Logic and the Public Image of Pesantren in the Xpose Uncensored Trans7 Controversy
+16 more
Transcript 27 lines
Cold Open
Davis
Have you ever noticed how a conversation about values turns into a conversation about politics before anyone says party?
Jenny
Yes, and that's why I get twitchy when someone says the religious vote, like a pastor flips one switch and everyone files out in party order.
Davis
But the mess is the story: in Brazil, Bolsonaro's evangelical support didn't look like one campaign capturing one bloc; it looked like pastors, media, moral language, and everyday fears lining up until the coalition felt obvious.
Jenny
So not religion hiding in the background, and not politics simply using religion, but a public way people make sides feel righteous and readable...welcome to This Week In Religion and Politics on paperboy.fm.
Stats Overview
Jenny
This week we had 650 search hits, narrowed to 200 in the semantic shortlist, and 51 qualified papers. Those papers came from 106 authors across 21 countries, so the room is still wide, but it’s noticeably smaller than last week.
Davis
The qualified set fell from 81 to 51 papers, down 37 percent. The visible driver is volume, not stricter taste: the whole top of the funnel dropped from 1,197 hits to 650, down almost 46 percent.
Jenny
Right, and I’d be careful about calling that an intellectual shift by itself. The methods are heavily qualitative this week, 26 papers, with only 4 surveys and 3 quantitative studies, so we may be seeing fewer big-data political religion papers and more close readings of institutions, classrooms, and communities.
Davis
Geography narrowed too, from 35 countries to 21, down 40 percent. Indonesia leads with 6 papers and Brazil has 5, which matters because both places make religion very public: schooling, party life, church authority, and civic belonging all show up as political tools.
Jenny
The author mix is pretty balanced. Of 106 authors, 27 are first-time authors, meaning first-ever paper in the metadata, 41 are emerging, and 38 are experienced, so this isn’t just senior scholars defining the field from the top down.
Davis
And the theme sweep fits the episode’s through-line. Catholic Church, religious education, and secularism each appear 3 times, with COVID-19, political orientation, social justice, and family dynamics close behind at 2 each; religion here isn’t private background noise, it’s how groups build coalitions, police boundaries, and make politics feel morally legible.
Paper Walkthrough
Paper 1 From Opportunity to Alignment: Bolsonaro, Evangelicals, and Brazil’s Changing Political Landscape
Davis
Alright, let's get into the papers with Bruna Fonseca and Macarena Valenzuela's From Opportunity to Alignment: Bolsonaro, Evangelicals, and Brazil's Changing Political Landscape, published in The social science in twenty twenty-six. They're asking why Jair Bolsonaro's evangelical base in Brazil formed around him before the presidency, including during his seventh run for federal deputy, instead of treating it as just a clever campaign move in twenty eighteen.
Davis
Their core claim is that this became an alignment, meaning a durable fit between religious identity, moral language, party breakdown, and a candidate who learned how to speak into that moment. The concrete pivot is Rio de Janeiro, where Bolsonaro's support starts shifting in evangelical-rich municipalities beginning in twenty fourteen, before the presidential race made the story obvious.
Jenny
So how do they separate a real religious-political alignment from ordinary campaign messaging aimed at a useful voting bloc?
Davis
They triangulate it, which just means they check the same story with different kinds of evidence. They use voting patterns and the territorial distribution of evangelicals in Rio de Janeiro, individual voting-intention surveys from the twenty eighteen presidential election, and close readings of Bolsonaro's parliamentary speeches and social media discourse. The limit is important, though: this is strong for Brazil's party-system crisis and evangelical brokerage, but it shouldn't become a universal model of evangelical politics everywhere.
Jenny
That makes the Faith Becomes Alignment thread feel very literal. If you're studying a religious voting bloc, this paper says don't just count churchgoers and campaign slogans; look for local pastors, broken parties, moral appeals, and the moment when a politician becomes legible as the defender of a whole public way of life.
Paper 2 Conspirituality: Predicting COVID-19 Conspiracy Beliefs Using, Spirituality, Purity, and Political Orientation
Jenny
That phrase, becoming legible as the defender of a whole public way of life, is a useful bridge into this next paper, Conspirituality: Predicting COVID-19 Conspiracy Beliefs Using Spirituality, Purity, and Political Orientation, by M. Schofield, Christa Howard, and Stu Rimmer in the Journal of Scientific Exploration.
Jenny
The plain version is this: in an online survey of two hundred forty people recruited through social media, higher spirituality, stronger moral purity concerns, and more right-wing political orientation all significantly predicted belief in COVID-nineteen conspiracy theories.
Davis
But is this really measuring spirituality itself, or is it catching a very particular online wellness subculture where crystals, anti-vaccine posts, and distrust of institutions travel together?
Jenny
That's exactly the pressure point, because they used established self-report scales for spirituality, political orientation, general conspiracy beliefs, and COVID-nineteen conspiracy beliefs, then ran a multiple regression, which just means they asked which variables still predict the outcome when the others are considered at the same time.
Jenny
They also used the moral purity subscale from the Moral Foundations Questionnaire, where purity means concern with contamination, sanctity, and keeping the body or community clean, and their network analysis, basically a map of which variables sit closest to the action, put political orientation and purity at the center.
Davis
So the takeaway isn't, spiritual people believe conspiracies, full stop; the evidence is useful but moderate because it's a self-reported online survey of two hundred forty people, and the sharper point for public health is that factual correction may miss the target if the belief is tied to purity language and political identity.
Paper 3 Farm Animal Welfare on the Mind and Meat in the Diet: Who Are These Consumers?
Davis
That self-report problem carries over, but this next paper has a much bigger Dutch sample: Farm Animal Welfare on the Mind and Meat in the Diet: Who Are These Consumers? Hajer and colleagues look at two thousand one hundred sixteen households in the Netherlands and ask whether caring about farm animals actually shows up on the plate.
Davis
The surprise is that farm animal welfare concern was often moderate to strong, but it didn't neatly mean eating less meat. Political orientation had the strongest association with both welfare concern and diet: left-wing respondents reported more concern and less frequent or no meat, while Christian affiliation moved the other way, and non-Christian religious affiliation was only weakly tied to vegetarian or vegan diets.
Jenny
If people say they care about animal welfare, how did the researchers check whether that actually changed what they eat?
Davis
They compared people's self-classified diets, like omnivore, flexitarian, vegetarian, or vegan, against demographics, animal contact, religion, education, and politics, using covariate analyses, which means holding several factors in view at once, plus Random Forest, a machine-learning method that can catch messy non-linear patterns. Men were more likely to report an omnivorous diet and lower concern, women reported higher concern and more vegetarian or vegan diets, and regular animal contact predicted stronger concern but not a different diet. The evidence is sturdy for this Dutch case because the sample is large and the analysis is layered, but I'd be careful exporting it wholesale to countries where religion, farming, and party politics line up differently.
Jenny
So for an animal-welfare campaign, the message isn't just, here's suffering, now eat differently; it's, what public identity does this person think they're joining or betraying. That fits the Faith Becomes Alignment thread almost too neatly, because Christian affiliation, left voting, education, and gender are doing social sorting work that concern alone doesn't do.
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