This Week In Religion and Politics

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Cold Open Stats Overview Paper Walkthrough free_promo

Cold Open

Jenny Have you ever felt more anxious when you were stuck halfway between two ways of seeing the world?

Davis Yes, because if one worldview is a map, being halfway means you're holding two maps and neither one tells you where the exits are.

Jenny I like that image, but I'm suspicious of any tidy curve about belief, because real people don't arrange themselves neatly for our charts.

Davis Fair, but this week keeps circling that pressure point: elections, migration, nationalism, state power, all asking who belongs and who feels exposed.

Jenny And the study that hooked me starts in Israel, where fear of terrorism was highest not among the most religious or the most secular, but among people in between...welcome to This Week In Religion and Politics on paperboy.fm.

Stats Overview

Davis This week the funnel got bigger at every useful point. We looked at 943 search hits, and 69 papers made the cut, from 123 authors across 28 countries. So the episode isn't built on one hot debate. It's a wide week of religion and politics showing up wherever belonging feels contested.

Jenny And that jump is real, but I want to keep the soft edge visible. Qualified papers rose from 51 to 69, a 35.3% increase. Query hits, meaning everything the search caught before relevance screening, rose from 650 to 943, up 45.1%. What's driving that, more elections, more migration, more nationalism language, or just a louder database week?

Davis The country spread gives us one clue. Coverage expanded from 21 to 28 countries, with Indonesia at 5 papers, the United States and Russia at 3 each, and Turkey, Israel, the Netherlands, Egypt, and India at 2. That fits the through-line: religion and politics colliding when national identity, minority status, or state power puts pressure on belonging.

Jenny Method matters here too. Qualitative work dominated, with 39 papers, compared with 8 surveys and 7 case studies. Plain translation: this week is heavy on interviews, documents, fieldwork, and close reading, not broad polling. That's great for texture, but I'd be careful about turning these patterns into population claims.

Davis The author mix is also interesting. Of 123 authors, 37 were first-time authors, meaning their first-ever paper in the metadata, not just new to us. Another 51 were emerging researchers, and 35 were experienced. So about 7 in 10 authors are early in the record, which may help explain why the topics feel live and locally grounded.

Jenny Theme-wise, the quick sweep is religion and identity politics at 4 papers each, then political theory, politics, social movements, and identity at 3 each. That's not a random pile. It's the same question from different angles: who gets to belong, who gets to define the group, and what happens when sacred identity meets political pressure.

Paper Walkthrough

Paper 1 Riding two horses: a coherence model of religiosity and terrorism threat perception

Jenny Alright, let's get into the papers with Dvir Greenberg and Daphna Canetti's Riding two horses: a coherence model of religiosity and terrorism threat perception. It's an Israel study asking a sharp question: in a country living with sustained security threats, who feels terrorism as most threatening?

Jenny The surprising answer is not the most religious people, and not the secular people. Across Israel National Election Study waves from twenty fifteen, twenty nineteen, and twenty twenty-two, with a pooled sample of one thousand eight hundred forty-eight people, threat perception peaked in the middle of the religiosity scale, in what the authors call an inverted U-shape, meaning the line rises and then falls instead of moving one way.

Davis How did they measure that middle zone of religiosity without just forcing people into crude labels like religious versus secular?

Jenny They used multi-point religiosity measures, so people could land along a scale, and then ran cumulative link models, which are statistical models built for ordered answers like low, medium, and high threat. The curve held after adjusting for political orientation, gender, education, and age, but the big limit is context: this is strong survey evidence from Israel, not a universal law of religion and fear.

Davis That makes the belonging story more interesting, because the people in the middle may be riding two horses for real. If your worldview is neither fully religious nor fully secular, danger may have fewer ready-made meanings, and that matters for anyone trying to measure public fear instead of assuming more religion simply raises or lowers it.

Paper 2 It’s the practice, not the pew: religious attendance, denominational differences, and political participation in Taiwan

Davis That last paper had people in Israel riding two horses between religious and secular meanings, and this next one asks a cleaner belonging question in Taiwan. Liang Jiang's Politics and Religion paper is called It’s the practice, not the pew: religious attendance, denominational differences, and political participation in Taiwan.

Davis The punchline is very practical: people who showed up to religious gatherings were more politically active, but being Buddhist, Taoist, folk religious, or something else did not add its own separate push. And the attendance link was stronger for campaign activities than for voting, which makes it sound less like private belief and more like bumping into people who pull you into public life.

Jenny If affiliation didn't matter, what exactly is attendance capturing here: faith, friendship networks, partisan sorting, or just the kind of person who already says yes to every community event?

Davis Jiang uses pooled data from three waves of the Taiwan Election and Democratization Study, then controls for partisanship and national identity, which are two huge political filters in Taiwan. The interpretation is social capital, meaning recurring ties that make people easier to inform, ask, and mobilize, but the limit is real: Taiwan is a pluralist democracy with its own religious institutions, so this doesn't automatically travel to a very different religious or authoritarian setting.

Jenny That feels like a strong belonging-moves-politics finding because the label on the door did less work than the habit of walking through it. For civic organizers, the useful map may be weekly practices and durable networks, not just formal religious identity boxes on a survey.

Paper 3 Backlash to Christian nationalism: The impact of the January 6 th insurrection on Americans’ religiosity and political partisanship

Jenny That question about walking through the door goes dark in this next one, because Backlash to Christian nationalism asks what happened when Americans saw religious symbols at the January sixth, twenty twenty-one Capitol riot.

Jenny Campbell and Layman argue that the imagery didn't just rally people; among Independents and Republicans who remembered Christian nationalist signs, meaning symbols that fuse American identity with Christianity, religiosity fell, Trump favorability fell, Republican favorability fell, and some Republicans even moved away from Republican identification.

Davis Are we looking at a real change in people's commitments, or mainly a reaction among the people who noticed the religious imagery in the first place?

Jenny That's the right pressure point, because the study uses survey data from Americans who reported what they recalled seeing on January sixth and then connects that recall to later religious and partisan responses, with some qualitative evidence about how people understood the riot.

Jenny The sample is strong enough to show clear patterns, but because recall is doing so much work, we can't say the symbols alone caused every shift; self-report means memory, disgust, media exposure, and prior doubts may all be tangled together.

Davis Still, the practical takeaway is sharp: if a movement wraps politics in sacred symbols, it may not just deepen belonging, it may also contaminate the religious label for the exact Independents and Republicans it hoped to keep.

This Week In Religion and Politics

Practice, Symbols, and Political Faith

Episode

Cold Open

Stats Overview

Paper Walkthrough

Paper 1 Riding two horses: a coherence model of religiosity and terrorism threat perception

Paper 2 It’s the practice, not the pew: religious attendance, denominational differences, and political participation in Taiwan

Paper 3 Backlash to Christian nationalism: The impact of the January 6 th insurrection on Americans’ religiosity and political partisanship

free_promo

Other Episodes

This Week In Religion and Politics

Practice, Symbols, and Political Faith

Episode

Cold Open

Stats Overview

Paper Walkthrough

Paper 1 Riding two horses: a coherence model of religiosity and terrorism threat perception

Paper 2 It’s the practice, not the pew: religious attendance, denominational differences, and political participation in Taiwan

Paper 3 Backlash to Christian nationalism: The impact of the January 6 th insurrection on Americans’ religiosity and political partisanship

free_promo

Other Episodes

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