When Faith Becomes Political Infrastructure
This week’s strongest papers treat religion less as background belief than as a working part of power: diagnosing defections, shaping leadership selection, constraining women’s political participation through violence, and reproducing or stabilizing sectarian rule. Across Nigeria, Lebanon, African Pentecostalism, Islamist populism, and far-right Christian politics, the shared question is how moral and religious language shapes political behavior.
- Religious ethics can be cast as a remedy when political loyalty becomes tied to greed, desperation, and self-interest.
- Sectarian orders do more than allocate power; they can shape whose political participation becomes dangerous.
- Populist supporters may engage cosmopolitan ideas selectively through faith-framed and majoritarian political commitments.
Nigeria’s moral politics
Greed and Desperation: The Reasons for Defections in Nigerian Politics: The Religious Cure
It frames Nigerian political defections as a crisis of greed, desperation, and weakened party loyalty, then asks religious traditions to supply ethical repair.
Mobilization of Ethnoreligious Sentiments and Leadership Selection in Sardauna Local Government Area of Taraba State, Nigeria
It examines how ethnoreligious identity can shape leadership selection in a Nigerian local government, using social identity theory and qualitative evidence.
Sectarianism as political machinery
An Intersectional Theory of Gendered Political Violence Under Sectarian Systems
It argues that gendered political violence in Lebanon is not only backlash against women, but a mechanism for preserving sectarian order.
From the Republics of the Sects to the Taif State : Pathways of Transformation in Lebanon’s Political Structure
It traces Lebanon’s political structure through Druze, Maronite, Sunni, and Shiite power centers, asking whether sectarian politics was overcome or reproduced.
Faith in public authority
Two Kingdoms, One Neighbour
It examines African Pentecostal public engagement, contrasting spiritual practice with uneven approaches to institutions, accountability, and political vocation.
Islamist Right-Wing Populism, Authoritarian Majoritarianism, and Conditional Cosmopolitanism: Supporter Perspectives from Turkey and Pakistan
It uses interviews in Turkey and Pakistan to show how supporters of Islamic populist movements engage with cosmopolitan ideas conditionally rather than simply rejecting them.
Die Rechte und das Christentum
It surveys how Christian and religious motifs are used to legitimize far-right politics and build bridges into broader Christian milieus.
Summary written from this week's papers and fact-checked against their abstracts.
Episode
2026-10-12 – 2026-10-19
63 papers
Covered in this episode
Papers:
Islamist Right-Wing Populism, Authoritarian Majoritarianism, and Conditional Cosmopolitanism: Supporter Perspectives from Turkey and Pakistan
An Intersectional Theory of Gendered Political Violence Under Sectarian Systems
Informal elite urbanism and Pentecostal city-making: Rethinking ‘religious gentrification’ in Lagos (Nigeria)
Development, the state, and new media: revisiting the models of demand for and supply of religion
+16 more
Transcript 28 lines
Cold Open
Davis
When someone says everyone is welcome, what makes you wonder who they really mean by everyone?
Jenny
I want to pause on welcome, because it can mean come as you are, or come as long as you already fit the room.
Davis
Exactly, and the twist this week is that exclusion can sound surprisingly inclusive: in interviews from Turkey and Pakistan, some Islamic populist supporters used worldly, cosmopolitan language, but only for people who accepted a clear religious hierarchy.
Jenny
So the question isn't whether welcome sounds generous, it's who gets to set the conditions of belonging... welcome to This Week In Religion and Politics on paperboy.fm.
Stats Overview
Davis
This week we had 643 search hits, narrowed to 200, and 63 made the cut, with 108 authors across 32 countries.
Jenny
That cut is interesting because qualified papers rose from 58 to 63, about 9 percent, even while the raw hits fell from 938 to 643, so either the search got cleaner or the week got more concentrated, and the data can't tell us which.
Davis
The people and places widened too: authors went from 94 to 108, countries from 27 to 32, with Nigeria leading at 7 papers, Indonesia at 5, and Lebanon and India at 4 each.
Jenny
Methodologically, this is a qualitative week: 36 papers use qualitative work, meaning close reading of texts, interviews, or social settings, compared with 7 case studies and 4 surveys, so we're learning more about how boundaries get built than how common each pattern is.
Davis
The author mix is almost perfectly split: 33 first-time authors, meaning first-ever paper rather than new to this feed, 37 emerging authors, and 38 experienced authors, so this isn't just one senior clique talking to itself.
Jenny
And the theme sweep fits the episode's through-line: patriarchy and religiosity each show up 3 times, while Nigerian politics, social cohesion, governance, conflict resolution, and religious moderation cluster at 2 each, which points to religion as a public toolkit for drawing lines and managing communities.
Paper Walkthrough
Paper 1 Islamist Right-Wing Populism, Authoritarian Majoritarianism, and Conditional Cosmopolitanism: Supporter Perspectives from Turkey and Pakistan
Davis
Alright, let's get into the papers with Nicholas Morieson, Susan de Groot Heupner, A. Bliuc, and Ihsan Yilmaz in Politics and Religion, twenty twenty-six: Islamist Right-Wing Populism, Authoritarian Majoritarianism, and Conditional Cosmopolitanism.
Davis
The title is doing a lot, so plain version first: they ask whether supporters of Islamic populist parties in Turkey and Pakistan really reject global openness, or whether they accept it only when their own religious majority stays on top.
Davis
Their answer comes from one hundred five qualitative interviews, meaning long-form conversations rather than a survey, with supporters of Turkey's AKP and Pakistan's PTI. The key finding is that these supporters often praise diversity and pluralism, but with hard limits: Sunni Muslim moral and political authority remains the ranking system underneath the welcome mat.
Jenny
If people say they support pluralism, how did the researchers tell whether that pluralism had hard limits?
Davis
They looked at how interviewees talked through concrete boundaries: who counts as part of the moral community, which kinds of difference are acceptable, and when equality gives way to majority rule. That's the conditional cosmopolitanism piece, openness with strings attached, and the main caution is that this is rich evidence from two movements in two countries, not a universal map of all Islamic populism.
Jenny
That makes the Boundaries of Belonging thread really literal: don't just listen for words like diversity or tolerance, listen for who gets included as an equal and who gets included as a subordinate. I'd treat this as a sharp two-case warning light, not a final verdict, but it's exactly the kind of evidence that keeps a big claim honest.
Paper 2 An Intersectional Theory of Gendered Political Violence Under Sectarian Systems
Jenny
That line about subordinate belonging is a good bridge, because Fatimah Saadi and Tània Verge take us to Lebanon in An Intersectional Theory of Gendered Political Violence Under Sectarian Systems, in Politics & Gender, and ask what happens when the boundary being policed is a woman trying to run for office.
Jenny
Their argument is sharper than, women enter politics and men push back. They say violence against women candidates helps maintain the sectarian system itself, meaning the political order built around religious communities, because the pressure comes through three overlapping channels: family coercion, party- and militia-linked enforcement, and sectarian boundary policing.
Davis
So what makes this sectarian, rather than just another brutal version of sexism in politics?
Jenny
The authors use Lebanon as a theory-building case, and they work abductively, which means they move back and forth between field evidence and theory to explain patterns that don't fit a simple gender-only story. What makes it sectarian is the script attached to the threat: honor, purity, loyalty, and communal stability, so a woman candidate isn't only accused of being too ambitious, she's framed as risking the family, the party, or the religious community.
Jenny
The evidence is rich enough to build a serious framework, but it's still one deeply divided society, so I'd call it a strong warning from Lebanon rather than a plug-and-play law for every divided country.
Davis
And the practical takeaway is pretty concrete: if you're trying to protect women candidates, election-day security is too narrow. This belongs in the Gendered Rights Battles thread because the body, the family, and the community boundary all become enforcement sites, not just the ballot box.
Paper 3 Informal elite urbanism and Pentecostal city-making: Rethinking ‘religious gentrification’ in Lagos (Nigeria)
Davis
That idea of community boundaries becoming enforcement sites travels in a very different direction in Lagos. In Informal elite urbanism and Pentecostal city-making in Lagos, David Garbin, T. Lawanson, and Gareth Millington look at Onike, a central Lagos neighborhood shaped by Mountain of Fire and Miracles Ministries.
Davis
Their claim is that this mega-church isn't just one big institution sitting in the city. It acts like an informal urban elite, meaning a powerful non-state actor that can reshape streets, land use, and local behavior through moral authority, political ties, money, and selective obedience to planning rules.
Jenny
How do we know the church is changing the neighborhood, rather than just being a huge neighbor with louder microphones and more traffic than everyone else?
Davis
They get there through ethnographic fieldwork and interviews with residents and urban stakeholders in Onike, so they're tracking how people describe the church's expansion, its territorial presence, and its effect on everyday movement and local power. The evidence is strong for this one Lagos neighborhood, but it's not a license to treat every Pentecostal urban story as the same story.
Jenny
That lands for me as a planning problem, not just a religion story. If a church can govern space without holding office, then urban planners have to treat major religious institutions as governing actors, not only as land users or service providers, which puts this squarely in the Moral Authority Governs thread.
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