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Spirituality, purity, Catholic racial ideology, and media framing show religion hardening into political alignment and public boundaries.
From COVID-19 conspiracy beliefs to interwar Brazil and pesantren television framing, this week follows religion as a public technology for coalition and legitimacy.
Covers 2026-07-06 to 2026-07-13; 5 free papers from 40 selected papers.
Where pulpits, courts, parties, and movements collide, this show follows the research behind the headlines on faith, power, identity, and democracy.
Episode covers 2026-07-06 – 2026-07-13.
Themes: Catholic Church, Religious Education, secularism, COVID-19, political orientation, religion, social justice, family dynamics
Methods: qualitative, case-study, survey, quantitative, critical discourse analysis, theoretical analysis
Premium also covers 10 related news stories, including independent.co.uk — Trump commission calls for building bridges between church and state, europeantimes.news — FoRB Policy Europe: Why It Matters Now - news, and ground.news — Faith Under Censorship! Morena's Member of Parliament Would ...
The premium version of this podcast covers all 40 research articles and 10 news stories selected for the episode. Subscribe to the premium podcast.
Generated by paperboy.fm.
Where pulpits, courts, parties, and movements collide, this show follows the research behind the headlines on faith, power, identity, and democracy.
Subscribe for the premium version of this podcast: https://paperboy.fm/podcasts/this-week-in-religion-and-politics/subscribe
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.
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.
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.
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.
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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