In Burundi, weekly services are the primary point of contact between churches and their followers, with most of the population attending. These gatherings provide churches with a strategic platform to attract and retain members. Over six months, we collected data from five churches in the rural town of Muramvya—Catholic, Anglican, Pentecostal, FECABU (Evangelical), and Adventist—analyzing 125 transcripts for structure, themes, scope, tone, and key words. We find that emerging denominations—Pentecostal, FECABU, and Adventist—pursue different strategies than traditional ones. Pentecostal and FECABU churches place greater emphasis on rituals than on scripture readings, adopt a more positive tone, and focus on the immediate concerns of their congregants rather than abstract topics. The Adventist Church, while also emphasizing rituals and using a positive tone, distinguishes itself with a stronger commitment to scripture. The Pentecostal church uniquely combines a focus on morality with references to supernatural punishment. We argue that this blend of approaches among emerging denominations strengthens group cohesion and enriches individual faith experiences, helping them attract followers. Our findings shed light on the growth of these denominations in Burundi and may help explain broader religious trends across Sub-Saharan Africa.

Muslim Americans are running for and being elected to political office at record levels. Despite this trend, the literature on minority candidate emergence has yet to examine which district factors affect the likelihood of Muslim Americans running and winning their races. What district characteristics influence the emergence of Muslim American candidates, and how do voters respond when they appear on the ballot? Through examining state legislative candidates, I find that Muslim Americans are less likely to emerge in districts with a high white population share and that lean conservative. Overall, Muslim American candidates are less likely to win compared to non-Muslim Americans. However, Muslim Americans are far more likely to emerge as candidates and win in districts with a high Muslim population share. These results demonstrate that Muslim American candidates face supply-side barriers to running and electoral penalties that can be alleviated by high Muslim population shares in districts.

This paper explores the paradox of secularism in Chile’s 2022 constitutional proposal, celebrated as the “world’s most progressive” yet decisively rejected in a national referendum. The drafters sought to secularize Chile’s political institutions by curbing the influence of mainstream religions—above all, Catholicism—while simultaneously granting broad recognition and autonomy to Indigenous worldviews, including their spiritual and ritual dimensions. This dual strategy raises the question of whether the constitution merely substituted one religious framework for another under the guise of decolonial justice. To explain this apparent contradiction, the paper distinguishes between two axes of division: a first-order cleavage of oppressors vs. oppressed, which shaped the draft’s core commitments, and a secondary secular vs. religious cleavage, which played a subordinate role. The analysis concludes that Indigenous worldviews were embraced not as religious doctrines but as expressions of historically wronged communities deserving redress, whereas institutional religion was sidelined as a marker of colonial oppression. The paper contributes to debates on constitution-making and secularism in non-European contexts, illustrating how secular projects can entangle with alternative substantive doctrines in pursuit of historical justice.

Christian Nationalism has been an increasing focus of scholars as it has seemingly come to dominate much of the Republican Party and its voters. Existing research, however, has focused almost exclusively on individual attitudes. In this article, I examine a key piece of the Christian Nationalist agenda, policy change at the state level, seeking to change individuals’ perception of the religious foundations of the United States through symbolic legislation. I focus on Project Blitz, an organization that creates model bills for state legislators to introduce all over the country. Project Blitz is an explicitly Christian Nationalist effort, and its origins and supporters help demonstrate a key missing piece of the scholarly and popular conversation about Christian Nationalism: the current power and influence of Christian Nationalist attitudes and activities is based on the historical influence of the Christian Right social movement.

Previous research has identified intermarriage as an important factor in immigrant integration, but what affects immigrants’ willingness to intermarry or support intermarriage? A significant and understudied aspect of attitudes toward intermarriage among immigrants is the role of religion. We focus on a particular group of immigrants, Bhutanese refugees, for whom religious persecution featured prominently in their forced migration and resettlement in the US. Using an individual-level survey, we explore factors affecting their attitudes toward intermarriage. Specifically, we analyze the impact of social interactions, socioeconomic conditions, and demographic factors on resettled Bhutanese refugees’ attitudes toward intermarriage. Results indicate that, in addition to age, income, and English proficiency, resettled refugees who spend more time interacting with individuals from outside of their own ethnic, cultural, and religious group are more likely to support intermarriage. Social interactions may allow refugees to overcome religious restrictions and advance refugee integration into American society through intermarriage.

Does the robust Western finding that religious attendance predicts political participation hold in non-Christian democracies? We test this using pooled data from three waves of the Taiwan Election and Democratization Study. In Taiwan, the dominant religions—Buddhism, Taoism, and folk religion—lack the Protestant congregational structures that theoretically drive civic skill-building. We find that religious attendance robustly predicts political participation, surviving strict controls for partisanship and national identity. Crucially, religious affiliation has no independent effect, and the attendance–participation slope is denomination-invariant. Decomposing participation reveals that attendance predicts campaign activities more strongly than voting, consistent with a network-based mechanism. Religious belief intensity shows no independent association with participation beyond attendance. These findings—attendance matters, affiliation does not, and the effect is uniform across diverse traditions—strongly support a generalized social capital mechanism over civic skills, mobilization, or psychological belief-oriented alternatives. By replicating the attendance–participation link in a religiously pluralistic, East Asian democracy, this study demonstrates that religious civic engagement relies on communal social ties rather than denomination-specific lay governance, political recruitment, or internalized belief.

State-registered religion is puzzling because it can be portrayed as both an opponent and a partner of the state. While registered religions need to be receptive to the rules of the government, they also need to satisfy the needs of their congregants. In light of the Communist Party’s increasing repression, I investigate how this complex positioning between the government and the congregation has influenced the content of sermons in state-approved Protestant churches. Using computational text analysis on sermons from a state-approved Protestant church in China between 2009 and 2021, I analyze the pastors’ degree and composition of self-censorship in their receptiveness to changes over time, as well as to politically and religiously sensitive dates. By focusing on sermons shared in state-approved churches, I shed light on the complex positions in which these Party-registered pastors maneuver. This research also contributes to the broader discussion of civil rights and state-society relations in the context of a strong authoritarian state.

While collective identity scholarship has generated insights into how social movements construct and mobilize identities to distinguish themsleves from others, it has paid comparatively less attention to why some groups reject divisive identities and instead align with broader collective identities. Using the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt and their rejection of sectarianism as a representative case study, the article examines why social movements choose to adhere to larger collective identities, even when their environment encourages the adoption of divisive ones. Tracing the Brotherhood’s collective identity, the article advances an ideational explanation that shows how two enduring identity elements—the constitutive norm of Islamic inclusivity and the social purpose of resisting imperialism and authoritarianism—generated master frames that consistently led the group to reject sectarian divides during periods of heightened secterianization in the Middle East. This identity construction both enabled and constrained the movement’s political choices, shaping its responses to regional sectarian tensions. This article demonstrates how collective identity framing structures the repertoire of political options available to social movements and offers a theoretical and empirical vantage point for understanding their behaviour.

This comparative study explores the relationship between political and personal religious attitudes and their impact on reconciliation and tolerance in conflicts. Using survey data from 2,171 respondents across Palestine, Israel, Egypt, Jordan, and Tunisia, the research highlights the mediating role of religious conflict perception in shaping attitudes toward reconciliation. The findings challenge deterministic views of religion’s role in protracted conflict, showing that while political–religious attitudes correlate with a rejection of reconciliation, personal religious attitudes do not. Rather, the interplay of religious attitudes, justice perceptions, and conflict narratives shapes these attitudes. In internal political conflicts, the adoption of religious attitudes does not always correlate with intolerance. The study integrates constructivist and instrumentalist perspectives, demonstrating that the role of religion in conflict is context-dependent. It also shows that, regardless of religious affiliation, political and personal religious orientations similarly influence attitudes toward reconciliation and tolerance, offering important insights for intergroup and conflict resolution strategies.

Between 2011 and 2018, Bulgaria enacted a series of reforms accommodating the two most salient demands of its Muslim minority in the postcommunist period: the registration of elected Muslim leadership and the provision of state funding for religious communities. This constituted a significant departure from the restrictive policies pursued during the first two decades after communism and from the repressive legacies of earlier periods. Through process tracing based on 11 semi-structured elite interviews, press releases, and secondary sources, I argue that the geostrategic concerns of Bulgarian elites from the influence of the minority’s kin-state, Turkey, from 2011 onward, and their aim to decrease the dependence of the minority on the kin-state provided the main motivation to accommodate Muslims’ religious demands. These concerns were driven by domestic political changes in Turkey in the post-2011 period and their reflections in the country’s foreign policy.

Which levels of religiosity are most associated with terrorism threat perception amid conflict and why? Using three waves of the Israel National Election Study conducted around national elections (2015, 2019, 2022; pooled N = 1,848), we estimate cumulative link models with multi-point religiosity measures to examine nonlinear effects. Results reveal a robust inverted U-shaped relationship: threat perception peaks at intermediate religiosity and declines among both the very religious and the secular. The pattern holds across election cycles and after adjusting for political orientation, gender, education, and age. We interpret these findings through the concept of existential clarity, arguing that coherent religious and secular worldviews provide stable interpretive frameworks that buffer perceived threat, whereas intermediate positions may reflect lower belief-system coherence. By integrating nonlinear modeling with religion–politics theory, the study reconciles inconsistent findings in the literature and clarifies how religiosity structures threat perception in democracies facing sustained insecurity.

Examining religion and state arrangements in the United States, this study investigates under what conditions religious law, rooted in state establishment, declines in democracies. We argue that when (1) state founders or political elites intentionally refrain from embedding religious arrangements within state institutions, (2) the state apparatus enforces a constitutionalized and explicit prohibition against government-sanctioned religion, and (3) legal justifications shift from religious to secular rationale to maintain their justifiable constitutionality, then reliance on religious law within the state diminishes. However, due to institutional path dependence, laws initially rooted in religious arrangements/traditions may persist but are increasingly framed in secular terms, aligning with the broader secularization of modern Western societies, regardless of the extent of separation between religion and state. Hence, the religious influence and objectives of these laws endure despite the secular disguise.

This article proposes a theory of mosque regulation to explain why state-mosque relations vary at the subnational level in Europe, using Belgium’s regions as comparative cases. Focusing on Belgium’s policy of formal recognition for mosque-communities, I argue that regulatory outcomes emerge from strategic interactions between local officials and mosque leaders, each responding to distinct audience pressures. I draw from original data on 270 mosques and 52 semi-structured interviews to argue that partisanship shapes regulatory practices: left-leaning governments pursue cooperative regulation to court minority voters, while right-wing officials adopt combative approaches to appease anti-Muslim constituencies. Mosque leaders, in turn, consider reputational costs when deciding whether to engage with the state, often pursuing recognition not for material gain but to signal trustworthiness to the broader public. These findings contribute to an emerging scholarship on the political behavior of Muslim leadership, as well as to broader literatures on minority incorporation and subnational governance.

The aim of this article is to examine the issue of refugees/migrants at the Polish–Belarusian border in the discourse of the Polish Catholic press, with a particular focus on assessing the consistency of the Catholic press discourse with the teachings of Pope Francis. This juxtaposition is significant, as the teachings of the Pope undergo interpretation by spiritual symbolic elites, the Catholic press and are further conveyed to the people. In light of this, the most widely read Catholic opinion weeklies were selected for empirical analysis. The longterm perspective (from August to December 2021) made it possible to observe the evolution of views on the migration crisis at the Polish–Belarusian border. The analysis was based on Gerbner’s framework for the analysis of press information. The research led to the conclusion that there is a lack of consistency between the presented discourses. This article examines how faith-based media mediate religious authority while navigating political alignments during the migration crisis on the Polish–Belarusian border. Rather than uniformly transmitting papal teachings, Catholic outlets employ selective citation and framing that subordinate religious authority to political interests. The analysis reveals three mechanisms: mediation of religious authority through selective interpretation of papal texts, political alignment subordinating theology to political projects, and threat construction shaping editorial narratives to reflect political positioning. These mechanisms reflect broader patterns observed in faith-based media globally when addressing migration and humanitarian crises.

Although many studies have examined how religion contributes to violence in Nigeria, there is a lack of research examining the reverse relationship. This study seeks to fill that gap by examining the correlation between exposure to violent conflict and religiosity. Religiosity is measured using an item in the World Values Survey (WVS) that asks respondents to rate the importance of God in their lives on a ten-point ordinal scale ranging from “not at all important” to “very important.” Exposure to violent conflict is assessed using the cumulative number of conflict incidents occurring within a 30 km radius of respondents’ dwellings. Using QGIS software, I construct the measure of conflict exposure by exploiting the geocoded dimensions of both the WVS and conflict data from the Armed Conflict Location and Event Data Project (ACLED). Regression analysis reveals that as conflict exposure increases, so does the importance Nigerians attach to God in their lives. The positive relationship persists when the data are disaggregated by religious affiliation (Muslims and Christians), gender (men and women), and region of residence (North and South), with models estimated for each subsample. A plausible explanation for this result is that the existential threat posed by violent conflict prompts individuals to rely on God as a coping strategy.

Studies testing the relationship between preferences for Islamism and preferences for democracy in the Muslim world are inconclusive—and likely the result of measurement issues. Previously, we introduced a four-question battery measuring conceptions of Islamism and found that responses vary predictably across two components: whether respondents consider a shari‘a-based government to be one that provides services or one that imposes restrictive Islamic norms. Here, we demonstrate the consistency, generalizability, and utility of the battery through an analysis of 11,849 respondents in 11 Muslim countries. Defining a shari‘a-based government as one that provides is significantly and positively correlated with support for democracy, while defining it as a government that imposes is negatively correlated with these preferences across the entire sample.

Does deference to religious authority undermine support for democratic norms, including those forbidding the use of violence for political ends? Scholars have struggled to answer this question, in part, we believe, because they have typically employed proxies for religious deference (e.g. Biblical literalism, worship attendance, and self-reported religiosity) instead of measuring it directly. We develop a new measure of deference to religious authority in politics (DRAP), using the 2024 Chapman Survey of American Fears. We find that (1) DRAP is strongly correlated with support for political violence; (2) other common measures of religiosity (e.g. Biblical literalism and self-reported religiosity) are generally uncorrelated with support for political violence once the effects of our new measure are taken into account; and (3) the positive relationship between DRAP and support for political violence is more pronounced among respondents with low levels of religious participation.

Why are cash waqfs administered and regulated by the state in some countries but by non-state entities in others? I present a twofold argument to explain this puzzle. First, colonial policies shaped the baseline framework for the regulation of religion, well into the postcolonial period. However, political actors in the postcolonial period then made specific choices within those regulatory frameworks, with implications for the administration and regulation of cash waqfs. In British India, legal arbitration became the primary framework for religious regulation. In postcolonial Bangladesh, successive governments politicized the bureaucracy as they prioritized survival, and so cash waqfs exist within the Islamic banking and finance sector. In British Malaya, local sultans were able to bureaucratize all aspects of Islam. The bureaucratization of Islam proceeded in a centripetal manner from the state to the federal level in postcolonial Malaysia, with the federal government taking charge of cash waqfs.

Political crises play a pivotal role in shaping political secularization across sub-Saharan Africa. Côte d’Ivoire, located in the heart of French-speaking West Africa, exemplifies how such crises can catalyze secularist dynamics at the political level. From the early 1990s through the 2020s, especially following the near-overthrow of the government by armed rebels in 2002, it became increasingly apparent to many politicians that institutional religious leaders, both Christian and Muslim, should step back from political involvement. This process of secularization, driven by politicians, remains confined to the political sphere and has yet to permeate broader society and culture. This paper is based on fieldwork and data collected in Côte d’Ivoire between 2017 and 2020, including interviews, archival material from political parties, major newspapers, and religious organizations. Resources from the Pew Research Center further inform this research.