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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.