Religion and the New Media: Discourses and Debates in the 2018 Fiji General Election Campaign

Abstract

This article explores discourses and debates on secularism, religion, and politics in social media in connection with the 2018 Fiji general election campaign, and in interviews with leading figures in churches and religious organisations. It discusses how people responded to these issues. It shows that there is still a pervasive lack of clarity in the Fijian population as to what the terms Christian state, secular state, secularism, and secularisation mean, how people understand, discuss, and debate them, and how this lack of clarity was used politically during the campaign.