Religious Polarization Research Articles

How intellectual humility relates to political and religious polarization

ABSTRACT Intellectual humility (IH) is related to less political and religious polarization, so IH may help shed light on polarization broadly. That said, IH-polarization relations may differ depending on the belief domain or identity in question, which in turn raises important implications for applied work aimed at reducing polarization. Here we simultaneously examined political and religious affective polarization in relation to IH. Across belief domains (politics and religion) and identities (Republicans, Democrats, atheists, Christians), IH was consistently related to less affective polarization. These relations tended to remain significant even when controlling for belief strength. There was limited evidence, however, that IH statistically protected against variables that predict more polarization (e.g. moralization of beliefs). Altogether, these findings highlight pressing directions for future research that can uncover the constellation of variables that might mitigate polarization in those most likely to be polarized.

The Fate of “Essential Religious Practices” in India's Constitutional Courts

It has been nearly seven decades since the Indian Supreme Court laid down the “essential religious practices” test to determine which religious practices are granted constitutional protection against state regulation. This article surveys the forty-three cases in which the essentiality plea has been raised since its formulation in 1954 until August 2022. Although the essentiality plea has a staggeringly high failure rate of 84 percent before India's constitutional courts, judicial decisions show a shift in legal rationale. The article shows that many of these decisions invariably reflected the socioreligious context of their time. An increase in anti-Muslim religious polarization meant that the fate of the essentiality plea differed depending on the religion of litigants. This judicial treatment of cases stands in stark contrast to the cases decided during the initial decades of the Constitution, when the government was avowedly secular.

Religious Beliefs and Socialization: An Empirical Study on the Transformation of Religiosity in Spain from 1998 to 2018

This empirical study investigates the transformation of religiosity in Spain over the two decades from 1998 to 2018, with a focus on social changes in belief, religiosity, and religious controversies, as well as the evolution of religious socialization. By incorporating the concepts of religious socialization and religious controversy into the theoretical framework, the study analyzes data from three waves of surveys on religious topics conducted in Spain during this period. The descriptive findings reveal a clear trend towards a decline in religious belief, religiosity, and practice, coupled with a significant rise in atheistic and non-religious attitudes. Moreover, the explanatory analysis indicates a reduction in the impact of primary religious socialization during childhood, while sociodemographic variables such as age and ideology have either maintained or increased their influence in shaping religious or non-religious positions. The study identifies religious polarization, driven by a marked increase in atheism and non-religion, and suggests that intergenerational and ideological shifts are more critical in explaining changes in religious beliefs than traditional religious socialization processes.

How Can Digital Maps of Religions Inform Us about Fractionalization and Polarization in Post-Communist Romania?

This study explores religious diversity in Romania and how the trends of indices of religious fractionalization and polarization manifest at the county level in a post-communist period. The county level was selected as the relevant level for analysis due to its more clearly visible spatial dynamics with regard to religions. Recent studies have revealed that the erosion of diversity is an important aspect for any country and needs to be considered as an important aspect of democracy. This paper highlights how digital mapping of religious polarization and fractionalization in Romania has been generally maintained, although the regions of Transylvania, Banat, Dobrogea and Western Moldova remain areas in which there are different religions. Other than the general aspect of religious diversity depending on ethnic trends, there has been a rise of Pentecostals and Baptists at the county level. This aspect has further implications for our study, which calls for creating new institutions for dialogue between majority Orthodox communities and Protestants, not only so that potential conflicts do not appear between Orthodox and emerging religious communities but also to ensure objective, cultural, religious coherence. Our maps revealed the distribution patterns and the temporal evolution of religious denominations for the 1992–2011 period. The major line of originality in our research rests in the findings that after conducting a bivariate spatial autocorrelation analysis of religious fractionalization and polarization, we were able to identify two distinct clusters with spatial overlap over historical provinces.

Religious Polarization in Europe

Abstract We define two types of religious polarization and investigate the extent to which they are present across European countries, based on data from the 2008 to 2017 European Values Study and hierarchical linear modeling. The first type is polarization by religiosity, with declines in the middle ground between the actively religious and the nonreligious as secularization reaches an advanced stage. The second type is issue polarization, with the religious and secular taking different positions on a range of socio-political values, including social conservatism and ethnic nationalism. We find limited evidence of bimodality in the distribution of religiosity. We find more evidence, however, of issue polarization between the religious and secular in Europe, especially in social conservatism. Religious polarization should thus be understood as a multidimensional concept where one dimension may be more prevalent than others in society.

Religious polarization and justification of belief in invisible scientific versus religious entities.

Children and adults express greater confidence in the existence of invisible scientific as compared to invisible religious entities. To further examine this differential confidence, 5- to 11-year-old Turkish children and their parents (N = 174, 122 females) from various regions in Türkiye, a country with an ongoing tension between secularism and religion, were tested in 2021 for their belief in invisible entities. Participants expressed more confidence in the existence of scientific than religious entities. For scientific entities, children justified their belief primarily by elaborating on the properties of the entity, rather than referring to the testimonial source of their judgment. This pattern was reversed for religious entities, arguably, highlighting the role of polarization in shaping the testimony children typically hear.

The 2022 State Elections in Uttar Pradesh and the RSS-isation of the BJP

Since 2014, the BJP has become increasingly dominant in Uttar Pradesh, India, a state where, as recently as 2012, its vote share had slumped to 15 percent. This paper examines, through ethnographic field research with party workers and others, the reasons for the turnaround in the party’s fortunes. A large part of the answer lies in the increasing strength of BJP party organisation, modelled on an RSS template, as well as the increasing coordination between the RSS and the BJP, with RSS personnel frequently seconded to the BJP. This intense closeness between the RSS and the BJP is a new post-2014 feature, something that did not characterise earlier periods of the BJP in power. A second key factor, building on the BJP’s increased organisational capacity, and one long advocated by the RSS, is the mobilisation of state welfare benefits by the party and the concerted effort to convert welfare recipients, coming from all communities, into supporters. A third key factor, at which the BJP is increasingly adept and where RSS organisational skills provide a significant advantage, is the micromanagement of caste dynamics and religious polarisation as and when required to gain and maintain a political advantage.

How the Nineteenth-century Evangelical Revival Strengthened Faith and Undermined Christendom

This article deals with the paradoxical relationship between the nineteenth-century Evangelical Revival and secularization. It is argued here that the revival and its worldview played a role in increasing pluralism and choice in the nineteenth century – a process often related to secularization. The Evangelical movement both attempted to oppose modernity and rationalism and emphasized religious freedom, voluntarism, and individualism. It therefore induced and popularized self-reflection, doubt, and deconversion. It also favoured religious democracy in opposition to a state-imposed religious monopoly (at least in northern Europe). Furthermore, by dividing people into believers and nonbelievers, it emphasized religious polarization. This contributed to an undermining of established religious structures, fragmenting and pluralizing the religious landscape and giving people the option to abstain completely from religious commitment. The Swedish confessional (inner mission) revivalist denomination Evangeliska Fosterlands-Stiftelsen (EFS – approx. the Swedish Evangelical Mission Society), founded in 1856, is used as a case. The popular literature they published and distributed manifested an evangelical worldview. In this article four themes, based on the popular literature, are used to study empirically the changing role of religion in relation to nineteenth-century revivalism: ‘the dualistic worldview’; ‘conversion’; ‘activism’; and ‘self-reflection’.

Religious identity, trust, reciprocity, and prosociality: Theory and evidence

We use the trust and the dictator games to explore the effects of religious identity on trust, trustworthiness, prosociality, and conditional reciprocity within a beliefs-based model. We provide a novel, rigorous, theoretical model to derive the relevant predictions, which are then tested in lab-in-the-field experiments in the Indian states of Bihar and Uttar Pradesh. We find strong evidence of the effects of religious identity on the belief hierarchies, and the chosen actions, of Hindu and Muslim subjects. Priming for a religious identity has little effect on Hindu subjects but it enhances religious polarization in beliefs and actions among Muslim subjects. There is taste-based discrimination but no statistical discrimination. All our underlying assumptions on beliefs, and their dependence on priming and identity are confirmed by the data, identifying a precise beliefs-based mechanism for the effects of religious identity. More religious subjects expect greater prosociality/reciprocity and often are more prosocial/reciprocal.

Bucking the Trend: South African Jewry and Their Turn Toward Religion

Across the Jewish world religious polarization is gaining momentum. At the secular end of the spectrum people are switching away from religion while at the religious pole fertility levels are high. This trend is evident among South African Jewry; data from the 2019 Jewish Community Survey of South Africa (N = 4193) show that the community is becoming polarized, and the traditional center ground is collapsing. However, unlike many other Jewish communities today, switching toward more religious subgroups than the one in which one was raised is more common in South Africa than switching away from them. This tendency is most pronounced among people born in the 1960s and 1970s. A similar trend characterizes South African non-Jews. We argue that coming of age in a period of profound political and social instability explains the increased likelihood of switching toward religion. The effect is more marked among Jews due to distinct communal characteristics and history that provided the optimal conditions for switching towards a more religious lifestyle. This paper highlights the necessity of examining internal processes that are unique to the Jewish community alongside broader developments to improve our understanding of religious polarization among Jews.

The Political Path of Copts in Egypt after 2011

The Coptic Church monopolized the religious and political representation of the Copts since the establishment of the Egyptian state. It withdrew from direct involvement in the political sphere during the presidency of Hosni Mubarak, characterized by a close relationship between the Church and the political regime, especially in times of perceived common threats. Consequently, the Church often supported the regime to safeguard against potential risks that might arise if the regime were to fall. In this context, Mubarak's regime used Islamist elements to intimidate the Copts, while justifying its actions by claiming that the secular political system had become sectarian. Consequently, Mubarak's regime closed its doors to Coptic representation within his party.
 The January 25th, 2011 revolution provided an opportunity for the Copts to act more freely in the political climate. However, this newfound democracy had its challenges, as it witnessed the mobilization and substantial participation of Islamist groups, such as the Muslim Brotherhood, utilizing their organizational capacity. Through this religious polarization, the Islamists succeeded in winning elections, leading to the presidential victory of Mohamed Morsi.
 The Muslim Brotherhood failed to alleviate the Copts' concerns about religious freedom and their marginalization in state institutions. Moreover, some Brotherhood leaders and their allies adopted a sectarian rhetoric against the Copts, which had negative consequences on the overall political direction of the Brotherhood. This ultimately led to their downfall, paving the way for a new era of governance in Egypt.

RELIGIOUS POLARIZATION, RELIGIOUS DIALOGUE AND ISLAMIC EDUCATION: Characteristics of Interreligious Communication Patterns in Building Tolerance and Harmony in Schools

RELIGIOUS POLARIZATION, RELIGIOUS DIALOGUE AND ISLAMIC EDUCATION: Characteristics of Interreligious Communication Patterns in Building Tolerance and Harmony in Schools

HUMOUR AS A COUNTER ISLAMIST DISCOURSE

This article addresses counter-Islamist discourses by NU Garis Lucu (NU’s Funny Brigade) through its social media accounts. Instead of a clear-cut theological debates, NU Garis Lucu offers humour as method to counter attack Islamit’s arguments through its social-media activism. Using a discourse analysis approach, this article examines tweets of the NU Garis Lucu’s during the course of 2015-2020. It further reveals the account strategies to counter attack Islamist’s discourse which include questioning the legitimacy of the religious authority of Islamist groups, promoting religious moderation, supporting democracy as an ideal political system, promoting ‘smiling’ Islam, and putting to an end religious polarization.

Models and Political Attitudes of Fundamentalist Groups in Indonesian Presidential Elections

Islamic fundamentalist groups played an important role in Indonesia's 2019 presidential election. They openly sided with the number 2 candidate, Prabowo Subianto-Sandiaga Solahudin Uno. Even today, the presidential election was marked by polarization and religious sentiments that are very strong and sharp. This study examined the model of presidential election contestation that will likely take place in 2024, the position of fundamentalist groups in political contestation, and its relation to religious polarization trends. This qualitative research used a case study approach to explore political models and attitudes in presidential election contestation. Interest group theory was placed to analyze the issue. The results showed that the map of contestation that will occur in 2024 will still be the same as the 2019 presidential election contestation. Second, the division between religious groups will still occur in the 2024 presidential election. Third, the alignment of religious fundamentalist groups in the 2024 presidential election will lead to figures willing and able to accommodate their groups.

Religion and identity polarisation: A slight note from the frontier region

This article examined the recent emergence of the national and international issue of religious polarisation and identity, which affects some groups’ populism and fanaticism. Regarding social phenomena, religion and identity are intertwined like the two sides of a coin. This discourse has an impact how to interpret diversity on religious issues that are caused by political influences. Given the polarisation of identity politics and religion, the national and state campaign slogan ‘unity in diversity’ is merely wishful thinking. The polarisation of identity and religion is heavily implicated in the Indonesia–Philippines border case; consequently, in some instances, the ‘seeds’ of these cases are discovered, eventually resulting in group fanaticism. This article employed the historical way of writing while also taking a social science angle that interacts with the research being done. For some communities, religion and identity may take on symbolic meaning, affecting how well they adapt and are accepted. However, the qualities of a community group or region are also shaped by historical events. According to the study’s findings, religion and ethnic identity have played important roles in long-standing historical processes and impacted them. This study is anticipated to ‘suppress’ the problem of political division involving religion and identity because the identification of ‘border’ communities depends not only on entity and identity issues but also on the community’s culture.Contribution: The contribution in this study is that it has an impact on religious issues and cultural identity relations perspectives.

Religious polarization among youth in southeast Europe: The role of secularization and prevailing confession

Recent rapid secularization has been a major force behind the overwhelming political and ideological polarization in some Western countries. Focusing on Western European countries, Ribberink et al. (2018) found that religious polarization was associated with higher levels of secularization, and at the same time, with the relative dominance of Catholicism. Based on national representative surveys from 2018, this paper analyses religious polarization among young people from ten countries in Southeast Europe. The results show that the level of religious polarization is indeed positively correlated to the level of secularization, as well as to the predominance of Catholicism among young people. Slovenia and Croatia, two countries where youth is both highly secularized and predominantly Catholic, stood out with the highest levels of religious polarization. Furthermore, it is only in these two countries that young people became more secularized between 2008 and 2018. We interpret these results mainly in light of the rise of the individual-choice norms that parallel secularization, combined with the mechanism of religious defence, which can be successful largely because of the Catholic Church?s abundant material and cultural resources.

The BJP Government and the Kashmiri Pandits: Managing the Politics of Displacement in India

ABSTRACT After the Kashmiri Pandits were driven from their homes by a violent insurgency in the 1990s, the issue of their displacement and potential rehabilitation has featured prominently in mainstream Indian political discourse, and particularly in the messaging of the Hindu-nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). The BJP subsequently became the leading political force in India and as the governing party has had ample opportunity to respond to the Pandits’ plight. The displacement and possible rehabilitation of the Pandits is thus an appropriate case study to consider how the BJP in government has managed a grievance-based issue that served the party well while it was building its political base. In this article, I apply a critical discourse analysis methodology to the BJP’s handling of the plight of the Kashmiri Pandits. I argue that the government has used the plight of the Pandits for electoral advantage while doing little to resolve the issue and failing to create favourable conditions for the community’s rehabilitation. The BJP’s approach, and the consequent exacerbation of regional and religious polarisation, has instead led to further insecurity for the displaced Pandits.

Komunikasi Konflik Pada Pelaksanaan Dan Pasca Pilpres 2019 Di Media Sosial Twitter

Communication and interaction in social relations have the potential to create conflict, due to differences in opinion, knowledge, and so on. Like the conflict that occurred between supporters of the Jokowi-Amin and Prabowo-Sandi presidential candidates in the Indonesian presidential election 2019. The conflict occurred because of different interests, hopes and differences in choices between groups. The conflict is getting sharper when religious polarization is raised in it. The research was conducted through a qualitative approach with descriptive methods, using literature study data collection techniques. This study aims to describe conflict communication in the implementation and after the 2019 presidential election on social media is Twitter. The results showed that the delivery of hate speech is getting sharper in the 2019 presidential election. Swear words of hatred are reciprocated in order to satisfy the desire for support for the presidential candidate of his choice. Even the phenomenon of hate speech is increasing ahead of the 2024 presidential election, especially during the Covid 19 pandemic era, through the identity symbols with insult orientation, bad accusations, swearing and scolding, or considering the opposing party stupid, and giving bad labels.

The spiritual experience of Chinese Muslim minorities post-1998 reformation: A study of Chinese Muslims becoming Indonesians

This article describes a new method of viewing a historical phenomenon based on its social significance. This method enabled the classification and analysis of a group in a context simultaneously and chronologically. Using historical phenomenology, the authors found a polarisation of Chinese Muslims’ thoughts and practices in the Indonesian context. As an example, the technique of classification of Islamic thoughts is illustrated to discover Chinese Muslim figures’ religious activities. This method allows an improved social investigation to probe deeply into Chinese Muslims’ formal religious life. The evaluation of the effectiveness of the new method is confirmed by the calculation of the polarisation of Chinese Muslim religiousness, leading to the fragmentation and diversification of Indonesian Chinese Muslims in the realms of politics, economic practices or Islamic rituals. New research results improve the understanding of how a social history of an ethnicity could grow and assimilate in a context. The assimilation could contribute to religious harmony in such a pluralistic country such as Indonesia and can be used for making better social decisions, especially related to the lives of minorities, who urgently need policymakers and stakeholders to accommodate the rights of those who are still in the process of gaining fairer recognition.Contribution: Using historical phenomenology, this article tries to classify and study a group in a setting concurrently and chronologically. An in-depth social inquiry into the formal religious life of Chinese Muslims discovered a calculation of religious Chinese Muslims’ polarisation, which led to the dispersion and diversification of Indonesian Chinese Muslims’ politics, economic practices and Islamic rituals. New policy proposals can be made by evaluating religious polarisation.

Outcome of FPTP in a Diversified Society


 Democracy across the world has witnessed the evolution of the electoral system. The First-past-the-post (FPTP) system practiced in India has certain disadvantages, such as disproportional representation. This paper analyses the election outcome in FPTP electoral system in a diverse society like India using constituency-level information for the Lok Sabha election. I examine how social diversity, religious diversity, and fractionalization affect the outcome in the FPTP system. The fractionalization index for religious diversity, polarization index for religious polarization, and Herfindahl–Hirschman Index for vote concentration are formed for Lok Sabha constituencies to understand the impact of diversity on vote concentration as well as vote share of winning candidates. Further regression analysis is done where state-specific and time-specific effects are controlled. It is found that fractionalization i.e. religious diversity affects the vote concentration negatively. It is also found that on average the vote concentration for SC/ST reserved constituencies is lower than general constituencies. This suggests that religious diversity reduces the vote concentration which further leads to disproportionality. It is important to think of ways to provide the space for the parties which are getting votes but not getting seats in Lok Sabha, especially for reserved constituencies.