Religion and Power
The political-religious fusions actively reshaping the world. Calmly described, with named cases, structural patterns, and serious disagreement laid out plainly.
(Pew Research, 2025; the unaffiliated share, 24%, has grown slightly but remains a minority globally)
(a selection, not a census; see the named cases below)
(Pew Research, 2017: roughly 22% have an official state religion and another 20% a preferred one. The line between "favored" and "official" is contested in many cases)
A note on framing. Treating religion as a private belief that is mostly separated from political power is a Western-modernity assumption that does not describe much of the world. The political-religious fusions covered here include some of the most consequential governance projects of the present moment, in major democracies and authoritarian states alike. This page is calm and descriptive; it is not a critique of religion as such, and it is not a defense of any particular fusion.
Iranian theocracy
The 1979 Islamic Revolution produced a constitutional system in which ultimate political authority rests with a religious figure (the Supreme Leader) under the doctrine of velayat-e faqih ("guardianship of the jurist"). The Supreme Leader is elected by the Assembly of Experts (itself composed of clerics) and serves for life. Below the Supreme Leader, the Guardian Council vets candidates for elected office, ensuring that effective political competition is bounded by religious-revolutionary criteria. Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei was killed in US and Israeli strikes on February 28, 2026, at the start of a war that had not formally ended by late September. On March 8 the Assembly named his son Mojtaba, 56, who has close ties to the Revolutionary Guard but less religious standing than his father.
Economic hardship from sanctions and policy choices, disputed elections and religious dress rules have fed repeated protests. They include the 2009 Green Movement, the 2017-18 and 2019 protests, the 2022-23 Mahsa Amini protests, and nationwide protests in December 2025 and January 2026. The state's response has been increasingly coercive: an Iranian official told Reuters that at least 5,000 people were killed in January 2026, and the rights group Human Rights Activists News Agency has confirmed more than 6,000 deaths. The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps controls a substantial share of the economy and major regional foreign policy. Whether the system reproduces itself under its new leader, gradually evolves into a more secular authoritarian state, or experiences a sharper transition is a major open question.
What makes the Iranian case important is that it is the most institutionally developed theocratic constitution in the modern world. Its intellectual case (Khomeini's velayat-e faqih) is articulated in detail, and its institutions are extensive.
Russian Orthodox-state alignment
Post-Soviet Russia has rebuilt a relationship between the Russian Orthodox Church and the state that has substantial pre-Soviet precedent (the Tsarist simfoniya, the symphony of throne and altar) but takes new forms. Patriarch Kirill's tenure has involved active alignment with Putin's political project. The Patriarchate framed the 2022 invasion of Ukraine in spiritual terms, with explicit support for the war and its aims, and in March 2024 Kirill oversaw a decree calling it a "holy war". The Church has supported what Russian officials call the "Russian World" (russkiy mir) concept, treating Russian-speaking and Orthodox communities outside Russia's current borders as part of a single civilizational space.
Declassified Swiss police files, reported in 2023, indicate that Kirill worked for the KGB in the 1970s, which his nephew, the church's representative in Geneva, denied. The Church has substantial state-supported real-estate, broadcasting, and educational reach. Anti-LGBT, anti-abortion, and "traditional values" legislation have advanced with Church endorsement. Researchers describe its network abroad as a channel of Russian soft power, including support for nationalist and traditional-values movements in Western states.
What makes this case important is how rapidly a religious institution moved from Soviet repression to state alignment, and how that alignment shapes domestic policy and foreign relations. It has also split Orthodoxy. Moscow broke with the Ecumenical Patriarchate of Constantinople over Ukraine, and the Moscow-linked Ukrainian Orthodox Church declared its independence in 2022. Ukraine's government still treats that church as tied to Moscow and, under a 2024 law, has asked a court to dissolve its governing Kyiv Metropolis, a case pending in mid-2026.
Hindu nationalism in India
The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), in power at the national level in India since 2014, draws ideologically from Hindutva - the political theory developed by V. D. Savarkar and the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) since the 1920s, treating Hindu identity as the core of Indian nationhood. Under Prime Minister Narendra Modi, several policy and institutional shifts have advanced this project. They include the abrogation of Article 370, ending Jammu and Kashmir's special status (2019); the Citizenship Amendment Act, creating religion-based pathways to citizenship (2019); and the Ayodhya temple consecration on the site of the previously demolished Babri Masjid (2024). A 2025 law overhauling the management of Muslim religious endowments (waqf), which the government says brings transparency and critics say erodes Muslim control, is partly suspended pending a Supreme Court ruling.
India has about 213 million Muslims (Pew, 2020), one of the three largest Muslim populations in the world with those of Indonesia and Pakistan. It has substantial Christian, Sikh, Buddhist, Jain, and other communities. Election competition remains real: the BJP lost its own majority in the 2024 national election and governs with coalition partners. In the 2026 state elections it won West Bengal for the first time, after a voter-roll revision that the Election Commission said removed ineligible voters and critics said was skewed against marginalized and minority communities; other parties won Kerala and Tamil Nadu. Whether India is best understood as a Hindu-nationalist project gradually transforming a secular state, or as a complex democracy where the BJP's policies are one program among several, is contested.
What makes the Indian case important is the scale (more than 1.4 billion people), the speed (most of these measures date from 2019), and the project's repeated electoral mandates. Unlike theocratic models where religious authority is constitutionally privileged, it operates within a formally secular constitution that, critics say, the ruling party has reinterpreted rather than rewritten.
The US Christian right and Christian Zionism
The relationship between conservative Christianity and US politics has been a defining feature of American political life since at least the 1970s. The mainstream evangelical movement remains a major force in the Republican Party. A more specific set of currents - Christian nationalism in its various forms, dominionist theology, and the broader project of Christian-foundational understandings of American identity - has gained visibility in ways that distinguish them from traditional religious-right politics.
The terminology matters. "Christian nationalism" as used by sociologists (Andrew Whitehead, Samuel Perry) describes a worldview that sees America as fundamentally a Christian nation whose laws and institutions should reflect that. In a 2025 survey by the Public Religion Research Institute (PRRI), 11% of Americans were adherents of this view and 21% sympathizers, shares stable since 2022; 64% were skeptics or rejecters. The Supreme Court's conservative majority, the post-Roe legal landscape on abortion, and disputes over religion in schools are where these currents meet the law. In 2025 the Trump administration, citing religious freedom, created a Task Force to Eradicate Anti-Christian Bias; in April 2026 a federal appeals court upheld, 9-8, a Texas law requiring the Ten Commandments in every classroom.
Christian Zionism is a related but distinct theological position, particularly strong among American evangelicals, that supports a robust Israeli state on biblical-prophetic grounds. It is one of the largest sources of US political support for Israel and has shaped Republican Middle East policy across multiple administrations. The Christian Zionist movement is much larger than its Jewish-American counterpart, and its leaders backed decisions such as the 2018 move of the US embassy to Jerusalem and the recognition of Israeli sovereignty over the Golan Heights.
What makes the US case important is that it tests how far religious movements can shape law within a constitutional system designed (in the First Amendment) to prevent an established church. The mechanisms - electoral mobilization, judicial appointments, state-level policy laboratories, parallel educational institutions - operate within ordinary democratic processes. Whether this is a revival of long-standing American traditions or something specific to the present moment is debated.
Political Islam in its multiple forms
Political Islam covers a wide range of distinct movements that share some commitments to Islamic law and identity in public life but differ substantially on goals, methods, and theological foundations. Treating them as one phenomenon obscures more than it explains.
Sunni mainstream political Islam. The Muslim Brotherhood and its intellectual lineage, with significant variants across countries: Erdoğan's Justice and Development Party in Turkey (in power since 2002), Hamas in Gaza (which has an armed wing and led the October 7, 2023 attack on Israel), Tunisia's Ennahda, and Morocco's Justice and Development Party. These movements have generally accepted electoral participation while pursuing Islamization of law and social norms. Ennahda's leader, Rached Ghannouchi, jailed in Tunisia since 2023, was sentenced to life in June 2026 on terrorism charges his lawyers call political. Jordan banned the Brotherhood in 2025, and in January 2026 the United States designated its Egyptian, Jordanian and Lebanese branches as terrorist organizations; Brotherhood leaders say they renounce violence.
Saudi Wahhabism and exported Salafism. The Saudi state's interpretation of Islam, exported globally through religious institutions, education, and finance from the 1970s through roughly 2017, when Saudi religious-export policy began shifting under Mohammed bin Salman. The legacy is substantial: institutional infrastructure across Asia, Africa, and Western Muslim communities that operates partly autonomously from current Saudi policy.
Iranian-aligned Shia political Islam. Iran-supported movements across the region: Hezbollah in Lebanon, Iranian-aligned Iraqi Shia parties and militias, Yemen's Houthis (Zaydi Shia rather than Twelver, complex relationship with Iran). US intelligence judged in March 2026 that Israel had seriously weakened the military capabilities of this "Axis of Resistance" and that Iran was "focused on survival". In the 2026 war Hezbollah attacked Israel on Iran's behalf, drawing an Israeli ground operation, some Iraqi militias attacked US bases, and the Houthis remain active.
Jihadist movements. Al-Qaeda, ISIS and successors, Boko Haram in West Africa, several others. These reject the state-system framework that mainstream political Islam works within. Their salience has decreased from the 2010s peak, but they remain locally significant, above all in the Sahel. Two such movements now govern states: the Taliban in Afghanistan, recognized by Russia in July 2025, and Syria's Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, once linked to al-Qaeda, whose leader Ahmed al-Sharaa is now president.
Quietist and reform movements. Major intellectual currents within Islam - reform-Islam approaches, Sufi-influenced quietism, secular-Muslim political thought - that explicitly resist political-Islam framings. They make less news than political movements but represent large parts of the global Muslim intellectual landscape.
What makes political Islam important is the scale of the societies it operates in. The world's roughly 2 billion Muslims (Pew, 2020) live in dozens of states with very different relationships between religious and political authority, a variation poorly captured by single-frame coverage.
Israeli religious Zionism
Israeli politics since the 2000s has involved a substantial growth in the political weight of religious-Zionist parties and ultra-Orthodox parties. The 2022 government formed by Benjamin Netanyahu's Likud with the Religious Zionism alliance and ultra-Orthodox parties was often called the most religious in Israel's history. Ministers from Religious Zionism (Bezalel Smotrich at Finance, with West Bank settlement-related authorities, and Itamar Ben-Gvir at National Security) advanced policies aligned with their movement's traditional commitments.
The religious-Zionist movement has grown demographically (with higher birth rates than secular Israelis) while becoming increasingly mainstream politically. The historical compromise between secular Zionism and religious Judaism that defined the early Israeli state has shifted toward a more religious-influenced character. The 2023 judicial-reform proposals and the response to October 7, 2023 each accelerated debate about what kind of state Israel is becoming.
The mainstream religious-Zionist movement (associated with the Mafdal and successors) is distinct from the ultra-Orthodox (Haredi) parties (Shas and United Torah Judaism), which have different demographic bases, theological commitments, and policy priorities. The post-2022 government rested on the alignment of these currents. Military service became its fault line after the Supreme Court ruled in June 2024 that yeshiva students' blanket draft exemption had no legal basis. In July 2026, as the Knesset dissolved for the October 27 election, the coalition passed a law shielding Haredi draft evaders from arrest until January 2027; the Supreme Court froze it pending a hearing. Haredi parties hailed it; opponents, including the army chief, rejected it.
What makes the Israeli case important is that it shows the political-religious shift advancing in a country founded with strong secular components. Israel also has substantial religious diversity within Judaism itself, and a security environment where religious framings have direct policy implications. The October 27 election will show whether the shift continues.
Buddhist nationalism in Myanmar and Sri Lanka
The Western image of Buddhism as a peaceful, apolitical tradition does not describe the political-Buddhist movements that have shaped Myanmar and Sri Lanka over recent decades. Both countries have seen sustained political mobilization around defending Buddhist identity, often with ethnic-majoritarian framing.
Myanmar. The "969 Movement" and the Ma Ba Tha (Association for the Protection of Race and Religion) advanced a political-Buddhist project in the 2010s, with figures like Ashin Wirathu providing ideological leadership. The movement has been associated with the hostility toward the Rohingya Muslim minority that preceded the military's 2017 operations, which drove more than 700,000 Rohingya into Bangladesh. UN investigators said the army's commanders, including Min Aung Hlaing, president since April 2026, should be investigated for genocide, a charge Myanmar contests at the International Court of Justice. Since the 2021 coup, analysts say, the military has used Buddhist nationalism instrumentally; many monks have opposed it, while others have aligned with it.
Sri Lanka. Sinhalese-Buddhist nationalism has been a dominant force in Sri Lankan politics since independence, contributing to the long civil war (1983-2009) and to ongoing tensions with Tamil Hindu and Muslim minorities. The Bodu Bala Sena (Buddhist Power Force) has been accused of stirring up violence against Muslims and Christians, which its general secretary, the monk Galagoda Aththe Gnanasara, denies. He was convicted in 2024 of inciting hatred against Muslims. The Rajapaksa political family's leadership across multiple administrations worked with these movements at times. In 2024 voters gave President Anura Kumara Dissanayake's National People's Power 159 of 225 parliamentary seats, including in Tamil-majority Jaffna.
What these cases show is that political-religious nationalism is not specific to particular religions. The structural pattern - majoritarian identity, perceived threat from minorities, mobilization of religious authority for political purposes - reproduces across very different theological frameworks.
The paths from here
Continued advance of political-religious fusions
The general trajectory of religious nationalism continues across multiple major countries. Specific cases progress at different speeds; the structural pattern is durable. The post-Cold War assumption that secularization would advance globally proves to have been Western-centric.
Generational shift moderates several cases
Younger adults are less religious than older ones in 46 of the 106 countries Pew surveyed, including Iran and the United States, though Pew found no such gap among Hindus in India or Jews in Israel. As these generations become voters, several specific political-religious projects encounter electoral resistance. The trajectory is uneven and slower than 1990s assumptions, but the demographic component is real.
Specific cases produce dramatic transitions
Iran's theocracy faces sustained challenge that produces eventual transition (peaceful or otherwise); so far it has survived mass protests and the killing of its Supreme Leader. Israel's October 27 election shifts the religious-political balance significantly in either direction. The US Christian right consolidates further or fragments. Predictions about specific cases have been wrong often enough that confident forecasting is unwarranted.
Major religious institutions shift positions
The Catholic Church's direction under Pope Leo XIV - elected in 2025 after the death of Francis, whose papacy had already broken with earlier ones on several political-religious questions - will shape multiple such questions over the coming decade. Major Sunni institutions (Al-Azhar, others) navigate between political pressures and theological commitments. The Orthodox Christian world's post-2022 fracture continues to play out.
Religious revival in unexpected places
China's officially atheist ruling party counts about 200 million religious believers in the country (its 2018 figure) and requires religious groups to "practice core socialist values". Russia's official Orthodox revival coexists with substantial popular religious indifference. Cultural-religious revival in some Western countries (post-secular interest in tradition) produces unexpected political effects. The picture is not a simple "secularization versus revival" choice; both are happening, often in the same country.
Where serious analysts disagree
Religious nationalism is the rising structural force of our time
Multiple major countries are simultaneously experiencing political-religious mobilization that reshapes domestic politics, foreign policy, and the international order. The post-1945 framework that treated religion as private and the state as secular is giving way to something different. Coverage that under-weights this misses the central political-cultural pattern of the moment.
Held by: Mark Juergensmeyer (University of California, Santa Barbara; "Terror in the Mind of God"). Supporters cite the cases on this page; skeptics reply that nationalism, not faith, drives them (card 2).
"Religious nationalism" is mostly nationalism using religious vocabulary
The actual driver of these movements is identity, status, and political mobilization; religion provides the symbolic vocabulary but is not the substantive content. Treating them as fundamentally religious obscures the underlying political-economic dynamics. Hindu nationalism is more about caste and class than about Hindu theology; Christian nationalism is more about white American identity than about specific theology; and so on.
Held by: Olivier Roy (European University Institute) and parts of the political-sociology literature. The case has support on the mobilization side; critics point to the sincere theological commitments many participants hold.
Secularization theory was wrong; religious resilience was the underweighted variable
The mid-twentieth-century assumption that modernization would produce secularization was a Western-projection error. The actual pattern globally has been religious resilience and adaptation, with secularization specific to certain Western European contexts and parts of East Asia. The political-religious fusions are not anomalies; they are the expected pattern for societies undergoing modernization while retaining religious commitments.
Held by: Peter Berger (whose "desecularization" work in the 1990s reversed his earlier position), José Casanova (Georgetown), Jocelyne Cesari, and a strand of comparative-religion scholarship. Critics answer that secularization continues: the share with no religion rose from 23.3% to 24.2% in 2010-20, and younger adults are less religious than older ones in 46 of 106 countries (Pew). Supporters reply that the number of religious people keeps growing, mostly through births.
Anti-religious-nationalism positions are themselves often a form of identity politics
Western liberal critique of religious nationalism is sometimes itself a form of secular-liberal identity assertion that does not engage the religious traditions on their own terms. Productive dialogue requires distinguishing between specific political projects (which can be criticized) and the religious traditions (which require more careful engagement than dismissal). The line is not always honored by Western analysts.
Held by: parts of the comparative-political-theology field, the post-secular philosophical tradition, and several religious-studies scholars. Supporters point to reflexive Western critique; opponents answer that the charge can be used to wave away documented abuses.
The most consequential case is the one being least carefully covered
Different analysts pick different "most consequential" cases. Some argue Hindu nationalism in India will reshape more lives. Some argue Russian-Orthodox alignment will reshape Eastern Europe more than is acknowledged. Some argue Chinese state management of religion (suppression in some regions, controlled coexistence in others) is the most underweighted case. All of these are large, and the relative ranking is contested.
Held by: various analysts in their respective specializations. The disagreement reflects real difficulty in comparative weighting rather than fundamental disagreement about what is happening.
What the available evidence supports: political-religious fusions are a major feature of the present global landscape, and neither "religion in retreat" nor "religion as the master variable" captures them well. Forecasts that treated them as a passing phase have often been wrong, even as surveys show religion declining in many countries. And the political-religious dimension of major conflicts (Russia-Ukraine, Israel-Gaza, India-Pakistan, the wider Middle East, US politics) is often under-weighted in coverage that defaults to secular-political framings.
What this means for you
If you read foreign policy coverage
The religious dimension of major conflicts is often an under-covered layer. Sources like the Pew Research Center, the Berkley Center for Religion, Peace and World Affairs at Georgetown, the Religion News Service, and country-specific religion-and-politics scholarship provide depth that mainstream foreign-policy coverage usually does not.
If you live in a country with active political-religious mobilization
For many people in many of the cases described, the political-religious project is largely benign or actively positive. For others, especially religious or ethnic minorities and people whose identity does not align with the majoritarian project, the experience can be increasingly marginalizing or directly threatening. Understanding which experience you are likely to have, and what protections exist, is part of practical citizenship.
If you are religious yourself
The relationship between your particular tradition and political projects that claim its authority is one of the most important questions of practical religious life in this moment. Most major traditions have substantial intellectual resources for distinguishing between the tradition's actual commitments and political-religious projects that claim its name. Engaging those resources directly is more useful than either uncritical alignment or reflexive opposition.
If you are not religious yourself
The assumption that religion is fading everywhere does not fit the global data: about three in four people still identify with a religion. Engaging seriously with religious traditions and political-religious projects, on their own terms, is part of being able to think clearly about most of the world. Treating them as residual or irrational tends to produce analytical errors.
If you vote on policies that touch religious communities
Religious-freedom protections matter; so do limits on religious-political projects that constrain other people's freedoms. The line between them is contested in good faith across multiple traditions. Political rhetoric that flattens this complexity in either direction is usually substituting partisan signal for substantive engagement.
