Journal for the Study of Religions and Ideologies

Inclusive Tolerance as Poles’ Attitudes Towards Religious Minorities

Katarzyna Czornik — 2026-07-22

This paper demonstrates that Poles’ attitudes towards religious minorities are characterised by a high degree of religious tolerance, primarily active tolerance, in which inclusion constitutes an integral component. Both historical experience (the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth as a “state without stakes”), the fact that Polish society has for centuries remained largely homogeneous in terms of religious affiliation (the dominance of the Catholic Church), as well as extensive and effectively enforced legal and institutional guarantees for religious minorities, have contributed to the embedding of inclusive tolerance within the Polish national identity. A short-term challenge, but not a threat, to the prevailing inclusive tolerance in Poland was posed by the destabilisation of Poland’s immediate and broader international environment, including the intensification of jihadism, the migration and refugee crisis, the Belarusian regime’s orchestration of Muslim migration at the Polish–Belarusian border, as well as the growing support for far-right political forces. The Muslim minority was perceived at that time as the greatest threat. The temporary dominance of passive tolerance, occasional xenophobia and Islamophobia constituted part of a political spectacle aimed at increasing the socio-political popularity of far-right forces in Poland.

Spiritual influencers and digital religion

Sandu Frunză — 2026-06-25

Digital religion brings to the fore the figure of the spiritual influencer. This figure is accompanied by other significant actors, such as the religious influencer and Christian influencers, as well as by a wide variety of communities of followers, adherents, or believers. Digital religion is an outcome of the development of communication technologies and digital platforms, which open not only toward religious or spiritual content, but also toward religious practices and spiritual techniques mediated by technology and Artificial Intelligence. The present text focuses on revealing the specificity of the profile of spiritual influencers. Presenting themselves as an alternative to traditional ways of doing religion, spiritual influencers nevertheless stand in continuity with them by offering a holistic perspective on the human being’s search for existential meaning and for the living of a good and authentic life. They operate within a hybrid register that brings together the real and the virtual world, within a construction of digital religious experience in which the individual finds himself or herself as part of a digital identity delivered according to the principles of spiritual marketing. The sphere of action of spiritual influencers, as agents in the construction of existential meaning, is very broad: it concerns a spiritual culture of personal fulfilment, the attainment of well-being, and a good life understood as a happy, that is, authentic, life.

Algorithmic Religiosity: Religious Influencer Conversations on Indonesian Short-Video Platforms

Muhammad Maulana — 2026-06-25

Religious content often appears on social media platforms through recommendation patterns that surface similar material beyond deliberate search. While studies on digital religion have examined mediated authority, AI-assisted practices, and platform interaction, limited attention has been given to how influencer conversations are compressed, replicated, and repeatedly resurfaced across short-video environments. This study examines how religious narratives are constructed within conversations and how recommendation environments shape their visibility. Focusing on Indonesian social media, it observes circulation patterns across YouTube Shorts, Instagram Reels, and TikTok. The analysis maps narrative forms, traces cross-platform appearances, and treats recommended appearances as indications of how platform features guide religious circulation. The findings show that recurring exposure emerges through clipping, reuploading, and replication that attach moral narratives to recognizable figures. To describe this condition, the study develops algorithmic religiosity as repeated platform visibility that stabilizes religious authority, moral recognition, and everyday encounters with religious guidance within feeds.

Modern Piety and Religious Revivalism: Unfolding the Role of Social Media in Transforming Dawah Practices in Pakistan

Kausar Ali — 2026-06-25

This research article focuses on the Tablighi Jamaat and its relationship with emerging technologies and social media. While much has been written about the Islamic movement—its ideology, history, and role in contemporary Muslim societies—the role of social media in the propagation of its revivalist message has largely remained unexplored in academia until now. Based on Participant observation method and the Mediatization theory, this study examines the emerging relationship between new media and revivalist Islam in contemporary Pakistan. The study argues that although the Tablighi movement has not established any official newspaper, television channel, or online website, its younger activists actively use a variety of social media platforms to spread the message of revivalist Islam in wider society. Numerous YouTube channels and Facebook groups regularly share Tablighi-related content in Pakistan. This indicates that despite the conservative nature of the Tablighi activists, the digitalization of modern society has had a significant impact on the missionary movement. Although the Tablighi Movement continues to rely primarily on face-to-face methods of dawah, recent advancements in digital media have given rise to a new phenomenon, which I term the ‘Digitalization of Tabligh’ and the ‘Dawatization of Digital Media.’ University-educated youth belonging to Generation Z have played a significant role in linking digital media with Islamic revivalist movements in Pakistan. This expanding practice of digital da‘wah and tabligh is also evident across numerous Muslim-majority societies.

From the Administered Body to the Signifying Body: Bioethics, Biopolitics, and the Sacred in the Medicalization of Maternity

Antonio Sandu — 2026-07-22

The article proposes a reflection on the relations between bioethics, biopolitics, and the medicalization of social life, starting from the thesis that bioethics lacking biopolitical awareness remains naïve, while a biopolitics lacking ethical reflection becomes cynical. On the basis of Foucault’s definitions of biopolitics (1976, 1997) and Illich’s critique of social and cultural iatrogenesis (1976), the study distinguishes between the anatomo-politics of the body and the biopolitics of the population, and constructs a triple analytical grid — sociological, bioethical, and biopolitical — for contemporary phenomena of medicalization. To this grid is added Aurel Codoban’s model of the body as a surface of communication (2011), read here within the horizon of an ontology of the sacred and of the communicational construction of reality: medicalization does not leave the body “neutral”, but rather shifts its regime of signification, from the sacred toward the statistical and the communicational. The argument is tested through a case study devoted to the medicalization of maternity and to caesarean birth, in which both the bioethical–biopolitical tension and the ideological capture of the maternal body by pseudo-scientific “great replacement” narratives are analysed — narratives whose quasi-religious structure is critically examined. The conclusion contends that a physician trained solely in bioethics, without an understanding of the power relations traversing the medical act, risks becoming a technical executant, while a physician trained solely in biopolitical terms, without bioethical principles, risks confusing public health with social control.

Mapping relationality: Webs of intercession in the Orthodox Marketplace

Stephen Pax Leonard — 2026-06-25

Relationality in an Orthodox context can be mapped using “webs of intercession” which act as social phenomena and aid in analysing complex, transactional prayer delegation. Russian Orthodox fill out prayer-slips called zapiski and pay priests to read out these prayers and intercede on their behalf. Intercession in this context can be perceived as triangular: the living can intercede for the living; the living can intercede for the dead and the dead can intercede for the living. An element of exchange is implicit in these “webs of intercession”: for many devout this sense of exchange is most acute after the death of a loved one where the penitent not only prays for the deceased, but also awaits in return the prayers of the one that has passed. On saints days and on days where the dead are remembered such as Meatfare Saturday (subboty Myasopustnaya), the intercession becomes multi-mediated. Orthodox Christians believe that they inherit sin from their dead parents and grandparents; they pray for the departed ones to be forgiven for these sins and in turn they hope that the departed ones will pray for them to be cleansed of the sins that they handed down. These complex “webs of intercession” create in terms of exchange something akin to a marketplace.

Disseminating Spiritual Broadcast Content in Faith-Based Radio Stations: A Pathway to Religious Identity Adherence Among Listeners

Geoffrey Korir — 2026-07-22

The broadcasting of spiritual content by faith-based radio stations in Kenya has not only strengthened the religious needs of a Christian audience but has also drawn them into the competitive media market. It is within this context of competition that this study sought to establish key factors influencing the framing and dissemination of faith-based radio content. This exploration was essential because faith-based radio stations must first strengthen their appeal to their relatively homogeneous Christian audience before extending to a more heterogeneous one. The review of generic studies in this paper was more theoretical than praxis-oriented by its exclusive focus, albeit rudimentarily, on the media effects theories that provide essential multi-reference terms for analysing key divaricate empirical findings and expending the methodological rigour for such an analytic portion by exploring the mediatization of Christianity through benign historical lenses. The investigation revealed from a functionalist perspective that the stations’ attempts to incorporate secular issues as a diversification strategy were far-fetched and manifestly detrimental to their core mission. It is therefore crucial for these stations to broadcast wholesome spiritual content, as it is a powerful correlate to their mission and vision.