September 26, 2018
Rachel Beatty Riedl (Northwestern University)
There is a popular view that religious teachings motivate political participation, but much political science scholarship hesitates to attribute causal influence to religious teachings. The dissonance between these two perspectives presents a puzzle. Do religious teachings influence political engagement? To what extent, and to what end? Examining contemporary Christian sermons in sub-Saharan Africa, we argue that exposure to religious teachings can shape political engagement, even when those teachings are not explicitly political. In the context we examine, religious teachings provide metaphysical instruction about the causal logics of the spiritual and physical worlds and about the possibilities for change. We find that exposure to such teachings can influence both whether people engage in politics and also how they do so: for instance, whether they seek political change through individual transformation or through structural reform. We also argue that links between religious world views and political behavior, rather than necessarily being deep-seated and immovable, can be short-term (even detectable in the lab) and exploited for those short-term effects or reactivated through frequent exposure. The project leverages experimental results, survey data, focus groups, and case studies from across sub-Saharan Africa. The findings challenge us to pay greater attention to the episodic, content-dependent influence of religious teachings on political behavior, and to religious teachings as part of a larger class of metaphysical messages that can shape citizens’ approaches to politics.