Editors’ introduction

Abstract

The contributions to this issue of Religion, State & Society take us to a range of different contexts: Latin America, Russia, Bangladesh, and Pakistan. They explore seemingly disparate themes of the relationship between religion and state legislatures, political parties, movements, and cultural trends. However, for all their variety, these contributions ultimately address the perennial question of boundary-making – something that the social anthropologist Douglas ([1966] 2002) saw as a crucial element of human experience – which is key to understanding the social and political structures we create. Jakob Schwörer and Belén Fernández-García open this journal issue with the first largescale and systematic study of how Latin American political parties use religious content in their social media outreach. Schwörer and Fernández-García find that mentions of God, Christianity, and the church on Facebook are important for parties wishing to articulate a positive moral presence in society. Parties most typically do this to assert conservative moral boundaries that appeal to evangelical voters, though in a few cases religious language is used for signalling progressive views. Importantly, the authors uncover regional differences. The use of religiously inflected language and symbols is most prevalent among parties in Central America and Brazil where evangelicals are highly active and in Paraguay which has an ultraconservative political culture. Parties are less likely to reference religion on social media in other countries that are more secularised or where evangelicals are less important as a voting bloc. Pål Kolstø continues the theme of conservative moral boundaries in his article on advocacy of a total ban on women’s abortion rights by representatives and activists of the Russian Orthodox Church (Moscow Patriarchate). He argues that this advocacy potentially puts the Church leadership on a collision course with the Putin regime, because the latter is aware that the majority of Russians do not support such a ban. While in the current situation of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine any disharmony between the Moscow Patriarchate and Putin’s regime seems unlikely, the article raises interesting longerrange questions about the boundaries between ecclesiastical and secular authorities, which may be drawn differently and expediently, depending on the issue at hand. Focusing on Bangladesh, Jinat Hossain and Ishtiaq Jamil investigate gender-related political struggles over legislation on inheritance rights. Multiple actors involved in these political debates conceive of different boundary lines for defining gender relations. In particular, human rights organisations and international frameworks push towards gender-equal revisions of the law, whilst various domestic groups who advocate for Islamic or Hindu political visions urge retaining gender differences. Ironically, even though the two main prime ministerial rivals in Bangladesh for the past few decades are female, both have been hamstrung in any possible support of gender-equal policies because of their reliance upon political Islam to court voters. RELIGION, STATE & SOCIETY 2023, VOL. 51, NO. 2, 129–130 https://doi.org/10.1080/09637494.2023.2207898