The Role of Religion in Public Projections: How Religious Actors Make Sense of the Political Future

Scholarly interest in the complex interplay between religious beliefs and politics picked up new momentum within current debates on the return of religion to the public sphere. While studies analyzed the influences of religious beliefs on political participation (Driskell et al. 2008) and discourse (Bächtiger et al. 2015), the dynamics through which religious beliefs become politically effective have remained largely uncharted. In this paper, we unpack these dynamics by investigating in what ways and under which circumstances religious beliefs shape political projections, defined as scenarios about the outcomes and implications of political events such as elections or crises (Tenenboim-Weinblatt 2019). By decomposing political projections into five different subdimensions (predictions, evaluations, anchors, probabilities, and responses), we aim to study how religion shapes the contents and modes of political speculations. Arguing that religious beliefs are structurally grounded in faith-based certainty (Kantner & Overbeck 2015), we expect them to strengthen the predictive confidence of projections, and to enhance religious actors’ resilience against objections, dissenting facts, or political criticism. We investigate these assumptions within the case of the three rounds of the 2019-2020 Israeli elections. Covered by a range of religious news outlets, the elections were accompanied by high uncertainty and constant party changes. However, the ultra-orthodox parties remained stable in both their formation and electoral results, making this case particularly valuable to our study. We conduct a mixed-methods study on election projections from: (1) lay discourse from self-declared religious/ultra-orthodox individuals within twenty-five focus group meetings, and a seven-wave panel survey; and (2) journalistic discourse from Tweets of 30 religious/ultra-orthodox political commentators, supplemented by 5 expert interviews. The preliminary results show that religious individuals project with higher levels of optimism, certainty, and stability over time in comparison to secular individuals. Moreover, religious political commentators show a propensity to link eschatological beliefs with political scenarios (e.g. in the “long way of the Jewish people” narrative). In contrast to fact- and trend-driven forecasting, religion, with its groundless confidence, wider time horizons, and focus on immutable givens enables a distinctive projecting style that bolsters confidence in the articulated projection.