The Cross and the Ballot: How Religion Became Policy in 22 Democracies

There is a photograph, taken in Brasília in January 2023, that tells you most of what you need to know about what has happened to democratic politics in the past decade. It shows hundreds of people kneeling on the marble floor of Brazil's National Congress, hands raised, praying for God to overturn an election. Some are weeping. Some are filming themselves on their phones. Behind them, the plate glass windows are shattered. They had broken in an hour earlier, believing—truly believing—that they were instruments of divine will. The riot was not a deviation from their faith. It was an expression of it.

I keep returning to this image because it is not unique. In New Delhi, lawmakers cite the Ramayana during budget debates. In Ankara, President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan opens cabinet meetings with Quranic recitation and closes them with policy designed to reverse a century of secularism. In Washington, members of Congress attend Bible study groups organized by pastors who believe the United States must be governed according to scriptural law. In Lagos, in Manila, in Warsaw, in Jerusalem, the pattern repeats: religious identity has become the organizing principle of political life.

This is not about belief. It is about power.

The Arrangement

In 2024, scholars at Princeton's Bridge Initiative documented the political ascendance of religious nationalism across 47 countries. What they found was not a theological resurgence but a strategic realignment. Religious movements had learned to operate as political machines: delivering votes, enforcing discipline, providing narratives that simplified complexity into us-versus-them. By early 2026, religious nationalist parties or coalitions held governing power in 22 democracies, up from nine in 2010. The faiths varied—Pentecostal Christianity in Brazil, Hindutva in India, Sunni political Islam in Turkey and Tunisia, Catholic integralism in Poland, evangelical prosperity gospel in Kenya. The method did not.

The playbook is now legible. First, identify a population that feels displaced by economic change, cultural pluralism, or globalization. Second, offer a story in which that displacement is not the result of policy choices but of spiritual corruption—secularism, multiculturalism, the loss of a sacred past. Third, promise restoration: of purity, of hierarchy, of a time when belonging was clear and uncontested. Fourth, encode that promise into law.

In India, the Bharatiya Janata Party has rewritten textbooks to remove Mughal history and recast the independence movement as a Hindu awakening. It has passed citizenship laws that explicitly favor Hindus over Muslims, transforming secular nationalism into religious belonging. In Turkey, Erdoğan's Justice and Development Party has reopened Hagia Sophia as a mosque, purged the military of Kemalist secularists, and rewritten the education curriculum to emphasize Ottoman glory and Islamic virtue. In Poland, the Law and Justice party made abortion nearly impossible, declared "LGBT-free zones," and appointed bishops to state commissions. In each case, the mechanism is the same: theology becomes policy, and dissent becomes heresy.

The Megachurches of São Paulo

I am thinking now of the Universal Church of the Kingdom of God, which operates in 105 countries and owns the third-largest television network in Brazil. Its founder, Edir Macedo, has a net worth estimated at $1.1 billion. His church endorsed Jair Bolsonaro in 2018 and spent the next four years providing the infrastructure for political mobilization: the buildings, the networks, the language of spiritual warfare. When Bolsonaro lost in 2022, it was pastors who organized the protests, who told congregants that the election had been stolen not by fraud but by Satan.

This is the model that has traveled. In Nigeria, Pentecostal megachurches like Redeemed Christian Church of God and Winners' Chapel operate as political machines, delivering blocs of votes to candidates who promise to enshrine Christian values into law. In the Philippines, the Iglesia ni Cristo—with 3 million members—endorses candidates in exchange for policy concessions and government contracts. In the United States, evangelical churches have become the organizing backbone of the Republican Party in state after state, providing not just votes but volunteers, money, and the conviction that political defeat is spiritual apostasy.

The theology is flexible. Prosperity gospel promises that faith will bring wealth. Dominionism teaches that Christians are commanded to govern. Liberation theology—once the language of the left—has been repurposed by the right as a call to reclaim nations from secular elites. What binds them is not doctrine but the conviction that political power is a theological imperative, that democracy is provisional and divine law is not.

The Precedents We Forgot

None of this is new. In 1979, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini overthrew the Shah of Iran and established a theocratic republic, demonstrating that religious authority could replace secular nationalism as the organizing principle of a modern state. In the 1980s, the Moral Majority in the United States transformed evangelical Christianity from a largely apolitical subculture into a voting bloc that reshaped the Republican Party. In the 1990s, the Bharatiya Janata Party rose to power in India by demolishing the Babri Masjid mosque and promising to restore Hindu pride. In the 2000s, Erdoğan's AKP won election after election by offering pious voters both religious validation and economic growth.

What has changed is the coordination. Religious nationalist movements now learn from one another, borrow tactics, and form transnational alliances. In 2024, leaders from Brazil's evangelical caucus, India's BJP, and Hungary's Fidesz party attended the World Congress of Families in Madrid, a gathering dedicated to opposing abortion, gender ideology, and secular liberalism. They shared strategies for winning referendums, controlling media, and neutralizing courts. They returned home with templates.

Who Benefits

The political scientists Pippa Norris and Ronald Inglehart have argued that religious nationalism thrives in conditions of existential insecurity—economic precarity, cultural displacement, the erosion of traditional hierarchies. The data supports this. In countries where inequality has widened, where manufacturing jobs have disappeared, where immigration has increased, religious nationalist parties have gained. They offer certainty in a time of flux, belonging in a time of fragmentation, and an enemy to blame.

But the primary beneficiaries are not the faithful. They are the leaders who harness faith for power. Narendra Modi has used Hindu nationalism to consolidate control over India's institutions while presiding over rising unemployment and agrarian distress. Erdoğan has used political Islam to purge opponents and enrich loyalists while Turkey's economy has collapsed. Bolsonaro used evangelical support to dismantle environmental protections and enrich agribusiness. Viktor Orbán has used Christian nationalism to capture Hungary's judiciary, media, and universities while funneling state contracts to friends.

What It Means to Lose

In Uttar Pradesh, India's most populous state, Muslim families describe a new geography of fear. Neighborhoods are segregated. Mosques operate under surveillance. Interfaith marriages are prosecuted under "love jihad" laws that presume Muslim men are religiously motivated predators. In March 2025, Amnesty International documented 127 cases of mob violence against Muslims in Uttar Pradesh alone, most involving accusations of cow slaughter or religious conversion. Police made arrests in 11 cases. Convictions: zero.

In Turkey, Alevis—a heterodox Muslim minority comprising perhaps 15 million people—have watched their houses of worship lose state recognition, their children subjected to compulsory Sunni religious education, their leaders excluded from government consultations. When they protest, they are accused of disloyalty. When they stay silent, their erasure accelerates.

In Poland, women seeking abortions after fetal abnormality diagnoses have died because doctors feared prosecution under laws written by bishops. In Nigeria, Christians in the Middle Belt bury children killed in herder-farmer conflicts that politicians have reframed as religious warfare. In the United States, public school teachers in seven states are now required by law to teach that America was founded as a Christian nation, erasing the Enlightenment secularism that actually shaped the Constitution.

The cost is measured in what cannot be said, in who is no longer safe, in the constriction of possibility. Democracy requires the premise that we can disagree about the good life and still share a polity. Religious nationalism rejects this premise. It insists that the nation belongs to the faithful, that law must reflect divine will, that pluralism is betrayal.

The Reckoning

I keep returning to the photograph from Brasília because it captures the sincerity of the thing. Those people on their knees believed they were defending God. They believed democracy had failed because it had produced the wrong result. They believed that faith and power were inseparable, that to govern was to enforce the sacred. They were not cynics. They were believers. That is what makes them dangerous.

The question we face now is whether democracy can survive its redefinition as a vehicle for religious authority. Whether courts can resist when judges are appointed for their theology. Whether media can report freely when journalists are accused of blasphemy. Whether minorities can live safely when law defines them as outsiders. Whether elections can produce change when losers are told that God has chosen otherwise.

We tell ourselves stories in order to live. The story that religious nationalists tell is that democracy failed, that secularism was a mistake, that pluralism was chaos, that the solution is restoration of a sacred order that never actually existed. The story is powerful because it is simple, because it names enemies, because it promises belonging to those who feel dispossessed.

The alternative story—that democracy is slow, uncertain, frustrating, but capable of accommodating difference without demanding conformity—is harder to tell. It does not promise restoration. It does not offer the comfort of certainty. It does not divide the world into faithful and infidel. It only promises the possibility of living together without demanding that anyone surrender their conscience to someone else's god.

That is the choice now visible in 22 countries and counting. Not between faith and secularism, but between democracy as a system of shared fallibility and theocracy as a claim to absolute truth. The faithful are on their knees. The question is whether the rest of us will stand.