Heaven Holds a Place for Those Who Pray: Instrumentalizing Religion and Disinformation the 2022 Brazilian and 2023 Turkish Presidential Campaigns

Abstract

This comparative study examines the interplay of religious messaging and disinformation in the election campaign material of Jair Bolsonaro and Recep Tayyip Erdogan for the 2022 Brazilian and 2023 Turkish presidential elections. We employ a mixed-methods approach, combining computational keyword filtering and content analysis with qualitative discourse analysis and applied to a corpus of 10,519 posts across seven social media platforms. The analysis informs two key findings. First, in both Bolsonaro and Erdogan’s presidential campaigns, religious rhetoric and symbolism is used to bolster personal authority and in-group support to consolidate the idea of (presiding over) a majority bloc. Second, while disinformation interfaces with religious messaging in both presidential campaigns, we find that religion is overwhelmingly instrumentalized as a vector for political disinformation—thus, we did not identify any significant presence of “religious disinformation,” classically understood. Ultimately, our article creates space for further comparative and region-specific scholarship to explore how religion, politics, and disinformation intersect with authoritarian populism in modern elections and beyond, while also contributing to the conceptual refinement of “religious disinformation.”