How religious emotion fuels populist appeal on social media

Populist politics has long been understood as a politics of grievance. A substantial body of research has established that negative emotions, such as anger, resentment, and fear, are central to the production of populist discourse, which typically divides society into a virtuous people and a corrupt elite. But must populist discourse always be exclusivist in tone? A new study published in Humanities and Social Sciences Communications challenges the assumption that hostility is the only affective fuel of populism, showing how positive religious emotions can serve as a powerful and quieter pathway to the same political ends.

The research, conducted by Youle Peng of the Department of Theology and Religion at the University of Birmingham, examines the online discourse of Yogi Adityanath, the populist leader of Uttar Pradesh, India’s most populous state. Drawing on a manually coded dataset of 3,967 posts published by Adityanath on the social media platform X, the study identifies the emotional orientations and recurring themes of his online communication. It then asks a deceptively simple question: do posts expressing religious affect generate higher levels of audience engagement than posts representing other positive emotional categories?

To answer this question, Peng employed a mixed-methods design that combined quantitative and qualitative techniques. Independent-samples t-tests and one-way analysis of variance (ANOVA) were used to compare engagement metrics, specifically retweets and likes, across different emotional categories in the dataset. These statistical tests determine whether observed differences in average engagement between groups of posts are unlikely to have arisen by chance. The quantitative findings were then followed by qualitative discourse analysis to explain the underlying logic connecting religious sentiment to audience response.

The results are striking. The study finds that Adityanath predominantly employs positive rhetoric rather than overtly negative attacks, and that posts expressing religious affect receive significantly more retweets and likes than posts expressing other positive emotions. In other words, among all the feel-good content a populist leader might share, it is the sacred content that resonates most strongly with audiences. Religious festival greetings and expressions of deity worship, the analysis shows, generate what the author describes as collective ecstasy and sacred sentiment, moments of shared emotional intensity that bind followers to the leader and to one another.

Beyond festival greetings and worship, the study identifies broader narrative structures at work. Narratives of sacred place and Hindu civilization, Peng finds, cultivate place attachment and cultural pride among followers. These are not merely decorative themes; they function as affective resources, emotional raw material that populist communication can draw upon. By framing territory and history in sacred terms, the discourse transforms geography and heritage into objects of collective love, giving supporters an emotional stake in the political project that extends far beyond any single policy debate.

A case study of the consecration of the Ram Temple in Ayodhya illustrates these dynamics in vivid detail. The analysis demonstrates that religious affect surrounding this event fostered emotional identification with what the study calls an imaged Hindu community, a collective imagined through shared devotion rather than formal citizenship alone. At the same time, this emotional identification rendered the historical experiences and emotional claims of minorities largely invisible. The sacred celebration, in effect, produced a silent cacophony: a loud chorus of joy within the community of believers, and a quiet erasure of those outside it.

This is the study’s central theoretical contribution. Rather than replacing populism’s antagonistic logic, religious affect provides an alternative positive affective pathway through which populist identity boundaries are constructed and exclusion is legitimized without explicit expressions of hostility. The exclusion is no less real for being unstated. When the people are defined through sacred belonging, those who do not share that belonging are quietly positioned outside the moral community, not through angry denunciation but through the simple absence of recognition.

The methodological rigor of the study deserves attention in an era when social media research often relies on automated sentiment analysis. The dataset of 3,967 posts was manually coded, meaning that human judgment, guided by a coding scheme, assigned each post to emotional and thematic categories. This approach captures nuance that algorithms frequently miss, such as the difference between a festival greeting and a policy announcement that happen to share positive vocabulary. The subsequent statistical comparisons, using t-tests and ANOVA, then provided a defensible quantitative basis for the claim that religious affect outperforms other positive emotions in driving engagement.

The findings carry implications well beyond Uttar Pradesh. Populist movements across the world increasingly blend religious symbolism with digital communication, from nationalist rhetoric in South Asia to civil religious language in Western democracies. The study suggests that researchers and observers should attend not only to the angry edges of populist discourse but also to its warm center, the celebrations, blessings, and civilizational pride that can make exclusion feel like belonging. Positive emotion, the research indicates, is not a moderating force by default; it can be a legitimizing one.

For social media platforms and democratic institutions, the study raises difficult questions about how sacred sentiment circulates online. Engagement algorithms reward content that generates collective emotional intensity, and the research shows that religious affect is especially effective at producing it. Understanding this mechanism, Peng argues, is essential for grasping how populist identity boundaries are constructed in the digital age, and how exclusion can be legitimized without a single explicit expression of hostility, through the quiet, resonant power of the sacred.

Subject of Research: Analysis of religious affect and positive emotion in populist social media discourse

Article Title: ‘Sacred resonance, silent cacophony’: the embedded religious affect in Yogi’s populist discourse on X

Article References: Peng, Y. (2026). ‘Sacred resonance, silent cacophony’: the embedded religious affect in Yogi’s populist discourse on X. Humanities and Social Sciences Communications. https://doi.org/10.1057/s41599-026-09436-6

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1057/s41599-026-09436-6

Keywords: populism, religious affect, social media, X platform, Hindu nationalism, political communication, emotion research, India, Sacred, resonance, silent, cacophony