The geopolitics of religious soft power

Solly Rakgomo | Monday April 20, 2026 06:00

His academic profile, as an adviser at the US State Department and at USAID on religion and foreign policy, gives him a strong grasp of both scholarly debates and policy practice

Mandaville and Jon Hoffman lays the conceptual foundation in his first chapter, begin with a simple observation: for a long time, mainstream International Relations treated religion as something private or irrational, even though political leaders kept using religious language and working with religious actors. Against this background, they introduce “religious soft power” as a way to describe how states use religious institutions, symbols, and networks to attract and persuade rather than to coerce. Peter S. Henne and Gregorio Bettiza opens the empirical part with the United States and does so in a historical way. Their inquiry anchored with the Cold War scenario, when American leaders framed the struggle with the Soviet Union as a battle between belief in God and “godless Communism.” From there, they trace how religion has been used in US soft power across different moments: providential narratives about America’s mission, religious freedom campaigns, faith-based development aid, outreach to Muslim publics after 9/11, and so on.

The central question of their argument is whether religion can be consciously turned into an instrument of foreign policy in a country that also values pluralism and church–state separation. A distinguished Professor of Law Robert Blitt changes the narration from Russia and to what he calls “Putin-phonia.” The story is about how the Kremlin and the Russian Orthodox Church have developed a close partnership in which religion helps dress a largely secular foreign policy in sacred robes. Orthodoxy becomes a tool for projecting Russia as the defender of “traditional values” against Western liberalism, for legitimising interventions in the near abroad, and for building ties with other conservative or Christian-majority societies. He also stated that Russian state is not pious so much as strategic, instrumentalising Orthodox language to legitimise its secular geopolitical aims, while the Church, empowered by this partnership, acquires new visibility and leverage that at times enable it to diverge from, complicate, or even contest the Kremlin’s preferred script. Yoshiko Ashiwa and David L. Wank, take us further east to China and to the role of Buddhism in Chinese and East Asian countries Foreign policy as a Soft Diplomacy.

Chinese state treats Buddhism in two ways at once. Internally, temples, pilgrimage routes, and Buddhist organisations are tightly regulated and folded into the Party’s broader control mechanisms, including the united front. Externally, the same Buddhist heritage is promoted through international conferences, cultural diplomacy, and heritage projects as proof of China’s long, peaceful and “harmonious” civilisation. Ahmet Erdi Öztürk’s chapter takes us to Turkey and shows the tensions of using religion as soft power in an illiberal democracy. Under the AKP, the Diyanet has grown much larger, mosques and religious centres built or funded outside Turkey, and how Ankara has tried to present itself as a leader of a wider Muslim world. In the beginning, this can look like a success story: Turkey seems to combine economic strength, Islamic identity, and active diplomacy. However, as Turkish politics has become more polarised and authoritarian, this image is much harder to maintain. Öztürk calls this “ambivalent” religious soft power because it works in two directions at once: it builds influence, but it also produces suspicion and criticism in many of the places Turkey wants to reach. Indian Scholar Sumit Ganguly, examines India Foreign policy under the Modi government and reads it alongside Turkey as another example of majoritarian religious politics. Ganguly depicts how Hindu symbols and narratives such as yoga, temples, and the civilisational language of an ancient tolerant India are used in public diplomacy and diaspora outreach.

At the same time, he underlines the tension between this soft image and domestic developments that have made many minorities, especially Muslims, feel more insecure Edward Wastnidge described Shi‘i diplomacy and the so-called “axis of resistance”, with a focus on Iran and its regional allies. Rather than speaking about Islam in general, he pays attention to a specifically Shi‘i repertoire: martyrdom narratives, shrines and pilgrimage routes, religious seminaries, and clerical authority. These elements support alliances and networks that stretch across Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, and beyond. In this setting, religious soft power is never far from hard power. The same clerical and institutional networks that create sympathy and loyalty also connect to armed groups and resistance movements.

Ann Wainscott shifts the focus to North Africa and to the long reign of King Hassan II in Morocco. Over several decades, the Moroccan monarchy cultivated an image of itself as the guardian of a moderate Maliki–Sufi Islam and as a sharifian dynasty with deep religious legitimacy. This slow, careful work now allows Morocco to position itself as an exporter of religious expertise. Training institutes in the country host imams from West Africa and Europe, and Moroccan officials present their model as a way of managing Islam that is both faithful to tradition and compatible with the modern nation-state James Hoesterey keeps the theme of moderation in view but in a very different social and institutional setting. He presents Indonesia as a noisy democratic arena in which religious organisations, politicians, and bureaucrats all compete to define what “moderate Islam” means in practice.

Indonesian leaders try to market the country as a model Muslim democracy for the world, yet conservative and populist forces constantly complicate that picture. Stacey Gutkowski turns to Jordan and to a small Hashemite monarchy that carefully crafts its own version of moderation through initiatives such as the Amman Message and state-led interfaith projects. Claudia Baumgart-Ochse broadens the comparative canvas by examining Israel’s religious soft power “within and beyond Judaism”, tracing how religious parties, narratives about the land, and ties with Jewish and Christian communities abroad shape the country’s external image. Timothy Byrnes treats the Catholic papacy as a distinctive soft power actor, which has no army yet exercises influence through moral authority, diplomatic presence, and a dense global network of institutions and believers. Guilherme Casarões and Amy Erica Smith move the discussion to Brazil and ask what it means when the slogan “Brazil above everything” is coupled with “God above everyone'.

They unpack how Catholic, evangelical, and nationalist strands have been woven together in recent foreign-policy messaging, and how this affects Brazil’s standing abroad. Gregorio Bettiza and Peter Henne return to the larger argument of the book and draw together these diverse cases. They identify some common patterns: the popularity of “moderate” religious branding, the repeated use of religion against perceived ideological enemies from Communism to jihadism and and the constant ways in which domestic politics complicate soft-power projects.

For them, religious soft power carries real promise: it can open doors, enable dialogue, and mobilise forms of solidarity that secular tools cannot easily reach. The chapters offer a clear picture of how states actually use religion as soft power in practice. And the book moves from a strong conceptual opening to well-chosen case studies US, Russia, China, Turkey, India, Iran, Morocco, the Gulf, Indonesia, Jordan, Israel, the Vatican, and Brazil before ending with a synthetic reflection. Its main strengths are the tight link between theory and grounded examples, and the honesty about failure, tension, and contradiction. The focus remains largely state-centred, with less attention to grassroots religion, but the volume still provides a precise vocabulary and comparative map for studying religion in foreign policy.