In the last few years, I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about how digital platforms shape political conflict — especially around issues like gender, sexuality, and reproductive rights. But one question kept nagging me: What exactly are religious users doing in these online political spaces?
We often assume they’re important actors, especially in moral-conservative battles, but there is very little work on their online presence, behavior, or political alignment at scale. There are several papers on the content they publish on social media, but little structural work on their prevalence, the networked fields they move in, and their digital behavior.
So in my latest study — which has now been accepted for publication in the Journal of Religion, Media and Digital Culture (preprint available on SocArXiv)— I set out to do exactly that. I dove into nearly 100,000 tweets about abortion posted during Italy’s 2022 general election, combining computational methods with network analysis and partisanship modeling.
Here’s what I found — and why I think it matters.
A Small Minority Making a Lot of Noise
One of the first surprises: only 1.08% of users in the debate were religious, at least according to how they publicly described themselves. But here’s the twist: They produced more than double the number of tweets we’d expect from a group that size.
They were far more likely than others to belong to influential categories — media professionals, politicians, and social media elites. The loudest voice was Pro Vita & Famiglia, Italy’s most visible anti-gender, pro-life organization.
In other words: yes, religious users are few, but “few” does not equal “irrelevant.” Their visibility — and their organizational structure — can make them influential.
They Talk About Different Things Too
Using topic modeling, I looked at what religious users talked about compared to everyone else. Three themes stood out as uniquely theirs:
- Explicitly religious framing: Biblical references, Catholic doctrine, moral language.
- Support for restrictive abortion policies: Including the controversial bill requiring burial of fetal remains.
- Misinformation: Particularly attempts to link abortion to COVID-19 vaccines — a small but significant cluster.
This last point matters. Even if misinformation makes up only 1–2% of the overall volume, it functions as a strategic amplifier for moral-conservative narratives. Outrage travels far in these networks.
Politically, They Lean Right — But Not Blindly
Most religious users aligned with Italy’s right-wing parties: Fratelli d’Italia (Brothers of Italy), Lega (the League), Italexit. What’s interesting, though, is not just how they lean — but how they engage.
I expected religious users to act as heavy political amplifiers during an election. But the data showed the opposite: religious users retweeted political leaders less often than non-religious users. This pattern holds even after controlling for user category (e.g., media outlets, individuals, political figures, advocacy actors, etc.) and political leaning.
This finding was puzzling. Why would a group that is otherwise highly politically engaged amplify political tweets less?
The likely reason: They are selective, and mostly retweet political content tightly tied to moral-conservative values. Through the retweeting of politically authoritative content on moral issues central to their religious agenda, they secure a form of reverse legitimation.
Parties don’t always give them what they want. Right-wing leaders in Italy don’t consistently foreground abortion or anti-gender themes on social media. When the content doesn’t match their priorities, religious users simply ignore it.
So the relationship between religious users and right-wing parties is not straightforward loyalty. It’s a conditional alliance, based on shared interests rather than blanket support. It is often suggested that politicians exploit religiosity for political gain, but these findings show that the opposite is also true: religious users exploit political actors to advance their own religious agenda.
They Form Their Own Digital Community
The network analysis was one of the clearest results of the above-mentioned pattern: religious users cluster together in a distinct community, positioned right next to the far-right clusters but still separate.
This “religious–moral-conservative hub” behaves almost like a standalone ideological ecosystem, connected to but not absorbed into party politics. This is important: moral-conservative movements online are not simply arms of parties. They’re organized digital actors with their own agenda.
Why This Research Matters
As the anti-gender, moral-conservative backlash strengthens across Europe and beyond, understanding these digital religious communities becomes all the more urgent. What this study shows is that:
Religious users are not an afterthought — they’re active political players. Even a tiny minority can have substantial influence when coordinated, loud, and well-placed
Religion’s role in digital politics isn’t only discursive — it’s structural. These users behave differently, cluster differently, and amplify differently.
We need better tools to study them. Most research on religion online looks at content, not at the digital behavior of identifiable religious users. This paper helps bridge that gap by offering a scalable, computational method for studying them as political actors.