A week or so ago, the Pew Research Center published a survey on “religious nationalism.” It is an unwieldy term, as the researchers admitted, but Pew did its best to simplify it. In the Philippines, for instance, a religious nationalist would be a Christian who says (and I’ve adapted this from the definition for Americans) that

Being a Christian is very important to being truly Filipino;
And it is very important that the Philippine president shares their religious beliefs;
And the Bible should have at least some influence over Philippine laws;
And when the Bible conflicts with the will of the people, the Bible should have more influence. 

The same would apply to a Malaysian or Indonesian, although obviously with “Muslim” replacing “Christian” and the Koran replacing the Bible. With that in mind, the survey found that 21 percent of Filipinos are “religious nationalists,” the second-highest percentage for the Christian-majority countries surveyed. Some 46 percent of Indonesians would qualify as such, as would 38 percent of Malaysians. Just 9 percent of Thais and less than 1 percent of Singaporeans would be. I opened the report expecting these figures to be much higher, although the headline numbers aren’t that illustrative (partly because of the conditions put on the term), and the reader ought to focus more on the more targeted questions found later on.

Perhaps most interesting are the (apparent) contradictions the survey threw up. Take the query about the importance of having a political leader whose religious beliefs are the same as your own. Indonesia and Malaysia were in the top three out of 35 countries for thinking this important. Indonesia ranked first among Muslim-majority countries, in fact. However, only 73 percent of Indonesian Muslim respondents thought this. That 27 percent of Indonesian Muslims can seemingly countenance a non-Muslim president seems like something to be welcomed.

One does have to parse this with other questions that suggest secularism is waning, though. For example, whereas a 2022 poll also by Pew found that 86 percent of Malaysian Muslims and 64 percent of Indonesian Muslims favor making Sharia the official law, the more recent survey found that 93 percent of Malaysians and 89 percent of Indonesians wanted this. Which brings up another apparent contradiction. According to the survey, 89 percent of Indonesian Muslims want Sharia to be the official law, yet only 73 percent think that a president has to be Muslim. So, 16 percent of the Muslims in Indonesia (around 36 million people, if the results are representative) want Sharia as the national law but would be happy with a non-Muslim president overseeing the religious law?

Here’s another contradiction. Take the question of whether a holy book “should have at least some influence over national laws.” Some 81 percent of Filipinos agreed with this (51 percent said the Bible should have a “great deal of influence”), and more than four-fifths of Malaysians and Indonesians agreed. The researchers posed a follow-up question, “If the religious text and the will of the people conflict with each other, which should have more influence on the laws of their country?” It’s important to note that this question was only asked of those who had already said they thought their holy book should influence the law. In Indonesia and Malaysia, the majority chose the Koran over the will of the people. However, 45 percent of the more-religious Filipinos said the will of the people should take precedence, against 37 percent who said the Bible.

The difficulty in working out whether these findings have any real meaning is that it depends on knowing how much someone actually understands what their holy book says. Consider the issue of abortion in the Philippines, over which the Bible and the will of the people do conflict – but in the opposite way than most people think. Abortion is mentioned twice in the Bible. One of those (Exodus 21:22-23:13) says that if two men are fighting and one accidentally injures a pregnant woman who miscarries, the punishment is a fine. But if the woman dies in the melee, the punishment is death. So, the Bible doesn’t say an unborn child is already a living being. The other, Numbers 5:11-31, actually recommends priests should attempt to cause a woman to miscarry (so perform an abortion) as a test for adultery. Nevertheless, the Bible is invariably invoked by Christians as to why the Philippines should maintain one of the most restrictive abortion laws in the world.

But recall that a larger share of very religious Filipinos said the will of the people should take precedence over the Bible if both are conflicting. In my example of abortion, who is actually taking which side? Well, the will of the people (which seemingly doesn’t want to change anti-abortion laws) is taking precedence over the Bible (which doesn’t forbid abortion) over national policy, yet most Christians who support anti-abortion laws would probably claim they’re defending the faith against secularists. Pro-choice activists in the Philippines would do well to point out to Christians this contradiction. I don’t think I’m being overly facetious by saying that Pew should have framed the question, “If your interpretation of the religious text and the will of the people conflict with each other, which should have more influence on the laws of their country?”

If they were to do a follow-up survey, Pew would also do well to interrogate some of the contradictory results their report threw up. I’d like to see the percentages on a question like “Do you think your understanding of your religious text conforms to what the text says?” or “Could a political leader who is not of your religious belief be expected to stand up for people of your belief?” Moreover, I’d like to see something about the conflict between the will of the people and religious texts over issues which holy texts have nothing to say. (The survey framed the question only when there was a dispute between the two.) For instance, neither the Koran nor the Bible contain commandments about AI technology, social media, or trade tariffs. Do the pious have a problem with secular laws per se or only when those secular laws conflict with religious edicts?