Social scientists routinely characterize religious influence in electoral politics as conservative and left-wing parties as fundamentally secular. Against these claims, I argue that the relationship between religion and electoral politics is shaped by the redistributive beliefs and preferences of religious leaders, who can become valuable allies of left-wing parties. I evaluate this argument in Brazil following the appointment of Pope John Paul II, leveraging as-if random variation in municipalities’ exposure to progressive Catholic bishops. I show that bishops who actively supported state-led redistribution were essential to the electoral success of the left-wing Workers’ Party (Partido dos Trabalhadores [PT]). Voters in municipalities with longer exposure to these bishops supported the PT at higher rates. The findings highlight the under-examined role of religious leaders in shaping the electoral influence of religion and provide evidence that these leaders can, in fact, be key for the development of left-wing parties, especially in the developing world.

Turkish mosques are staffed by state-appointed imams and callers to prayer whose practices are regulated through a complex bureaucratic network operating on an internet-based data-management and communication infrastructure. A centralized mosque loudspeaker network enables the broadcast of calls to prayer and other Islamic recitations across the country. During an attempted takeover, as coup plotters moved to seize major infrastructural arteries and telecommunications, the conservative government responded with an unprecedented deployment of government-run mosques and their centralized loudspeaker system. By broadcasting an Islamic recitation known as the salâ nationwide, this audible infrastructure helped mobilize certain members of the religious majority against the attempted takeover, generating pious affects and cultivating religiously inflected nationalist sentiments through a shared, sensate experience. Embedded within broader technical and administrative assemblages, Turkey's centralized mosque loudspeaker network demonstrates how religion is entwined with infrastructure and state power and illuminates the making of technologically mediated institutional modes of religious governance in the contemporary era. In anthropology, infrastructure is often conceptualized as a “secular” techno-political domain. The political deployment of an Islamic recitation through a centralized loudspeaker network, however, problematizes the presumed secularity of infrastructure and suggests that religious institutions, their technical systems, and even religious recitations can be enlisted as infrastructures for mass mobilization by an incumbent regime.