Religeopolitics and the Affective Spatialities of Faith: Rethinking Religion in Geopolitical Analysis

ABSTRACT This article introduces religeopolitics as a conceptual framework for analyzing how religious actors participate in the production of geopolitical space through affective, embodied, and relational practices. It positions religion as a constitutive element of geopolitical analysis rather than an exceptional or marginal category within it. While recent developments in political and cultural geography have embraced feminist, moral, and affective‐oriented approaches, religion often remains unevenly integrated—typically reduced to ideology, identity, or extremism despite substantial existing scholarship. This article reframes religeopolitics through a synthesis of feminist and affective geographies with work on the spatialities of religion, moral geographies, congregational territoriality, and affective spatiality. Rather than presenting new empirical data, the article draws on illustrative cases from evangelical transnational networks alongside comparative examples from Islamic geographies to highlight how evangelical Christian communities (and, in other contexts, other faith communities) generate territorial imaginaries, cultivate moral attachments, and enact everyday geopolitical practices. It also foregrounds the ambivalence of religious spatial agency—its capacities for care and solidarity alongside exclusions, racialized and gendered hierarchies, and colonial reproduction. The concept of religeopolitics offers geographers a tool for engaging religion not as an anomaly within spatial analysis, but as a routine force in world‐making. The article concludes with a research agenda that positions religeopolitics within broader debates about non‐state agency, postsecular urbanism, and affective geopolitics.