‘Sacred resonance, silent cacophony’: the embedded religious affect in Yogi’s populist discourse on X

A long tradition of research on populism and affect has established that negative emotions are central to the production of populist discourse. However, must populist discourse always be exclusivist? This study examines the intertwined relationship between religion, positive emotions, and populist communication. Specifically, it investigates whether religious affect enhances the appeal of populist discourse, and how it functions as an affective resource within populist communication. Based on a manually coded dataset of 3967 posts on X by Uttar Pradesh populist leader Yogi Adityanath, the study first identifies the emotional orientations and themes of his online discourse. It then employs independent-samples t-tests and one-way ANOVA to examine whether posts expressing religious affect generate higher levels of audience engagement than posts representing other positive emotional categories, followed by qualitative analysis to explain the underlying discursive logic. The findings show that Yogi predominantly employs positive rhetoric and that posts expressing religious affect receive significantly more retweets and likes. Religious festival greetings and deities worship generate collective ecstasy and sacred sentiment; and broader narratives of sacred place and Hindu civilization cultivate place attachment and cultural pride. A case study of the consecration of the Ram Temple further demonstrates that religious affect fosters emotional identification with an imaged Hindu community, while rendering the historical experiences and emotional claims of minorities largely invisible. Rather than replacing populism’s antagonistic logic, religious affect provides an alternative positive affective pathway through which populist identity boundaries are constructed and exclusion is legitimized without explicit expressions of hostility.