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Progressive Religious Activism
Abstract
Significant scholarly attention has been paid to politicized conservative religion, especially the Religious Right and white Christian nationalism. But the common assumption is that religious conservatives face off primarily against secular liberals. This leads many to overlook the active world of progressive religious activism. The field of progressive religious activism, sometimes called the “Religious Left,” attracts a racially and religiously diverse set of participants, including many nonwhite Christians and non‐Christians, some white mainline Protestants and Catholics, and occasionally white evangelical Protestants. These varied groups often join in multifaith coalitions that may also include secular partners. Progressive religious activists have played a major role in US political history, whether through actions taken within liberal congregations, faith‐based community organizations, or social movements. Religion, however, is increasingly associated with conservatism in the US, raising questions about what influence this diverse and loosely organized “Religious Left” will have on American politics in the future.
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Brad R. Fulton and Richard L. Wood’s chapter uses a national dataset of faith-based community organizing (FBCO) coalitions to provide an overview of an organizational field that is central to the progressive religious activist field as a whole. The chapter focuses on the high levels of religious diversity, racial/ethnic diversity, and socioeconomic diversity of the FBCO field, and argues that these groups draw on shared religious commitments to bridge their racial/ethnic and socioeconomic divides. Finally, they argue that in addition to the sheer scale of mobilization enabled by the FBCO infrastructure, this diversity constitutes faith-based organizing’s most significant source of power and most important credential for legitimacy in the public arena.
Why did Americans vote for Donald Trump in the 2016 Presidential election? Social scientists have proposed a variety of explanations, including economic dissatisfaction, sexism, racism, Islamophobia, and xenophobia. The current study establishes that, independent of these influences, voting for Trump was, at least for many Americans, a symbolic defense of the United States' perceived Christian heritage. Data from a national probability sample of Americans surveyed soon after the 2016 election shows that greater adherence to Christian nationalist ideology was a robust predictor of voting for Trump, even after controlling for economic dissatisfaction, sexism, anti-black prejudice, anti-Muslim refugee attitudes, and anti-immigrant sentiment, as well as measures of religion, sociodemographics, and political identity more generally. These findings indicate that Christian nationalist ideology-although correlated with a variety of class-based, sexist, racist, and ethnocentric views-is not synonymous with, reducible to, or strictly epiphenomenal of such views. Rather, Christian nationalism operates as a unique and independent ideology that can influence political actions by calling forth a defense of mythological narratives about America's distinctively Christian heritage and future.
This study draws on theories of personalist culture and social performance to explain why organizations in the field of faith-based community organizing are able to effectively engage people in collective action on multiple issues across social difference. Using two qualitative datasets, we document the construction and transformation of personal motivations in interactive social movement settings, and show the importance of this process for mobilizing action in pursuit of a multi-issue social justice agenda. Through cultural practices that construct moral meaning in interactive settings, activists learn to internalize a collective moral imaginary – a cultural schema that affirms the importance of individuals’ personal motivations, links these to those of other people, and situates them within a larger social structure. This expands individuals’ understandings of self and community, and thus frames multi-issue social justice activism organized across social difference as a morally compelling and effective means of pursuing personal interests and motivations.
Why does secularization proceed differently in otherwise similar countries? Secular Conversions demonstrates that the institutional structure of the state is a key factor shaping the course of secularization. Drawing upon detailed historical analysis of religious education policy in the United States and Australia, Damon Mayrl details how administrative structures, legal procedures, and electoral systems have shaped political opportunities and even helped create constituencies for secular policies. In so doing, he also shows how a decentralized, readily accessible American state acts as an engine for religious conflict, encouraging religious differences to spill into law and politics at every turn. This book provides a vivid picture of how political conflicts interacted with the state over the long span of American and Australian history to shape religion's role in public life. Ultimately, it reveals that taken-for-granted political structures have powerfully shaped the fate of religion in modern societies.
During the struggle for the eight-hour workday and a shorter workweek, Chicago emerged as an important battleground for workers in “the entire civilized world” to redeem time from the workplace in order to devote it to education, civic duty, health, family, and leisure. This book explores how the city's eight-hour movement intersected with a Protestant religious culture that supported long hours to keep workers from idleness, intemperance, and secular leisure activities. Analyzing how both workers and clergy rewove working-class religious cultures and ideologies into strategic and rhetorical frames, the book shows how every faith-based appeal contested whose religious meanings would define labor conditions and conflicts. As it notes, the ongoing worker–employer tension transformed both how clergy spoke about the eight-hour movement and what they were willing to do, until intensified worker protest and employer intransigence spurred Protestant clergy to support the eight-hour movement even as political and economic arguments eclipsed religious framing. A revealing study of an era and a cause, this book illustrates the potential—and the limitations—of religious culture and religious leaders as forces in industrial reform.
Sharon Erickson Nepstad’s chapter hones our understanding of how religion can shape activists’ interpretations of repression. Through a comparative analysis of the Plowshares movements in the United States and Sweden, this chapter argues that long prison sentences did not harm the U.S. Plowshares movement in part because activists’ Catholic beliefs and identity led them to view repression in religious terms that deepened their commitment, motivation, and unity. The chapter contrasts the U.S. case to the experience of the secular Swedish Plowshares activists, who interpreted their repression in ways that made them susceptible to internal disputes, waning commitment, and co-optation.
In a concluding chapter, Rhys H. Williams assesses the ways in which attention to the complexities of progressive religion in the United States forces us to reassess longstanding theoretical understandings of religion, social movements, civic life, and political action. Drawing out key themes and questions that emerged from the volume, the conclusion examines the factors that have led to the low visibility of progressive religious social action in the media and academic research, and points to several conceptual and empirical benefits of taking progressive religion into account when studying American political life.
Rebecca Sager’s chapter focuses on a broader ecology of progressive religious organizations and actors working at the national level, and their relationship to Democratic Party politics. Drawing on participant observation of the 2008 and 2010 political campaigns of Democratic candidate Tom Perriello of Virginia for Congress, she demonstrates how Democratic Party activists used this campaign as means of exploring how a progressive candidate could reach out to religious voters. She also shows how the group of activists who led this effort were connected to a variety of new progressive religious movement organizations that had emerged as a loosely coordinated force to offset the power of the religious Right in the public sphere.
Paul Lichterman and Rhys H. Williams’s chapter focuses on theologically liberal Mainline Protestants, who have historically been at the forefront of many progressive religious actions. First, the chapter outlines some of the distinctive cultural challenges Mainliners face when they try to bring a specifically religious voice to progressive political advocacy. It then shows how Mainline Protestant identity and communication style, as well as the larger reputation of vocal conservative Christianity in public, all create cultural gaps that politically progressive Protestants must confront and engage.
Mia Diaz-Edelman’s chapter sheds light on the challenges associated with cultivating cultural diversity within the Immigrant Rights Movement. Asking how this movement maintains solidarity across immigrant and non-immigrant activists from faith-based, interfaith, and secular organizations, the chapter demonstrates that the movement has developed a “multicultural activist etiquette,” a unifying mechanism within activist meeting spaces rooted in the common values of equality and the physical and emotional security of all persons.
Gary J. Adler, Jr.’s chapter argues that in discussions about undocumented immigration, progressive religious organizations and actors employ a style of “formal neutrality,” which allows them to represent “all sides” of this contentious debate and protect their “non-partisan” status. Based on participant observation with BorderLinks, a transnational organization that leads weeklong immersion trips across the U.S.-Mexico border as part of its strategy of “raising awareness, inspiring action” against the injustices done to undocumented migrants, immigrant communities, and border cities, the chapter finds that this “neutral” style of talk may not generate the activism that its practitioners hope, since it fails to fully connect the experiences of participants with narratives of injustice or pathways to potential action.
Ruth Braunstein’s chapter examines the Nuns on the Bus campaign, launched by a group of Catholic Sisters in 2012 to raise awareness of the harm that federal budget cuts would cause struggling American families. The chapter focuses on the Nuns’ use of storytelling during this campaign. Through their storytelling performances, the Nuns framed religious communities as morally superior carriers of knowledge about the effects of cuts in government spending; framed vulnerable people and the programs that serve them as morally worthy beneficiaries of government spending; and asserted the moral necessity of taking stories seriously alongside other forms of more abstract and impersonal data that inform the policymaking process. Overall, the chapter argues that this communications strategy helped the Nuns overcome challenges they faced as progressive religious actors seeking to influence public policy debates.
Joshua Z. Gahr and Michael P. Young’s chapter provides a historical analysis of the somewhat counterintuitive, yet central, role that Protestant institutions played in the emergence of the new Left. Through a case study of the Christian Faith-and-Life Community at the University of Texas at Austin from 1955 to 1962, the chapter documents how a group of liberal Presbyterian, Methodist, and Baptist clergy pushed university students to reconceive the Church’s “mission-in-the-world” and their personal witness to this mission in ways that unleashed a moral “breakthrough.”
Philip S. Gorski’s chapter provides historical context for progressive religious groups’ use of civil religious rhetoric. Through an analysis of Barack Obama’s efforts to resurrect the civil religious tradition during his two campaigns and terms as president, this chapter revisits and reconstructs the vision of American civil religion that was originally advanced by Robert Bellah in 1967. The chapter shows that the American civil religion is woven out of two main threads: the prophetic religion of the Hebrew Bible and an Anglo-American version of civic republicanism. It also distinguishes the civil religious tradition from its two main rivals: religious nationalism and radical secularism.
Juan R. Martinez’s chapter argues that religious institutions today offer unique resources that encourage civic participation among non-citizens. Drawing on five years of ethnographic fieldwork, the chapter shows that social movement organizations apply and customize recognizable aspects of religious culture to promote progressive values and action among undocumented immigrants. By using religion to cast undocumented immigrants as deserving citizens, these organizations generate religious meaning that encourages calls for citizenship and civic engagement among marginalized populations.
Kraig Beyerlein and A. Joseph West’s chapter examines what qualities congregations that mobilize for progressive causes share. Generally speaking, progressive political mobilization out of congregations is rare, but Beyerlein and West identify several “causal recipes” that suggest which congregations are most likely to engage in progressive politics. In particular, they focus on combinations of variables including the presence of a liberal ideology and social justice orientation in the congregation, and the presence of educated clergy and laity. In so doing, Beyerlein and West provide broad templates of the kind of congregations that we may see engage in progressive action.
Kristin Geraty’s chapter focuses on a faith-based community organizing coalition that mobilizes congregations for progressive action around issues of fair housing, education, and workforce development, but in which many participants are registered Republicans and consider themselves theological conservatives. The chapter shows how the coalition struggles to construct a call to action that resonates with members, and to negotiate how their religious identity is communicated and interpreted in an affluent, suburban environment where the intersection of religion and politics is almost always conservative.
Drawing on datasets that examine ideas and attitudes of religious activists on both the Left and the Right, Laura R. Olson’s chapter asks whether religious progressives share a collective identity as activists and whether they are committed to specific social movement organizations within their fields of action. She finds that when compared to religious conservatives, progressive religious activists are less committed to specific organizations and are less mobilized behind a coherent public agenda. Finally, Olson discusses the extent to which this difference may affect movement efficacy in political arenas.
Prophets and Patriots takes readers inside two of the most active populist movements of the Obama era and highlights cultural convergences and contradictions at the heart of American political life. In the wake of the Great Recession and amid rising discontent with government responsiveness to ordinary citizens, the book follows participants in two very different groups-a progressive faith-based community organization and a conservative Tea Party group-as they set out to become active and informed citizens, put their faith into action, and hold government accountable. Both groups viewed themselves as the latest in a long line of prophetic voices and patriotic heroes who were carrying forward the promise of the American democratic project. Yet the ways in which each group put this common vision into practice reflected very different understandings of American democracy and citizenship.
Hout and Fischer have made the repeated, controversial claim that the dramatic rise of “religious nones” in the United States is due to the prominence of the politics of the Christian Right. As the argument goes, the movement’s extreme stands on gay rights and abortion make religion inhospitable to those who take more moderate and liberal positions. We take another look at this proposition with novel data drawing on expert reports and interest group counts that capture the prominence of the movement in each American state from 2000 to 2010. We attach these data to decennial religious census data on the unchurched, as well as estimates of the nones from Cooperative Congressional Election Study data. At stake is whether religion is independent of political influence and whether American religion is sowing its own fate by failing to limit taking extreme stands. Rising none rates are more common in Republican states in this period. Moreover, when the Christian Right comes into more public conflict, such as over same-sex marriage bans, the rate of religious nones climbs.
Donald Trump’s calls to “Make America great again” loosely unified a Republican coalition divided over policy, priorities, and style. In contrast, Democrats in 2016 were divided between two stories about America. Progressives today seek a new narrative that can unite their ideologically and socially diverse coalition while also providing a compelling alternative to Trump’s account of national decline. This article argues that one such narrative already exists. It is most closely associated today with a diverse set of progressive religious leaders including Rev. William J. Barber II. This narrative differs from Trump’s in terms of its portrayal of the country’s historical trajectory, American identity and belonging, and citizens’ responsibilities to the American democratic project. Presidential elections are as much about disagreements over the American story as they are about policy differences. Attention to these competing stories offers new insights into the 2016 election and the role that progressive religious leaders are playing in the resistance movement that has emerged in its aftermath.
Hebah Farrag recounts how Black Lives Matter activists have synthesized a range of spiritual practices and healing modalities to support the rise of an inclusive, holistic movement.
Todd Nicholas Fuist’s chapter examines the complicated ways in which participants in progressive religious communities use religious language to talk about politics. The chapter shows that the communities Fuist studies use three models for understanding the connection between faith and politics: the Teacher Model, where religious exemplars are understood as promoting progressive action; the Community Model, where groups promote specific, progressive understandings of what it means to be a community; and the Theological Model, where existing beliefs are creatively applied to contemporary politics. Through the combination of these three models, these communities create pathways to understanding and action by sacralizing progressive ideologies and practices about social justice.
This chapter introduces readers to the often-overlooked field of progressive religious activism in the United States, and maps its contours. First, it traces the history and continued relevance of progressive religious activism in American political life. Second, it argues that progressive religion should not be conceptualized as a category of social actors, but rather as a field of action defined by participants’ commitment to progressive action, progressive values, progressive identities, and/or progressive theology, as well as through participants’ efforts to distinguish themselves from the activities of religious conservatives and/or secular progressives. Finally, it assesses the varied ways that attention to progressive religion challenges common political binaries (like Right/Left and progress/tradition), and prompts a reconsideration of long accepted theories of religion and social movements as well as the role of faith in democratic politics and civic life.
The Pew and the Picket Line collects works from a new generation of scholars working at the nexus where religious history and working-class history converge. Focusing on Christianity and its unique purchase in America, the contributors use in-depth local histories to illustrate how Americans male and female, rural and urban, and from a range of ethnic backgrounds dwelt in a space between the church and the shop floor. Their vivid essays show Pentecostal miners preaching prosperity while seeking miracles in the depths of the earth, while aboveground black sharecroppers and white Protestants establish credit unions to pursue a joint vision of cooperative capitalism. Innovative and essential, The Pew and the Picket Line reframes venerable debates as it maps the dynamic contours of a landscape sculpted by the powerful forces of Christianity and capitalism. Contributors: Christopher D. Cantwell, Heath W. Carter, Janine Giordano Drake, Ken Fones-Wolf, Erik Gellman, Alison Collis Greene, Brett Hendrickson, Dan McKanan, Matthew Pehl, Kerry L. Pimblott, Jarod Roll, Evelyn Sterne, and Arlene Sanchez Walsh. © 2016 by the Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois. All rights reserved.
In the 2016 presidential election, Americans who shared core religious beliefs and salient religious identities, but who differed in racial identification, sharply diverged in their voting patterns. While media accounts emphasized a generic “evangelical” support for Mr. Trump, it was actually White evangelicals and Catholics who supported him in record numbers; people of color in these traditions did not. Thus, the election provides an opportunity to critically examine both scholarly and popular assumptions about the link between religiosity and political preferences. Such a re-examination must involve a rejection of insider narratives that focus on religious belief as a primary causal mechanism that has a unitary and straightforward effect on political action, policy preferences, and social attitudes. I propose a research agenda that forefronts feminist and critical theoretical insights and argue that the most urgent research question for sociologists of religion is an intersectional one: “How do religion, race, gender, sexuality, social class, and other aspects of social location intersect to constitute people’s understandings of their identities and interests?” Such an approach acknowledges religious belief as an important component of meaning-making, but calls on researchers to investigate how social location influences which aspects of religious belief are understood as relevant and to analyze the culture work that links specific beliefs to political preferences, social attitudes, and behaviors.
Scholarly examinations of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) religious identities have typically focused on “identity reconciliation,” which assumes that being both LGBT and religious is a “contradiction,” and posits a “coherent” identity as a desired end goal. The present research draws on a qualitative study of three LGBT-identified congregations to demonstrate that there are a variety of ways in which LGBT religious people approach the connection between their LGBT identity and their religion. While some participants of the study did feel a need to reconcile these aspects of their self, others report never feeling a strong conflict between their LGBT identity and faith. The differences in these understandings of LGBT identity emerge out of the sociotemporal contexts the interviewees exist in, suggesting that different contexts provide divergent resources for identity performances. Through these findings, I contribute to our understanding of the intersection of religious agency, religious identities, and religion as a quality of social spaces.
This article examines how civil religion reworks state/citizen relations among the formerly incarcerated. Participant observation and interviews were collected at two sites: FORCE (Fighting to Overcome Records and Create Equality), a civic group of formerly incarcerated persons and former gang members, and Community Renewal Society, a larger, interfaith civic group that provided institutional backing for FORCE. Data collection occurred over 18 months, as the two groups utilized faith-based community organizing to advance legislative reform (Illinois House Bill 5723/3061) expanding the sealing of criminal records. Findings suggest that faith-based community organizing, together with formerly incarcerated persons’ use of “redemption scripts,” can facilitate empowering social integration. Whereas research on religion in the postincarceration experience has focused on rehabilitation and reentry programming, our findings suggest that civil religion can facilitate empowering social integration. Civil religion enables collective and political action by de-privatizing personal narratives.
Through measures of orthodoxy, images of God, and instrumental beliefs, scholars of the social scientific study of religion have been able to demonstrate how abstract and specific religious beliefs influence political and social attitudes. Building upon this work, this article uses a unique data set to measure social and prosperity gospel support. Further, it examines the roots and political behavioral consequences of support to these religious ideologies. The results show that religious tradition, congregational messages, and social demographics all influence doctrinal support. However, these relationships are conditional upon race. The results also show that the social gospel promotes an emphasis on the structural sources of social problems and the importance of rehabilitation, which leads to higher levels of self-expressed liberalism and democratic identification. Conversely, the prosperity gospel promotes holding individuals accountable for social problems and punishing deviant behavior, which leads to higher levels of self-expressed conservatism and Republican identification. The data also suggest that race matters, as the relationship between prosperity gospel support and political attitudes is more powerful for blacks than whites.
For many Christian ethicists the language of individualism serves as a philosophical short-hand for an atomistic and anti-social existence which refuses the invitation of a common life with others. Is this negative description deserved? This article undertakes a close reading of the categories of the individual and the person in order to formulate a theologically affirmative account of certain liberal strands of social and political individualism. In an effort to ground this project, dialogue is initiated with the Quaker theological tradition. Through a close engagement with early Quaker accounts of community, selfhood and conversion, the discussion retrieves a social and teleological model of individuality which challenges key suppositions of individualism's contemporary critics. This article concludes by considering ways in which Quaker formations of the individual can assist the Church in the task of faithfully engaging with liberal societies.
In recent years, the "religious right" has often seemed like a raging torrent, moving voters to the polls. Not so the "religious left." Certainly no credible observer would characterize the latter as a "raging torrent" in terms of its impact on voters. But is it at least a gentle stream? And could it grow into a "river glorious"?1 This chapter attempts to answer these questions. When the religious right appeared in the late 1970s, it surprised many observers and, despite fluctuating assessments of its vitality, has become a fixture of national politics.2 As a consequence, scholars know a great deal about the religious right, including its potential constituencies among voters.3 In contrast, the contemporary religious left has received much less scholarly attention. This lacuna is ironic: for much of the twentieth century various kinds of liberals dominated the religious contribution to American public life, playing a significant role in the civil rights, women's, peace, and environmental movements. But at the turn of the twenty-first century, such voices were much less audible in the public square. As a consequence, scholars know little about the potential following of the religious left in the American mass public.4 This chapter investigates the potential constituencies of the religious left in the American electorate. First, we put the religious left in historical context. We then turn to the question of how to define it conceptually and operationally. With these definitions in mind, we examine the relative size of several potential constituencies of the religious left and describe their socialdemographic, religious, and political characteristics. In each case, we compare the constituency to secular liberals and traditionalist conservatives, defined in an analogous fashion. We conclude by assessing the role of these constituencies in the 2004 presidential campaign and their potential impact in the future.
In this absorbing book, George McKenna ranges across the entire panorama of American history to track the development of American patriotism. That patriotism-shaped by Reformation Protestantism and imbued with the American Puritan belief in a providential "errand"-has evolved over 350 years and influenced American political culture in both positive and negative ways, McKenna shows. The germ of the patriotism, an activist theology that stressed collective rather than individual salvation, began in the late 1630s in New England and traveled across the continent, eventually becoming a national phenomenon. Today, American patriotism still reflects its origins in the seventeenth century. By encouraging cohesion in a nation of diverse peoples and inspiring social reform, American patriotism has sometimes been a force for good. But the book also uncovers a darker side of the nation's patriotism-a prejudice against the South in the nineteenth century, for example, and a tendency toward nativism and anti-Catholicism. Ironically, a great reversal has occurred, and today the most fervent believers in the Puritan narrative are the former "outsiders"-Catholics and Southerners. McKenna offers an interesting new perspective on patriotism's role throughout American history, and he concludes with trenchant thoughts on its role in the post-9/11 era.
This book assesses the role of local worship communities - churches, mosques, temples, and others - in promoting civic engagement among recent immigrants to the United States. The product of a three-year study of immigrant worship communities in the Washington, D.C. area, the study looked at churches, mosques, temples, and other communities of immigrants from Korea, China, India, West Africa, the Muslim world, and El Salvador. The researchers surveyed 200 of these communities and studied twenty in depth. Communities vary widely in how much they build social capital, provide social services to immigrants, develop the civic skills of members, and shape immigrants' identities. Local leadership and group characteristics much more than ethnic origin or religious tradition shape the level and kind of civic engagement that the communities foster. Particularly, where leaders are civically engaged, they provide personal and organizational links to the wider American society and promote civic engagement by members. Homeland causes and a strong sense of religious and ethnic identity, far from alienating immigrants from American society, promote higher levels of civic engagement in immigrant communities.