Communication in Religious Lobbying: Making Meaning,Creating Power

This article examines influence-building tactics used in the political discourses of religious groups born from social movements. It applies Hofrenning's (1995) 3 strategies (symbolic, language, and coalition building) to an organizational publication. The work traces the Christian Coalition stances on issues of separation of church and state between 1992 and 1996 by content analyzing Christian American, the group's official publication. This study concludes that this organization of religious conservatives used varying issue emphases, contexts, and alliances to mobilize followers. It gravitated toward a political rather than religious agenda and moved toward a more secularly delivered message over time. This article also indicates that groups rooted in social movements may be able to take places within the political superstructure relatively quickly and that Hofrenning's list is useful for tracking these transitions.     

THE IMPACT OF RACE ON DENOMINATIONAL VARIATIONS IN SOCIAL ATTITUDES: THE ISSUE AND ITS DIMENSIONS

Although the impact of religious affiliation on social attitudes is a popular research topic in the sociology of religion, few scholars have examined the role that race plays in this relationship. Moreover, studies that do explore the interplay of race and religious affiliation seldom move beyond the general categories of conservative, moderate, and liberal denominational families. Our research uses recent data from the General Social Surveys to compare the social attitudes of African Americans and their white counterparts within established designations of religious affiliation. Along with control variables, we include attitude measures for political tolerance, legalized abortion, gender equality, premarital sex, homosexual lifestyles, and extramarital sexual relations. Our analysis isolates levels of support for these attitudes within categories of race and religious affiliation to determine whether variations emerge and whether they are nested within specific issues, religious denominations, or reflect more general patterns of race differences.     

Conceptualizing and understanding the Gülen movement

The Gülen movement (GM) is a controversial international Islamic movement originating in Turkey. Interestingly, the movement seems to be “in between” the standard conceptual categories used by social movement scholars: The GMs' focus on individual transformation and religious practices suggests that it is a religious movement; its extensive outreach into various institutions (i.e., education, health care, and media) suggests a social movement seeking legitimacy and broad social change; its purported infiltration of key government and military offices suggests a political movement. In this article, I demonstrate the utility of conceptualizing the GM as an everyday‐life‐based movement and of using a multi‐institutional politics model to examine this type of movement. By doing so, it becomes clear that sometimes, movements focusing on individual change may also be seeking to transform social, economic, and political institutions.     

“A Community of Communities”– Catholic Communitarianism and Societal Crises in Ireland, 1890s–1950s1

Abstract This article argues that discourse on community as a socio‐political problem needs to be located within historical, institutional, and socio‐structural contexts if it is to be properly understood. In particular, it suggests that the role of religion in promoting forms of communitarian discourse and practice needs to be given greater attention than it has hitherto received within the social sciences. The article pursues this argument through examination of the religious discourse on community cultivated and promoted by the Catholic Church in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. By providing an analysis of its role in Catholic responses to three major socio‐political crises in Ireland between the 1890s and 1960s, the paper suggests that not only does socio‐religious discourse on community constitute a powerful alternative to secular social‐scientific discourses, but that such discourse is particularly effective in helping to constitute specific groups as communities, given favourable sociological conditions.     

The Ethnos in the Polis: Political Ethnography as a Mode of Inquiry

In the social sciences, there is renewed attention to political ethnography, a research method that is based on close-up and real-time observation of actors involved in political processes, at times even extending the definition of these processes to move beyond categories of state, civil society, and social movements. This article examines the emergence of political ethnography from a number of disciplinary locations, such as political science, the cultural turn in sociology, and anthropology, and shows the value of this new approach for understanding how politics work in everyday life.     

Religious Culture and Political Action

Recent work by political sociologists and social movement theorists extend our understanding of how religious institutions contribute to expanding democracy, but nearly all analyze religious institutions as institutions; few focus directly on what religion qua religion might contribute. This article strives to illuminate the impact of religious culture per se, extending recent work on religion and democratic life by a small group of social movement scholars trained also in the sociology of religion. In examining religion's democratic impact, an explicitly cultural analysis inspired by the new approach to political culture developed by historical sociologists and cultural analysts of democracy is used to show the power of this approach and to provide a fuller theoretical account of how cultural dynamics shape political outcomes. The article examines religious institutions as generators of religious culture, presents a theoretical model of how religious cultural elements are incorporated into social movements and so shape their internal political cultures, and discusses how this in turn shapes their impact in the public realm. This model is then applied to a key site of democratic struggle: four efforts to promote social justice among low-income urban residents of the United States, including the most widespread such effort—faith-based community organizing.     

Religion and progressive politics in the United States

In recent decades, scholars interested in the role of religion in American public life have largely focused on the Christian Right or the role of religion in civic life. Compared to these extensive literatures, relatively little attention has been paid to the role of religion in liberal/progressive politics. Progressive religious voices are more widespread and more racially, socioeconomically, and religiously diverse than is typically recognized. Moreover, while these actors seek influence within the most visible political realms of elections and policymaking, they also focus on shaping the cultural identities, narratives, and discourses that undergird democratic life. This article offers a framework through which to conceptualize the progressive religious field of action and reviews the growing body of research on the individuals and organizations that comprise this field. It begins by examining the prevalence of progressive religious views and activities among the general public; reviews research on three different types of progressive religious political organizations (social movements, national advocacy organizations, and faith‐based community organizations) as well as religious congregations' efforts to spur members to progressive political consciousness and mobilization; and evaluates the place of progressive religion in American political culture. Finally, it points to fruitful areas for future research.     

What is mixed in welfare mix? Welfare ideologies at stake in the Lithuanian case of social service delivery

The article deals with the development of social welfare and social services in Lithuania by describing cultural contexts and disclosing evaluations of social service providers and recipients and needs of social service delivery. The authors of the article discuss the changing role of the state, pose a question as to what the institutions and the actors are and to what extent should they participate in the creation of social welfare. One of the aims of this paper is to describe the development of the welfare mix in Lithuania, by showing that welfare is inevitably woven into the historical, economic, political and social context; the distinctive cultural configuration of the welfare mix in social services delivery in Lithuania is revealed. Empirical research (survey of social services recipients and providers) presented in the article discloses that actors of social services delivery experience tension and ambiguity between the demand of neoliberal policy to choose and be responsible and the expectation that the state will participate in the social service market. At the same time social services recipients and providers express a need for different actors to take an active part in the welfare system.     

External resources and the Unemployed Councils of the 1930s: Evaluating six propositions from social movement theory

This article uses six propositions developed from the resource mobilization and political opportunity structure approaches to social movements in order to highlight the importance of external resources and political environment in explaining the emergence, development, and decline of the Unemployed Councils—the major organization of the unemployed workers movement of the 1930s. The analysis emphasizes the dominance of the Communist Party on the inner life of the Councils but notes both the important exceptions to that dominance and the social functions served by that dominance. The analysis also suggests that conflicts among elites opened up the political space for short-term political concessions on the local, state, and national levels. Because Council leaders did not perceive the changing political opportunities of the New Deal, however, they were unable to consolidate these concessions nor build stable organizations among the working class. These conclusions speak to several unresolved or problematic issues in both resource mobilization and political opportunity structure approaches.An earlier version of this paper was presented at the annual meeting of the Eastern Sociological Society, Providence, Rhode Island, April 1991.     

The forms of power and the forms of cities: building on Charles Tilly

Chuck Tilly’s late work on coercion, capital, and trust is provocative when applied to changes in urban form. Extending those categories for use in tracing the history of conflicts in cities about how development should be handled highlights the changing roles of economic and physical and cultural power, and the growing importance of trust in these processes. This is a speculative article with a political hope. The speculation is around the potential of using an expanded version of key categories of Charles Tilly’s to create a framework for understanding the nature of change in the form of cities over time. The political hope is to use that framework to illuminate the possibilities of social change in cities today in the direction of social justice.     

The translocation of culture: ‘community cohesion’ and the force of multiculturalism in history1

In his work on a Welsh border village, Ronald Frankenberg showed how cultural performances, from football to carnival, conferred agency on local actors and framed local conflicts. The present article extends these themes. It responds to invocations of ‘community cohesion’ by politicians and policy makers, decrying the failure of communal leadership following riots by young South Asians in northern British towns. Against their critique of self‐segregating isolationism, the article traces the historical process of Pakistani migration and settlement in Britain, to argue that the dislocations and relocations of transnational migration generate two paradoxes of culture. The first is that in order to sink roots in a new country, transnational migrants in the modern world begin by setting themselves culturally and socially apart. They form encapsulated ‘communities’. Second, that within such communities culture can be conceived of as conflictual, open, hybridising and fluid, while nevertheless having a sentimental and morally compelling force. This stems from the fact, I propose, that culture is embodied in ritual, in social exchange and in performance, conferring agency and empowering different social actors: religious and secular, men, women and youth. Hence, against both defenders and critics of multiculturalism as a political and philosophical theory of social justice, the final part of the article argues for the need to theorise multiculturalism in history. In this view, rather than being fixed by liberal or socialist universal philosophical principles, multicultural citizenship must be grasped as changing and dialogical, inventive and responsive, a negotiated political order. The British Muslim diasporic struggle for recognition in the context of local racism and world international crises exemplifies this process.     

Poverty and Polygyny as Political Protest: The Waldensians and Mormons.

Abstract This paper examines Waldensianism and Mormonism, two very different religious movements, separated by time, space, cultural, and economic conditions. The sources are a mixture of secondary and published primary sources, including church documents both in translation and the original language, and personal writings, such as diaries and letters. The treatment of these sources is not unusual, rather the contribution of this paper is a synthetic theoretical analysis of these movements in terms of the practical consequences of action.
Both movements were coherent attempts to address contemporary social issues; neither was principally illogical nor irrational, nor comprised primarily of socially disconnected individuals. These movements were neither apolitical nor solely comprised of pure political action. Instead, both became political protest movements, in addition to being religious movements, because the symbolic content of the movement was interwoven with contemporary politics: the movements' ideological critiques implicated the larger political structure which attempted to prevent ideological change. These religious struggles were processes, becoming political movements because ideological change implied political action.     

The Political Incorporation of Anti-System Religious Parties: the Case of Turkish Political Islam (1994–2011)

When and how do anti-system religious parties become incorporated into the political system of their countries? In recent decades, social scientists have sought answers to this question within the framework of the moderation literature. While moderation theory identifies key factors that influence party leaders’ willingness to seek political incorporation, it is less successful in explaining the contingent outcome of the incorporation process. This article develops an alternative analytical framework for the study of political incorporation grounded in social performance theory. Through a case study of Islamic parties in Turkey between 1994 and 2011, the author demonstrates that political incorporation is as much a function of successful cultural performances on the public stage as the right alignment of institutional incentives and sanctions. As a result of the Justice and Development Party leaders’ successful projection of a mainstream political identity between 2002 and 2011, secularist state elites in Turkey failed to establish legitimate grounds for a political intervention, which in turn provided the party with the time and opportunity to remove the institutional barriers to its incorporation.     

Ethno‐sectarianism in Iraq,diaspora positionality and political transnationalism

In this article, I draw on the experiences of Iraqi diasporas in the UK and Sweden after the 2003 US‐led intervention to demonstrate how ethno‐sectarianism in Iraq has affected their political transnationalism. Using the concepts of intersectionality and positionality, I show how the reconfiguration of the social positions of individuals and groups in the diaspora affects their types of political engagement and the spaces in which political mobilization takes place. In the case of the Iraqi diaspora, I show how, among other things, the social categories of ethnicity, religion and gender create positions of both subordination and privilege, which inhibit, reshape and empower the political actions of diasporas in both the homeland and host country. In societies divided along ethnic, religious or tribal lines, the social positions of individuals and groups relative to the dominant ethnic/religious political parties and the nationalist ideology they promote determine the nature of their diasporic mobilization.     

Understanding the Sustainability of Insurgency Conflict in Thailand

Abstract

This article seeks to model the insurgency conflict in the three southern border provinces of the Kingdom of Thailand: Pattani, Yala, and Narathiwat. In so doing, it will explore the sustainability of the conflict by representing it in terms of a conflict life cycle that is responsive to complexity and change. The cycle arises from the cybernetic viable systems theory of ‘living systems’, and is able to foster a better understanding of what is happening empirically on the social level in these provinces, in respect to a situation characterized as one of incessant conflicts. This conflict model that arises suggests that there is an interconnection between the agents involved, and their individual and interactive dynamics. The conflict involves five types of politically related behaviours that occur between two interactive agents: the state (engaged in searching for and making arrests of insurgents) and the insurgents (engaged in violent acts of shooting, bombing, and arson). These agents are studied to the end of being able to determine the precise interactive nature of the political conflict in which they are engaged. In carrying out this investigation both quantitative and qualitative approaches were used. The research was carried out in three stages. In the first stage, time series techniques were used to determine inferentially whether the conflict is both rational and involves interactive behaviours. Stage two adopts the Weibull distribution technique to assess the political conflict. In the third stage, a statistical analysis is conducted of the conflict situation in political terms. Finally, it is explained how the model and the methods used in this article may be used to deal with intractable conflict in other social environments, incidentally tracking the likelihood of conflicts being sustainable. Other agencies could utilize this approach in examining other political conflicts so as to be better able to prepare suitable approaches for coping with intractable conflicts to the end of fostering sustainable peace processes.     

Religion,Nationalism, and Transnational Civil Society in the Eritrean Diaspora

This article examines the emergence and significance of religion among Eritreans in the United States as a basis for building community in diaspora, reconfiguring nationalist identity, and constituting transnational civil society. It argues three related points: that religious identity and gatherings help mitigate against fractured political identities that have weakened secular diaspora associations; that practicing Eritrean identity through religion challenges the hegemonic power of the Eritrean state to transnationally control diaspora communities and dictate national identity; and that the very incipience of religious bodies as transnational avenues provides Eritreans in diaspora with an autonomous space to resist the state's totalizing demands. Through a critical ethnographic investigation of religious identity and church bodies in Eritrea and one United States diaspora community, the article shows that uneven transnational networks between the United States and Eritrea create new spaces for political action. Specifically, the relative autonomy of churches and the incipience of their transnationalism allow diaspora Eritreans to use religion in the constitution of an emergent transnational civil society.     

Bandits,Militants, and Martyrs: Sub-state Violence as Claim to Authority in Late Antique North Africa

Fourth Century North Africa was a site of intense religious and political conflict. Emerging from a period of persecution and newly legitimized by the Roman state, the Christian Church immediately fractured into two competing camps. Now known as the Donatist schism, this fracture was the result of competing claims to religious authority between two camps of bishops, but the doctrinal debate at its core precipitated a specific form of violence: attacks on clergy and property perpetrated by roving groups of militant bandits. Known as circumcellions, these bands acquired a perverse reputation for religious zeal, a desire for martyrdom, and what their opponents described as the ‘madness’ and ‘insanity’ of their violence. Here I analyze sources produced by both Donatists and Catholics to trace patterns of circumcellion violence. I draw on borderland theory and research on non-state violence to argue that such acts were not mad, but rather the result of strategic efforts to consolidate religious and political power. In this, Donatism and the sectarian violence that accompanied it provide important insights into how banditry and peasant rebellions can serve as alternate sources of social and political power, avenues through which heterodox movements challenge the power state and religious hierarchies alike.     

The Historical Political Ecological and Political Economic Context of Mohawk Efforts at Land Reclamation in the Mohawk Valley

The purpose of this article is to elaborate on the history of the relationship between the political ecological and political economic changes occurring in the Mohawk communities in the Saint Lawrence river valley during the Twentieth Century with three Mohawk efforts at land reclamation in Upstate New York and the reestablishment of a Mohawk residential community in the ancestral homelands of the Mohawk river valley. I demonstrate how each of these efforts is conceptualized and should be understood in historical materialist terms as a social response to the changing social, economic, ecological, and political conditions in those communities and the processes involved in the reshaping and remaking of those communities.     

Pushing boundaries and blurring categories in digital media and religion research

As religious identity and spiritual practices transform and expand in the digital media moment, this article advocates for more critical scholarship on media and religion that examines the complex ways that individuals make meaning in the digital age. First, I present an overview of foundational media and religion theories that analyze the interactions between these ever‐changing fields, such as the culturalist tradition, mediatization theory, and the social shaping of technology approach. Furthermore, this essay highlights insightful research trends that blur distinctions between media spaces and complicate definitions of religion. Finally, a discussion of gaps in the scholarship will justify an argument for more theories centered in international contexts, as well as analysis of the relationships between media technologies, aesthetics, affect, identity and religious expression. These emerging approaches provide more in‐depth discussions of how the fast‐changing and ever‐complex digital culture is deeply connected to the evolving nature of religion and human existence.     

Zastiin Nogoodoi: Tribal Zakhchin Music of Western Mongolia

When national governments support homogenising religious programs within plural populations, scholars are called to pay close attention to the subsequent interactions between state power and religious projects/actors. This article responds to this need by providing a sub-national perspective on Indonesian Council of Islamic Scholars (MUI), a national body seen by some as a state-supported homogenising project. Based on fieldwork in the Indonesian cities of Tasikmalaya and Malang, the article describes the ideological diversity that exists between the central MUI and its regional branches. In the regions, the MUI is supported financially by regional governments, and in this way, its branches are shaped by local political conditions rather than by allegiance to ideological programs promoted from the centre. The authors observe the openness of the Tasikmalaya MUI to a wide range of Islamic movements, and contrast this with the ideological homogeneity of Malang's MUI, where the regional government is intent on restricting Islamic programs that threaten religious and social diversity. The contrasting religio-political positionings of the regional MUI signal the ideological heterogeneity to be found within the Indonesian Islamic Scholars’ Council and shed light on the importance of sub-national factors in shaping Indonesia's institutional responses to religious diversity.