Communicating mixed messages about religion through internet memes

This article investigates the dominant messages Internet memes communicate about religion. Internet memes about religion are defined as, ‘memes circulated on the Internet whose images and texts focus on a variety of religious themes and/or religious traditions’ (Bellar et al., 2013). By drawing on meme genres identified by Shifman (2012) and analyzing techniques used to frame ideas concerning religion in memes, this study identifies common genres found amongst religious Internet meme and core frames used to present messages and assumptions about religion online. This article further draws attention to the importance of studying religion in digital contexts, as it highlights trends, recognized by scholars toward ‘Lived Religion’ within digital culture (Campbell, 2012). Lived Religion argues that contemporary media and digital culture provide important resources for presenting popular beliefs about religion. This study also suggests that studying Internet memes about religion provides a useful lens for understanding popular conceptions about religion within mainstream culture.     

Home visits,holy visits: Diasporic pilgrimage to the ‘Holy Land’ amongst Palestinian–Jordanian Christians from Amman

This paper contributes to ‘visiting friends and relatives’ (VFR) discussions within migration and diaspora literatures by proposing a closer theorization of religious mobilities through the conceptual framework of ‘diasporic pilgrimage’. It advances VFR thinking by considering religion as a productive analytical category to interrogate relationships between people and place which sustain and constitute diasporic connection and attachment. This will be explored through the experiences and encounters of Palestinian–Jordanian Christians undertaking visits to places of religious and relational significance across Israel and/or Palestine from Jordan. Through an exploration of ethnographic data collected amongst diasporic Palestinian Christians living in Jordan, diasporic pilgrimage will be theorized as a localized process critically engaging with everyday facets of familiarity and regularity. This will revolve around three main elements of diasporic pilgrimage: translocal connections, temporalities and power geometries which constitute visits from Jordan and the so-called ‘Holy Land’ a diasporic form of religious mobility.     

Religion in the Television-mediated Public Sphere Transformations and paradoxes

This study suggests to look at the audiences of religious television programmes as a possible common field of interest for both the sociology of religion and communication research. The current visibility of religion on Italian television, amplified by the Jubilee 2000 and confirmed by the repeated successes of fictions dedicated to religious characters, put unusual questions to sociological theory. We argue here that such visibility must be interpreted within the ‘process of de-secularization’, i.e. one of the many processes which are currently de-constructing modernity and confusing the distinction between the public and the private sphere. The ‘mediated’ religion is the result of the ambiguous rediscovery of religion in the post-modern society. From this point of view, the Jubilee 2000 appears as a media event typical of the global media society, in that religion is spread throughout the world but within the limits of media (and especially television) formats.     

Recalling the ‘Islam of the parents’ liberal and secular Muslims redefining the contours of religious authenticity

Scholarship on Islam in Europe has largely invested in examining the generational dynamics in the lived religious experiences of Muslims. Within this perspective, the idea of a generation gap, which revolves around a distinction between ‘tradition’ and ‘religion’, has figured as an important account in assessing some of these religious transformations. Drawing on fieldwork with Belgian Muslims of Moroccan origin, this paper seeks to nuance this perspective by exploring accounts wherein this ‘traditional’ Islam of the parents is actively reclaimed. This was especially the case for respondents who were quite critical of Islamic revivalist trends. In many of these stories, the parents’ Islam was understood as tolerant and open, in a way that was consonant with ‘tradition’. By focusing on these narratives, a first aim of the paper is to understand how genealogy and ancestry figure as distinct criteria in determining the ‘real Islam’. A second aim is to complicate the understanding of the liberal and modern self, and its relationship to the past.     

The trouble with 'inclusion': a case study of the faith zone at the Millennium Dome

Some sociologists of religion would argue that there has been a move away from ‘religion’, in terms of institutionalised dogmas and established corporate ways of believing, towards ‘spiritualities of life’ where the emphasis lies on the personal, the individual and the experiential ( Heelas, 2002 ; Wuthnow, 2001 ). Given the evidence for the apparent popularity of spirituality in contemporary Western society, it is surprising that between 1996 and 2000, the Zone concerned with religion at the Millennium Dome in Greenwich was re‐named from‘The Spirit Zone’to‘The Faith Zone’. A range of political, economic and religious interests lay behind the Zone’s re‐naming, and both the name (and the content) changed to reflect ‘religion’ rather than ‘spirituality’. The process of constructing the Zone thus moved in a diametrically opposite direction to some of the trends associated with religious belief in modern Britain. An investigation of the dynamics behind the construction of the Faith Zone at the Dome provides an opportunity to evaluate what ‘counted’ as religion ( Beckford, 2003 ) at a specific time and context in British society. The paper also shows that behind the Labour Government rhetoric of ‘inclusion’, various dimensions of spiritual belief and activity in Britain are excluded from the public sphere. When it comes to religion, taken‐for‐granted criteria operate – resulting in the prioritisation of the official, the ‘representative’, the ‘respectable’, and ‘the unified’ over the unofficial, the deviant, the private, and the contested. This paper looks at the struggles and the conditions associated with the idea and the policy of inclusion in relation to religion in modern Britain, using the Faith Zone at the Dome as a case study.     

Marriage in a British Evangelical Congregation: Practising Postfeminist Partnership?

This article explores understandings and practices of marriage in a congregation from the growing British evangelical Christian movement New Frontiers International (NFI). It investigates how those who subscribe to evangelical religion interact with the gendered ideas and behaviour of the more ‘secular’ society they inhabit. The data for this research are drawn from participant observation and interviews with members of the congregation. These are situated in the context of the official discourse of NFI and of contemporary debates about the move to individualized partnership. It is argued that though these evangelicals claim to shape their marriages according to ‘biblical’ patterns, they in fact reflect the partnership practices of their less religious peers. Building on work by Stacey and McRobbie, patterns of marriage and heterosexual partnership in contemporary Britain are conceptualized as ‘postfeminist’; the article locates within this framework NFI's declared – and undeclared – marriage practices. It finds that while they are somewhat more conservative than their ‘secular’ peers, NFI evangelicals are indeed practising postfeminist partnership. Observations are also offered on the impact of religion on people's ability to live out individualized partnerships.     

Navigating religious diversity: exploring young people’s lived religious citizenship in Indonesia

Against the backdrop of several concerning reports which have noted growing socio-religious conservatism and intolerance amongst Indonesia youth, this study examined how school-aged Indonesian young people navigate encounters with religious difference in their everyday lives. Recognising the significance of religious and citizenship education curricula, the research included classroom observations and interviews with 20 religiously-diverse Indonesian young people in three purposively selected high schools in Jakarta. The paper reveals that participants in all three schools agreed that religious studies and their personal religious frameworks were central to their approaches toward religious tolerance. However, their lived everyday experiences of rubbing shoulders with religious ‘others’, expanded upon and critiqued the narrowness and rigidity of these frameworks and showed greater religious inclusivity. Through this analysis the paper integrates prior work on ‘lived religion’ and ‘lived citizenship’ to fuse a ‘lived religious citizenship’ concept, arguing that this adds depth to both fields by recognising that religion cannot be separated from the experience of being a citizen. A focus on lived religious citizenship provides a deeper account of individual identity and highlights the importance of qualitative studies focused on the living out of religion and citizenship.     

Young British religious ‘nones’: findings from the Youth On Religion study

This article contributes to an understanding of diversity in beliefs and practices among young religious ‘nones’ who report the absence of a specific religious faith. It focuses on those describing themselves as atheist, agnostic or otherwise of ‘no religion’ within (a) a large-scale survey of over ten thousand 13–17-year-olds, and (b) interviews, discussion groups and eJournal entries involving one hundred and fifty-seven 17–18-year-olds, in three British multi-faith locations. Compared to the study population as a whole, the young religious ‘nones’ were particularly likely to be white and born in Britain. There was, nonetheless, considerable diversity among this group in beliefs and practices: almost half the survey members mentioned some level of belief in God and most of the interview participants pointed to some presence of religion in their lives. Being a religious ‘none’ is, furthermore, not necessarily a stable identity and some young people had already shown considerable fluidity over their life cycles. Around half the survey members said they had maintained similar religious views to their mothers, but participants in both quantitative and qualitative studies pointed to the impact of their experiences and interactions, as well as the role of science, as factors affecting their beliefs and practices.     

Historical Sociology and Secularisation: The Political Use of ‘Culturalised Religion’ by the Radical Right in Spain

The critique of the theory of secularisation has favoured the emergence of a series of concepts for the analysis of contemporary socio-religious transformations, such as ‘culturalised religion’. These categories constitute, in turn, an opportunity to rethink the process of secularisation from the perspective of historical sociology. Against this background, this article carries out a theoretical analysis of the ambiguities of secularisation in Spain from which a cultural approach to religion (‘culturalised religion’) emerges and its potential connection to the expansion of the radical right-wing party Vox, which became the third-largest party in Spain's parliament in the 2019 national election. After analyzing this interrelation between ‘culturalised religion’ and the radical right on the basis of statistical sources, discourse analysis and bibliographical sources, the article concludes by stressing the importance of historical sociology for understanding phenomena like ‘culturalised religion’, which take us out of the binomial logic that has marked part of the interpretation of secularisation (revival of religions vs decline of the religious) and introduce us into the multiple interactions between the historical past and sociological reality.     

Young Muslim women of Bengali and Moroccan origin in Italy: multiple belongings,transnational trajectories and the emergence of European Islam

This paper investigates the multiple dimensions in the identity constructions of the daughters of the Muslim migrations to Italy. It focuses on the transformations in the way girls and young women relate to religion, in the transition from the generation of mothers, who emigrated from countries with a Muslim majority, to the generation of daughters, who grow up in a European context where Islam is a minority religion. It discusses ‘transmissions’, ‘translations’ and ‘betrayals’ in the migration experience, from a standpoint which highlights the specificities of gender and of generation. The article is based on an intersectional analysis of biographical accounts by Muslim girls and young women of Bengali and Moroccan origin who were born and/or grew up in Italy. Intersecting religious identity with other identity lines such as national belonging (to the parents’ country of origin and to the country where they were born or grew up), gender, class, color and age, multiple reactions and positions emerged. In this context, the religious dimension inherited/experienced/reinvented/called into question by the daughters of migrations appeared to be in constant evolution. Indeed, the stories contained herein of young Muslims tell of the emergence of European Islam.     

Media art and the resurrection of an image: motion and sculpturing

The last decades' increase in the visual methods in social science has not been reflected in the study of religion. There is a rather perplexing absence of such methods in the study of religion, given the importance of visual symbolism in many religious traditions. This article is about photo-elicitation among young Christians, Muslims and non-religious people in the multicultural Grønland area in inner-city Oslo, Norway. We focus on two images of holy books: a Bible with a pair of aged hands folded on top, and a Qur'an with a prayer bead. Four narratives that these two images elicited form the basis of the article: (1) ‘Everyday life sociologists of religion’; (2) ‘Cousin Religion's holy book: tool for everyday cosmopolitanism’; (3) ‘Translating holy books’; and (4) ‘The image becomes sacred’. From these narratives, we discuss how photo-elicitation can work in the study of religion. We outline which participants provided which narratives. We discuss the potential of images for tapping silent knowledge about different religious life-worlds, and for bridging different social and cultural worlds.     

Pierre Bourdieu and the sociology of religion: A central and peripheral concern

Although some of Bourdieu’s most basic concepts have their roots in the sociology of religion, religion itself has, in appearance, only a marginalized status within his work. This article focuses on the genesis of religious field and how the theories of Durkheim, Mauss, and Weber fold into the notion of field defined by Bourdieu. Religious field must be understood within the symbolic economy as well; divisions of symbolic labor are therefore discussed in relation to segmented and non-segmented societies. Finally, Bourdieu’s analysis of institutions, in particular the Catholic Church, further help us understand the use and evolution of religious field in his work and shed light on the sociologist’s understanding of the movement from religious beliefs toward aesthetic ones.     

Ulak (The Messenger): a mystic fable of Islamic messianism

Although modernity considers religion as a fable, religion has always been part of modern politics. The ‘return of religion’ in global politics, which marks the contemporary political and cultural imagination, accentuates this paradox. Religion has now become indispensible for the idea of truth. In this article, I approach this problematique by discussing the relationship between religion and art in terms of their relation to the idea of truth. In this respect, I focus on a Turkish film, Ulak (The Messenger), and analyze the film’s thought about religion and the link it establishes between the artistic/narrative fable and the idea of truth. The film’s choice of Gnosticism as the language of the dispossessed indicates a political position in relation to both the ‘return of religion’ and the popularity of the cultural turn in politics. On this basis, the article examines the film’s take on the concept of the event as a miracle (in religious messianism), contrasting it with the philosophy of revolution. Thus, it navigates the ambivalent border between art and non-art, between the mystic fable and politics. With modernity, it is said that, art has replaced religion and borrowed its sacredness. A reverse process in place today: a resacralization of art and politics. Art and religion share a common element: illusion. However, art profanes illusion, while religion sacralizes it. On this basis, the article concludes that Ulak is a cinematic form of antiphilosophy. It is a spectacular movie as a critique of institutional religion, yet it is captivated by the understanding of truth as a miracle, by the truth of the fable. Following Badiou, who views art as a truth procedure, one could say that Ulak’s potential to clarify the value of the truth event remains questionable.     

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.     

Five concepts of religion

In the face of continuing debate about the adequacy and definition of the concept of ‘religion’, this paper argues that it is necessary for the social sciences to become more self-critical about their various – and changing – uses of the term. As this paper shows, three main uses are currently dominant: religion as belief/meaning, religion as identity, and religion as structured social relations. By contrast, some uses which were once important are currently recessive, including Marxist approaches to religion as ideology, and Parsonian conceptions of religion as norms and values. Some new uses are also emerging, including ‘material’ religion, religion as discourse, and religion as practice. Drawing these together, the paper proposes a taxonomy of five main major uses of the term. It reflects on their adequacy, and points out where there are still occlusions: above all with regard to ‘super-social’ or ‘meta-social’ relations with non-human or quasi-human beings, forces and powers.     

Indigenous Religion,Christianity and the State: Mobility and Nomadic Metaphysics in Siberut,Western Indonesia

Recent studies in the anthropology of mobility tend to privilege the cultural imaginaries in which human movements are embedded rather than the actual, physical movements of people through space. This article offers an ethnographic case study in which ‘imagined mobility’ is limited to people who are not mobile, who are immobile or sedentary and thus reflects a ‘sedentarist metaphysics’. The case comes from the island of Siberut, the largest of the Mentawai Islands off the west coast of Sumatra, Indonesia, where government modernisation programs in the second half of the twentieth century focused on relocating clans from their ancestral lands to model, multi-clan villages and on converting people from the indigenous religion to Christianity. Recent changes in the national, regional and local political contexts have led many of the Christians in the villages to reclaim the indigenous religion by invoking the figure of the shaman, whose special skill is the mobility that village dwellers do not have—a mobility that produces and reproduces a spatial, social and cosmological continuity between home and forest. Many people who live on their ancestral land and practice only the indigenous religion argue that the Christians’ hybrid religious practice is not culturally ‘authentic’ because the indigenous religion requires a mobility that is not possible in the government villages. In this view, the shaman is a surrogate, and his ‘substitute mobility’ arises from a sedentarist metaphysics.     

Transnational Islamic charity as everyday rituals

In this article, through a case study of transnational Islamic charity, we explore the intersection between migrant development engagements and religious practices. While migrant engagement in development is well known, the intersections of these with everyday religious practices are less so. We use the prism of ‘everyday rituals', understood as human actions that connect ideals with practices. Everyday rituals not only express but also reinforce ideals, in this case those of Islamic charity in a context of sustained migrant transnationalism. The article draws on 35 interviews about Islamic charity, transnationalism and development with practising Muslims of Pakistani origin in Oslo, Norway. We argue that everyday rituals are a useful tool for exploring the role of religion in motivating migrant development engagements. This is because they include transcendental perspectives, bridge ideals and practices that connect the contemporary to the hereafter, encompass transnational perspectives, and are attentive to the ‘here’ and ‘there’ spatially in migrants’ lives.     

Prisoners of conscience in the Plowshares and School of the Americas Watch movements: the politics of privilege,gender, and religious identity

ABSTRACT

The American peace movement has always been predominantly white and Christian, and this essay makes the privileged identities of nonviolent prisoners of conscience in the Plowshares and School of the Americas Watch movements its analytical starting place. From the axes of gender (female or male) and religious identity (laity or vowed religious), it examines how privilege and experience are understood and animated by movement participants, and how this impacts activist experience. Specifically, it investigates how some prisoners of conscience negotiate and employ their whiteness, education, class, and status as a strategic use of ‘privilege power,’ as well as how the ‘moment of action’ is a gendered experience of empowerment that is shaped by religious identity. The data illuminate the ways that privilege can be a site of intentional contestation and power, while un-examined areas of identity can shape experience in meaningful ways.