Religion and Social Protest Movements

Tobin Miller Shearer

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9781138090262
• eBook ISBN: 9781351592376
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Human Rights
• Index: Politics & International Relations

What role has religion played in social protest movements? This important book examines how activists have used religious resources such as liturgy, prayer, song and vestments with a focus on the following global case studies:

• 
  
  

• The mid-twentieth century US civil rights movement.

• 
  
  

• The late twentieth century antiabortion movement in the United States of America.

• 
  
  

• The early twenty-first century water protectors' movement at Standing Rock, North Dakota.

• 
  
  

• Indian independence led by Mohandas Gandhi in the early 1930s.

• 
  
  

• The Polish Solidarity movement of the 1980s.

• 
  
  

• The South African anti-apartheid movement of the 1980s and 1990s.

Prayer as a sacred act is usually associated with piety and pacifism; however, it can be argued that those who pray in public while protesting are more likely to encounter violence. Drawing on journalistic accounts, participant reflections, and secondary literature, Religion and Social Protest Movements offers both historical and theoretical perspectives on the persistent correlation of the use of public prayer with an increase in conflict and violence.

This book is an important read for students and researchers in history and religious studies, and those in related fields such as sociology, African-American studies, and Native American studies.

1

Faithful fasting: the Indian independence movement

In the course of activism, Gandhi engaged in seventeen public fasts. Very often, he declared that he would keep on fasting – until death if necessary – until a demand he had set was met. Of the many public-facing religious elements found in India’s campaign for self-rule, practices that also include the saying of prayers and the taking of vows, it is fasting that I find so fascinating. Gandhi fasted again and again – and evoked a massive response nearly every time – managing in the process to shape and channel a nation’s struggle for independence. In short, Gandhi bent an entire nation to his will. And he used religion to do it.

This chapter will follow the arc of Gandhi’s life and history of protest to explore the use of religious resource in the Indian independence struggle. Although the story of India’s independence movement is much larger and more complex than the narrative of one man’s life, Gandhi provides a focused means of following the religious thread in the independence saga. Gandhi’s life did not define or determine swaraj – that is, self-rule – for India, but his story did correspond to the primary events that shaped it. And the religious frame he crafted through his frequent use of fasting in the end defined his death as well as the subsequent memorialization of the life he had lived.

India’s religious context

Hinduism’s dominance in India amplified Gandhi’s seamless approach to religious practice. One commentator observed that Hinduism in India “is a way of life which meshes with the mythological prehistory, the history, the economy, the geography, and the ethnography of India.” As a result, given Hinduism’s wide-spread practice, “religion is the sum total of the national experience.”¹ The practice of religion, and especially of Hinduism, was for Gandhi and his contemporaries a complete way of being, from first breath to death a unifying whole.

Two more elements of religious life in India need brief discussion: the caste system and fasting. Traditional Hinduism promoted a system of social hierarchy consisting of five divisions: Brahmans – priests; Kshatriya – warriors; Vaishya – traders and farmers; Shudra – artisans, the largest group, consisting of sixty percent of the population; and the Dalits, technically outside the caste system itself, who dealt with meat, the dead, and refuse. At the top, the Brahmans defined the very notion of purity while the Dalits – formerly referred to as the untouchables – carried the stigma of being defiled and polluted.² Sub-groups within the four main castes, known as jati, further defined one’s position in society and numbered more than 3,000 distinct levels. Seldom did a member of a given caste shift or change their position regardless of hard work, education, or wealth.³ Gandhi was born into the third-ranking caste, the Vaishya, and would focus a significant portion of his activism on treatment of the Dalit caste, whom he renamed the Harijans or “children of God.”⁴

Fasting also figures prominently in the narrative of India’s struggle for independence. Gandhi’s seventeen public fasts make that evident.⁵ In addition, participants in many nonviolence campaigns committed themselves to fasting as a means of spiritual preparation for the demands that awaited them.⁶ The ceremonies that often marked the end of one of Gandhi’s fasts honored multiple religious traditions. In particular, he found the biblical example of Christ’s fasts to hold much promise for ethical transformation.⁷ But it was Hinduism that provided a particularly rich context for what those fasts meant and how the public received them. Hindus often fast to purify themselves. A religious pursuit of this kind has little political application other than demonstrating the character of the one who fasts. The practice of dharna, however, has direct political import. Dharna refers specifically to the practice of sitting quietly at the door of a debtor and refraining from eating until the debt is paid. In addition to the social pressure applied by the public nature of the fast, the debtor risks losing merit in subsequent reincarnations if the one who is fasting should die. Dharna also could be used to influence deities by demonstrating self-sacrifice and the focusing of the will.⁸ The fasts that figured so prominently in the pursuit of swaraj drew heavily on the tradition of dharna to effect political change.

Gandhi’s religious formation

Religion infused Gandhi’s childhood. Born on October 2, 1869, Gandhi witnessed his mother’s devotional practices from a young age. Putlibai refrained from drinking alcohol, smoking tobacco, and eating any kind of meat and would fast regularly as part of her religious observances.⁹ A daily attendant at the local Vaishnava temple where she would engage in worshipping Vishnu, the preserver, one of Hinduism’s supreme deities, Putlibai nonetheless did not provide any formal or regular religious instruction to her children. A precocious child, the young Gandhi did not find the form of devotion practiced by his mother, with all its pageantry and formality, satisfying.¹⁰ He desired more.

The land of his birth certainly had much more in the way of religion to offer him. Hinduism alone presented a pantheon of gods and goddesses, multiple worship practices, and distinct theological traditions.¹¹ Although Hindus were – and remain – dominant in India, accounting for more than eighty percent of the population, other religious groups flourished. Buddhism, Jainism, and Sikhism all call India the country of their birth, and Islam, Christianity, Zoroastrianism, Judaism, and the Bahá’i count numerous followers.¹² Historically, those religious groups have co-existed with relatively little overt violence.¹³ It is not by accident that Gandhi would go on to promote a religious universalism accepting of truth in all faith traditions. He had plenty of exposure to many different religious communities as a youth and young adult.

Before settling into his identity as a Hindu, Gandhi considered several other spiritual paths. At the age of thirteen in 1883, Gandhi entered into an arranged child marriage with fourteen-year old Kasturbai Makhanji, a union that would foster much spiritual turmoil for Gandhi over his eager sexual relations with his partner and lead in part to his eventual vow of celibacy. Five years after his marriage, Gandhi travelled to England to study law. While there, and then beginning in 1893 in South Africa where he worked as a barrister, Gandhi searched for his spiritual home. He studied the Parsi faith with its Zoroastrian roots that had influenced his mother’s Hindu practice. Theosophy, a synthesis of science, religion, and philosophy that emerged in the 1870s, also attracted Gandhi.¹⁴

But Christianity, by his own admission, influenced him most significantly in his journey back to Hinduism. While in South Africa he studied the Old Testament, which he found boring; focused on a New Testament passage known as the Sermon on the Mount, which he found compelling; and attended an evangelical revival, which he found unconvincing.¹⁵ The writings of Leo Tolstoy, in particular The Kingdom of God is Within You, also proved influential as Gandhi developed his insight into the ability of social institutions and political organizations to undermine the Truth.¹⁶ Despite these interactions, as well as efforts of a group of proselytizing Quakers and members of the South Africa General Mission to convert him along with a brief affiliation with the Esoteric Christian Union, he ultimately concluded “that to be a good Hindu also meant I would be a good Christian.”¹⁷ Later in life, he wrote positively about his interactions with Christians, describing his debt “to them for the religious quest that they awakened in me.”¹⁸ By 1896, his path as a Hindu had been made clear.¹⁹

His religious identity came to rest on three fundamental convictions: God’s ultimate reality, life’s unadulterated unity, and love’s fundamental necessity. Gandhi returned to the topic of God’s existence numerous times, finding all the proof he needed in the order of the universe, the presence of light in the darkness, and divine leading – which he referred to as the “still small voice” – to take action in pursuit of truth.²⁰ As his life progressed, he referred to his reliance on God in ever more concrete terms. Mere weeks before his death, he wrote of God, “I dance as He pulls the strings. I am in His hands and so I am experiencing ineffable peace.”²¹ Building from his bedrock belief in God, Gandhi saw a profound unity throughout creation held together by divine presence. He quoted from the sacred Hindu text, the Bhagavad-Gita, to describe that unity: “At the heart of this phenomenal world,/within all its changing forms,/dwells the unchanging Lord.”²² And it was love, especially as expressed through moral courage and a commitment to truth, that bore his belief into the world.

The expression of these three foundational values hinged on dharma, the moral duty to enact religious commitments. In Gandhi’s view, the realization of dharma required a total commitment to incorporating one’s beliefs into all aspects of life: prayer, public sanitation, clothing, food.²³ That commitment came before any other concern, including pursuit of personal salvation.²⁴ To do so required moral courage to overcome an irresolute will, which he referred to as akrasia from Aristotle’s use of the Greek term.²⁵ And the primary means through which Gandhi fostered the moral courage to live out dharma was through the taking and keeping of vows. He expected those who participated in his nonviolent campaigns to not only keep the vows that they had made but to see them through even if they resulted in suffering...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of figures
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1 Faithful fasting: the Indian independence movement
• 2 Invoking violence: the civil rights movement
• 3 Sacred surety: divine mandate and violence in the antiabortion movement
• 4 The Pope and the Black Madonna: ritual, word, and movement in the Polish Solidarity movement
• 5 Imagining the impossible: the anti-apartheid movement of the 1980s and 1990s
• 6 Prayers permeated: water protectors and the #NoDAPL movement
• Conclusion: a model for analyzing religious resources in social movements
• Index