Religion in Rebellions, Revolutions, and Social Movements

Warren S. Goldstein, Jean-Pierre Reed, Warren S. Goldstein, Jean-Pierre Reed

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2022
• Print ISBN: 9781032012414
• eBook ISBN: 9781000583342
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Religion in Rebellions, Revolutions, and Social Movements demonstrates that, while religion is often a social force that maintains, if not legitimates, the sociopolitical order, it is also a decisive factor in economic, social, and political conflict.

The book explores how and under what conditions religion functions as a progressive and/or reactionary force that compels people to challenge or protect social orders. The authors focus on the role that religion has played in peasant, slave, and plebeian rebellions; revolutions, including the Chinese, English, French, Russian, and Iranian; and modern social movements. In addition to these case studies, the book also contains theoretical chapters that explore the relationship religious thought has with the politics of liberation and oppression. It examines the institutional, organizational, ritualistic, discursive, ideological, and/or framing mechanisms that give religion its oppressive and liberating structures. Many scholars of religion continue very conventional modes of thinking, ignoring how religion has been—and continues to be—both a hegemonic and counterhegemonic force in conflict. This book looks at both sides of the equation.

This international and interdisciplinary volume will be of interest to students and scholars in the fields of politics of religion, sociology of religion, religious studies, gender studies, and history.

1 An Introduction to the Critical Study of Religion in Rebellions, Revolutions, and Social Movements

Jean-Pierre Reed and Warren S. Goldstein

DOI: 10.4324/9781003177821-1

Since the late 1970s, the resurgence of religion across the globe has come from the religious right: evangelicals and fundamentalists in the United States; Islamists across the Muslim world; Hindu nationalists in India; Buddhist nationalists in Myanmar, the Haredi in Israel, the United States, and the United Kingdom; Pentecostals in Latin America; the prosperity gospel in Africa. Although the left has leaned more in a secular direction since the Enlightenment, not all religious people today are conservative; there are many religious liberals and even leftists as well. The religious left has indeed resurfaced (Baker and Marti 2020; Rolsky 2019). There is a spectrum between the religious right and religious left. Religious actors have not only been tied up with the establishment or part of the forces of reaction but also have been the agents of progressive social change. This collection of essays is an examination of the role that religion has played in rebellions, revolutions, and social movements. To understand this role, it is necessary to approach them critically. By this we mean to evaluate both the positive and negative aspects of religion based on a set of stated values (e.g., freedom, equality, justice, etc.), whether explicit or implicit. This methodology is that of the critical theory of religion.

The critical theory of religion is an approach that makes sense of religion’s “renewed role in the public sphere,” given its revival and continued routinization in secular contexts (Goldstein, Boer, and Boyarin 2013, 8). It entails opening oneself to the insights of varied social scientific, and humanistic, disciplines. It is interdisciplinary, drawing from the fields of sociology, religious studies, theology, anthropology, history, literature, media studies, philosophy, political science, and psychology. It incorporates varied critical approaches—including (neo-)Marxism, (post)structuralism, postmodernism, postcolonialism, feminism, and queer theory. It sets out to make sense of religion as a social force. Given its interdisciplinary attributes, however, it sets itself apart from the social sciences in that it critically embraces (rather than excludes) religious perspectives as a point of departure for making sense of religion (Goldstein, Boyarin, and Boer 2014). It incorporates useful insights, for example, from the humanities, including religious studies, theology, and biblical criticism (Goldstein et al. 2015, 2–6).

What makes the critical theory of religion critical? To begin with, it recognizes that the study of religion is not value-free and that religion—as a discursive, institutional, ritual, and organizational practice—is not apolitical. As such, the critical theory of religion understands and advocates for scholarship on religion to be “in the service of human interest” (3). This implies a connection between theory, research, and praxis. The object of knowledge for the critical theory of religion is human subjectivity, which is recognized as being situated in an already-given historico-political context: this requires an “active” approach that avoids the pretension of “knowledge-impartiality” or “scientific objectivity.” Such a “political” approach necessarily requires the practitioner to engage in self-reflexivity lest the approach ceases to be critical or is taken for granted. Overall, the critical theory of religion is “characterized by the need to discern what is beautiful and what is not, to negate the negative and draw out the positive in any given idea, position or tradition, and to encourage its deployment for the sake of human flourishing” (Goldstein, Boer, and Boyarin 2013, 4).

How exactly is the critical theory of religion “critical”? It questions the concept of religion itself, its institutional origins, and its normative and Western roots (Goldstein, King, and Boyarin 2016). It aims to move beyond the secular–religious binary by recognizing and questioning, for example, the sacredness/idolatrous nature of capitalism (Martínez Andrade 2015, 2019). It aims to come to terms with the relationship religion/religious beliefs has/have to lived realities, their class, gender, racial, sexual, and/or global dimensions, and the material conditions within which the latter lived dimensions unfold. It is critical in that it does not content itself with understanding the positive social effects of religion; it also aims to diagnose religion’s and society’s ills (Goldstein 2020). The critical theory of religion, to be more specific, and yet broadly conceived, is critical because (1) its point of departure is, as is the case with any critical approach, the recognition that power and hierarchical divisions are fundamental features of society; (2) it aims to make sense of the role of power in religions and religious denominations; (3) it recognizes how religions and religious denominations operate in specific fields of political action (given points 1 and 2); (4) it aims to understand how and by what means some religions and religious denominations are marginalized or gain legitimacy (given points 2 and 3); and (5) it studies the implicit symbolic boundary work in processes of inclusion and exclusion that take place in secular and missionary practices (given points 1–4; Josephsohn and Williams 2013). Because the critical theory of religion aims to improve the human condition, it is praxis-oriented—a key feature of its approach is understanding the role played by religion in sustaining and challenging injustices and social inequalities in society (Williams and Josephsohn 2013).

Practitioners of these critical orientations in the study of religion recognize that politics and religion are inextricably bound to each other. Christian Smith makes a perspicacious point in this regard:

Religion itself is a socially constituted reality that always exists in a social context that shapes and is shaped by religion. For this reason, in explaining social movements, it is simply impossible to separate the religious factors of belief and practice from more mundane matters of wealth, power, and prestige. All of these elements of social existence interact dynamically and mutually, and can have combined and reinforcing effects in generating disruptive social conflict.

(1996, 7)

The critical theory of religion, moreover, recognizes that our understanding of religion itself is predicated on recognizing its dual character—its oppressive and emancipatory features—in much the same way dialectical interpretations affirm the importance of the “unity of opposites” in understanding the relational nature of social reality. This recognition opens the door to fully appreciating how religion and/or the study of religion is/are not neutral territory. Indeed, religion is inherently political. It plays a role in both secular and religious settings. This is an insight apparent to both classical and contemporary theorists of religion.

On the Political Nature of Religion: Some Theoretical Approaches

Religion is often seen as a carrier of tradition rather than a vehicle of social change. Along these lines, Karl Marx remarked that religion is the “opium of the people,” seemingly identifying for contemporary and future readers an oppressive component inherent to religion. However, Marx’s quotation is frequently taken out of context and misunderstood. In the same passage, he also wrote religion is “an expression of real suffering and a protest against” it. Marx’s use of the word opium was allegorical; it had multiple meanings. In the mid-19th century, opium was a commodity used for medical purposes as well as a form of oppression (of the Asian peasantry) and a source of social conflict (e.g., the Opium Wars) (McKinnon 2006). The employment of the term opium to describe religion, while not exclusively his (see Löwy’s argument in Chapter 2), was a way for Marx to metaphorically contend with the ravages of capitalism; apprehend the destructive machinations behind capitalist accumulation; and conceive, if indirectly, of a utopian horizon. Religion is not an opium, according to Finke and Stark (1992, 251), but an amphetamine; indeed, it can be both. This oppositional take on religion has roots in Marx’s intellectual history as a member of the left Hegelian movement, whose key figures were David Friedrich Strauss, Bruno Bauer, and Ludwig Feuerbach, all of whom were theologians.

Neo-Marxists, whose work has tended to focus more centrally on the significance of subjective factors, for example, “culture” and “consciousness” (Jacoby 1995, 581), similarly developed their own emancipatory perspective on religion. Ernst Bloch (1995) argued, for example, that religious stories of emancipation and oppression possess a utopic function in that these stories reveal the inherent contradictions of human existence and, in so doing, open the door to understanding the need for the transcendence and transformation of existent society. In this sense, religion, while often operating as an ideology of domination, can also be understood as a revolutionary narrative that inspires political commitment to challenge the irrealism of social reality. For Bloch, an atheist like many Marxists, the inherent meaning of religion is hope—Judeo-Christianity in particular—especially because religion offers a platform through which theology itself, and the social conditions in which it operates, can be critiqued and denounced. Religion can also offer, if indirectly, an alternative vision of society. The prophetic tradition of denouncing existent, and announcing alternative, social orders based on the principle of hope, as Marxist scholar of religion Roland Boer (2007) conveys, is predicated on “rescuing the Bible” from the Right. The Bible, he notes,

is too important and too multi-valent a text to be left to the religious right. Thus it is necessary to take sides with the liberatory side of the Bible, and in doing so … denounce the reactionary use and abuse of the Bible, for imperial conquest, oppression of all types, and the support of privilege and wealth.

(2007, 79)

This reclamation project is similarly found in the work of Bloch...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Notes on Contributors
• 1 An Introduction to the Critical Study of Religion in Rebellions, Revolutions, and Social Movements
• PART I Rebellions
• PART II Revolutions
• PART III Social Movements
• Index