Social Sciences
Religious Movements
Religious movements refer to organized efforts within a religious community to bring about change or reform. These movements often arise in response to perceived shortcomings or changes within the larger religious tradition. They can take various forms, such as revival movements, religious sects, or new religious movements, and may have significant social, cultural, and political implications.
Written by Perlego with AI-assistance
Related key terms
1 of 5
11 Key excerpts on "Religious Movements"
- Richard K. Fenn(Author)
- 2008(Publication Date)
- Wiley-Blackwell(Publisher)
234 JAMES BECKFORD Religion and Social Movements The term “social movement” refers to collective attempts to identify, challenge, and change situations that movement supporters consider unjust or unaccept-able. They pursue their grievances and campaigns mainly outside the channels of institutionalized politics. Although there are overlaps between religion and social movements, religion clearly has aspects to which there are no obvious counterparts in social move-ments. For example, notions of prayer, worship, intercession, salvation, and immortality are remote from the core claims and activities of nonreligious social movements. Religion cannot be reduced to a social movement. Indeed, in every-day life the boundary between religion and social movements is relatively unproblematic. On the other hand, there is a gray area between them where ideas, sentiments, and activities closely associated with conventional definitions of religion are used in ways that are characteristic of social movements and vice versa . For example, the promotion of values considered to be ultimately signifi-cant is common to religion and many social movements. So are the diagnosis of serious problems in social life and the framing of putative solutions. Collective identity and communal solidarity are highly valued in religions and social move-ments alike; and a sense of obligation to participate in them in the face of prob-lems requiring an urgent response is usually well developed in both. In other words, as I shall argue below, there may be more in common between religion and social movements from a sociological point of view than scholars have com-monly acknowledged. (For exceptions, see Hannigan 1991, 1993, Mauss 1993, Smith 1996, Zald and McCarthy 1998, Yarnold 1991a, Hart 1996.) In par-ticular, three social and cultural changes have made it important to examine the things in common between religion and social movements.
eBook - PDF- John A. Saliba(Author)
- 2016(Publication Date)
- Bloomsbury Academic(Publisher)
4 T H E N E W R E L I G I O U S M O V E M E N T S I N S O C I O L O G I C A L P E R S P E C T I V E THE RESURGENCE of religious fervor and the advent of new Religious Movements in the last three decades have revitalized the study of religion in the social sciences, particularly in sociology. 1 Sociologists interested in the field of religion have been given the opportunity to observe how new religions might come into being and how they interact with their sociocultural environments. Insights gleaned from these direct personal observations have been used to re-examine other movements in different periods of history. Comparative analyses have been employed to determine to what degree the new movements of the second half of the twentieth century can be considered a unified phenomenon of religious reviv-als, sharing similar features among themselves and with other alternative groups that came before them. The sociological study of the new religions differs from the psycho-logical approach in that it looks on them as social movements, affecting not just individuals but society as a whole. 2 Sociologists focus on the existence of these new religious entities as marginal subcultures or units that are in conflict with society at large. They examine the way diverse religious institutions and organizations are formed and maintained; the internal dynamics that make them viable social entities; their economic, social, and political structures; the type of charismatic leadership that provides divine legitimation for the movements' beliefs and practices; and the levels and types of commitment demanded of their devotees. They further explore the social correlates that go with membership and the cultural factors that influence recruitment policies. They are also interested in the conflicts that exist between the new groups and the mainline reli-gious traditions and the effects such conflicts might have on both. In addition, they follow the evolution of particular movements that
eBook - ePub- Greg Martin(Author)
- 2023(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
Chapter 7 Religious Movements and social movementsDOI: 10.4324/9780367821760-7Introduction
In various parts of the book so far we have seen how religion has figured in studies of social movements. In Chapter 3 , we saw how early theorists of collective behaviour included Religious Movements in their taxonomies and conceptual frameworks, although they tended to regard these movements as expressive or value-oriented, and hence less significant than social movements striving for purposive social change. Also in Chapter 3 , we considered briefly how Nazism has been described as a ‘political religion’ (Evans 2007 ), which, we might add, could be equivalent to ‘civil religion’ (Bellah 1970 ), in that it performs the same social function as religion (i.e. promoting social cohesion), albeit with secular content. And, in Chapter 5 , we saw how the precarity movement has utilised religious imagery, even inventing its own saint, San Precario, to protect all precarious workers.While discussion of Religious Movements has been largely tangential up to now, the main focus of this chapter is on the relationship between social movements and Religious Movements. The chapter begins by considering why there has been relatively little cross-fertilisation of ideas between the two fields of study, noting that most resistance has come from Marxist-influenced quarters of social movement theory, which view religion as regressive, reactionary and conservative, and, accordingly, see Religious Movements as retreatist or inward-looking, rather than progressive or empancipatory.More recently, however, and especially with the advent of new social movement theory, which we looked at in Chapter 5 , scholars have tried to reconcile the two fields, treating Religious Movements as
- William Sims Bainbridge, William S. Bainbridge(Authors)
- 2011(Publication Date)
- SAGE Publications, Inc(Publisher)
Social Movements A huge literature exists concerning two general categories of social movement, Religious Movements and political movements , but only modest and poorly organized litera-tures are available about many other areas of human life where movements are often significant. One reason is that the consolidation of collective behavior into formal move-ments is obvious in these two domains, and the result may be a legally registered religious denomination or political party. Given that our topic is scientific and technological movements, which are built on an extensive cultural base in the form of new discoveries and devices, Herbert Blumer’s (1969) concept of general movement applies: a collection of organizations rather than one organization, connected by common aims and conceptions into a subcul-ture. These organizations may individually become well established as an industrial corporation, a university department, the community supporting a particular scien-tific journal, or even a formal program in a government bureaucracy. The most visible of these general science and technology movements may be called pioneer movements because they explore a field for the first time, but revival movements can also be significant, restoring vitality to an existing field. Pioneer Movements Perhaps the most significant technical movement that flourished in the decades around the year 2000 is not usually analyzed as such by academics, perhaps because it was so large that no scholar could become conversant with all of it: personal computing .
- James A Beckford, Jay Demerath, James A Beckford, Jay Demerath(Authors)
- 2007(Publication Date)
- SAGE Publications Ltd(Publisher)
The health and distribution of the economy, the relative openness of the polity and the status of religion in societal legal insti-tutions (e.g., Richardson 2004), and the con-nections between political power and institutional religion all shape the likelihood of religiously based social movements. Further, the extent to which a culture is permeated with religious meanings (what Demerath 2001, calls ‘cultural religion’), the strength of collective and individual emotions that accompany reli-gious convictions, and how the content of reli-gious meanings open or close certain avenues of action, affect movement activity. RELIGION IN REBELLION, RESISTANCE, AND SOCIAL MOVEMENTS 423 It should be clear, given these three areas of social dynamics, why religion is so often a factor in efforts at protest, resistance, rebellion, and social change. Religion’s cultural and insti-tutional properties, along with its various roles in different types of societies, mean that it is often implicated in the struggle for social change. A variety of scholars have specifically explored religion’s contribution to social movements (e.g., Beckford 1989: Chapter 6; Nepstad 2004; Smith 1996; Williams 1996, 2003), sometimes focusing on one of these dimensions, sometimes trying to integrate them. To illustrate these dynamics more concretely, we offer three empirical cases in which religion was central to the dynamics of contention. In each case, some religious ele-ments supported the social movement challenge while other elements opposed it. We hold up issues of ideology and culture, organization, and social environment as a way of showing some of the ways religious collective action intersects with, shapes, and is shaped by, social forces.
eBook - PDFSociology of Religion
A Rodney Stark Reader
- Rodney Stark, Dedong Wei, Zhifeng Zhong(Authors)
- 2015(Publication Date)
- Baylor University Press(Publisher)
I subsequently recog-nized that with slight modification the theory could be applied to all Religious Movements, thus greatly increasing its scope and utility. It is this revised and expanded version that follows. The theory itself consists of ten propositions which attempt to specify the necessary and sufficient conditions for the success of Religious Movements. Before turning to these it will be useful to define religion and religious move-ments and to distinguish these from magic and magical movements. RELIGION AND MAGIC “Religion” refers to any system of beliefs and practices concerned with ulti-mate meaning and which assumes the existence of the supernatural. “Reli-gious movements” are social enterprises whose primary purpose is to create, maintain, and supply religion to some set of individuals. This definition excludes both secular social movements and movements based primarily upon magic. Social movements concerned with such things as achieving politi-cal utopia or with averting environmental disaster are not religious move-ments regardless of their capacity to inspire intense commitment. Lack of a supernatural assumption makes all nonReligious Movements vulnerable to empirical disconfirmations. Attempts to create a classless society can fail and be seen to fail, for such a goal must be achieved in this world—which is 399 WHY Religious Movements SUCCEED OR FAIL / precisely why the dozens of attempts to sustain secular utopian communi-ties during the nineteenth century were so short lived (Stark and Bainbridge [1987] 1996). In similar fashion, widely publicized predictions made during the early 1970s (Meadows and Meadows 1972) that the world would run out of most primary mineral resources by 1990 are now known to have been foolish. However, predictions to be realized in another world are beyond empirical inspection and, therefore, Religious Movements may rely on non-empirical claims, or at least claims without empirical implications in this world.
eBook - PDF- David A. Snow, Sarah A. Soule, Hanspeter Kriesi(Authors)
- 2008(Publication Date)
- Wiley-Blackwell(Publisher)
Religious Movements offered an alternative order in the face of chaos, a promise of power and status in the face of status threats. This view of Religious Movements shared an outlook with dominant theories of social movements at the time. Cohn (1959), Lanternari (1963), Tuveson (1964), and Barkun (1974) are exemplars of this tradition. The old-school functionalism at the heart of these mid-century works has consigned them to the limbo of infrequent citation in the more Religious Movements 697 recent social movement literature; but their prominent place in the ‘‘received tradition’’ in both the sociology of religion and social movement theory is evidence of the fact that the social-scientific interest in Religious Movements is anything but new. Having said that, we turn now to the studies of ‘‘new’’ Religious Movements that have dominated the literature on Religious Movements in recent decades. New Religious Movements The US seems to be an especially fertile ground for religious innovation. Explan-ations of this American exceptionalism note that ethnoreligious pluralism, a product of historical immigration patterns, has combined with the constitutional disestab-lishment of religion in the US to produce a vibrant ‘‘free market’’ of Religious Movements that are free to set up shop when and where they like and compete for adherents. The economic metaphor suggests that such free competition will result in high levels of religious participation on the part of ‘‘consumers’’ and high levels of religious innovation as ‘‘producers’’ attempt to appeal successfully to ‘‘market niches.’’ (See Warner [1993] for a comprehensive review of the market metaphor applied to the sociology of religion.) This helps to explain the surprising quantity of Religious Movements in the US, but the constitutional freedom from state regulation that Religious Movements enjoy also has an impact on their qualitative characteris-tics.
eBook - PDF- Peter F Beyer(Author)
- 1994(Publication Date)
- SAGE Publications Ltd(Publisher)
12 The problem of defining social movements and distinguishing them from other forms, especially organizations, is a long-standing one in the literature and here cannot be the place to give it a full airing. One of the more important common threads, however, is the notion that social movements are somehow non-conventional, outside or beyond currently normal institutional bounds. Accordingly, various conceptions have located them in the realms of deviance, social problems, and antisystemic directions in society. 13 Even a practical approach such as resource mobilization theory assumes the constant presence of 'grievances' or 'strains' as the motivational base of social movements. 14 A related recurring feature is the instability, evanescence, or fragility of social movements. Like Weber's charisma, they must routinize or institutionalize to avoid disappearing. And just as charisma was for Weber a key element in social change, so many observers regard social movements as similarly connected. 15 What unites all these and various other possible defining aspects is, of course, that social movements move: at the heart of any proper conception must be the notion of mobilization. 16 Precisely what would not happen if things were left to their normal, institutional, or systemic course: this is what social movements are all about. As such, they exist only through constant mobilization until they disappear either by simply fading or by becoming institutionalized them-selves. 17 These few common features in most discussions of social movements already point to their possible role in the question of religion and what I am here calling the residual matters of the dominant global systems. The reproduction of religious communication through religious organiz-ations and interaction-based social networks alone cannot counter the privatizing trend embedded in globalizing modernity.
- Richard Harvey Brown(Author)
- 2008(Publication Date)
Bizarrely, however, the vast majority of writers on NSMs focus on feminist, environmental, antiwar, or ethnic movements, whereas the study of contempo-rary Religious Movements is addressed by specialists in religious studies or Mid-dle Eastern politics. Perhaps this exclusion re fl ects an ideological bias insofar as, in the generally liberal orientation of social scientists, NSMs appear to be pro-gressive, whereas Religious Movements, whether in the United States or in India or Iran, are usually viewed as reactionary. Yet given our guiding de fi nitions of social movements and their origins in certain social structural and cultural changes, there is no reason to rigidly distinguish between the religious and the secular. As noted, many secular NSMs have strong sacral aspects, and most re-ligious NSMs have at least implicit political agendas. Both are formed around issues of identity or status more than issues of class; both are non- or antibu-reaucratic in ethos and often in form; both seek to create morally committed bonds of solidarity and status; both claim to reject modernist, statist, or class politics in favor of grassroots mobilization and individual transformation through solidarity and commitment; and, in all this, both are in transit toward a postmodern politics (Gibbins , – ; Brown , ch. ). Grievances, however ubiquitous, become political causes only when articu-lated as changeable through morally imperative action. And religiously based social movements are especially well endowed with latent symbolic capital that can easily a ff ect such mobilization in pursuit of social change. The involvement of churches in the Civil Rights Movement in the s (Morris and Mueller ), the in fl uence of the religious right on the Republican party and the fed-eral government since the s, and turnout for George W. Bush in the Re-Social Movements, Politics, and Religion 136
eBook - PDF- Ah Eng Lai(Author)
- 2008(Publication Date)
- ISEAS Publishing(Publisher)
This dimension of the “work” performed by these movements is imperative not just from the viewpoint of their own agenda, but is particularly crucial in the local context for another reason. Increasingly, the leadership of these movements has realized that, in order to acquire legitimacy and approval within the community, it is important that they are not seen exclusively as a “religious” or “spiritual” group, but also as being concerned with broader social, cultural, and economic concerns of the local community. As such, these groups also present themselves as a “welfare society”, which includes a concern with spiritual issues but is not exclusively defined by them. This lesson/realization is especially relevant for groups that want to formalize their presence in the local context. It is ironic that the very rejection of the label “Hindu” by a particular group could actually work against itself in specific instances. At least one movement did not gain approval for offering counselling for prisoners, on grounds that it 155 “Religiously-inspired”, “India-derived” Movements in Singapore 155 was not a “Hindu” group, while several Hindu temples could offer this service without any problems. Diverse Backgrounds of Followers Structurally, the groups are interesting in terms of the socio-cultural, religious and economic profiles of the followers. Again, while variation within the block of movements is to be expected, some broad features can be identified. In terms of numerical strength, a “small” group size is observed — where membership and participation is evident in hundreds rather than in thousands. Members are largely from middle-class and upper, middle-class backgrounds and are English-educated professionals. There are exceptions to this such as the Sai Baba movement which attracts a substantial number of non-English speaking, Chinese participants.
eBook - PDFTheology and Religious Studies in Higher Education
Global Perspectives
- D.L. Bird, Simon G. Smith(Authors)
- 2009(Publication Date)
- Continuum(Publisher)
I regard this way of referring to religion as one side of a two-pronged definition. The other, based on the work of the French sociologist, Danièle Hervieu-Léger, situates religious communities in his-torical, social and cultural contexts by insisting that religion transmits an authoritative tradition, or what Hervieu-Léger calls ‘a chain of memory’ (1999: 89). This two-sided approach, at once focusing on what adherents themselves postulate, while at the same time emphasizing patterns of com-munity authority, provides a definition of religion freed from theological associations. Part one of the definition: focus on the community’s beliefs and experiences The first part of my definition of religion restricts the study of religion to ‘identifiable communities’, which means that religion is always, in the words of Jeppe Jensen (2003: 117) a ‘social fact’. Theories about religion, of course, as Jensen (2003: 118–21) argues further, are also social facts, which means that scholars of religion must always conduct their research in a self-critical, reflexive and transparent manner. Nonetheless, when we speak about religion, we are describing and interpreting that which is observable and testable as part of identifiable social systems. The scholar of religion cannot study individual experiences as religion, unless the experiences are 102 Theology and Religious Studies in Higher Education somehow embedded in shared social constructs that are codified, symbol-ized and institutionalized in communities. In the case of individuals who testify to intense experiences of an extramundane reality, these can be treated as religion only if the individual incorporates the experiences into the life of an already existing identifiable community, or, as in the case of many charismatic leaders or prophets, forges the experience into a new religious movement comprising a definite group.
Index pages curate the most relevant extracts from our library of academic textbooks. They’ve been created using an in-house natural language model (NLM), each adding context and meaning to key research topics.
