Religion in Rebellions, Revolutions, and Social Movements

Edited By Warren S. Goldstein and Jean-Pierre Reed

forthcoming May 2022

https://www.routledge.com/.../Goldst.../p/book/9781032011523

Book Description:

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.

Table of Contents:

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

-Jean-Pierre Reed and Warren S. Goldstein

Part I: Rebellions

2. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels on Religion and Revolution

-Michael Löwy

3. Mandate for Revolution? Reconsidering Chinese Peasant Rebellions in Terms of Changing One’s Destiny

-Roland Boer

4. Peasant Revolt Against the Roman Imperial Order in Ancient Palestine

-Richard Horsley

5. John Ball and the 1381 English Uprising: From Rebellion to Revolutions

-James Crossley

Part II: Revolutions

6. A Second Path: Nuns in the Early French Revolution, 1789–1791

-Corinne Gressang

7. "Elective Affinities" Between Eastern Orthodox Christianity and the 1917 Russian Revolution

-Tamara Prosic

8. "The Spirit of the Spiritless World": The Shiʿa Rituals of Muharram and the 1979 Iranian Revolution

-Babak Rahimi

9. The Ambivalence of African Independent/Initiated Churches in Colonial and Postcolonial Politics

-Joram Tarusarira and Bernard Pindukai Humbe

Part III: Social Movements

10. Theorizing Religion, Social Movements, and Social Change

-Anna Peterson

11. Mobilizing Religion in Twenty-First Century Nativism in the United States

-Rhys H. Williams

12. Elective Affinities Between Liberation Theology and Ecology in Latin America

-Luis Martínez Andrade

13. Indigenous Spirituality and the Decolonization of Religious Beliefs: Embodied Theology, Collectivity, and Justice

-Sylvia Marcos

14. Epilogue: On the Significance of Religion for Rebellions, Revolutions, and Social Movements

-Jean-Pierre Reed and Warren S. Goldstein

……………………………………………………………………………………………

Warren S. Goldstein, Ph.D.
Center for Critical Research on Religion
1340 Centre Street, Suite 103
Newton Centre, MA 02459 USA
1(617) 678-2180
goldstein@PROTECTED
www.criticaltheoryofreligion.org
 

Editor
Critical Research on Religion
https://journals.sagepub.com/home/crr

Series Editor
Studies in Critical Research on Religion
brill.com/scrr
haymarketbooks.org/series_collections/13-studies-in-critical-research-on-religion