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This lecture gives an overview of religious activism and political utopias. It begins by detailing the emergence of a political symbol, pan-Islam. The second section focuses on how Muslim politics today is partly pre-occupied with contestation over this symbol. Pan-Islam emerged as an idea and a symbol that is conditioned by modern contexts. It is also seen to be shamelessly used and manipulated, but is still able to exercise a pull on the modern Muslim imagination.

This concluding chapter assesses the overall significance of religious activism in bringing renewal to communities, creating new citizenship rights, and ultimately confronting American empire. While activism occurring in both borderlands and cosmopolitan social locations seeks to lessen the impact of the most negative consequences of globalization and empire, the case studies in this book also reveal clear distinctions in the actual character of religious activism in the two settings. Indeed, it is apparent that religious activism frequently serves as a bridge between the two. Moreover, the use of multiple case studies situated in distinct social locations provides a fuller picture of contemporary religious activism's capacity to also engage marginalized people in organizing. Both congregational-based community organizing and worker-justice activism demonstrate religious activism's ability to empower marginalized people to construct new forms of citizenship from the bottom up.

This chapter provides an overview of the book's main themes. This book describes the geographies of desire that underlie subject formation in women's Islamic activism in Egypt. It attempts to further the discussion of the mutuality of religion and secularism in the modern Middle East by foregrounding the heterogeneity of desire in the analysis of subjecthood. It asks the following questions: What are the processes that shape, shift, incite, and produce the desires and subjectivities of women in Islamic movements? How do women activists articulate their desires, and how do these desires mirror the complexity of negotiation, inculcation, and inconsistent appropriation and individual experience? It is argued that the desires of women activists in Islamic movements in Egypt today cannot be fully grasped through a focus on unitary ethical subjects based only on religious practice. Instead, subjecthood is varied, heterogeneous, and unstable.

This chapter marks the shift toward cosmopolitan religious activism by looking at various forms of religious peacemaking. These include traditional pacifist support for conscientious objectors, solidarity work, and human rights work. Less concerned with empowering individuals to act, peace-making activism focuses on the intricacies of the issues, making heavy use of email to reach its supporters. Most organizations also engage in various types of mass actions, including civil disobedience, yet there are a few whose outreach is entirely done online. The Fellowship of Reconciliation (FOR), which is the oldest U.S. religious pacifist organization, has over the decades been joined by a diverse array of other religious peace-making groups. These include Catholic, Jewish, Buddhist, and Muslim peace organizations as well as a younger generation of evangelicals who are important new voices within a religious community marked by strong triumphalist tendencies.

This chapter presents a broader explanation of what the prophetic traditions within both the Hebrew Scriptures and the New Testament have to say about various justice issues. Since there is a multiplicity of voices present in both the Hebrew Bible and New Testament, quotes from both continue to be used to justify hegemony, militarism, racial, ethnic, and gender exclusion. For example, God's willingness to slaughter the Canaanites is still used to justify savagery and genocide against present-day so-called enemies. Prophetic texts have also been appropriated as tools for the maintenance of dominance. In addition to the widespread use of prophetic texts, religious justice activists consistently employ certain common methodologies in their work. These include the use of various popular education models to empower people with a critical consciousness, and the use of civil disobedience within tactical repertoires.

This chapter examines how urban aspirations that drive migration to the megacity are intertwined with religious media practices. More specifically, it shows how Shi'ite traditions in Mumbai articulate with urban aspirations that bring migrants to megacities in a globalized world. The chapter begins with an overview of religious activism in Indian megacities as it relates to recent reformulations of the nexus between religion and globalization. It then considers the aspirations of Twelver Shi'ites in Mumbai within the context of globalized urbanity. It also discusses the role of contemporary media technology in the link between urban socioeconomic aspirations and religious mobilizations. Finally, it analyzes the spread of major religious traditions that emphasize the theme of transcendence.

This chapter studies the emergence of the contemporary living wage movement in the United States. By conscious political choice, U.S. politicians decided to undermine the original intent of the minimum wage by refusing to raise it adequately over the last half-century. Despite increased worker productivity, the minimum wage remains far below what is necessary for a small family in this country. The increase in working poverty thus signals both the economic and political poverty of low-wage workers. Religious organizations join coalitions for a living wage precisely to counter these intertwined poverties. The reemergence of progressive religious activism and the rebirth of religion–labor–community coalitions for living wages have been mutually reinforcing. The chapter shows how religious activists seek to enhance the economic political agency of low-wage workers and put poverty back on the national agenda.

This book presents a synthesis of existing work and offers new insights into the engagement of Christian traditions with the democratic experiment, concentrating specifically on countries in the process of transition to a democratic order or those that might be prospective candidates for democratisation in the future. There are some core defining features of ‘democracy’. Some Christian groups would raise questions about the necessary separation of Church and State. There will almost certainly be occasions when the teachings of the churches come into conflict with the political or societal consensus. The reasons for the changing Catholic attitude towards democracy lay in religious change that affected the ideas and actions of national hierarchies. The approaches in explaining religious activism are explored. The book can hopefully offer a resource for those interested in exploring and thinking more about the complex relationship between Christianity and democracy.

Chapter 2 investigates the previously unexplored history of extracurricular youth mobilization among the Vojvodina’s ethnic Germans during the interwar period. It traces the many specifically “German” youth organizations that flourished as Yugoslav German cultural organizations like the Kulturbund, local pro-Reich Erneuerer, Third Reich teachers, Hitler Youth agents, Yugoslav sports groups, and both local and “reichsdeutsche” Catholic and Protestant agencies entered the youth mobilization race, attempting to imbue young Donauschwaben with specific notions of “Germanness.” As the chapter indicates, the initial organizational plurality and relative indifference to exclusivist national causes “from below” shifted towards the late 1930s: by 1940, over 90 percent of Yugoslavia’s young Donauschwaben had joined the local pro-Nazi Deutsche Jugend, creating a formidable army of potential home and battle front recruits ready and willing to fight for Hitler’s Reich.

This chapter examines how the moral framing of the living wage movement and its religiously resonant arguments on the moral nature of government and wages enable an alternative vision of the political economy. Religious activists not only define the injustice about working poverty, but also identify culpable actors (businesses and government), offer an action plan, and provide the motivation to move people to action. While drawing on long-standing religious traditions for their arguments, religious activists also include pragmatic economic appeals. The social equity strand of neoclassical economics encourages governments to focus their economic corrections on lower and middle classes for greater economic growth. While this establishment has great resonance with U.S. voters, activists must be careful not to embrace the neoliberal ideal of independence from government.

Previous chapters flesh out the ideals that inspired believers from across the nation; this chapter shifts the focus to one believer, Gerrit Smith, and one community, Smithfield, New York, both known for their piety, to situate an understanding of the case study in lived religion that remains the centerpiece of this volume. It does so by documenting Gerrit Smith's path to conversion, contextualizing his religious activism in the context of a town in an area of New York known as the Burned-over District that he used as a laboratory for his religious ideals and by exploring his specific beliefs more fully.