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Conclusion

Nader Hashemi

in Islam, Secularism, and Liberal Democracy: Toward a Democratic Theory for Muslim Societies

The conclusion summarizes, re‐states, and expands upon the key theoretical and practical claims on the relationship between Islam, secularism, and liberal democracy. A chapter overview and summary ... More

The conclusion summarizes, re‐states, and expands upon the key theoretical and practical claims on the relationship between Islam, secularism, and liberal democracy. A chapter overview and summary appears that recalls the key arguments and propositions advanced throughout this book. A concluding statement on the significance of this topic for contemporary global politics, especially with respect to understanding the role of religion and international affairs, is advanced.Less

Politics of Religion: Competing and Coalescing Conceptualizations

in Beyond Sacred and Secular: Politics of Religion in Israel and Turkey

This chapter, which examines the competing and coalescing conceptualizations in politics and religion in Israel and Turkey, lays out the intellectual foundation for this study and the reasoning ... More

This chapter, which examines the competing and coalescing conceptualizations in politics and religion in Israel and Turkey, lays out the intellectual foundation for this study and the reasoning behind its conceptual language, and considers the arguments of several scholars, including Emile Durkheim, Max Weber, and Peter Berger. It explores the three areas of interaction that affect religious politics, including the political position and capacity of religion, the rules of power sharing and political contestation, and the symbolic capital of religious ideologies.Less

Purification, Thanksgiving, and the Churching of Women

David Cressy

in Birth, Marriage, and Death: Ritual, Religion, and the Life-Cycle in Tudor and Stuart England

This chapter examines the tradition of purification, thanksgiving, and the churching of women after childbirth in Tudor and Stuart England. These rituals connected the semi-secret domestic world of ... More

This chapter examines the tradition of purification, thanksgiving, and the churching of women after childbirth in Tudor and Stuart England. These rituals connected the semi-secret domestic world of women and childbirth with the public ecclesiastical and communal business of religion. Churching ceremonies occupied a special place in the womanly world of fecundity and motherhood. But like baptism, churching became embroiled in the liturgical and disciplinary contests of English Protestantism and the struggles of religious politics.Less

Lincoln's Political Religion and Religious Politics

John Y. Simon, Harold Holzer, and Dawn Vogel

in Lincoln Revisited: New Insights from the Lincoln Forum

Abraham Lincoln's understanding of the requirements of republican government led him to direct religious sentiment toward responsible democracy or self-government. As a successful republic requires a ... More

Abraham Lincoln's understanding of the requirements of republican government led him to direct religious sentiment toward responsible democracy or self-government. As a successful republic requires a moral or self-controlled people, he believed the religious impulse of society could help moderate the excesses of passion and self-interest in the community. As a means of achieving this social order, Lincoln promoted “support of the Constitution” and “reverence for the laws” to become what he called “the political religion of the nation.” Lincoln believed that the perpetuation of the free government established by the American Revolution depended on this almost sacred law-abidingness, and he called on both politician and preacher to promote this “political religion.” This chapter focuses on a few examples of “Lincoln's political religion and religious politics” to illustrate what he thought was a prudent connection between politics and religion.Less

Religion in the Making of the Israeli and Turkish Nation-States: Incomplete Debates and Continuing Institutional Reformations

in Beyond Sacred and Secular: Politics of Religion in Israel and Turkey

This chapter details the ideas, agreements, and shifts that have marked the broader settings of religious politics in Israel and Turkey, and analyzes how elites of religious parties reproduced ... More

This chapter details the ideas, agreements, and shifts that have marked the broader settings of religious politics in Israel and Turkey, and analyzes how elites of religious parties reproduced religious symbols and why an increasing number of voters find these messages relevant. It warns against ahistorical treatment of the interactions between the state and religion and the reification of a secular state sphere as an area that can be easily separated from the religious sphere. The chapter also suggests that the dependency of the state on religion and vice versa, and not the state's control of religion, seem to make religion one of the most contentious areas of Israel's and Turkey's politics.Less

The World That Smith Made

Winnifred Fallers Sullivan

in Politics of Religious Freedom

This essay argues that the decision in Employment Division v. Smith has shaped the contemporary politics of religious freedom in the United States. Sullivan describes the diversity of religious ... More

This essay argues that the decision in Employment Division v. Smith has shaped the contemporary politics of religious freedom in the United States. Sullivan describes the diversity of religious communities and organizations that came together in opposition to the Smith decision, which was widely perceived as a threat to religion. Post-Smith, a new accommodation between the religion clauses of the First Amendment favors the rights of religions communities over those of individuals.Less

Noble Power and Politics, 1560–1603

Keith M. Brown

in Noble Power in Scotland from the Reformation to the Revolution

This chapter focuses on the tensions within the political community, on those fissures that broke apart the consensus that made government possible. It observes that ideas about resistance, ... More

This chapter focuses on the tensions within the political community, on those fissures that broke apart the consensus that made government possible. It observes that ideas about resistance, implacable religious divisions and a legacy of weak government and civil war that fed the worst attributes of a feuding society all threatened to make the kingdom ungovernable. It also discusses and highlights the nobility's ambivalence towards resistance as James VI came of age, an increasing disenchantment with religious politics, and a growing unease at the escalation of feuding. It explains that the power of individual nobles, and even factions of nobles, could be broken by the crown when it exploited the natural conservatism of noble society and deployed the power of other nobles in its cause. It emphasizes that James VI's removal to England in 1603 changed forever the political landscape of Scotland, altering in the process the relationship between crown and nobility.Less

Modernizing America

Joseph Kip Kosek (ed.)

in American Religion, American Politics: An Anthology

The United States became recognizably modern in several key ways in the half-century after the Civil War. Changes such as the end of slavery, urbanization, and the suffrage movement posed formidable ... More

The United States became recognizably modern in several key ways in the half-century after the Civil War. Changes such as the end of slavery, urbanization, and the suffrage movement posed formidable challenges to religious authority. Many of the most significant writers on religious politics in this period were not government officials but reformers who sought to remake Americans' public life. This chapter presents the following documents: Reynolds v. United States (1878), the Pittsburgh Platform of Reform Judaism (1885), Frances Willard's Woman in the Pulpit (1888), Elizabeth Cady Stanton's The Woman's Bible (1895), W. E. B. Du Bois' “Of the Faith of the Fathers” (1903), Walter Rauschenbusch's Christianity and the Social Crisis (1907), and William Jennings Bryan's “Mr. Bryan's Last Speech” (1925).Less

Urban Megachurches and Contentious Religious Politics in Seoul

Ju Hui Judy Han

in Handbook of Religion and the Asian City: Aspiration and Urbanization in the Twenty-First Century

This chapter examines the contentious religious politics of urban megachurches in Seoul, South Korea. It begins with an overview of the urban political ecology of religion in Seoul in the context of ... More

This chapter examines the contentious religious politics of urban megachurches in Seoul, South Korea. It begins with an overview of the urban political ecology of religion in Seoul in the context of the city's complex multireligious geographies. Focusing on the case of SaRang Community Church, it then highlights the uneven urban geography of conflicting aspirations for growth and belonging. Two key moments relating to the SaRang Community Church are considered: the 2007 labor dispute involving a church leader who was also a corporate business leader, and the 2013 grand opening of the church's new building as well as the controversies surrounding its expansion and construction. This chapter examines the successes of megachurch growth as well as the tensions and political conflicts within and across the public sphere.Less

The Hajj and Religious Politics after 1905

Eileen Kane

in Russian Hajj: Empire and the Pilgrimage to Mecca

This chapter examines how the hajj got embroiled in religious politics in Russia after 1905. In 1908, Russia's minister of internal affairs, P. A. Stolypin, appointed a hajj director for the empire—a ... More

This chapter examines how the hajj got embroiled in religious politics in Russia after 1905. In 1908, Russia's minister of internal affairs, P. A. Stolypin, appointed a hajj director for the empire—a Muslim named Said Gani Saidazimbaev. This move was a major turning point in Russia's efforts to organize the hajj. The new position was tasked to “solve the many existing problems” associated with the hajj and organize it inside Russia. This was the first time that the government put a single institution or individual in charge of the pilgrimage. This chapter first provides an overview of Saidazimbaev's plan to organize the hajj in Russia before discussing the post-1905 political flux and contestation over religious policy, with particular emphasis on Stolypin's conflict with the tsar and the Russian Orthodox Church. It also considers the challenges presented by the hajj amid the dispute, along with the disagreements and miscommunications among tsarist officials involved in the functioning of Russia's hajj infrastructure.Less

Internet Hindus: Right-Wingers as New India’s Ideological Warriors

Sahana Udupa

in Handbook of Religion and the Asian City: Aspiration and Urbanization in the Twenty-First Century

This chapter explores the relationship between social media and an emergent group of right-wing “Internet Hindus,” with particular emphasis on a range of mediations—technological, social, and ... More

This chapter explores the relationship between social media and an emergent group of right-wing “Internet Hindus,” with particular emphasis on a range of mediations—technological, social, and urban—that underlie its making. Drawing on important scholarship by Thomas Blom Hansen, Arvind Rajagopal, and Peter van der Veer, it considers the media practices of Hindu activists in the Internet age and the ways in which digitally mediated agency builds up and maintains the momentum of Hindu nationalist ideology. Specifically, it analyzes the production of the strangeness of the “religious other” through digital agency in Mumbai as a form of violence. Finally, it shows how social media such as Twitter shapes religious politics in Mumbai and Hindu nationalism in particular.Less

Putting the pulp into fiction: the lump-child and its parents in The King of Tars

Jane Gilbert

in Pulp Fictions of Medieval England: Essays in Popular Romance

The central figure of the Middle English popular romance known as The King of Tars (hereafter KT) — a formless lump of flesh born instead of a child — defines a certain view of popular literature. ... More

The central figure of the Middle English popular romance known as The King of Tars (hereafter KT) — a formless lump of flesh born instead of a child — defines a certain view of popular literature. The birth is an outrageously sensationalist event; the ideological message conveyed by its subsequent transformation into a human being through baptism is simplistic, vulgar and racist. This chapter concentrates on the treatment of the lump in order to show how its treatment throws into relief the different configurations of paternity and maternity, of gender roles and of religious politics put forward in a range of re-tellings.Less

The Road to the Bible Belt: Mobilizing the Godly

Joseph Locke

in Making the Bible Belt: Texas Prohibitionists and the Politicization of Southern Religion

By the turn of the twentieth century, a cohort of clerical activists, plagued by notions of a widespread spiritual crisis, realized that religious authority in public life could be bolstered by the ... More

By the turn of the twentieth century, a cohort of clerical activists, plagued by notions of a widespread spiritual crisis, realized that religious authority in public life could be bolstered by the construction of new and powerful denominational bureaucracies, the pursuit of moral reforms such as prohibition, and by tackling head on the widely held anticlerical fears confronting religious activism in public life. Activists such as Methodist minister George C. Rankin would learn, for instance, that reclaiming historical memory—abolishing hostile associations with witch trials and inquisitions–could convince more and more Texans that government could—and should—be run along religious lines. Moral reform was only the most public manifestation of a brewing clerical movement that targeted the popular religious attitudes of everyday southerners to enable the construction of the Bible Belt.Less

Anything That Ought to Be Done: The Triumph of Clericalism

Joseph Locke

in Making the Bible Belt: Texas Prohibitionists and the Politicization of Southern Religion

Fleeting political defeats could not blunt the rising power of Texas’s evangelical activists, and clerics’ cloistered denominational worlds sustained their efforts through all of the bitter political ... More

Fleeting political defeats could not blunt the rising power of Texas’s evangelical activists, and clerics’ cloistered denominational worlds sustained their efforts through all of the bitter political battles over prohibition and other moral reforms during the early twentieth century. Shielded from the stormy winds of politics and the public’s anticlericalism, the clerical culture nourished new generations with the gospel of politics and southern religious leaders pushed triumphantly into public life behind the issue of prohibition. Aggressive religious leaders such as J. Frank Norris and Robert Shuler outmaneuvered hostile politicians, including Governor James Ferguson, and elevated Morris Sheppard, the “father of national prohibition” and a firm champion of Christian nationalism, to the U.S. Senate. By the time the United States entered World War I, clerics were well-positioned to implement the Eighteenth Amendment, allowing for the national prohibition of alcohol.Less