9

Religion in Rebellions, Revolutions,
and Social Movements
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.
Warren S. Goldstein, Executive Director of the Center for Critical Research on

Religion, USA (www.criticaltheoryofreligion.org) has a Ph.D. in Sociology from
the New School for Social Research. He is the editor of Critical Research on
Religion (SAGE Publications) and Series Editor of “Studies in Critical Research
on Religion” (Brill Academic Publishers and Haymarket Books).
Jean-Pierre Reed is Associate Professor of Sociology, Africana Studies, and

Philosophy at Southern Illinois University, USA. His primary research interests
include the sociology of revolutions/social movements, theory, culture, and
liberation theology.
Routledge Studies in Religion and Politics
Edited by Jeffrey Haynes
London Metropolitan University, UK
This series aims to publish high quality works on the topic of the resurgence
of political forms of religion in both national and international contexts. This
trend has been especially noticeable in the post-cold war era (that is, since
the late 1980s). It has affected all the ‘world religions’ (including, Buddhism,
Christianity, Hinduism, Islam, and Judaism) in various parts of the world (such
as, the Americas, Europe, the Middle East and North Africa, South and Southeast
Asia, and sub-Saharan Africa).
The series welcomes books that use a variety of approaches to the subject,
drawing on scholarship from political science, international relations, security
studies, and contemporary history.
Books in the series explore these religions, regions and topics both within
and beyond the conventional domain of ‘church-state’ relations to include the
impact of religion on politics, conflict and development, including the late Samuel
Huntington’s controversial—yet influential—thesis about ‘clashing civilisations’.
In sum, the overall purpose of the book series is to provide a comprehensive
survey of what is currently happening in relation to the interaction of religion and
politics, both domestically and internationally, in relation to a variety of issues.
A Quarter Century of the “Clash of Civilizations”

Edited by Jeffrey Haynes
Religion and Democracy

A Worldwide Comparison
Carsten Anckar
2nd edition
Religion after Deliberative Democracy

Timothy Stanley
Religion in Rebellions, Revolutions, and Social Movements

Edited by Warren S. Goldstein and Jean-Pierre Reed
For more information about this series, please visit: www.routledge.com/

Routledge-Studies-in-Religion-and-Politics/book-series/RSRP
Religion in Rebellions,
Revolutions, and Social
Movements
Edited by Warren S. Goldstein and

Jean-Pierre Reed
First published 2022
by Routledge
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DOI: 10.4324/9781003177821
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Contents
Acknowledgmentsvii
Notes on Contributorsviii
1 An Introduction to the Critical Study of Religion

in Rebellions, Revolutions, and Social Movements 1
JEAN-PIERRE REED AND WARREN S. GOLDSTEIN
PART I
Rebellions29
2 Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels on Religion and Revolution 31

MICHAEL LÖWY
3 Mandate for Revolution? Reconsidering Chinese Peasant

Rebellions in Terms of Changing One’s Destiny 40
ROLAND BOER
4 Peasant Revolt Against the Roman Imperial Order

in Ancient Palestine 53
RICHARD HORSLEY
5 John Ball and the 1381 English Uprising: From Rebellion

to Revolutions 71
JAMES CROSSLEY
PART II
Revolutions89
6 A Second Path: Nuns in the Early French Revolution, 1789–1791 91

CORINNE GRESSANG
vi Contents
7 “Elective Affinities” Between Eastern Orthodox Christianity
and the 1917 Russian Revolution 110
TAMARA PROSIC
8 “The Spirit of the Spiritless World”: The Shiʿa Rituals

of Muharram and the 1979 Iranian Revolution 132
BABAK RAHIMI
9 The Ambivalence of African Independent/Initiated

Churches in Colonial and Postcolonial Politics 158
JORAM TARUSARIRA AND BERNARD PINDUKAI HUMBE
PART III
Social Movements173
10 Theorizing Religion, Social Movements, and Social Change 175

ANNA PETERSON
11 Mobilizing Religion in Twenty-First-Century Nativism

in the United States 199
RHYS H. WILLIAMS
12 Elective Affinities Between Liberation Theology and Ecology

in Latin America 219
LUIS MARTÍNEZ ANDRADE
13 Indigenous Spirituality and the Decolonization of Religious

Beliefs: Embodied Theology, Collectivity, and Justice 231
SYLVIA MARCOS
14 Epilogue: On the Significance of Religion for Rebellions,

Revolutions, and Social Movements 246
JEAN-PIERRE REED AND WARREN S. GOLDSTEIN
Index264
Acknowledgments
The origins of this project go back a few years. The idea is rooted in our respec-
tive scholarship. Warren S. Goldstein’s broad scholarly background on religion, in
particular a course taught at Boston College titled “Religion, Rebellion, and Rev-
olution,” and Jean-Pierre Reed’s work on the role of religion in the Nicaraguan
revolution provided the bases for the organic development of what eventually
became this project. The project is also the product of discussions on the con-
nection between religion and politics as well as conferencing here in the United
States and abroad on the same topic. Our panels on religion and politics produced
useful discussions. We are grateful to fellow panelists and the audience for their
engagement and feedback. Their fruitful participation enriched our endeavor in
many ways. Needless to say, we are also indebted to the contributors for their
willingness to join our project. While at times the editing process was a challenge,
they stood by us. We are grateful for their patience and willingness to address our
feedback.
The College of Liberal Arts (COLA) at Southern Illinois University funded
this edited volume endeavor. They funded a graduate research assistant (GRA),
Scott Miller, who diligently worked with formatting, bibliographical work, and a
substantial part of the index. We are grateful for his assistance. Bill Danaher, the
chair of the sociology department at the time the project gained momentum as a
book contract, procured the funding from COLA to make Scott J.-P.’s GRA. He
also funded the translation of Michael Löwy’s contribution. We are indebted to
him for this and for getting the funds for Scott to become our GRA. Mitch Abidor
delivered an excellent translation of Michael’s contribution—thank you! Last but
not least, Chris Husted supported J.-P. when circumstances merited.
Notes on Contributors
Roland Boer is a professor at the School of Philosophy, Renmin University of

China, Beijing. He has published many works on Marxist philosophy, including
the five-volume work, The Criticism of Heaven and Earth (Brill 2007–2014).
In 2014, the series was awarded the Isaac and Tamara Deutscher Memorial
Prize for the most innovative work in the Marxist tradition. Most recently, he
has published Socialism with Chinese Characteristics: A Guide for Foreigners
(Springer 2021) and Friedrich Engels and Foundations of Socialist Govern-
ance (Springer 2021).
James Crossley is Professor of Bible, Politics and Culture at St Mary’s Uni-
versity, Twickenham, London, UK, and Academic Director of the Centre for
the Critical Study of Apocalyptic and Millenarian Movements (CenSAMM).
He has published widely on Christian origins and religion in English political
discourse.
Warren S. Goldstein, Executive Director of the Center for Critical Research on
Religion, USA (www.criticaltheoryofreligion.org) has a Ph.D. in Sociology
from the New School for Social Research. He is the editor of Critical Research
on Religion (SAGE Publications) and Series Editor of “Studies in Critical
Research on Religion” (Brill Academic Publishers and Haymarket Books).
Corinne Gressang is Assistant Professor of History at Erskine College, USA.
She specializes in the history of the French Revolution and Catholicism. She
serves as Assistant Digital Coordinator for the Society for French Historical
Studies and is a member of the executive council for the Western Society for
French History.
Richard Horsley is Distinguished Professor of Liberal Arts and the Study of
Religion (emeritus) at the University of Massachusetts Boston, USA, and the
author of more than twenty-five books.
Bernard Pindukai Humbe is Lecturer in the Department of Philosophy and Reli-
gious Studies at Great Zimbabwe University, Masvingo. His areas of research
interest include African indigenous religious knowledge systems, the contem-
porary meaning of African traditional religion, African Independent/Initiated
Notes on Contributors ix
Churches and politics, traditional law and social development, religion and
entrepreneurship, religion and social transformation, and religion and power.
Michael Löwy is Emeritus Research Director at the CNRS (National Center for
Scientific Research), Paris, France. His books and articles have been translated
into thirty languages.
Sylvia Marcos is Founder and a Senior Researcher of the Seminario Per-
manente de Antropologia y Genero at the Institute for Anthropological
Research (IIA) at the Universidad Nacional Autonóma de Mexico (UNAM),
and Professor of Catedra de Teología Feminista at Universidad Iberoameri-
cana, IBERO, Mexico. She is the author of many books and articles, and she
has been actively engaged with the indigenous movements in Mexico and
Latin America.
Luis Martínez Andrade is Visiting Postdoctoral Fellow at the Collège d’études
mondiales/FMSH, France, as part of a Gerda Henkel Fellowship. In 2009, he
won the first International Test Prize “Think Against Current” awarded by the
Cuban Book Institute, the Ministry of Culture of Cuba, and the Social Sciences
Edition.
Anna Peterson is Professor in the Department of Religion at the University of
Florida (UF), USA, and an affiliate of UF’s Center for Latin American Stud-
ies; the School of Natural Resources and the Environment; the Tropical Con-
servation and Development Program; and the Center for Women’s, Gender,
and Sexualities Studies. She also coordinates an interdisciplinary initiative on
ethics in the public sphere. Her teaching and research address social and envi-
ronmental ethics and religion’s role in social change.
Tamara Prosic is Senior Researcher at the School of Philosophical, Historical
and International Studies at Monash University, Australia. Her focus is on reli-
gions as totalizing social and cultural phenomena, which discursively and as a
lived experience influence people’s (in)action. She is particularly interested in
the ways Eastern Orthodox Christianity intersects with classical Marxism and
modern Marxist theories and the role Orthodox Christianity played during the
1917 Russian Revolution.
Babak Rahimi is Director of the Program for the Study of Religion and Associ-
ate Professor of Communication, Culture and Religion at the University of
California, San Diego, USA. His research interests concern the relationship
among politics, religion, and technology. The historical and social contexts
that inspire his research range from early modern Islamicate societies to the
global South.
Jean-Pierre Reed is Associate Professor of Sociology, Africana Studies, and Phi-
losophy at Southern Illinois University, USA. His primary research interests
include the sociology of revolutions/social movements, theory, culture, and
liberation theology.
x Notes on Contributors
Joram Tarusarira is Assistant Professor of Religion, Conflict and Peacebuilding
at the University of Groningen, the Netherlands. He has expertise in religion,
conflict, peacebuilding and reconciliation; religion and politics; commu-
nity development; civil society and social movements; and climate-induced
conflicts.
Rhys H. Williams is Professor and Chair of Sociology at Loyola University Chi-
cago, USA, where he also directs the McNamara Center for the Social Study
of Religion. His current research efforts focus on the politics of immigration in
the United States and connections to religion, race, and national identity.
1 An Introduction to the
Critical Study of Religion in
Rebellions, Revolutions, and
Social Movements
Jean-Pierre Reed and Warren S. Goldstein
Since the late 1970s, the resurgence of religion across the globe has come from
the religious right: evangelicals and fundamentalists in the United States; Islam-
ists 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 col-
lection of essays is an examination of the role that religion has played in rebel-
lions, 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 routiniza-
tion 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, the-
ology, and biblical criticism (Goldstein et al. 2015, 2–6).
What makes the critical theory of religion critical? To begin with, it recog-
nizes that the study of religion is not value-free and that religion—as a discursive,
DOI: 10.4324/9781003177821-1
2 Jean-Pierre Reed and Warren S. Goldstein
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 “politi-
cal” 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 flour-
ishing” (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 con-
ditions 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 recogni-
tion 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 denomina-
tions; (3) it recognizes how religions and religious denominations operate in spe-
cific 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 secu-
lar 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
The Critical Study of Religion 3
prestige. All of these elements of social existence interact dynamically and
mutually, and can have combined and reinforcing effects in generating dis-
ruptive 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 reli-
gion 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 oppres-
sion (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 uto-
pian 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 Feu-
erbach, all of whom were theologians.
Neo-Marxists, whose work has tended to focus more centrally on the signifi-
cance 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 understand-
ing 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 chal-
lenge 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. Reli-
gion 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) con-
veys, 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, but also in
members of the Frankfurt School, Max Horkheimer and Walter Benjamin (Boer
2009, 2012), and more recently, post-colonial theorist Enrique Dussel (2009)
and post-Marxist philosophers Slavoj Žižek (2003), Alain Badiou (2003), and
Giorgio Agamben (2005). The latter four thinkers theorize the resurrection (the
Christ-event) as a “state of exception” (to employ Agamben’s terminology) and
Saint Paul’s conversion from Pharisee to Christian apostle as a model of sub-
jective transformation (Reed 2020). The Christ-event and St. Paul’s conversion,
they insist, represent alternative models that could potentially take us beyond
global capitalism (and in the case of Dussel, capitalist decolonial conditions).
Despite their differences, classical, neo-Marxist, post-Marxist, and postcolonial
interpretations—while critical of religion—have in common an openness to its
counter-hegemonic, if not resistant, potential. (In this volume, the relationship
religion has to postcolonial conditions is explored by Marcos [Chapter 13] and
Tarusarira [Chapter 9]).
It is Weber who provides the most useful framework in analyzing how various
components of religion can simultaneously support the dominant order and, at the
same time, challenge it. While Weber was critical of the so-called historical mate-
rialists, he was influenced by them. There are three types of domination for Weber
(1978): traditional, charismatic, and bureaucratic. Traditional and bureaucratic
domination are everyday (alltäglich) types of domination whereas charismatic
domination is not only “not everyday” (außeralltäglich), but it is also indeed rev-
olutionary. Two types of charismatic leaders for Weber are the prophet and the
revolutionary. The prophet, like the revolutionary, is idealistic with a concern for
values. This idealism brings them into conflict with the established order to which
the priests belong. If the prophet or the revolutionary is successful, they will
establish a new order based on “authentic” values. With the death of the prophet
or the revolutionary, however, there is a question of who will succeed them, and
thus, there is a routinization of charisma back into everyday tradition. Following
this Weberian framework centered on the institutional and revolutionary manifes-
tations of religion, Ernst Troeltsch ([1912] 1992) articulated his own church-sect
theory. Churches are part of the established order whereas sectarian movements
are charismatic, revolutionary, and come from below. But due to the secularizing
influence of wealth, sects ultimately become established into churches (Niebuhr
1987). Thus, we see from this framework that religion—as embodied in churches
and the priests who run them—is part of the established order and connected with
the upper classes, while prophets and sectarian movements are charismatic, revo-
lutionary, and articulate the needs of the downtrodden.
Emile Durkheim, who typically is associated with a status quo-oriented the-
ory of religion, also makes a case for the transcendent power of religious rituals
and how revolutions are indeed sacred phenomena. In The Elementary Forms of
Religious Life, a masterwork designed to come to terms with the significance of
religion for society, Durkheim imparts a significant insight: life is fundamentally
ritualistic in character in that our symbolic and material (totemic) representa-
tions of what we consider “good” (sacred) and “bad” (profane) are kept in place
through everyday (formal or informal) ritualistic practices. As symbol-using (and
symbol-making) creatures, that is, we celebrate in our everyday and extraordinary
practices what is good and condemn what is bad. This insight, of course, may
be distilled further. Social life, Durkheim conveys, is fundamentally religious in
nature. We ascribed sacred meaning to things in much the same way “primitives”
ascribed sacred meanings to totems. We also engage in rituals to elevate or protect
that which is considered sacred, and to keep apart and undermine that which is
considered profane. This makes human beings unique creatures, despite their dif-
ferences. At a very fundamental level, human beings are homo sacré—they lead
sacred lives by virtue of the fact that they ascribe sacred and profane meanings to
things, including revolution (Durkheim 1995, 213, 215–16).
Historical Applications of Religion in Rebellions,

Revolutions, and Social Movements
While religion is often a social force that maintains, if not legitimates, the soci-
opolitical order, it has also played a role in rebellions, revolutions, and social
movements. Thus it is a decisive factor in economic, social, and political con-
flict. Rebellions, revolutions, and social movements are interrelated phenomena;
these varied forms of political activity, moreover, share characteristics in com-
mon (Goldstone 1998; McAdam, Tarrow, and Tilly 2001). Broadly speaking, they
stand for contentious collective action. More specifically, they share in common
“the mobilization of individuals and groups to pursue certain goals, the framing of
purposes and tactics, and taking advantages of the opportunities for protest arising
from shifts in the grievances, power, and vulnerability of various social actors,”
including, and more consequentially, the state (Goldstone 1998, 143). Yet, they
are distinct from each other, primarily in terms of the nature of their political
demands and organizational efforts. Rebellions “are often spontaneous uprisings”
(Selbin 2010, 12). They also tend to embody conservative, if not reactionary or
traditionalist, appeals, often manifesting themselves as political responses to per-
ceived threats to traditional or communal ways of life. At best, they are either
aimed at resisting change to the status quo or “changing leaders, policies, or even
political institutions” (12). At worst, they are geared toward restoring the sta-
tus quo ante (Calhoun 1982). According to Hannah Arendt (1965), in contrast
with a rebellion—which, at best, signifies a regime change—a revolution has a
more transformative effect in that it establishes a “new secular order.” Successful
revolutions, as Charles Tilly (2004) has pointed out, have only taken place under
closed political systems, such as monarchies, dictatorships, or colonial orders. In
modern democratic societies, however, protests or challenges against the dom-
inant power structure have often taken the form of social movements seeking
reform. Key to these three forms of political activity is the “cultural valuations”
ascribed to ongoing and emergent political events and state actions (Goldstone
1998, 140), especially because identities, political and otherwise, are constituted
through moral claims (Taylor 1989). In its various forms, religion has been at the
center of the cultural valuations that have inspired contentious collective actions.
Religion, we demonstrate, plays a role in the politics of social transformation
(revolutions), successful or otherwise; reform (social movements) of a limited or
far-reaching kind; and political spontaneity (rebellions).
Rebellions
Rebellions are often part of social movements and revolutions. The social chaos
they produce can provide an opportunity for the conflict between organized politi-
cal challengers and governmental authority to grow in favor of the challengers.
Yet, rebellions also take place independent of social movements and revolutions,
especially when conditions in society are not conducive to organized political
challenges. Social movements and revolutions, however, can emerge from rebel-
lions, which more often than not are spontaneous in that they lack the ideological
and organizational coherence found in social movements and revolutions whose
intentional enterprise gives a more pointed direction to rebellions. Their sponta-
neousness, however, is why rebellions are often considered pre-political (Hob-
sbawm 1971) if not amorphous in nature (Weber 1946). However, they are not
purely spontaneous and disorganized. Their occurrence is periodically predicated
on a moral and emotional logic—based on customary cultural and political expec-
tations—that compels participants to negotiate their relationship to authority—
imperial, communal, or otherwise (Scott 1976; Wolf 1973; Thompson 1991).
According to E.P. Thompson, for example, food rioting in English urban centers
during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries was a collective response stem-
ming from “the political culture, the expectations, traditions, and indeed super-
stitions” present in “the relations—sometimes negotiations—between crowd and
rulers” (1993, 260). As a type of rebellion, food riots were a rational, if sometimes
unorganized and spontaneous, response to socially produced scarcity (Thompson
1993). In this sense, this form of rebellion may be said to be purposeful, if not
opportunistic. The same can be said of other forms of rebellions, including rural
banditry and urban mobs (Hobsbawm 1971), tax revolts (Wolf 1973), resist-
ance to enclosures (Bloch 1970), grocery riots (Rudé 1967), and more recent
contemporary variants in contexts of economic dislocation affecting middle-
income or wage-dependent peasants (Wolf 1973; Scott 1976; Walton 1984), civil
war (Weinstein 2006), political exclusion (Walton 1984), and rebellion-inspired
revolutions (Migdal 1974; Page 1975; Walton 1984). Rebellions can take the form
of local uprisings and/or national revolts and on occasion are part of revolutions.
Their histories, moreover, can also be suffused with religious meaning, as it has
been the case with more purposeful and organized, if not more far-reaching or
revolutionary millenarianism-inspired peasant revolts (Hobsbawm 1971; Scott
1979, 1985) and religious labor sects (Hobsbawm 1971), making the political
significance of rebellions religious. In these later contexts of rebellion in which
religion plays a central role, it does so by ideologically justifying and motivating
collective action based on notions of brotherhood or shared beliefs of what is
right, just, and humane, often in the service of economic interests. They are typi-
cally driven, as Marc Bloch noted of peasant rebellions in France, by “a powerful
preoccupation with the primitive egalitarianism of the Gospels” (1970, 169). We
turn to the history of ancient Israelites to more specifically illustrate the aforemen-
tioned points on purposefulness and spontaneity.
The Rebellions of Ancient Israel

The history of ancient Judaism is a history of exile, military occupation, and rebel-
lions against them: the neo-Assyrian conquest of the Northern Kingdom (ca. 720
bce), the Babylonian conquest of the Southern Kingdom more than one hundred
years later (605 bce), the Babylonian Exile after the Persian conquest (539 bce),
the Maccabean Revolt (167–160 bce), and the repeated peasant revolts against the
Romans culminating in the Jewish War (66–70 ce). It is no wonder that the politi-
cal history of the ancient Israelites begins with a slave revolt—that is, the exodus
from Egypt. Yet, the exodus from Egypt is not just symbolic; it is a metaphor and
allegory for political struggle against empire and oppression—a desire for libera-
tion. Moses thus provides us with a messianic model (Bloch 1995, 1232). (See
Horsley’s contribution to this topic in Chapter 4).
Religious stories centered on the history of ancient Israelites also convey
the significance of prophesy for politics. It was the occupation of the southern
kingdom that resulted in the elimination of the Davidic line and the subsequent
occupation of Jerusalem, which gave rise to the prophecy of the messiah. Mes-
siah means “the anointed one”—one who is democratically chosen by lot like
David (Horsley 1999, 6, 89–96). The messiah, a symbol for liberation, would
lead a revolt against the foreign occupiers and reestablish an independent Jewish
kingdom, an idealized past projected from their tribal confederacy and/or united
kingdom. It was the repeated occupations by the Babylonians, Persians, Greeks,
and Romans that caused messianic beliefs to take hold. The messiah, prophecy
conveyed, would enter during a period of catastrophe (Unheil) and bring about
salvation (Heil) (Weber 1952, 327). Importantly, the messianic belief in the con-
text of ancient Israelite political history was in the son of man, a savior-king; it
was this-worldly, not other-worldly.
Enter Jesus, or at least the story of Jesus (the Gospels, according to Mark,
Matthew, Luke, and John). The very beginning of Matthew (1:1–17) claims to
establish Jesus as being from the Davidic messianic line. There are multiple
emblematic examples of rebelliousness against authority in the story of Jesus,
among others: overturning the tables of the money lenders in the temple (Mat-
thew 21:12; Mark 11:15; John 2:15); not coming to bring peace but a sword
(Matthew 10:34); a contempt for wealth (e.g., a camel passing through the eye of
a needle; Mark 10:25); and giving to Caesar what is Caesar’s and to God what is
God’s (Matthew 22:21). There is also the possible association of Jesus with the
Essenes, a communistic sect, and his contempt for the Pharisees (the priests, the
elders, and the scribes). The disciples in Acts (4:32–37) also have much in com-
mon with both the Qumran community by the Dead Sea and the Essenes, in giv-
ing up their wealth to the community and in living communally (Philo 1993, 689,
745). With the crucifixion of Jesus, however, the messiah is no longer victorious
but suffering; the messianic belief is no longer this-worldly but, in despondency,
becomes other-worldly. This belief largely coincides with the loss of the Jewish
War against Roman occupation (66–70 ad), the time around which the Gospels
were written.
Whether the Old Testament stories about the history of ancient Israelites really
happened does not matter since, regardless, they serve as a foundational myth,
one with political ramifications. Gershom Scholem (1995, 3), for example, points
out how messianic stories in the Old Testament have both a restorative function
and utopian tendency that motivated Israelites to pursue liberation and aspire for
a better tomorrow.
Born in the context of ancient Israelite history, the messianic idea fueled the
rebellions against the Greeks and the Romans. Although it became other-worldly
with the emergence of the Christian Church, the spirit of rebellion continued on
as religious movements in the heretical sects during the Middle Ages and the Ref-
ormation (Kautsky [1895] 1966; Troeltsch ([1912] 1992). Among these are the
Waldensians, Franciscans, Beghards, Lollards, Hussites, Taborties, Brethren, and
Anabaptists. (See Crossley in Chapter 5 for a unique contribution on this analyti-
cal tradition focused on John Ball, a forerunner of the Puritan Revolution).
Revolutions
Social revolutions are typically conceived as transformative historical events
that fundamentally change the social structures of a society. Their causes are
connected to deep structural issues. Here we may consider the combination of
dependent development and economic downturns (Foran 2005), or fiscal crises
(Skocpol 1979); state intransigence affecting not only the interests of elites but
also of the masses (Goodwin 2001); a favorable geopolitical context for move-
ment actors (Goldfrank 1975; Foran 2005); political cultures of opposition and
creation (Foran 2014); demographic trends (Goldstone 1991); and multiclass coa-
litions (Foran 2005; Goodwin 2001; Selbin 1993). They encompass both revo-
lutionary situations and revolutionary outcomes (Tilly 2008). The former term
refers to the successful mobilization of oppositional forces as it pertains to a “dual
power” condition (Lenin 1964; Trotsky 1987). The latter term refers to a transfer
of state power to opposition forces and typically entails processes of revolutionary
institutionalization and consolidation (Selbin 1993). Revolutionary outcomes are
usually associated with the transition to modernity, the rise of capitalism, and the
emergence of democracy. It is these transformative effects, despite similarities,
that sets them apart from rebellions, revolts, and other organized social move-
ments, and makes them rare events in history. Theda Skocpol (1979, 4–5) defined
them in socio-structural terms as “rapid, basic transformations of a society’s state
and class structures; and they are accompanied and in part carried through by
class-based revolts from below.” She famously noted that “revolutions are not
made; they come” (17), a position she subsequently reconsidered in light of her
understanding of the role played by Shi’a Islam in the Iranian Revolution (dis-
cussed later).
Since Skocpol’s pathbreaking structural approach in States and Social Revolu-
tions, a new generation of scholars has aimed to highlight agency more pronounc-
edly in their analyses, although not at the expense of structural explanations.
A focus on the role of religion in revolution has been a key feature of this new
analytic trend. John Foran, for example, notes that “multiclass alliances, often
motivated by diffuse ideals such as nationalism, populism, or religion rather than
particularistic ones such as socialism, have made most of the revolutions in world
history, [including in] . . . Third World cases” (2005, 15). In the context of Third
World revolutionary situations, for example, religion played a significant role in
Iran (Farhi 1990; Moaddel 1993), Mexico (Banerjee 2019), Nicaragua (Lancas-
ter 1988; Reed 2017, 2020), and Zimbabwe (Ranger and Ncube 1996; Banerjee
2019). In Western societies, it played a role in the classical revolutions, among
others, France, England, and Russia. Mark Gould, for instance, has proposed
that religion contributed “a theoretical justification for a challenge to the existing
political system” in the context of the English political revolution (1987, 285). To
illustrate the transformational role of religion for revolution, we turn to the Eng-
lish, French, Russian, Chinese, Iranian, and Nicaraguan cases.
The English or Puritan Revolution

The Puritan Revolution served as a turning point between rebellion and revolu-
tion; it was a political revolution that was religious. It was triggered when Charles I
tried to impose the Episcopalian structure of the Anglican Church over the demo-
cratically elected church hierarchy of the Presbyterian Church in Scotland. Thus,
a war broke out between England and Scotland. Needing to get the approval of
Parliament to raise taxes to finance the war, the House of Commons, which was
dominated by Independents, sided with the Scots against the king, resulting in reg-
icide. The Independents, who rejected church hierarchy, were pejoratively called
Puritans. Oliver Cromwell and his puritanical New Model Army of Roundheads
fought against the royalist Cavaliers. Thus, the civil war was one between Angli-
cans, Presbyterians, and Independents—three Protestant denominations. During
this period, many radical groups and sects emerged. There were the Levellers
(who wanted political equality), led by John Lilburne, who wrote his tracts while
he was a prisoner in the Tower of London, and the Diggers, a Christian commu-
nist group, led by Gerrard Winstanley, who dug up George’s Hill, turning it into a
commune. The Levellers were deists and rationalists (Bernstein [1895] 2000, 89).
There were Ranters, who rejected morality and reveled in drinking, swearing, and
fornication, and Seekers, who went from church to church looking for an ideal
one. There were also those who believed in the coming of the Fifth Monarchy,
not to mention Quakers and Baptists. According to Winstanley, writing about two
hundred years prior to Marx and Engels, the paradise of communism preceded the
existence of private property, and the emergence of private property was the cause
of inequality and poverty. “After the failure of their efforts,” both Winstanley and
Lilburne ended up joining the Baptist movement (Bernstein [1895] 2000, 187).
The French Revolution

In the French Revolution, the spirit of revolutionary contention became secular-
ized, although it retained religious elements in the Cult of Reason and the Cult
of the Supreme Being. These were the new “civil religions” the revolution-
ary outcome in France produced (Sicard 1895), the former atheistic, the latter
deistic. These and other secular religions canonized the martyrs and heroes of
the revolution (e.g., Joseph Chalier, Louis-Michel Le Peletier, Jean-Paul Marat,
Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Voltaire), sacralized new Republican virtues/aspirations
(i.e., democracy, equality, fraternity, liberty), and celebrated the faith of the
revolution (e.g., human morality, human law, and freedom of thought, that is, Reason)
(Mathiez 1968, 84–118; Quinet 1845; Michelet 1868; Soboul 1988, 131–44). In
the end, the French Revolution was the first secular revolution due to its opposition
to the alliance of the Catholic Church with the absolute monarchy of the Bourbon
kings. It was the political realization of the Enlightenment—the “Age of Rea-
son”—which set itself in opposition to faith, on which the church relied. It marked
a break with a religious past, but it also stood for the beginning of a new secu-
lar, quasi-religious, era. “The Revolution,” Albert Soboul noted of the time, “was
good news, the gospel, assuring the salvation of humanity” (1988, 136).
The Jacobins, led by Maximilien Robespierre and Louis Antoine de Saint-Just,
during their Reign of Terror, embarked upon a program of dechristianization.
They founded the Cult of the Supreme Being and replaced the Christian calendar
with the Jacobin calendar, in which Year I began with the establishment of the
First French Republic after the regicide of Louis XVI. The Jacobin calendar had
a ten-month year and a ten-day week. It was implemented on the grounds that it
was more “rational” in that it adopted the already-developed decimal system and
aimed to purge the republic from its backward Christian heritage. But it was also
meant to commemorate the history and virtues of the revolution. The calendar
marked the birth of a new era, the era of the French people in much the same
way, as Walter Benjamin inferred, the birth of Christianity meant the dawn of a
new age (1968, 261). Mona Ozouf asserts that its demise in Year X “deprived the
Revolution of its extraordinary character” (1989b, 546). (In Chapter 6, Corrine
Gressang writes about the role that nuns played in the early years of the French
Revolution, 1789 to 1791, in the context of the rapid sacralization of the secular.)
According to Emile Durkheim (1995), Jules Michelet (1868), Edgar Quinet
(1845), and, more recently, Mona Ozouf (1988, 1989c) and Lynn Hunt (1988a,
1988b), the French Revolution was a sacred phenomenon with materialist and
ritualistic traits. Michelet famously observed, that “the revolution was nothing
without the religious revolution” (la révolution n’était rien sans la révolution
religieuse), by which he meant that the social revolution found “its content, its
strength and its depth” (sonsontien, sa force et sa profondeur) in the religious
revolution—that is, in the adoption of a new scheme of sacred meanings (1868,
115–22). Quinet recognized that the revolution produced sacred places. The Bas-
tille Saint-Antoine and the Tuileries Palace, once sacred symbols of the ancien
régime, became sacred symbols of the new republic. Once a prison, the Bastille
now stood for individual liberty and the power of the people. Once a refuge for
royalty, Tuileries Palace became a place where the Committee of Public Safety,
Constituent Assembly, Jacobin Club du Manèg, and National Convention met.
Durkheim similarly conveyed that the French revolution produced a new “body
of [sacred] symbolism” under effervescent conditions in society:
Nowhere has society’s ability to make itself a god or to create gods been more
in evidence than during the first years of the [French] Revolution. In the gen-
eral enthusiasm of that time, things that were by nature purely secular were
transformed by public opinion into sacred things: Fatherland, Liberty, Rea-
son. A religion tended to establish itself spontaneously, with its own dogma,
symbols, altars, and feast days.
(1995, 233, 215–16)
Building on this insight and Ozouf’s, Hunt adds democracy, equality, frater-
nity, and the sans-culottes to newly established sacred things the revolution pro-
duced (1988b, 28). For Hunt, the newly established system of symbols essentially
embodied new messianic faiths: “the Cult of Reason, which in turn was replaced
by the Cult of the Supreme Being which in turn was replaced by Theophilan-
thropy, which gave way to a revived Catholicism” (Hunt 1988b, 31). These new
faiths—in effect, revolutionary religions—celebrated the new homeland and its
new rational traits. “In worshipping Reason,” François-Alphonse Aulard noted,
the French people “worshipped God” and “the patrie” (1910, 191).
The revolutionary religions were based on material (totemic) and symbolic
representations of what became the new sacred: the Declaration of the Rights
of Man and Citizen (1789), miniature statues of the goddess of liberty, red lib-
erty caps, busts of revolutionary martyrs/heroes, insurrection poles, newly enti-
tled legislatures, hymns, civic oaths, liberty trees, national constitutions (1791,
1793), Temples of Reason/Supreme Being, patriotic altars, and tricolor cockades
(often fastened on caps and baby diapers; Ozouf 1989a, 1989c). Commemora-
tions at the time similarly reinforced new, and condemned old, notions of the
sacred. Festivals, plays, songs, and prayers celebrated republican virtues, the
people, the new nation and new human beings the revolutionary era represented.
Everyday practices embodied new notions of space (horizontality as a signifier of
democracy) in much the same way the calendar embodied new notions of time.
Ceremonial burnings condemned “royalist and Catholic symbols” (Hunt 1988a, x),
while carnivalesque festivals degraded figures of the clergy, the king, the pope,
and nobility.
In ceremony, festival, and procession, the new revolutionary religions meant
to achieve “social integration” and “restore order to the sphere of religious and
moral ideas” (Ozouf 1989c, 566). The ritualistic practices, and totemic represen-
tations that embodied them, not only established a sense of belonging; they also
facilitated “a transference of sacrality” and, in so doing, gave vitality to a new
secular, if religious, horizon (Ozouf 1988, 262–82). As with state religions, revo-
lutionary religions also paradoxically reinforced the Terror in much the same way
religion operated during the ancien régime: it functioned as a source of domina-
tion. Yet, despite their generative and oppressive traits, they never managed to
fully displace the “traditional religion in the soul of the people” (Soboul 1988,
133). Their emergence, however, created a new popular Catholicism. That is, it
transformed the nature of traditional religion.
The Revolutions of 1848 and the Birth of Marxism

Napoleon rose to power during the French Revolution and imposed aspects of the
revolution over the monarchies he conquered. With his defeat in 1814–1815, the
absolute monarchies were reestablished and therefore the alliance between church
and state. Thus, the republican and communist movements which emerged dur-
ing this time—along with the revolutions in which they culminated (France 1830;
France, Prussia, the Hapsburg Empire, Italy in 1848)—were largely secular, setting
themselves in opposition to the church–monarchy alliance. While the republicans
aimed to rid themselves of both absolute and constitutional monarchies and estab-
lish political equality, the communists went a step further, demanding economic
equality. Both of these are further extensions of what Friedrich Nietzsche (1989)
referred to as “slave morality,” having its roots in Judaism and Christianity, the
first of which desired freedom, while the latter desired equality before God. The
churches and clergy, on the other side, supported the legitimists who wanted to
restore absolute monarchies; it was those in favor of a republican form of govern-
ment who wanted to sever this connection. In an attempt to avoid being overthrown,
Prussian Kaiser Friedrich Wilhelm IV—a devout Pietist—made concessions allow-
ing Prussia to become a constitutional monarchy. In the tumultuous year of 1848,
Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels penned The Communist Manifesto for the League
of the Just, a Christian communist organization headed by William Weitling, whose
motto was “all men are brothers.” Indeed, their supposition was that communism,
like paradise, existed at the beginning and end of history; like the Messiah, the
revolution would occur during a crisis and bring about a new age (Michael Löwy
writes about “Friedrich Engels on Religion and Revolution” in Chapter 2).
The Russian Revolution of 1917 and the German Revolution of 1918
The Russian Revolutions of 1917 and the German Revolution of 1918 were
Marxist-inspired and carried on by both the Mensheviks and Bolsheviks in Russia
(minority and majority social democratic labor parties) and the German Spar-
takus, which was a splinter group from the German SPD. While both revolutions
were more secular and atheistic than the French revolutions that preceded them,
they relied on a revolutionary utopian faith in a future classless society. While
Lenin ([1905] 1965) reiterated Marx’s opium metaphor in a more dogmatic man-
ner, Anatoly Lunacharsky, who became Commissar for Enlightenment in 1917,
was more agnostic; he advocated “God building,” which attempted to develop a
secular religion of socialism. He saw the prophets as revolutionary and said that
Marx was the greatest among them in his two-volume Religion and Socialism,
which was attacked by Lenin (Boer 2014, 189, 201, 203). Lunacharsky’s mixture
of socialism and religion was also opposed by the Russian Orthodox Church. Yet,
as Tamara Prosic writes in Chapter 7, there were “ ‘elective affinities’ between
the non-messianic utopian aspects of Orthodox Christianity and the utopianism
of Marxism,” which thereby helped to facilitate the Russian Revolution of 1917.
While the Bolsheviks turned many churches into museums, they were never able
to completely repress the Russian Orthodox Church. The failed revolution of
Spartakus, on the other hand, was too short-lived to make any definite statements
about its relationship to religion. But, interestingly enough, that revolution was
put down by the right-wing Social Democrats who formed a coalition with the
German Democratic and Catholic Center Parties; this coalition established the
Weimar Republic after the abdication of Kaiser Wilhelm II (Harman 2003).
The Taiping Rebellion, the Chinese Revolution, and the Cult of Mao
China has had a history of peasant rebellions. The founding of the Ming dynasty
occurred as the result of a rebellion led by millenarian messianic movements.
Zhu Yuanzhang, the leader of the rebellion who became emperor of a new
dynasty, articulated this means of regime change as the Mandate of Heaven. For
an emperor to rule, they must have the mandate of heaven—that is, as long as
they can provide economic prosperity and social stability. Natural and humanly
caused disasters can be seen as a sign of the failure of their mandate. When a crisis
occurs, the peasants have the right to rise up in revolt and replace the emperor,
thereby establishing a new dynasty, and so the cycle continues (Yonglin 2011).
(Roland Boer writes about the Mandate of Heaven in Chapter 3.) Thus, in China,
we see a spirit of rebellion that developed independently of the Western tradition.
The Chinese Revolution of 1911–1912 brought about the end of the Qing
dynasty and the establishment of a republic. The first secular social move-
ment in China was the May Fourth Movement, which was opposed to reli-
gion, in particular Confucianism. The Chinese Communist Party, led by Mao
Tse Tsung, and the Chinese nationalist Kuomintang, led by Chiang Kai Shek,
had opposing positions on religion. Mao, who received a Confucian education,
became an atheist Marxist while Chiang married a Methodist who graduated
from Wellesley College in Massachusetts and was baptized. During the civil
war, Mao tolerated minority religions in the outlying areas they controlled.
However, after the Chinese Communists were victorious 1949, they imple-
mented the Three Self-Patriotic Movement—in essence, state-controlled reli-
gious organizations, one for each of the major religions: Confucianism, Taoism,
Buddhism, Christianity, and Islam. Religion was partially repressed during the
Great Leap Forward (1958–1960), and then completely during the Cultural
Revolution (1966–1976). All temples, churches, and mosques were closed, and
clergy were sent to the countryside. In the place of religion, there was the
establishment of the Cult of Mao, a secular religion. Mao was depicted as pos-
sessing “extraordinary powers”; his portrait was treated as an icon (Goossaert
and Palmer 2011, 187; Urban 1971, 176). Followers of the Cult of Mao sang,
danced, and made vows and confessions in front of his portrait or statue. Mao
was deified as “the Red Sun”—“the savior of the people” (Yang 2012, 74, 91).
He was portrayed as a healer of the sick—one who could perform miracles.
Mao Zedong’s thought advocated asceticism; comrades engaged in self-sacri-
fice. The Cult of Mao was a community of brotherly love (Urban 1971, 8, 17,
24, 63–63, 94, 96, 117, 119).
At the same time as the emergence of the Cult of Mao, those who practiced
traditional religion were forced underground, provoking the growth of the house
church movement. After the end of the Cultural Revolution, the three self-patri-
otic movement was reestablished. Nevertheless, the house church movement has
continued to grow, and groups such as the Falun Gong, which held a mass demon-
stration outside the headquarters of the Chinese Communist Party in 1999, have
been repressed.
The Iranian Revolution

Revolutionary messianism is found not only in Judaism and Christianity but
also in Islam, particularly in the Shiite tradition of the twelfth, or hidden, Imam,
the myth Ayotallah Khomeini used during the Iranian Revolution of 1979. The
revolution had roots in the 1950s. The 1953 coup d’état, backed by MI6 and the
Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), overthrew Mohammed Mossadeq, the leader
of the National Front, which controlled Parliament. Mossadeq was a thorn to
British and American interests because he nationalized the Iranian oil industry,
which was previously owned by the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company (renamed as
the British Petroleum Company [BP] in 1953). The coup suppressed both the
nationalists and communists (Tudeh Party). However, it was unable to repress
the mosque network, which was composed of independently endowed Madras-
sas and mosques. In the early 1960s, Ayatollah Khomeini spoke out against the
shah in Qom. He was placed under house arrest for doing so, which triggered
demonstrations; he subsequently went into exile. Parallel to Lenin’s essays writ-
ten in Switzerland, he recorded sermons on cassettes in Najaf, Iraq, that were
smuggled back into Iran. Khomeini’s pronouncements prioritized socioeconomic
issues over theology. During the 1970s, he adopted the language of sociologist
Ali Shariati and the Mojahedin (Abrahamian 1993, 12, 47). The Mojahedin and
the Fedayeen were two groups that mixed Islam and revolutionary guerilla strug-
gle engaging in attacks against the regime. Like them, he depicted society as
being composed of two warring classes: the oppressors and the oppressed. How-
ever, unlike the Marxists, he remained a constant defender of private property
(39–40, 47). During the late 1970s, demonstrations became increasingly wide-
spread against the shah.
The ideological fuel behind the Iranian revolution was Shi’a Islam. As the pri-
mary religious idiom with a history of both conformity and dissent in Iran, it oper-
ated as a symbolic reservoir of resistance against unjust authority in the 1970s.
In the context of a sociopolitical crisis, it was rearticulated to resist an oppressive
regime. According to Mansoor Moaddel,
Shi’i revolutionary discourse . . . transformed the economic difficulties

and social discontents of the 1970s into a revolutionary crisis. Its symbolic
structures and ritualism contributed to the revolutionary mobilization of the
people against the state and provided an effective channel of communica-
tion among participants in the revolution. Shi’i revolutionary discourse also
conditioned contentions for power and class conflict in the postrevolution-
ary period.
(1993, 24–25)
Shi’a Islam’s founding myth is the story of the Battle of Karbala, where the
grandson of the prophet Muhammad—Husayn ibn Ali—was killed by Yazid I, the
usurping ruler of the Umayyad caliphate, which was the second caliphate estab-
lished after the death of Muhammad. Husayn’s death became a symbol of martyr-
dom in struggles against illegitimate authority, injustice, and religious falsehood.
For Shi’ites, the Battle of Karbala became a symbolic representation and model
of revolution. It imparted to its followers “that it would be better to be dead than
to compromise with injustice.” During the course of the Iranian Revolution, some
“protesters who faced machine guns and became agitated when they saw their
friends shot would shout the slogan ‘Every place is Karbala! Everyday is Ashura!’
(the day Iman [Husayn] was beheaded” (Salehi 1988, 50). In the context of pro-
tests like this one, the Husayn myth functioned as an agentic conduit through
which protesters mobilized. Theda Skocpol reevaluated her structural approach to
revolution in light of the latter recognition, specifying that
the networks, the social forms, and the cultural myths of Shi’a Islam helped
to coordinate urban mass resistance and to give it the moral will to persist
in the face of attempts at armed repression. . . . [The] “traditional” part of
Iranian life [although] fitting in new ways into a steadily changing modern
socio-political scene [] provided crucial political resources for the forging of
a very modern-looking revolutionary movement.
(1982, 275)
and concluding that
no innovative revolutionary propaganda retailed to “the masses” overnight,

in the midst of a social crisis, [can] sustain the self-conscious making of a
revolution. But a world-view and a set of social practices long in place can.
(Ibid., 275–76, emphasis added)
The Husayn myth, the myth of the Twelfth Imam, and the Doctrine of Imamate
are significant components of Shi’a Islam’s worldview. The first one “provided
a framework for labelling and reacting against the Shah as the evil, tyrannical
‘Yazid of the present age’ ” (274). The second one stood for a “messianic yearn-
ing,” invoked in the figure of Khomeini, and represented an Islamic “telos of
history” (277). The third one, which is connected to the Husayn myth, “ascribes
legitimate rule to the imams who were descendants of Ali” and “since the Shi’ites
presumably do not differentiate between political and religious spheres, a tension
has always existed between religious authority and political power” (Farhi 1990,
90). In a radicalizing and growing context of Islamic nationalism, this tension
favored oppositional forces. Funerals, religious holidays, collective prayer sites,
and bazaars reinforced and facilitated the growth of the religious resistance that
culminated in the overthrow of the Shah. (Babak Rahaimi writes about how the
Shia mourning ritual was used to bring about the Iranian Revolution of 1979 in
Chapter 8).
The Nicaraguan Revolution

Much as it was the case for Iran, religion functioned as a cultural precondition for
many Nicaraguans’ resistance to the increasingly arbitrary and repressive politi-
cal climate under the Somoza dictatorship in the 1970s. While the organizational
efforts of the Sandinistas (FSLN) were an essential component of the insurrection-
ary challenge that culminated in the victorious overthrow of the Somoza regime
in the summer of 1979, their eventual victory was not primarily the result of their
vanguard undertaking. Some people participated in the struggle out of Marxist
beliefs. Others did so as a means of self-defense, because they were inspired by
ongoing events to do so or because they sought to reconcile a world turned asun-
der. Many were inspired to take arms against the regime because of liberation the-
ology. Liberation theology is a prophetic expression of the Christian tradition with
roots in not only Vatican II (1962–1965) and the second and third Latin American
Episcopal Conferences (1968 and 1972) but also national and local socio-
religious developments. It is a radical theological perspective on class oppression/
exploitation that is defined by a preferential option for the poor, by a commitment
to establishing solidarity with the economically and socially marginalized, by
denouncing and changing the sociopolitical conditions and mechanisms that keep
them marginalized while preventing the promotion of the common good, and by
the formation of more fraternal and just societies. From the perspective of libera-
tion theology, the kingdom of heaven is not other-worldly but rather this-worldly,
requiring “the total transfiguration of th[e] world” at the hands of committed
Christians inspired by the notion of egalitarian brotherhood (Boff 1978, 49). As a
counterhegemonic thought, liberation theology made it possible for Nicaraguan
Christians to rearticulate conventional religious meaning and to challenge the
injustices associated with the Somoza regime.
The religious in Nicaragua became insurgents in large part because of their par-
ticipation in Bible-study settings. These included seminaries, CBCs (Christian-
based communities), and cursillos de cristiandad (small Christian courses). These
sites functioned as forums for liberation theology and the radicalization of Chris-
tians. They also became indispensable links between the FSLN and the mounting
popular struggle against the Somoza regime in the 1970s. The discussions tak-
ing place at these settings “helped [many] to see that injustice and exploitation”
did not conform “to the will of God” (Mulligan 1991, 93). For example, a four-
volume collection, The Gospel in Solentiname—based on recorded verse-based
discussions centered on stories of Christian virtue, miracles, prophecy, and social
challenges in a Bible-study setting—reveals how participants, in their readings
of the Gospels of John, Matthew, and Luke, found justification for denouncing
and condemning corrupt political and religious leaders and the adverse condi-
tions imposed on them (Reed 2017). In this religious dialogic context, as it was
the case with similar sites, humble and middle-class Christians discovered their
connection to prophetic Christianity, interrogated religious conventions and their
relationship to injustices, developed vocabularies of condemnation, and found
motives for action, including violent action. To be specific, those who participated
in these Bible-based discussions identified and condemned adversaries as villain-
ous, while they deemed spontaneous uprisings on the part of the population, and
guerrilla attacks against state forces, as invariably defensible and virtuous (Reed
2020). These latter actions were similarly heroized. Who were the enemies of the
people? Those “on the side of power,” exploitation, and oppression (Cardenal
1976, 189): the dictator (Somoza), who was often compared to the devil; state
forces, who acted like Roman soldiers; the rich, who were exploiters; histori-
ans, journalists, politicians, priests loyal to the magisterium, and the well-to-do
who defended the status quo; and US imperialism, which was often recognized as
inherently evil in discussions. In the end, Bible-based discussions made it possible
for many Nicaraguans to assume insurgent identities, and ultimately to take up
arms against the state. (See Martínez Andrade in Chapter 12 on a unique explora-
tion of the connection liberation theology has to environmentalism).
Social Movements
Social movements, as is the case with revolutions, “problematize the ways in
which we live our lives.” They “call for changes in our habits of thought, action
and interpretation” (Crossley 2002, 9). Rebellions seek to restore traditional ways
of life, but they can also play a role in radical calls for change. As argued, the
difference between these three types of political activity lies in the degree of
change that is sought in society. While revolutions typically entail a fundamental
transformation of society, and rebellions tend to be (but are not always) less ambi-
tious and organized in their demands, social movements arise in societies that are
democratic enough to make reforms when needed and when pressure is applied
on the power structure. (Anna Peterson theorizes about the role that religion plays
in social movements in Chapter 10. In Chapter 11, Rhys H. Williams analyzes
the discursive context under which an anti-immigration and nativist movement
gained momentum in the US).
Broadly speaking, social movement scholars draw on the analytical insights
of resource mobilization (RM) and political process (PP) models to make sense
of this particular form of political activity. They also draw on other frameworks
that focus on the more subjective features of political mobilization (e.g., framing,
emotions, contingency) to supplement the former two models. RM emphasizes
the role of elite outsider organizations and the resources they supply. However,
PP is critical of this work. It does not completely deny the role of these groups,
though, as it makes a case for how they play a role in mobilization. They do
so after indigenous organizations have created the mobilizational conditions that
make oppositional challenges plausible. Compared to RM, PP is defined by a
bottom-up approach to the study of politics, given the primacy it attaches to the
role indigenous organizations play in making a movement viable. Two other dis-
tinguishing characteristics of PP are its focus on contexts of political opportu-
nity and the meanings movement participants attribute to the larger sociopolitical
environment and their capacity to mobilize their communities. In combination,
the import of these two models may be distilled to three factors that explain a
social movement’s emergence and its mobilizational dynamics. Although identi-
fied and named in various ways, and similar to factors scholars of revolution con-
sider,1 these are: idea, organization, and opportunity structure. Idea refers to the
role of ideology and culture in motivating and mobilizing movement actors and
potential movement participants.2 Organization refers to the resources movement
organizations provide movement participants.3 An opportunity structure refers to
the larger macro-structural contexts—economic, political, legal, and/or discur-
sive—that enable a movement’s emergence and/or mobilization.4
Beginning in the mid-nineteenth century, the US and varied European coun-
tries have had a series of social movements seeking reform: abolitionist, suffra-
gist, labor, civil rights, antiwar, gay rights, feminist, and environmental. While
these were widely secular social movements, religion—in many of them—played
a significant role in their gaining momentum. We consider the civil rights and the
Central American solidarity movements as an illustration of some of the afore-
mentioned points and of the role religion played in them as a resource for cultural
valuation.
The Civil Rights Movements

The civil rights movement had its bases in the black church, other indigenous
organizations, and their respective leaders (e.g., the Southern Christian Lead-
ership Council, Alabama Christian Movement for Human Rights, Nashville
Christian Leadership Council, and United Christian Movement, Inc.; Morris
1984; McAdam 1982). Outsider organizations, in conjunction with indigenous
ones, also played a role in the movement (McAdam 1982, 1988).5 In Political
Process and the Development of Black Insurgency, 1930–1970 (1982), Doug
McAdam makes the strongest case for opportunity structures at the political,
legal, and economic levels. According to him, the civil rights movement emerged
in a macro-structural historical context (1931–1954) favorable to its main interest:
desegregation. Rapid changes in the nature of the regional economies of southern
states—from agricultural to industrial production—transformed their respective
class structures and the economic and educational opportunities of the African
American community, providing resources to it when these were not previously
available. The collapse of the cotton economy meant the collapse of the peonage
and tenancy systems, a significant development because it undermined social con-
trol mechanisms associated with these agricultural practices. The collapse of the
cotton economy also resulted in a demographic outflow to northern and southern
urban centers. The demographic outflow to northern cities elevated the national
electoral presence of blacks, giving them increasing leverage in presidential elec-
tions. The demographic outflow to southern cities meant better-paying jobs for
those who could find industrial work; it also meant black workers in urban areas
had more time on their hands for political activism since the industrial workday
was considerably shorter than the agricultural workday associated with the peon-
age and tenancy systems. Supreme Court decisions, most notably the 1954 Brown
decision, also played a role, signaling to movement entrepreneurs that their organ-
izational efforts at dismantling segregation were not in vain. Another significant
factor in this consequential movement was its participants’ ability to rearticulate
the meaning of religion—their ability to recombine religious values and ideas
in unfamiliar and new ways such that they would gain new connotations, con-
gruency, and lived significance for political and oppositional involvement (Omi
and Winant 2014). Besides cementing the movement’s oppositional culture, the
rearticulation of black Christianity created a “cultural opportunity” through which
movement actors could find legitimate reasons for their collective action efforts
(McAdam 1994). In doing so, it made the movement’s desegregation goal a plau-
sible and possible political agenda. Aldon Morris explains this impact, noting,
By giving contemporary relevance to familiar biblical struggles . . . by

defining such religious heroes as Jesus and Moses as revolutionaries . . .
by systematically introducing them to direct action workshops, movement
literature, and a familiar religious doctrine that had been significantly altered
to encourage protest. . . . A “good Christian” was one who actually sought to
change “sinful” social conditions.
(1984, 98–99)
To date, the racial order continues to be a pressing issue for people of color in
the United States. Yet, the civil rights movement made possible the passage of
significant reforms that changed the racial order, if in a limited way. In a political
context favorable to the interests of fundamentalist Christians today, religious
progressive activism continues to play a role in the US, although in diminished
form (Braustein, Fuist, and Williams 2017).
The Central American Solidarity Movement

In Convictions of the Soul: Religion, Culture, and Agency in the Central America
Solidarity Movement (2004), Sharon Nepstad makes a case for the significance
of religious agency in the anti-US interventionism in the Central America soli-
darity movement that emerged in the 1980s. Her focus in this significant book
is not so much opportunity structure, but rather, the mobilization of religious
ideas and the role played by organizations in what essentially became a trans-
national movement. Her overall aim, however, is bringing back moral convic-
tion to the study of social movements, given the structural and organizational
bias in social movement scholarship. To make sense of religious agency—
that is, the moral conviction of participants—she focuses on leadership, the
biographical background of activists, and their emotional engagement through
religious storytelling, solidarity trips, sanctuary work, and rituals. She starts with
missionaries—the leaders of the movement—and finds that their missionary
experiences, theological training, organizational skills, and understanding of
liberation theology made their leadership effective. Rank-and-file activists joined
the movement on account of their biographical predispositions: their progressive
religious upbringing emphasizing equality, justice, peace, and solidarity with the
oppressed; the labor- and pacifism-oriented neighborhoods they grew up in; the
critical thinking skills imparted to them in their families and churches; and their
later life experiences traveling abroad and witnessing such historical events as
Vatican II and the Vietnam War. These predispositions made them less likely to
develop strong emotional ties to political authority, more likely to question blind
patriotism, and more critical of global issues, ultimately making “them respon-
sive to information about human rights abuses, poverty, oppression, and war” in
Central America (Nesptad 2004, 85).
In what ways was the commitment of solidarity activists specifically sustained/
mobilized? The short answer to this question is emotions, stories, solidarity trips,
sanctuary work, and rituals. Experienced in the context of safe havens and dur-
ing the course of collective action, these subjective factors facilitated the for-
mation of a collective identity—“we-feelings” based on shared goals, interests,
values, shared definitions of situations, and a sense of destiny—denoting bounda-
ries between “us” versus “them,” a consciousness of dissent, and the assertion
of different moral standards. The use of martyr stories during church gatherings
about the assassination of religious figures in El Salvador—Archbishop Oscar
Romero and four American nuns—was a way to animate, educate, engage, and
familiarize (prospective) solidarity activists. Leaders of the movement drew par-
allels between the martyrdom of these religious figures and Jesus. These stories
gave “empirical credibility” to the ongoing civil wars in the region (Nesptad
2004, 107). They humanized the victims of US-sponsored wars. More important,
they carried a moral message about what was wrong (innocent victims suffered
unjustly), helped identify the US government as an enemy of Central American
people, facilitated participant solidarity based on social justice concerns and com-
passion for the oppressed, and evoked moral outrage and hope, two key emotions
through which American Christians revitalized their faith. Because Romero at one
point held conservative views about the plight of the poor, his transformation into
a challenger of the oppressive regime in El Salvador functioned as a conversion
model for movement participants. Ultimately, the celebration of Romero’s and the
nuns’ martyrdom, Nepstad conveys, became a powerful reminder of the power of
resurrection.
Solidarity trips to El Salvador, Guatemala, and Nicaragua and sanctuary work
in the United States not only opened the eyes of (prospective) participants to the
realities of war, but they also provided opportunities to encounter vilified com-
munist-others. These organized activities evoked strong emotions: outrage, guilt,
and sadness after witnessing the realities of war; anger at misinformation from
the Reagan administration; and hope that their religion-inspired political activism
would deliver peace. They also engendered a strong sense of solidarity with the
people of El Salvador, Guatemala, and Nicaragua. In the context of movement
decline in the late 1980s, emotions also played a role. Movement participants
were able to maintain their activism on account of the emotional energy they
garnered in liturgy-based demonstrations against the School of the Americas, a
counterinsurgency command center in the United States where the training of
Latin American military personnel continues to take place today, although under
a different name and with a curriculum that ostensibly incorporates human rights
training—a departure from its legacy of training commanding officer members of
repressive forces in the region.
To date, the United States continues its interventionist diplomacy in the West-
ern Hemisphere and beyond. As a hegemon in the context of global capital, it has
continued its role as the world’s police imposing its will on other nations willy-
nilly, although some would say for geopolitical reasons. Yet, for a brief moment
in time, its deleterious interventionism was challenged by progressive Christians.
While the Central America solidarity movement failed to change the nature of US
foreign policy, it nevertheless stands as a reminder that justice is a principle by
which the religious are guided.
Conclusion
While religious forces have often been conservative if not reactionary, they have
also played progressive and emancipatory roles in making society more just and
equitable. Historical records, including most of the histories portrayed in this
volume, speak to this latter pattern. In antiquity, history and politics were seen
through religious lenses. Desires for social change were expressed in religious
terms. Opposition to the established order took the form of rebellions that sought
regime change rather than a fundamental transformation of society. Since the
Enlightenment, however, there have been more secular understandings of it, and
thus the birth of the modern social and political revolution which attempted to
bring about a new secular order (Novus Ordo Saeclorum) (Arendt 1965). In this
context, religious forces have increasingly operated in a secular environment,
especially when political, social, or economic crises are involved. This new secu-
lar order brought about republican forms of government that gave rise to social
movements. Some of these movements (e.g., the civil rights movements) have
not only been inspired by religion but also used religious institutions (e.g., the
black church) as their organizational basis. As a familiar and taken-for-granted
cultural model with empirical credibility, religion will continue to offer the reli-
gious vocabularies of conviction—given progressive religion’s moral imperatives
for brotherhood, equality, freedom, justice, and love—that will allow them to deal
with conditions that undermine human flourishing. Understanding the dual role
that religion plays in rebellions, revolutions, and social movements is the key to
unlocking the doors to a more humane, just, and egalitarian future.
Notes
1 Idea, organization, and opportunity structure play a role in revolutions, although the
terminology used by scholars of revolution is different. Scholarship on revolutions calls
attention to macro-structural contexts. Unlike opportunity structures, however, the focus
is more on the effects of detrimental conditions rather than facilitation. Fiscal crises
(Foran 2005; Skocpol 1979), state intransigence (Goodwin 2001), a favorable geopo-
litical context for movement actors (Goldfrank 1975; Foran 2005), and demographic
trends (Goldstone 1991) are macro-structural conditions that are individually necessary
but not sufficient for a revolutionary outbreak. Ideas and organization also play a role
as indicated by the terms political cultures of opposition and creation (Foran 2014) and
multiclass coalitions (Foran 2005; Goodwin 2001; Selbin 1993).
2 It also refers to defining and evaluating the grievances or social problems facing them,
justifying collective action, and developing a shared collective identity. These processes
entail the assignation of meaning to events, situations, participants, and opponents
according to the cultural/ideological meaning-systems movement participants share.
They are connected to what Goldstone refers to as “cultural valuation.”
3 Organizations are themselves a resource, but organizations also provide movement par-
ticipants, among other resources, a space to meet, a safe haven, funds, personnel (includ-
ing leaders), people with whom to discuss issues, collective action repertoires, a place to
develop skills, and discretionary resources.
4 An opportunity structure does not produce a movement per se. Rather, it creates a “struc-
tural potential” for it (McAdam 1982, 48).
5 In 1964, Freedom Summer, a project designed to bring national attention to the enfran-
chisement plight in Mississippi, is an example of external and indigenous organizations
working together. It should be noted, however, that external support grew earlier in the
decade, three years prior Freedom Summer, and after indigenous groups created insur-
gency conditions (McAdam 1982, 123, 146–80).
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Weber, Max. 1946. “Class, Status, Party.” In From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology, edited
by Hans Heinrich Gerth and C. Wright Mills, 180–95. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
———. 1952. Ancient Judaism. New York and London: The Free Press.
———. 1978. Economy and Society. 2 Vols. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Weinstein, Jeremy M. 2006. Inside Rebellion: The Politics of Insurgent Violence. Cam-
bridge: Cambridge University Press.
Williams, Rhys H., and Thomas J. Josephsohn. 2013. “North American Sociology of Reli-
gion: Critique and Prospects.” Critical Research on Religion 1 (1): 62–71.
Wolf, Eric R. 1973. Peasant Wars of the Twentieth Century. New York: Harper Torchbooks.
Yang, Fenggang. 2012. Religion in China: Survival and Revival under Communist Rule.
Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press.
Yonglin, Jiang. 2011. The Mandate of Heaven and the Great Ming Code. Seattle and Lon-
don: University of Washington Press.
Žižek, Slavoj. 2003. The Puppet and the Dwarf: The Perverse Core of Christianity. Cam-
bridge: MIT Press.
Part I
Rebellions
2 Karl Marx and Friedrich
Engels on Religion and
Revolution1
Michael Löwy
Much ink has been spilled concerning the Marxist critique of religious alienation
and the fight of materialist atheism against Christian idealism. Something else
interests us in this chapter, however: the contribution of Marx and Engels to the
sociology of religious facts and their interest in the oppositional and/or revolu-
tionary role of religion. An attentive excursion on this terrain could present us
with some surprises.
Supporters and adversaries of Marxism seem to be in agreement on one point:
the famous phrase “religion is the opium of the people” represents the quintes-
sence of the Marxist conception of the religious phenomenon. But this formula
has nothing specifically Marxist about it. With a few nuances here and there, it can
be found before Marx in Kant, Herder, Feuerbach, Bruno Bauer, and many others.
Let us take two examples from writers close to Marx.
In his 1840 book on Ludwig Börne, Heine refers in a rather positive—and
slightly ironic—way to the narcotic role of religion: “Blessed is a religion which
pours into the bitter chalice of suffering humanity a few sweet and soporific drops
of spiritual opium, a few drops of love, faith, and hope.” Moses Hess, in his essays
published in Switzerland in 1843, adopts a more critical position, although one
not lacking in ambiguity: “Religion can make bearable . . . the unhappy con-
sciousness of servitude . . . in the same way opium is of great assistance in painful
illnesses” (Gollwitzer 1962, 15–16).
The expression appears shortly thereafter in Marx’s article “A Contribution to
the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right” ([1844] 1960b). A careful reading
of the entire paragraph shows that his thought is more complex than is usually
thought. In reality, at the same time Marx rejects religion, he nevertheless takes
its dual character into account:
Religious despair is at one and the same time the expression of the true despair
and a protest against this real despair. Religion is the sigh of the oppressed
creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It
is the opium of the people.
(Marx and Engels 1960a, 22, 35; Marx
and Engels 1960b, 42, 77)
DOI: 10.4324/9781003177821-3
32 Michael Löwy
A reading of the entire essay clearly demonstrates that Marx’s point of view
in 1844 has more to do with Left Neo-Hegelianism, which sees in religion the
alienation of the human essence, than with the philosophy of the Enlightenment,
which simply denounces it as a clerical conspiracy (the “Egyptian model”). In
fact, when Marx wrote the preceding passage, he was still a disciple of Feuerbach,
a Neo-Hegelian. His analysis of religion was thus “pre-Marxist,” lacking in any
reference to social classes and quite ahistorical. But it was nonetheless dialectical,
for it perceived the contradictory character of religious “despair”: sometimes the
legitimation of existing society, sometimes a protest against it.
It was only later—in particular in The German Ideology ([1846] 1960a)—that
the actual Marxist study of religion as a social and historical reality began. The
central element of this new method of analysis of religious facts is that of con-
sidering them—together with law, morality, metaphysics, political ideas, and so
on—as one of ideology’s multiple forms, that is, the spiritual production (geistige
produktion) of a people: the production of ideas, the representations and forms
of consciousness necessarily conditioned by material production, and the corre-
sponding social relations.
If he sometimes speaks of a “reflection”—a term that would lead several gen-
erations of Marxists into quite an impasse—the central idea of the text is rather the
need to explain the genesis of various forms of consciousness (religion, philoso-
phy, morality, etc.) with social relations as the departure point, “the whole thing
can, of course, be depicted in its totality (and, therefore, too, the reciprocal action
of these various sides on one another)” (Marx and Engels 1960b, 74).2 An entire
“dissident” school of sociology, one of Marxist culture based on Lukács, would
privilege the dialectical category of the totality over that of reflection. For exam-
ple, according to Lucien Goldmann the grand principle of the Marxist method of
sociology, is that of the “total character of human activity and the indissoluble
bond between the history of economic and social facts and the history of ideas”
(1966, 63).
One can sum up this methodology by a “programmatic” passage that appears
in an article written several years later: “It is clear that with every great historical
upheaval of social conditions the outlooks and ideas of men, and consequently
their religious ideas, are revolutionized” (Marx and Engels 1960b, 94).3 This
macro-social method of analysis would have a lasting influence on the sociology
of religions, even beyond the Marxist sphere of influence.
From 1846, Marx paid only slight attention to religion as such, as a specific cul-
tural/ideological universe: one finds practically no further extensive studies of a
religious phenomenon of any kind. Convinced, as he asserted from the time of his
article of 1844, that the criticism of religion must be transformed into a critique
of this vale of tears, and the criticism of theology into a criticism of politics, he
seems to turn his attention away from the religious realm.
It is perhaps because of his pietist education that Friedrich Engels demonstrated
a far more sustained interest than Marx in religious phenomena and their his-
torical role, all while sharing, of course, his friend’s decidedly materialist and
atheist choices. His principal contribution to the Marxist sociology of religions
Marx and Engels on Religion and Revolution 33
is unquestionably his analysis of the relationship between religious representa-
tions and social classes, and his interest in the revolutionary role of certain reli-
gious movements. Christianity, for example, does not appear in his works (as in
Feuerbach) as an ahistorical “essence” but as a cultural (“ideological”) form that
is transformed over the course of history and as a symbolic space, the stake of
antagonistic social forces.
Engels does not always avoid the temptation of reducing the various beliefs to
a simple “religious disguise” of class interests. Nevertheless, through his method
of analysis, based on their relationship to the class struggle, a new sociological
light is cast on the study of religions, thanks to which he is able to grasp religious
institutions, not as a homogeneous whole (a vision inherited from the Encyclope-
dist critique of the clerical conspiracy) but as a field of forces traversed by social
conflicts.
While remaining an irreconcilable enemy of religion, Engels nevertheless rec-
ognized, like the young Marx, the paradoxical duality of the phenomenon: not
only its role in the sacralization of the established order but also, depending on
the case, its critical, oppositional, and even revolutionary role. What is more, it is
precisely this second aspect that most interests him and that is found at the center
of most of his concrete studies, from the origins of Christianity to revolutionary
English Puritanism of the seventeenth century, by way of medieval heresies and
the German peasant wars of the sixteenth century.
Engels returned several times to the history of primitive Christianity. In a first
attempt—the article “Bruno Bauer and Primitive Christianity” from 1882—he
suggested that the movement had recruited most of its original members among
the slaves of the Roman Empire. In replacing the various national, local, or tribal
religions of the slaves, destroyed by the empire, Christianity was “the first uni-
versal religion possible.” A few years later, in his “Contribution to the History of
Primitive Christianity” (1894–1895), he proposed a more nuanced sociological
analysis of the first Christians: at one and the same time, destitute free men of
the cities, freed slaves deprived of all rights, small peasants weighed down with
debt, and slaves. Since no common road to emancipation existed for such varied
elements, only religion was able to offer them a common perspective, a common
dream (Marx and Engels 1960b, 199, 327–28).
Engels’s interest in primitive Christianity is not purely archaeological; it is sus-
tained by two current political observations. On one hand, the memory of the
Christianity of its beginnings is present in all popular and revolutionary move-
ments, from medieval heresies to working-class communism of the nineteenth
century, by way of the Taborites of Jan Zizka (“of glorious memory”) and the Ger-
man Peasant Wars. Even after 1830, primitive Christianity continued to serve as
an inspiration for the first German working-class communists (Wilhelm Weitling),
as well as the French revolutionary communists.
On the other hand, Engels notes a structural parallelism between Christian-
ity at its origins and modern socialism: in both cases, it is a question of move-
ments of the oppressed masses whose members were outlawed and pursued by
the authorities and who preached imminent liberation from slavery and distress.
34 Michael Löwy
In order to illuminate his comparison, Engels amused himself by citing a phrase
of Ernest Renan: “If you want to get an idea of the first Christian communities,
look at a local section of the International Workingmen’s Association.” The essen-
tial difference between the two movements resided in the fact that the Christians
deferred deliverance into the hereafter, while socialism posited it in this world (in
Marx and Engels 1960b, 311–12).
But is this difference as clear as it at first appears? In his study of the second
great Christian protest movement—the Peasant War—it seems to lose its clarity:
Did not Thomas Münzer, the theologian and leader of the revolutionary peasants
and plebeians of the sixteenth century, want the establishment of the kingdom of
God on earth?
Engels was fascinated by the peasants’ uprising and particularly Münzer’s per-
sonality. He would dedicate to them one of—if not his most important—historical
studies, The Peasant War in Germany (Engels [1850] 1967). This interest is
probably the result of the fact that this uprising was the sole truly revolutionary
tradition in German history. Analyzing the Protestant Reformation and the turn-
of-the-century religious crisis in Germany in terms of the class struggle, Engels
distinguished three camps that confronted each other on the politico-religious bat-
tlefield: the conservative Catholic camp, composed of the power of the empire,
of prelates, and a part of the princes, the wealthy nobles and the patricians of
the cities; the party of the moderate Reformed Lutheran bourgeoise, bringing
together the wealthy elements of the opposition, the mass of the lower nobility,
the bourgeoisie, and even a section of the princes, who hoped to enrich themselves
through the confiscation of church property; and, finally, the peasants and the
plebeians constituted a revolutionary party, “whose demands and doctrines were
most forcefully set out by Thomas Münzer” (Marx and Engels 1960b, 105).4
If this analysis of religious confrontations, viewed through the grid of antago-
nistic social classes, is sociologically enlightening, Engels does not always avoid
the reductionist shortcut. Too often he seems to only consider religion as a “mask,”
as a “cover” (Decke), behind which are hidden “the interests, needs, and demands
of the different classes.” In the case of Münzer, he claims that he “hid” his revolu-
tionary convictions behind “Christian phraseology” and a “Biblical cloak.” If he
addressed the people in “the language of religious prophecy,” it was because this
was “the only one it was capable of understanding at the time.” The specifically
religious dimension of Münzerian millenarianism, its spiritual and moral force,
its authentically lived mystical profundity, seems to have escaped him (Marx and
Engels 1960b, 99, 114).5
At the same time, he didn’t hide his admiration for the figure of the chilias-
tic prophet, whose ideas he describes as “quasi-communist” and “revolutionary
religious”:
Münzer’s political doctrine followed his revolutionary religious conceptions

very closely, and as his theology reached far beyond the current conceptions
of his time, so his political doctrine went beyond existing social and politi-
cal conditions. . . . His programme, less a compilation of the demands of
the then existing plebeians than a genius’s anticipation of the conditions for
the emancipation of the proletarian element that had just begun to develop
among the plebeians, demanded the immediate establishment of the kingdom
of God, of the prophesied millennium on earth. This was to be accomplished
by the return of the church to its origins and the abolition of all institutions
that were in conflict with what Münzer conceived as original Christianity,
which, in fact, was the idea of a very modern church. By the kingdom of
God, Münzer understood nothing else than a state of society without class
differences, without private property, and without superimposed state powers
opposed to the members of society. . .
(Marx and Engels 1960b, 114)
What is suggested in this astounding paragraph is not only the oppositional

and even revolutionary function of a religious movement but also its anticipa-
tory dimension, its utopian function. We are here at antipodes from the theory
of “reflection”: far from being the simple “expression” of existing conditions,
Münzer’s politico-religious doctrine emerges as a “brilliant anticipation” of the
communist aspirations of the future. One finds in this text a new path, which is not
explored by Engels but which would later be richly elaborated on by Ernst Bloch,
from the essay written in his youth on Thomas Münzer to his opus major on “the
Principle of Hope.”
For a sober and fair balance sheet of Engels’s contribution to the social-historic
study of the Reformation, we can refer to Leonard Krieger’s preface to the Eng-
lish edition of the book (1967):
The connection between the radical sects and the ‘peasant-plebeian’

classes—the connection that embodied Engels’ most penetrating historical
perception—remains the one definite relationship that has been accepted by
historians on both sides of the Marxist divide. In general, moreover, even if
Engels’ priority of social interests and his one-to-one correlation of other reli-
gious confessions with social classes have found no such acceptance, the rel-
evance of the social dimensions of the religious conflicts of the Reformation
is beyond cavil and the discovery of how this relationship actually worked
remains one of the live issues for European historiography.
(XLII)
Examining the English Revolution of the seventeenth century from the viewpoint
of the sociology of religions, Engels observed: “In Calvinism, the second great
upheaval of the bourgeoisie found its doctrine ready cut and dried.” If religion
and not materialism provided the doctrine for this revolutionary combat, this is
owed to the politically reactionary nature of this philosophy in England during
that period:
With Hobbes, it stepped on the stage as a defender of royal prerogative and

omnipotence; it called upon absolute monarchy to keep down that puer
36 Michael Löwy
robustus sed malitiosus [“Robust but malicious boy”]—to wit, the people.
Similarly, with the successors of Hobbes, with Bolingbroke, Shaftesbury,
etc., the new deistic form of materialism remained an aristocratic, esoteric
doctrine, and, therefore, hateful to the middle-class both for its religious her-
esy and for its anti-bourgeois political connections. Accordingly, in opposi-
tion to the materialism and deism of the aristocracy, those Protestant sects
which had furnished the flag and the fighting contingent against the Stuarts
continued to furnish the main strength of the progressive middle-class.
(Engels 1960b, 297–98; Marx and Engels 1968, 390–91)
This remark is significant. Breaking with the linear vision of history inherited
from the thinkers of the Enlightenment, Engels recognizes that the combat
between materialism and religion does not necessarily correspond to that between
revolution and counterrevolution, progress and regression, freedom and despot-
ism, dominated and dominating classes, contrary to the claims of official Marxism
of Soviet manufacture (Rosenthal and Ioudine 1955, 360).6 In this precise case,
the relationship is exactly the inverse: revolutionary religion versus absolutist
materialism.
Strangely, despite his forty-year stay in England, Engels never showed an inter-
est in the politico-religious dimensions of the English Revolution, and in particu-
lar in the radical, egalitarian, and communist currents (e.g., Levellers, Diggers)
that manifested themselves in this great uprising. Unlike the German Reformation
of the sixteenth century, the English movement is analyzed almost exclusively in
its bourgeois dimension.
Engels was convinced that the Puritan Revolution of the seventeenth century
was the last in which religion had been capable of playing the role of a revolution-
ary ideology:
The flag of religion waved for the last time in England in the seventeenth
century, and hardly fifty years later appeared undisguised in France the new
world outlook which was to become the classical outlook of the bourgeoisie,
the juristic world outlook.
The Great French Revolution was the first bourgeois uprising that had “entirely
cast off the religious cloak and was fought out on undisguised political lines”
(Marx and Engels 1960b, 240–43). From this moment religion was only able to
be a regressive social and political force.7
This is the reason that (like Marx) he demonstrates the greatest perplexity in
the face of the persistence among the first worker and communist currents of the
nineteenth century, of the reference to primitive Christianity. In his 1843 article
on “The Progress of Social Reform on the Continent,” Engels is surprised that
the French communists, “being a part of a nation celebrated for its infidelity, are
themselves Christians. One of their favorite axioms is, that Christianity is Com-
munism, le Christianisme c’est le Communisme. This they try to prove by the
Bible, the state of community in which the first Christians are said to have lived,
etc.” He can find no explanation for this paradox other than poor knowledge of
the Bible among French communists. If they had been more familiar with the
Scriptures, they would have understood that “the general spirit of its teachings is
completely opposed” to communism. He also notes that Weitling, the founder of
German communism, also claimed “exactly like the Icarians of France . . . [that]
Christianity is communism.” Rejecting this type of politico-religious syncretism,
Engels shows his sympathy and his philosophical agreement with the English
socialists (i.e., the Owenites) who, “like us, fight against religious prejudices”—
unlike the French communists, who “perpetuate religion by dragging it over with
themselves into the projected new state of society” (Engels 1843 quoted in Desro-
che 1965, 268–75).8 As we know, these divergences on religion would block an
agreement between Marx and Engels and the French communists concerning a
common review in 1844 (in the Deutsch-franzözische Jahrbücher) and would
also provoke their break with Weitling in 1846 expressed in a letter sent to the
League of the Just criticizing the “communism of love” of Hermann Kriege.
Thirty years later, Engels noted with satisfaction that the new socialist worker’s
movement was nonreligious, a concept that seemed more pertinent to him than
that of “atheism.” His principal argument for deriding the pretentions of certain
revolutionaries (the Blanquists and Bakuninists) for the “transforming [of] people
into atheists by order of the mufti,” of “abrogating God by decree,” or of “mak-
ing atheism a mandatory article of faith,” was that, in any event, among the vast
majority of socialist workers, notably in Germany and France, atheism “has had
its day.” “This purely negative term does not apply to them, for they are no longer
in theoretical opposition, but rather practical opposition with belief in God: they
are simply through with God; they live and think in the real world and so are
materialists” (Marx and Engels 1960b, 143).9
This diagnosis is obviously related to Engels’s fundamental hypothesis, which
is that from the eighteenth century, with the advent of Enlightenment philoso-
phy, Christianity had entered its final stage and had become “incapable of serving
in the future as an ideological cloak for the aspirations of any progressive class
whatsoever” (Marx and Engels 1960b, 260). Even so, in certain concrete analyses,
Engels is more nuanced and prepared to recognize the existence of potentially
subversive religious movements or of a revolutionary movement that borrow a
religious “form.”
For example, in an 1853 article on the conflict between the Bishop of Freiburg
and Protestant authorities (the Prince of Baden), Engels refers to the armed upris-
ing of peasants to defend their (Catholic) clergy and drive out the Prussian gen-
darmes. How to explain this unexpected return of the religious conflicts of the
seventeenth century?
The secret is simply this, that all popular commotions, lurking in the back-
ground, are forced by the governments to assume at first the mystical and
almost uncontrollable form of religious movements. The clergy, on their
part, allow themselves to be deceived by appearances, and, while they fancy
they direct the popular passions for the exclusive benefit of their corporation,
38 Michael Löwy
against the government, they are, in truth, the unconscious and unwilling
tools of the revolution itself. . .
(Marx and Engels 1954, 633–34).10
More surprising still is the analysis Engels proposes on the subject of the Salva-
tion Army in England: in its effort to maintain at whatever cost the religious spirit
in the working class, the English bourgeoise
accepted the dangerous aid of the Salvation Army, which revives the propa-
ganda of early Christianity, appeals to the poor as the elect, fights capitalism
in a religious way, and thus fosters an element of early Christian class antago-
nism, which one day may become troublesome to the well-to-do people who
now find the ready money for it.
(Marx and Engels 1960b, 303, 1968, 394)
There is no need to add that Engels erred in his predictions and that neither the
Catholic peasants of Baden nor the Salvation Army has become dangerous for
the “well-to-do.” But what should be stressed is his openness to the possibility of
the reemergence of religion as the ideology and culture of a revolutionary, anti-
capitalist movement.
This would later be realized in forms far more important than the Salvation
Army—which, let it be said in passing, had also fascinated Brecht—who devoted
his play Saint Joan of the Stockyards to it—in the French Christian left from the
thirties to the seventies and the Latin American movement from the sixties until
today (notably liberation theology). But this is a different story, one neither Marx
nor Engels could have foreseen.
To conclude, heirs of Left Hegelianism and Enlightenment philosophy, Marx
and Engels would nevertheless create a new mode of analysis of religion, based on
the study of the connections among economic change, class conflicts, revolution-
ary movements, and religious transformations. Although they didn’t always avoid
reductionism, they nevertheless opened a field of research that until today remains
at the heart of the sociology of religions and of revolutionary struggles.
(Translated by Mitchell Abidor)
Notes
1 A version of this chapter was previously published as Löwy, M. January–March 1995.
“Karl Marx et Friedrich Engels comme sociologues de la religion.” Archives de Sci-
ences Sociales de la Religion, n 89, pp. 41–52, which is now available on an Open
Access basis: www.persee.fr/doc/assr_0335-5985_1995_num_89_1_976
2 See also Marx and Engels (1975b, 53).
3 See also Marx and Engels (1978, 244).
5 See also Marx and Engels (1978, 422–26).
6 See, for example, the Petit Dictionnaire Philosophique prepared by two eminent
Soviet academicians, M. M. Rosenthal and P. F. Ioudine: “Materialism . . . has always
been the worldview of advanced social classes fighting for progress and interested in
the development of the sciences” (1955, 360).
7 See also Marx and Engels (1957a, 1957b, 1968, 391).
8 See also Engels (1843); Marx and Engels (1975a, 407).
9 First published in Engels (1874). See also, Marx and Engels: On Religion, Moscow:
Progress Publishers (126–27).
References
Desroche, Henri. 1965. Socialismes et Sociologie Religieuse. Paris: Cujas.
Engels, Friedrich. 1843. “Les Progrès de la Reforme Sociale sur le Continent.” The New
Moral World, Third Series 19 (November).
———. 1874, “Littérature d’émigrés.” Volksstaat 73 (June).
———. 1967. The German Revolutions: The Peasant War in Germany, and Germany:
Revolution and Counter-Revolution. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Goldmann, Lucien. 1966. Sciences Humaines et Philosophie. Paris: Gonthier.
Gollwitzer, Helmut. 1962. “Marxistische Religionskritik und Christliche Glaube.” In
Marxismus Studien, edited by Vierte Folge, 15–16. Tübingen: J.C.B. Mohr.
Krieger, Leonard. 1967. “Introduction.” In The German Revolutions: The Peasant War in
Germany, and Germany: Revolution and Counter-Revolution, ix–xlvi. Chicago: Univer-
sity of Chicago Press.
Marx, Karl, and Friedrich Engels. 1954. “Die Religiöse Bewegung in Preussen.” In Zur
Deutschen Geschichte. Berlin: Dietz Verlag.
———. 1957a. “Lawyers’ Socialism.” In Marx and Engels: On Religion, 240–43. Mos-
cow: Progress Publishers.
———. 1957b. Marx and Engels: On Religion. Moscow: Progress Publishers.
———. 1960a. Die Deutsche Ideologie. Berlin: Dietz Verlag.
———. 1960b. Sur la Religion. Paris: Editions Sociales.
———. 1968. Marx and Engels: Selected Works. New York: International Publishers.
———. 1975a. Marx and Engels Collected Works. Vol. 3. London: Lawrence and Wishart.
———. 1975b. Marx and Engels Collected Works. Vol. 5. London: Lawrence and Wishart.
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Philosophique. Paris: Langues Étrangères.
3 Mandate for Revolution?
Reconsidering Chinese
Peasant Rebellions in Terms
of Changing One’s Destiny
Roland Boer
The Chinese term mandate of heaven (tianming) is usually assumed to have the
following meaning: a ruler’s mandate is bestowed by “heaven,” but if the ruler
does not follow the precepts of virtue and wisdom in ruling, the mandate can be
removed. From here two possible scenarios may unfold. The first is the palace
coup: once “heaven” has removed its approval, someone—usually with a signifi-
cant force behind him—can depose the ruler in question and assume the mantle
of power. So it was that dynastic changes took place in China’s long history of
emperors and dynasties. The second is the peasant revolution: given that a ruler’s
ultimate responsibility was to ensure the well-being of the common people, if a
ruler turned out to be rapacious and cruel, the people would be justified in diso-
beying and indeed replacing the ruler. At times, the two scenarios would merge,
not so much with the frequent peasant rebellions throughout China’s long impe-
rial history, but more with the peasant revolution that succeeded in placing its
ruler on the imperial throne. Examples include Liu Bang (256–195 bce) and the
establishment of the Han dynasty in 202 bce and Li Zicheng (1606–45 ce), who
led a peasant revolt against the fading Ming dynasty and established the fleeting
Shun dynasty that lasted barely a few months in 1644 before the Qing dynasty
took over.
While there is some truth to this common understanding, it has its limits. In
what follows, I examine three terms that reveal an inherently this-worldly (secu-
lar) focus of Chinese cultural assumptions. First, mandate of heaven (tianming)
means not so much a “divine right of kings” with heavy religious overtones but
was understood—already in the first millennium bce—as a deeply secular “des-
tiny” or “allotted life span.” The sense here is that the wider scope of human
affairs—contained within the realm of the heavens or the sky (the basic mean-
ing of tian) and earth—has determined a person’s and indeed a society’s life.
The second term is destiny-and-fortune (mingyun), a term that requires such a
translation in order to capture a distinct dialectic—in the sense that there is a
conjunction of forces that pull away from each other and yet can be found amid
each other (think of yin-yang). It includes ming (命), which is one of the char-
acters from tianming and has the meaning of destiny or fate. But the yun (命)
indicates that one can, through persistent and conscientious effort, change
one’s destiny. Literally, it means to “move one’s fate.” The cycle of peasant
DOI: 10.4324/9781003177821-4
Mandate for Revolution? 41
revolutions in China, right up the beginning of the modern era with the Taip-
ing Revolution (1851–1864), may be characterized in these terms. They were,
through sustained and dangerous action, seeking to move or change their fate.
The third term is the people’s needs, which came to be the ultimate determining
factor in a ruler’s “allotted life span.” From at least the Warring States period,
we find this emphasis throughout the Chinese tradition. If the ruler ensured
adequate food and shelter, as well as social stability and harmony, then the
ruler’s “allotted life span” would be long. If not, the people would rebel. In
order to consider this emphasis in a little more detail, I examine two case stud-
ies, one concerning Liu Bang and the peasant revolt of the third century bce that
led to the Han dynasty in the early days of the imperial system and the other
concerning the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom toward the end of the imperial sys-
tem in the nineteenth century ce. The latter enables me to return to the question
of religion and why the biblically inspired Taiping were ultimately rejected by
Chinese culture.
Mandate of Heaven as a Secular Term

Let us begin with the “mandate of heaven,” which was initially developed by the
long-lived Zhou dynasty (1046–256 bce) to justify their overthrow of the ear-
lier Shang dynasty. The Zhou lasted for eight centuries, and even though the last
few centuries entailed nominal and ritual power over neighboring states that were
constantly at war with one another, the earlier Zhou period was often held up as
an ideal for how rulers should govern in terms of economic, technological, and
cultural prowess. However, there was an initial problem: the Zhou had technically
usurped the Shang in the eleventh century bce. How to justify such a move? The
“mandate of heaven” was born, predicated on appropriate policies to ensure social
harmony, economic well-being, and social codes. It was propagated in particular
by the Duke of Zhou,1 who argued that the Shang had forfeited this “mandate”
through corrupt and rapacious practices and that it was up to the Zhou to restore
the social order.
The Book of Songs (Shiji) bestows such a “mandate” to the one attributed with
establishing the Zhou dynasty, Wen Wang.2 The song in question (235) comes
from a section called “daya,” literally “refinement” but glossed by the fabled
translator James Legge as “Greater Odes of the Kingdom.” This material in the
Book of Songs is among the earliest, which comes from the tenth to ninth centu-
ries bce, and thus soon after the Zhou dynasty was established. Throughout the
subsection concerning Wen Wang, we find references to the “mandate of heaven.”
To begin with, the house of Zhou may have been an old house, but the “mandate”
(ming) had fallen upon it only recently with an expectation of renewal and reform.
Why? The qualities of the first king:
Profound was king Wen;

Oh! continuous and bright was his feeling of reverence.
Great is the mandate of heaven [tianming]! (Legge 1871, 427)
42 Roland Boer
The stanza continues with a reference to the Shang (also known as Yin), whom
the Zhou had usurped. The Shang may have had many descendants of the royal
house, but when “God on high [shangdi] gave the mandate [ming]” to the Zhou,
the Shang became their subjects. At the same time, the text has a warning: be sure
to show respect for ancestors, “cultivate virtue [xiude],” and strive to align with
“destiny [ming].” If so, the outcome will be much good fortune and happiness.
But these are not always assured:
The mandate [ming] is not easily [preserved],

Do not cause your own extinction.
Display and make bright your righteousness and name,
And look at [the fate of] Yin in the light of heaven.
The doings of high heaven,
Have neither sound nor smell.
Take your pattern from king Wen,
And the myriad regions will repose confidence in you. (Legge 1871,
427–28)3
In light of this early material, one may understand why the connection has
been made with the Western notion of the “divine right of kings.” This connection
was initially made during the last phase of European absolute monarchs, pre-
cisely when the Chinese texts initially became available in translation. The idea
of the “divine right of kings” is, of course, quite old and can be found in religious
texts such as the Hebrew Bible, as well as other material from ancient Southwest
Asia. But let us stay with the European context, where theological justifications
for monarchies took a number of forms. In a Roman Catholic framework, it was
argued that all states must be subject to the church’s mandate, in which the pope
functioned as God’s representative on earth. Even in the twentieth century, there
were efforts to reclaim this idea (Maritain 1951; Jouvenal 1957). From Lutheran
and Reformed perspectives, the sovereign was always subject to divine approval
or its abrogation. This is particularly so with Calvin’s argument that even though
an unpopular monarch rules with divine sanction, this was always subject to the
ruler in question following God’s laws. If not, then God would appoint an agent
to remove the ruler and even allow the people to disobey (Calvin [1559] 2006;
Boer 2019, 75–90). We find the same emphasis in a somewhat more muted man-
ner in Luther’s “two kingdoms” hypothesis, with its transfer of secular power
from Rome to the prince (Luther [1523] 1962). Even so, Luther never urged a
complete separation between the two kingdoms: the monarch was to ensure not
merely proper conduct of religious observance but of all relevant divine laws as
well. If not, the sanction would be removed. This emphasis even applies to abso-
lute monarchies: the monarch may be the determinant of and thereby above state
law—“There is no authority except from God, and those authorities that exist
have been instituted by God” (Romans 13:1–7)4—but such a monarch relies on
divine sanction (Bodin [1576] 1993; Hobbes [1651] 1996). It follows that such
sanction can also be removed from a wayward monarch.
The connection with the ancient Book of Songs from China would seem to
be obvious, especially with its reference to Shangdi (上帝)—literally “the
deity above” but often translated as “God on High”—as the one who confers
the mandate. The problem here is what is known as “using western categories to
understand China [yixi jiezhong]” (Wang 2018, 26). More specifically, there may
have been references in the earliest layers of the Book of Songs to an abstract
“God on High”—taken over from the earlier Shang dynasty—but these began to
fade already with the Duke of Zhou, who emphasized a shift from the ignorance
and superstition of the earlier ideas inherited from the Shang to a focus on “valu-
ing and emphasizing human affairs [zhong renshi]” (Gu and Yu 2014). By the time
of Confucius in the sixth and fifth centuries, the definition of wisdom became:
“To devote oneself to the people’s just cause, and, while respecting spiritual
beings [guishen], to keep aloof from them, may be called wisdom” (Confucius
1993, 6:22). The spirits and gods should be kept “at a distance [yuan],” which
entails a distinct focus on this world and specifically the right conduct in relation
to human ties and relationships (the sense of yi—义). Such a this-worldly focus
would become a distinctive feature of Chinese culture, so much so that Mozi’s
effort in the fifth and fourth centuries to develop a more fully fledged religious
system foundered and instead elements of Mohism were absorbed into a Confu-
cian framework (Johnston 2010). Indeed, when there has been a risk of a more
esoteric turn, these Confucian concerns would be reinvigorated—as, for example,
with the neo-Confucianism of the eighth and eleventh centuries ce, which arose
in response to the more esoteric and spiritual dimensions of both Buddhism and
Daoism.
What are the implications for the “mandate of heaven”? The term for “heaven”—
tian or 天—has little of the personalized divine nature of the Western “Heaven.”
Instead, it means an impersonal and material “sky” or the heavens, often coming
to be associated with “destiny” or “fate.” Indeed, the more basic sense of tian-
ming is precisely this: the destiny determined by the greater domain of heaven
and an earth populated by human beings, which are seen as one—tianren heyi
(Xu 2016). What happened to the old Shangdi, the “God on High”? He went even
further above or “on high [shang],” while the main concern was squarely with the
world below the heavens—tianxia (天下). Thus, tianming became the “allotted
life span” of a dynasty and indeed a society, as determined by the wider realm of
the heavens and the earth. As mentioned in the Zuozhuan, or Zuo’s Commentary
on the Spring and Autumn Annals: “Humans are born between the heavens and
the earth [tiandi] and this is what is called their destiny [ming]” (Durrant, Li, and
Schaberg 2016, 802).5
Changing One’s Destiny (mingyun)

We are at the point where Chinese culture—understood in the broad sense that
includes history, society, and political structures6—is by default concerned with
this world and is thus “secular”—to invoke the basic sense of the Latin sae-
cularum. This means that the peculiar history of the western peninsula of the
44 Roland Boer
Eurasian landmass—as Diakonoff (2003, 157) liked to call western Europe—is by
no means normative. Here I mean the relatively recent history of “secularization”
from the religious assumptions and structures that dominated Europe for century
upon century. In China, this narrative does not apply, or, if it does at some level,
we would need to go back some 3,000 years to find not so much an analogous as
a prototypical process.
Thus, the concept of tianming was more about the determination of life by
the wider dynamics of the world, the unity of the heavens and the earth (tiandi).
The shorthand for this determination is “destiny” (ming). In the case of tianming,
this destiny pertained to the rulers of the various dynasties. Now we come upon
two questions, which have implications for understanding the process of peasant
revolutions in Chinese history. The first question is whether tianming is still seen
as in some way superstitious. Perhaps I can answer as follows: after I arrived in
Dalian to begin working at the School of Marxism at Dalian University of Tech-
nology, the dean referred to yuanfen (缘分). This related term refers to the appar-
ent chance that brings people together, or—more preferably—the natural affinity
between people that brings them to a “predestined relationship.” The dean was
referring to the process by which we had met in Australia. I had come to Dalian
for a lecture, and then his suggestion that I come to Dalian to work there caught
me at a time when I was indeed looking for a change—even if I was not particu-
larly conscious of the desire at the time. I asked the dean and others present—who
are all members of the Communist Party of China (CPC)—whether yuanfen is a
superstitious term. Not at all, they replied; it is a perfectly materialist notion about
how the world works. The same observation applies to tianming.
The second question: Is this “destiny” or “fate” a given, concerning which one
can do nothing and simply acquiesce? This may be the western cultural tradi-
tion’s understanding of “fate,” which then stands in tension with free will and
human action. In contrast to such a Western either–or approach to contradictions,
or “zero-sum” as it is also called, the Chinese approach is rather different: “things
that oppose each also complement one another [xiangfan xiangcheng].”7 We may
see such a dialectic in another crucial term, mingyun (命运). It combines a char-
acter we have already met, ming (命), which refers to the destiny of fate pertain-
ing to one’s life, with yun (运), which includes the senses of fortune, movement,
use, and application. The combination of the two characters as mingyun means
that one can, through sheer hard work and innovation, change the course of one’s
destiny. In other words, if we apply ourselves to the task at hand, we can move
destiny in our favor—for which the translation “fate-and-fortune” may be the
most apt. To be sure, Chinese culture has plenty of material concerning predeter-
mined fate. For example, a student of Confucius named Zi Xia observed: “I have
heard that life and death are determined by fate [ming], and that wealth and honors
depend upon the will of the heavens [tian]” (Confucius 1993, 12.5). At the same
time, there is an even greater sense that one can change the direction of one’s des-
tiny toward good fortune. For example, already in the Books of Songs we find the
idea that even an ancient country needs to innovate. Let us return to the section
on the first king of Zhou, Wen Wang. In the first stanza of that section, we find:
“Although Zhou was an old state, the mandate was for reform [qi ming weixin]”
(Legge 1871, 427). The word for “reform” may also mean that the mandate was a
recent one, although both senses apply: the new mandate was also a mandate for
reform and innovation. More substantially, the Chinese also believe that “human
will triumphs over the heavens” and “human effort can achieve anything.” Or, as
Mencius put it, “whether life is long or short does not change one’s attitude, but
through self-cultivation one waits for whatever issue; this is the way to estab-
lish one’s destiny [ming]” (Mencius 1895, VII.1.1).8 In sum, there is a distinct
dialectic in the idea of mingyun, with both destiny and concerted effort insepa-
rably connected.9 One can understand, then, how Marx’s formulation strikes a
distinct chord in China: “Human beings make their own history, but they do not
make it just as they please; they do not make it under circumstances chosen by
themselves, but under circumstances directly encountered, given and transmitted
from the past” (Marx [1852] 1979, 103, [1852] 1985, 96–97). Indeed, it is often
said in China that Marxism has enabled the Chinese people to seize hold of their
destiny and overcome the profound century-long humiliation at the hands of colo-
nial powers—the abject poverty in which China found itself—and rejuvenate the
country through revolution and reform (Boer and Zang 2019, 10).
The People’s Needs

Let us pause for a moment and take stock: the idea of “mandate of heaven” (tian-
ming) turns out to be an already secularized concept bearing the sense of a destiny
determined by the larger context of human existence between the heavens and the
earth. Furthermore, it should be understood in light of “mingyun,” which bears
the sense of changing one’s destiny through arduous human effort. The question
remains as to how all of this is relevant for peasant revolutions, especially in light
of my invocation of Marx at the close of the previous section. To be sure, there
was plenty of plotting and skullduggery in the imperial courts, with not a few pal-
ace coups. But—as mentioned—there is also a long history of peasant rebellions,
a few of which rose to the full level of a successful revolution, even if they ended
up establishing another imperial dynasty.
Now a final consideration comes into play: the people’s needs, which are
clearly focused on collective concerns. On this matter, a distinct saying sums up
an emphasis of thousands of years: “When the granaries are full, the people follow
appropriate rules of conduct, and when there is enough to eat and wear, the people
know honor and shame” (Sima 2014, 2595, 3952).10 The saying, as recorded by
the historian Sima Qian, is attributed to Guan Zhong (720–645 bce), an influ-
ential reformer of the state of Qi during the Warring States period.11 There are,
of course, many other statements along a similar vein in the Chinese tradition,12
which emphasize not merely that a ruler’s destiny or mandate is decided by the
vaster realm of human existence designated by tian but especially whether or not
the ruler ensured the collective well-being of the people. This well-being took the
form of conditions that enabled adequate food and shelter, as well as social stabil-
ity (wending) and harmony (hexie). Indeed, it was the ruler’s task to “bring peace
46 Roland Boer
and stability to the country [anbang dingguo].”13 Typically, we find that when
these collective needs were not met, revolts by the common people—overwhelm-
ingly peasants—would break out.
Liu Bang and the Han Dynasty

Let me give a couple of examples, one from the early days of the imperial system
and one from its last days. Liu Bang (256–195 bce) rose from humble peasant
origins to become the first emperor—known as Gaozu—of the Han dynasty
(202 bce–220 ce). We are reliant on two main accounts, one by Sima Qian, in
volume eight of his history (2014, 435–502), and the other by Gu Ban in the
first volume of his Hanshu (1962, 2–24).14 These histories generally deal favora-
bly with Liu Bang, since he—after some persuasion by a scholar known as Lu
Jia15—adopted a Confucian framework for governing the empire. Indeed, it was
the result of this emphasis that Confucianism has become the core framework for
Chinese culture. The key here, however, is that Liu Bang was of a very humble
peasant background, from the countryside of the state of Zhou. In light of the
uncertainty surrounding the succession to the Qin dynasty (221–210 bce) and
widespread peasant rebellions, Liu Bang was able to leverage himself to a com-
manding position in the rebel forces. After considerable struggle, he secured rule
and established the Han dynasty.
Why was there so much unrest? The historians attribute this to the harsh rule of
the first and only Qin emperor, who implemented measures based on what became
known as the Legalist tradition.16 This tradition stressed that a ruler should govern
“according to law as the basis [yifaweiben]” and that all should be subject to the
law. All very well, but this was predicated on the assumption that “human nature
is evil [xing’elun],” needing stern punishments and appropriate rewards for the
sake of social order. Legalism has often become a byword for harshness of punish-
ment. It was this system that was adopted by the state of Qin, which became by
221 bce the first real empire that unified China. However, the very harshness of
the laws and the degradation of the peasantry soon led to revolt and the overthrow
of the dynasty. It was precisely these conditions that enabled Liu Bang to rise as
a peasant leader.17
After being persuaded of the benefits of Confucianism, which had been widely
suppressed during the brief Qin era,18 Liu Bang instituted a rather different sys-
tem. It was predicated on the “both hands” (liangshou) of legal sanction and vir-
tue, although there was a distinct emphasis on the latter. The five key virtues
that should ensure stability and harmony are benevolence, righteousness, ritual
(propriety), wisdom, and faithfulness (captured in the five-character phrase renyi-
lizhixin). These were—as Mencius would come to emphasize—to provide the
foundations for a concern with the common people’s livelihood. In brief, the Con-
fucian emphasis is both “rule of virtue” (dezhi) and “rule of propriety” (lizhi).19
What about the rule of law? Already with Lu Jia, but especially with his succes-
sor, Dong Zhongshu (179–104 bce), there was a dialectical emphasis on both law
and virtue. Here the Daoist tradition’s yin-yang was very useful: the two lines are
inescapably connected in governance, in which the positive yang is virtue and the
negative yin is punishment. The result: not only was Confucianism assiduously
promoted, but Liu Bang immediately issued a decree to lower taxes on peasants
to a manageable level and minimize the cycle of compulsory labor (laoyi) for the
common people. Of course, these were not abolished, for that would be somewhat
self-defeating for an imperial system, but the easing of burdens has also contrib-
uted to a generally favorable historical assessment of Liu Bang.
Taiping Heavenly Kingdom

The second example comes from the other end of China’s long imperial history:
the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom of the nineteenth century (1850–1864). It began
as a small movement with a few local villagers in the mountains of Guangxi
Province. They were led by a charismatic and rather unstable visionary, Hong
Xiuquan, and drew on disaffected peasants, miners, ethnic minorities, and organ-
ized “bandit” groups. Within a few short years, the pent-up frustrations of impe-
rial exploitation and colonial humiliation attracted millions. The Taiping forces
swept north, developing innovative and spectacularly coordinated military tactics
against which the Qing forces were no match (Luo 1991). Along the way, the
Taiping instituted strict discipline, reorganized the social and economic fabric
of an emerging state, and captured the old imperial capital of Nanjing in 1853
(renamed Tianjing, the heavenly capital). In doing so, the Taiping managed to
control for a time the “cradle” of Chinese civilization in the most populous and
prosperous part of China. The new state was short-lived. British colonial forces
were keen to preserve their lucrative drug trafficking of opium while a weakening
Qing Empire colluded with the British colonialists for their own reasons to stran-
gle the Taiping state. Nanjing fell in 1864, and the last remnants of the Taiping
forces were obliterated in the 1870s and 1880s. Their eventual destruction left ten
to twenty million dead and far more devastated. As for the Qing Empire, it would
never recover, managing to struggle on for another fifty years before it fell in the
republican revolution.
The Taiping movement was profoundly ambiguous. In many respects, it man-
ifested features of the peasant rebellions of old, with an explosion of pent-up
frustration in response to systemic exploitation and mistreatment, along with a
leader of equally humble origins. It was also an anti-colonial revolution, focused
on eradicating the bane of opium and colonial humiliation, and yet it deployed
the “foreign teaching” of a version of Christianity for its main ideological and
social agenda. Furthermore, the Taiping movement was thoroughly anti-imperial,
targeting the whole imperial system as such, and yet it instituted what was in
many respects a new imperial system with Hong Xiuquan as its ruler. It sought
to overturn what it saw as the dead weight of the Confucian heritage and yet
incorporated many features of Confucianism in its new ideology of state. In short,
the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom appeared at a crucial turning point in Chinese
history: on one hand, it marks the final chapter of the old pattern of palace coups
and peasant uprisings; on the other, it signaled the emergence of a newer struggle
48 Roland Boer
for anti-colonial national liberation. We find this ambiguity in Mao Zedong’s own
assessments, but it is an ambiguity that enables a whole series of different assess-
ments of the movement.20
In the past, I have taken sides in such debates, emphasizing the revolutionary
character of the movement, to the extent of arguing that it marks the arrival of
the Christian communist tradition in China (Boer 2019, 183–99). Upon further
reflection, it is clear to me that Taiping movement was far more ambiguous than
I had at first thought. One reason for that earlier assessment was that it came at the
closing stages of a long research project on Marxism and religion. When I initially
wrote the piece for a lecture in 2015, I thought that it might be possible to use the
method and framework I had developed to understand Chinese communism. But
I was mistaken. Let me put it this way: when I presented my lecture concerning
the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom in China, my argument did not persuade the audi-
ence. Why? It is not merely that Hong Xiuquan is seen as little more than a bandit,
but more the way in which a unique interpretation of the Bible came to form the
core of the Taiping ideology and structure of governance. The path to such an
emphasis among the Taiping is long and convoluted, but ultimately this approach
was alien to Chinese cultural sensibilities. Here was a system of thought and cul-
ture that emphasized ontological or outer transcendence (waizaichaoyue), which
is deeply foreign to Chinese cultural sensibilities in which inner transcendence
(neizaichaoyue) and cultivating one’s moral character (xiuchen) are key (Ren
2012; Shen 2015; Guo 2016; T. Xu 2016). The movement also sought to impose a
religiously inspired framework on a culture that had been deeply secular for mil-
lennia. In brief, it was the invocation by the Taiping of what is known as “foreign
teaching” (yangjiao) that led to their rejection.
We may interpret such a response in a number of ways. One way is to develop a
historical dialectic of the religious and the secular in Chinese history, in which one
returns when the other is dominant (Goldstein 2017). This is clearly a develop-
ment on the tendency to pick one or the other side in, for example, assessments of
the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom.21 I have a somewhat different interpretation: there
have and will continue to be moments of religious expression in times of turmoil
and upheaval, but ultimately the core this-worldly focus of Chinese culture will
reassert itself. Perhaps we can invoke Mao’s reinterpretation ([1937] 1965, [1937]
2009) of dialectical materialism here: not only do contradictions move in a pattern
of unity-in-struggle, but in any contradiction there is always a primary term. In a
Chinese cultural context, the primary term is precisely the this-worldly focus, the
inner transcendence of self-cultivation, in which the “unity of heavens and human
beings” (tianren heyi) becomes the “unity of nature and human beings.” Thus, a
revolutionary movement that is to have any traction in such a context will be one
that is focused on people’s needs, on the ability to change one’s destiny through
concerted human effort.
Conclusion
This reexamination of the “mandate of heaven” has taken us through three key
ideas: tianming as an allotted life span that is determined by the context contained
within the heavens and the earth, or in the unity of nature and human beings;
mingyun as an ability to move or transform one’s destiny through human effort,
in light of which we should understand the emergence of peasant revolutions in
Chinese history; and the collective focus on the people’s needs, or what is now
called “people-centered” or “taking the people as center” (yi renmin wei zhong).
Indeed, it is precisely with the combination of the latter two ideas that we find a
deeper connection between earlier Chinese history and the communist revolution
of the twentieth century. That whole process may have dispensed with the notion
of tianming, the mandate of heaven, but it does continue the emphasis on trans-
forming one’s destiny by a focus on taking the people as the center. Indeed, this
may well be seen as a Chinese Marxist definition of revolution.
Notes
1 The Duke of Zhou (Zhougong) took over after the brief reign of Wu (ca. 1046–1043
bce) and governed as regent until the youthful Cheng, son of Wu, could take over
responsibilities as emperor.
2 Wen was later acknowledged as the founder of the Zhou dynasty, although his son, Wu,
was technically the first emperor from 1046 bce.
3 Translation modified. One may also also find a bilingual text, with Legge’s translation,
at https://ctext.org/book-of-poetry/wen-wang.
4 For example, in a Danish Lutheran context, biblical texts such as 1 Samuel 8–10, with
its warnings over what a king would do, were reinterpreted to justify precisely such
acts by an absolute monarch (Petterson 2012).
5 Translation modified. One may also find the Chinese text at https://ctext.org/chun-qiu-
zuo-zhuan/cheng-gong-shi-san-nian. The risk with using the terminology of “secular”
is that it assumes a religious dimension that it challenges, seeks to negate, and then
embodies once again in a qualitatively new form. In the text, I am trying to convey the
point that this may have been the situation in the first millennium bce in China, but it
has been not so prevalent since then.
6 The best overview of Chinese culture in English is by Gan Chunsong (2019).
7 The initial appearance of this phrase—in full as xiangfan er jie xiangcheng ye—comes
from the first century ce, in Ban Gu’s Hanshu, or History of the Earlier Han Dynsasty,
in the yiwenzhi part (B. Gu 1962, 374). The text may also be found at https://ctext.org/
han-shu/yi-wen-zhi. It has become a common phrase and one finds it also in the works
of Mao Zedong ([1937] 1965, 333, [1937] 2009, 343).
8 Translation modified. The bilingual text may also be found at https://ctext.org/mengzi/
jin-xin-i.
9 It is not for nothing that the word is found in the increasingly popular phrase in devel-
oping countries around the world: “a community of common destiny/future [mingyun]
for humankind.”
10 The sentence appears on two occasions in Sima Qian’s Shiji, once in the Guanyan
liezhuan section, and once in the Huozhi liezhuan section. The later Confucian tradi-
tion would debate whether ethics arose naturally from such a material basis or whether
they also required the “cultivation of moral character [xiushen].” The latter became
the dominant position under the influence of Mencius, who observed that if the people
“have not a certain livelihood, it follows that they will not have a fixed heart.” But the
steady “heart” in question required more: people must have more than food and shelter,
for without the cultivation of virtue they would be little better than animals (Mencius
1895, I.7, III.3).
11 Some readers may be reminded of Engels’s observation ([1883] 1985, 407) at Marx’s
funeral: “humankind must first of all eat, drink, have shelter and clothing, before it
50 Roland Boer
can pursue politics, science, art, religion, etc.” Note also Bertolt Brecht’s aphorism
from The Threepenny Opera—“Food comes first, then morality” (Brecht and Weill
1968, 54).
12 For example, in the Analects we find that “if all is well-apportioned, there will be no
poverty; if all are in harmony, there will be no lack of men; if stability reigns, there
will be no danger of collapse” (Confucius 1993, 16.1). One may also find a bilingual
version at https://ctext.org/analects/ji-shi.
13 This saying is attested in the thirty-seventh chapter of Romance of the Three King-
doms. A bilingual text may be found at https://ctext.org/sanguo-yanyi/ch37.
14 The accounts may also be found at https://ctext.org/shiji/gao-zu-ben-ji and https://
ctext.org/han-shu/gao-di-ji.
15 Lu Jia is reputed to have written the twelve-volume Xinyu (literally “New Words”),
available at https://ctext.org/xinyu.
16 I am summarizing here a very complex history. For an excellent overview in English,
see Zhang Jinfan (2013), while one may also consult in Chinese the works of He Qin-
hua (2017, 2018).
17 Nonetheless, scholars are keen to point out that whenever a government has needed to
root out corruption and ensure stability for the sake of economic and social improve-
ment, it has resorted to the Legalist tradition.
18 It was during the Qin period that the infamous “burning of the books and bury-
ing alive of the Confucian scholars [fenshukangru]” was supposed to have taken
place.
19 As the Analects (1993, 2.3) put it: “If the people are guided by law, and kept in order
by punishment, they may try to avoid crime, but have no sense of shame. If they are
guided by virtue, and kept in order by the rules of propriety, they will have a sense of
shame, and moreover will come to be good.”
20 Within China, the ambiguity enabled—for example—Sun Zhongshan (Yat-sen) to see
the Taiping as basically anti-imperial, while the earlier doyen of Taiping scholarship in
China, Luo Ergang (1943, 1986), initially argued for their revolutionary and egalitar-
ian credentials. Later, Chinese Marxist scholars tended to see the movement more in
terms of utopian socialism and argued that there was little that could be regarded as
revolutionary.
21 Goldstein’s study also examines the Yihetuan Yundong, or Boxer Rebellion, the “House
Church” movement, and the sectarian extremism of Falun Gong.
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4 Peasant Revolt Against the
Roman Imperial Order in
Ancient Palestine
Richard Horsley
Introduction
The victors in historical conflicts write the history—certainly of the sustained
revolt of Judean and Galilean peasants against the Roman imperial order in Pal-
estine in 66–70 ce. The imperial context and aftermath of the revolt determined
how it was portrayed. The revolt in Judea and Galilee was only one among sev-
eral “disorders” in the empire in the last years under Nero. In the aftermath of
Vespasian seizing imperial power and his son Titus finally devastating Judea and
destroying Jerusalem, the Flavian family touted the reconquest of Judea as their
glorious restoration of “Peace” in the empire that had been falling into disorder.
They presented the destruction of Jerusalem and its temple as a glorious victory
over the subjected enemy religion and god as well as people. In their triumph, they
paraded the most sacred objects from the destroyed Jerusalem temple through the
imperial capital along with captured rebels and their leader, Simon bar Giora, “the
king of the Judeans,” who was ceremonially executed. The massive Arch of Titus,
prominently placed in the Roman Forum, displayed the captured trophies from the
temple as well as the story of the conquest.
The presentation of the Judean Revolt and the Roman devastation of Judea and
Jerusalem in Flavian propaganda became dominant both in antiquity and in mod-
ern scholarly interpretation. By the second century, Christian intellectuals were
interpreting the Roman destruction of Jerusalem and the temple as God’s rejection
of the Judean people. Israel (later “Judaism”) had been superseded by the rapidly
expanding Christian communities. Modern scholars, not seriously questioning the
extensive Flavian propaganda, have largely believed that the revolt was by the
whole Jewish ethnos led by the high priests in charge of the temple (“nation” is
an anachronistic translation for ethnos; see Anderson [1981] 1991). Even Jewish
historian Martin Goodman, in an otherwise critical survey of how the predatory
“ruling class of Judea” had forfeited any remaining support of their people, argued
that when push came to shove, they joined and led the revolt (Goodman 1987; cf.
Horsley 1986a).
The accounts by Josephus, the principal sources for the history of the revolt and
Roman devastation, fit into the context of the Flavian imperial propaganda. This
wealthy Judean priest had tried to control the revolt in Galilee and then deserted to
DOI: 10.4324/9781003177821-5
54 Richard Horsley
Vespasian. Lavishly rewarded by the emperor, he took the name Flavius Josephus
and titled his seven-book history The Judean War, that is, the Judean war against
the Romans. Josephus’s accounts of the revolt, however, are far more complex
than the Flavian propaganda. He greatly exaggerates and embellishes the impor-
tance of his own role. But he carefully defends the Judean high priests for having
led the revolt. In his Life, he states more explicitly than in the War that in forming
a high priestly council as a provisional government and sending “generals” to
various districts, they were attempting to control the revolt until they could nego-
tiate with the Romans. This is historically credible since the reason the Romans
installed them was to control the populace and extract the tribute to Caesar. If
they failed to do that, then the Romans would have had no further use for them.
Recognizing the Flavian imperial context of Flavius Josephus, his accounts of the
revolt can be read critically to discern how complex the situations were in Judea
and Galilee and to discern the course of the unfolding revolt.
The great revolt of 66–70 ce was not a revolt by “the Jewish people” in general.
It began as a revolt against the high priestly rulers in Jerusalem as well as the
Romans in the summer of 66 ce. The high priestly figures most notorious for their
collaboration with the Romans fled Jerusalem. Others of the priestly aristocracy
first barricaded themselves in fortified buildings in Jerusalem and later only pre-
tended to join in order to contain the widespread revolt that had swept through the
countryside in Judea and Galilee. In a matter of months, the people of Jerusalem
and various peasant groups effectively drove out the Roman troops. The peasants
thus to a degree achieved their independence of Roman rule and held the counter-
revolutionary high priestly junta in Jerusalem at bay for up to three years.
After the Roman forces had suppressed the revolt in Galilee in 67 and began
reconquering Judea in 67–68, with their terrorizing “shock and awe” practices
of destroying villages and slaughtering or enslaving the people, many headed
into the hills to form bands of resistance. One after another, coalitions of peasant
groups eventually moved into Jerusalem with its walls and fortified temple as the
only defensible fortress where they might withstand the attacks of the Romans.
Once in the city, the peasants attacked the wealthy and well-born generally as well
as both Herodians and high priestly rulers who had been the face of Roman rule in
Palestine. Vespasian’s departure for Rome in hopes of becoming the next emperor
after the death of Nero allowed the peasant groups a respite for a year or so. When
Titus resumed the devastating conquest and laid siege to Jerusalem, a feuding
coalition of four main groups of peasants held out against the Roman siege of
Jerusalem for months and fought to the death resisting a return to Roman rule.
A Critical Review of the Historical Political–Economic–

Religious Context of the Revolt
Since the role of “religion” in the peasant revolt of 66–70 is the agenda of this
study, the starting point has to be criticism and rejection of the controlling concepts
that have long determined how life in early Roman Palestine has been understood.
Because this period has been viewed as formative for the religion of Judaism and
Peasant Revolt in Ancient Palestine 55
because in the academic division of labor this period is studied mainly by schol-
ars of “early Judaism” and of the spin-off religion of “early Christianity,” textual
sources from this period are standardly understood as expressions of and sources
for Judaism. Judaism has been understood to have had two “pillars,” the Temple
and the Torah. The Temple has been understood as a religious institution, separate
from the political sphere that was controlled by the Romans. The high priests who
headed its operations have been understood as religious leaders. The Torah/Law
has been understood as an already-completed sacred written text (scripture) that
was readily available and widely read by all or most Jews. It was simply assumed
that all or most Jews were loyal to the Temple and faithful adherents of the Torah.
These controlling concepts of “Judaism,” “the Temple,” and “the Torah/ Law”
have effectively blocked recognition of the stark political–economic and cul-
tural–religious divisions in Roman Palestine, the diversity of regions and people
and movements, and the social (political–religious) conflicts that are indicated
in the sources for the period. The simple first step in unblocking recognition of
these divisions and conflicts is to realize that in the ancient world religion was
not separate from political–economic life, institutions, ceremonies, and ideolo-
gies. The second more complex and difficult step is the discernment of what the
sources indicate were the political–economic–religious division and conflicts in
early Roman Palestine, particularly in the districts of Judea and Galilee, while
avoiding further projection of the misleading synthetic but reductionist construct
of Judaism (Horsley 1995).
The fundamental political–economic–religious division was between the peas-
ants living in hundreds of semi-independent village communities in the districts of
Judea, Samaria, Galilee, Perea (in the trans-Jordan) and Idumea, on one hand, and
their local and imperial rulers, on the other. The villagers worked the land to pro-
duce their own subsistence living and a “surplus” that was taken as tribute, taxes,
and/or tithes by local rulers and the Romans who appointed them and maintained
them in power. Generally, the village communities were still semi-independent
with their village assemblies (synagogai in the Gospels) as their form of semi-
self-governance (Horsley 1995, chs. 8–10).
The temple-state had been sponsored by the Persian imperial regime that sent
the descendants of the previously deported Jerusalem ruling class back to rebuild
the temple and control the tiny area around Jerusalem. Successive imperial
regimes retained the temple-state as the local extension of their rule and extrac-
tion. In a period of Hellenistic imperial weakness following the Maccabean revolt,
the upstart Hasmonean high priests, with their armies of mercenaries, had con-
quered the Idumeans to the south, Samaritans to the north, and took control of the
Galileans farther north, thus vastly expanding the territory and people under the
control of the Jerusalem temple-state. The military strongman Herod whom
the Romans imposed on Palestine as king retained the temple-state as an instru-
ment of his own rule. He expanded the high priestly aristocracy and rebuilt the
temple on a massive scale in grand Hellenistic style. To fund this and his other
huge building projects, such as whole cities in honor of Caesar the divine Savior,
along with his munificence to the Hellenistic cities of the Empire, he taxed his
56 Richard Horsley
subjects heavily. Aware that resentment of his rule was widespread, he imposed
sharply repressive measures.
Not surprisingly the peasantry erupted in revolt in Judea, Galilee, and the Tran-
sjordan when he finally died in 4 bce. After their reconquest, the Romans reas-
serted their control in Galilee through client Herodian “kings.” In Judea (along
with Samaria and Idumea), they reverted to the high priestly aristocracy as their
client rulers, only now under a Roman governor. It is thus evident from sources
such as the histories of Josephus and the Gospel stories that the temple was not
merely a religious institution but a political–economic–religious institution, a
temple-state perpetuated by a succession of imperial regimes as a local exten-
sion of imperial rule over the productive peasantry of Judea and nearby areas. In
the temple city of Jerusalem itself, besides the ruling priestly aristocracy, lived a
considerable number of the ordinary priests who conducted sacrifices and other
rituals in the temple, various kinds of artisans (potters, smiths, weavers, etc.) who
served the needs and desires of the priestly aristocracy, and the scribal experts
in the laws and customs and other traditions who assisted the high priests in the
operations of the temple-state (Pharisees, etc.). The temple-state and the city of
Jerusalem as a whole, however, were supported by extracting produce from the
peasant producers in hundreds of village communities. The high priests had been
charged by the Romans with collecting the tribute to Caesar as well. This was
the fundamental political-economic division and source of continuing conflicts
between the rulers and the ruled in Roman Palestine that had been most overtly
evident in earlier peasant revolts: a sustained three-year resistance against Her-
od’s conquest of his subjects in 40–37 bce and the regional revolts after Herod’s
death in 4 bce.
During the first century ce, conflicts between the rulers and the ruled in Roman
Palestine were becoming more and more frequent, taking various forms. Some
scribal teachers led a refusal to render the tribute to Caesar in 6 ce. In the mid-
first century, a series of popular prophets led their followers out into the wil-
derness to experience a new act of deliverance patterned after the great acts of
deliverance in the past led by Moses and Joshua. Leading high priestly figures
became downright predatory on the people, sending their goon squads out to the
village threshing floors to commandeer grain. From the mid-first century, the usu-
ally endemic banditry became epidemic, a good barometer of peasants’ economic
distress. After mid-century, the high priests and the Roman governors could no
longer maintain even a semblance of political order.
The Course of the Peasant Revolt in 66–70

Finally, after a series of provocations by the arrogant Roman governor, wide-
spread revolt erupted both in Jerusalem and in the countryside, particularly in
Judea and Galilee. After the Jerusalemites and peasant insurgents drove out the
Roman forces in 66 and “the high priests and leading Pharisees” formed a junta to
attempt to control the volatile situation, the revolt developed differently depend-
ing on the circumstances in different areas.
The area of Galilee had been ruled by Jerusalem for only a hundred years before
the revolt and Roman reconquest in 4 bce when the Romans imposed Herod’s son
Antipas as ruler. In the first twenty years of his rule, Antipas built two new capital
cities in the small area of lower Galilee, Sepphoris and Tiberias. With the ruler
now established in Galilee itself for the first time, collection of revenues—needed
to fund the construction and support of the new cities—would have become far
more “efficient.” In the mid-first century, the Romans then divided control and
taxation of lower Galilee between the two cities, Sepphoris as part of a Roman
province and Tiberias as a toparchy subject to King Agrippa II. (The following
sketch is based on the fuller discussion in Horsley 2002.)
According to Josephus’s accounts of struggles and events in Galilee, there
was a sharp and sustained political–economic conflict between (the officers who
controlled) these two cities and “the Galileans,” the term he uses for the peas-
ants living in the scores of villages they ruled (e.g., War 22.621–222; 3.199; Life
102, 243). The Galileans “had the same detestation for the Tiberians that they
had for the Sepphorites” (Life 384). The peasants’ hostility was rooted in how
the officials in the cities “had inflicted miseries on them before the war” (Life
392). They seized the opportunity of the collapse of the Roman imperial order
in Palestine to attack their exploiters in Sepphoris and Tiberias, which remained
staunchly loyal to the Romans and/or King Agrippa II (Life 66–67, 104–11,
373–78, 381–84).
Josephus had been sent by the high priestly junta in Jerusalem as the “general”
to control the situation in Galilee. Even though the high priests had not ruled Gali-
lee for the previous seventy years, they still claimed authority over the area and
people. Josephus commanded a small army of mercenaries as well as a substantial
“body-guard”; he depended on them for his security and his “forceful suasion”
(Life 159, 240–42, 243, 383). He attempted to restrain the Galileans by forming a
council of “those in office” in various villages who dined with him as his “friends”
(close advisers). These village leaders he kept under guard, in effect as his hos-
tages for the cooperation of the Galilean villagers (Life 79, 228; cf. War 2.570).
While he claims that “the Galileans” were devoted to him, he also indicates that
they distrusted, challenged, opposed, and even attempted to kill him, suspect-
ing all along that his intention was “to betray the country to the Romans” (Life
132–48; War 2598–610). He claims, although we may doubt it, that he checked
the possibility of the peasants making common cause with the bands of brigands
that had formed along the northern frontier with the territory controlled by Tyre
in the collapse of social order leading up to the revolt. He supposedly did this by
conning the peasants into paying the brigands to serve as mercenaries guarding
the frontier while insisting that the brigands obey his orders not to enter Galilean
territory unless sent for.
All of Josephus’s maneuvers and manipulations, however, could only some-
what mitigate the effects of the peasants’ revolt and that only in lower Galilee.
They had already asserted their freedom from their rulers in the principal cities
of Sepphoris and Tiberias. With the peasant hostility now relatively unchecked,
officials in Sepphoris and Tiberias were unable to carry out their usual duties of
58 Richard Horsley
social control and collection of taxes and tribute, even in immediately surround-
ing villages such as Shikhin, near Sepphoris (Life 230–33). In Tiberias, the Galile-
ans made common cause with “the sailors and the poor,” for example, in attacking
the palace of Antipas (Life 32–35, 64–67, 69, 296). The peasants felt sufficiently
confident in their revolt that they could make raids on their rulers beyond the
countryside of Galilee and into the Great Plain, still supposedly under Roman
or royal control. For example, peasants from Dabaritta, a village on the western
slope of Mount Tabor, ambushed a baggage train of King Agrippa’s finance officer
escorted by a band of cavalry and carried off “a large pile of silver and 500 pieces
of gold,” some fine apparel, and other goods. They were not fooled, moreover,
by Josephus’s secret scheme to return what they had taken to king Agrippa
(War 2.595–7; Life 126–34, 149–52).
The revolt of the peasants in upper Galilee developed unconstrained. In Gis-
chala, the most prominent village, “the inhabitants, mainly farmers (georgoi)
whose whole attention was devoted to the prospects of the harvest,” made com-
mon cause with gangs of brigands from along the frontier with countryside under
the rule of Tyre (War 4.84). Josephus charges that John, the leader in Gischala, got
his start as a bandit-chieftain. This might be standard polemic by the elite against
any rebels. But in peasant revolts, it is common for local “big men” who value
their independence in an area to become leaders of large bands of brigands who
are no longer merely “social bandits” but become the vanguard of revolt. John’s
move to “seize the imperial grain stores of upper Galilee” was a blatant act of
revolt against Roman rule, taking back what had been taken from the peasants as
tribute to Caesar (Life 71–73). The coalition of brigands and peasants became a
significant part of the fighting force that provided the basis of John’s expanding
influence in Galilee and his bid for leadership of the revolt (e.g., War 2.588, 625;
Life 94, 101, 233, 292, 301, 304, 371–72). In contrast to the capitulation of Tibe-
rias and Josephus’s self-serving surrender at Jotapata when the Romans invaded
to suppress the revolt in Galilee, John and his forces at Gischala resisted as long
as they could and then headed for what must have appeared as the center of the
revolt and a more defensible fortress in Jerusalem (War 4.98–120). There they
became one of the four principal peasant forces that continued the revolt after the
Romans had again “pacified” Galilee, slaughtering and enslaving the peasants and
destroying their villages.
The revolt in Judea differed from that in Galilee insofar as it gained momentum
and intensity after the one in Galilee had been suppressed by Roman legions. The
principal division and conflict were again between the village-based peasantry
and the city-based rulers and their Roman patrons. Local factors rooted in history
were again in play. In contrast with Galilee where the temple-state had not been a
factor except for sending Josephus and his force to control the revolt, the revolt in
Judea was against the high priestly rulers as well as against the Romans. Leading
high priestly figures and Herodian families had built themselves lavish mansions
in Jerusalem while manipulating peasants into deeper debt through which they
could extract their labor and produce, even take control of their land, particularly
in the Judean hill country northwest of Jerusalem. By the 60s, however, the high
priests could no longer maintain control of the populace, making it impossible, for
example, for them to collect the tribute.
Although Josephus focuses on the actions of Jerusalemites in his account of
the beginning of the revolt, it is likely that peasant groups, especially from vil-
lages near the city, were also involved in the attacks against high priestly figures,
Herodians, and the Roman forces. Such peasants, for example, would have been
eager to join in the storming and burning of the archives that held records of
debts owed to the wealthy in the city—while it is quite conceivable that debtors
among the majority of poor Jerusalemites and other sympathizers carried out the
action. Since followers of Simon bar Giora from as far north as Acrabetene were
involved, it seems likely that peasant groups to the northwest of the city also were
active in the attacks on the Roman expedition led by Cestius Gallus to suppress
the revolt, attacks that successfully drove the Romans out of Judea.
Once Vespasian and Titus completed their reconquest of Galilee in the summer
of 67; however, they moved south into the Judean countryside, continuing their
“scorched earth” practices. As the Roman forces approached their villages, many
of the people did not wait to be slaughtered but fled into the hills to form bands of
resistance. At some point, says Josephus, “the brigand chiefs of all these scattered
bands joined forces and, now merged into one pack of villainy, stole into poor
Jerusalem” (War 4.135), the only place they could imagine being able to resist the
Roman onslaught. Shortly thereafter “fresh brigands from the countryside entered
the city and joined the more formidable gang already there” (4.138). These peas-
ants-turned-brigands were called “the zealots” (see further Horsley 1986b)—not
to be confused with the misleading modern scholarly construct “the Zealots” pre-
viously imagined to have been a long-standing Jewish “nationalist” party that had
been agitating for armed revolt throughout the first century.
Once the coalition of “bandits” arrived in Jerusalem, they pointedly brought
the class conflict in which the revolt was rooted dramatically to the fore. In his
hatred of the peasants, Josephus relishes the chance to embellish how successive
groups that invaded the city seized the opportunity to attack their rulers and others
of rank, wealth, and high birth in Jerusalem. Right away and in broad daylight,
he complains in his perpetually polemical narrative, they proceeded to murder
the most eminent figures in Jerusalem, such as Antipas, one of the royal family
(he had attempted to nip the revolt in the bud, War 2.418, but remained in the
city after others fled). They seized and “butchered” several prominent powerful
figures (dynatoi) for betraying the common freedom (koine eleutheria), claim-
ing that the dynatoi had conferred with the Romans about surrendering the city
(4.138–142). The invading peasants, of course, knew very well that their positions
of power and privilege depended on their support by the Romans, and Josephus
periodically admits that their suspicions were right. Josephus often says that the
demos, that is, the people of Jerusalem, were attacked by the peasants in the city
and that they, in turn, opposed the peasants. But the demos, hardly “demo-cratic”
in the modern sense, was hierarchical; the people who mattered and properly ran
things were the distinguished nobly born priests and other wealthy figures, par-
ticularly at first when the provisional government was still in control.
60 Richard Horsley
The zealots, being outsiders from the countryside with no place of their own in
the city took over the principal public space, the temple, which was well fortified.
As the zealots continued to attack the wealthy and well-born, the leading high
priest, Ananus, and other prominent figures, such as the leading Pharisee Simeon
son of Gamaliel, organized Jerusalemites to try, in effect, to imprison them in the
inner court of the temple and gradually exterminate them (4.158–207). John of
Gischala, leader of the Galileans who had fled into the city, feigning common
cause with the Jerusalemites, tipped off the zealots that the high priestly council
was about to invite Vespasian to take the city (4.208–223). (Later, John joined
forces with and became one of the principal leaders of the zealots.)
Having revolted in the cause of freedom, the zealots were now effectively
imprisoned in the temple by the forces of the high priestly junta (4.228–30). Des-
perate, they appealed to the Idumean peasants to come into Jerusalem to rescue
them. Not surprisingly Jesus, the high priest second in command, barred these
“turbulent and disorderly people” from entering the city, insisting that the zeal-
ots were “the scum and offscourings of the whole countryside” (4.231–269).
The Idumeans, however, in solidarity with their fellow peasants, entered the city
through a gate opened by the zealots (4.300–313). Once in the city, they targeted
high priestly figures, killing Ananus and Jesus. As Josephus comments, thinking
their energies wasted on the regular city populace (plethos), they went in search
of other high priests, who were soon captured and slain (4.314–25). Together the
Idumeans and zealots imprisoned and then killed many young nobles, setting up
“mock trials” of eminent wealthy and powerful figures (4.326–344).
While many of the Idumeans left the city, the zealots continued to attack power-
ful figures of exalted rank and birth, especially those “with whom they had ancient
quarrels” (4.355–365). Peasants driven out of their villages in northwestern Judea
by the Roman reconquest were taking the opportunity of attacking the Jerusalem
elite who had been exploiting them for generations. Similarly, the Idumeans went
back for generations, to their conquest by the Hasmonean high priest John Hyr-
canus, who had forced them to submit to “the laws of the Judeans.”
The last and largest group of Judean peasants to enter Jerusalem was that led by
Simon bar Giora. Josephus’s extended account lends a sense of how his movement
gradually gained momentum during the course of the revolt. The opening incident
in his account illustrates how peasant forces were involved from the beginning of
the revolt in Judea. Simon, with a significant fighting force, was among the rebels
who harassed the Roman army under Cestius Gallus advancing through Judea to
suppress the nascent revolt in Jerusalem. “Simon son of Gioras fell upon them
as they were mounting towards Beth-horon and cut up a large part of their read-
guard, and carried off many of the baggage mules, which he brought with him
into the city” (War 2.521). In the last paragraph of the War book 2, Josephus then
evidently explains the origins of Simon’s forces, indicating how class struggle in
the provinces erupted into overt class conflict, and hints at the significance of the
movement headed by Simon for later in the revolt:
In the toparchy of Acrabatene (considerably north of Jerusalem) Simon,

son of Gioras, mustering a large band of revolutionaries, devoted himself
to plundering . . . the wealthy and their houses. When Ananus and the rulers
(archonton) sent an army against him, he fled with his band to the brigands at
Masada and remained there until Ananus and his other opponents were killed.
(War 2.652)
It seems clear that his band consisted of peasants in revolt against wealthy Judeans,
as well as the Romans, and that the high priestly junta attempted to suppress them.
This paragraph also suggests that the Jerusalem high priestly council’s dispatch of
military forces to attempt to control the revolt in the provinces did initially slow
the spread of revolt.
Once the high priest Ananus had been killed, Simon began expanding his move-
ment, gathering around himself “villians from everywhere” (4.508):
Having collected a strong force he first overran the villages in the hill-country,
then through continual additions to his numbers was emboldened to descend
into the lowlands and attracted even men of standing. His was no longer an
army of mere debt-slaves and brigands but included many city people, sub-
servient to his command as to a king.
(War 4.509–520)
Simon’s social-economic movement of independence from the rulers and wealthy

now extended from the province of Acrabetene through Judea east and south of
Jerusalem and into to greater Idumea. He had fortified the village of Nain (evi-
dently somewhat north of the Idumean frontier) and adapted a series of caves “in
the valley known as Pheretae” (northeast of Jerusalem?) for storage of supplies
and as a base for his fighters (511–513).
Realizing that he was making preparations for an attack on Jerusalem the zeal-
ots went out to fight him, but he drove them back into the city (War 4.514). Simon
next moved to expand his movement into Idumea or at least to control the ter-
ritory. Josephus mentions Simon encamping at the village of Tekoa (five miles
south of Bethlehem). After initially resisting, the Idumeans acquiesced to Simon’s
expanding forces (4.515–528). Thus, he was able to take over the “little town”
(polichne) of Hebron, where he gained considerable booty and vast supplies of
grain (529–532). While we may have doubts about Josephus’s portrayal of Simon
having ravaged the Idumean countryside, it is quite credible that he was comman-
deering provisions from the towns for his “troops” and the thousands of displaced
people now following him (534–537).
Vespasian launched another invasion of the hill country of Judea, subduing
the provinces of Acrabetene and Gophna with great slaughter and destruction.
The Romans also “laid waste upper Idumea” and burned Hebron, killing both
young and old (War 4.550–555). As the Roman troops took over the hill country,
Simon’s forces pushed the fugitives into Jerusalem and followed themselves, sur-
rounding the city (4.556–557). The city people (demos), still suffering the zealots’
attacks against the wealthy, their houses, and their possessions, in a meeting with
the high priestly council, finally invited Simon and his forces into Jerusalem to
help them against John of Gischala and the zealots (571–576). Simon thus became
62 Richard Horsley
“master of the city” and proceeded, with the support of the demos, to attack John
and the zealots still holed up in the temple (577–58).
Toward the beginning of his account of the Romans’ siege of Jerusalem,
Josephus lists the numbers of the insurgents determined to resist. While the
numbers are exaggerated, his figures offer a sense of the relative strength of
the coalitions of peasant defenders. “Simon had an army of 10,000, . . . plus his
Idumean contingent of 5,000. . . . John, at the time when he seized the temple,
had an army of 6,000, . . . [and] the zealots who joined him were 2,400” (War
5.248–250). While they continued to feud and fight one another, they also man-
aged a common defense against the Romans (5.278). While the Romans tortured
and crucified Judeans they captured opposite the walls (5.443–451), the peasant
defenders on the ramparts “heaped abuse” on the Caesars, Titus and Vespasian,
“crying out that they scorned death, which they honorably preferred to servi-
tude” (458). They were particularly vigilant about deserters to the Romans and
periodic reports of plots to betray the city: “those of rank and wealth in particu-
lar were brought up before the tyrants” (5.439). Simon condemned Matthias
son of Boethus (of high priestly ancestry) whom the demos had sent as their
envoy to invite him into the city on suspicion of siding with the Romans. Also
executed were the distinguished priest Ananias son of Masbalus and Aristeus,
the scribe of the council (5.527–530). That is, like the earlier zealots, this lat-
est movement of peasants and their leaders who entered the city continued the
attack on the wealthy and the high priests and others in the junta who were still
in the city.
It was impossible for the peasant fighters in the city to hold out against the
overwhelming military might of the Roman legions. Many of them fought to the
death. Simon managed to survive the destruction of the city and temple and to rise
mysteriously from an underground chamber to be captured (War 7.26–36, 118).
As mentioned at the outset, the victorious Flavian “Caesar” sent him, along with
several hundred of the peasant rebels in chains, to be ceremonially executed as the
enemy general at a celebration of the great triumph in the imperial city.
Rethinking the Role of Religion in the Revolt

As noted above, in investigating the role of “religion” in the revolt, the starting
point has to be the criticism and rejection of the controlling concepts that have
long determined how life in early Roman Palestine has been understood. Judaism
is a synthetic anachronistic modern scholarly construct that blocks recognition
of the stark political–economic–religious divisions attested in the sources. The
sources give no indications that the temple was somehow one of the two pillars of
Judaism to which most or all Jews were devoted. The temple was the fortified cen-
tral public space, the site of sacrifices, and the storehouse of the temple-state (with
its prodigious wealth, War 6.282). It was headed by the high priestly aristocracy
empowered by the Romans to extract and control tithes to support themselves
and the ordinary priests who conducted sacrifices and offerings from the people,
ostensibly to please or appease their divine Lord who supposedly dwelt there.
The high priests were also charged by the Romans to extract from the people the
tribute owed to the divine Caesar.
The discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls and several largely independent lines of
recent research into ancient communications media, moreover, are now decisively
undermining previously standard assumptions about the Torah/Law as the sup-
posed second pillar of Judaism. Among the previously unknown texts were many
manuscripts of what have been understood as books of the Hebrew scriptures,
manuscripts over a thousand years older than any previously known. After a life-
time of close analysis of these manuscripts, text-critics have found that there were
multiple versions of each book all still undergoing further development (Ulrich
1999). That is, contrary to prevailing assumptions, there was no standardized text
of the scriptures, including the books of the Torah. Recent research, furthermore,
has established that communication was predominantly oral in antiquity (Harris
1989; Hezser 2001). Indeed, in Roman Palestine, literacy was extremely limited
(roughly 3 percent), mainly to circles of professional scribes. It is thus extremely
unlikely that the common people had contact with what were thought to have been
the written texts of the Torah. While the people may have known of the existence
of such “books” that were authoritative for scribes who served in the temple-state,
the “books” of Torah were not widely available, and the people would not have
been able to read them. The Torah was thus not known by most or all Jews, cer-
tainly not in the form that modern scholars know and study such books.
This does not mean, however, that common people were unfamiliar with Israel-
ite traditions. Another parallel line of research is showing that, as in other agrarian
societies, the Judean and Galilean peasantry cultivated (orally) their own popular
tradition somewhat parallel to the official or scribal tradition (see Horsley 2013).
Anthropologists and others doing fieldwork in contemporary villages have found
that peasants have their own “little tradition” that parallels the “great tradition” of
the capital cities but, more important, articulates their own distinctive identity and
interests (Scott 1977).
Because peasants, who were not literate, did not leave written texts, evidence
for the popular Israelite tradition is fragmentary and largely indirect. (The Gospel
stories of Jesus and his largely peasant movement that do provide more direct
evidence are highly unusual among societies of the world insofar as they became
written on scrolls and codices.) I first discerned the existence and effects of Isra-
elite popular tradition in probing Josephus’s accounts of leaders and movements
involved in the revolts of 4 bce and 66–70 (Horsley 1984). Despite Josephus’s dis-
gust of peasants, especially when they oppose or make trouble for the high priestly
rulers and the Roman governors, his accounts of their actions offer clues into how
those actions were rooted in Israelite popular tradition. The peasant revolts in
Galilee, the trans-Jordan, and Judea in 4 bce (War 2.55–65; Ant. 17.269–285)
all took the same distinctively Israelite form (Horsley 1984). Villagers in each of
these districts acclaimed their leader as “king.” It seems evident that the leaders
and movements were informed by their memory of the early Israelites having
“messiahed” the young David to lead their resistance against the invading Philis-
tine armies (2 Samuel 2:1–4; 5:1–4). The striking difference of this acclamation
64 Richard Horsley
by the people from the more august ceremonial coronation of an imperial king
as “the Messiah and Son of God” (e.g., in Psalm 110) is a clear indication of its
derivation from earlier Israelite popular tradition.
Other legendary elements from Israelite popular tradition included in the offi-
cial Deuteronomic history with the people’s acclamation as king were David’s
origin as a shepherd and his rise as a bandit-chieftain and his home or basis in
the town of Hebron. These help us discern other clues in Josephus’s accounts that
the form of the movements led by popularly acclaimed kings was informed by the
Israelite popular tradition of the young David as leader of the people. Josephus’s
histories offer accounts of other peasant movements, in the mid-first century ce,
that also took a distinctively Israelite form, that of popular prophets leading fol-
lowers out into the wilderness to experience an act of deliverance patterned after
the formative deliverance of the people led by Moses and/or Joshua (Horsley
1985).
I suggest that if we want to understand the religious dimension of political-eco-
nomic life in Judea and Galilee in which the peasant revolt of 66–70 was rooted,
we should further investigate Israelite popular tradition.
Judean and Galilean peasants and other Israelites were subject to the temple-
state, which was the extension and face of Roman imperial rule in Palestine. The
temple-state was legitimated by an ideology of divine presence, priestly rule, and
people’s obligations and operated according to an official ideological repertoire of
customs and laws cultivated by the scribes and Pharisees serving as its intellec-
tual-legal retainers. Some of these were purity laws to protect the sanctity of the
inner precincts of the temple and the hierarchical castes of priests who officiated
in the sacrifices. The people were expected to yield tithes to support the priests
and to send offerings and sacrifices to God and to attend pilgrimage festivals in
Jerusalem, all of which provided economic support for the temple state.
Judean and Galilean peasants, however, were also members of village commu-
nities that were semi-independent and semi-self-governing, recognition of which
has been blocked by the controlling construct of Judaism. The most prominent
articulations of the collective identity of the people of Israel were legends and
other stories of historical origins and ancestral struggles for independence. Also
prominent were customs and principles of social–economic interaction in village
communities, customs and principles that seem to have guided the whole people
across village lines. The principal communal ritual or ceremony in peasant life,
moreover, was a celebration of the legend of the people’s origin.
All of these would have been articulated in Israelite popular tradition cultivated
orally in village communities. As noted, evidence for the popular tradition is lim-
ited and indirect. Texts produced by the scribal elite such as the “books” that were
later included in the Hebrew Bible cannot be used as direct sources. But since the
scribal circles that produced those “books” incorporated and adapted what had
been stories, legends, songs, customs, and practices that originated among earlier
Israelite villagers (as long since explained by critical “biblical” scholars), those
“books” can be used as indirect sources. A brief survey can focus on some further
examples of legends and stories, and customs, laws, and practices that may well
have factors in the inspiration, motivation, and social forms of the peasant revolt
in 66–70.
Central to Israelite peasants’ collective identity was the foundational legend of
the people’s origins from bondage to Pharaoh. This was articulated in multiple
ways, such as the “Song of the Sea” (incorporated into the “book” of Exodus in
ch. 15) and several psalms (later included in the “book” of Psalms). Parallel to
the exodus legend of the people’s origins were several other songs and stories
of early Israelites’ deliverance from or fighting against rulers who had subjected
them (e.g., in Joshua 8:10–23; 11:1–13; Judges 5; 1 Kings 11–12). The collective
identity articulated in these legends and stories was oppositional. The people of
Israel originated and continued in struggles for independence of rulers who had
dominated and exploited them.
Of special importance in the religious dimension of life is ritual or ceremony
that etches what is commemorated deeply into the collective memory and identity.
The foundational legend of the exodus, of course, became deeply ingrained from
its annual celebration in Passover. As indicated in “biblical” descriptions, it was
originally celebrated in village households. But, perhaps because of Passover’s
potential oppositional power, later rulers wanting to consolidate their political–
economic–religious power (if not King Josiah, then surely the early temple-state)
centralized the celebration of Passover as a pilgrimage festival in the Jerusalem
temple. The centralized celebration of the Passover thus stood in contradiction
to the exodus liberation that it supposedly celebrated. Not surprisingly the sharp
political–economic–religious division in Judea became exacerbated and dramati-
cally visible at this festival. According to Josephus’s account, the residual tensions
between rulers and ruled escalated when Judean peasants went up to the temple
in Jerusalem to celebrate their paradigmatic liberation in the exodus. Anticipat-
ing trouble, the Roman governors regularly brought a cohort of Roman troops
into the city and posted them atop the colonnades of the temple. But this only
exacerbated the tensions as Judean peasants had to celebrate their paradigmatic
liberation under surveillance by their new imperial rulers. Under the governor
Cumanus (48–52 ce), the Judeans celebrating Passover protested an obscene ges-
ture by a Roman soldier, and Cumanus unleashed his troops on the festival crowd
(Ant. 20.105–109). Here is a prime illustration of how Israelite popular tradition,
social memory deepened by foundational celebration, was the basis for opposition
to the temple-state.
Of equal importance in the Israelite popular tradition to the foundational leg-
end and other stories that articulated the people’s collective identity over against
their (would be) rulers were the principles and customs that guided the common
life of the people. Critical “biblical” scholars have finally discerned that in the
“literary” collections of laws known as “the Covenant Code” in Exodus 21–23,
“the Holiness Code” in Leviticus, and the laws and teachings in Deuteronomy,
Judean scribes have adapted many popular customs and practices that had guided
common life for generations (Knight 2011; Horsley 2009; cf. Scott 1976). These
included, for example, gleaning rights for the poor and lending liberally at no
interest to the needy, practices that would help keep individual households in
66 Richard Horsley
village communities economically viable. Letting the land lie fallow every sev-
enth year was still standard practice in Judea and was taken into account in cal-
culating the amount of the tribute due in early Roman times. The cancellation of
debts in the seventh year was also still standard practice among the people, as
illustrated ironically by creditors avoiding it by placing the records of debts into
the custody of courts, as allowed by the prosbul decreed by (the Pharisee) Hillel.
The sabbatical release of peasants who had become debt-slaves was included in
these traditional mechanisms to keep households economically viable, although it
is doubtful such an ideal was practiced by wealthy creditors.
In several passages in the “books” of Exodus, Deuteronomy, and Joshua, it is
clear that the social-economic customs, laws, and teachings had become centered
in what is presented as the Mosaic Covenant that bonded the people with God
their transcendent “king” and with one another. In the key passages (e.g., Exodus
20; Deuteronomy 5; Joshua 24), the Mosaic covenant has a particular form with
three basic component steps: the opening declaration of deliverance by YHWH
(focused on the exodus); the central set of ten “words” or commandments, fol-
lowed by sanctions on the people keeping those commands. The “ten words” of
the covenant were fundamental principles according to which the people were
to maintain justice in their own communities independent of political domina-
tion and economic exploitation by human kings/ rulers. The first four “words,”
particularly the first two, insisted on exclusive loyalty to YHWH (the transcend-
ent force that had liberated them) as their sole ruler and forbade them to “bow
down and serve” (other) gods of the surrounding states/kings with their subsist-
ence produce. The other six “words” were principles of social-economic relations
among the people that forbade them from scheming to take control of (coveting)
or stealing others’ crops/resources or swearing falsely in obtaining or making
loans (Horsley 2009). According to these and other “books” the Mosaic covenant
was periodically renewed in a covenant-renewal ceremony.
It seems evident that this covenantal form was operative in the popular Israel-
ite tradition cultivated in village communities. The dissident scribes and priests
who left Jerusalem in protest against the Hasmonean high priests adapted the
covenant form in the formation of their community, as evident in the regular cov-
enant renewal ceremony laid out in their Community Rule (1QS). The Gospels
portray the Moses- and Elijah-like prophet Jesus renewing the covenant in his
movement based in village communities, as evident in “the Sermon on the Mount”
in Matthew 5–7 and its parallel in Luke 6:20–49 and the renewed covenantal
principles articulated in Mark 10.
Several incidents mentioned in sources for first-century Roman Palestine indi-
cate how committed Judeans and Galileans were to the covenantal command-
ments despite the risk to their own lives and livelihood. Subjection to imperial
rule was a direct contradiction of Israelites’ covenantal relation with their god.
Rendering tribute to Caesar, honored throughout the empire as the divine savior,
brought to the fore their violation of the first and second commandments. When
the Romans reverted to ruling through the high priests in 6 ce, says Josephus,
“the fourth philosophy” led by the scribal teacher Judas and the Pharisee Saddok
insisted that the people could not pay the tribute to (the divine) Caesar since they
already had God as their (exclusive) ruler, that is, that paying the tribute was
prohibited by the first two commandments. Josephus also claims that they agreed
with the Pharisees on all matters (Ant. 18.4–6, 23). By implication, the Pharisees
also knew that the people should not be paying the tribute but were compromis-
ing the commandments in their service of the temple-state that was subject to the
Romans.
The striking commitment of the peasantry to the covenantal commandments,
particularly the first and second, (“you shall have no other gods” and “you shall
not bow down and serve”), is illustrated by two incidents. Once we no longer
read the Gospels through the lens of the modern Western separation of church
and state, then it is clear that when the Pharisees attempted to entrap Jesus about
payment of the tribute, his cagy response left no doubt about his and the people’s
commitment: since all things belonged to God, then nothing belonged to Caesar
(Mark 12:13–17). He had not explicitly stated that people should not pay, but he
had declared that they did not owe tribute and really should not be paying it. One
of the more remarkable events in first-century Roman Palestine was the “peasant
strike” in Galilee. The emperor Gaius (Caligula) commanded that a huge military
force proceed through Galilee and Judea to place a statue of his divine eminence
in the Jerusalem temple. As the legions moved through western Galilee, large
numbers of peasants refused to sow seed in the soil. They were not just protesting
a “graven image” of the supposedly divine emperor. They were risking starva-
tion in order to deny Caesar his tribute since there would be no harvest later in
the year. As the Herodian officials advising the Roman commander pointed out,
instead of the usual harvest from which the tribute would be taken, there would be
“a harvest of banditry” among the desperate peasantry in the district. And of
course, epidemic banditry might lead to a peasant revolt.
Particular Examples of How Israelite Popular Tradition May

Have Inspired and Informed the Peasant Revolt
Israelite popular tradition that articulated the collective Israelite people’s identity
and guided their common life focused on a sustained struggle for independence
of domination and extraction by human rulers and the divine forces they served.
Roman imperial domination, which operated through high priestly rule in the
temple-state, was diametrically opposed to and an obvious violation of Israelite
tradition generally and of the Mosaic Covenant that bonded the people with their
god and with one another in particular.
Josephus’s narrative of how the revolt erupted in the summer of 66 includes
what may well be an account of what finally triggered the revolt, both in Jerusa-
lem and among the peasants in the countryside. Being forced to pay the tribute
to Caesar was a blatant violation of the first two commandments of the covenant
as well as a symbol of their subjugation and a concrete threat to their economic
subsistence. As social order disintegrated in the 60s, the predatory high priestly
aristocracy had been unable to carry out the collection of the tribute with which
68 Richard Horsley
they were charged by the Romans. As anti-Roman agitation mushroomed in 66,
however, the high priestly rulers suddenly went out to the villages and levied the
tribute, as a way of showing the Romans that Judeans were not in revolt (War
2.405–407). Having high priestly officers from Jerusalem suddenly come into
their villages to extract the tribute from their food supply is likely what led Judean
peasants to join or mount the attacks that drove the Romans out.
Josephus’s frequent polemics against the peasants who invaded the sacred
precincts of the temple and attacked the high priestly ruling class, moreover,
offer several indications of their deep resentment of the religious dimension of
the temple-state, its rulers, and its ideological-ritual self-legitimation. As just
noted, the peasants were subject to the temple-state headed by the ostensibly
hereditary high priestly rulers and its ideology and regulations that protected
the sanctity of the temple and its presiding priests. To the peasants, however,
these aspects of the religious dimension of the temple-state and its priests would
have been symbols of their subordination—symbols of the institution and its
heads that drained away their livelihood. As Josephus’s account indicates, once
the coalition of peasants called the zealots came into Jerusalem, there was lit-
tle to restrain them from acting out their attitudes toward the sanctity of the
temple and the priesthood. The invading peasants pointedly profaned (what
Josephus and others of the priestly establishment considered) the sacred space,
rituals, and officiating figures of the temple. Josephus is scandalized that they
“invaded the temple with polluted feet.” He is outraged that John of Gischala
“had unlawful food served at his table and abandoned the established rules of
purity of our ancestors” (War 7.263–264). In a carnivalesque parody of the pre-
tentious temple-state, the zealots “took it upon themselves” to hold an election
of the high priest by lot. Mocking “the claims of those families from which the
high priests had always been drawn” the lot fell to the rude lowborn peasant
Phanni son of Samuel of the village of Aphthia, who “they dragged out of the
countryside, . . . dressed in the sacred vestments, and instructed him how to act”
(War 4.147–150).
Finally, Josephus’s account of the movement led by Simon bar Giora offers
clues to how Israelite popular tradition was an active force among the people
embedded in it that inspired and informed the social–political–religious form
taken by the most prominent coalition of peasants engaged in the revolt. Once
Simon began expanding his movement into southern Judea and Idumea, the sto-
ries of the young David’s rise from shepherd to bandit chieftain to the popularly
acclaimed king of the Israelites struggling against the Philistines appear to have
provided the pattern according to which the movement took form. When he moved
into the rugged area south of Jerusalem, he attracted poor people and debtors (War
4.508). This is strikingly similar to the circumstances of the legendary movement
that had gathered around the young brigand-chieftain David in the same general
area (1 Samuel 22:1–2). Simon and his movement appear to have been acting
in imitation of the young David in making his base the town of Hebron, which
in Israelite legend had been the home and base of David where Israelites had
gathered to messiah him as their king to lead them against Philistine domination.
Simon’s proclaiming freedom for debt-slaves and rewards for the free (i.e., poor
but not yet fallen into debt-slavery) indicates that his movement had a program
of social-economic relief and renewal based on traditional Israelite covenantal
principles and practices. It seems clear that Simon was posing as, and the people
were responding to him as the (new) young David leading them to again establish
their independence of foreign rulers.
The revolt of Judean and Galilean peasants was an ancient class war rooted in
the inseparably political–economic–religious class conflict of the Roman imperial
order in Palestine that was, in turn, rooted in and shaped according to Israelite
popular tradition in which the people were embedded.
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5 John Ball and the 1381
English Uprising
From Rebellion to Revolutions
James Crossley
There is no doubt that the English uprising of 1381, popularly labeled as the
“Peasant’s Revolt,” was grounded in class-based resentments and conflict.1 With
nearly half the population of Europe wiped out, the aftermath of the Black Death
of 1348/49 saw agricultural workers capitalizing on the labor shortage and new
opportunities. This was met with a defense of class interests “from above,” includ-
ing Parliament (Statute of Labourers, 1351) who attempted to cap wages and keep
serfs tied to the land, which further provoked resentment in response. The ongo-
ing wars with France were costly, and the introduction of more taxes heightened
these tensions, not least because, in return, communities were not given enough
protection as they remained vulnerable to coastal raids. The three new taxes intro-
duced between 1377 and 1380 were among the more immediate causes of the
uprising, particularly the infamous poll tax of 1380 and the unpopular coercive
methods of collection. Despite the uprising’s famous label, the rebels were not
just peasants but included among their ranks were local officials, urban dwellers,
escaped prisoners, and lower clergy, with a competing range of interests from
issues surrounding social mobility through local grievances to settling old scores.
Uprisings took place in different parts of England, but the uprisings in the
southeast of England have received the most popular and scholarly attention, not
least because of the dramatic events that took place in London under prominent
leaders, such as Wat Tyler. On Thursday, June 13, 1381, rebels from the south-
east managed to gain entry into the capital and were joined by Londoners and
prisoners sprung from jail. The rebels appear to have been generally disciplined
(although there were inevitable exceptions), typically refused to engage in theft,
and selected political, economic, legal, and ecclesiastical targets for their attacks,
including destroying the wealth of the Savoy Palace owned by the much-hated
John of Gaunt. The rebels managed to negotiate with King Richard II, and their
demands included the end of serfdom, the pardon of criminals, and the removal
or execution of royal advisors. Remarkably, the rebels managed to break into the
Tower of London and behead some of the leading figures of the realm, including
the Archbishop of Canterbury and the Chancellor of England, Simon Sudbury.
While Richard accepted some key rebel demands, Tyler and rebels from Kent
pushed for more, including a dramatic restructuring of the legal system, social
hierarchy, and a national church which would now be overseen by the king and
DOI: 10.4324/9781003177821-6
72 James Crossley
one bishop. The confusion that followed led to Tyler being fatally wounded, while
Richard responded by pacifying the rebels as the crown set about reestablishing
authority and having leaders put on trial and executed.
One such figure was the lower clergyman and would-be church leader in this
new England John Ball, who was captured in Coventry, tried in St Albans in mid-
July, and hanged, drawn, and quartered, with his four parts sent to different cities.
Ball seems to have been popular among the rebels of the southeast and provided
or articulated the theological underpinnings of the revolt. This being medieval
England meant, of course, that a class-based revolt was inevitably a religious one.
This combination of class and religion was epitomized by Ball’s famous take on
a widely known couplet that pointed to an alternative future by looking at the
mythical past: “When Adam delved and Eve span, who was then a gentleman?”
The figure of Ball provides us with the prime example of understanding the com-
bination of religion, rebellion, and revolution in the case of the 1381 uprising.
The 1381 uprising itself was a “rebellion” in that demands involved a change
of political leaders, policies, and institutions among a range of other competing
interests. Nevertheless, 1381 was also “revolutionary” in that Ball and the rebels
sought a fundamental transformation of English society. This was not, of course,
realized in 1381, so, if it was a revolution, it was a failed one. However, if revolu-
tion is also a process that facilitates the transition to modernity and the emergence
of democracy, we can see 1381 as more than a rebellion: it reveals something
about the long-term transformation to bourgeois capitalism. To embrace the lat-
ter interpretation, we need to look in more detail at Ball’s ideas but also a further
dimension of Reed and Goldstein’s discussion of revolution in the introduction to
this volume in terms of historical transformation: Marxist ideas of historical mate-
rialism that, as it turns out, have incorporated the figure of Ball in understanding
long-term historical change in England.
Ball and Historical Materialism

Friedrich Engels in Peasant War in Germany provided a historical materialist
approach to the movement around the revolutionary theologian Thomas Münzer
(Engels [1850] 1967).2 But another figure mentioned by Engels was Ball. Engels
was interested in religious and apocalyptic figures like Ball, with their demands for
radical equality and opposition to feudalism and church authority, partly because
their varied demands could be understood in historical materialist terms and how
they were reconceptualized over the long term in the transformation to bourgeois
capitalism. Engels’s historical materialist readings were especially influential
on British Marxists and socialists and this influence dovetailed with a British or
English tradition that had rescued Ball after centuries of bad press by historians
and intellectuals of the ruling class (see the later discussion). The famous British
Marxist historians emerging from the Communist Party Historians’ Group (1946–
1956), developed inherited readings of Ball in terms of both historical materialism
and English or British radicalism in their pioneering work on the “history from
below” approach. While the seventeenth-century English revolution associated
John Ball and the 1381 English Uprising 73
with Christopher Hill, the making of the English working class associated with
E.P. Thompson, and the growth of the industrial world associated with Eric
Hobsbawm have since attracted the most attention, medieval England was just as
crucial for the Communist Party Historians’ Group because central to their agenda
was explaining the transformation from feudalism to capitalism.3
Dona Torr was one of their most influential figures. Her posthumous and
incomplete book on Tom Mann (a founding member of the Communist Party
of Great Britain) placed Ball and his most prominent interpreters in an “English
revolutionary tradition,” adding,
Our story of the struggle for freedom begins with the great Rebellion led by
Wat Tyler and inspired by Ball’s 20 years’ preaching. . . . The defeated revo-
lutionaries who at their execution spoke so proudly of their cause were the
first Englishmen who have told their rulers and judges that they were glad to
suffer for freedom . . . the ideas of the Levellers and Diggers have their place
in the English revolutionary tradition which extends from John Ball to Tom
Mann.
(Torr 1956, 98)
Building on the agenda set by Torr and others (cf., e.g., Fagan 1938; Morton
1938; Lindsay 1939; Hill 1954, 11–12), Rodney Hilton would develop the most
sustained reading of the 1381 uprising in terms of both an “English revolutionary
tradition” (see, e.g., Fagan and Hilton 1950, 9–10, 89) and, especially, a thor-
oughgoing historical materialism. Hilton thus saw 1381 in the wider context of
class struggle in feudal England, and much of his career involved looking at the
exploitative relationship between landowner and peasant. Put crudely, Hilton
argued that the landowner extracted the surplus from the peasant, with “peasant”
understood as a broad category encompassing serfs, agricultural laborers, and
artisans (reflecting the broad range of backgrounds represented in the 1381 upris-
ing). According to Hilton, the struggle involved in the landlord–tenant relation-
ship was the motor of historical change. Extraction of rents, competing demands,
and accompanying conflict developed in different ways and times in medieval
Europe but, Hilton argued, increased with the growth of both trade and the reach
of the state (see, e.g., Hilton 1969, 1973, 1975, 1981a, 1981b, 1990).
The religiously justified demands for freedoms and liberties that came from
peasants and artisans was, over the long term, integral to the emergence of agrar-
ian capitalism, which, in turn, would develop into industrial capitalism. For
Hilton, figures like Ball and the rebels of 1381 played their role in the declining
deference towards the ideas and power of the ruling class that accompanied the
shift towards commodity production in the more market-orientated southeast of
England. Hilton went further and saw the later emerging bourgeois claims about
freedom, liberty, and egalitarianism as owing something to earlier peasant and
insurgent claims associated with Ball and 1381. The class-based tensions in feu-
dalism were accompanied by religious ones, which likewise contributed over the
long term to the transformation in ideology that accompanied the rise of bourgeois
74 James Crossley
capitalism. The preaching of a figure like Ball in Hilton’s reading of history was
grounded in the tension in Christianity and the Bible at the heart of the medieval
ideological system—that same tension identified in Reed and Goldstein’s intro-
duction, where Christianity and the Bible have provided both the legitimation
of given social worlds and resistance against them. As a representative of resist-
ance from below, Ball employed the Adam and Eve couplet because it was so
well known and already embedded in peasant ideology (Hilton 1973, 211–12, cf.
1990, 9–10). Hilton suggested that 1381 provided an instance of not only shared
interests in action but even class consciousness among the peasantry and related
producers, which included a long-term vision beyond feudalism articulated by
lower clergy like Ball, who he claimed functions as the “medieval equivalent of a
radical intelligentsia” (cf. Hilton 1981a, 171–72, 1981b, 18).
This is not the place to rehearse the controversial and ongoing “transition
debate” or the “Dobb-Sweezy debate” about whether the rise of trade and the
transformation to capitalism was driven by internal contradictions in feudalism
or by external factors. Nor is this the place to give a full assessment of Hilton’s
work in light of subsequent scholarship on the 1381 uprising and medieval eco-
nomics. However, the general point raised by Hilton in connecting 1381 and the
transformation to capitalism is an important one that can be developed further.
As class conflict remains central to scholarly understandings of the uprising and
its accompanying religious rhetoric, what we can further do is look at the chang-
ing reception of Ball in light of the emergence of capitalism and resistance to
capitalism. While we do not have enough data to assess the reception of Ball to
see how the internal contradictions of feudalism may or may not have played
out, what we can see is something akin to what Hilton was arguing, namely, that
calls for freedom, liberty, and so on, were absorbed (sometimes explicitly) into
emerging bourgeois thought from the end of the eighteenth century onward. But
in good dialectical style, Ball was also being absorbed into an emerging Eng-
lish radical and revolutionary traditions in opposition to bourgeois capitalism. Put
another way, understanding the reception of Ball through a historical materialist
lens allows us to see how a leading figure in a medieval rebellion was transformed
into an English revolutionary icon.
Ball and the English Rebellion of 1381

There have been attempts to reconstruct Ball’s earlier life which are inevitably
speculative (for an overview of Ball’s life, see, e.g., Prescott 2008; Crossley
2021). Nevertheless, there are some issues where we can be more certain. From
letters attributed to Ball around the time of the 1381 uprising (Knighton, Chroni-
cle 220–25; Walsingham, Chronica maiora 548–49),4 it seems likely that he was
a priest connected to St Mary’s, York (probably St Mary’s Abbey or an associate
church), who later moved or returned to Colchester in Essex. When active in
Essex, he was an itinerant lower clergyman who repeatedly found himself in trou-
ble with the authorities. In February 1364, Edward III permitted special protection
for Ball because Ball feared physical harm from his enemies. However, the king
revoked this protection because he learned that Ball had wandered “from place to
place preaching articles contrary to the faith of the church to the peril of his soul
and the souls of others, especially of laymen” (No name 1912, 470).
Ball seems to have become popular for his preaching in or around public mar-
kets, cemeteries, streets, and fields, although this activity was viewed with sus-
picion by ecclesiastical authorities who saw heresy in action. Exactly what was
deemed heretical is not clear. Shortly after the revolt, it was claimed that Ball
was a follower of John Wycliffe (the proto-Protestant reformer) and his followers
(the Lollards), but there is reason to be suspicious of such claims. First, there is
no obvious doctrinal link in the best sources we have. Second, the claims were
aimed at discrediting both Ball and Wycliffe and the connection made was ret-
rospectively framed in such a manner. For instance, the hostile chronicler Henry
Knighton claimed that just as John the Baptist was the precursor to Christ, so Ball
was to Wycliffe, and thus, Ball “prepared the way for him [Wycliffe] in people’s
minds, and it is said that he subverted the beliefs of many with his teaching”
(Knighton, Chronicle 242–43). However, general claims from the chroniclers
about Ball’s popularity are likely to be broadly accurate, even if the accuracy
of details can be disputed. Thomas Walsingham, for instance, claimed that Ball
preached about “the things which he knew would please the common people, dis-
paraging men of the Church as well as secular lords, and so won the good will of
the commons rather than approval before God” (Chronica maiora 544–45). This
understanding of Ball as a popular priest is confirmed by the best evidence about
Ball’s pre-1381 life. Ball raised the ire of Sudbury, the prominent churchman who
would go on to lose his head in the 1381 uprising. In October 1364, when Sud-
bury was Bishop of London, he excommunicated Ball for his ongoing activities
while in December 1376 reference was made to Ball’s ex-communication under
Sudbury (now Archbishop of Canterbury) “for his manifest contumacy,” and so
Essex clergy were urged to bring Ball before the sheriff on account of his actions
against the church (Calendar of the Patent Rolls: Edward III, Vol. XVI, 1916,
415). In April 1381, Sudbury suggested that Ball was among the “false prophets”
and stressed that his ideas were heretical and poisonous and against apostolic and
church authority and, in a likely indication of Ball’s popular support, that he was
as elusive as a fox evading a hunter (Wilkins 1737, 152).
The details of Ball’s preaching become clearer in descriptions of his activi-
ties around the time of the 1381 uprisings, even if (as ever) we cannot be certain
about the accuracy of all the stories about Ball. While we cannot rule out Knight-
on’s claim (Chronicle 210–11) that Ball was sprung from prison in Maidstone
and Walsingham’s report (Chronica maiora 546–47) of Ball’s famous sermon at
Blackheath during the uprising, there is the possibility that he was not in Kent
or London at this time and that he was the named “John Ball” who was sprung
from prison in Bishop’s Stortford on June 11 (Prescott 1984, 303–4). But wher-
ever Ball may have been during the uprising in June 1381, the varied presenta-
tion of his teaching is theologically consistent across the chronicles and was said
to be the ideological driving force of rebellion. Echoing the Gospels (Matthew
11:7–8; Luke 7:24–25; 16:19–31), Ball was said to have attacked a society of
76 James Crossley
lords in fine clothing, living in luxurious houses, and consuming good food and
drink. This was a life maintained, Ball argued, by the lower orders who lived in
poor cloth, surviving off the chaff and water, and laboring in the fields through
wild weather (Froissart, Chroniques 10.96).5 Ball was also said to have looked to
an overturning of the accompanying ecclesiastical system, ridding the church in
England of “all the lords, archbishops, bishops, abbots and priors, as well as most
of the monks and canons so that there should be no bishop in England except for
one archbishop, namely himself” (Anonimalle Chronicle 137; cf. Walsingham,
Chronica maiora 546–49; Knighton, Chronicle 210–11).6
Ball and his supporters appear to have believed such dramatic social and politi-
cal upheaval was imminent (e.g., Dobson 1983, 19–20; Hilton 1973, 223; Dunn
2004, 79; Crossley 2020; cf. Green 1992, 182, 186). Whether or not Ball actu-
ally delivered the famous Blackheath sermon on June 12, 1381, what we have
recorded (Walsingham, Chronica maiora 546–47), is consistent with what we
know about his view. Here, the story of Adam and Eve and the social structures
at the beginning of human history were said to have been used by Ball to cri-
tique the present and inspire the imminent replacement of the social and political
order. Ball was said to have opened his sermon with his famous couplet, tell-
ingly recorded in English: “Whan Adam dalf, and Eve span / Wo was þanne a
gentilman?” (When Adam dug and Even span, who was then a gentleman?). As
there was no serfdom at the time of Adam and Eve, so serfdom had to be a later
human invention created by lords to sustain their privileges. This is not (as has
often been assumed) necessarily an example of radical egalitarianism ahead of its
time because the underlying assumption remains that Ball would be the Bishop of
England, which tallies with other ideas present during the revolt about a popular
replacement hierarchy that would be successful in dispensing justice where the
lords had failed (cf. Froissart, Chroniques 10.111).
While there were some dubious claims made that the rebels had regicidal ten-
dencies (Walsingham, Chronica maiora 435, 498–99), Ball and the rebels prob-
ably viewed the youthful Richard II as being in the role of the just king (Froissart,
Chroniques 10.96, 102, 111, 118; Anonimalle Chronicle 137–138, 144; Walsingham,
Chronica maiora 420–23) who was presumably expected to take his place at the
head of a localized system of “kings” (Walsingham, Chronica maiora 490–510).
What was stopping Richard from seeing the plight of the rebels, so the rebels
thought, was a clique of unscrupulous and wicked advisors in the court. While
we cannot posit direct literary connections, this was probably part of long-estab-
lished myth of the ideal and just king who was given an eschatological spin in
texts such as the Tiburtine Sibyl and the Apocalypse of Pseudo-Methodius, and
popular prophecies about a final triumphant and just Christian emperor (Cohn
1970, 31–35, 71–74; Shoemaker 2015). One work that we know did have a direct
(and often unintentional) influence on Ball and the rebels was William Langland’s
roughly contemporary Piers Plowman (B.3.259–325), which includes a discus-
sion of a just Davidic ruler and a Christian king. The more reformist Langland
doubtlessly would have disapproved with Ball and the rebels over how to achieve
this alternative society with a chastened church, but they likely shared the general
hope for an ideal Christian king.
It is regularly noted that the rebels’ arrival in London on the feast of Corpus
Christi (Thursday, June 13, 1381) was deliberately timed. Corpus Christi involved
the celebration of the Eucharist and the body of Christ that, as Margaret Aston
showed, incorporated ideas about liberation and the exodus from Egypt as fore-
shadowing the crucifixion and Christian freedom (Aston 1994, 19–21). Such ideas
may well have been taken up and synchronized with the material and ideological
interests of the rebels. For instance, eucharistic ideas seem to play an integral
role in a cryptic letter attributed to Ball which discusses the labor of breadmaking
in relation to Christ’s death (Walsingham, Chronica maiora 548–49). The letter
refers to the tellingly (and probably coded or generically) named “John Miller”
who has “ground small, small, small; The King of Heaven’s Son shall ransom all.”
The labor of breadmaking in relation to salvation and freedom is also associated
with “Jakke Mylner” (Jack Miller) in a letter possibly written by Ball (Knighton,
Chronicle 222–23). As Aston argued, the language of “bread of life,” grain, flour,
grinding, and milling in relation to Christ and salvation would have been known
from sermons, matins, poems, and plays relating to Corpus Christi (Aston 1994,
26–33). In the context of the letters associated with Ball, such ideas point to an
alternative social body united by their labor, just as Ball was elsewhere said to
have presented Adam and Eve as united in labor.
The letters attributed to Ball also indicate that the uprising was the moment for
the inauguration of this alternative vision of English society. This includes refer-
ence to Ball ringing a bell which is the signal of the time for action, much like
church bells were (Pettitt 1984, 6–7). Indeed, the letters also claim that “now is
tyme” which involves the call to stand together in truth and the claim that truth
will help the rebels’ cause, echoing the reapplication of eschatological language
in John’s Gospel (e.g., John 4:23; 5:25; 8:31–32; Crossley 2020, 33–35). The call
to bring about this new world with a strong emphasis on human agency grounded
in scriptural justification is found in Ball’s (alleged) sermon at Blackheath. Ball
was likewise said to have proclaimed that God “had now given them the time
during which they could put off the yoke of their long servitude” and that “if they
wished . . . rejoice in the liberty they had long desired” (Walsingham, Chronica
maiora 546–47). The Blackheath sermon gives an indication of the violence such
actions would involve:
He therefore urged them to be men of courage, and out of love for their virtu-
ous fathers who had tilled their land, and pulled up and cut down the noxious
weeds which usually choke the crops, to make haste themselves at that pre-
sent time to do the same. They must do this first, by killing the most powerful
lords of the realm, then by slaying the lawyers, justiciars, and jurors of the
land, and finally, by weeding out from their land any that they knew would
in the future be harmful to the commonwealth. Thus they would in the end
gain peace for themselves and security for the future, if after removing the
78 James Crossley
magnates, there was equal freedom between them, and they each enjoyed the
same nobility, equal dignity, and similar power.
(Walsingham, Chronica maiora 546–47)
The sermon alludes to the parable of the Wheat and the Tares from Matt. 13:24–
30, 36–43, a medieval source text to justify allegations of heresy (Aston 1993,
93; Crossley 2020, 35–36), including against Ball himself (Shirley 1858, 272–74;
cf. Wilkins 1737, 152). But it was also a text that obviously pointed to future
transformation and the defeat of evil. Ball’s sermon employed the parable in both
these senses as part of a justification for the violence involved in the imminent
transformation of England.
This eschatological teaching was connected to Ball’s brand of anticlericalism.
According to Walsingham, Ball claimed that “no one was fit for the kingdom of
God who had not been born in wedlock” (Chronica maiora 544–45). The context
in which this statement is presented by Walsingham involves a critique of church
wealth and behavior in which Ball is said to look to a time when tithes will not be
paid to a priest who earns more than the giver and who is not living a better moral
life than the parishioner. Furthermore, closely related ideas from the roughly con-
temporary Piers Plowman (B.9) and the Lollard Richard Wyche shed further light
on Ball’s saying about the “kingdom of God” (Justice 1994, 104–11; Crossley
2020, 30–33). In these contexts, chaos and disorder were associated with bastardy
and those born to problematic parents, all of whom stood in the tradition of bibli-
cal villains, such as Cain and Judas. In the medieval present, this sort of behavior
and labeling was attributed to misbehaving and corrupt bishops and priests who
would not struggle to be saved and the teaching attributed to Ball likewise sees no
future place for the exploitative priests and the clerical agents of chaos.
This transformed future would involve a society of communally shared posses-
sions and distribution according to need, harking back to the example of the early
church (Acts 2:44–45; 4:32–35). In a saying almost as famous as his Adam and
Eve couplet, Ball was said to have proclaimed that things were “not well to pass in
England, nor shall do till everything be common.” In this new society there would
be no serfdom, no greater lords, and no exploitation of peasant labor because “all
come from one father and one mother, Adam and Eve” (Froissart, Chroniques
10.96; cf. Anonimalle Chronicle 137). Fourteenth-century meanings of “all things
in common” varied according to class, interests, and status (Cohn 1970, 200–1),
but for Ball and the rebels, this new England was connected with ideas about
liberty from serfdom and full access to the resources of the land (Crossley 2020,
36–40). We get further insight into its meaning from the rebel demands presented
in one account of the meeting between Tyler and Richard II, namely, that
all game, whether in waters or in parks and woods should become common to
all, so that everywhere in the realm, in rivers and fishponds, and woods and
forests, they might take the wild beasts, and hunt the hare in the fields, and do
many other such things without restraint.
(Knighton, Chronicle 218–19)
Truly, then, Ball and his teaching were a product of a distinctively medieval vari-
ety of class conflict, but that would, eventually, be updated in the transformation
to capitalism in his reception history.
The Reformist and Revolutionary Legacies of Ball and 1381

The four hundred years following the failed 1381 uprising, Ball received a relent-
lessly bad press which I summarize here (for full details, see Crossley 2022).
When he appears in late medieval texts, he is presented as evil, satanic, wicked,
and seditious, sometimes accompanied by allegations that he was a heretic and
arch Lollard. In the English Reformation, there are occasional indications that he
was understood as a proto-Protestant martyr suitably shorn of any seditious impli-
cations (Foxe 2011 [1563 edition], 2.192; Minton 2013, 186–87; cf. Bale 1895,
86–87; Foxe 2011 [1570 edition], 5.554, 2011 [1576 edition], 5.453, 575, 2011
[1583 edition], 5.597), but his memory was too dangerous to be rescued. Far more
common were claims that he was an example of extreme Protestantism akin to the
Anabaptists and a seditious threat to the emerging Protestant nation. These sorts
of polemics were taken up in the English revolution of the seventeenth century as
Ball was seen as a precursor to the accompanying religious radicalism. It is worth
noting that while similar ideas to Ball’s were present in the seventeenth-century
English revolution, there is little in the way of evidence that Ball himself was pre-
sented favorably—indeed, the example of 1381 was used on both sides to attack
one another. But Ball more typically turns up in royalist polemics, and there is
perhaps no more polemical text in the long reception history of Ball than The Idol
of the Clownes, or, Insurrection of Wat the Tyler, with His Priests Baal and Straw
(1654), attributed to the anti-Puritan John Cleveland (later editions bore the title
The Rustick Rampant, or Rural Anarchy Affronting Monarchy). The following
example uses the once-common variant name “John Wall,” but the play on names
is still clear enough:
One Baal the most sottish and most unworthy, but most factious of the Clergy
is stirred up by the Devill . . . the Devill (who, if rebellion be as the sinne of
Witchcraft, is the Father of both) to be the Antichrist of this Reign, to blas-
pheme and cry down God and Cesar his anoynted, the Rights of God and
Cesar . . . . Of these imaginations . . . was a foolish Priest in the County of
Kent called John Wall (for Baal) and to make it plain that he was the Father
of the uproar . . . [etc.].
(Cleveland 1654, 5)
The Restoration and the 1688 revolution meant that ideological uses of the threat
posed by Ball were updated in light of debates about absolutism, mixed mon-
archy, foreign threats to security, and a national constitution, as well as related
eighteenth-century fears of mob violence in a rapidly growing capital.
But the eighteenth century also marks a turning point, and when Ball’s repu-
tation begins to change in public debate is striking, namely, when serfdom was
80 James Crossley
a thing of the distant past and bourgeois capitalism was in its ascendancy. An
important indication of a changing world and changing reception of Ball is David
Hume. In his 1762 installment of The History of Great Britain, Hume’s account
of 1381 is standard fare in its criticisms, but like some contemporaries, he now
saw requests for “a general pardon, the abolition of slavery, freedom of com-
merce in market-towns without tolls or imposts, and a fixed rent on lands instead
of the services due by villenage” as “extremely reasonable in themselves,” even
if “the nation was not sufficiently prepared to receive, and which it was danger-
ous to have extorted by violence” (Hume 1762, 245–48). Ball was still seen as
“a seditious preacher,” but his preaching of “the principles of the first origin of
mankind from one common stock,” their “equal right to liberty,” their right “to
all the goods of nature,” and the notion of the “tyranny of artificial distinctions”
could no longer be dismissed lightly (Hume 1762, 245). Hume added that “these
doctrines” were “agreeable to the populace” who were “conformable to the ideas
of primitive equality” that “are engraven in the hearts of all men.” Certainly, these
were backhanded compliments, but the ideological nature of what was acceptable
to Hume is a significant moment in the history of reception. Furthermore, in
Hume’s final corrections published in 1778, he emphasized this point in a differ-
ent way: “There were two verses at that time in the mouths of all the common
people, which, in spite of prejudice, one cannot but regard with some degree of
approbation: When Adam delv’d and Eve span, Where was then the gentleman?”
(Hume 1778, 290). For Hume, the tension was the same as it was for the more
acceptable end of the rebels’ demands: between rightful sentiment and wrongful
use of violence.
Hume’s reception of Ball is an indication of the transformation to capital-
ism and to liberal democratic readings, as are others, including those receptions
which also helped pave the way for the use of Ball in resistance to capitalism. The
radicalism following the American and French Revolutions, and the influence of
Thomas Paine in particular, provided the context for democratic, radical, and even
revolutionary readings of Ball to emerge in 1790s England. The silversmith and
radical John Baxter turned the received historical narrative about Ball on its head
in A New and Impartial History of England (1796) and employed the myth of the
Norman Yoke to reread English history, that is, the idea that Saxon liberties and an
ancient consensual constitution had been perverted by the tyranny of the Norman
invasion and the Norman line (see Baxter 1796, ix–x). With this myth in place,
Baxter reread Ball as a hero of resistance, an example of English constitutional-
ism from below and one “who is called a seditious preacher, but whom we will
denominate a true philanthropist.” It was now an emphatically good thing that
Ball “inculcated among his countrymen the principles of the first origin of man-
kind from one common stock” and preached about an “equal right to liberty, and
to all the goods of nature.” It was now an emphatically good thing that Ball spoke
out against the “tyranny of artificial distinctions,” “the abuses which had arisen
from the degradation of the more considerable part of the species, and the aggran-
dizement of a few insolent rulers.” Echoing Hume’s words but now in a positive
framework, such “doctrines” complemented ideas about “primitive equality” that
are “engraven in the hearts of all men” and appreciated by the suffering people,
among whom the Adam and Eve couplet was common (Baxter 1796, 196–97).
The most influential work in the transformation of Ball’s reputation from the
1790s was not initially published after it was written. Nineteen-year-old Robert
Southey—the future poet laureate but at this time Jacobin and radical utopian
thinker—wrote his dramatic poem, Wat Tyler (1794), which in many ways func-
tions as a reflection on what was happening in France (Southey 1817, 2–12). Ball
(who features more prominently than Tyler) is portrayed as a Christlike figure
who preaches equality, justice, and love, is concerned for the poorest in society,
condemns the wealthy, takes his own beatings without reciprocal malice, while
also being concerned with lost English rights much like Baxter’s presentation
of Ball. But Southey’s presentation also includes a theory of revolutionary vio-
lence. The beheading of an archbishop may be a curse and revenge may be wrong,
but violence is the collateral damage in a revolution, something unfortunately
expected when the oppressed are freed from their slavery and the authority of
avaricious and hypocritical rulers and their clergy. Blood and slaughter are risks
inevitably involved for all things to be equal and belong to the difficult decisions
awaiting the would-be revolutionary. There is also a revolutionary martyrology
in Wat Tyler; the Christlike Ball’s brutal death may seem like a failure, but his
“truth” will survive, return, and “blaze with sun-surpassing splendour” as the
“dark mists of prejudice and falsehood/Fade” and the “whole world be lighted!”
(Southey 1817, 48–69).
But Wat Tyler was not published in the 1790s for reasons that are not entirely
clear. Instead, it was pirated in 1817 when the now reactionary Poet Laureate
Southey had renounced his radicalism and Jacobinism. His enemies published
Wat Tyler repeatedly to brand Southey as a hypocrite and, unfortunately for
Southey, Wat Tyler would be the most influential reading of Ball for the next fifty
years. This did not necessarily mean the revolutionary reading of Ball dominated.
With demands for working-class political representation, calls for constitutional
reform, and concerns about economic hardships and the plight of industrial work-
ers in the nineteenth century, there were two trajectories (sometimes overlap-
ping, sometimes not) associated with the rehabilitation of Ball’s reputation that
we can label “reformist” and “revolutionary.” The “reformist” readings could
take the form of Ball as an advocate of nonviolent political change towards
democratic inclusion and representative of “acceptable” working-class behavior
(e.g., Mrs O’Neill 1833), a Ball who did not really want to abolish all property and
declare everyone equal (e.g., Dickens 1852, 304–6; Spurgeon 1867). To this day,
the tradition of a democratic, nonviolent Ball remains strong where it especially
thrives among liberal journalists and the leftist figures who are close to main-
stream parliamentary politics (for full discussion, see Crossley 2022).
The “revolutionary” reading of Ball got its biggest post-Southey boost through
William Morris’s A Dream of John Ball, first serialized in 1886–1887 (Morris
1903). Morris had been working with Ernest Belfort Bax to produce a dialecti-
cal and materialist reading of history in the emerging Marxist tradition, both in
the sense of explaining stages of human history (including, of course, feudalism)
82 James Crossley
and in the transformation from capitalism to socialism and communism in the
future (Morris and Bax 1994; cf. Salmon 2001; Eisenman 2005; Vaninskaya 2010,
78–81). Workers’ education was crucial in that it would help the working-class act
with discipline and organization when the time came, and the future would absorb
and secularize the religious language of the past, particularly ideas about fellow-
ship and all things shared in common. Towards the end of his life, Morris (1893)
lectured that communism would foreground the resources of nature that would be
owned by “the whole community for the benefit of the whole” so that people have
their necessities and “reasonable comforts” satisfied while their work would be
“for the benefit of each and all.” Nevertheless, the struggle to help bring about this
change was something now needed in the nineteenth century.
A Dream of John Ball is a retelling of this Marxist theory of history and hope
for the future in story form. In something of a dream-vision, the narrator (effec-
tively Morris himself) called the Man from Essex leaves the nineteenth-century
present and visits Kent in 1381 during the uprising and eventually meets Ball for
an extended discussion about the future. The story discusses how the religiously
grounded hopes of equality are presented as something explicable in medieval
England but will be adopted and transformed into a more secularized future. The
Man from Essex explains to a puzzled Ball that his dream of a world in which eve-
ryone would enjoy the fruits of the earth freed from oppression will not happen
soon. Feudalism will come to an end, but then there would be the capitalist era of
exploiters and exploitation when so-called free people will produce for the mar-
ket by selling their labor to the masters and earning enough to live. There will be
more victories and more defeats, and eventually workers will realize their shared
interests and see that their struggles were not for nothing as in Ball’s dream of
the “Fellowship of Men shall endure” and one day be realized (Chs. IX, XI, XII).
But Ball’s relevance remains in the revolutionary example he has set because
the same attitude and determination was now required in the late nineteenth cen-
tury to bring about the change (cf. Kinna 2000, 41–42, 114, 97, 98–99, 130, 138,
162–63, 174–77).
Morris’s influence on understandings of Ball was at least the equal to Southey’s
and dominated the reception of Ball until the mid-twentieth century. While lib-
eral and reformist appropriations of Morris also occurred (cf. Arnot 1934), this
historical materialist reading of English or British history was further developed
by the Marxist wing of the labor movement and suffragettism. Ball and the Mor-
ris tradition peaked in the 1930s through the Communist Party of Great Britain’s
version of the Popular Front against fascism that foregrounded the overlaps with
the radical religious, liberal, and Whiggish traditions of English history to counter
traditions threatened or appropriated by fascists—all the while still criticizing the
ruling class and implicitly promoting a Marxist-Leninist future. Presentations of
1381 in pageants, popular histories, and poetry typically placed Ball as one of
the founding figures of English radicalism (cf. London District Committee 1936,
4; Fagan 1938; Morton 1938; Lindsay 1939; Lindsay 2014, 9–12; Wallis 1994,
1995, 1998). With constant connections with international struggles, these narra-
tives would end up connected with the struggles of the present and the presence
of the Red Flag alongside those who had died in Spain, such as the Communist
Party activist Felicia Browne. The implicit historical materialism was presented in
terms of a history of struggles against feudalism, industrial capitalism, and now,
of course, fascism (Linehan 2010, 45–46). After the Second World War, the influ-
ence of this historical materialist tradition declined, as did much of the interest in
medieval figures like Ball. Ironically, the violent revolutionary Ball continues to
thrive in the mainstream, non-Marxist novels, and documentaries, which is in line
with the prevalent presentation of anticapitalism in the context of neoliberal cul-
ture, namely, that anti-capitalism and political radicalism is regularly performed
for us (e.g., in film) but at a safe cultural and historical distance (Žižek n.d.; Fisher
2009; Cremin 2011). But the revolutionary Ball has not disappeared, and thanks to
historians such as Hilton and the ongoing commemorations in the socialist daily,
the Morning Star, the historical materialist reading of 1381 has continued to stay
alive (see further, Crossley 2022).
Concluding Remarks
Whatever the future may hold for the reception of Ball, his story is one that
helps us understand something of the nature of rebellion, revolution, and histori-
cal materialism. Ball’s theology emerged from a context of feudal class conflict
and envisaged a dramatic overhaul of existing society to favor peasants and the
lower orders and do away with the existing status quo. Although this was still a
model reflecting inherited medieval (and biblical and Christian) hierarchies about
an ideal king and leading ecclesiastical figure, it did look to a future that went
far beyond existing medieval and feudal models. The revolutionary potential of
Ball’s teachings is highlighted by them being seen in such a way in the aftermath
of the American and French Revolutions and their sustained and ongoing appro-
priation as a historic precursor to English Marxism and far-left movements. That
the actions of the rebels and the teachings of Ball held revolutionary potential
is also somewhat confirmed by four hundred years of repeatedly using them as
especially seditious examples of threats to the realm. However, the timing of the
changes in the reception of Ball also points to different types of revolutionary
potential. On one hand, claims about equality and access to markets associated
with the rebels meant that toward the turn of the nineteenth century, and the rise
of bourgeois capitalism and liberal democracy, their demands were quickly seen
as reasonable and reformist, even if the more conservative commentators at the
end of the eighteenth century might still find the violence of Ball’s teachings and
the rebel actions wrong (see also Burke 1791, 132–34). On the other hand, Ball’s
ideas about a dramatic transformation of society and concern for the laboring
classes meant that his ideas were also enthusiastically taken up in resistance to
capitalism, including in socialist and communist movements that have looked to a
world beyond capitalist exploitation. The reception history of Ball thus supports,
in a general sense at least, what historical materialist readings of the 1381 upris-
ing were always doing, namely, looking at how the teachings of a figure like Ball
belong to an understanding of history in terms of revolutionary transformation.
84 James Crossley
Notes
1 The bibliography is predictably vast. For a selection of detailed scholarship underpin-
ning this summary of the 1381 revolt, see, for example, Prescott 1981, 1998; Prescott
2004, 2016; Hilton 1973, 1990; Hilton and Aston 1984; Barron 1981; Brooks 1985;
Eiden 1995, 1998, 2008, 2017; Dunn 2004; Lacey 2008; Barker 2014.
2 For a definition of historical materialism, see Reed and Goldstein’s introduction to this
volume.
3 On historical materialism as central to the Communist Party Historians’ Group and the
ongoing work of members after the group’s demise, see now, White 2021, 103–11.
4 For Henry Knighton’s Chronicle, see Martin 1995. For Thomas Walsingham’s Chronica
maiora, see Taylor, Childs, and Watkiss 2003. See also the translation of Ball’s letters
presented by Knighton and Walsingham in Dobson 1983, 380–83.
5 For the text and translation of Jean Froissart’s Chroniques, see, for example, Gaston
1869; Dobson 1983; Ainsworth and Croenen 2013.
6 For the text and translation of the Anominalle Chronicle, see Galbraith 1970; Dobson
1983.
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Part II
Revolutions
6 A Second Path
Nuns in the Early French
Revolution, 1789–1791
Corinne Gressang
However, keep the religious useful: there are some, such as those of the congrega-
tion of Saint-Maur, of France, the begging orders, which rendered and still render
very great services to the Church. . . . Let us remind everyone of their duty; that all
men become citizens, that no one forgets that he owes himself entirely to God and
to the fatherland, that an egoist is an evil being that must be detested if he does not
want to use his talents and his means in a way useful to society (Archives Parle-
mentaires, ASSEMBLÉE NATIONALE. Seance du mardi 13 octobre 1789, 433).1
—M. l’abbé Gouttes, Speech in the National
Assembly, October 13, 1789
This quote from the National Assembly reminds readers that the French Revolu-
tion was not, at least at the start, an enemy of religion. In the wake of the traumatic
and violent dechristianization of the Year II, 1793, of the French Revolution, the
French Revolutionaries’ more accepting stance on religion was eclipsed by the
violence. Letters written by nuns between 1789 and 1791 provide a vision for
revolutionary France that included religious services in teaching, nursing, and
charity as useful to the public good (Rapley and Rapley 1997). Similarly, in the
National Assembly’s debates, the representatives argued that being a good French
citizen necessitated being a Christian. Human beings had certain inalienable rights
declared by the Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen (1789), but they also
had duties to both “God and the fatherland.” In studying the letters from nuns
lobbying for their preservation, their argument is one of reconciliation between
revolutionary and religious principles. It is through their perspective that we can
see the possibility of a very different French Revolution.
Although this vision was abandoned, our retrospect had blinded us to the role
convents played in shaping the religious future of France. It was religious issues
that sparked the fiercest resistance to the Revolution.2 Furthermore, the practical
arguments for the utility of convents and religious institutions were an effective
strategy for religious women to adopt to preserve their communities. Service to
the good of France was the duty of French citizens and the vocation of religious
women. Being a good revolutionary was not precluded from nuns during the
French Revolution. It was only after 1791 that the nuns had to choose whether
their obedience was to church or state first.3 This chapter proposes a second path
DOI: 10.4324/9781003177821-8
92 Corinne Gressang
that the revolution could have followed: one in which religion underpinned revo-
lutionary changes. In 1790, after permanent vows were abolished, the National
Assembly sent representatives to all the convents in France to get an idea of the
people and properties that made up these institutions. These records give a sense
of how these women saw their convents fitting into the new political landscape of
the revolution, and the collision of personal religious sentiment with revolution-
ary culture.4 Municipal representatives traveled to thousands of religious houses
to record their material and nonmaterial property, which was now at the service of
the nation. They were shocked to find that few religious women wanted to leave,
and they saw their religion as complementary to the revolution. In fact, in argu-
ing for the preservation of the convents, even the most devout Catholic nuns used
the language of the revolution to argue for their continuation. “The multivocality
of collective action discourse,” whereby “meaning is produced in the interaction
between social action and systems of signs,” was demonstrated by the revolu-
tionaries’ and the nuns’ discourse (Hodge and Kress 1988, 6). This multivocality
opened the opportunity for the nuns to understand the claims and vision of the
revolutionaries to be “different from (and not necessarily congruent with) what
they intended” (Steinberg 1999, 740). They could, therefore, take the language of
revolution to argue for their own continuation.
On The Paradox of Liberty and Institutional Order

Suppression of convents was nothing new in France. Convents were already well
practiced at convincing authorities of their utility and financial viability to ensure
their preservation (Rapley 2011, 218–19).5 These organizations often already
faced declining membership and economic instability throughout the eighteenth
century (Rapley 2001). Even before the revolution, the government helped the
convents and hospitals that teetered on the brink of bankruptcy due to declin-
ing donations and an overall decline in zealous piety (Vovelle 1973). Therefore,
these letters by nuns during this early period demonstrated their flexibility, astute
political maneuvering, and familiarity with the revolutionary language.6 The
nuns were actively seeking to shape the course of the Revolution through their
self-advocacy.
For example, Mother Natalie of Jesus, the prioress of the Carmelites on the
rue de Grenelle in Paris, speaking for all the Discalced Carmelites, wrote to the
National Assembly in 1790 opposing the suppression of monastic vows using
the language of the Enlightenment. Three of the prioresses in Carmelite convents
in Paris added their names to her address, including Sister Marie-Louise de Gon-
zague, the prioress on the rue de Saint-Jacques; Sister Dorothée de Jésus, prioress
of Saint-Denis; and Sister Thérèse du Saint-Esprit, prioress on the rue Chappon.
In this address, which was later reprinted in Marseille, she argued:
The most complete liberty governs our vows; the most perfect equality reigns
in our houses; here we know neither the rich nor the noble, and we depend
A Second Path 93
only on the Law. . . . In the world, they like to publish that monasteries con-
tain only victims, slowly consumed by regrets; but we proclaim before God
that if there is on earth a true happiness, we possess it in the dimness of the
sanctuary and that, if we had to choose again between the world and the
cloister, there is not one of us who would not ratify with greater joy her first
decision. After having solemnly declared that man is free, would you oblige
us to think that we no longer are? You will think that citizens who, under the
protection of the laws, voluntarily engaged themselves in a state which is the
happiness of their life, claim from all the rights, the most inviolable, when
they implore you to let them die in peace. . . . We would regard as the most
unjust and cruel oppression the one that would trouble asylums that we have
always regarded as safe and inviolable.
(Sr. Nathalie de Jesus 1790, 1)7
This letter was powerful because it challenged the revolutionaries’ laws using
their own language. The Carmelites were some of the most tightly cloistered con-
vents in France, yet they believed that the convent offered them greater liberty and
happiness. She argued that this freedom and happiness were what the Declaration
of the Rights of Man and Citizen claimed to protect. These prioresses challenged
the revolutionaries to give them the freedom to continue to practice their religion
in a way that they hoped would achieve perfect liberty and equality. This showed
that women living in the convent were never completely isolated from what was
going on outside their walls. Their ability to use the language of the revolution
to affirm their religious identity shows their attempt to control and negotiate their
positions as an expression of the very freedom the revolution proclaimed was a
sacrosanct component of the new social order.
Other nuns also affirmed that even the contemplative life of prayer was use-
ful to society and could play an important role in France. In an address to the
National Assembly from the nuns of the Assumption, they wrote, “Quiet in the
depths of our innocent retreats, we have never, Our lords, caused trouble in soci-
ety, nor excited around us any sensation contrary to the maintenance of peace
and public order. We implored Heaven for the prosperity of the state” (de Sainte
Victoire et al. [1790] 1992, 2).8 Their argument was not only that they were
not enemies of the state and would never do anything to harm the prosperity of
France but that they also prayed for the state. In praying for the good of France,
they, likely, genuinely believed that they were doing a public service. Prayer
was the most powerful weapon that they had to offer, and they gave it freely to
the state.
Education was something that both the church and the French state agreed was
necessary (Curtis 1999, 54). For Enlightenment thinkers, such as Choderlos de
Laclos, women were everywhere slaves, but “education should be a re-conquest
of liberty . . . she should cultivate her reason, her heart, and her spirit (wit)”
(Choderlos de Laclos 2018 [1783]).9 A woman’s path out of her state of slavery
and ignorance was education.
94 Corinne Gressang
Furthermore, a member of the National Assembly, Creuzé-Latouche, argued
that nuns could repurpose their skills in teaching to be of service to France. He
argued:
If your position permits, you can usefully fill your days with your care and
your instructions to the children of your parents, your neighbors, your friends.
You can train them to work, giving them your talents; to teach them to read;
and this care will be, more than ever, important and respectable; you will
teach them the Declaration of the Rights of Man so that they will be aware
of these rights early and will respect them all their lives in others, and never
divest themselves of them.
(Creuzé-Latouche 1791, 47–48)10
Therefore, even the revolutionaries saw a connection between the useful skills
nuns possessed and the work they could do for the revolution. The nuns could be
rehabilitated to teach natural rights to French children. If only the revolutionaries
could redirect the nuns to teach a new sort of catechism, they would be indispen-
sable for raising French citizens.
Some revolutionaries understood the problems of suppressing all the institu-
tions that provided such a useful service to the public in teaching or nursing. For
the most part, unfortunately, the revolutionaries underestimated the impact sup-
pression would have on education and public services. As early as October 1789,
even before suppression, Pierre Victor Baron Malouet asked his colleagues in the
National Assembly,
Can we, without being sure of the national will, generally suppress all mon-
asteries, all religious orders, even those who are devoted to the education of
the youth, to the care of the sick, and those who by useful work well-deserved
by the Church and the State? Can we, politically and morally, take away
all hope, all means of retirement from those of our fellow citizens whose
religious principles, or prejudices or misfortunes, make them consider this
asylum as a consolation?
(Malouet 1789, 436)11
His argument against the suppression of convents and monasteries underlined that
taking away the means of subsistence for these organizations would cripple the
social services that they offered to the nation.
Nursing and teaching orders were at first exempt from some of the more
aggressive antireligious policies at the start of the revolution because they did
thankless labor. They also had more leverage to bargain for their continuation
because they provided essential services to their communities. When there was no
obvious replacement for the thousands of nuns working in service to others, they
could ensure some level of freedom to continue their vocation. Many wrote to the
National Assembly in 1790 with a coherent argument about their usefulness. Such
A Second Path 95
pleas demonstrated that the nuns took an active role in lobbying for changes in the
practice of the faith in convents in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.
On the Freedom and Benefits of Teaching

Marie-Françoise de la Bourdonnaye, the superior of the communauté des Écoles
charitables de Saint-Charles, argued that her school served “secular” ends, or ends
that were not just solely confined inside the convents.12 Secular clergy, unlike
regular clergy actually interacted with their community. This community of sis-
ters ran the local school. She reasoned,
Our community was secular, devoted to the free education of poor young
girls and the relief of the sick; we attended the public services of our parish,
although we had a chapel open to the public, and the happiness of having the
most holy sacrament there.
(Theiner 1857, 338–41)
The community lived in the convent but served those who resided outside of it.
Therefore, it was not just a religious institution, but the school and the chapel also
met both the public and religious needs of the community. Since both the adoration
of the Holy Sacrament and the education of children were essential to the mental and
spiritual growth of their community, both could serve French society. Thus, these
nuns clothed their religious activities in arguments about their public utility.
Even more traditional aristocratic convents emphasized that they turned from
their original mission to emphasize their work in education. The Filles de Saint
Thomas wrote that “they had the consolation “of seeing a great number of pupils
[become] good Christians [and] excellent mothers and families, themselves capa-
ble of raising their children within the same principles” (Archives Nationales
DXIX 16, Dossier 234 pièce 5). Education helped prevent women from falling
into “danger” and provided an important benefit to society. The congregations
argued that educated women made better mothers who successfully performed
their civic duty to raise children correctly.13
While superiors of teaching institutions undeniably pointed to their role as
teachers to insulate their communities from closure, some women were genuinely
concerned about how new legislation might impact their vocation. The superior
of the congregation of Notre Dame in Nemours wrote to the National Assembly
on behalf of her congregation in October 1789, just after the nationalization of
their property. She operated a free school for children in their community. Her
students attended the school from the age of four until just after they made their
first communion. Furthermore, the congregation housed several other boarders,
both adults and children, that they accepted from all classes and all ages (AN D
XIX 16, 234).14 The convent funded the school with donations from the commu-
nity and with the dowries from the nuns who entered the convent (AN D XIX 16,
234). Without dowries, the small fee collected from the community might prove
96 Corinne Gressang
insufficient. Furthermore, the convent’s superior added that they were the only
convent in Nemours and, therefore, indispensable to the town.
The Ursulines, in particular, emphasized their commitment to “public instruc-
tion” or the free education of children (AN D XIX 1, Dossier 7, 175).15 One
Ursuline wrote,
Faithful to our engagements with God and the fatherland, there are none of
us, Sir, who do not gain a glorious and true satisfaction to consecrate our-
selves until the last of these moments [of our lives], to the free education of
the young girls, to which we are destined by our institution’s constitution [to
which they have vowed obedience].
(AN D XIX 1, Dossier 1, 37)16
Far from being miserable prisoners in oppressive convents, they emphasized the
real satisfaction that they found in devoting their lives to free education. Further-
more, they felt that their “sentiments, so analogous to the views of the august
National Assembly, may deserve the honor of your vote, sir, and that of the
respectable committee of which you are the head and the light” (AN D XIX 1,
Dossier 1, 37).17 They reinforced their argument that their mission was the same
as the mission of the National Assembly: both were devoted to the public good,
education, and raising a moral French citizenry. They thought the two, religion
and revolution, could not only coexist but perhaps also work together to educate
and raise French citizens.
Similarly, the Ursuline convent in Angoulême made the argument that their
education of young people fulfilled an essential public function and not just a
religious one. Their convent was
specially instituted and established for the education of the very young and
especially poor girls and obliged to educate them for free; the number of
young people to raise is considerable. They also have a boarding school usu-
ally composed of forty or so boarders, most of whom are small children, and
they neglect nothing to make themselves useful to the public.
(AN D XIX 1, Dossier 6, 117)18
This care for young children provided an invaluable resource for the public well-
being. They framed their work as not only the work of God but, more important,
performing a vital public service to the community as well. Convents not only
helped to educate the poor but, in some cases, with orphans and foundlings, they
raised children who were abandoned to their care. Nuns performed the duties of
adoptive mothers. They took on the identity of “mother” to France’s children.
During the revolution, after convents were dismantled entirely, hospitals could
not keep up with the triple or quadruple number of abandoned children. Only
three or four out of twenty-five would survive after twelve years (Adams 2005,
94). Losing so many potential French citizens was not the revolutionaries’ inten-
tion and was counterproductive to their goals.
A Second Path 97
Under the terms of the 1790 law, teachers belonging to religious congregations
were required to remain in their posts until replacements arrived (Curtis 1999, 52).
Due to difficulties in funding and organizing a national school system and with-
out the aid of the free labor provided by religious houses, many of these women
were able to remain indefinitely, particularly those who resided in communities
far from Paris. The nuns faced growing resistance as the revolution became more
secular, but the women could rely on the communities they served to protect their
function. “Their position became more difficult since tithes and foundations were
suppressed. It was worsened by the establishment of the ‘national school.’ Many
would let themselves be chased out of their classes and continued clandestine
education, parents sacrificing themselves to pay them” (Kernel 1976, 90).19 The
parents were not willing to give up this religious education.
By November 27, 1790, religious orders engaged in teaching had to swear the
oath of loyalty to the French state. Most Ursulines refused the oath but stayed in
their post until they could be replaced by lay teachers. Thanks to the ability of
some nuns to leverage their positions as teachers, there was often less zeal for
the strict enforcement of the revolutionary legislation. An unofficial “blind eye”
was turned by the revolutionary government, which had neither the resources nor
the personnel to revamp education throughout France overnight. Teaching nuns
often negotiated with the revolutionaries and sometimes gave up their religious
garb or swore oaths to continue in their teaching positions. These women’s ability
to move within the confines of the revolution demonstrated the revolutionaries’
flexibility in enforcement and the nuns’ agency in determining the paths their lives
would take, at least during the first years of the revolution. They did not simply
wait for the revolution to disband them; they also advocated on their own behalf
and tried to shape the revolutionaries’ ideas about nuns and their convents. On
August 18, 1792, teaching congregations, even those that took only simple vows,
were suppressed altogether (McCloy 1946, 436). After this decree, their property
was seized, and the municipality ran its own schools. All charity schools were
supposed to be dissolved (McCloy 1946, 443). Former nuns, however, continued
to work in educating the young, as tutors in families that could afford their ser-
vices, and in the provinces where there were no other educational alternatives, and
they were protected by those who sought their services. However, this dissolution
was neither inevitable nor entirely predetermined by pre-revolutionary forces.
Teaching orders and their allies in the National Assembly laid out a vision for a
new France that included nuns as essential to raising French citizens.
The Freedom to Care for the Sick

Like teachers, nursing sisters used the language of utility and public service to
preserve their vocation against the challenges they faced from 1789 to 1791. They
were well practiced at negotiating with the religious and secular politics to main-
tain aspects of their religious calling. In adopting new patterns of living, titles,
and values, they presented their commitment to public charity as a service to their
God and the nation.20 Most important, they leveraged their service to the sick to
98 Corinne Gressang
maintain parts of their religious identities. Religious women performed underval-
ued labor that was both difficult and dangerous to their health—labor that, without
the promise of salvation, men and women refused to perform. Therefore, they
were confident that their services would still be necessary in revolutionary France.
The nuns were not the only ones who understood the value of their labor.
According to one historian, “the nuns who devoted themselves to the physical care
of the sick and wounded were treated with far greater respect and circumspection
[than the aristocratic orders]. The nuns were not disliked by the generality of
Frenchmen” (Forrest 1981, 46). Therefore, patients and their families were some
of the staunchest defenders of the nursing orders. Revolutionaries understood that
they needed the nuns to continue their work. During this early period, “revolution-
ary authorities were at great pains not to antagonize the nursing orders, treating
them, at least until the Jacobins came to power in the summer of 1793, with the
greatest caution” (Forrest 1981, 46–47). For example, when public officials were
forced to swear the oath to liberty and equality, at first, the sisters did not have
to take it. Revolutionaries feared the nuns’ resistance and anger at being asked to
take a public declaration. They knew such a law would only provoke the nuns’
indignation (Forrest 1981, 47).21 Although intent on curtailing the inefficiencies of
the convents, the revolutionary authorities had yet to come up with an alternative
source of nurses (Jones 1989).
Some religious houses had only one or two nuns to serve the entire community.
In contrast, others had dozens of sisters to perform a variety of tasks that helped
these institutions function. For example, in the diocese of Auxerre, the house of
the nursing sisters of the congregation of Christian Charity in Seignelay had only
one sixty-three-year-old superior and two other nuns, while the Union of Chris-
tian Providence in the same diocese had thirteen sisters (AN D XIX 1, 265 and
290). It was increasingly popular for widows and young women to join this type
of institution, where they could take only simple vows and were not required to
follow the rules of enclosure (AN D XIX 1, 290).22 The goal in all the houses,
whether small or large, cloistered or uncloistered, was to serve the vulnerable in
their communities, especially the poor and the sick. Next, we turn to the congrega-
tions and convents, or groups of women who took some form of religious vows
and served in hospitals (Mills 2001, 168–92).23
The labors performed by nursing orders were nearly as diverse as their structure.
They prayed with patients, distributed medicines and other remedies, instructed
the poor, gave alms, cared for orphans, and helped feed the sick and needy. The
sisters’ roles in preparing infants for baptism and praying with and instructing
those placed in their care were essential to their patients’ spiritual health that was
inseparable from their physical care. France would need healthy citizens, and for
the nuns, this included the body and the soul. They saw their work as caring for
both the spiritual and physical health of the patient. Caring for only the physical
would do nothing to truly “save” the patient.
Despite their tireless work in the convents performing diverse labors, they were
not always the most fiscally responsible or efficient. Nuns faced resistance from
local administrators, who were frustrated with the growing costs of maintaining
A Second Path 99
these houses, and from doctors, who criticized the nuns’ superstitions. French
hospitals begged for reform long before the revolution. However, historian Dora
Weiner found that “all efforts to reform the Hôtel-Dieu came to naught, largely
because the trustees and the sisters resisted change” (Weiner 1993, 33). The nuns
felt prepared to handle these criticisms and adjust themselves to the new pressures
from the Revolution.
Perhaps the best example of the integration of the principles of the Enlighten-
ment with the rules of the convent was the 1790 Rules for Hospital Nuns in Lyon
(Réglement des Hospitaliers de l’Œuvre des Hôpitaux et des Prisons de la Ville de
Lyon). On the very first page, the organization claimed that
since the relief of the poor and the sick is not only a work which the natural
law prescribes to all men, but which our holy religion commands to all Chris-
tians in the strongest and most precise manner, all associated with the work
of the Hospital should have nothing so much at heart as to apply themselves
to it with all their power.
(NA 1790, 2)24
Therefore, the sisters’ labors were inspired by the laws of nature and the laws
of Christianity. There ought to be no contradiction between the two; the laws of
nature were the laws of God for these hospital workers.
Although religious motivations were primary for the nursing sisters, the lan-
guage of the Revolution also figured in their justifications for the continuation of
their orders. In Autun, the Visitation convent argued that their house served as one
of the few places that cared for the sick in their town and, therefore, performed a
useful public function. The superior wrote,
The object of our institution according to the intention of St. Francis de Sales,
our founder, was to provide a retreat for infirm persons, of all ages, to widows
and to those with a delicate [constitution], which would be an obstacle to a
[rule] more austere than that of the order of the Visitation of Holy Mary. The
desire to make ourselves more useful has engaged us since the establishment
of this house.
(AN, D XIX 1, 185)25
This convent argued that its usefulness to France had always been a high priority.
They sought to make their house and their rule amenable to the needs of those
they served in the town. Visitandines (and other orders that took solemn vows)
usually catered to upper-class boarders who paid for their care and residence in
the convent. Before the advent of nursing homes, in the eighteenth century, nuns
were the best system of charity and long-term health care for the terminally ill and
elderly. However, the high cost of care in these institutions made such care unat-
tainable for all but the wealthiest families.
Those that were ineligible to be treated at the Visitandine convents because
they could not afford the pension or were not “mentally healthy” enough could
100 Corinne Gressang
seek aid from nursing sisters from the order of Saint Joseph, the Sisters of Charity,
or the Daughters of Wisdom. This wide variety in the structure of congregations
reflected the variety of needs in each community. In the diocese of Angoulême,
the Daughters of Wisdom, “whose institute was to treat the sick,”26 declared that
they intended to provide
visits and to look after the pauvres malades in the countryside, or the poor
who are sick, but are ashamed to ask for charity in the cities, to instruct the lit-
tle children; several hospitals, even Royal military ones, have been entrusted
to their care.
(AN, D XIX 1, 145)27
The designation of the “sick poor,” or pauvres malades, referred to the distinction
between the vagabonds who Enlightenment critics claimed became dependent on
the charity of these institutions and the “deserving” poor. The “sick poor” were
too poor to afford care when they got sick but were not necessarily indigent. Of
the two Daughters of Wisdom houses in the diocese of Angoulême, the Vars house
only had two members, and their house in the city of Angoulême had only three.
Despite the dwindling members of their houses, their letters argued they were
essential for serving their communities in diverse ways. They argued that many
of the people they served were too proud to seek help in the cities, so their institu-
tions filled an important gap in care. Although the government closed contempla-
tive orders with only two or three members in the eighteenth century, the sisters
believed that their utility should protect them from the same fate in 1790.
The Hôtel-Dieu in Limoges, however, was staffed by only five nuns of the order
of Saint Martha. This hospital focused on serving the sick poor, but their duties did
not end there (AN, D XIX 1, 132). For congregations and lay sisters, their duties
were “to take care of the sick who [we]re admitted to the Hôtel-Dieu of that city;
and the poor who [we]re in the city; finally, to teach the girls of the city to read and
to write, all for free” (AN, D XIX 1, 283).28 Through this network of hospitals of
varying sizes, the cities and the surrounding towns created a delicate web of care
for a diverse group of poor, sick, and orphaned inhabitants. This web of care pro-
vided the basis of the petitioners’ utility argument. Because this system developed
over centuries, there was no easy way to change it. Services and structures varied
widely based on the individual needs of the community. As the revolutionaries
redefined roles for every man, woman, and child in the new society they sought to
build, the nuns had their own ideas of how they might fit into this new vision. For
many, their service as nurses featured prominently in their arguments.
Women who served in the hospitals, but who might not be associated with a
larger order, fell under the name of nursing sisters or hospitalières. For example, a
hospital in Rochefoucauld was established “for the relief of suffering and unhap-
piness of humanity. This hospital was founded in 1684. . . . In 1710, four places
were established for Paupers, daughters of incurable families [established in per-
petuity]” (AN, D XIX 1, 132).29 In addition to serving the sick, these hospital-
ières educated young girls and maintained the hospitals’ financial viability. Their
A Second Path 101
institution was maintained partly through the dowries of the sisters who entered
their profession. But their obedience was to the bishop of Angoulême (AN, D XIX
1, 132).30 Other nursing sisters, such as those in Auxerre, however, were members
of the Congregation of Christian Charity, or congrégation de la charité chrétienne,
and their object was the “care for the pauvres malades and the instruction of the
young children” (AN, D XIX 1, 265).31 The Hôtel-Dieu in Charité-sur-Loire in
Auxerre was also staffed by religious women who were not associated with a
distinct congregation or set of vows (AN, D XIX 1, 276) (AN, D XIX 1, 283).32
Therefore, these diverse communities filled the needs of their specific communi-
ties. The entire network of charity and nursing was rapidly shifting, yet the vary-
ing structures of these organizations and their overlapping care of the poor, sick,
and vulnerable showed a willingness to adapt to the needs of the community and
the government’s jurisdiction long before the revolution.
The same Arles congregation also argued that one of the most critical services
they provided was the assurance that patients would die “in holiness.” They
argued,
We help them to die in holiness, according to the spirit of our rule which
prescribes that we should not stop being with them when they are in danger
[of dying without salvation], and this is a point very faithfully observed
among us.
(AN, D XIX 1, 171)33
Religious women had a duty to meet the patients’ spiritual and physical needs by
helping the sick pass from life to eternity. Public well-being required both spir-
itual and physical care in eighteenth-century France. This was, of course, exactly
why the revolutionaries wanted to secularize the system; they did not see a link
between spiritual and physical care. While the patient might have preferred a
physical cure over spiritual salvation, the nuns had a priority to ensure that if they
could not physically save the patients, they could at least save their souls.
In addition to caring for the sick and elderly, however, nuns were also in
charge of caring for orphans and running foundling hospitals. The order of Saint
Augustine, in the Hôtel-Dieu de la Magdelene of Auxerre, only had twenty-seven
women to care for more than two hundred fifty abandoned children or enfants
trouvés (AN, D XIX 1, 262). This institution was so old and well-established in
their community that the author of this letter claimed: “We do not know the time
of the founding of the Hôtel-Dieu of the Magdalene of Auxerre, but we have
documents concerning this house that are more than 540 years old” (AN, D XIX
1, 262).34 This institution had become essential for the care of children and had
been around long enough that Auxerre had no idea how to function without it.
However, the role of religious orders and congregations in caring for hundreds of
abandoned children whose own mothers had shirked their obligations for republi-
can motherhood challenged Enlightenment critiques of their celibacy. Nuns may
not have conceived many French children, but they certainly raised them, which
revolutionaries believed was a duty well-suited to their sex. The mother superior
ended her letter, “We are with the deepest respect, and the most earnest confidence
in your zeal for the help of the pauvres maladies—that only hope for public com-
passion” (AN, D XIX 1, 261).35 Religious women provided “public compassion”
that was so desperately needed. Since religious women looked to heaven for the
reward for their labors, instead of money or earthly rewards, they were able to
provide essential labors at a low public cost.
Conclusion: On Religion, Gender, and Agency

Using the pleas of complementarity with the revolution, the nuns inserted them-
selves into the political debates to carve out a place for their continued existence.
They came prepared to make arguments for their compatibility with revolu-
tionary goals. They took an active role in carving out a space for themselves in
France. In this early period between 1789–1790, before the schism caused by the
Civil Constitution of the Clergy, there was a widespread belief that a reformed
Catholic Church could coexist peacefully with the new institutions created by
the revolution. In revisiting the presumed incompatibility of rational Enlighten-
ment thought and religion, a different path of revolution could have existed, one
that was both religious and revolutionary. By 1791, however, the revolutionaries
were beginning to believe that the nuns could not serve two masters. Despite the
flexibility shown by the nursing orders like the Daughters of Charity, the Sisters
of Saint Joseph, and other congregations, most religious houses were still dis-
solved in 1792, and a few sisters were even killed for refusing to give up their
posts (L’Misermont 1914). Eventually, the revolutionaries moved away from the
ecclesiastical system of relief to a more organized, secular, social welfare state.
However, this proved to be difficult because the government consistently failed to
provide the necessary funds, the need for medical care outstripped the available
labor pool, and the priority to establish such a robust system of social welfare
became less critical in the face of war. Faced with this situation, the revolutionar-
ies stopped selling hospital properties and, in some cases, the convents reclaimed
them. Often, the revolutionaries turned a blind eye to those nuns who resumed
their vocations.36
During the revolution, nuns inserted themselves into revolutionary debates on
liberty, religious toleration, and utility. As noted by sociologist Marc Steinberg
(1999, 741), “meanings are susceptible to change over the course of a cycle of
action,” and this was particularly true for meanings of liberty and religious free-
dom. Liberty was one frame that did not have a static meaning for all participants
during the Revolution. Thus, production of meaning was a joint labor between
actors (745). Questions about liberty became complicated for nuns. Many rev-
olutionaries saw religious institutions as antithetical to the principle of liberty
because they required members to swear permanent vows. However, the nuns
offered the possibility that their religious freedom, and their voluntary practice
of an ascetic lifestyle should be protected under promises of liberty. They did not
wait for the revolutionaries to decide their fate but crafted a different narrative of
the purpose and future of convents in France.
A Second Path 103
Furthermore, the nuns and sisters, saw the opportunity to remake and reform the
Gallican, or French Church.37 They wanted to maintain their practice of the faith,
in teaching and nursing, but argued their services could fit into the new revolution-
ary vision. There was a real chance that after some level of church reform, religion
would play a central role in the new French constitution. Religious women who
wrote to the National Assembly in 1790 seemed aware of the critiques against
their institutions and were determined to use their religious vocation to prove they
performed a useful function to society, their roles were economically viable, and
their aspirations were compatible with revolutionary goals and principles. Hospi-
tal workers worked within a web of both secular and religious authorities, which
trained them to negotiate their religious duties to accommodate France’s public
needs. Although in the short run, most hospitals and religious congregations dis-
solved between 1792 and 1794, by 1801, these were the first institutions to be
brought back under Napoleon. This alternative vision for the French Revolution
was largely forgotten in the aftermath of the dechristianization which followed. In
studying letters by the nuns, the representatives of the National Assembly, and the
architects of the early Revolution, a more moderate path to reform emerged. The
French Revolution could have been an example of the complementarity between
religion and revolution.
Notes
1 The original reads as follow: « Conservez cependant les religieux utiles: il en est, tels
que ceux de la congrégation de Saint-Maur, celle de France, les ordres mendiants qui
ont rendu et rendent encore de très-grands services à l'Eglise: ils ont trop bien mérité
d'elle et de la patrie pour ne pas leur rendre la justice qui leur est due. Rappelons
chacun à son devoir; que tous les hommes deviennent citoyens, que personne n'oublie
qu'il se doit tout entier à Dieu et à la patrie, qu'un égoïste est un être malfaisant qu'il
faut détester, s'il ne veut employer ses talents et ses moyens d'une manière utile à la
société. »
2 The Civil Constitution of the Clergy and dechristianization inspired the fiercest resist-
ance from a population concerned with eternal salvation. The counterrevolutionaries
called themselves the “Catholic and Royal Army,” reinforcing that religion was always
political and antireligious policies faced the fiercest resistance.
3 For additional information on religious orders and the French Revolution, consult
Gwénaël Murphy’s (2005) Les Religieuses dans la Révolution Française, Krumen-
acker’s (1992) Religieux et religieuses pendant la Revolution 1770–1820, and Aulard’s
(1903) La Révolution Francaise et les congrégations. For religious orders after the
Revolution or in the ninteenth century, consult Langlois’s (1984), Le Catholicisme au
Feminin: Les Congrégations Francaises à Supérieure générale au XIX siècle.
4 It is their intersectionality as women, Catholics, and celibate nuns that interests me
in trying to navigate the troubled waters of the French Revolution. This phenomenon
of intersectionality has been noted by many historians and social scientists, including
Orhan’s 2019 study which argued, “gender dynamics do not operate alone but intersect
in many ways with these dynamics to influence political violence” (Orhan 2019).
5 Between 1727 and 1788, a program of suppression and consolidation of convents was
designed by the Commission de Secours, eventually closing close to 250 of the 2,000
convents in France (Rapley 2011, 218–19). Numerous historians have noticed this phe-
nomenon (McNamara 1996, 552–3) (Beales 2003, 85).
6 Much of this maneuvering was socially constructed by the nuns themselves. A similar
theme of construction and deconstruction can be found in Foucault’s Birth of the Clinic
(Foucault 1994).
7 Reprinted in Bruno, Le Sang du Carmel, 97n. The original reads as follows: « Les
richesse des Carmélites n’ont jamais tenté la cupidité; leurs besoins n’importunent pas
la bienfaisance; notre fortune est cette pauvreté évangélique qui, en acquittant toutes
les charges de la société, trouve encore moyen d’aider les malheureux, de secourir
la patrie et nous rend partout heureuses de nos privations. La Liberté la plus entière
préside à nos vœux; l’égalité la plus parfaite règne dans nos maisons; nous ne conois-
sons ici ni riches ni nobles et nous n’y dépendons que de la loi. . . . On aime à publier
dans la monde que les monastères n’enferment que des victimes lentement consumées
par les regrets; mais nous protestons devant Dieu que s’il est sur la terre une véritable
félicité, nous en jouissons à l’ombre du sanctuaire et que, s’il fallait encore opter entre
la siècle et le cloitre, il n’est aucune de nous ne le sommes plus ? Vous penserez que
des citoyennes qui, sous la protection des lois, se sont volontairement engagées dans
un état qui fait la bonheur de leur vie, réclament de tous les droits, le plus inviolable,
quand elles vous conjurent de les y laisser mourir en paix. . . . Nous regarderions
comme l’oppression la plus injuste et la plus cruelle celle qui troublerait des asyles que
nous avons toujours regardes comme surs et inviolables. »
8 The original reads as follows: « Tranquilles au fond de nos innocentes retraites, nous
n’avons jamais, Nosseigneurs, porté le trouble dans la société, ni excité autour de nous
aucune sensation contraire au maintien de la paix & de l’ordre public. Nous avons
imploré le Ciel pour la prospérité de l’État; nous avons gémi de ses malheurs. . . »
9 Pierre Choderlos de Laclos, Des Femmes et de leur éducation quoted in Duhet, Les
Femmes et la Révolution 1789–1794. (Duhet 1971, 20–21).
10 The original reads as follows: « Vous pourrez, si votre position le permet, remplir utile-
ment vos journées, par vos soins et vos instructions envers les enfans de vos parens,
de vos voisins, de vos amies. Vous pourrez les former au travail, en leur donnant vos
talens; leur apprendre à lire; et ce soin va être, plus que jamais, important et respect-
able; vous leur apprendrez la déclaration des droits de l’homme, afin qu’ils se pénètrent
de ces droits de bonne heure, pour les respecter toute leur vie dans les autres, et ne s’en
dessaisir jamais eux-mêmes. »
11 The original reads as follows: « Pouvons-nous, sans être bien surs du voeu national,
supprimer généralement tous les monastères, tous les ordres religieux, même ceux
qui se consacrent à l'éducation de la jeunesse, aux soins des malades, et ceux qui par
d'utiles travaux ont bien mérité de l’Église et de l’État ? Pouvons-nous, politiquement
et moralement, ôter tout espoir, tous moyens de retraite à ceux de nos concitoyens dont
les principes religieux, ou les préjugés ou les malheurs, leur font envisager cet asile
comme une consolation ? »
12 The term secular is a tricky one. Secular can be contrasted with “regular clergy” that
followed a rule, such as the Rule of Benedict. This religious community was a rather
flexible, uncloistered community that did not follow a specific rule. Therefore, in the
context of the rest of her letter, we can assume that her use of the term secular was to
contrast herself to the inutility of regular orders. It was an argument about her com-
munity’s usefulness. For a more detailed discussion of the difference between reli-
gious and secular please refer to Jose Casanova, Public Religions in the Modern World
(Cassanova 1994).
13 Of course, the question quickly emerged whether the nuns were the best fit for raising
children “correctly.”
14 The original reads as follows: « Nous avons habituellement deux classes ouvertes,
ou nous recevons des enfans depuis l’âge quatre ans, jusqu’après leur première com-
munion, en telle nombres qu’elles le présentent ainsi que des pensionnaires, grandes,
et petites; de tout état, et de tout âge. »
A Second Path 105
15 This particular convent was the Ursulines of Auxerre (Annaert 1994).
16 The original reads as follows: « Fidèles à nos engagements avec dieu et la patrie, il
n’est aucune de nous Monsieur, qui ne se fasse une gloire et un vraye satisfaction de
consacrer jusqu’aux derniers de ces instants, a l’éducation gratuite des jeunes filles, a
laquelle nous sommes d’avouées par notre institution, »
17 The original reads as follows: « ces sentiments si analogues aux vues de l’auguste
assemblée nationale peuvent nous mériter l’honneur de votre suffrage, monsieur,
et celui du respectable comité dont vous élèves le chef et la lumière. Nous avons
l’honneur d’être très respectueuse. . . »
18 The original reads as follows: « La communauté des religieuses ursulines de la ville
d’Angoulême est spécialement instituée et établie pour l’éducation dès la jeunesse et
surtout des filles pauvres, et obligées de les instruire gratuitement le nombre des jeunes
élever est considérable elles ont en outre un pensionnat composé habituellement de
quarante quelques pensionnaires, dont la majeure partie sont des petits enfants et elles
ne négligent rien pour se rendre utile au public et répondre à sa confiance »
19 The original reads as follows: « Leur position devint de plus difficile puisque dimes
et fondations étaient supprimées. Elle empira par l’établissement de l’école nationale.
Beaucoup se laisserait chasser de leurs classes et continuèrent un enseignement clan-
destin, les parents de saignant pour les rémunérer. »
20 The nuns’ participation in the politics of the revolution has been ignored because the
church wanted to use the example of the martyrs as perfectly obedient servants to the
church, but these were women who became active participants in the political culture
of the revolution.
21 However, by 1793, the nuns did eventually have to take the oath.
22 The original reads as follows: « La communité de filles séculières de l’union chréti-
enne de la providence d’Auxerre est composée de filles et de veuves qui ne font que
des vœux simples et n’observe point de clôture. »
23 The confraternities and their important role in caring for the sick and poor is better
discussed in a chapter by Hazel Mills. The confraternities were specifically targeted in
1792, but many reappeared by 1797. She found that it was the women who were able
to function as nurses without taking formal vows (Mills 2001, 168–92).
24 The original reads as follows: « le soulagement des pauvres malades et des affligés
n’étant pas seulement une œuvre que la loi naturelle prescrit à tous les hommes, mais
que notre sainte religion commande à tous les Chrétiens de la manière la plus forte et
la plus précise, tous les associes à l’œuvre des Hospitaliers, ne doivent avoir rien tant
à cœur que de s’y appliquer de tout leur pouvoir.»
Natural law, since the Enlightenment, has referred to a general law that all of nature
abides by. Now for religious institutions this natural law could be a law set by God
for the universe to follow. Most Enlightenment thinkers were deists and believed in
a “Supreme Being.” This particular use of natural law was intended to show compat-
ibility between religious institutions and the revolutionary project.
25 The original reads as follows: « l’objet de notre institution selon l’intention de St. Fran-
çois de Sales, notre fondateur, à été de Procurer une retraite aux personnes infirmes, de
toute âge aux veuves et aux complaction [complextion] faibles délicates, qui seroit un
obstacle pour une reigle [regle] plus austère que n’est celle de l’ordre de le Visitation
Ste. Marie. Le désir de nous rendre plus utile nous a engagé depuis l’Etablissement
de cette maison a nous Devoirs à l’éducation de la jeunesse dont un nous a Confiées
volontier le soin d’un assez grand nombre. » Archives Nationales, D XIX 1, 185
26 The original reads as follows: « . . . dont l’institut est de soigner les malades. » Archives
nationales, D XIX 1, 144.
27 The original reads as follows: « pour visites et soigner les pauvres malades dans la
compagne, les pauvres malades honteux dans les villes, instruire les petits enfans, plu-
sieurs hôpitaux même militaire du Royaume son confies à leurs soins. »
28 The original reads as follows: « . . . leur fonctions à Saint Fargeau sont de prendre soin
des malades qui sont admis à l’hôtel dieu de cette ville; et des pauvres qui sont dans la
ville; enfin d’apprendre à lire et écrire aux filles de la ville le toute gratuitement. »
29 The original reads as follows: « L’objet de leur institution est seulement etably pour
le soulagement de l’humanité souffrante et malheureuse. Cet hôpital a été fondé en
1684. . . . En 1710 a fondé quatre places pour des pauvres, filles des familles incurables
à perpétuité. »
30 The original reads as follows: « . . . cet Hospital ce soutient partes dots des sœurs qui
après leurs décès en donnent la moitié aux pauvres et l’autre pour leur entretiens cette
congrégation dépend de Monseigneur l’évêque d’Angoulême. . . »
31 The original reads as follows: « L’objet de leur institution est le soin des malades et
l’instruction de la jeunesse. »
32 The original reads as follows: « Si nous ne craignons pas Monseigneur de vous Être
importunes, nous prendrions la Liberté de vous faire quelques observations sont état
actuel de notre maison, mais ne voulais pas vous être à charge dans un temps où tous
vos moments sont précieux; »
33 The original reads as follows: « Nous les aidons à mourir saintement, selon l’esprit
de notre Règle qui nous prescrit de ne pas cesser d’être auprès deux quand ils sont en
danger et c’est un point très fidèlement observé chez nous. »
34 The original reads as follows: « on ne connait pas l’Epoque de la fondation de l’Hôtel-
Dieu de la Magdeleine d’ Auxerre mais nous avons des monumens de cette maison qui
remontrent a plus de 540 ans. »
35 The original reads as follows: « Nous sommes avec le plus profond respect, et la plus
vive confiance dans votre zèle pour le secours des malades pauvres qui n’Espérons
qu’en la compassions publique. »
36 My favorite group were a couple sisters of the order of Saint Joseph who traveled to
towns pretending to be lace workers, but in reality, they were providing medical care
to the towns that sheltered them (Hufton 1989, 75).
37 For debates on the origin of dechristianization see Michel Vovelle’s (1973) Piété
Baroque.
References
Archival Primary Sources
Archives Nationales. Paris, Pierrefitte-sur-Seine. D XIX, 1, 1790.
États des religieuses du diocèse d’Agen.
États des religieuses du diocèse d’Aix.
États des religieuses du diocèse d’Alais.
États des religieuses du diocèse d’Amiens.
États des religieuses du diocèse d’Angoulême.
États des religieuses du diocèse d’Arles.
États des religieuses du diocèse d’Auch.
États des religieuses du diocèse d’Auxerre.
États des religieuses du diocèse de Bazas.
États des religieuses du diocèse de Castres.
États des religieuses du diocèse de Chartres.
États des religieuses du diocèse de Dijon.
États des religieuses du diocèse d’Angers.
États des religieuses du diocèse d’Autun.
États des religieuses du diocèse d’Autun.
A Second Path 107
D XIX 16, 1789–1790
Lettres, adresses et représentations de religieuses annonciades sur les
décrets qui concernent leur suppression.
Lettres, adresses et représentations de religieuses augustines.
Lettres, adresses et représentations de bénédictines.
Lettres, adresses et représentations de bernardines.
Lettres, adresses et représentations de capucines.
Lettres, adresses et représentations de carmélites.
Lettres, adresses et représentations de clarisses.
Lettres, adresses et représentations de cordelières.
Lettres, adresses et représentations de dominicaines.
Lettres, adresses et représentations d’hospitalières.
Lettres, adresses et représentations de religieuses récollettes.
Lettres, adresses et représentations de religieuses de Notre-Dame-de-la-
Charité ou du Refuge.
Lettres, adresses et représentations d’ursulines.
Lettres, adresses et représentations de religieuses de la Visitation.
Lettres, adresses et représentations de religieuses de la Visitation.
Lettres, adresses et représentations de religieuses dont l’ordre n’est pas
désigné.
Lettres, adresses et représentations de communautés et de particuliers sur
les décrets.
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Creuzé-Latouche, Jacques-Antoine. 1791. Lettre de M. Creuzé-Latouche, membre de
l’Assemblée nationale, à Madame ***, ci-devant religieuse, sortie de la communauté
de ***, en vertu des décrets de l’Assemblée nationale. Paris: Bibliothèque Nationale de
France, Ld4–3485. http://catalogue.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/cb37239601g
de Jésus, Nathalie. 1790. Adresse à l’Assemblée Nationale de la parte des Carmélites de
France de la reforme de Sainte Thérèse. Marseille: P.A. Favet.
Marguerite de Sainte Victoire et al. (1790) 1992. “Adresse à l’Assemblée nationale, de la
part des religieuses du monastère de l’Assomption.” In The French Revolution Research
Collection. Microfilm: Bibliothèque nationale de France, Lb398585. http://catalogue.
bnf.fr/ark:/12148/cb37231541h.
N.A. 1790. Règlement des Hospitaliers de l’Œuvre des Hôpitaux et des Prisons de la ville
de Lyon. Lyon. https://books.google.com/books?id=AKuiVNwJEZIC&printsec=frontc
over&source=gbs_ge_summary_r&cad=0#v=onepage&q&f=false, 2.
Pierre Victor, baron Malouet. 1789. “Speech in the ASSEMBLÉE NATIONALE.” Octo-
ber 13, Archives Parlementaires, 436.
Additional References
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Annaert, Philippe. 1994. Les collèges a féminin: Les Ursulines aux XVII et XVIIIsiècles.
Namur: Thèse de doctorat.
Beales, Derek. 2003. Prosperity and Plunder: European Catholic Monasteries in the Age
of Revolution 1650–1815. New York: Cambridge University Press.
Casanova, Jose. 1994. Public Religions in the Modern World. Chicago: University of
Chicago.
Choderlos de Laclos, Pierre-Ambroise-François. 2018 [1783]. De l'éducation des
femmes. France: Éditions des Équateurs.
Curtis, Sarah. 1999. “Supply and Demand: Religious Schooling in Nineteenth-Century
France.” History of Education Quarterly 39: 51–72.
Duhet, Paule-Marie. 1971. Les Femmes et la Révolution 1789–1794. Paris: Gallimard.
Forrest, Alan. 1981. The French Revolution and the Poor. New York: St. Martin’s Press.
Foucault, Michel. 1994. The Birth of the Clinic: An Archaeology of Medical Perception.
New York: Vintage Books.
Hodge, Robert, and Gunther Kress. 1988. Social Semiotics. Ithaca: Cornell University
Press.
Hufton, Olwen. 1989. Women and the Limits of Citizenship. Buffalo: University of Toronto
Press.
Jones, Colin. 1989. The Charitable Imperative: Hospitals and Nursing in Ancien Régime
and Revolutionary France. London: Routledge.
Kernel, Marguerite. 1976. De l’Insécurité selon J.-M. Moyë (1730–1793). Le Projet de vie
des Sœurs de la Providence. Paris: Éditions franciscaines.
Krumenacker, Yves. 1992. Religieux et religieuses pendant la Revolution 1770–1820.
Lyon: Actes du colloque de Lyon.
L’Misermont. 1914. Les Vénerables Filles de la Charité d’Arras, dernières victimes de
Joseph Lebon à Cambrai. Paris, https://www.worldcat.org/search?qt=worldcat_org_all
&q=Les+V%C3%A9nerables+Filles+de+la+Charit%C3%A9+d%E2%80%99Arras%2
C+derni%C3%A8res+victimes+de+Joseph+Lebon+%C3%A0+Cambrai.
Langlois, Claude. 1984. Le Catholicisme au Feminin: Les Congrégations Francaises à
Supérieure générale au XIX siècle. Paris: Les Editions du Cerf.
McCloy, Shelby T. 1946. Government Assistance in Eighteenth-Century France. Durham,
NC: Duke University Press.
McNamara, Jo Ann Kay. 1996. Sisters in Arms: Catholic Nuns Through Two Millennia.
Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Mills, Hazel. 2001. “ ‘La Charité est une Mère’: Catholic Women and Poor Relief in France,
1690–1850.” In Charity, Philanthropy and Reform from the 1690s to 1850, edited by
Hugh Cunningham and Joanna Innes, 168–92. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
Murphy, Gwénaël. 2005. Les Religieuses dans la Révolution Française. Paris: Bayard.
Orhan, Mehmet. 2019. “The Intersectional Dynamics of Political Violence and Gender in
the Kurdish Conflict.” Studies in Ethnicity and Nationalism: 269–89.
Rapley, Elizabeth. 2001. A Social History of the Cloister: Daily Life in the Teaching Mon-
asteries of the Old Regime. Ithaca: McGill- Queen’s University Press.
———. 2011. The Lord as Their Portion: The Story of the Religious Orders and How They
Shaped Our World. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans Publishing Co.
Rapley, Elizabeth, and Robert Rapley. 1997. “An Image of Religious Women in the Ancien
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A Second Path 109
Theiner, Augustin, ed. 1857. Documents inédits relatifs aux affaires religieuses de la
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Johns Hopkins University Press.
7 “Elective Affinities”
Between Eastern Orthodox
Christianity and the 1917
Russian Revolution1
Tamara Prosic
“We are not, in fact, afraid of all these socialists, anarchists,

atheists, and revolutionaries. We keep an eye on them, and their movements
are known to us. But there are some special people among them, although
not many: these are believers in God and Christians, and at the same time
socialists.
They are the ones we are most afraid of; they are terrible people! A socialist
Christian is more dangerous than a socialist atheist.”
Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov (1881)
The relationship between Eastern Orthodox Christianity2 and the 1917 Russian
Revolution has mostly been viewed through the lenses of two extreme positions.
One considers that relation to be profound, claiming that there was a substan-
tive parallelism and correspondence between certain aspects of Russian Ortho-
dox Christianity and Marxism, which aided the Bolsheviks and the communist
revolution (Berdyaev 1937; Sarkisyanz 1955; Murvar 1971; Agursky 1987;
Duncan 2002; Hosking 2001). For the other position, however, Orthodox
Christianity had no role in the success of the revolution except as an extremely
conservative force opposing any kind of political change (Pipes 1974; McLellan
1987; Stites 1989; Steinberg 2002). For the former, Orthodox Christianity, more
specifically, Russian Orthodox messianism, was the pervasive element of national
consciousness; for the latter, Orthodox Christianity in general was an insignificant
and very superficial aspect in the lives of the majority of Russians.
Although in many ways antithetical, there is not much critical discussion
across these two positions, nor is there any theoretical framework that informs
and guides their interpretations. The two simply stand as the Scylla and Charybdis
of the relationship between Orthodox Christianity and the 1917 revolution, mak-
ing proposing alternative views quite a demanding task, a task that, on one hand,
demands a critique of these traditional views, while, on the other, requires an
appropriate theoretical background that can justify the alternative proposal and be
in a constructive hermeneutic dialogue with the documentary material.
This is precisely what this chapter sets out to do. It discusses the weakness of
the two existing positions before explaining its own proposal and presenting an
analysis utilizing a particular conceptual and theoretical perspective. Similar to
DOI: 10.4324/9781003177821-9
“Elective Affinities” 111
the position that argues for the significance of Orthodoxy in the revolution, this
chapter also argues for its importance but without invoking the notion of messian-
ism. Its main thesis is that there were, as Max Weber would put it, certain “elec-
tive affinities” (2001, 49) between the non-messianic utopian aspects of Orthodox
Christianity and the utopianism of Marxism, which in 1917 and during the civil
war functioned as a quasi-proletarian cultural hegemony and prise de conscience
politique guiding the majority of people to approve, embrace, and, most impor-
tant, persevere with the revolution.
In arguing this thesis, Marxist theories about the importance of cultural hegem-
ony (Gramsci 1978; Williams 1977) and utopian thinking (Bloch 1995) in com-
munist revolutions provide the platform for discussing the reasons why Orthodox
Christianity and its utopianism can be considered a contributing factor in the
success of the revolution, while ideas on semiotic translatability and translations
(Lotman 2010; Ludskanov 1975) provide the framework for understanding the
process of translating from the religious to the political that this chapter proposes
happened during the revolution. Finally, Orthodox Christianity is in this chapter
discussed as a “lived religion” (Orsi 1997), which is a notion that designates a
nondiscursive, intuitive type of knowledge and familiarity with religious teach-
ings, values, norms, attitudes, and narratives gained primarily through everyday
experience of the religion.
The Messianism Thesis

In 1937, Nikolai Berdyaev published The Origin of Russian Communism in which
he claimed a deep resonance between the salvational role Marxism attributed to the
proletariat and the Russian national ethos, which, he suggested, was characterized
by strong messianic overtones. In his view, from very early on in their history, Rus-
sians believed that Russia was the “Third Rome,” the spiritual heir to Byzantium
and guardian of true Christianity and therefore destined to be the world’s savior.
The meeting between the secular messianism of Marxism and the religious, specifi-
cally Russian Orthodox, messianism led to an “identification of the Russian peo-
ple with the proletariat, and of Russian messianism with proletarian messianism”
(106), an explosive mix that resulted in a successful communist revolution (143).
With this volume, published with the explicit intention to educate the West
about Russia, Berdyaev paved the way for a very long list of works that uncriti-
cally use his claims as the starting point for their own discussions about the rela-
tionship between Orthodox Christianity and the revolution. The Origin of Russian
Communism, however, is quite a strange book that should not be taken at face
value. Although presented as some kind of history, it is actually a philosophy of
Russian history rather than Russian history. It is full of speculative generalizations
without, however, providing facts illustrating and supporting the claims. The fol-
lowing sentences illustrate the problem:
The doctrine of Moscow the Third Rome became the basic idea on which
the Muscovite state was formed. The kingdom was consolidated and shaped
112 Tamara Prosic
under the symbol of a messianic idea. The search for true, ideal kingship was
characteristic of the Russian people throughout its whole history.
(9)
For this volley of statements about the character of the Russian state and the Rus-
sian people (both forward and backward in history), the only evidence he offers
is two sixteenth-century letters, written by the monk Filofei to the Grand Duke of
Moscow, Vasilli III, in which the “Third Rome” phrase is used.3
The discussion that follows these initial conjectures progresses in the same
problematic manner. In many ways, it is highly reminiscent of Hegel’s Philoso-
phy of History and his highly intentional, Procrustean type of interpreting world
history from the perspective of his metaphysics. Berdyaev’s book also reads as a
philosophy of history. In his case, however, the history is confined to Russia, and
the philosophy is not about the unfolding of the absolute spirit’s rationality but of
the spirit of Russian messianism.
Overall, according to Berdyaev almost every twist and turn in Russia’s history
is an expression of the state’s redemptive universalism and of the corresponding
messianic ethos of the Russian people. In the unfolding of this specifically Rus-
sian messianic spirit, the communist revolution, the Soviet Union, and the Third
International were the latest chapter, albeit a misguided one. At this point, the
discussion turns from being about “the origin of Russian communism” to a politi-
cally driven ideological tool encouraging anti-Soviet feelings and attempting to
split the communist movement by driving a cultural wedge between Western and
Soviet communists. Right before he repeats the claim about the identification
between the two messianisms, he writes: “Western communists, when they join
the Third International, play a humiliating part; they do not understand that in
joining the Third International they are joining the Russian people and realizing
its messianic vocation” (Berdyaev 1937, 143).
The hostility toward the Soviet Union that Berdyaev had relayed via the inher-
ent Russian Orthodox messianism thesis set the tone for many other works that
followed in the wake of The Origin of Communism, especially during the Cold
War, when, in addition to the revolution, it was also used to explain the Soviet
Union’s expansionism, communist imperialism, and so on. The perspective of
these works is staunchly anti-communist, and like in Berdyaev’s work, the Rus-
sian Orthodox Christian heritage is used to essentialize the Soviet Union as the
incomprehensible and irrational cultural, religious, and political “other.”4 This
time, however, not just in relation to Western communists but also to other com-
munist countries. In one of the “academic” works from this period, the Soviet
Union appears as an absolute “other” (to the traditions of West, European com-
munist countries, and China) because of the alleged Russian Orthodox messianic
roots of its communism (Murvar 1971, 277).5
Over the years, the “Third Rome” and the messianic thesis have graduated
to an axiomatic theoretical basis for interpreting almost every aspect of Rus-
sian cultural, intellectual, and political history. Recent scholarship, however, has
seriously challenged the veracity of the inherent Russian messianism idea. An
examination of Muscovite court documents from the sixteenth to the eighteenth
century showed that, apart from Filofei’s letters, there are no other references to
Moscow as the “Third Rome,” which seriously undermines Berdyaev’s claim
that messianism was the force driving Russian culture or state policies during
this period (Bushkovitch 1986). In a similar manner, a careful reading of Filofei’s
letters led to the conclusion that Filofei’s use of the phrase may not have
been messianic at all, at least not in the world redemptive manner suggested
by Berdyaev (Keenan 1994; Poe 2001). The same seems to be the case with
Slavophiles and the pan-Slavs in the nineteenth century. The “Third Rome”
phrase does not appear in their works and their redemptive ambitions, as
their descriptors already suggest, were limited to Slavic countries and nations
(Siljak 2016). They did believe in the uniqueness and the superiority of Ortho-
dox Christianity, but that does not necessarily imply a national messianic ethos,
especially not of the apocalyptic, millenarian type that Berdyaev suggests in The
Origin of Russian Communism.
It was only after discovering Filofei’s letters in 1860 and close to the end of
the nineteenth century that Russia and Orthodoxy began to be portrayed as world
saviors. The thesis about Russian messianism was first articulated by Dostoevsky
in 18806 and then taken on and further developed by a group of poets, writers, and
religious philosophers.7 Like other intellectuals and artists from the Silver Age,
they were also preoccupied with defining Russia’s national and cultural identity,
especially in relation to western Europe. Berdyaev was part of this circle, and he
contributed to the debate in a truly unique way. What were actually his personal
ambitions for Russia and Orthodox Christianity, he projected onto all Russians,
asserting and legitimizing their alleged inherent collective quality and antiquity
via Filofei’s letters (Siljak 2016). In other words, he himself had invented Russian
inherent messianism.
The Bolsheviks’ behavior adds further credence to these findings. Namely, in
March 1918, precisely at the moment when the success of the October revolution
was igniting spot fires all over the world, they signed the Brest–Litovsk peace
treaty with Germany, which was arguably an extremely non-messianic move.
Instead of opting to spread the revolutionary apocalypse far and wide, they chose
to save only Russia thus effectively going against their Karl Marx-cum-“Third
Rome” vocation to bring world salvation.
As it seems obvious, the idea about Russian Orthodox messianism carries
all the hallmarks of Hobsbawm’s “invented traditions” (2012). Born out of the
intelligentsia’s efforts to revive Russian intellectual and spiritual heritage and
define Russian cultural and national identity, messianism became a Russian “tra-
dition” only after the revolution and after the publication of Berdyaev’s The
Origin of Russian Communism. It was a made-up tradition rather than a tradi-
tion in the classical sense of an inherited, firmly established, customary pattern
of thought, action, and behavior. Russians did not collectively suffer from an
Orthodox-based messianic complex since time immemorial; therefore, the part
Orthodoxy possibly played in the success of the revolution cannot be tied to
messianism.
114 Tamara Prosic
The Conservatism/Insignificance Thesis
The other extreme position about the relationship between Orthodox Christianity
and the revolution holds that Orthodox Christianity had no part in the radicaliza-
tion of the Russian population or the revolution, whose success is considered to
be exclusively a result of the Bolsheviks’ political deftness (Pipes 1974; McLellan
1987; Stites 1989). Several arguments feed this view.
One of them is the alleged political conservatism of Orthodox Christianity. It
is based on the close ties between the Russian Orthodox Church and the Russian
monarchy, and there is seemingly little in the way of challenging this argument
given that Peter the Great’s religious reforms transformed the Russian Orthodox
Church into a department of the state. Its main problem, however, is that it treats
Orthodoxy in a pars pro toto manner in which its institutional side is overem-
phasized and taken to represent its totality.8 Simple historical facts contradict
this reductionist attitude and its facile dismissal of the whole Orthodox tradition,
including its disassociation from left political radicalism. The 1905 Russian revo-
lution, which undermined the monarchy beyond any repair and decisively pushed
Russia toward 1917, was triggered by Father Georgy Gapon, an Orthodox priest.
It was on his call that in January 1905, more than 250,000 people signed the peti-
tion demanding radical social and political reforms that led to the massacre of the
procession intended to present the demands to the tsar. The indiscriminate shoot-
ing of men, women, and children shocked Russia, which erupted into protests,
strikes, military mutinies, and seizures of land, culminating in the armed uprising
of October 1905. Many Orthodox clerics from all over the empire also rebelled
against the autocratic government and joined the lay Russians in their demands
(Pisiotis 2000). That revolution soon collapsed, but it was, as Lenin later said
(1920), the dress rehearsal for 1917. In Soviet historiography, the contribution of
Father Gapon and the dissenting clerics to the radicalization of common Russians
was never acknowledged, but even Western historians, who are deeply aware of
the significance of 1905, fail to consider the role Orthodox values had in shaping
their aspirations.9
Like every other religion, Orthodox Christianity is also a multifaced social and
cultural phenomenon whose complexity often manifests itself through significant
contradictions, discrepancies, and frictions among its various dimensions. Exist-
ing social and political reality might be accepted and endorsed on the official
level, yet some of its fundamental teachings and the believer’s experience of their
practice point to resistance and rejection. The Russian Orthodox Church did offi-
cially teach loyalty to the tsar and conformity with the established political and
social order, but it was at the same time subverting that message by, for example,
glorifying and canonizing the so-called holy fools (yurodivy), whose “foolish-
ness for Christ”—along with traditional early Christian values such as giving up
material possessions and living in poverty—also involved inverting conventional
social norms and rules of behavior, a brazen lack of respect, and a reverence
for power and authority, political and otherwise. All Orthodox Churches have
their “holy fools,” but the Russian Church is famous for them. More than thirty
saints are designated as yurodivy. The famous Moscow’s St. Basil’s Cathedral
is named after Basil the Blessed, a sixteenth-century yurodivy, who, according
to legend, did not have any possessions, walked the streets naked, and publicly
shamed the rich and the powerful, including the tsar Ivan the Terrible, who feared
and respected the “fool.” The message that the canonization of Basil and other
revered “fools” implicitly yet unambiguously communicated was that the path
to salvation was not through conformism and acceptance of the existing reality,
but through its rejection, condemnation of its faults, and its inversion. The history
of St. Basil’s cathedral is also a good illustration of this Russian Orthodox (and
generally Orthodox) contradiction of “explicitly accepting while implicitly reject-
ing” attitude toward political powers and the nondiscursive, yet powerful, ways it
uses to communicate the rejection. The original layout of the cathedral complex
did not include a chapel dedicated to St. Basil the Blessed. Built by Ivan the Ter-
rible, the complex was initially consecrated in honor of the Day of the Protection
of the Holy Virgin commemorating Ivan’s military victories and, without doubt,
as a compelling reminder of his imperial powers. St. Basil’s chapel, whose saint
now defines the whole complex, was added a few years after Ivan’s death, in
the year of Basil’s canonization. It is the smallest of all the structures, and it is
attached to the main complex in a way that slightly interrupts the harmony of the
original design. This physical disruption honoring the impertinent pauper seems
to have also served as a kind of cognitive intrusion into the cathedral’s grand nar-
rative about the tsar’s reign, a nudge toward thinking that rejecting, questioning,
and challenging authority could also lead to salvation. Over time, that informal,
nondiscursive, but constantly visually experienced narrative about true Christian
virtues prevailed over the imperial one; the whole complex became known as St.
Basil’s Cathedral.
As these examples demonstrate, answering the question about Orthodox atti-
tude toward political powers is a bit more of a complicated matter than just look-
ing at the proclamations of its official representatives and its institutional side.
It requires knowledge of its theology and fundamental teachings, but also of the
ways they are enacted in practice and experienced by believers. So, as much as
it can be claimed that Orthodox Christianity taught Russians conformity with the
monarchy, it can be equally argued that it radicalized them against it.
Another view that contributes to the narrative about the insignificance of Ortho-
dox Christianity concerns the level to which the majority of Russians were really
Christian. According to this long-standing theory, Orthodox Christianity was an
elitist religion, while the common Russians, peasants in particular, engaged in
“dual faith” (dvoeverie), a combination of a thin layer of Orthodox rituals and
deeply ingrained pre-Christian polytheistic beliefs. As it happened with Berdy-
aev’s Russian messianism, dvoeverie has also been strongly challenged in recent
times, proving to be another intellectual invention (Worobec 2006, 15–16; Rock
2007). In this case, the creators were nineteenth-century Russian ethnographers
riding the wave of Romanticism and its exaltation of folklore and the nonclassical
past. Like their Western counterparts, they also discovered a rich folk tradition
populated with a variety of supernatural non-Christian beings and Christianized
116 Tamara Prosic
magic rituals. However, while German folklore involving characters such as
Holda (Old Mother Frost), white women and celebrations of Yule festival, and
the like never raised any doubts about the depth and purity of German peasants’
Christian faith, that was not the case with Russian peasants. In the writings of
left leaning intellectuals of the time, their Baba Yaga (Old Witch), leshi (forest
spirits), domovoys (household spirits), and so on became a symptom of their athe-
istic “dual faith” and evidence of their superficial, ritualistic, and fundamentally
pragmatic adherence to Christianity (Rock 2007, 87–97). For obvious reasons,
Soviet historiography continued with this view, while in the West, it found deep
resonance with the traditionally patronizing attitudes toward Orthodoxy as an
inferior type of Christianity lacking Western Christian discursive sophistication,
further enhanced by M. Müller’s view (1873, 103) that higher forms of religions
involved books and minds while lower forms of religion involved rituals and
senses. With its icons, top-to-bottom wall church murals, the overuse of gold, and
never-ending liturgies, Orthodox Christianity is indeed sensory and experiential
rather than abstract and discursive. That nondiscursive functioning, however, does
not mean that Orthodoxy was an insignificant factor in shaping dominant cul-
tural values. The aforementioned example of how a cathedral initially celebrating
imperial powers become ultimately a monument to a “holy fool” is both an illus-
tration of the power nondiscursive ways can have in transmitting religious values
and an evidence of the deep influence traditional Christian teachings, such as
Jesus’s preferential treatment of the poor and the marginalized, had over people’s
thinking.
New studies about the position, role, and significance of Orthodox Christian-
ity in pre-revolutionary Russia confirm that peasants were indeed deeply Chris-
tian and that Orthodox Christianity was central to their identity (Worobec 2006;
Shevzov 2004; Chulos 2012; Kenworthy 2010; Herrlinger 2008; Hedda 2008;
Heretz 2008). Such a different picture certainly has consequences when it comes
to the debate about the possible part Orthodox Christianity played, even if only
implicitly, in the radicalization of the Russian population and the success of the
revolution. It demonstrates that Orthodox Christianity was the source of dominant
cultural values and therefore also a potential source from which the mass agree-
ment with and acceptance of Bolshevik radical ideas originated.
This brings us to the question of the role of the Bolsheviks in the revolu-
tion, which for many was the key factor in its success (Pipes 1990; Figes 1997;
Anweiler 1974; Donald 1993; Cliff 1987; Von Laue 1964; Marot 2012). Their
significance is undeniable, especially after the October removal of the Provisional
Government, but the truth is that in 1917, it was the political radicalism of the
people, rather than that of the Bolsheviks alone, that led to the October seizure
of state powers (Fitzpatrick 2008, 37–39). Their main import in this period was
that they were the only party that sensed the mass hostility toward the bourgeois
character of the Provisional Government and decided to acknowledge it by act-
ing on it. An incident that took place during the July unrests is a good illustration
of that grassroots, non-Bolshevik, generated political radicalism. According to
Pavel Miliukov, after Viktor Chernov, a member of the Petrosoviet’s executive
committee, refused the protesters’ demands for an immediate transfer of power to
the soviets, the angry crowd arrested him on the spot amid shouts “Take power,
you son of a bitch, when it is given to you!” (1921, 244). Less than two months
after these protests, the Bolsheviks announced their readiness to seize power in
the name of the soviets.10
Where did this mass radical political consciousness and energy that propelled
the Bolsheviks into action and defended the October revolution for the next three
years originate from? During the nineteenth century, Russia developed a signifi-
cant left-orientated intellectual tradition based on the ideals of the Enlightenment
and Marxism, but that influence was limited to the educated elements of Russian
society. The vast majority, including the workers and especially the peasants, had
very little understanding of basic political concepts and were even less famil-
iar with Marxist theory, whose subtleties about class and class conflict, stages
of development, material forces of production, and so on, only confused them
(Figes 2004, 110–14). Yet, by supporting the October revolution and Red Army
throughout the civil war, they did demonstrate a mass political consciousness and
attitude which undoubtedly shared certain Weberian “elective affinities” with the
Bolsheviks’ Marxist-based radicalism and revolutionary attitude. This is where
the position of Orthodoxy as the source of dominant cultural values becomes
important, because, as in other premodern European countries, it was religion that
held sway over cultural hegemony in Russia. It was Orthodox Christianity that
provided people with a “lived system of meanings and values—constitutive and
constituting—which as they are experienced as practices appear as reciprocally
confirming” (Williams 1977, 110). And it was its teachings and practices that
shaped their “sense of reality” (110) in a way that led them to assign their energies
to the cause of the revolution. That “sense of reality” might not have been authen-
tically proletarian or Marxist, but it was similar enough to allow for a semantic
overlap with Bolshevik ideals.
This hegemonic cultural position of Orthodox Christianity is the basis of
the alternative view on its significance that I want to propose, namely, that
it did aid the success of the revolution, because it functioned as the famil-
iar semantic background on which people relied in translating and interpret-
ing social and political ideas that were outside of their everyday experience
and beyond their conceptual and semiotic systems. According to Yuri Lotman
(2010, 166), a translation that enables a dialogue and understanding between
different semiotic systems is always a translation of obscurities into a lan-
guage of familiar concepts, or, as Henry D. Thoreau wrote, “We hear and
apprehend only what we already half know” (1961, 212). In my view, Ortho-
dox Christianity at the time of the revolution was exactly that language of
familiar, half-known concepts that facilitated the common people’s translation
and understanding of Bolshevik radical ideas, leading them to agree, support,
and persevere with them.
There are many avenues that can be explored under this type of importance
of Orthodox Christianity. The final part of this chapter, however, focuses on
the “elective affinities” and the semantic dialogue and translation between the
118 Tamara Prosic
religious and the political in terms of the Orthodox utopian vision and the utopian
dimension of the 1917 revolution.
There are several reasons for this particular choice. In works that deal with
Christianity and left radicalism, the traditional approach is to examine the lan-
guage of “liberation theology” and the “elective affinities” between Marxism
and Christian proto-communist messages. Such messages were always present
in Orthodoxy, either implicitly, as demonstrated by St. Basil the Blessed and the
history of his cathedral, or explicitly via direct sermons. In the decades before
the revolution, many Russian clerics and intellectuals used “liberation theol-
ogy” language to denounce Russia’s budding capitalist economy (Putnam 1977;
Negrov 2005; Pisiotis 2006; Hedda 2008; Herrlinger 2008). Such messages and
language certainly contributed in their own way to the Russian, quasi-proletarian
cultural hegemony, but that is not something that distinguishes Orthodoxy from
other Christian branches. What is its differentia specifica, and therefore an ele-
ment that could have facilitated the revolution in a unique way, is its mystical
utopian vision, which in its openness toward the historical and the material is
ontologically and epistemologically much more compatible with Marxism than
its Western Christian counterparts (Prosic 2020).
Before I turn to look at a concrete example of how Orthodox mysticism could
have had an impact on the success of the Russian revolution, I need to make a few
methodological disclaimers.
The first one is that the analysis of the idea of podvig that follows is not intended
to be a historical reconstruction despite the fact that it partly relies on tracing the
history of certain concepts. It is not meant to be an investigation of its direct
influence on revolutionary activism but of its circuitous functioning as part of the
Russian hegemonic cultural system and, in that sense, the dominant semantic filter
through which ideas surrounding the revolution were translated, understood, and
accepted.
The second disclaimer I need to make is in reference to the discussion illustrat-
ing the idiosyncrasies of Orthodox mystical theology. At the time of the revo-
lution, discursive knowledge of Orthodox theology was limited to the educated
elite, so from a point of view concerned with actualities and direct influences, one
can certainly question the validity of a discussion that focuses on the religion of
ordinary Russians. However, whether the masses were conscious of the subtleties
of Orthodox mysticism is not of critical importance. As mentioned, the aim of
this analysis is not to demonstrate a “billiard-ball” causality between Orthodoxy
and the Russian revolution that presupposes widespread discursive knowledge
and understanding of Orthodox theology. It deals with Orthodoxy as a “lived reli-
gion” and intuitive knowledge gained from everyday encounters with Orthodox
mystical aspects, broadly understood as everything perceived as the meeting point
between the mundane and the divine, the immanent and the transcendent. In this
sense, Orthodoxy is mystical not only because of hesychasm, its most obvious
mystical manifestation in which the hope is to visually experience divine presence
but also because of its icons, which are windows opening toward the transcend-
ent, its liturgy, which proclaims that God is “invisibly present among us,” and its
understanding of unconventional behaviors as manifestations of continuous bless-
ing by God, as was the case with the iurodivyi or with stranniki (holy wander-
ers) who were seen as some kind of walking icons of Christ and quite frequently
described as such in nineteenth-century model sermons (Lindenmeyr 1996, 10).
It is this perception of convergence between transcendence and immanence that
constitutes Orthodox utopianism and mysticism. To be acquainted with this type
of utopian mysticism does not require intellectual sophistry; it is a consequence
of religion as it is lived and experienced in everyday life. While ordinary Russians
were quite certainly unaware of the official doctrines underpinning Orthodox
mysticism, they certainly had an intuitive familiarity with it. It was this intuitive
knowledge, gained through quotidian encounters with various forms of Ortho-
dox mysticism, that I claim was the semantic background against which common
people interpreted the ideals of the revolution and the efforts needed to achieve it.
Bloch’s Revolutionary “Militant Optimism” in an Orthodox

Christian Key
The success of the October revolution and the formation of the Soviet Union
were unique moments in history. They inaugurated an era when, as the protesting
French students many decades later put it, to “be realistic” meant “to demand the
impossible.” From October 1917, Marxist-based “realistic” protests, rebellions,
and revolutions that “demanded the impossible” have multiplied. Some were suc-
cessful, many were not, but what the Russian revolution achieved for all of them
and for Marxism in general was to drag the idea of communism from its utopian
heights and firmly anchor it into historical reality. A society based on Marxist
principles, which until then was the stuff of theory and the desires of the down-
trodden, became a praxis. Its concrete achievements and shortcomings could be
scrutinized, evaluated, and innovated on, inevitably leading to the idea of com-
munism losing some of its utopian undertones. From being a matter of hope, it
also became part of positive knowledge and practical reasoning.
For ordinary Russians, the main torchbearers of this opening towards the realiz-
ability of Marxism, however, communism was still just a lit silhouette on the hori-
zon that was yet to be brought into being from the womb of the future and whose
concrete reality was yet to be figured out and created from that future. After the
tsar’s abdication in February 1917 until the end of the civil war in 1922, they were
confronted with two choices as to what path post-imperial Russia would take. One
was represented by the Provisional Government (March 2—October 26, 1917
[new calendar March 15—November 8, 1917]), which advocated emulating the
liberal democratic model of Western European countries and becoming a society
based on capitalist relations of production with a multiparty parliament. The other
path was to follow the lit silhouette of communism championed by the Bolshe-
viks and build a society based on common ownership over the means of produc-
tion and soviets as the form of economic and political governance. Both offered
a better future. The former in an ameliorative way in which Russia would be
incomparably better in terms of formal social and political freedoms yet without
120 Tamara Prosic
guarantees against exploitation and inequality. The latter, however, advocated a
radical transformation of the social totality, an almost de novo creation of eco-
nomic, political, and social systems aimed at abolishing exploitation and inequal-
ity. Between the two, the Bolshevik path was by far more precarious as socialism
and communism at this stage of history were no more than theoretical constructs
and a matter of utopian imagination. Contained in the simplicity of the slogan
“land, bread, peace,” their practical aspects were still nebulous, emerging primar-
ily from the Marxist critique of capitalism but not from anything that was already
in existence. It was a new and completely uncharted path, but in contrast to the
one by the Provisional Government, it was offering hope and optimism that a
society that until then was only part of utopian dreams and desires could be cre-
ated. The almost-bloodless overtake of government by the Revolutionary Military
Committee of the Petrosoviet in October of 1917, the very subdued public reac-
tion to the dissolution of the Constituent Assembly in January 1918, and finally
the logistical support that the rural population provided to the Red Army during
the civil war are proof enough that between the realpolitik of the Provisional
Government and the Bolshevik politics of realizing the utopian, the majority of
Russians chose the latter.
In its optimism that a completely new social totality can be created, the revolu-
tion was running mostly on what Bloch would later term the “principle of hope”
(1995), an anticipatory-utopian drive characterized among other things by an
active and activist attitude toward the present reality from the perspective of the
future. In Bloch’s theory, this attitude is called “militant optimism” (198) and has
a fundamental role in revolutions because it allies subjective, imaginative factors
with real, historical tendencies and actively correlates the present and the future. It
turns wishful dreams into will-full acts and maintains the momentum towards the
Novum of the future by being a constant reminder that the “undecided material” of
present reality “can be, however, decided through work and concretely mediated
action” (199). “Militant optimism” is thus part knowledge that reality is an open
process that can be acted on and part courage and unwavering commitment to
transcend the existing conditions by constantly acting toward the desired future. It
is a dimension of the revolution that is “transcendent without transcendence” and
capable of “transcending without transcendence” (210).
For Bloch, of course, the only tradition that can feed such a type of optimism,
one that dialectically correlates and mediates between knowledge and courage,
subjectivity and objective conditions, the future and the present, the utopian and
the historical, the wishful and the will-full, is Marxism. In the Russian revolu-
tion, Marxism was fueling the “militant optimism” of the Bolsheviks. It taught
them about the dialectics of the historical process, the exploitative relations of
capitalism and its alienating consequences, the illusory character of bourgeois
democracy, and about communism as the society in which the perennial historical
problems of exploitation and inequality would find their resolution, which gave
them strength to maintain the revolutionary mood. Marxism, however, was quite
certainly not the tradition on which ordinary people relied to maintain their own
“militant optimism” in persevering with the October Revolution and the Bolshevik
ideas. Their tradition—which did not teach them about historical materialism but
did involve a historically bound utopian vision and a similarly relational method
to Bloch’s “militant optimism” for achieving the utopian—was most plausibly the
mystical utopianism of Orthodox Christianity.
Orthodox Christianity developed in very different historical circumstances to
those of Western Christianity, building its ideas exclusively on the authority of
early Greek and Syriac Church fathers.11 As a consequence, it also developed very
different understandings of almost every concept it shares with Western Christi-
anity. It has a different understanding of original sin, sin in general, revelation,
humans, salvation, and even of God, all of which blend into a distinctly mysti-
cal, but also dynamic and very this-worldly “sense of reality.”12 Most importantly
from the perspective of Marxism and Bloch’s “militant optimism,” Orthodox
theology refrains from essentialist determinations either of humans, God, or the
world. Еverything is a matter of becoming/overcoming instead of being, of eksta-
sis instead of stasis; humans, the world, God, and his utopian kingdom are all a
matter of interactive processes between transcendence and immanence, the eter-
nal and the historical.
Humans are also defined in a much more holistic, concrete, and relational way.
In Western Christianity, humans are often reduced to their abstract and immaterial
elements such as the soul and the spirit, while their this-worldly task is limited
to following God’s commandments and hoping that they will reach the utopian
once they make the ontological leap from life to death. By contrast, in Orthodox
theology, humans are an affirmative relational synthesis of body and soul whose
purpose in this world is not to wait for the utopic but to actively search for its
realization, to become godlike, to be deified, or, in other words, to experience the
kingdom of God without necessarily exchanging life for death or this world for
some other.
Neither is God a completely separate and ultimately unknowable entity. As
Bloch noticed (1995, 514), Pentecost, the event when the holy spirit descended
on the disciples, is not understood as a unique, one-off, and already completed
utopian event, as it is the case in Western Christianity, but as an ongoing process,
an “unconcluded revelation” of the future utopia. In Orthodox Christianity, this
future utopian condition seeps into, intertwines, and interacts with the histori-
cal and the material in a variety of ways. Monks attempt to have an unmedi-
ated visual experience of divine light via their contemplative practices; for the
common people, every icon is a reminder of the divine revelation through the
material, while every liturgy is supposed to be a prefiguration of the future har-
monia mundi. Liturgy, however, cannot be performed in an empty church; it is
the material presence of the community that ultimately draws God and the utopia
into this world.
In all these cases, there is an overlap between the perfection of the transcendent
and the imperfection of the historical; in all of them, we find the idea that the reali-
zation of utopia and the participation in it do not exclusively depend on God’s will
but also and mostly so on the people’s resolution and unwavering commitment to
be with God by actively removing the main obstacle leading to him: their own
122 Tamara Prosic
individualistic urges and desires. This insistence to be with God through complete
surrender of self-consequentiality is the essence of Orthodox utopian mysticism.
In Russian, this single-minded striving for and insistence on realizing the uto-
pian, which is in its boundness to the historical strongly reminiscent of Bloch’s
revolutionary “militant optimism,” has a particular name. It is called podvig,
which is one of those dense, polysemic terms whose connotative complexity
always presents a challenge for translators. In English, podvig has been translated
as “feat,” “valor,” “selfless heroic act,” “asceticism,” “spiritual struggle,” “self-
denial,” “improvement,” “achievement,” “humility,” “advancement,” “denial of
the world,” and even “glory.” According to Nikolai Roerich (1943), none of those
words correctly conveys its meaning:
Heroism heralded by trumpet blasts still does not fully interpret the ever-
living, all-perfecting idea carried by the Russian ‘podvig.’ ‘Heroic deed’—is
not quite it; ‘valour’—will not cover it; ‘self-denial’—again is not the same;
‘improvement’—falls short; ‘achievement’—is entirely different, because it
implies some conclusion, while ‘podvig’ is unlimited. Collect from different
languages many words which carry the best ideas of advancement, and not
one of these words will be equivalent to the succinct but adequate Russian
term ‘podvig.’ And how beautiful is this word: it is more than advancement—
it is ‘podvig’!
Today, that “beautiful word” has both religious and secular overtones, but its
original meaning is religious, and its journey from the religious to the political
is illustrative of Orthodox mysticism’s potential to have served as the cultural
semantic fulcrum on which ordinary people relied in understanding the revolution
and the energies needed to achieve its ideals.
Etymologically, podvig is a derivative of the verb dvigat, which means
“to move,” while po-dvigat means to “recommence/restart/release an arrested
movement/development/change.” In Russian early religious texts, it referred to
movement, aspiration, diligence, struggle, great exhaustion, and a great and dif-
ficult deed (Sreznevskij 1902, 1031–34; Dal’ 1907, 167). Until the nineteenth cen-
tury, podvig, podvizhnichestvo (engaging in podvig), and podvizhnik (the one who
engages in podvig) were almost exclusively associated with monastic life, biblical
events, saints, martyrs, and ascetics (Almazov 1865). Over time, the pool of pod-
vizhniki widened. In the nineteenth century, it included almost every important
past and contemporary official religious figure but also the mentioned yurodivi
and stranniki (Platonov 2010): mostly ordinary people, who by living on charity
and being on a constant move between monasteries, churches, and other sacred
places, attempted to emulate the words from Matthew 19:21 and Luke 12:33: “If
you would be perfect, go, sell what you possess and give to the poor, and you will
have treasure in heaven; and come, follow me.”
The nineteenth century was also the period when along with many other typi-
cally religious terms, such as martyr, sacrifice, holy, and others, podvig migrated
to the secular sphere, where it became a politically charged concept associated
with subversive and revolutionary activities, such as the Decembrist uprising and
actions of clandestine organizations involved in assassination attempts on the tsar
and prominent state officials (Trigos 2009; Henry 1983). In Alexey Pleshcheyev’s
famous poem from 1846, “Step Forward,” it became a metaphor for revolutionary
struggle. This poem deserves some specific attention because it became a sort of
revolutionary anthem, and its fate is indicative of the semantic transformation of
the religious to radical political language.
“Step Forward,” which called people to podvig,13 was an instant success with
the left intelligentsia. Named the Russian La Marseillaise, its verses were set to
music, it was recited at gatherings and written about in private correspondence,
students knew it by heart and conspirators sang it when arrested (Pustil’nik 1966,
206–10). Quite often, parts of it were incorporated into other literary works with a
radical political message, as was the case with “Workers’ Poem,” which appeared
in 1897 in an illegal pamphlet published by the South-Russian Workers Union,
one of the very first radical workers’ organizations. Its first two verses were from
Pleshcheyev’s Step Forward (Step forward, without fear and doubt, / To valiant
podvig, friends!), followed by new lines about workers’ solidarity and ending with
a call to workers to swear an oath to follow Marx’s behest and a paraphrase of
the Communist Manifesto’s slogan “Workers of the world unite.” In addition to
the first two verses, the two poems also shared the same revolutionary bravado,
but the language was markedly different. Step Forward overflowed with religious
metaphors and imagery (podvig, holy redemption, heaven, priests of sin, idols,
blessed, guiding star, holy truth), while in Workers’ Poem only podvig and zavet
(testament, behest) had indisputably religious connotations, although quite muted
by the nonreligious language of the rest of the poem.
The semantic move of podvig from its religious roots to the social sphere signi-
fying political radicalism continued and by the beginning of the twentieth century
was so successful that in 1909, in the aftermath of the 1905 revolution, Sergey
Bulgakov found it necessary to explain the differences between revolutionary her-
oism and Christian podvizhnichestvo (1994). His efforts fell on deaf ears. Political
radicalism and podvig continued to be correlated, and in the years during the civil
war, the revolution was often called podvig in speeches intended to keep up the
revolutionary spirit and highlight the efforts of the Red Army.14
According to A. Ludskanov, “semiotic transformations are the replacements of
the signs encoding a message by signs of another code, preserving (so far as pos-
sible in the face of entropy) invariant information with respect to a given system
of reference” (1975, 7). Taking this into consideration, the main question within
the context of the Russian system of reference/cultural hegemony is what was the
“invariant information” between the religious code of Orthodox mysticism and
the secular code of Bolsheviks’ Marxist political radicalism which allowed the
semiotic translatability and transformation of podvig into a sign with a radical
political message? Peter Henry finds it in the selfless idealism and moral dedi-
cation that were characteristic of both religious podvizhniki and revolutionaries
(1983, 140–41). This suggestion is certainly true but only to the extent that for
podvizhniki, such qualities refer to basic Christian duties and are just a starting
124 Tamara Prosic
point for podvig. They are certainly not attributes that would surrender to an
effortless interface with the radicalism, initiative, and dynamism inherent in the
notion of revolution. What does allow for such interface is that podvig, like com-
munist revolutions and the Marxist “militant optimism,” also demands something
that is outstanding, that goes beyond every expectation, even beyond idealism
itself, which in the last instance means challenging, undermining, and negating
the existing on every possible level and in every possible form, not simply from
the point of a better future but also from the point of the ultimate, utopian, future.
For podvizhniki, the ultimate future that they wanted to actualize was to be god-
like, for the Bolsheviks, to build a society without exploitation.
There are various aspects to “podvig” in Orthodox mysticism, but the most rel-
evant regarding the “militant optimism” of revolutions is the emphasis on human
subjectivity and agency in achieving the utopian goal. As its etymology and use
in early Russian religious texts indicate, the main markers of podvig are constant
change, struggle, movement, and process. The first podvizhnik (podvigonacha-
lnik) and the one who established podvig (podvigopolozhnik) was Jesus Christ
(Zadonskij 2015, 433; Kronštadtskij 1996, 2). So, if one is to move toward the
utopian condition of being godlike, the fulfillment of that hope is predicated on
initiating change, movement, improvement, heroism, and action (Kronštadtskij
1893, note 310). A clear expression of that dynamism based on active human
pursuit is clearly expressed by Russian theologians (Kronštadtskij 2009, 304),
who often use podvig in conjunction with the verses “kingdom of heaven has suf-
fered violence, and men of violence take it by force” from Mathew 11.12. In other
words, instead of relying on God’s grace and waiting for the future utopia to just
happen, people themselves have to pull the utopia from the future into the present.
In this respect, even the hesychastic practice of continuous repetition of the
“prayer of the heart” is not about passive ruminations on God. Outwardly, the
words of the prayer “Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me” look as
if the whole salvation economy, the precarious relation between human will and
god’s grace, is on the side of the divine. On closer inspection, however, it becomes
clear that the constant repetition tips the scale towards humans, transforming the
prayer into an instrument of human agency. The prayer actually functions as an
unceasing “knocking on heaven’s door,” a bold implementation of the verses from
Matthew 7.7 and Luke 11.9 that whoever asks will be given, whoever seeks will
find and that whoever knocks, it will be opened for them. From this perspective,
the prayer is less a supplication asking for a divine favor than it is a constant
reminder of the right of humans and this world to experience the perfection of the
utopian.
What constitutes podvig in hesychastic practice, however, is not so much the
ascetic life monks lead or their mental and physical discipline but primarily their
intrepidity to constantly interact with the perfection of the utopian and their abso-
lute desire to experience in the present the divine perfection. Practically speaking,
hesychasm is a contemplative practice, but what makes it very distinct from simi-
lar mystical practices is the belief that the prayer will lead to a sensory experience
of the transcendent. This connection with the body effectively grounds the divine
and the utopian in the material and the historical. Podvizhnichestvo, thus, whether
it is in a form of praying, yurodivy’s “foolish” behavior, or stranniki’s incessant
wanderings, is a process of continual journeying toward and tugging at the fringe
of the utopian with the ultimate aim of transforming the existing through merg-
ing it with the future. In this movement toward and desire for the future, the most
important aspect is the process itself, which in its trajectory toward the utopian and
from the “will be” reality challenges, undermines, and changes existing reality.
From this perspective, it is clear why the Russians found it so easy to relate
podvig to political radicalism. Even in its most contemplative form, it bears all
the hallmarks of Bloch’s revolutionary “militant optimism”: it demands a con-
stant movement toward the future; it requires an absolute, selfless persistence in
achieving its intended goal; and, finally, it is an unending transformative process
that does not just aim at another reality that transcends the existing but that “tran-
scends without transcending” within the existing reality, thereby changing it.
One of the best explanations of podvig’s relation to the future can be found in
Nikolai Chernyshevsky’s utopian novel What Is to Be Done? In a dream, Vera,
one of Chernyshevsky’s “new people,” is told by one of the goddesses of the
future (1989, 379):
Tell everyone that the future will be radiant and beautiful. Love it, strive
toward it, work for it, bring it nearer, transfer into the present as much as you
can from it. To the extent that you succeed in doing so, your life will be bright
and good, rich in joy and pleasure.
Chernyshevsky was a socialist and an atheist,15 but many of his ideas from
the novel, which fundamentally influenced Russian revolutionaries of all colors,
Lenin included,16 have been today recognized as thinly veiled messages of Ortho-
dox Christian mysticism (Katz and Wagner 1989, 1–36; Morris 1993, 129). What
Is to Be Done? enjoyed unparalleled popularity in nineteenth-century Russia, but
its acclaim can hardly be credited to its openly radical political message. At the
time it was published in 1863, revolutionary discourse was already part of Rus-
sia’s cultural and political scene. What was truly captivating about it was its suc-
cessful semantic transformation of the obscure yet intuitively familiar, culturally
habitual message of Orthodox Christianity into a rational political discourse. For
many Russian intellectuals, that meant an uncompromising commitment to Marx-
ism on which they drew for their “militant optimism” during the revolution, but
for the uneducated workers and peasants of Russia, it was perhaps Orthodox mys-
tical utopianism and podvig that were the political consciousness on which their
understanding of the revolution was based and on to which they depended for
their “militant optimism” in order to persevere in the quest to realize the revolu-
tion’s ideals.
Orthodox Christianity dominated the ideational landscape of Russia for centu-
ries, and even the most ardent atheists, such as Lenin, could not completely avoid
its influence on their “sense of reality.” While in exile, one of his favorite pastimes
was listening to a romance by Tchaikovsky that was set to verses of “Podvig,” a
126 Tamara Prosic
poem by Alekséj S. Homâkóv (Valentinov 2017, 56), one of the most significant
lay Russian theologians of the nineteenth century. The key to understanding why
even Lenin was attracted to a poem with unequivocally Orthodox overtones is
the absence of absolute transcendence in Orthodox Christian utopianism and its
anchoring in the historical. That connection between the utopian and the real is
the “elective affinity” of Orthodoxy that deeply resonated with Lenin’s Marxist
utopianism and that, during the revolution, aided the masses to understand and
persevere with the Bolshevik ideals.
Notes
1 The research for this chapter has been funded by Gerda Henkel Stiftung.
2 In further text, Orthodox Christianity.
3 “Of all kingdoms in the world, it is in thy royal domain that the holy Apostolic Church
shines more brightly than the sun. And let thy Majesty take note, O religious and gra-
cious Tsar, that all kingdoms of the Orthodox Christian Faith are merged into thy king-
dom. Thou alone, in all that is under heaven, art a Christian Tsar. And take note, O
religious and gracious Tsar, that all Christian kingdoms are merged into thine alone,
that two Romes have fallen, but the third stands, and there will be no fourth. Thy Chris-
tian kingdom shall not fall to the lot of another” (Berdyaev 1937, 9).
4 The list of works from this period is very long and includes academic articles and
books, foreign policy journals, popular press, publications by post–World War II ultra-
nationalist émigré communities from Ukraine and Croatia, and even statements from
the State Department. An extensive, although not exhaustive, list of these works can be
found in M. Poe (2001) and Siljak (2016).
5 Incidentally, the author was an escaped Ustasha from the Independent State of Croatia,
a Nazi puppet state during World War II, which perpetrated a genocide on the Orthodox
Serbs. That fact casts a very deep shadow over the objectivity of his research.
6 In a speech about Pushkin, https://pages.uoregon.edu/kimball/DstF.Puw.lct.htm#DstF.
Puw.lct.
7 See, for example, Vladimir S. Solov'ev (1891, 20), Dmitrii S. Merezhkovskii (1973,
4:39–40), and Vâčesláv I. Ivánov (1909a, 1909b).
8 In many cases this reductionist attitude led to quite paradoxical research efforts exclu-
sively focused on the political subversiveness of all kinds of minority religions, while
the religion professed by the majority of Russians was by default dismissed as a con-
formist political force advocating passivity and acceptance of the established social
order. See, for example, McLellan 1987, 90–92; Steinberg 2002, 224–47.
9 See, for example, Sablinsky 1976; Surh 1981a, 1981b.
10 Immediately after the February Revolution (February 23–March 3, 1917 [new calendar
March 8–6, 1917]) the role of the soviets, especially of the Petrosoviet, was to support
the Provisional Government and work with it on preventing a counterrevolution. Less
than a week after the formation of the Provisional Government (March 3) the Petroso-
viet’s role shifted toward controlling the actions of the Provisional Government. That
shift led to a situation of “dual power” (Lenin 1917). The Provisional Government
nominally (in the eyes of the privileged classes and the international community) had
the governing powers, but in reality, its decisions and policies were followed only if
sanctioned by the Petrosoviet, which commanded the trust of the masses. In a con-
fidential letter by Alexander I. Guchkov, the first minister of war in the Provisional
Government (March–May 1917) to Mikhail V. Alexeev, the commander-in-chief of
the Russian army, he wrote that “the Provisional Government does not possess any
real power, and its directives are carried out only to the extent that it is permitted by
the Soviet of Workers’ and Soldiers’ Deputies, which enjoys all the essential elements
of real power, since the troops, the railroads, the post and telegraph are all in its hands.
One can say flatly that the Provisional Government exists only so long as it is permitted
by the Soviet” (Gaponenko 1957, 429–30). The October Revolution and the removal
of the Provisional Government simply formalized the soviets as the people’s chosen
form of government.
11 This summary of Orthodox theological ideas is based on a range of modern Orthodox
theologians (Florovsky 1932; Schmemann 1973, Lossky 1997a, 1997b; Meyendorff
1979; Chryssavgis 2004; Zizioulas 1985; Russell 2009; Ware 1995) and pre-revolu-
tionary Russian theologians such as St. Vasilij Kalika 1853; Petrov 1997; Zadonskij
2015; Kronštadtskij 1996, 1893, 2009; Tihomirov 1886; Martynov 1886; Epifanovič
1996; Mitropolit Filaret 1867; Brânčaninov 1886; Bulgakovskij, 1893; and many
others.
12 See, for example, Lossky 1997a, 1997b; Schmemann 1973.
13 The first four verses are “Vpered, bez strakha i somnen'ya, / Na podvig doblestnȳĭ,
druz'ya! / Zaryu svyatogo iskuplen'ya / Uzh v nebesakh zavidel ya!” (Step forward,
without fear and doubt, / To valiant podvig, friends! / Holy redemption’s dawn / I’ve
already seen in heaven!).
14 See, for example Kalinin’s speeches from 1919 at the party’s meeting of the Vyborg
region and at the Kronstadt mass rally (Kalinin, 1960, 147, 155) and in the Minutes of
the Ninth Congress of the Communist Party (1920, 9).
15 Chernyshevsky’s father was a priest and like many nineteenth-century Russian intel-
lectuals, Chernyshevsky was also a seminary student before moving to university in
St. Petersburg, where he was introduced to radical left ideas and where he became an
atheist.
16 According to the memoirs of N. Valentinov, Lenin intentionally gave the same title to
his seminal pamphlet on the organization and the role of the revolutionary party What
Is to Be Done? (1902) as Chernyshevsky’s utopian novel (2017, 79). Lenin called
Chernyshevsky “the greatest and most talented representative of socialism before
Marx” under whose “influence hundreds of people became revolutionaries. . . . He
ploughed me up more profoundly than anyone else. . . . After my brother’s execution,
knowing that Chernyshevsky’s novel was one of his favorite books, I really under-
took to read it, and I sat over it not for several days but for several weeks. Only then
did I understand its depth. . . . It’s a thing that supplies energy for a whole lifetime”
(Valentinov 2017, 79).
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8 “The Spirit of the Spiritless
World”
The Shiʿa Rituals of Muharram
and the 1979 Iranian Revolution
Babak Rahimi
Introduction
The Iranian Revolution of 1979 was a stunning social upheaval that altered the
common perception of revolutions as secular political transformations of the
established orders. The street demonstrations that rocked Iranian cities from Janu-
ary 1978 to February 1979 displayed a rare alliance of heterogeneous groups, in
particular the loose coalition of Marxist-Leninist militants, liberal nationalists,
and Shiʿa Islamist factions under the charismatic leadership of Ayatollah Ruhollah
Khomeini. Such an unusual alliance brought forth the dynamic role of mass street
protests in making the first “Islamic Revolution” possible in a region where coun-
tries such as Iran had undergone rapid modernization. Of significance were the
social changes caused by the state-driven autocratic modernization of the Pahlavi
regime that, in the words of the late Tim McDaniel, “reshaped social relationships
and facilitated the emergence of powerful forces of social protest” (1991, 147).
The 1979 Iranian Revolution was more than a political upheaval; it was also a
social transformation of historic magnitude with transnational implications.
As mobilized protests, however, the “religious character” of the 1979 Revo-
lution has kept generations of analysts busy in attempts to discern the histories
and meanings of “the Islamic Revolution.” These attempts have entailed the ines-
capable challenge to conceptualize the Iranian Revolution with religion as a key
component. Does Iran of 1979 offer an essentially unique case of the religious
becoming political? Or do the 1979 uprisings represent a distinct case of religion
(Shiʿa Islam) revealing its inherently revolutionary force? How can we under-
stand religion in the course of revolutionary mobilization? In what follows, I look
at the 1979 Revolution in terms of the lived experiences of revolutionaries who
made radical change possible. Religion, I argue, plays an important role in these
lived experiences that are intimately tied to emotions as a motive for action. My
intention here is to provide a counternarrative to a number of scholarly works that
have mostly overlooked the relationship between emotions and religion in the
1979 Revolution.
The wide-ranging discourses on the religious dimension of the 1979 Revolu-
tion have involved different assumptions, the most problematic of which is on the
insurrectionary phase (1978–79) as a teleological process toward an inevitable
DOI: 10.4324/9781003177821-10
“The Spirit of the Spiritless World” 133
revolutionary triumph (Harris 2017, 77). The other problematic is certain defi-
nitional assumptions about religion as a cultural and ideological phenomenon,
which are then analytically ascribed to explain the revolution. While they attempt
to underscore a coherent set of values, ethics, or mindsets that frame revolution-
ary action, teleological and ideo-cultural approaches, in the end, fail to capture
the nature of insurrectionary actions, in particular why Iranians resorted to the
mass-based overthrow of the regime. Failing to understand “why” people become
involved in revolutions overlooks the affective dimensions of street protests. It
also tends to reify political upheavals as vanguard- or elite-driven and overlooks
how revolts unfold on the ground, where ordinary people take up arms in face of
potential death.
Broadly speaking, social revolutions are collective experiences of radical polit-
ical change. Such collective experiences involve emotional energies and are real-
ized in situational, lived contexts, and the transformational events that make them
possible (Reed 2020, 22–25). Although the religious character of the insurrections
can be described on multiple levels, in the case of 1978–79 Iran, the most impor-
tant character of the revolutionary upheaval, I argue, are the experiences of shared
emotions that emerged from rituals and energized actors to engage in collective
resistance. In what Randall Collins calls “mutual entrainment of emotion,” such
affective experiences produce shared cognitive experiences that seek not only to
interpret but also create a new social reality with alternative meanings (Collins
2004, 48).
This chapter is not intended to offer a historical generalization; it also does
not engage in a broad theoretical discussion on “religion” as a sociocultural and
organizational structure for revolutionary mobilization. Rather, it offers a focused
account of Tasua’ and Ashura ceremonies as street demonstrations in Decem-
ber 1978. The Shiʿa rituals under study are known as mourning traditions per-
formed on the ninth (Tasua’) and tenth (Ashura) nights and days of the lunar
month of Muharram (hence also known as the “Muharram rituals”) in commem-
oration of the martyrdom of the grandson of the Prophet, Husayn, who died a
martyr’s death in Karbala in 680 ce. In the Shiʿa Muslim calendar, the two days
are the most important during which various rituals of mourning are observed
with complex dimensions, one of which is strengthening community and social
meaning.1
In its late Pahlavi context, the street ceremonies have been described as the
most politicized expressions of Shiʿa Islam. They became, in the words of two
prominent scholars, “converted into a cogent political weapon” in the course of
insurrections (Chelkowski and Dabashi 1999, 83). Although organized in violent
contexts and mobilized as street political demonstrations, the religious ceremo-
nies were also massive. Compared to other demonstrations, the 1978 Muharram
protests were of “unprecedented size,” estimated between 500,000 and 4 million
in Tehran and, in total, 6 to 9 million in all Iranian cities (Axworthy 2014, 121).
Largely due to pervasive anger against the Pahlavi regime, the street demon-
strations were so large that they prompted the late French philosopher Michel
Foucault, who was working as a special correspondent in Tehran, to describe
134 Babak Rahimi
the street protests in Iran as “an absolutely collective will” in the demand for
the departure of the shah (Afary and Anderson 2005, 253). The demonstrations
took place at a critical juncture during the insurrectionary phase of the revolution,
becoming the most glaring referendum on the shah, effectively ending the legiti-
macy of the monarchy. The massive demonstrations marked the beginning of the
end and culminated in the overthrow of the regime in February 1979 (Kurzman
2004, 119; Bakhash 1984, 190).2
How can we critically conceptualize religion in shaping a “collective will” as
an affective force of political orientation? This study is threefold. In the first sec-
tion, I begin a discussion of select studies on the Iranian Revolution, primarily
in the span of two decades after the Revolution, and show how emotions have
been under-analyzed primarily because of structural (as opposed to subjective)
approaches that tend to focus on causal explanations to studying the street protests.
I also criticize instrumental approaches that identify religion as either cultural or
ideological expressions. As a way to set the stage for a theoretical discussion on
the role of emotions (in the fourth section), the second and third sections offer a
brief historical account of the Muharram rituals leading up to the 1978 protests.
The primary aim here is to depict the massive demonstrations in their historic
context. While I acknowledge other street demonstrations, I reflect on the 1978
Muharram processions as a distinct form of demonstrations that differed from
previous annual performances observed as mourning rituals.
The final section builds on the compellingly well-evidenced research of Charles
Kurzman, The Unthinkable Revolution in Iran (2004). In his study of the 1979
Revolution, Kurzman argues that revolutions are contingent, and hence unpredict-
able, because of varied collective responses to the confusion generated by radical
interruptions to the routineness of life. But in a way, the section also aims to go
beyond Kurzman’s “confusion” approach and focus on emotions as a form of col-
lective action engaged in revolutionary politics at the street level. Here of critical
importance is an account of the Muharram demonstrations by Michel Foucault,
who bases his personal observations on Marx’s ambiguous notion of religion
as “the spirit of a world without spirit,” described as an “inner experience” of
collective significance (Afary and Anderson 2005, 252). Beyond a subjectivist
voluntarist reading, I describe Foucault’s “inner experience” as a nuanced mode
of solidarity that affectively performs dissent in collective action, without which
a revolution, “Islamic” or otherwise, would not be possible. Finally, I briefly
explore suffering as agency and affective action.
Emotions, Religion, and the 1979 Iranian Revolution

It is an odd intellectual affair to reflect back on a revolutionary event. The histori-
cal and theoretical projects of explaining key historical events imputed as “revo-
lutions,” at times named years after, have mostly sought to answer questions on
the genesis and developments of the uprisings, which in many ways prove to
be multicausal and multidirectional with long-term impacts. In the case of 1979
Iran, the challenge for the new generation of scholars has lain in identifying
multidirectional, contingent, and transnational aspects of the revolution that, in
the words of Neghmeh Sohrabi, has served as “one of the last great successful
revolutions of the post-colonial world and in its post-revolutionary shape, as one
of the first to answer the questions and anxieties of its global south ethos in an
Islamic form” (Sohrabi 2018, 8). Yet the most challenging task is the rationalizing
effort to reconstruct political and social disruptions that, by nature, are evanescent
and provisional, although at times routinized into institutional structures and state
entities. In the desire to demonstrate the rationality of revolutions, the tendency is
to emphasize the causal chain of decisions, moments, events, and state responses
(or lack of) to collective actions viewed according to broad changes in cultural,
economic, political, or religious institutions. For a revolution to be studied, the
task at hand is assumed to be an assessment of causes and implications of exist-
ing institutional constraints or transformations in response to competing interest
groups that make a society prone to revolutionary upheaval.
The rise of studies on the 1979 Iranian Revolution shares variegated modes of
explanatory models, although ultimately limited to different modalities of his-
torical consciousness in theorizing revolution, which seek to assess the massive
uprisings in terms of causal measures. Most early works on the Iranian Revolu-
tion, which by 1995 alone included more than fifty books and hundreds of aca-
demic articles in English (Kurzman 1995, 25), have as a benchmark the paradigm
of organizational and institutional structures. Such a paradigm is set to delineate
dimensions of violence and organized uprisings within the nation-state setting,
although it is equally responsive to an international context.
Space plays a key role in the production of knowledge. In what Sohrabi has
identified as two main strands of historiography on the 1979 Revolution, namely,
scholarly works published in Iran as nihzat (movement) and those outside of Iran
as (Enqelab) revolution, numerous interpreters of the revolution were participants
in the revolution and saw their scholarly activities as frameworks of analysis to
understand a historic event that changed their lives equally whether in Iran or in
diaspora (Sohrabi 2018). What appears to be neglected is the dissonance of coa-
lesced political groups, emerging from a transnational milieu, which shaped the
revolutionary movement into being. Also, I would add, at the core of these early
approaches is a historical imaginary of revolutions that posits political change
as a product of intricate historical developments that through connected links of
actors culminate in the revolutionary events. Yet causality models, as convinc-
ingly criticized by Kurzman’s anti-explanation approach, are macro-interpretive
practices that mostly overlook the specificity and contingency of revolutionary
action in favor of broader and causal variables that can bring about a teleological
progress, even if hampered by revolutionary setbacks (Kurzman 2004).3 Causal
models also neglect spontaneity in collective action and, more important, the role
of emotions that help define goals and “motivate action” in protest mobilization
(Jasper 1998, 421).4
The discussion that follows is not comprehensive and does not address all the
numerous theoretical models for the Iranian Revolution and the role of religion in
it.5 I also do not include recent studies of the revolution that have problematized
136 Babak Rahimi
the structuralist and secularist tendencies in earlier scholarly works, as this study
shares a theoretical affinity with many of these works that view the 1979 Revo-
lution as contingent, dissonant, and multidirectional (Ghamari-Tabrizi 2016;
Keshavarzian and Mirsepassi 2021).6 As a way of building a new theoretical
approach on religion and emotion in the course of a revolutionary process, what
I map out here are certain scholarly strands that overemphasize the causes of the
revolution and their connection to religion, which according to certain interpreta-
tions either becomes a mere mechanism of organizational activism or a cultural
object of political value for the revolutionary movement. Here, I argue, the key
problem lies with an instrumental approach that conceptually consolidates reli-
gion into either a cultural or an ideological category of functional character, ulti-
mately understood as a political expression of revolutionary form. Connected to
the instrumental approach is the implicit notion of religion as a set of beliefs, dis-
courses, or ways of framing action to which emotions become merely functional
means for shaping a new political paradigm.
But prior to a critical engagement with the literature, albeit brief, it is impor-
tant to ask the following question: What role do experiences play in revolution-
ary upheavals? An answer should begin with a multiple model of revolutionary
unfoldings. First, revolutions, in particular the Iranian revolution, are process-
based phenomena that are mobilized by multiple actors and ideological sources
in local and international contexts (Moghadam 1994). Second, the insurrectionary
phase of the 1979 Revolution was not a single episode of upheaval, framed around
a clear ideological percept, but a sequence of events that could have unfolded in
different directions and at various temporal moments and involved varied actors
with different motives, intentions, expectations, and ideologies. Third, and more
important, the changing sources of mobilization cannot be divorced from complex
emotions of protestors who undergo shifts in consciousness according to unfold-
ing events that operated as “moments of collective creativity” similar to experi-
ences of frenzy or “moments of madness” beyond the mundane and the ordinary
(Reed 2020, 19; Zolberg 1972). In fact, if we consider revolutions as a series of
contingent events that produce liminal situations for mobilization, any account of
a revolution must be grounded on piecemeal knowledge based on moments that
arise and, hence, enable actors to produce an uprising.
Because revolutionary consciousness is always born out of contingency, reli-
gion can play an affective role in how changing circumstances are perceived,
interpreted, and ultimately acted upon as moral judgments with a rational orienta-
tion in lived and situated contexts. The Durkheimian notion of “effervescence,”
as creative periods during which a collective becomes animated in intense ritual
performances, go beyond “the ordinary condition of life” (Durkheim 1995, 218)
can help us understand how religious practices, in particular ritual, can function
as a powerful collective subjective force. This is because religious practices are
about not just maintaining order but also transcending it for new shared modes
of being in the world. These new shared modes also involve meaningful ways of
rearranging the world in the reversal of everyday perceptions. As displays of con-
siderable frenzy, sometimes appearing as “delirium,” collective effervescences
are the form of social gatherings that are creative in the way they can transform
subjectivity, causing participants to “lose sight of the boundary between the licit
and illicit” since, Durkheim argues, “there are also religious ceremonies that bring
about a kind of thirst for violating those rules that ordinarily are widely obeyed”
(1995, 387). Such ritual activities impart cognitive practices that initiate feelings
of solidarity, confidence, elation, and morality that are symbolically represented
through varied material, embodied, or virtual performances (Collins 2004, 49,
53–64). How ritual participants in a given ceremonial event undergo efferves-
cence involves the act of transgression of perceived social and political norms,
which in a revolutionary context, such as Iran of 1979, can push for a new social
reality.
At a critical juncture between ritual and subjectivity, emotions play a crucial
role in how effervescences are sustained. This is because emotions are integral
motivational forces that shape mass gatherings such as street protests to address
circumstances perceived as unjust or oppressive. As events of “heightened emo-
tion,” insurrections involve the kind of intense emotions that range from moral
outrage to hope in a way to find new meaning for lived circumstances (Reed 2020,
128). Emotions such as anger, despair, fear, outrage, joy, hope, or trust, although
expressed in varied cultural and situational contexts, are the driving force in mak-
ing the contingent now displayed on the street into a new reality, one that the
mobilized emotions and the shared common mood aim to redefine the future to
come. Emotions especially in protests, in this sense, facilitate the reevaluation of
self and reality. As Steven M. Parish (2004) has argued, emotions are not distinct
from reason but in fact a form of cognitive judgments in evaluating the world
for moral betterment. Likewise, emotions signal a moral response to “perceived
injustice” (Holmes 2004). Mourning expressed in ritual weeping can be polyse-
mic and, in distinct situations, provide moral commentary and critique (Ebersole
2004). Although expression of emotions can vary in linguistic expression and be
variedly performed from one community to another, the emotional component in
religious practice lies in how feelings become sources of action through embod-
ied performances and discursive frameworks that interpret ways of being in the
world.
Mostly overlooked in studies of the 1979 Iranian Revolution is the aspect of
how emotions become sources of action on a micro-level where collective action
unfolds. From the outset, it is important to note that early approaches to the Ira-
nian Revolution, although varied in theory and hardly reductive to monocausal
interpretations, are primarily attempts to understand the conditions that led to the
revolution, rather than its insurrectionary emergence at the subjective level. This
is, partly, because the subjective elements are perceived through ideological and
cultural explanations that limit subjectivity to an often preordained or constructed
set of attitudes, beliefs, ideas, ideals, customs, myths, rituals, or traditions that
prevent the examination of affects that are equally important to subjectivity. Sub-
jectivity, for the most part, is understood in strictly ideological-cultural terms and
revolutionary movements, accordingly, are framed in a restricted sense of dis-
courses or traditions that are defined as specific modes of political or politicized
138 Babak Rahimi
behavior. While I do not suggest approaches with a focus on culture and ideol-
ogy should be dismissed, I argue that the prominence of emotions is primarily
overlooked because of the assumption that they are either exploited by elites for
mass mobilization, as irrational actions open to manipulations, or mere cultural
expressions that can be utilized by political organizations for an expected set of
political outcomes.
If emotions are whimsical behaviors, why make them an integral part of his-
tory? Grounded in the realist tradition of objectivity, in numerous historical stud-
ies of the Iranian Revolution emotions only appear to play a minor, reactionary
role in the chronological flow of historical time. Notable historians such as Nikki
Keddi, Abbas Amanat, and Michael Axworthy, for example, provide lucid chro-
nologies of the tumultuous day-to-day events that toppled the Pahlavi regime, but
they hardly engage with the changing dynamics of lived emotions that motivated
and animated revolutionary actors in the insurrectionary contexts (Keddi 2003;
Axworthy 2014; Amanat 2017).7 The failure of historical realist approaches is that
they neglect to recognize not only the limitation of historical knowledge but, more
important, how the historical condition also is predicated on shared subjective
experiences that foster historical change. For most of the early body of scholar-
ship on the Iranian Revolution, rich in historical insights and theoretical depth,
investigations of the revolutionary process mostly adopt a developmentalist bias,
with history unfolding in a relatively coherent direction within the modernization
paradigm. In this view, the role of subjectivity in terms of emotions is a mere
reactive response to broader economic, institutional, political, and social changes
by which the modernizing state within an international context and in its various
capacities and stages of development, plays a key role. Ordinary Iranians react to
broader historical processes, and in their reactive responses, they participate in
history through chronological changes, by which events happen because of elite
action/decisions and not as a result of “emotional climates” that are constitutive
of revolutionary actions (Sewell 1996, 845).
Structural approaches of various schools of thought tend to approach the 1979
Revolution in a similar manner but with less emphasis on history and more on
institutions. While structural approaches acknowledge subjective dimensions,
the tendency to overemphasize institutional forces marked by rational action in
political change over spontaneity of action underscores the structural predica-
ments within which revolutionaries find themselves. Structures that potentially
give way to revolutionary events are maintained and fostered through rational
action, which, in turn, define the very structures that constitute them.
By the late 1970s and 1980s, three prominent theoretical models on the Ira-
nian Revolution emerged. Primarily articulated in historical and social scientific
disciplines, the first approach centered on a developmental notion of economic-
political growth, led primarily by the Pahlavi modernizing state. The narrative
is straightforward. Between the 1960s and 1970s, radical changes in state and
capital relations saw the growth of three key structural problems: (1) rentier over-
centralization, which ultimately undermined the prowess of the “petrolic despot-
ism” to maintain control because of corruption and incompetence, especially after
initiating reforms (see, e.g., Katouzian 1981), (2) economic growth that generated
new political classes, although the state failed to modernize political spaces for
democratic participation, also known as the structural disequilibrium thesis (see,
e.g., Ervand Abrahamian 1982, 427), and, finally, (3) an expanding economic
inequality that led to class conflict.
Kurzman has convincingly criticized the economic approaches that by many
measures have failed to comparatively and sufficiently identify the economy as
the main cause of the uprisings (Kurzman 2004, 77–104). Here, however, I want
to briefly point to an underlying developmental assumption in various economic
approaches. This is a feature that can be equally observed in most liberal and some
Marxist analyses, a legacy of nineteenth-century economic positivism.
In whatever capacity or formation, state-led or industrial economic growth
inherently generates political unrest, and it does so, historically speaking, through
conflicts that arise between competing groups and the state that regulates politi-
cal space. As for the second approach, politics is key to economic developmen-
tal approaches but a conception of politics that views rational decision-making
distinct from emotive action, although unfolding in everyday urban and situated
contexts. In a significant sense, the anomaly of postwar Iran was marked by the
absence of even development that, despite the speed in growth and size of the
economic sector, prevented political progress. Seen in this way, revolutionary
consciousness of an emotive kind is a political response to economic discontent
by individuals or groups who demand change. Emotions in collective actions are
mere outcomes to short-term or long-term political–economic processes, through
variations of agential disposition under changing conditions. The role of religion
is equally tied to actors who seek political opportunity in climates of crisis, even
as they operate in less structured and spontaneous contexts, or in what Asaf Bayat
(1997) calls “everyday encroachments.” Discontent expressed in religious dis-
course or practice are expressions of political interest as expressed both in both
formal settings and in an informal locus of urban sociability.
Although not a structuralist, Bayat best articulates the preceding position. He
writes: “In an historical situation when a secular modern political language has
not yet become popular, the language, the terms and the symbols of the pre-
dominant popular culture, religion, have become political.” “Political behavior,”
Bayat adds, “is clothed in religious language and slogans and even in sermons.
Religion (as popular culture) is no longer simply an instrument of class domina-
tion, but rather a subject of class struggle” (Bayat 1987, 48). By “subject” of
class struggle, Bayat means how religion takes the historical role of instrumen-
tally bringing about a new, radical consciousness toward true political emancipa-
tion. How religion is instrumentalized in Bayat’s approach is the pivotal role of
formal and informal degrees of organization and communication among actors
that make spontaneous action, including religious expressions, possible in the
first place.
The third approach is best articulated in a 1982 article by sociologist Theda
Skocpol. Written months before the 1979 Revolution, Skocpol (1979) had argued
that revolutions occurred when a breakdown in state power with the convergence
140 Babak Rahimi
of internal and external factors emboldens collective action for radical change.
Reflecting on her earlier work, Skocpol (1982) saw the Iranian Revolution as
a unique case in which cultural idioms can equally matter (Skocpol 1982).
Skocpol, however, was keen to underscore the “mystery” that produced the col-
lective organizational force in Iran that advanced resistance to the state power-
holders. In her article, she wondered why “to a cross-nationally and historically
very unusual degree, so many Iranians were willing to face death again and again
in the recurrent mass demonstrations that finally wore down, demoralized, and
paralyzed the army, the Shah, and his US supports” (Skocpol 1982, 272). The
answer is the distinctive cultural logic of Shiʿa Islam as a “world-view and a
set of practices long in place,” she argued, to “sustain a deliberate revolutionary
movement” (276).
The key framework for “religion” in Skocpol’s analysis is not the expression
of “world-view” but a perspective spatially (and historically) located in the cul-
tural domain of a national character. The spatialization of religion in a given soci-
ety, specifically in structural terms of communication and organizational dynamic,
typifies a cultural approach that allocates essential mental characteristics to actors
who comprise a social movement of national locality. Here the category of reli-
gion collapses into the category of culture either as a set of expressions or idioms
manifested in the form of organizations or ritual traditions that produce myths of
self-sacrifice or martyrdom. Religion as culture is a preexisting spatialized real,
essentially discernible act of the sort that Clifford Geertz notably also identified in
his 1972 study of the Balinese Cockfight. What, of course, is reified in the cultural
analysis is the subjective processes associated with religious experience, which in
reality can entail a competing and conflicting array of intentions, motivations, and
emotions beyond the cultural norms.
Two intertwined concerns can be noted here. First, the symbolist notion of
religion as culture entails its own essential form of action, wherein a multitude
of subjectivities with a range of emotions, experiences, and mentalities in shift-
ing social contexts are reduced to behavioral artifacts that contain preconditioned
action. Second, religion as culture equally assumes the uniformity of thought,
emotions, motivations, and intentions, say, among Iranian revolutionaries, who,
in fact, participated in the protest movement for multiple reasons, individual as
well as social.
Farideh Farhi’s work is a case in point. For Farhi (1990, 83–105), writing a
decade after the successful overthrow of the Pahlavi regime, religion is viewed
as a cultural system that is redefined by revolutionary activists into an ideological
articulation for political mobilization. The significance of religion in revolution-
ary movements, however, is the spatialization of ideological discourses, practiced
through media print, slogans, cassette tapes, or mosques, where they could be
instrumentally applied (or perhaps manipulated) for collective action. Even in its
redefined form, religion is spatially limited to the domain of ideas as media sites
where they can be operationally used and castoff for rational political action. In
Farhi’s ideological approach, emotions do not play a role in the revolutionary
process; they are secondary to ideological discourses that rationalize the insurrec-
tion into revolutionary events.
Kurzman has provided a thorough critique of the cultural approach. In his criti-
cal examination, he offers evidence that street demonstrations, which took place
as religious events between 1977 and 1979, combined diverse organizational,
tactical, and even ideological constructs (Kurzman 2004, 50–76). For Kurzman,
there is no single ideological marker nor a religious cultural character that made
the 1979 Revolution possible. More specifically, as he argues, the “mosque-net-
work” paradigm, as a cultural entity, which has been explained as a key factor
for bringing about political protests, was, partly, a later development rather than
an initial cause for the revolution (Kurzman 2004, 33–49).8 Also, the various
“mosque-networks” underwent change from 1977 to 1979 as Iranians of various
backgrounds loosely joined the network’s operations in the insurrection. Mean-
while, in organizational terms, vying Islamist revolutionaries, at times hostile to
each other, equally participated in transnational militant currents, underlying the
entangled relationship between a variety of leftist and Islamist movements in the
prerevolutionary period (Alemzadeh 2021).
Moreover, by treating religion as a spatial repository of beliefs or ideas, eth-
ics, and doctrines, religion (as culture) becomes classified as a distinct sphere
or organization of life upheld and promoted by the scripturalist elite and fol-
lowed by “believers” whose agency mostly fades under the shadows of historical
change. Shiʿa Islam, in this cultural sense, is either understood in the structural
terms of class organization (see e.g., Abrahamian 1982) or, in the Weberian
account of Said Arjomand, as a forceful but distinct “world religion,” in which
a deep historical fissure between the hierocracy and the state, together with the
messianic revivalism of Khomeini, would pave the path for the 1979 Revolution
(Arjomand 1988).
In the case of Arjomand, religion is singularized into the organizational domain
of the clerical establishment, an elite institution that since the Safavid period
(1501–1722) has been prone to exert power over the political sphere (i.e., the
monarchy). Here, the constructed binary between politics and religion is then
applied to a comparative method to which the institutional model of “church–state
relations” in (mostly Western) Europe serves as the historical yardstick by which
Shiʿa Iran is evaluated (Arjomand 1985). In this geographical imaginary, Europe
is privileged for internally resolving its distinct antimonies. In contrast, Shiʿa Iran
of 1979 serves as a deviant trajectory in the conflation of the religious and the
political spheres. There is also the problematic of colonial history that is consist-
ently overlooked in place of what Dipesh Chakrabarty calls “self-contained histo-
ries” of European societies, that are complete within “self-assigned geographically
boundaries” (Chakrabarty 2000, 45). Shiʿa Iran, too, attains a self-contained his-
tory of periphery significance, one that religion is spatially determined to play
a role in the unique history of Iran. Arjomand’s comparative-historical sociol-
ogy identifies a limited role for subjectivity, one that religious action of emo-
tional orientation and, by extension, contingency of action, is primarily limited
142 Babak Rahimi
to the institution of clerical authority and its changing relation with state power
(Arjomand 1988).9
Second, Shiʿa Islam, defined as symbolic structures, can either instrumen-
tally or structurally appear as a cultural space of a revolutionary kind, marked by
militant activism and an ethos of martyrdom. As a symbolic order with multiple
resonances, religion and specifically emotions can be instrumentally applied for
mobilization, which underscores religion’s functional role as a “vehicle” in pur-
posive action. In the case of Iranian Shiʿism in 1979, in the words of Michael
M. J. Fischer, religion became manifest in ‘language,’ used in different ways by
different actors in order to persuade their fellows, to manipulate situations, and to
achieve mastery, control, or political position” (1980, 4). Religion is an ideologi-
cal site for change.
The ideological space can also be inherently revolutionary. In a long history
that goes back to its foundation with the crisis of succession that followed the
death of Prophet Muhammad, Hamid Dabashi’s approach recognizes Shiʿism as
intrinsically a religion of protest. Emerging out of a central metaphor on martyr-
dom of the Prophet’s cousin and son-in-law, Ali ibn Abi Talib, in 661 ce. and his
grandson, Husayn, at the battle of Karbala in 680 ce, Dabashi (2011, 57) argues
that Shiʿa Islam by ideological disposition is an “anti-institutional charismatic
movement.” In its modern manifestation, especially in the 1979 Revolution,
Shiʿism best expressed its dissident dispositional identity along with anticolonial
and Third World socialism, as cosmopolitan currents that equally defy institution-
alization and are subversive to global imperialism.
However, Dabashi’s conception of Shiʿism in its charismatic origins and politi-
cal foregrounding begs the assumption of an open-ended revolutionary force. It
also assumes that Shiʿism’s divergent histories and context-dependent practices
in vast global regions, from Trinidad to Lucknow, are inherently defined by a
singular culture of “deferred defiance” against institutionalized politics. But what
does such defiance entail? Dabashi’s notion of “syncretic cosmopolitanism,” a
cross-sectarian and transnational culture in which the 1979 Revolution histor-
ically served as the site of contestation for universal justice, is reminiscent of
Trotsky’s permanent revolution (a concept originally coined by Marx in refer-
ence to the 1848 Revolutions), understood as a perpetual, non-conformist social
transformation of the liberative kind (Dabashi 2011, see especially 263–76).10
The revolutionary force of cosmopolitanism revolves around the myth of human
emancipation, realized in dynamic human action, which principally takes place in
discursive knowledge. What is sustained, and perhaps prone to be transformed, in
such cosmopolitan space is institutionalized religion or nonrevolutionary expres-
sions of religion that by definition, at least in the Shiʿa Iranian case, become self-
canceling in historical change.
An important point often missed is that, as shown by Najam Haider (2011,
25–53), there is little historical evidence to support the view that the nascent Shiʿa
political community as a “vociferous minority” emerged in the years follow-
ing the death of the Prophet. It was rather in the mundane ritual and pilgrimage
practices around sacred space devoted to the Shiʿa imams, and not revolutionary
protest, that Shiʿism as a ritual community emerged a century after the death of
the Prophet. Shiʿa identity, by extension, remained firmly entrenched in its asso-
ciation with the correct conduct of rituals and pilgrimage rites to sacred sites,
in particular at the shrine of Husayn in Karbala. Moreover, throughout its his-
tory, Shiʿism spread in varied practice-based responses to changing historical
and social contexts that produced multiple communities with diverse political
orientations, many of which were inherently tied to context-specific conditions.
In other words, there is no such thing as an essential Shiʿa core, revolutionary
or otherwise, or to put it differently, there is no stable “culture,” conservative or
revolutionary, in Shiʿism.
The key claim of the culturalist approach is how religion manifests itself
according to historical precedence (structuralist) or ideological practices that are
used to alter the existing social conditions (constructionist). However, such trans-
formations are characteristically realized because of elite manipulation or an in-
built worldview of dissent that has qualified religion to function as a revolutionary
force. The self-expressivity of Shiʿa revolutionary Iran is, therefore, the reconfig-
ured domain of symbolic discourses, as allegorical and symbolic filters that actors
employ to mobilize protest. Lived emotions associated with the protests, accord-
ingly, play a mere secondary role to ideas, beliefs, doctrines, or ideologies that,
depending on circumstances, facilitate radical change.
In what follows I turn to the December 1978 Muharram rituals. Although
historical and social contexts are integral to understand any ritual process, the
emphasis here is on the centrality of emotions in the period of insurrection, spe-
cifically the Tasua’ and Ashura protests of 1978. Key emotions that are underlined
in the following discussion range from anger and grief to solidarity and hope, all
combining a singular collective desire for radical change that brought down the
Pahlavi monarchy in February of 1979.
Prerevolutionary Muharram
The massive street demonstrations in Tehran and other major Iranian cities that
took place on December 10 and 11, 1978, defy simple categorization. In terms
of theological discourse, they represent two of the most important days of the
lunar month of Muharram. In calendarial terms, Tasua’ and Ashura, the ninth
and tenth days of Muharram, are symbolically significant in the course of the
bereavement period for the slain Imam, the grandson of the Prophet, Husayn,
believed by his followers as the legitimate heir to the leader of the Muslim
community (‘umma), and who died a martyr’s death at the hand of the second
Umayyad Caliph, Yazid. The two days include daily and nightly mourning pro-
cessions for the martyrdom of the fallen Imam whose tragic story in the bat-
tlefield of Karbala continues to be remembered through various rituals by his
devotees. Since its formation after the battle of Karbala, the Shiʿa community
has and continues to be a community of remembrance, revived each year dur-
ing Muharram, when allegiance to the imam is renewed through enactments of
grief and sorrow.
144 Babak Rahimi
Although the importance of this theological narrative cannot be overlooked,
the Muharram performances, in particular during Tasua’ and Ashura, have been
intensely multilayered in terms of individual and collective meanings and expe-
riences, at times defying the official practices ascribed as commemorative cer-
emonies. When discussing Muharram performances as religious processions,
we are dealing with the dissonance of emotions and moods. These moods range
from festive to grief, from banal to dejection, from erotic to ascetic, and from
combative to collaborative. In what can be called affective dissonance, Muhar-
ram rituals are permeated by a cacophony of subjectivities that make ritual
into a collective experience of shared emotions. Such mixed emotions allow
participants to make meaning in a collective way while responding to shifting
circumstances.
In the first officially recorded account under the Buyid ruler, Muʿizz al-Dawlah
in 963 ce, Muharram lamentation performances were tied to urban centers, where
commemorative rituals were staged in the city market of Baghdad. The accounts
of the ceremonies depict wailing women who wore coarse woolen hair clothes,
with uncovered faces and disheveled hair, beat their faces as a sign of public grief
(Rahimi 2011, 207–8). The emergence of the Turkish and Persianate cultures (also
known as the Turko-Persian Ecumene), during what Marshal Hodgson called the
Middle Period (945–1503), helped spread the mourning traditions across nomi-
nally Shiʿa and even Sunni communities, especially in the Anatolian countryside
where competing Sufi-millenarian movements eventually gave rise to the estab-
lishment of the Safavid imperial rule in the early sixteenth century. Under the
Shiʿa Twelver Safavids, Muharram performances became an official state ritual
in Iran. The performances included the participation of various segments of the
urban milieu with ties to the agricultural countryside. The construction of the new
capital city of Isfahan in the early seventeenth century consolidated the mourning
ceremonies into urban practices across Isfahani neighborhoods, at times in the
form of factional fights.
The proliferation of Muharram throughout the Iranian landmass from 1641
to 1714 brought about a diversification in the practices but, more importantly, a
socialization of the performances of rural–urban significance. By the eighteenth
century, under the Zand Dynasty (1751–1794), Muharram became a key social
feature of everyday life in Iran. By the Qajar period (1789–1925), however, the
mourning traditions had increasingly become woven into the very fabric of neigh-
borhoods in cities and rural settings, where they were popularly performed in
close connection with the local mosques and Husayniyyehs (congregation halls).
In particular, Taziyeh, a form of Muharram dramatic reenactment of the Karbala
tragedy, grew in popularity throughout Shiʿa-dominated regions of Iran as major
social events that involved all members of the community as organizers, directors,
actors, and audiences.
By the twentieth century, the lamentation practices underwent two dramatic
transformations. First, the rapid economic and industrial modernization under the
new autocratic monarchy of Reza Shah, brought to power with the support of
the British in 1925, was accompanied by the reconstruction of Iranian society.
State centralization included several nation-building projects aimed at the promo-
tion of a new civil religion that favored the pre-Islamic past to Shiʿa Islam. As a
key state project, Pahlavi urbanization entailed the erasure of some of the Qajar-
era architectures, replaced by new monumental spaces to create a new national
identity. The most noteworthy transformation in the architectural landscape was
the construction of the Melli Bank (National Bank). As the first state building
to employ Achaemenid motifs, the new bank was built in 1946 (Marefat 1988,
102) over Takkiyeh Dowlat, the large “State Theatre” in Tehran where Taziyeh
performances were staged in the Qajar period (Rahimi 2013). The 1932 ban of
Taziyeh underscores how the Pahlavi modernization excluded certain Shiʿa tradi-
tions in the formation of a new identity based on pre-Islamic cultural idioms. By
the 1950s, Muharram had been sidelined to the countryside or to certain urban
spaces populated by the poor or the working class.
With the rapid urbanization and growth of a middle class, between the 1960s
and 1970s, a new political consciousness emerged. Key sociological changes that
gave rise to the new self-awareness were the proliferation of “third places” rang-
ing from places of leisure to intellectual urban sites where emotions and ideas
are cross-fertilized into new social experiences (Oldenburg 1989). The 1967 con-
struction of multipurposed religious spaces such as Husayniyeh Ershad, a key
religious center with the educational aim of propagating a modernist Islamic dis-
course (Rahnema 2000, 226–27), exemplified a “third place” where the notable
radical intellectual figure, Ali Shariati, would deliver highly popular lectures on
Islam, devoid of clerical authority and colored by Marxist views of universal class
struggle. Shariati’s profound reinterpretation of Islam also included a new look
at the tradition of martyrdom and Shiʿism in general as a revolutionary struggle
following the path of God for a redemptive, universal future (Scot Aghaie 2004,
100–12). Shariati’s concept of history—bifurcated between “Safavid Shiʿism”
(representing quietism in favor of tyrannical state power) and “Ali Shiʿism (repre-
senting struggle and justice)—sought to define an authentic Shiʿism characterized
as resistance against injustice. For Shariati, Husayn’s martyrdom at Karbala iden-
tifies a revolutionary event as a “transhistorical battle of justice against tyranny
(Ghamari-Tabrizi 2016, 85).
The transformation of Muharram from neighborhood-alley mourning proces-
sions to broader street protests, however, had begun to spread following the 1953
Central Intelligence Agency–led coup that toppled the democratically elected
government of Mohammad Mossadeq.11 The June 5 and 6, 1963, demonstrations
(also known as “15 Khordad uprising”), in response to the arrest of Ayatollah
Khomeini’s anti-Shah sermons at the seminary school in Qum, exemplify the rad-
icalization of certain factions of the clerical network, which Ayatollah Khomeini’s
followers best represented. However, the importance of the 1963 demonstrations
are related to a combative sermon delivered by Ayatollah Khomeini on Ashura
(June 3) when he not only denounced Shah’s modernization policies, known as
the “White Revolution,” but also drew a resemblance between the Iranian mon-
arch and usurper Yazid, who was responsible for the martyrdom of Husayn (See
Mottahedeh 2002, 189–91). On the same day in Tehran, an estimated 100,000
146 Babak Rahimi
pro-Khomeini protestors took to the streets, marking the first Muharram as a day
of political demonstration against the monarchy (Moin 2009, 106).
The 1963 uprising transfigured Muharram into rituals of revolutionary expres-
sion (Kurzman 2004, 54–55). While nonactivist performances of the tradition
were the most dominant in rural and major urban areas such as the bazaar, partly
thanks to anticolonial thinkers such as Ali Shariati, the narrative of Muharram
had undergone a universal revolutionary interpretation in which Husayn was
viewed as the ideological foci of the struggle against injustice (Ghamari-Tabrizi
2016, 80).
Between the late 1960s and 1970s, two critical developments emerged. First,
the universalization of Muharram had removed various anti-Sunni themes in the
body of performances. Second, tied to the universal appeal to world justice, which
resonated with many revolutionary movements in the global South across the Ira-
nian population including some religious minorities, Muharram attained a revo-
lutionary character. In the aftermath of the 1953 coup d’état, a younger, educated
middle class, intimately connected with anticolonial politics across the global
South (Sadeghi-Boroujerdi 2018) played a key role in restaging Muharram into a
political event. Meanwhile, particularly between 1964 and 1976, the Muharram
tradition of elegiac performances saw an increasing level of securitization, as the
SAVAK (Iranian intelligence) maintained strict surveillance over the ceremonies
at local mosques (Falahi 2014, 141–50).
Revolutionary Muharram
The Muharram of 1977 saw the proliferation of local religious assemblies known
as heyats and husseiniyehs. Although many still performed in their traditional set-
tings in the neighborhood and bazaars, the significance of these assemblies was
to stage religious performances with anti-regime political overtones (Falahi 2014,
151–56). The political staging of Muharram culminated in the Ashura protests
in front of Husayniyeh Ershad on December 21, 1977 when, as Ghamari-Tabrizi
(2016, 35) describes, a crowd of a few hundred called the Shah the Yazid of the
time and proclaimed their readiness for Hussein-like martyrdom against his tyr-
anny. Slogans such as “Every month of the year is Moharram, Ashura, and every
piece of land is Karbala,” first coined by Shariati in a 1972 lecture (Rahnema
2000, 315), became emblematic of a radical shift in Muharram that no longer
limited the performances to mostly calendarial rites but spanned across univer-
sal time and space, underlying an ideological shift that partly explains its appeal
across wide groups of people in a transnational context.
It is perhaps, as François Furet (1981, 3) observes, one of the key obsessions of
revolutionary historiography to identify a point of origin, a mythical moment of a
“birth” that generates a radical transformation in periodic ruptures. For the most
part, the historiography of revolutions entails a distinct construct of the mythology
of revolutionary origin and periodization. In the case of the Iranian Revolution,
the myth of origin has been traced back to the 1953 coup, if not the Constitutional
Revolution of 1905 at the turn of the century, during which the legitimacy of
the state has come under question. For those who have sought the genesis dur-
ing the 1970s, the triggering events are identified with the poetry nights against
censorship at Tehran’s Goethe Institute or the street protests in reaction to the
January 1978 publication of an anti-Khomeini article in the Etelaʿat newspaper.
However, the actual unfolding of the revolution was much more immediate, vola-
tile, and, more important, sparked by series of radical experiences, in which the
revolutionary current emerged in a context of collective effervescence.
In historical terms, one can describe the 1977–1979 waves of protests through
mostly the intervals of fortieth-day memorials, commemorative traditions that
honor the deceased forty days after the day of death. Although the ceremonies
provided a certain sense of continuity in the organization of protests, they also
served as contentious sites of temporal confrontation where the emotional inten-
sity of insurrectionary action led to unpredictable results. From the fortieth-day
mourning of Mustafa Khomeini, the son of Khomeini who died in Iraq on Octo-
ber 23, 1977, to numerous fortieth day mourning processions for those killed by
the shah’s army in 1978, the commemorative traditions provided a repertoire of
dissent by which Husayn’s martyrdom was perpetually recalled for revolutionary
change. Yet as political events with a religious framework, they played a pivotal
role in raising revolutionary consciousness and changing the public mood for a
radical, new politics.
In the course of urban upheavals, the 1978 twin Muharram demonstrations were
a momentous event in the insurrectionary period. The massive demonstrations
followed several intervals of mourning demonstrations and, by September 1978,
a series of workers’ strikes. By the early fall of 1978, calls for the removal of the
Pahlavi dynasty had become commonplace in the political discourse. By Septem-
ber 1978, the revolutionary upheavals had also included broader segments of the
population, as public perception of the monarchy grew dire with an increase in
military repression.
As the series of daily and nightly protests shifted the expectation of what was
unthinkable, the December 1978 Muharram processions shared a unified call for
the toppling of the monarchy. The protests first appeared on a smaller scale in
the beginning of the month of Muharram (December 2), although limited in size
because of an impending military crackdown. However, days later, the military
government granted permission for the processions to take place across the coun-
try. The concession was based on a negotiated deal between the regime and Islam-
ist organizations conditional on the terms that no anti-Shah slogans would be
allowed during the demonstrations.
On the two days of protests, the large-scale processions brought together Irani-
ans from all walks of life. From unveiled women to migrant workers, from clerics
to Marxists, from ethnic to religious minorities, even soldiers, the grand Tasua’
and Ashura went beyond their localized segmentary performances, primarily
organized around neighborhoods, and now were staged into two huge public days
of collective protests.12 Although the state’s role in permitting the protests to take
place cannot be ignored, the two demonstrations resembled other religious and
especially mourning rituals that had been transformed into political events since
148 Babak Rahimi
late 1977 (Kurzman 2004, 59).13 Yet as the cancellation of the forty-day cycle in
June 1978 indicates, thanks to calls by Ayatollah Mohammad Kazem Shariatma-
dari for mourning observances to take place at mosques instead of streets, the
large-scale mourning ceremonies clearly appeared as a result of organizational
tactics rather than mere cultural events blindly followed by a crowd (Kurzman
1996; 2004, 54). The accounts of some men in white shrouds, displaying their
willingness to be martyred in defiance of curfew, bespeak of the organizational
role of mosques in mobilizing the protesters (Fischer 1980, 205). In Tehran, the
mosque network played a key role in organizing eight locations across the city as
meeting points for the start of the demonstrations on the early morning of Tasua’
(Falahi 2014, 186).
The accounts of those protesters without political affiliation who decided
to join the demonstrations because of curiosity or peer pressure underscore
the spontaneous and unprompted participation of some protesters. In various
instances, some simply joined the demonstrations when they saw the large crowds
(Kurzman 2004, 125). This element of spontaneous response in crowd partici-
pation could have included the presence of some nonactivist Iranians, who felt
united with others in a single call during a religious ceremony to end the shah’s
reign. Once joined together on the street, however, the affinity between the dem-
onstrators can be described as a combined spontaneous and organized unified call
to oppose the Shah.
The broadening of the protest movement had not only united many Iranians
but also bolstered a certain emotional bond that connected the participants to each
other. The energized mass-demonstrations underscored a defiance of an unex-
pected sort that would define the general mood in the following months that led
to the overthrow of the Pahlavi regime in February 1979. Muharram fostered soli-
darity that redefined insurrection into revolutionary triumph.
“The Spirit of a World Without Spirit”

Accounts of 1978 Muharram protests speak of the diversity of the crowd. They
also reflect a menacing uncertainty of the plausible crackdown by the military
government, which temporarily took the helm of government on November 5,
1978. Kurzman quotes Mahmud Golabdareh, a writer who describes the mood the
day before the protests as the following:
My mother is afraid. My father is asleep. My brother made a telephone call

and [afterward] told my mother: “Tell the kids not to leave the house tomor-
row. They’re going to kill everyone tomorrow, like on September 8. They’re
going to shoot from above, from rooftops and helicopters.”
(Kurzman 2004, 120)
Perhaps because of the sheer size of Muharram protests, the anticipation of a

violent clash appears to have been felt among many protestors. The aware-
ness of imminent death was shared among many who prepared to attend the
demonstrations.
And yet such experiences did not prevent the protests from take placing, as
thousands appeared on the streets on Tasua’ and Ashura. The mostly peaceful
Tasua’ demonstrations set the stage for even larger protests on the day of Ashura
when revolutionary chants could be heard by protestors from all directions. First-
hand accounts of the demonstrations depict emotions that vary from confusion
to the sensation of dare while facing the prospect of military assault. Fear of a
massacre or a possible US-led coup, similar to 1953, formed an uncanny collec-
tive anxiety.14 Mixed emotions such as dread and anger were the undercurrent
to the loud anti-Shah slogans sweeping the wide Isfahani or Shirazi streets. In
Tehran, some organizers attempted to restrain the protestors from making anti-
Shah chants, but many continued to raise fists to beat the air and chant “marg
bar shah” (Death to the shah; Kurzman 2004, 122). Yet anger ran wild in Isfahan
where Leftists attacked statues and the SAVAK offices while others burned down
cinemas, shops, and banks (Kurzman 2004, 123).
During the nighttime, protestors turned to rooftops. On these liminal spaces
between the city and the open sky, in a “synchronized move,” the protestors cried
“Allah Akbar” (God is Great; Bayandor 2019, 278). The collective cries revealed
how the calm of nightly life can be destabilized in creating a subversive sound-
scape through a multitude of loud voices. In between daytime protests, the noctur-
nal demonstrations are exemplary of a sonic space of resistance. They represent
the radicalization of darkness by the disembodied voices of an invisible public.
But while resistance incited separation from an existing order, a general sense
of solidarity unified the conscious experience of the demonstrators. An Ashura
protestor in Shiraz vividly described a felt camaraderie:
And then the unity and cooperation which I had always thought would never
happen. The attitude of the marches towards each other was very good. On
Tasu’a I got a nosebleed. My nose suddenly started bleeding. And then eve-
rybody wanted to help me. One person gave me a handkerchief. Another
gave me a Kleenex. Someone asked, “What happened? Another said, “Let’s
get an ambulance.” “Hey, it’s just a nosebleed,” I said. “I’m all right.” People
gathered around me. Finally they realized that it was nothing serious. This is
the way it was. Everyone wanted to help everyone else.
(quoted in Kurzman 2004, 140)
Ironically, there is a calm sense of munificence in this revolutionary moment that

reveals an ecstatic sense of unity among protestors while facing a common enemy.
Now while unity renders agency as a collective process, revolutionary solidar-
ity here is symptomatic of a singular desire to resist an existing social order. Yet
solidarity here is also an emotive event. It is the experience of a lived ambiance
where the unified rhythm of a crowd redefines the city in the form of a distinct
togetherness, that is, a collective activity in “real time.” The focal point of such
togetherness of a political drama is not the individuals but the bonding experience
of a moving crowd in its entirety. Once we focus on the wholeness of the crowd,
we start looking at the intricate network of affective relations that shape the dem-
onstrations into an emotive event of inexplicable significance.
150 Babak Rahimi
The bonding experience characterizes a sensuous consciousness of radical
change from the banal and towards the frenzy in the sheer act of confronting
a possible violent death.15 Equally important is the affective force that entails a
rupture in everyday life to reshape the street into a theatre of contestation. Fou-
cault’s 1978 account of the demonstrations provides a different understanding of
the Iranian Revolution with an emphasis on the experiential, one that the crowds,
as Manoukian (2020, 244) correctly points out, undermines the order of things in
the refusal to be defined, albeit temporarily as an ideological referent. Reflecting
on the Iranian Revolution with journalists, Clair Brière and Pierre Blanchet, in
March 1979, Foucault elaborated:
It is true that Iranian society is shot through with contradictions that cannot in
any way be denied, but it is certain that the revolutionary event that has been
taking place for a year now, and which is at the same time an inner experi-
ence, a sort of constantly recommended liturgy, a community experience, and
so on, all that is certainly articulated onto the class struggle: but that doesn’t
find expression in an immediate, transparent way.
(Afary and Anderson 2005, 252)
Foucault, who months prior to the preceding reflection had reported on the pre-
Muharram demonstrations, accentuates here an integral emotive feature with
the revolution. Central here is Foucault’s understanding of “inner experience”
in close association with “community experience” as a way of building a col-
lectivity, a “political will” that became manifested in the ritual process (“lit-
urgy”). Religion in its ritual practice, we can argue, is not a mechanism of
ideological expression, understood in a superficial Marxian sense that masks
contradictions, but a collective ecstasy of liberative force. For religion in its
protest form, Foucault further explains, is “the vocabulary, the ceremonial, the
timeless drama into which one could fit the historical drama of a people that pit-
ted its very existence against that of its sovereign” (Afary and Anderson 2005,
252). There is much to be said about Foucault’s take on ritual action, but here,
specific to religion’s role in the Iranian Revolution, I argue, he wants to under-
line a distinct force of rituality that is at once strategic and affective action. The
strategic operates in terms of crowd mobilization while the affective appears as
the “vocabulary,” not as a mere linguistic practice but rather as a bodily per-
formance through which a people in multitude make claims on a social order.
Religious action, in other words, is not a mere set of doctrines to be discursively
or culturally used for or against power but a rather dramatic expression of reit-
erated emotions, dispersed in space and time and yet enacted by a collective
against an oppressive situation. It is an expression that transforms discontent,
despair, and hatred into “force” as a new form of being together in opposition
to the state (Afary and Anderson 2005, 202). In its revolutionary form, ritual is
the performative utterance (“vocabulary”) of resistance in nonteleological time
and the contingency of open space.
In further expanding on the role of religion in the 1979 Revolution, Foucault
argues:
People always quote Marx and the opium of the people. The sentence that
immediately preceded that statement and which is never quoted says that
religion is the spirit of a world without spirit. Let’s say, then, that Islam, in
that year of 1978, was not the opium of the people precisely because it was
the spirit of a world without a spirit.
(Afary and Anderson 2005, 255)
Here Foucault is explicit on Marx’s twofold conception of religion.16 While

acknowledging Marx’s critique of religion as ideology, Foucault is also keen to
underline the paradoxical praxis of religion as a form of “expression of real suf-
fering and a protest against real suffering” (Marx [1972] 1978a, 54). When Marx
comes to explain the ontic reality of religion, he equally gives importance to reli-
gion’s expressive force, not of masking reality but as an emotive release, “the
sigh of the oppressed creature, the sentiment of a heartless world, and the soul
of soulless conditions” (54). The emotive dimension is rooted in lived reality. As
Marx expanded in the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, such lived
quality reflects the “sensuous nature” of the human species as an organic, emotive
being (Marx [1972] 1978b, 91). Revolutionary experience is the sensorial recon-
figuration of objective reality.
By reading Marx through Foucault’s take on experience, religion then facili-
tates a radical change in the subjectivity of collective character. It is the affective
push in the limits of shared experience through a “spirit” that animates a world
unconscious of its oppressive reality but equally significant anticipates a world
of justice that has not yet arrived. It is this very “spirit,” the will as a social force
that Foucault saw in the 1978 protests, including the Muharram processions in
its unique display of “the collective will of a people” (Afary and Anderson 2005,
253). “This collective will,” he describes, “which, in our theories, is always gen-
eral, has found for itself, in Iran, an absolutely clear, particular aim, and has thus
erupted into history” (253). A reading of this “will,” in the case of Iran, would
entail the radical agency to end the monarchy. While impossible to discern how
all the protesters understood the Karbala story on the days of the demonstrations,
the dramatic plot of mourning in Muharram appears to undergo a dramatic trans-
formation in the sheer presence of a new kind of crowd that makes itself, the
shared feeling of its solidarity, visible in an audio-visible collective movement
for change.
Foucault’s position, I argue, sets up the performative, not only of any form of
action that can be called revolutionary but also of the affective undercurrent in the
collective action. Between the “sigh of the oppressed,” as the sorrows of injus-
tice, and the spirit of solidarity, revolutionary action on the street level marks the
enactment of an alternative way of being in the world, a yearning for a different
sense of togetherness in a new social reality. Diana Taylor calls this reenactment
152 Babak Rahimi
as a coming to presence (¡presente!), a reorientation of the present with a new,
embodied (co)presence that defies reality in the reevaluation of what is known
and could be done (Taylor 2020). The space formation of this revolutionary event,
this as if moment is what Ernst Bloch understood, in the words of Michael Löwy
(2013, 27), as the “imaginary space of not-yet-being.” The political spirituality of
the revolutionary is the conjuring of what is absent, a future hidden from view by
an ordinary reality that appears all too self-evident but one that can be shattered
in the performance of a collective will, however ephemeral in “real time,” while
facing the imminence of death. In the words of Mehdi Bazargan, the provisional
prime minister to whom Foucault wrote an open letter on April 14, 1979, the
spiritual lies “where each one risked everything for an entirely different world”
(Afary and Anderson 2005, 261).
The Agency of Suffering: A Conclusion

The preceding discussion should be viewed as brief critical reflections rather than
a set of explanations for the 1979 Iranian Revolution. It argued that in order to
better approach the 1979 Iranian Revolution, we must distinguish a focus on the
specificity of the uprisings from the causal explanations of the revolution. Accord-
ingly, in the first section, the chapter argued for the role of subjectivity in insur-
rectionary action and showed how a number of key scholarly proceedings after
the 1979 Revolution primarily adopted causal explanations. While earlier studies
focused on structural, organizational, political, and ideo-cultural aspects that set
apart Iran’s 1979 Revolution, I argued, their accounts have failed to address the
subjective factors that make revolutionary action possible in the first place. Such
narratives overlook the role of emotions and religion with the potential for revo-
lutionary action, which the 1979 Iranian Revolution best exemplifies.
The chapter also argued that the largest mass-based revolution in modern his-
tory that brought down the Pahlavi regime involved a range of religious rituals
of affective importance of a collective force. Focusing on the massive protests
of Muharram Shiʿa rituals in December 1978, I argued how the processions
highlighted various emotions in which solidarity functioned as a key affective
action to make space for appearance in both visual and sonic ways. It is not that
the religious rituals of Muharram, thanks to Islamists or other activist groups,
became “politicized” in 1978–1979, but that the very religious processions in
1978 emerged as political events, shared spaces of copresence for an alternative
politics while facing a violent death. This is a critical conceptual distinction, as it
opens up a key question in the study of revolutions, that is, what might an emotive
account of the Iranian Revolution look like?
Here two concluding remarks are in order. First, if revolutionary experiences
are as emotively charged as they seem, then any theoretical approach will have to
start with the descriptive (as opposed to explanatory) specificities of the expressive
and sensory that reconfigure the human condition in limitations and possibilities of
historical change.17 Second, we can argue that the form of agency affective action
presents is an irreducible and contingent subjectivity, open to the radical now, defy-
ing a causal model of revolutions, since it is hardly set on in a direction that can be
predicted. Affective action also encompasses an agency that creatively responds to
changing circumstances, economic, political, or otherwise. To the question of revo-
lutionary action in terms of emotions, the 1978 Muharram protests present a dis-
tinct conception of revolutionary subjectivity, one in which suffering and mourning
emphasize an emotive agency in an altogether new life. This different life involves
a futurity oriented in ambiguity in the immediacy of nonlinear time than temporal
inevitability with questions of progressive certainty. As experiential practices, the
street staging of mourning is the sensorial consciousness of togetherness in the col-
lective act of a rejection, not of “self-empowerment” but spontaneous action in a
disruption for a different reality, however unpredictable it may be.
What form of politics does 1978 Muharram reveal? Foucault uses the term
political will to describe this new politic in a October 1978 report (Afary and
Anderson 2005, 208). Such politics revolves around the ferment of revolting
bodies that breakdown the assumed separable boundaries between religion, the
social, and the political. In this spirit of ambiguity, political will is at once singular
and plural, cautious and bold, “confused, and obscure even to itself” (Afary and
Anderson 2005, 212). Political will is also a form of spirituality but of a corpo-
real type in the yearning to “liberate the body from the prison house of the soul”
(Ghamari-Tabrizi 2016, 63). It is precisely the disruptiveness of the revolting bod-
ies to liberate from the institutionalized certainties that make the political will a
threshold of something new. “What is it that the people want?” Foucault asked in
his last report from Iran on November 26, 1978? “Everybody is quite aware that
they want something completely different” (Afary and Anderson 2005, 222).
Here a general claim can be made as a final note. For there is no doubt that the
1979 Iranian Revolution that shocked the world still haunts the historical imagi-
nary. The revolutionary traces that have left behind memories of devoured chil-
dren of the revolution overshadow the 1978 December uprisings. These are the
shadows that make the past in many ways inaccessible through the specters that
haunt a disjointed history. Yet we still breathe the very revolutionary air now
sought to be analyzed as an object of knowledge. As Furet reminds us in his study
of the French Revolution, “the revolution does not simply ‘explain’ our contem-
porary history; it is our contemporary history” (1981, 3). We unfold in revolution-
ary time, as spirits in a spiritless world.
Acknowledgments
The author would like to thank Eskandar Sadeghi-Boroujerdi and Jean-Pierre
Reed for their comments on an earlier draft of this chapter.
Notes
1 It should be noted that in addition to the month of Muharram, the rituals are observed
in the subsequent month of Safar, and they culminate on the day of arbaʿin, the fortieth
day after the martyrdom of Husayn.
2 The idea that the massive demonstrations displayed a public referendum against the
Pahlavi regime was first articulated in a statement by Ayatollah Khomeini on Ashura
of 1978 (Falahi 2014, 200).
154 Babak Rahimi
3 Here we can reference Foucault’s discussion on the revisionist historian François
Furet’s work on the 1789 French Revolution, where he distinguishes between the total-
ity of economic and social changes from the specificity of “what people experienced
deep inside” as a radical shift in “what they experienced in that sort of theatre that they
put together from day to day and which constituted the revolution” (Afary and Ander-
son 2005, 252).
4 Reference to “certain” causal models here excludes distinct Marxist approaches that
strongly adhere to the element of spontaneity in revolutionary movements. Consider,
for example, Rosa Luxemburg and George Sorrel.
5 By way of an example, one could reference Mantle of the Prophet (2002), in which
Roy Mottahedeh’s focus on the education of a cleric uncovers multiple components
that led to the 1979 Revolution. Although inherently a culturalist take, the socio-
biographical approach of this book advances a nonlinear understanding of a revolu-
tion that can best be articulated in a descriptive rather than explanatory mode of
discourse.
6 Here I have in mind the works of Behrooz Ghamari-Tabrizi (2016) and mostly emerg-
ing scholars in the edited volume Global 1979: Geographies and Histories of the Ira-
nian Revolution (Keshavarzian and Mirsepassi 2021).
7 Here we should acknowledge Mary Elaine Hegland, whose ethnographic study of the
village of Ali Abad provides the best exposition of the contingent history of the revo-
lutionary experience in the late Pahlavi period (Hegland 2014).
8 It should be noted that the Jam’iyat-e Mo’talafa-ye Eslami (The Islamic Coalition of
Mourning Groups), in close relations with Ayatollah Khomeini, had led the way with
the organization of heyats in various political capacities since 1963. See Ali Rahnema
2008. Jamʿiyat-e Mo’talafa-ye Eslami: Hay’athâ-ye Mo’talefa-ye Eslâmi 1963–79.
www.iranicaonline.org/articles/jamiyat-e-motalefa-i. As described by Arang Kes-
havarizan, in the context of heyat organizations, the clergy and the bazaaris played a
critical role in political mobilizations during the 1979 Revolution. Here we should con-
sider the role of a network of “procession leaders” ’ of religious events such as Muhar-
ram, who actively and efficiently helped organize street protests during the revolution
(Keshavarzian 2007, 249). I am grateful to Eskandar Sadeghi-Boroujerdi for pointing
out this important fact in relation to bazaar-heyat networks.
9 In earlier studies where contingency is discussed, such as the 1989 special issue in
the journal of Iranian Studies, Arjomand interprets the revolution as a contentious
relationship between clerical and state power, although contingent upon unplanned
military or political crisis (Arjomand 1988).
10 There are echoes of Shariati’s here in line with his interpretation of Shiʿa Islam as an
ideology of revolutionary agency with an emancipatory force. See (Sadeghi-Boroujerdi
2019, 113–34).
11 The first staging of Muharram as political rallies, led in “peaceful processions” by
shopkeepers and moneylenders against an increase of tariffs on Iranian merchants and
a postponement of loan repayments to local creditors to compensate declining customs
revenues, took place in 1905 and later in the summer of 1906 (Abrahamian 1982,
81–83). However, sources and academic studies on 1905–1906 Muharram protests are
scarce for a comparative study across time.
12 For an account of Jewish Iranian participation in 1978 Muharram, see Sternfeld (2019,
102–4).
13 As for an example of celebratory ritual turned into a day of political protest, we can
reference the birthday of the Hidden Imam of Shiʿa Twelver Islam, which in 1978 fell
on July 21 (Kurzman 2004, 59).
14 Interview, Mehdi Mohsenian Rad, May 18, 2021.
15 Foucault describes the confrontation with death as an “advance toward death in the
intoxication of sacrifice” (Afary and Anderson 2005, 216).
16 In an earlier interview, Foucault explains that Marx’s idea of religion, as the opium of
the masses, was the product of a specific historical form of Christianity in the nine-
teenth century. He argues, “His statement ought to be understood only for the time
period in which he lived, not as a general statement on all eras of Christianity, or on all
religion” (Afary and Anderson 2005, 186).
17 Note that the aftermath of revolutions would require a different set of descriptive spe-
cificities by which terror would be the more appropriate emotive measures.
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9 The Ambivalence of African
Independent/Initiated
Churches in Colonial and
Postcolonial Politics
Joram Tarusarira and Bernard Pindukai Humbe
Introduction
This chapter draws attention to the nexus between African Independent Churches
(AICs) and politics in Zimbabwe to investigate why the former, which emerged
as a liberating force in response or reaction to the oppressive and discriminatory
character of the colonial administration and Western mission churches, contin-
ues to legitimize the ruling party, the Zimbabwe African National Union-Patriotic
Front (ZANU PF) formed in 1963, which has perpetuated similar injustices in
postcolonial Zimbabwe. One would expect AICs to break ranks with the ruling
regime to demonstrate their commitment to following revolutionary principles
and not charismatic personalities. As this has not been the case, the question is
why they have continued to support the ruling regime? We argue that AICs have
in fact colluded with the ZANU PF political system: having formerly teamed up
with ZANU PF against the colonial administration, the AICs have remained part
and parcel of the political dynamics in Zimbabwe by continuing to support their
pre-independence collaborators. Moreover, they have devised resonating ideolo-
gies with which to sustain this collaboration. We argue that religion provides its
adherents with convictions and with a shared cultural system, a source of solidar-
ity, and ways of thinking, feeling, and acting, which can mobilize people to chal-
lenge or protect the social order. This chapter uses the concepts of the theodicy of
liberation and the theodicy of legitimation to examine how AICs’ adherents and
ZANU PF politicians have reinforced each other and especially why the former
have continued to support a party whose actions are a direct affront to the values
behind their original foundation.
AICs and Their Features

The acronym AICs has been used in very diverse ways by different scholars,
from “African Independent Churches” and “African Indigenous Churches” to
“African Initiated Churches” and “African Initiatives in Christianity” (Chitando
2005a, 85). This demonstrates the multivalent nature of the acronym, which has
helped it gain significant currency in studies of African Christianity (Humbe
2018, 85). Turner (1979, 92), for example, defined an African Independent
DOI: 10.4324/9781003177821-11
AICs in Colonial and Postcolonial Politics 159
Church as “one which has been founded in Africa, by Africans to worship in
African ways and meet African needs as Africans themselves feel them and as
others think they ought to feel them.” Oduro emphasized not only needs and feel-
ings in relation to AICs but also their organizational structures. He defined them
as “congregations and/or denominations planted, led, administered, supported,
propagated, motivated and funded by Africans for the purpose of proclaiming
the gospel of Jesus Christ and worshipping the Triune God in the context and
worldview of Africa and Africans” (Oduro 2002, 17). These churches are accord-
ingly perceived as representing a thoroughly Africanized version of Christianity
(Ndlovu 2014, 54). Movements in the forms of syncretists, sects, prophet cults,
Zionists, separatist sects, proto-nationalist movements, protest movements, and
independent, Pentecostal and spirit churches are all found under the label “AIC”
(Turner 1979, 92).
In contrast to scholars, the acronym “AIC” is used very broadly by Zimbabwe-
ans, including the following: African Pentecostal churches such as the Zimbabwe
Assemblies of God Africa (ZAOGA) of Ezekiel Guti; the Zionists, such as the
Zion Christian Church (ZCC) of Bishop Nehemiah Mutendi; Apostolic churches,
such as the African Apostolic Church (AAC) of Paul Mwazha; the Johane Marange
Apostolic Church; the Johane Masowe Church; the African Apostolic Church of
Mugodhi, Guta RaJehova (GRJ); and the St. Luke Jenkenisheni Church. The
majority of these sects were founded around the 1930s.
AICs are characterized by continuous intensification and expansion, with
smaller units splitting off from parent bodies, making them a heterogeneous group
(Humbe 2018). This makes generalizations about their belief systems difficult,
as they differ from one group to another. The followers of the Apostolic Masowe
sects, known as vapositori in the Shona language spoken in Zimbabwe, for
example, object to the use of the Bible as their only source of Christian authority
(Engelke 2004). Within these sects, certain groups have emerged whose adherents
are clad in red garments, earning themselves the name venguwo tsvuku (those in
red garments). Another example is the AAC, which forbids watching television
and using the Internet.
It would be difficult to provide a reliable statistical assessment of the number
of AICs’ adherents in Zimbabwe. Nevertheless, in Africa, the total of all AIC
groupings numerically far outstrips their mother churches. About a quarter of a
century ago, Daneel (1998) tried to give an actual figure, suggesting that AICs
had an estimated 2 million adherents throughout Zimbabwe. Sometimes AICs
follow one or more African indigenous belief systems that have been syncretized
with Christianity. They claim 50 percent or more of the Christians in rural areas,
which are a source of legitimation and a support base for the ZANU PF during
elections (Karkkainen 2002, 195). A significant number of vapostori are involved
in the informal sector of the economy, for example, in the manufacturing and
selling of homemade wares, such as baskets, crocheted items, metal containers,
brooms, mops, and wooden furniture. In addition, many are cross-border traders
with a ubiquitous presence at border posts and in major cities, where they func-
tion as unofficial moneychangers. The religious beliefs of the AICs and their high
160 Joram Tarusarira and Bernard Pindukai Humbe
numbers have received the attention of politicians, who see them as fertile ground
in mobilizing support during elections.
The AIC groupings that are most often attended by ZANU PF politicians are
the apostolic sects, popularly known as vapostori (Shona for apostles) (Dube
2019; Musoni 2019). Among their shared identity markers, the vapostori wear
white robes, a practice that has led commentators to label them “white garment
churches.” They use open-space venues for worship, usually under trees. Men
shave their heads but grow their beards long. In Zimbabwe’s second republic,
from 2017 onward, we have witnessed groups such as the Zimbabwe Indigenous
Interdenominational Council of Churches (ZIICC), led by Revd Wutawunashe,
which also plays a significant role in legitimizing the current regime. We shall
come back to this organization later in the chapter.
The vapositori observe Fridays, the Sabbath, and Sundays as their days of wor-
ship. They have strict dietary laws which are based on the Old Testament. Their
worship practices incorporate the use of dreams, healing, trances, and active lay
participation. A close look at AICs shows that they are highly spiritualized, which
is why they are also called “Spiritual Churches.” Consequently, they believe in
spiritual powers and emphasize the centrality of the work of the spirit through
their church leaders, whose statements, formal and otherwise, are binding and
constitute the church’s doctrine. These church leaders are essentially specialists
administering religious goods. They uphold the spiritual customs that have been
passed down by their ancestors, a characteristic that connects them to the national-
ists, who invoked the spirit mediums during the war of liberation. Spirit mediums,
through whom the ancestors communicated, played key roles in the first (1896–
1900) and second (1967–1979) wars of liberation in Zimbabwe. The guerrillas,
after realizing that the spirit mediums had a lot of respect among the peasants,
tried to get them on their side in order to win the peasants’ support (Lan 1985).
The spirit mediums helped with mobilization and recruitment and in boosting the
morale of the guerrillas themselves. Ranger (1970, 2) suggests that African resist-
ance to European colonialism could also be seen as a war between two religious
systems. Traditional religious leaders had a special position in the psyche of the
fighters (Chung 2006, 197–98). Spirit mediums and ancestors were therefore cer-
tainly a force to be reckoned with during the liberation struggle. This meant that
the involvement of spirit mediums and their invoking of ancestors in the war of
liberation was not alien to the AICs, which believed that God was already present
in Africa before the Europeans arrived and that African worship was better than
the worshipping of the missionaries. Thus, Africa is included in God’s plan of
salvation. For purposes of clarification, this study looks at only influential AIC
groupings that have declared their allegiance to ZANU PF at the macro level.
Theodicies of Legitimation and Liberation

To analyze the relationship between the AICs and the ruling regime against the
background of political instability, we deploy the concepts of the theodicy of lib-
eration and the theodicy of legitimation. The term “theodicy of liberation” refers
to a system of meaning that answers ultimate questions about people’s experi-
ences of oppression, leading to actions that facilitate freedom. The term theodicy
of legitimation denotes a system of meaning that explains and provides answers
about people’s suffering and oppression in a way that endorses and presents the
situation as divinely ordained, thus perpetuating people’s suffering and oppres-
sion and not encouraging any actions in the direction of liberation. These concepts
help us comprehend how and why AICs played a pivotal liberating role in the
fight against colonialism and oppression but failed to separate principles of social
justice from regimes and persons, as a result contributing to the legitimation and
perpetuation of the ZANU PF regime.
According to Campbell (2007, 2010), theodicies are cultural systems that spe-
cifically serve to meet the universal human need for ultimate meaning. Systems of
theodicy supply meaning at three levels: cognitive, emotional, and moral. At the
cognitive level, they explain why things are as they are. At the emotional level,
they offer guidance on what to feel under different circumstances. At the moral
level, they help people understand why things are as they are from a disinterested
scientific standpoint and from an interested perspective of human desires, hopes,
and expectations. They provide answers not in universal terms, but in terms of
the particular, to questions such as why the rich get richer and the poor and good
die young, why me and not the next person, why my brother or sister and not
a stranger, etc. Theodicies provide guidance for thought, behavior, and action.
A successful theodicy is therefore one “that tells people what it is that they should
think, how they should feel, on what basis they should judge others as well as
themselves, together with what actions they ought to perform to attain salvation,
peace or enlightenment” (Campbell 2007, 167).
Theodicies offer meaning in two senses, namely in terms of intelligibility and
significance. They are intelligible in that they render experiences coherent and
integrated—that is, they help people make sense of their experiences. They are
significant in that they help people link their experiences within a broader and all-
embracing cosmic and historical scheme. From this perspective, individuals draw
purpose as well as confidence and inspiration from subscribing to them. Some
people require rational explanations for their questions about life in times of need,
while others will require contact with superior powers. A successful theodicy is
therefore one that provides satisfactory answers to the search for meaning in an
intelligible manner and that shows the significance of life. A theodicy, however,
can fail at different levels. Cognitively, its account may no longer be seen as cred-
ible. Emotionally, it could be seen as spiritually empty or bankrupt, no longer
generating a worthwhile vision or supplying intense or transcendent experiences.
Morally, it can be perceived as not offering a meaningful explanation for why
experiences that are significant in different ways appear to be randomly distrib-
uted, while the meanings it offers may be ethically and morally unacceptable or
even repugnant. What has happened is that there is now a low index of theodical
satisfaction. As a result, there will be estrangement from the culture insofar as it
fails to meet the needs of its members. This prompts the need to reconstruct it
satisfactorily. It must be noted that no one theodicy can satisfy everyone. In this
respect, theodicies must be understood as being tied to specific needs to endow
particular socially and temporarily located populations with meaning.
When an existing theodicy seems unsatisfactory, the system’s intellectuals
rationalize and create or upgrade it so it becomes coherent enough to continue
legitimizing the system. Religious organizations have their functionaries and
specialists who protect religious goods through their production, reproduction,
conservation, and diffusion. These institutional figures consecrate and legitimize
theodicy (Bourdieu 1991). Their coherent articulations, while embodying ortho-
doxy, are not the same as theodical satisfaction. Intellectual coherence may be less
significant than the need for explanations that are experienced as satisfactory at
an emotional and morally inspirational level. Groups of adherents to the existent
theodicy may continue to push for more satisfying solutions to the problems of
meaning, for interpretations that meet their own needs. These groups will cam-
paign for change, and a prophet typically emerges to facilitate and initiate change
in the existing theodicy (Weber 1968; Bourdieu 1991). This move often goes
against the innate conservatism and resistance of the representatives of ortho-
doxy. The prophet and the dissatisfied subscriber groups articulate the lack of fit
between their experiences and the official meaning system. Events external to the
theodicy may accelerate legitimation efforts on the part of institutional figures
or the emergence of dissatisfied subscriber groups. In the case of the latter, the
existing theodicy of legitimation is undermined and may directly challenge its
credibility or viability. Such events include war, conflict, and political violence.
This chapter is interested in AICs as prophetic subscriber groups that are dissat-
isfied with the existing theodicy of legitimation because it sacralizes the political
order. AICs dissatisfied with the theodicy offered by the colonial system and mis-
sionary churches emerged with a theodicy of liberation, but unfortunately, they
then slipped back into cultivating a theodicy of legitimation. The following sec-
tion of the chapter focuses on these theodicies.
AICs and the Theodicy of Liberation

Religious orientations can be aligned with existing political ideologies like
nationalism, fundamentalism, liberation, sovereignty, and empowerment. From
1890, Zimbabwe was colonized by Cecil John Rhodes on behalf of Britain, and
the resulting British colony became known as Rhodesia. Resistance to colonial
power assumed different forms, including cultural, political, and armed strug-
gle (Kaulemu 2010, 47). AICs were actively involved in dislodging the colo-
nial regime. Their leaders actively engaged in anti-colonial critiques. Shoniwa
Masedza, founder of the Johane Masowe Church, for example, preached to Afri-
can workers on European-owned farms. He demanded higher wages for blacks
(Hastings 1979, 77) and protested against all kinds of oppression while worship-
ping outdoors (Mukonyora 2011, 146). According to the colonial authorities, wor-
ship had to take place indoors, inside a church building (Tarusarira 2016). Most
AICs worshipped outside, which was itself a marker of opposition and an act of
protest against colonialism.
Resistance to colonial power and anything that represented it manifested itself
in various ways. Some AICs resisted by not reading the Bible, others even told
their followers to burn it. The Bible was associated with literacy and literature,
vital tools or mechanisms in creating and maintaining symbolic power. This made
the “book” part of the colonial and missionary enterprise—the root of colonial
power—and hence burning it was an act of political defiance. The AICs claimed
to receive the word “live and direct” from above, meaning that burning the Bible
was not to be perceived as anti-Christian but as an act of political resistance.
This is not to suggest that all vapositori burn Bibles. Today the Johane Maranke
Church reads the Bible, and members believe that the deeper one reads the text,
the more one’s reading is purged of its political inflections (Engelke 2004, 76).
Johane Masowe conducts healing sessions to cure illnesses and proclaim an ethic
of self-sufficiency through skilled labor (Fields 1997). Resistance to colonial
power also entailed resisting anything that represented it. Missionary churches
allegedly worked in cahoots with the colonial power. They, thus, represented colo-
nial power. Racial discrimination in the missionary churches was, thus challenged
by the very fact of breaking away from them and forming AICs. Colonialism
and discrimination provided a context for the emergence of AICs. Peel (1997,
511) notes that every generation reaches a point at which levels of sickness and
social malaise become intolerable. As a result, prophets rise to facilitate social
renewal. AICs were therefore religio-political nonconformists of their time. They
developed a theodicy of liberation that investigated the causes of and reasons
for social injustices and privileges, hence becoming a sociodicy of liberation
(Bourdieu 1991, 16). A sociodicy of liberation, rather than legitimizing power,
challenges rationalizations of social adversities, inequalities, and injustice, as well
as addressing the existential meanings and ethical implications of human afflic-
tions and suffering in social life (see Morgan and Wilkinson 2001). It challenges
social injustice and speaks truth to power.
AICs and the Theodicy of Legitimation

In 1980, Zimbabwe was constitutionally declared a secular state. This meant that
individual religious liberty was recognized as a part of the fundamental rights.
The government adopted a Marxist version of policy on religion. Practically this
meant that there were no problems with individual religious liberty. However,
group or corporate religious liberty was to be aligned to the political objectives
of the party (ZANU PF) and the government (Hallencreutz 1988, 1–24). At inde-
pendence, then prime minister Robert Mugabe was grateful for the role that the
“churches” had played during the liberation struggle; hence, he invited them to
be collaborators in rebuilding the country after the war. The churches responded
to the call and complemented government efforts in various social sectors, par-
ticularly in education and health care. The contribution to education, health care,
and social welfare was necessary because of the infrastructural damage that had
happened during the war. Thus, there was the need to invest in infrastructure and
training personnel (Verstraelen 1998, 54–55; Gundani 2007, 10). The mainline
churches cooperated with and endorsed political power, playing a priestly rather
than prophetic role.
The churches acted as subcontractors for the government and ignored social
justice issues (Maxwell 1999, 210). With respect to the Catholic Church,
McLaughlin (1996, 4) argues that ignoring social justice was because those who
had been actively involved in the pursuit of social justice had left the country or
were too occupied with postwar reconstruction to reflect on the past. In addition,
discussions of such matters were not encouraged by the church leaders. The lead-
ers of the new state formed an alliance with the traditional church leaders rather
than with those at the grassroots (McLaughlin 1996, 272). The mainline churches
neither took a strong stand against a postcolonial culture of impunity nor chal-
lenged the state’s gravitation toward authoritarian rule. The Anglican and Catholic
Churches issued a few inconsequential statements (Raftopoulos 2006, 34). The
Methodist Rev. Banana (1996, 223) challenged his own church for opting for
“silent diplomacy” during times of crises, making them priestly rather than pro-
phetic. To keep its hold on power, the state constantly reminded churches, unions,
and organizations of the importance of inclusion as the route to peace and prosper-
ity (Chitando 2005b, 220–39). The dominant religious actors, thus performed a
priestly role, collaborating with the postcolonial authorities.
Robert Mugabe, the first president of independent Zimbabwe, was committed
to the country’s development, as evidenced by a massive expansion in education,
health care, housing, agriculture, and industrial infrastructures. The country was
even christened the “breadbasket of Africa.” This growth, however, was short-
lived, as the early 1990s began to show signs of an economic slowdown. Among
other factors, this was mainly due to the adoption of the infamous Economic
Structural Adjustment Programme (ESAP) following the pressure to embrace the
neoliberal economic principles being pushed at that time by the World Bank and
the International Monetary Fund (Kanyenze et al. 2011). The resulting effect was
massive retrenchment and severe deterioration in the delivery of service in the
government sector. The country’s economic woes were aggravated by its par-
ticipation in a civil war in the Democratic Republic of Congo and the unplanned
payment of gratuities to veterans of the Second War of Liberation, known as
the second Chimurenga (1967–79). All this was made even worse by the gov-
ernment’s poorly executed Fast Track Land Reform Programme (FTLRP) and
its associated human rights abuses. Hunger, poverty, inflation, and joblessness
became features of the status quo in Zimbabwe. The regime responded violently
to dissenting critical voices and protests. Coupled with greed, incompetence, cor-
ruption, nepotism, and the mismanagement of state resources, this caused the
majority of Zimbabweans to lose faith in Mugabe and his ZANU PF party. The
masses perceived Mugabe, who had become a dictator, as the cause of a collapsed
economy, and they began longing for a messiah to take over from Mugabe and
ZANU PF. Given the loss of faith in him in civil and political society, Mugabe
turned to the AICs for their support.
In the post-2000 era, Zimbabwe became an economically and socially stressed
country in which politicians competed for electoral support. All the elections that
followed reflected an increase in the creation and participation of political par-
ties. Out of the litany of Zimbabwe’s political parties, elections became a two-
horse race between the ZANU PF, and the Movement for Democratic Change
(MDC), which was founded in 1999. The Zimbabwe Congress of Trade Unions
(ZCTU), the most significant labor movement in Zimbabwe, together with other
civic societies formed the MDC. The first leader of the MDC was the late Morgan
Tsvangirai. Because of the poor performance of the Zimbabwean economy, the
party gained massive support, mainly from urban workers. Though democracy
had replaced colonial rule under Ian Smith, then leader of the colonial government
(1964–1979), Mugabe’s ruling ZANU party did not want any political challenger.
ZANU PF tolerates opposition politics only to the extent that they do not threaten
its hold on power. In the 2018 general elections, President Emmerson Mnangagwa
became the ruling ZANU-PF party leader. The new candidate of the main oppo-
sition party, the MDC-Alliance, was Nelson Chamisa, who succeeded the long-
standing opposition leader Morgan Tsvangirai, who died in February 2018. Since
2000, ZANU PF has never enjoyed the political monopoly it used to have before
the formation of the MDC. For ZANU PF, a panacea to this problem was politi-
cal violence and rigging the elections to defeat the MDC. Thus, the elections held
between 2000 and 2018 have always been contested.
Under socioeconomic and political instability, one would expect the AICs
to challenge those responsible for these social ills. However, most AICs have
endorsed ZANU PF’s leaders, such as late president Robert Mugabe and the current
president, Emmerson Mnangagwa. On the other hand, ZANU PF leaders address
gatherings of AICs, such as their annual congresses, especially during election
periods, to mobilize support because thousands of followers attend these events.
AICs were offered preferential treatment at state events. The AICs and ZANU PF
thus established a mutually beneficial relationship. In postcolonial Zimbabwe, a
theodicy of legitimation, focused on messages of independence, indigenization,
and sovereignty, and promoted by the AICs, reinforced the authority of ZANU
PF leaders as political actors. In doing so, the AICs provide a sacred canopy for
the ZANU PF regime insulating the behavior and practices of the powerful and
diverting the marginalized from issues of arbitrariness, corruption, and the abuse
of power stemming from state practices (see Maposa, Sibanda, and Makahamadze
2011). When ZANU PF’s beliefs and practices are sacralized, they become divine,
hence unquestionable and taken as given. Although the AICs had pioneered the
resistance to colonial oppression, they did not use their historical capital to resist
oppressive postcolonial conditions. Instead, they aligned themselves with the
ZANU PF and became its source of support when urban support waned (Muko-
nyora 2011, 137). As a result, the MDC became popular with the urban population.
Religio-political Alliance Between AICs and ZANU PF:

Explanatory Factors
Three factors explain the ZANU PF–AICs nexus, which resulted in an expression
of religion protecting the political order. First is the idea of “church co-option.”
The ZANU PF has co-opted the AICs as a political tool for mobilizing votes dur-
ing elections. All that ZANU PF politicians wanted was to use AICs as a means
to their own ends, which especially involved being sacralized and legitimized and
using the AICs for purposes of political coordination and mobilization because
these churches have significant numbers of followers. Second, the AICs needed
the ZANU PF for their own survival, especially in a context of socioeconomic
and political instability, in which connections to ruling political elites translate
into access to resources. In effect, AICs are exploiting the ZANU PF to achieve
their own ends. Finally, the ZANU PF’s relationships with the AICs are cordial.
This is because there are mutual benefits to be drawn from this connection, which
can be traced back to the colonial era and their shared pursuit of the liberation of
Africans from British rule.
First Factor: AICs Capture by the State

The AICs often operated as the mouthpiece of the ZANU PF. On the eve of the
2013 elections, for example, the Wutawunashe, considered by some a prophet and
the convener of ZIICC and the Faith for the Nation campaign, endorsed President
Mugabe’s candidature, describing him as Zimbabwe’s messiah due to his spirited
drive to ensure people have total control over their God-given natural resources
(Maponga 2013). His ZIICC initiative, dubbed the Faith for the Nation Campaign,
invites the president or the vice president as its guest of honor to its annual event
held in Bulawayo, Zimbabwe’s second-largest city. The hall in which the prayers
take place is decorated with pictures of the ruling president, and a specific prayer
is given for the president and the ruling party. The AICs also propagate the ZANU
PF’s propaganda, advance arguments in support of the anti-sanctions campaign,
never issue statements against ZANU PF misdeeds, and tirelessly work to tarnish
the image of opposition parties, especially the MDC.
The AICs also chastise other churches that hold different political views than
their own. This was noted in 2020 when the Catholic Church released a pastoral
letter titled “The March Has Not Ended.” In this letter, the Catholic bishops were
concerned about how the government was using COVID-19 restrictions to silence
dissenting voices opposed to the rampant corruption and the abuse of human
rights in the country. Cases of corruption involving high-profile politicians were
exposed by journalists, civic organizations, and opposition parties. The govern-
ment reacted harshly to the letter and publicly dismissed it as unfounded and
intended to divide Zimbabweans. The AICs lined up to support the regime and
criticize the Catholic bishops. Revd Wutawunashe distanced himself and his fol-
lowers from the bishops, saying:
We take strong exception to and categorically dissociate ourselves from calls

by certain religious leaders to march against the government and to reignite
conflicts and wounds of the past, from which God answered our prayers by
bringing political leaders to the negotiating table where reconciliation was
achieved. Please do not reverse the good that God had done. . . . a relentless
propaganda war bent on painting a picture of the government as intolerant,
corrupt and violating human rights with no regard to the rule of law is being
pursued—a picture that has relentlessly been played to the gallery of the
international community with the intent of persuading them to maintain the
economic sanctions which have brought untold suffering to the poor people
of this nation.
(Harare Post Reporter 2021)
Madzibaba Enock of Johane Masowe weChishanu, another AIC, asserted:
It’s clear that the [Catholic] Bishops are now acting as mouthpieces of the
country’s distractors. The Bishops spoke as opposition leaders, not as men of
God. The church’s duty is to pray for the country’s leadership, and it’s only
God who can rebuke the leaders. Like Johane Masowe, we don’t share the
same views with the Bishops.
(Harare Post Reporter 2021)
Being assured of such public support from the AICs, it is now a tradition before
every general election for ZANU PF politicians to visit the gatherings of AICs,
especially the John Marange Church, the Johane Masowe Church, the ACC of
Paul Mwazha, and the ZCC of Nehemia Mutendi. At these church gatherings, the
politicians are seen addressing the congregants wearing the respective regalia of
these churches. In one scenario, the late Robert Mugabe, then leader of the ZANU
PF and a staunch Catholic, dressed in the vapositori costume to identify himself
with them. During Mugabe’s time, the vapositori had seats reserved for them at
state functions and lined up at the airport to receive Mugabe on his return from
overseas trips (Tarusarira 2016). This goes to show how they had become part of
ZANU PF.
The Apostles Christian Council of Zimbabwe (ACCZ), which openly supports
the ZANU PF regime, was created to house and regulate about 350 apostolic and
Zionist churches in Zimbabwe (Nsingo 2012). The then vice president Joice Muj-
uru was the matron of this body, despite being a member of the Salvation Army.
At gatherings of the AICs, she exchanged her Salvation Army uniform for that of
an ACCZ-related church uniform, in the same way as Mugabe dressed in the gar-
ments of vapositori. By addressing the church gatherings, ZANU PF politicians
sought to create the impression that they were religious themselves, and hence
moral and trustworthy persons (Beyers 2015, 159) qualified to occupy high office.
The AICs described Mugabe as greater than the prophets of the Bible. Nehe-
miah Mutendi, the leader of the ZCC, is on record as designating President
Mnangagwa a God-given leader. This endorsement of the president polarized
the justice system and development in Zimbabwe. What is extraordinary is that,
despite the failures of these political leaders, they are fashioned as superhumans
by AICs. To buttress his heroic status, in 2019 President Mnangagwa at one point
described his government as more beautiful and efficient than God’s in heaven.
The AICs also resorted to prophecy, delivering oracles that predict resounding
victories for the ZANU PF. More often than not, this prophecy merely repeated
and reinforced a 1934 prophecy provided by the Prophet Shonhiwa Masedza,
founder of the Johanne Masowe Church, who “prophesied” that Mugabe would
rule Zimbabwe until his death. Thus, in this context, prophecy served to influence
the electorate into believing that the ZANU PF should remain in power since it
is God’s wish.
Second Factor: AIC Cartels Using the ZANU PF for

Personal Gain
The so-called ZANU PF–AIC bond is a type of cartel. It appears that most of
the influential people who align themselves with the AICS do so to protect their
wealth. In Zimbabwe, it is common to hear people say, “Uchida kupfuma chino-
tangawo sowe rako” (If you want to be rich, start your own church). The eco-
nomic activities of these churches are aligned with the ruling government’s policy
of indigenization. In the name of embracing the indigenization policy, they use
religion to access the country’s resources. They appear to be people who maintain
indigenous religious values, such as working hard and protecting ancestral land.
However, they blindfold their followers and ZANU PF politicians. The ideologi-
cal co-optation of ZANU PF into the AICs is achieved by church leaders bribing
the votes of their members. When the religious elites connive with politicians to
achieve political mobilization and pretend that their views represent and satisfy all
the vapostori, this is tantamount to social injustice (Musoni 2019). As the AICs’
believers revere their church leaders, when the latter accommodate ZANU PF
politicians, their followers also start idolizing these politicians.
The Zimbabwean judiciary has been dominated by hearing succession disputes
among AICs, for example, concerning the Mugodhi Church and the African Apos-
tolic Church. Bearing in mind the tendency for the judiciary to be controlled by
the ruling ZANU PF party, the influence of the government is understood to work
in determining religious matters as well. Those who are linked to the ZANU PF
are favored by the judiciary. A ZANU PF-favored candidate enjoys more privi-
leges, including material riches and immunity from prosecution, than those who
challenge the regime.
Third Factor: The Mutual Benefit Between AICs and

ZANU PF
The ZANU PF and the AICS are independent entities that complement each other
on the Zimbabwean religio-political landscape. The relationship is mutually ben-
eficial. The AICs and the party’s ideological goals are aligned. This relationship
facilitates the politicization of religion and the religionization of politics. Religion
has the power to make people have faith or remain loyal and respectful of political
parties and politicians, while politics has the power to protect religion and ensure
its survival. Religious myths, rituals, symbols, songs, and sacred texts sustain the
ZANU PF’s political ideology, for example, making the party and its leaders more
totalitarian. On the other hand, the country’s democratic constitution, laws, and
policies are exploited to sustain AIC church groupings in existence.
At times of elections and cabinet appointments, politicians rush to the AICs’
shrines seeking divine intervention and receiving holy water, pebbles, and sacral-
ized charms to facilitate their victory and assure them of good luck. ZANU PF
activists suspected of being involved in killings of opposition supporters allegedly
receive spiritual assistance from the AICs to suppress justice-seeking spirits.
The ZANU PF and the AICs find each other because they are all aware that in
some respects, they have lost their moral compasses. AICs adherents do not seem
to worry very much about the moral legitimacy, legality, or decency of the ZANU
PF. Because they claim to be apolitical, they care mainly about getting what they
can in order to survive in an economically challenging environment (Kaulemu
2010). Whether what they do as a result is moral or not is irrelevant. By abdicat-
ing their moral responsibility for the national social environment in this manner,
AICs fail to respond in a manner that is consistent with Christianity, thus having
a contradictory relationship with it. Reciprocally, the ZANU PF government has
been mute regarding the use of open-air venues for worship by AICs, which is
against the country’s health care policies. The problem is that worshipping in
open spaces with no sanitary facilities might trigger epidemics such as outbreaks
of typhoid, as has been common in Zimbabwe. To create open spaces for wor-
ship, AICs clear trees, thus destroying the environment. Because worshipping in
these open spaces violates the health care and environmental laws, the vapositori
invite ZANU-PF leaders to address them during their gatherings in open spaces
in order to legitimize their occupation of such spaces. The ZANU-PF leaders sim-
ply promise freedom of worship and assembly provided the vapositori vote for
their party (Musoni 2019). Under such circumstances, the ruling regime indirectly
coerces the vapositori to vote for it.
Conclusion
During the colonial era, the theodicy of liberation became an ideal. The ZANU
PF-AIC alliance was formed to manage the demands of African society seeking
liberation from the settler regime. In the face of perpetual human rights abuses,
there was a need for structural change, which transformed AICs into a movement,
which was developed to challenge the existing regime and propose new policies
that would reposition church and state relative to one another. However, the AICs’
theodicy of legitimation in the postrevolutionary period impeded further political
change. The support of the ZANU PF by AICs has led to the sacralization of all of
the ZANU PF’s actions. AICs even parade a stolen election as a God-sanctioned
electoral victory. This level of alliance has ultimately resulted in AICs losing their
moral legitimacy. AICs have undermined spaces for learning democratic values
that can help build a better society (Mukonyora 2011). They lack the desire to
engage existing authorities to address the daily problems that affect the general
population of Zimbabwe. Taking advantage of their relationship with the ZANU
PF, however, they could instead engage critically with existing injustices and
propose solutions. Conflicting voices have emerged within this church—state alli-
ance pitting the church against civic organizations or one religious group against
another, as well as dividing the members of one and the same religious group
internally. The stakes are about preserving the Christian moral values of peace and
justice in a hostile political environment.
As the sociopolitical and socioeconomic crises have deepened in Zimbabwe,
Zimbabweans have looked to AICs for an intelligible theodicy. However, as we
have seen, some of their leaders were co-opted by the political elites by way of
establishing alliances with them directly or indirectly. The leaders of the AICs
have in effect been neutralized by the political elites. The AICs did nothing to
help people morally understand their suffering. They did not offer them prac-
tical suggestions for freeing themselves from the crises. Instead, they avoided
actions that would challenge the existing political system and their alliance with
the regime. As such, the theodicy of the AICs has not provided any satisfac-
tory answers as to why citizens were being subjected to the evils of intractable
conflict and violence. They remained in the political slumber into which they
had retreated at independence. Bodies claiming to represent AICs, such as the
Union for the Development of Apostolic Churches in Zimbabwe Africa and the
ACCZ, align themselves with the ZANU PF on the issues of indigenization, inde-
pendence, and sovereignty. The relationship between church and state in Zimba-
bwe influences how the regime ends up in alliance with church bodies. Political
institutions, such as the country’s constitution, the courts, and political parties,
empower political actors by providing laws and regulations that allow them to
engage in political activities that bring in the church directly. Religio-cultural
institutions, by contrast, indirectly constrain their adherents’ rejection of political
actors through frames and norms that shape the way believers conceive of politi-
cal action within the political sphere. There are numerous examples of religious
leaders who sound like ZANU PF cadres or government spokespersons when
they speak or preach (Kaulemu 2007, 11). Therefore, invoking the theodicy of
the AICs is not sufficient to explain what exactly the political situation is, how
ordinary people are supposed to feel about it, or what action they should take. It
therefore fails cognitively, emotionally, and morally, becoming merely a theod-
icy of legitimation.
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Verstraelen, Frans J. 1998. Zimbabwean Realities and Christian Responses. Contemporary
Aspects of Christianity in Zimbabwe. Gweru, Zimbabwe: Mambo Press.
Weber, Max. 1968. Economy and Society: An Outline of Interpretive Sociology. New York:
Bedminster Press.
Part III
Social Movements
10 Theorizing Religion, Social
Movements, and Social
Change
Anna Peterson
Introduction
Religion plays a number of sometimes contradictory public roles. On one hand,
religious ideas, institutions, and symbols are often harnessed in support of the
powers that be. This was evident during the summer of 2020, when then-president
Donald Trump posed for photos in front of St. John’s Episcopal Church, across
the street from the White House, holding up a Bible (Rogers 2020). Trump had
previously ordered National Guard and Park police to clear hundreds of people
protesting police violence in the wake of the murder of George Floyd. The image
of Trump at the church invoked religion as a pillar of “law and order” and an
opponent of movements for social change. Trump’s “act of political theatre,” as
critics noted, “participates in a long history of using sacred texts to legitimize state
power” (Coogan and Moss 2020).
However, a second scene at the same church reflects religion’s capacity to legit-
imize challenges to state order. Among the antiracist protesters was Kevin Antlitz,
an Episcopalian priest, who knelt while holding a sign that says “Jesus is Lord, not
Trump” (Martin 2020). Antlitz drew on the institutional charisma of the church,
symbolized by his clerical collar, to justify challenges to the status quo. His mes-
sage echoes a core principle of religious protests: God’s law takes precedence
over human law, and when the two conflict, people of faith must side with God,
even if that means explicit opposition to what St. Paul called “principalities and
powers” (Eph 6:12).
The contrasting images at St. John’s Church reveal the ambivalence of reli-
gion’s place in political life. On one hand, those in power have often used
religion to justify and consolidate their status. Trump’s use of religion partakes
in a long-standing tradition in which political leaders harness religious institu-
tions, images, and ideas to buttress their authority. This conservative role of
religion has been a central theme in the sociology of religion, which has often
portrayed religion as “part of the social formation that supports tradition and
order, rather than promoting change and innovation” (Nepstad and Williams
2007, 419). Religion, in this view, inevitably stands on the side of those in
power, and the possibility of a “disruptive religion” seems to be an oxymoron
(Smith 1996, 1).
DOI: 10.4324/9781003177821-13
176 Anna Peterson
The historical role of religious institutions in revolutions and rebellions, espe-
cially in the West, has reinforced this idea. In many situations, religious leaders
and institutions have taught respect for authority, acceptance of injustice, and the
priority of otherworldly salvation over this-worldly solutions. It is not hard to
find evidence supporting the notion that religion has served primarily as a force
for stability or even reaction, including Luther’s rejection of the German peas-
ants’ uprising in the 1520s, the Roman Catholic Church’s support for the Spanish
Crown against Latin American independence movements in the 1800s, Christian
arguments in favor of slavery in the antebellum United States, and the contempo-
rary alliance between Evangelical Protestantism and right-wing political move-
ments in the United States. Marx’s famous dismissal of religion as the “opium of
the people” seems to encapsulate this view of religion as a tool of powerful forces
that seek to prevent oppressed people from changing their conditions.
On the other hand, however, marginalized people have just as often found
in religion both material and symbolic support for efforts to improve their lot
(Troeltsch 1992, 331; Weber 1958). Religious institutions have offered leader-
ship, resources, and legitimacy, while religious ideas, stories, scriptures, images,
and songs have provided inspiration and moral guidance. The history of reli-
giously motivated dissent includes abolitionists as well as pacifists, suffragists,
civil rights activists, environmentalists, and human rights campaigners. Arguably,
religion “has been a resource for most social movements that have transformed
American politics and society,” as well as many in other regions (Wilcox and
Fortelny 2009, 266).
Despite the presence of religious actors, symbols, and ideas in many movements
for social change, the progressive role of religion has received little systematic
analysis from either of the relevant scholarly fields—the sociology of religion and
social movement theory. “In sharp contrast to the wealth of studies on the Chris-
tian right,” as Wilcox and Fortelny note (2009, 279), “there is a paucity of studies
on the religious Left.” This is not entirely true, since there are numerous studies
of specific religiously based movements, as well as some recent overviews of reli-
gion’s place in progressive politics (e.g., Braunstein 2017; Braunstein, Fuist, and
Williams 2017; Coutin 1993; Ellingson 2016; Jenkins 2020; Marsh 2006; Rolsky
2019; Smith 1991; Snarr 2011; Stout 2010; Sullivan 2008). Despite this work,
however, as Ron Pagnucco notes, “there have been few systematic, quantitative
studies of the political behavior of faith-based social-movement organizations”
(1996, 205). Neither sociologists of religion nor social movement scholars have
theorized religion’s role in progressive social movements in a comprehensive way.
Furthermore, when social movement scholars do look at religion, they gener-
ally do so only in relation to movements with explicitly faith-based origins, ideol-
ogies, leaders, or membership. However, religious ideas, practices, communities,
symbols, and narratives shape activism in a variety of settings, including many
movements that are not obviously religious. This is because religion and politics
are always intertwined. On one hand, “religious meanings and the processes to
which they refer are constituted and contested in the rough-and-tumble of daily
life” (Rubin, Smilde, and Junge 2014, 9), so they are never separate from social,
Religion, Social Movements, and Social Change 177
political, and economic realities. On the other hand, people often interpret politics
with values and concepts drawn from religion and understand their activism as
religiously meaningful. In order to understand these interactions, it is important
to treat religion not merely as a derivative or function of other factors but rather
as a relatively independent variable, which actively shapes social processes just
as it is shaped by them.
In this chapter, I aim to begin developing a road map toward a systematic,
comprehensive understanding of the distinctive ways that religion contributes to
movements for social change. I focus on three interconnected factors. First, I ana-
lyze the ways that religion shapes movement ideology, by providing and justifying
worldviews, moral principles, and goals. Religion’s connection to a transcendent
realm and sacred history gives its ethical and ideological claims special power.
This is particularly valuable for those contesting the established order.
Second, I examine the ways that religion mediates between everyday life and
big structures (Levine and Stoll 1997; Levine 1992). Religious communities,
practices, and events create and strengthen relationships and provide ways for
people to connect their local experiences and concerns to larger economic and
political institutions. This theme is connected to the previous one, because reli-
gion mediates not just in practical ways but also in the realm of ideas: it connects
big ideas about God, morality, and the nature of human society to people’s own
lives (Billings 1990; Genovese 1976, 165).
Third, I am interested in practices of protest. Religion is the source and justi-
fier of distinctive movement practices, including symbolic and ritual practices as
well as nonviolent civil disobedience (Pagnucco 1996). Religious communities
and activists also often engage in acts of mercy or charity—direct aid to those
in need—in addition to actions aimed at structural change. This is linked to the
previous theme, because practices are the way that activists mediate between eve-
ryday life and big structures. Thinking about practices of protest, thus, can help
us conceptualize the links between means and ends and between short-term and
long-term goals.
A fourth factor, which is the main focus of most existing studies of religion
and social movements, is religion’s provision of organizational expertise, finan-
cial support, meeting spaces, leadership, and social networks. To the extent that
social movement scholars have looked at religion, they have focused on these
issues and, more broadly, the ways that religion provides tangible resources for
mobilization (e.g., Burns and Kniss 2013; Kniss and Burns 2004; Morris 1984;
Wilcox and Fortelny 2009). It is impossible to understand religion’s role in social
change without considering these factors. However, I spend more time on the
three factors discussed earlier, which have not received as much attention and
which can help ground a more holistic, nonreductive understanding of religion’s
role in social change, particularly in movements that are not explicitly religious
in origin or identity.
I do not contend that religion is the only source of ideas or practices or the only
way to mediate between everyday life and larger structures. However, I focus on
these themes in order to expand analysis of the distinctive roles that religion plays
178 Anna Peterson
in movements for social change beyond factors that have been more thoroughly
explored in most existing studies. I highlight both additional ways in which reli-
gion contributes to social change and a less reductive way of thinking about reli-
gion in these various capacities. In so doing, I hope to point to new theoretical
directions for scholarship on the topic in both sociology of religion and social
movement theory.
Theorizing Religion and Social Change

Religion’s role in social movements addresses issues that are central to two schol-
arly fields, the sociology of religion and social movement theory. The study of
social movements raises the core questions for sociology as a discipline: “why
and how people do the things they do, especially why they do things together”
(Jasper and Goodwin 2009, 4). The sociology of religion explores the place of
religion in social organization, beliefs, action, and institutions. Studying religion’s
role in social movements puts these fields together to explore how religion shapes
what people do, together, to alter their societies, and how it influences the values,
strategies, and goals that they bring to their collective efforts to change the condi-
tions of their lives.
Social Change and the Social Scientific Study of Religion

The social scientific study of religion, which includes scholarship in anthropol-
ogy, religious studies, political science, and sociology, analyzes religion’s place
in different cultures and societies. The origins of the field, broadly speaking, can
be located in the late 1800s and early 1900s, when European and North American
anthropologists encountered non-Western religions and began to study them in
relation to more familiar traditions. Their scholarly task was to develop theoreti-
cal models that would define religion and its social functions in ways that encom-
passed the growing range of religious experiences they were studying. Many of
these scholars understood religion as a stabilizing force, a way that groups express
and legitimize their way of life and worldview.
The notion that religion serves primarily to legitimate the existing order has a
long, influential history in the sociology of religion. The most prominent expres-
sion of this approach is the work of French sociologist Emile Durkheim. For
Durkheim, religion expresses the collective ideal of society to its members: “The
idea of society is the soul of religion” (1912, 466). In this view, sacred powers are
nothing but the collective and anonymous force of the community, embodied in
religious symbols such as the totem. Thus, religion’s primary social function is to
provide ideological and institutional support for the status quo.
Some more recent social scientists propose a similar analysis. According to
anthropologist Clifford Geertz, religion sacralizes the social order by fusing peo-
ple’s worldview, which describes the way things are, and their ethos, which pro-
poses how things should be. As Geertz writes, “the powerfully coercive ‘ought’ is
felt to grow out of a comprehensive factual ‘is’ ” (1973, 126). In practical terms,
this means that religion makes a society’s roles, customs, and institutions appear
to be divinely sanctioned and thus both necessary and good. Resistance to the
social order appears to be resistance to God’s will or other sacred forces. This
model provides few resources for interpreting religion’s place in movements for
social change.
A more explicitly conservative view of religion emerges in Peter Berger’s notion
of religion as a “sacred canopy.” Berger identifies the primary task of religious
ideas and institutions as “world maintenance,” which they accomplish by support-
ing a consensus about how the world is, explaining and justifying the social order,
and limiting challenges to it (Berger 1967, 29). While Berger is not as functional-
ist like Durkheim, he reinforces the notion that religion’s primary purpose is “to
offer timeless and non-changing truths, and often function to connect past, pre-
sent, and future times into a seamless whole. This can support the assumption that
the world as it is—including the social order—reflects divine intention or master
plan” (Nepstad and Williams 2007, 420). Because Geertz, Berger, and other social
scientists in the Durkheimian tradition “are heavily focused on religion as a con-
servative force in society—one that privileges order and can justify extant social
arrangements,” they offer few resources for analyzing religion’s contributions to
movements for social change (420).1
However, other approaches in the sociology of religion provide a more nuanced
view. One of the most important is Max Weber’s acknowledgment that religion
can either strengthen or challenge the existing social order and elite classes,
depending on circumstances. In The Sociology of Religion, Weber argues that the
Hindu notion of karma justifies the worldly privileges of elites, by attributing
their good fortune to meritorious action in previous lives. This “karma theodicy”
(Goldstein 2009, 153) legitimized the caste system and discouraged moral as well
as practical challenges. Furthermore, Hinduism’s conservative impact was not
merely ideological. Hindu law prevented changes in occupation and thus hindered
economic development, and the close ties between religious and secular law made
the caste system possible (153). At the same time, however, the doctrine of karma
can provide hope and comfort to underprivileged classes, who can look forward
for better rebirths (Weber 1956). Thus, while Hinduism is often a conservative
force, Weber does not rule out the possibility that aspects of Hindu traditions can
support change.
Weber explores religion’s capacity to accelerate change most fully in The
Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, which argues that certain forms of
Protestant Christianity helped “emancipate” Western societies from economic tra-
ditionalism and strengthen the rise of capitalism. In particular, Calvin’s doctrine
of double predestination and Luther’s idea of the calling combined to create a
“worldly asceticism” that gave everyday activity, especially labor, religious sig-
nificance (Weber 1958, 80). The rational nature of this asceticism helped under-
mine traditional domination, which is irrational (Goldstein 2009, 146). According
to Weber, the calling, worldly asceticism, and rationalization together “must
have been the most powerful conceivable lever for the expansion of that atti-
tude which we have here called the spirit of capitalism” (Weber 1958, 172). No
180 Anna Peterson
one deliberately used religion to transform economic structures and attitudes, but
there was an elective affinity between certain Protestant ideas and certain eco-
nomic changes which combined to make religion a powerful force for change.
Because he contradicts the Durkheimian notion that religion always reinforces
the traditional social order, Weber thus provides valuable resources for scholars
of religion and social change.
The third major stream within the sociology of religion was launched by Karl
Marx, who in some ways seems to agree with Durkheim that religion generally
functions as a conservative, even reactionary, force. Both in practice and in the-
ory, religion supports the status quo. In practical terms, religious ideas and insti-
tutions are usually controlled by powerful people who have a vested interest in
maintaining the status quo. Ideologically, religion justifies unequal social condi-
tions, directs people’s hope for relief toward other-worldly solutions, and eases
the suffering caused by those conditions just enough to prevent people from try-
ing to improve their situation. This view is captured, of course, in Marx’s famous
description of religion as “the opium of the people” (Marx 1978, 54).
This apparent dismissal of religion has led many socialist scholars to ignore
religion as a factor in social change and working-class struggles. Those who do
notice religion are mostly satisfied to characterize it as an opiate or at best an irra-
tional and ineffective response to real grievances. For example, the Marxist his-
torian Eric Hobsbawm described religion as a factor in “primitive” rebellions, in
which people express their opposition to unequal power structures through “pre-
political” practices such as millenarianism riots and social banditry (Hobsbawm
1959). This echoes Marx’s understanding of religion as a way to express legiti-
mate grievances but not as an aid to understanding the root causes of problems or
to provide real solutions.
Marx’s view, however, is much more complex than the “opium” line suggests.
In the same passage, he writes that “religious suffering is at the same time an
expression of real suffering and a protest against real suffering” (1978, 54). Reli-
gion expresses pain, in the same way that a limp or a moan expresses pain. Thus,
the very existence of religion is evidence of the cruelty and injustice that lead peo-
ple to seek solace in spiritual pursuits. Marx thinks that this effort is misguided,
because it distracts people from identifying and eradicating the root causes of
their suffering. However, he does not condemn religion itself as a force for evil.
On the contrary, it can be a positive force for people who have few other sources
of comfort in their lives: “the sigh of the oppressed creature, the sentiment of a
heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions” (54).
Marx’s view of religion is thus significantly less negative, and far less simplis-
tic, than many interpreters assume. Still, even though Marx acknowledges that
religion serves a positive role in the lives of suffering people, he does not see it
as a force for structural change. It is, at best, an “illusory happiness,” which must
be abolished as part of the revolutionary demand for “real happiness.” Because it
is primarily a symptom, not a cause, of injustice, the most important step toward
justice is not to end the illusions of religion but rather “to abandon a condition
which requires illusions” (54).
A few subsequent socialist thinkers have explored the theoretical complexity
at which Marx hints (e.g., Bloch 2000; Lancaster 1988; MacIntyre 1995; Maduro
1982; West 1991). Scholars in the Gramscian tradition, in particular, have ana-
lyzed the ways that religion and other cultural forces influence political attitudes
and actions, including activism (Gramsci 1971; Billings 1990). Other socialist
scholars have explored the practical history of religion’s involvement in social
change. In particular, a number of early Marxists were fascinated by the origins
of Christianity. Friedrich Engels found “notable points of resemblance” between
early Christianity and the working-class movement of his time (1894). Both are
movements of oppressed people, and both “preach forthcoming salvation from
bondage and misery; Christianity places this salvation in a life beyond, after
death, in heaven; socialism places it in this world, in a transformation of society”
(Engels 1894). Furthermore, Engels observes,
Both are persecuted and baited, their adherents are despised and made the
objects of exclusive laws, the former as enemies of the human race, the latter
as enemies of the state, enemies of religion, the family, social order. And in
spite of all persecution, nay, even spurred on by it, they forge victoriously,
irresistibly ahead.
(1894)
In The Foundations of Christianity, the early twentieth-century Marxist Karl

Kautsky makes similar arguments, citing the “proletarian” character of early
Christianity and the “fierce class hatred against the rich” expressed in the Gospels
(2008 [1908], 169; Goldstein 2014, 497). Kautsky also notes that even though
some Christian leaders “strove to efface its proletarian character, the proletariat
and its class hatred were not eliminated,” and numerous early Christian bishops
and saints wrote “bitter attacks on the rich, whom they equate with robbers and
thieves” (Ibid., 171).
Engels and Kautsky highlight religion’s persistent political ambivalence. On
one hand, religion is the realm of the poor and oppressed, expressing their dis-
satisfaction with the status quo and resentment of political and economic elites.
On the other hand, it fails to address the true causes of injustice and thus cannot
achieve the egalitarian society that believers desire. This mixed evaluation allows
that religion is more than just an opiate, although it may limit religion to a primi-
tive form of rebellion, as Hobsbawm put it (1959)—a precursor to the rational,
organized movements that would advance the cause of the working classes with-
out superstition. This association of religion with irrational, apolitical, or at best
pre-political ideas and practices may be one reason that contemporary social
movement scholars, and not only those in the Marxist tradition, pay it relatively
little attention. It simply does not seem to be the kind of cultural force that would
contribute to systematic efforts to eliminate oppressive structures.
One of the few Marxist analyses of religion’s role in social change is E. P.
Thompson’s magisterial book The Making of the English Working Class. Thomp-
son underlines the far-reaching and often ambivalent ways that religious ideas
182 Anna Peterson
and communities shaped the formation of working-class consciousness and
organizations in England. He pays particular attention to radical religious groups,
including millenarian movements and dissenting sects, which both reflected and
strengthened working-class dissatisfaction with the social order. These groups,
and religion in general, are powerful, in part, because of their link to “customs”—
elements of popular culture that reflect ordinary people’s values, conceptions
about the world, and social relations. Thompson acknowledges “popular religion
(or religious custom),” including Christianity, “as a component (and premise) of
the moral economy and, as such, a potential source of resistance against the impo-
sition of free-market relations,” as Jean-Pierre Reed (2011, 243) points out. Reli-
gion “provides actors familiar conceptual schemes and vocabularies with which
they can question the order of things” (253). For Thompson, then, customs serve
as “the essential ‘driving’ engine behind the politics of resistance” (243). This
suggests that popular religion can play a central role in movements for social
change, as Thompson shows in his analysis of both the Methodist movement and
smaller “sects.”2
Thompson’s analysis points to the themes I highlight in my argument about the
distinctive ways in which religion can contribute to movements for social change.
First, religion provides ideas that can inspire and sustain activism. This is not inevi-
table; in many settings, Christianity has called on believers to accept suffering and
submit to those in power, thus undermining the legitimacy of radical movements
(Reed 2011, 244). However, even seemingly quietistic theologies included both
critiques of the powers that be and visions of a better world to come. As Thomp-
son notes, “the tension between the kingdoms ‘without’ and ‘within’ implied a
rejection of the ruling powers except at points where co-existence was inevita-
ble” (Thompson 1963, 31). Perhaps most important, according to Thompson,
Methodist founder John Wesley provided a theological justification for social
equality. Methodism reproduces the tension between spiritual and temporal
egalitarianism that is present in Luther’s proclamation that “a Christian is a
perfectly free lord of all, subject to none (Luther 1958, 53; Thompson 1963, 392).
Wesleyanism, according to Thompson, was “a doctrine of spiritual egalitarianism:
there is at least equality of opportunity in sin and grace for rich and poor” (1963,
363). Some Methodist sects used rebellious language that “made it possible for
emergent working classes to resist the transition from a moral economy of provi-
sion that reinforced the centrality of human reciprocity to a moral economy of
the wage that undermined it” (Reed 2011, 244). While Luther and Wesley did
not make explicit the radical political implications of this spiritual egalitarianism,
other Christians did. Notably, Thomas Münzer drew on biblical texts to motivate
peasants in the German Peasant Wars of 1525. “The people are hungry; they must
eat; they intend to eat, as Amos says, and Matthew 5, too” (quoted in Keller 1996,
188). As Catherine Keller notes, Münzer refused “the Augustinian-Lutheran dual-
ism of two kingdoms, heavenly versus earthly domains.” Instead, he was inspired
by—and inspired his followers with—utopian images of “heaven on earth for
all” (Keller 1996, 190). Münzer’s language was powerful enough that even Marx
quoted him: “All things have become property, the fish in the water, the birds
of the air and all that growth upon the Earth—the creatures must become free”
(quoted in MacIntyre 1995, 42).3
Second, religion mediates between everyday life and big structures. Here
Thompson’s notion of customs is valuable. Customs are, by definition, part of
everyday life, ordinary ideas, and experiences. However, one of the roles of cus-
toms is to provide conceptions of the world and values that guide behavior. These
conceptions and values are not only inherited from earlier traditions but also
transformed by the experiences of each new generation. As Reed notes, Thomp-
son shows how
customs condition experience but experience is also an opportunity to con-

dition customs in new and strategic ways. Experience can propose new
questions that make possible the generation of new accounts and forms of
knowledge from within existing customary understandings and usages.
(Reed 2011, 251)
These “new questions” are crucial ways to connect received tradition to contem-
porary challenges.
Third, religion generates specific practices that provide concrete support for
movements and sources of collective identity and bonds. Thompson shows vari-
ous practical ways that both Methodism and the English dissenting sects contrib-
uted to working-class movements. For example, the “self-government and local
autonomy” of dissenting sects offered organizational models (Thompson 1963,
28). In particular, Thompson notes, “Methodism provided forms of class meeting,
methodical collection of penny subscriptions and ‘ticket,’ ” borrowed by radical
and trade union organizations (Ibid., 43). These practices helped people connect
with one another and build a common ethos, providing, in Marx’s words, a heart
in heartless conditions: “Men and women felt themselves to have some place in
an otherwise hostile world when within the Church” (Ibid., 379). While this con-
solation might be anesthetizing, it might also be empowering, insofar as it con-
tributes to a collective culture and identity among those who share their sorrows
and hopes with other members of their class. In addition, Thomspon shows how
Methodism, in particular, supplied the working-class movement with “resources,”
such as literacy education, leaders, and meeting places. Methodism offered “an
experience of efficient centralised organisation—at district as well as national
level—which Dissent had lacked” (Ibid., 43–44).
Thompson’s work provides a roadmap for exploring the religious dimensions of
contemporary social movements. He highlights, on the one hand, the ambivalence
of religion—its political impact is far from inevitable or univocal. On the other
hand, Thompson’s detailed historical account shows that religious ideas, institu-
tions, and practices can make distinctive contributions to social change, because of
the power of transcendent ideals—especially when embodied in everyday life—
and religion’s powerful connection to people’s everyday experiences.
184 Anna Peterson
Religion and Social Movement Theory
The Weberian and Marxian traditions in the sociology of religion point to the pos-
sibility, but not inevitability, that religion can justify and strengthen challenges
to the social order. Studies of social movements can help us identify the circum-
stances in which that happens. This is especially true for movements in which reli-
gion plays an explicit role in a movement’s origin, leadership, tactics, ideology,
organization, or goals. Scholars of social movements, however, have not often
analyzed religion’s contribution in a systematic, comparative fashion. This is due,
often, to a common view of religion as a function or derivative of other factors
(such as economic or political forces) rather than as a relatively independent vari-
able that can itself influence social processes (Rubin, Smilde, and Junge 2014,
8). As Fred Kniss and Gene Burns point out, “the social movement literature has
tended to treat the origins or causes of religious involvement in movements as an
exogenous variable. Even though researchers may take religion’s political effects
quite seriously, they do not expend much energy on understanding religion itself”
(2004, 711). As a result, they note, “it is difficult to find examples in the litera-
ture where religion qua religion is an important variable in the analysis.” The
consequence is “a gap in our knowledge of how variations in religious ideas and
practices across different religious groups may affect their participation in broader
social movements” (Kniss and Burns 2004, 709). To begin addressing this gap,
scholars must look at the relationship between religion and social movements as a
process of mutual influence and transformation. The notion that religious involve-
ment in social movements stemmed from external factors shapes a number of dif-
ferent approaches to the topic. Early scholarship on social movements portrayed
protests as aberrations from the norm of social harmony and threats to social sta-
bility. “Until the 1960s,” as James Jasper and Jeff Goodwin (2009, 5) write, “most
scholars who studied social movements were frightened of them. They saw them
as dangerous mobs who acted irrationally, blindly following demagogues who
sprang up in their midst.” If religion entered their analyses, it was as a contributor
to these irrational, superstitious, and undemocratic elements. Religion here was
“prepolitical,” as Eric Hobsbawm put it (1959), a primitive force that moved peo-
ple to react to external events, including injustice and oppression, in nonrational
ways. Religiously driven movements or uprisings might contain hints of political
analysis, “an expression of real suffering and a protest against real suffering,” as
Marx put it (1978, 54), but they remained at most “the sigh of the oppressed crea-
ture” rather than an effective way to attack the causes of suffering. By the 1960s,
however, scholarship on social movements adopted a more positive interpretation.
Social scientists described at least some movements, such as urban reformers or
trade unions, as rational efforts to improve people’s living and working conditions.
If social movements were rational ways for people to enhance their lives, the task
of researchers was to understand what motivated people to organize, what tactics
they used and to what effect, what ideas drove them, what goals they sought, how
they related to other institutions, and what impact they had. Research expanded in
the early 1970s, as scholars saw that many movements pursued not just material
benefits but also affective, symbolic, and cultural goods. These elements were
especially clear in what became known as “new social movements” (NSMs),
such as feminism, environmental activism, and gay rights. Such movements are
not merely instruments for achieving social and political goals but are ends in
themselves as well. The movement provides a source of identity and emotional
satisfaction, “a way of experiencing collective action itself,” as Italian sociolo-
gist Alberto Melucci put it (1989, 205). NSM theory is helpful for thinking about
the role of religion, which offers affective, symbolic goods that are frequently as
powerful as its material and logistical contributions.
These approaches can help us analyze social movements in which religion
plays a significant role, including the US civil rights movement, opposition to
military dictatorships in Latin America, economic justice, immigration reform,
and environmental advocacy, among many others. Religious institutions pro-
vide tangible contributions to movements such as leadership preparation, meet-
ing spaces, funds, material resources, and direct aid to needy groups. Religion
also offers intangible or discursive contributions, such as the moral authority of
the sermon, membership commitment, evocations of sacred history, examples of
alternative ways of living, and the legitimation of movement goals. These non-
discursive factors are difficult to quantify and thus often ignored, particularly by
resource mobilization theorists. However, they may be the most distinctive and
most important ways that religion contributes to movements for social change by
increasing actors’ capacity and desire to analyze their situation, form cohesive
groups, and mobilize (Billings 1990, 4).
The material resources that religion provides to social movements are impor-
tant, and I discuss them in more detail throughout this chapter. However, my
focus is on several less tangible contributions. First, religion provides ideological
grounding, particularly by framing political ideas and goals in terms that resonate
with ordinary people. Second, religion contributes to social movements by con-
necting different spheres and scales, especially the local experiences of everyday
life and large political structures. Third, religion serves as a source of distinc-
tive tactics and strategies, including those that are clearly spiritual or symbolic in
nature and practices that clearly have instrumental goals.
Religious Ideas and Social Change

In social movements and in everyday life, religious ideas are common sources of
inspiration, framing, and moral guidance. These ideas provide meaning, as Chris-
tian Smith notes, by describing a moral order that specifies proper relations among
persons and groups, the ultimate significance of life and the universe, and the
reasons for suffering, injustice, and death (Smith 2017, 79). Religion is thus a cru-
cial resource for what social scientists call “framing.” Framing, as Paul Almeida
explains, “involves the construction and shaping of the social world in a manner
consonant with encouraging and sustaining movement participation. In order for
a movement to be potent, it must have a viable collective action frame” (Almeida
2019, 81; see also Benford and Snow 2000; Snow et al. 1986). Collective action
186 Anna Peterson
frames gain legitimacy and meaning from historical events, shared experiences,
and important figures, including martyrs and victims of oppressive structures.
Religion serves as an important ground for collective action frames in many
settings. While providing meaning, explaining the world, and similar activities
are not unique to religion, what distinguishes religious ideas is their “fundamen-
tal concern with accessing superhuman powers for blessings and help,” as Smith
puts it (2017, 81). The special power of religious ideas, values, communities,
leaders, and practices rests on their connection to a transcendent realm, apart
from and superior to the mundane. This is especially evident when we look at
the way social movements use notions such as karma, creation, stewardship,
the reign of God, and divine law, among others, to justify and strengthen their
efforts.
Reynaldo Ileto provides a powerful example in his history of the ways that
peasant movements in the Philippines drew on the Pasyon—reconstructions of
the stations of the cross—to draw parallels between the suffering of Jesus and
the suffering of the poor, on one hand, and between the cruelty of those who
crucified Jesus and those who oppress the poor, on the other. As Ileto notes,
the identification of Filipino elites “with Christ’s tormentors could not fail to
have radical implications in actual life” (1979, 15). Their religiously inspired
frame portrays Jesus’s story not as meek acceptance of the power structures but
rather as “defiance toward the authorities out of commitment to an ideal” (17).
Christian activists in many other settings draw on similar images of Jesus as an
activist for justice who denounces and resists elites (e.g., Peterson 1997; Cone
1970, 114). Other religious leaders, from prophetic founders like Moses and
Muhammad to contemporary icons such as Romero, King, and Gandhi, provide
similarly powerful models for criticizing oppressive structures and legitimizing
resistance.
In these and other ways, scriptures and other religious narratives provide vivid,
concrete models of community, social relationships, and leadership. They help
participants connect their activities to sacred history, linked to others who pursued
the same divinely inspired goals. Religious ethics also help people critique exist-
ing social arrangements and authorities. The notion of a higher law, in particular,
provides justification to protesters who believe they may break human laws, if
these conflict with divine mandates. This is a common argument of protesters
committing civil disobedience, including civil rights activists who broke Jim
Crow laws by challenging segregated lunch counters and antiwar activists who
enter and even destroy government property at weapons plants (Epstein 1991;
Marsh 1997; McAdam 1988). A dramatic example came in the final Sunday ser-
mon of Oscar Romero, archbishop of San Salvador. Broadcasting to the nation,
Romero said:
I want to make a special appeal to soldiers, national guardsmen, and police-

men: each of you is one of us. The peasants you kill are your own brothers
and sisters. When you hear a man telling you to kill, remember God’s words,
“thou shalt not kill.” No soldier is obliged to obey a law contrary to the law
of God. In the name of God, in the name of our tormented people, I beseech
you, I implore you; in the name of God I command you to stop the repression.
(Kellogg Center n.d.)
Romero’s call to soldiers to disobey the orders of their superior officers is widely
seen as his final provocation to those in power, who had long resented his consist-
ent commitment to human rights, sympathy for opposition groups, and pointed
critiques of political and economic elites. Romero was assassinated on March 24,
1980, the day after he gave that sermon.
Religion influences the ideas and values of activists most clearly in organiza-
tions that have explicitly religious origins, leadership, or identities. Among the
best examples are civil rights and antiracist movements, past and present, whose
leaders frequently frame their position in religious terms, arguing that God made
all people equal, God grants human dignity to all, or God wills justice for all.
Many make frequent use of biblical phrases and images in their speeches. As
just one, especially famous example, King’s “I Have a Dream” speech quoted
the prophet Amos (5:24), asserting that African Americans will not be satisfied
until “justice rolls down like waters, and righteousness like a mighty stream”
(King 1963).
For King, this vision of justice was linked to the “beloved community” of
which he frequently spoke. Other social movements also draw on visions of a
better society to inspire and sustain activism. For example, Progressive Catholics
in Latin America often spoke of an ideal human society that echoed the values
of the reign of God, such as solidarity, abundance, equity, and peaceableness
(Romero 1985, 74). Such visions of a new society are among the most powerful,
and sometimes problematic, of religion’s contributions to social movements. The
notion that human achievements are embodiments, however partial, of a divine
reign can inspire people to sacrifice in pursuit of this ultimate good. In the strug-
gle for a better world, as Reinhold Niebuhr wrote, “the most effective agents”
will be people who believe in the illusion “that the collective life of mankind can
achieve perfect justice. It is a very valuable illusion for the moment; for justice
cannot be approximated if the hope of its perfect realization does not generate a
sublime madness in the soul. Nothing but such madness will do battle with malig-
nant power and ‘spiritual wickedness in high places.’ ” However, Niebuhr added,
“The illusion is dangerous because it encourages terrible fanaticism” (1931, 277).
Niebuhr’s warning reflects the special power of religious ideas, based on their
connection to sources of transcendent, absolute authority. This authority can
motivate people to challenge the powers that be even in the face of overwhelm-
ing obstacles, if they believe that God is on their side, but it can also encourage
“terrible fanaticism” (277).
Niebuhr’s analysis reflects a still common association of religion with fanati-
cism and fantasy. It is true that utopian images and notions of absolute righteous-
ness can be powerful inspirations. However, it is also true that religious ideas
contribute to social change in more mundane ways. Even while they are rooted in
a transcendent realm, religious ideas are also tied to the practices and customs of
188 Anna Peterson
everyday life (Reed 2011; Thompson 1993; Gramsci 1971). Their power, in fact,
comes in large part from their ability to situate people within a larger narrative
in which contemporary events echo sacred history and human efforts contribute
to the fulfillment of divine goals. An African American Pentecostal activist inter-
viewed by Richard Wood and Brad Fulton explains the distinctive power of this
language:
In a purely secular society, there is no real foundation in ideals; it turns into

idolatry. . . . There needs to be a deeper critique of how we define, understand,
and appropriate our language. So the faith language that comes out of our
traditions . . . we mine it for the kind of prophetic language that can redeem
the soul of our country, a country that’s been deeply soiled by racism, com-
modification, and a damning obsession with the material and with power.
(2015, 158)
This ability to “mine” Christian traditions for language that can “redeem the soul
of our country” has been a consistent strength of civil rights and antiracist organ-
izing in the United States, one of the most enduring and successful examples of
faith-based social activism.
Another example is rooted in the experience of progressive Catholic activ-
ists against military dictatorships in Latin America during the 1970s and 1980s.
They often understood their experiences of persecution in comparison to the
experiences of early Christian martyrs punished for their faith; as one Salvadoran
woman told me, “we’re in the time of the Romans, with the same spying and vigi-
lance” (Peterson 1997, 121–22). By drawing parallels between their experiences
and persecution described in the Bible, progressive Catholics define their struggle
as authentic and find the motivation to continue struggling despite sacrifices: “If
we’re persecuted like Christ,” another Salvadoran church activist explained, “it’s
because we’re doing what’s right and we’re not mistaken” (Peterson 1997, 123).
Parallels between contemporary experiences and sacred history perform a number
of important roles: they legitimize the struggles of contemporary activists, explain
their current lack of worldly power, provide role models for correct action, present
visions of a better society, and reinforce the goals they pursue. Their roots in scrip-
tures and other sacred narratives endow religious worldview and ethical systems
with resonance and influence that secular ideologies may lack (Ireland 1991).
This can make religious ideas powerful even in movements that are not explic-
itly religious. For example, a study of environmental values found that many
people who did not consider themselves religious used theological language to
express the reasons they cared about nonhuman nature. The authors of the survey
explained that even individuals who do not invoke God in other contexts do so in
order to talk and think about the meaning they give to nature. In particular, they
use the notion of caring for creation to explain the reasons that people should
preserve nature (Kempton, Boster, and Hartley 1995, 90). The reason so many
nonbelievers frame their environmental values in religious terms, according to
the researchers, is that “divine creation is the closest concept American culture
provides to express the sacredness of nature. Regardless of whether one actually
believes in biblical Creation, it is the best vehicle we have to express this value”
(Kempton, Boster, and Hartley 1995, 92). Rather to their surprise, the authors
conclude that instead of proving an obstacle to environmental support, religion, in
fact, reinforces and justifies it (Kempton, Boster, and Hartley 1995, 94).
An implicit, nonsectarian religiosity informs the attitudes of many environ-
mental advocates, who use religious terms such as creation and stewardship to
describe their commitment to the natural world. Many environmental organiza-
tions cite “stewardship” as a key value; it has become as prevalent as “sustain-
ability” in the shared language of environmental concern, used by both grassroots
movements and government agencies (see, e.g., Sierra Club 1995). Rarely do
these discussions mention God; stewardship is used in a generic way, as reflected
in the definition offered by the US Environmental Protection Agency: “environ-
mental stewardship is the responsibility for environmental quality shared by all
those whose actions affect the environment” (EPA n.d.; see also NOAA n.d.). The
concept of stewardship assumes that humans are caretakers on behalf of someone
else. Often this someone else is not named or is secularized, as the responsibility
to care for the planet on behalf of future generations. However, the roots of this
concept are religious: humans are stewards (or in the common Islamic phrase,
“vice-regents”) of the creation on behalf of the creator, who is the ultimate owner
and valuer. The widespread use of this term, like the notion of creation discussed
earlier, reflects the prevalence of spiritual values in the ways policymakers, activ-
ists, and ordinary people think about their responsibilities to nature.
In another example of the power of religious ideas in apparently secular move-
ments, E. P. Thompson documented the influence of religious ideas in earlier
workers’ struggles, showing how Methodism provided concepts of solidarity,
dignity, and mutual aid that enabled workers to resist the transition to a form
of capitalism that seemed to deny these values. In a more recent case, Dwight
Billings shows how Christian conceptions provided a lens through which Appala-
chian coal miners articulated their political goals (Billings 1990, 9). Particularly
in societies in which religion provides a dominant way of seeing the world, it is
an almost necessary source of the alternative moral conceptions that can motivate
oppositional political movements (Reed 2011, 239).
Ideas might be the most clear-cut contribution of religion to movements for
social change, since it is easy to identify the religious dimensions of ideologies,
moral codes, and language. However, ideas are always related to and embedded
in other aspects of religious life, including institutions and practices. The ideas
make sense and have force because of their connection to the material expressions
of religious experience, which can make big ideas about abstract ideals such as
justice, truth, and community real to people.
Religion, Everyday Life, and Big Structures

Just as religion can make big ideas real and meaningful to people’s ordinary expe-
riences, it can link local concerns to larger economic and political institutions. The
190 Anna Peterson
connection between everyday life and “big structures,” as political scientist Dan-
iel Levine puts it, is an issue for all social movements (Levine 1992). Religion is
crucial to this connection, because it encompasses both personal, local ideas and
practices and large institutions that operate in the public sphere. At the local level,
religion can provide moral legitimation, inspiration, organizational resources, and
community bonds. It can thus make uniquely valuable contributions to the devel-
opment of movements for social change. However, these contributions are not
automatic, and one of the tasks of scholarship on religion and social movements is
to identify the specific conditions that make religiously based activism effective.
This includes attention to the ways that religious communities and practices are
connected, by leaders and activists, to explicitly political institutions, practices,
and structures.
Thinking about religion’s role in these processes raises a larger problem that
faces many movements: how to connect scales so that what happens at the local
level is integrally linked to larger structural changes. The same is true of local
struggles; not all have equal potential to contribute to social change. Local activ-
ists must learn to “connect particular struggles to a general struggle in one quite
special way,” as Raymond Williams puts it (1989, 249). Many movements strug-
gle with this, either in efforts to expand their impact or, from the other perspective,
in efforts to make structural changes and national or global issues seem relevant to
people’s everyday lives. Religion can contribute to both challenges. As discussed
in the previous section, religious ideas can help people connect large concepts and
goals to their own lives. The same can be true of structures.
Thompson provides an example of religion’s ability to link everyday life and
big structures in his discussion of the ways that Methodism and the dissenting
sects contributed organization, logistical resources, education, and class identity
(Thompson 1963). Levin provides a more recent example in his analysis of pro-
gressive Catholicism in Latin America. Progressive Catholic initiatives usually
began at the level of a village, parish, or neighborhood, addressing people’s eve-
ryday concerns, such as access to seeds and fertilizer, education, and health care.
Many of these projects developed links to groups operating at larger scales, such
as pastoral training programs, peasant cooperatives, or women’s organizations.
These ties often emerged organically, because of the activities of particular people
who moved back and forth between levels. However, pastoral and lay leaders
also, in many cases, made deliberate efforts to connect people to spread models
and also to build the capacity to effect change at larger levels.
Another good example of these interconnections between scales is congrega-
tion-based organizing in the United States. This model is rooted in Saul Alinsky’s
conviction that when people organize successfully around issues such as local
schools or neighborhood conditions, they build power, identity, skills, and leader-
ship that they can then use to address problems on larger scales, like city, state,
or national policies (Alinsky 1989). Alinsky-style organizers systematically and
deliberately connect local struggles to larger issues, showing how power hier-
archies and systemic injustices operate at multiple levels and can be challenged
only by people working together. Congregation-based organizing puts religious
communities at the heart of this model, using congregations’ existing leadership,
relationships, social capital, and local knowledge as the foundation for building
movements that can effectively pursue policy changes. In this approach, faith pro-
vides a cultural basis for mobilization at the same time religious groups provide a
logistical basis (Wood and Fulton 2015, 153; see also Jacobsen 2001).
When successful, these organizations manage to “transcend localized concerns
while remaining embedded in local communities” (Wood and Fulton 2015, 38).
Their religious identity is crucial to this mediating capacity. Religious faith is
always intensely personal in its meaning and intensely local in its practices, at the
same time religious communities are almost always connected to bigger traditions
and institutions. This gives religion a unique ability to help social movements
make connections between scales, facilitating the diffusion of social movement
ideas, goals, and practices (Almeida 2019, 67). These connections can also trans-
form cultural and religious life, by relating faith to explicitly political institu-
tions, practices, and structures and thus redefining what is political and public.
Religion’s capacity to link different ideas, practices, and spheres in a nonpartisan,
relatively independent way is often crucial to the mobilization of people who
might not otherwise organize politically. As Dwight Billings explains, “religion
functions as a relatively autonomous sphere of social life that acts as a mediating
variable between oppression and opposition or submission” (1990, 2).
Religion and Practices of Social Change

My third theme—the distinctive practices that religion brings to social
movements—is linked to my prior discussions. Practices are the ways that
religious ideas become relevant to people’s experience and the ways that every-
day life is connected to big ideas. The connections between sacred history and
contemporary life, for example, or between local happenings and political institu-
tions, become real in and through concrete activities such as Bible studies, rituals,
and protests. These practices embody ideas in concrete ways, strengthen links
between people, and connect people to institutions, at both local and larger scales.
Some practices embody ideas in largely symbolic ways. Symbolic actions are
not undertaken, at least primarily, as steps toward the attainment of a strategic
goal but rather as a way to express moral values, solidify collective identities, and
inspire both the doers and observers. One form of symbolic protest is prayer, such
as one in which Bishop Mark Seitz joined other Catholic priests from the diocese
of El Paso to remember George Floyd, killed by police in Minneapolis (Seitz
2020). Remembering heroes and martyrs is another common symbolic practice.
Black Lives Matter activists, for example, frequently call out the names of victims
of police violence during their protests (Molina 2020). Similarly, Latin Ameri-
can human rights campaigners often use the combination of a victim’s name and
“presente!” Invoking these memories denounces the oppressive regime and also
commits survivors to seek justice (Lambelet 2019).
These actions have an implicit religious or spiritual dimension. In other cases,
protesters incorporate explicitly religious rituals into larger actions. The Christian
192 Anna Peterson
Eucharist, for example, has become part of antiwar rallies and other movements
(Moon 2003). In addition, religious practices such as pilgrimage and fasting have
themselves become political actions in a variety of movements, including Gandhi’s
campaign for Indian independence, Cesar Chavez’s work on behalf of migrant
farmworkers, and protests against the US role in political violence in Latin Amer-
ica (Lambelet 2019; Pagnucco 1996). Many times, these practices are not merely
symbolic but also instrumental, contributing in concrete ways to efforts to influ-
ence public opinion or policymakers (Orhan 2019a). This is evident, for example,
in the work of congregation-based organizations addressing economic and racial
inequities in many US cities (Wood 2002). Their actions, such as marching on
lawmakers’ offices or holding public meetings, not only have a strong symbolic
component but also aim at measurable goals. This underlines the important point
that the symbolic and instrumental dimensions of social movement activities are
not mutually exclusive and often cannot be clearly separated.
The relationship between action that has mainly symbolic value and that which
serves as a strategy or instrument toward a concrete goal is especially impor-
tant, and complex, in acts of nonviolent civil disobedience, such as civil rights
activists’ sit-ins or the sanctuary movement’s opening of churches to undocu-
mented immigrants. Civil disobedience has been central to pacifist activism, in
which nonviolent direct action serves both to call attention to protesters’ causes
and to embody their commitment to nonviolence. The combination of symbolic
and instrumental action is also central to the embrace of nonviolence by civil
rights activists, as King and other movement leaders often made clear. Nonvio-
lent, loving, and unified forms of action embody alternative ways of living, such
as King’s “beloved community,” or the grassroots Christian communities that
Catholic laypeople organized in Latin America. Many religiously grounded inten-
tional communities follow nonviolent principles, seeking to embody their values
in everyday life.
A powerful example is the Koinonia community, which has spent decades
embodying and working for racial integration, nonviolence, economic self-suffi-
ciency, and economic justice (Marsh 2006). Many intentional communities do not
directly undertake political action but rather seek to “be the change” they want
to see in the world, as an oft-cited phrase attributed to Gandhi puts it (Sanford
2013). In these communities, as Melucci wrote of new social movements, the
very forms of the movements are “messages” themselves. “Actors’ participation
within movements is no longer a means to an end” but rather an embodiment of
the kind of society that the movement seeks (Melucci 1989, 5). In such cases,
means and ends cannot always be clearly separated: activism becomes an end in
itself, regardless of its real-world impact. Ron Pagnucco argues that the religious
pacifists he studied, part of Pax Christi USA, believe “they must work for peace
and justice even if they are not at the moment ‘winning.’ ” He cites a popular
saying among Pax Christi activists: “We are called to be faithful, not effective”
(Pagnucco 1996, 218).
Religious communities and movements not only embody utopian visions but
also provide concrete forms of assistance to those who suffer as a result of unjust
social structures. Some activists dismiss direct aid because it addresses an imme-
diate need but does not change structures. However, feeding the hungry, shelter-
ing the homeless, and other charitable actions can be part of a larger strategy to
change larger institutions. This connection is not automatic; as Gary Francione
argues, regarding the animal rights movement, not all incremental measures are
created equally (Francione 1996, 111). Those that build power to change struc-
tures do so in and through practices that create community, train leaders, and
illuminate the structural context that gives rise to hunger, homelessness, and other
forms of social suffering. These practices mediate between big ideas and every-
day life, between local and larger spatial scales, and between secular and sacred
histories.
Conclusion
As I noted earlier in the chapter, there is no systematic, comprehensive analysis
that theorizes religion’s role in social movements (Pagnucco 1996, 205). As a
step toward this theorizing, I have highlighted three main ways in which religion
makes a distinctive contribution to social change. This role includes but goes
beyond the provision of tangible resources, such as funds, leaders, and infra-
structure, that many social movement scholars emphasize. In addition to these
contributions, I call attention to the ways that religion provides ideas, mediates
between spheres and scales, and generates distinctive practices of opposition.
I argue, further, that religion plays these roles even in movements not explicitly
faith-based.
Religious ideas are important because they shape the ways many people under-
stand the world and their role in it. They can help people interpret injustice in
moral terms and motivate resistance to it, provide models of exemplary behavior,
and give larger meaning to everyday experiences. Religious ideas are important
not only because they give legitimacy to activism but also because they help con-
nect different aspects of people’s lives—their faith and their experiences in the
workplace, for example, or their reading of sacred scripture and their interpreta-
tion of political events. This is true not only for explicitly faith-based movements
but also for those that appear secular. Even in the latter, people often frame the
issues and their own reasons for acting in religious terms, as in the frequent men-
tion of stewardship and creation by environmental activists.
Just as religion provides ideas that link different aspects of people’s lives, it can
mediate between different types and scales of experience. In particular, religion
can provide both practical and symbolic connections between everyday life and
local community, on one hand, and larger, explicitly political structures or pro-
cesses on the other. This occurs in practical ways, as when congregation-based
organizations connect local religious communities to larger struggles, such as coa-
litions fighting for health care reform, racial justice, and economic equity (Wood
and Fulton 2015). Religion also mediates between scales in symbolic ways, by
giving collective and even explicitly political significance to ordinary, personal
experiences. Thus, faith-based movements can help people interpret their own
194 Anna Peterson
hardships as part of something larger, both in terms of the causes of suffering and
in terms of potential solutions.
Perhaps the least studied aspect of religion’s role in social change is the dis-
tinctive kinds of practices that it generates. These include spiritually inspired
practices, such as pilgrimages, sacraments, preaching, praying, fasting, civil diso-
bedience, and other forms of nonviolent direct action. These activities have both
symbolic and practical significance, and the two aspects are often intertwined
and even indistinguishable. They are important, furthermore, in many movements
that are not exclusively or primarily religious in nature, such as antiwar and labor
activism, as well as innovative contemporary movements such as Black Lives
Matter (Farrag 2018; Lizza 2018; Lloyd et al. 2016; Molina 2020). Again, reli-
gion’s role in social change activism expands far beyond movements that clearly
have a religious or organizational base (Orhan 2019b).
Despite the breadth and variety of ways in which religion supports movements
for social change, this relationship is not inevitable. Religion’s social and politi-
cal roles are ambivalent and fluid and sometimes contradictory. While religious
images, ideas, and institutions can help legitimate and strengthen opposition to the
established order, they also serve the status quo in many ways. This ambivalence
is evident, for example, in Thompson’s study of Methodism’s multiple roles as a
vital resource for both working-class struggles and their opponents (Thompson
1963). The multiplicity of religion’s relationship to social change is due not only
to factors internal to a particular tradition or community but also to historical and
material circumstances. Religion is always in a mutually transformative relation-
ship with economic and political conditions. In the context of cultural life, as
Jean-Pierre Reed notes, “people exercise their choices, practice their beliefs, and
justify accepting or rejecting inherited conditions according to their values and
moral imperatives, which are not always conservative in nature but always subject
to innovation” (2011, 252). Studies of religion’s role in social change and social
movements must emphasize this fluidity and openness, which are rooted in the
very practices that make both social movements and religious life possible.
Notes
1 Not all sociologists would put Berger in the Durkheimian or functionalist camp, since
some of his early work was more syncretic and drew on a range of intellectual traditions,
including Schutz, Weber, and even Marx.
2 For another take on this position, see Halévy (1971).
3 It was Engels who brought Munzer’s work to Marx’s attention.
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11 Mobilizing Religion in
Twenty-First-Century
Nativism in the United States
Rhys H. Williams1
Introduction
Historically, religion has had a significant role in the formation and expression of
American identity. Religion has also been a central player in American politics,
in ways that range from influencing party identification to voting to galvanizing
social movements. Putting those two dynamics together, it is not surprising that
religion has been an important dimension of the political contention about who
can be an American. One way that has become manifest has been in the politics
of immigration—who should be allowed to come to this country, how many from
where, why they want to come, and what is expected of them when they do. Reli-
gion, in sum, has been vital to the US politics of immigration, including the politi-
cal movements that have sought to restrict immigration or to support it.
Those familiar with the history of nineteenth-century immigration to the United
States will hardly find that summary a controversial statement. Religious iden-
tities, both the identities held by prospective immigrants and the identities of
native-born Americans, combined with various religious values, have had a huge
impact on the acceptance of or resistance to immigrants. Particularly vibrant at
various historical points was anti-Catholic activism (Williams 2016a). That the
United States was assumed by many to be a fundamentally Protestant nation was
both implicit and explicit. Many native-born Americans (an ironic term in itself,
given their families’ origins in Europe and their living on land conquered from
indigenous peoples) assumed that Protestant religious and social values were
“naturally” aligned with the democratic-social values of the United States. From
this, many assumed that newcomers who were non-Protestant had to change
and assimilate in order to truly belong to this country; for others, however, there
was the firm belief that Catholics and Jews (and now Muslims) simply could not
become true “Americans.”
Following World War II in the United States, overt religious prejudice dimin-
ished. The combination of American Catholics’ full involvement in the war effort
and horror at the Nazi Holocaust made explicit prejudice and discrimination less
publicly acceptable (of course, it did not go away, but it became much less overt).
A consensus-based public celebration of religious pluralism became much more
common (Herberg 1955; Wuthnow 1988; Wall 2008). Thus, for many Americans,
DOI: 10.4324/9781003177821-14
200 Rhys H. Williams
issues of religion receded as one of the major influences on attitudes toward immi-
gration (Williams 2016b). For example, by the first decade of the twenty-first
century, a small minority of Americans reported ever hearing messages about
immigration as a moral or political issue from their religious congregation’s
leaders (Pew 2006) and in a 2010 survey, only 7 percent reported that religion
was “the most important influence” on their attitudes toward immigration, far
lower than the issues of same-sex marriage, abortion, or capital punishment (see
Williams 2016b, 278). Kobes du Mez (2018, 1) reported that “the Bible appears
to hold little sway when it comes to immigration: a 2015 LifeWay Research poll
found that 90 percent of all evangelicals say that ‘the Scripture has no impact on
their views toward immigration reform.’ ” She concluded that Evangelicals are not
basing their immigration views on scripture but are instead “acting out of a pow-
erful, cohesive worldview—an ideology that is at the heart of their religious and
political identity” (2018, 1). Thus, while immigration has become a hot-button
political issue again, this evidence provides reasons to think that religious distinc-
tions and prejudice are not foremost among the factors influencing the conflicts
around immigration policy.
And yet, in the second decade of the twenty-first century, a significant anti-
immigrant nativist movement became very active, with significant influence in
the Republican Party (Williams 2013). It is also true that by this time White Evan-
gelical Protestants had become a major part of the “base” of the Republican Party.
While much of the GOP’s appeal to White Evangelicals came from its antiabor-
tion politics, its anticommunist rhetoric, and its support for public displays of
religious symbols (such as Christmas Nativity scenes), it is also the case that
White Evangelicals are increasingly anti-immigration. This essay examines the
explicitly religious discourses used by White Evangelical religious leaders in jus-
tifying anti-immigration public policies. My argument is that the particular forms
of these discourses—scriptural citations—mobilize support for anti-immigration
policies by serving as a multidimensional “ideology” (Platt and Williams 2002).
That is, they provide intellectual and moral arguments for why certain policies
should be enacted, in a language that resonates and produces the emotional com-
mitments that make political action possible.
Religion and Immigration Sentiment

Immigration was a central dimension of Donald Trump’s appeal when he ran for
and was elected president in 2016—his remarks at the infamous 2015 announce-
ment of his candidacy were in large part consumed with the need to slow immi-
gration and expressed a myriad of fears regarding current immigrants. This
theme accelerated in the campaign, as the phrase “build the wall!” (meaning on
the southern US border with Mexico) became a common campaign rallying cry.
The general media coverage of, and the liberal political reaction to, this aspect of
Trump’s campaign and political appeal focused on its racial dimensions. Whether
Trump personally was racist was publicly debated to the point where sociologists
were pulling out their hair, but even academic studies centered on the question
Mobilizing Religion in US Nativism 201
of whether Trump’s popular appeal came from those experiencing economic dis-
placement or those motivated by racial resentment, especially among working-
class whites (e.g., even Robert Wuthnow, a noted sociologist of religion, focused
on the racial, not religious, aspects of anti-immigrant sentiment in his 2018 book
The Left Behind).
Nonetheless, Trump received more than 80 percent of the votes from White
Evangelical Protestants and their level of support for his presidency remained
higher than any other ethno-religious group throughout his presidency. Political
pundits pondered why this might be so, given Trump’s almost non-existent per-
sonal piety. Many noted that White Evangelicals supported Trump because he
promised to appoint anti-abortion justices to the Supreme Court; Trump also made
numerous nods to symbolic cultural practices favored by White Evangelicals—
such as saying “Merry Christmas” rather than “happy holidays.”
Wondering whether Trump’s appeal was “racist” or “religious” misses an
important sociological dynamic. For many, the definition of American national
identity involves being a particular type of Christian, an identity and a set of
beliefs that are simultaneously religious, political, and implicitly racial. Whitehead
and Perry (2020) show that what they call “Christian nationalism” is an inter-
secting ideology that combines religious and political commitments and ties it to
American identity; this politicized religious identity was a key predictor of voting
for Donald Trump in 2016. Relatedly, Williams’s (2013) examination of the cul-
tural politics of immigration and anti-Obama sentiment revealed the intersectional
nature of race and religion in much of this opposition.
In part because of the salience of race in American politics, the religious dimen-
sions of attitudes toward immigration and immigrants have been under-examined
compared to their racial dimensions. There are some exceptions, of course. Knoll
(2009) demonstrated the declining importance of religious tradition (i.e., Protes-
tant, Catholic, Jewish, etc.) as a predictor of immigration attitudes, even as indi-
viduals’ religious characteristics continued to matter, for both those on the liberal
and conservative sides of the issues. Sherkat and Lehman (2018) not only found
clearly heightened anti-immigrant and anti-Muslim sentiment among White Prot-
estant “sectarians” (roughly meaning Evangelicals) compared to other Protestants
but also found White Catholics much more suspicious and hostile compared to
non-White Catholics. Significantly, they showed that biblical literalism, as a reli-
gious commitment, was predictive of anti-immigrant sentiment.
Whatever the attitudinal situation before 2016, during the Trump presidency
the border wall on the US–Mexican border and general immigration policies,
increased as a contested and polarizing political issue. And conservative religious
anti-immigration activism became as significant as progressive religious activism
on immigration issues. Progressive, pro-immigration efforts regularly drew on
support and inspiration from religious pronouncements such as those emanating
from Roman Catholic leaders, including a 2014 statement from Pope Francis (see
also the analysis of Davis, Martinez, and Warner 2010). Concerns to “welcome
the stranger” and repetition of the parable of the Good Samaritan were common
(e.g., Yukich 2013). It was not uncommon for activists to portray the Holy Family’s
traveling to Egypt to escape King Herod as an example of why Christians should
be welcoming to refugees (Martinez 2017).
This chapter focuses on the use of religious arguments, images, and references
by anti-immigrant forces that supported the Trump administration’s policies, par-
ticularly post-2016. Not all anti-immigrant activists used religious arguments, but
the specific religious supports for contemporary anti-immigration sentiment have
not been examined closely in the sociological literature. Empirically, the purpose
here is to illuminate specific ideas and symbols used in these efforts to justify
religiously the Trump administration’s anti-immigration efforts. Theoretically, the
argument illustrates how mobilizing and framing rhetorics in collective action can
form a multilayered ideology that offers policy prescriptions, moral justifications,
and a subtext of collective identity.
Religion and Collective Action Framing

It is not a new point to emphasize the varied ways in which religion can be used
effectively in collective action (Williams 1996, 2003; Nepstad and Williams
2007; Reed 2017; Reed, Williams, and Ward 2016). This involvement can take
many different analytic and empirical forms. Religion can be a major part of the
institutional context in a society, thus making religious organizations natural sites
of organizing collective action. Morris (1984) on the civil rights movement and
C. Smith (1996) on the Central American peace movement both make this a
centerpiece of their analysis. Or a nation or social group can share a particular
religious identity, making the formation of movement collective identity easier
and locating collective interests in religious terms (e.g., Johnston 1993; Johnston
and Snow 1998).
In this chapter, I lift up the connections between the direct use of religious
language and symbols used by the movement “elites” who are opinion leaders.
These elites offer claims that urge support for particular social policies or actions
and explain why their preferences are justifiable and legitimate. I focus here on
the direct use of religious referents, as distinct from, for example, the generic use
of moralized arguments, or appeals to a shared identity, or implicit but coded lan-
guage. These religious referents can take a variety of forms. For example, Reed
(2017) shows the ways in which religious storytelling helped produce revolution-
ary consciousness in 1970s Nicaragua. Particular religious discourses based on
stories of prophecy, Christian virtue, miracles, and social challenges to revolu-
tionary action allowed story users to explore and understand models of action
that were consistent with political challenges and revolution. In the settings Reed
analyzed, they helped foster a shared and critical collective consciousness. To use
another example, James Aho (1996) demonstrates how the particular theological
doctrine of millenarianism, a belief about the end-times and Second Coming of
Jesus, was fused to racist political positions in the Christian Identity movement.
The theological commitment gave the movement’s members a sense of urgency
and righteousness that motivated extremist violence. Harrold, Eve, and Taylor
(2004) examine Creationism as both a theological construct and a movement
ideology, showing with another religiously based movement how deftly religion
can interweave those multiple purposes.
I focus here on well-established Protestant religious/institutional leaders in the
United States, asking a slightly different conceptual question. Rather than exam-
ine the development of collective consciousness at the grassroots, I look at the
symbols and examples used by movement elites to justify political preferences.
These framings, as would any effective movement rhetoric, draw upon a cultural
storehouse of knowledge that the grassroots would know and consider legitimate.
Some of the people cited here might deny that they are, in fact, “movement
elites.” Several of them are pastors of congregations and they would contend they
are just articulating a religious perspective on pressing public issues, as any com-
mitted Christian would. Nonetheless, they are pastors of what are often wealthy
congregations or religious media sites, which offer them visible platforms and
well-resourced bases. And they are propounding on these issues often because
their perspectives are solicited by the media. The media recognize that these fig-
ures are opinion leaders for a significant number of Americans. Whether reacting
or proactively speaking, they are clearly participating in what is collective action.
Debating whether they are actually “members” of a social movement risks treat-
ing social movements as if they are all voluntary associations with membership
requirements and lists. This misses the fluidity of collective action, especially in
the digital age; instead, I recognize the clear role these pastors and spokespersons
play in formulating a discursive structure that articulates and justifies collective
action goals.
In examining the religious images and referents used to justify the Trump admin-
istration’s immigration policies and actions, I found two overlapping but distinct
categories of claims: first, explicit references to God-given commands to control
or lower immigration, or at least lower the threat that immigration is thought to
present to Americans; and, second, references to persons and the roles they play in
the current drama around immigration—centering on President Trump, specific
immigrants, Americans, and even Jesus and the Holy Family themselves.
Scripture Justifying the Nation and Its Borders

Most of the direct religious references used by these Trump-supporting figures
come from scripture as articulated in the Christian Bible. This is not surprising
as the core of the Trump administration’s support were/are White Evangelical
Protestants, a group that historically has placed scripture at the center of religious
authority (Williams 2009). Practices such as “proof-texting”—that is, providing a
scriptural reference, usually an isolated, out-of-context biblical verse, as a support
and justification for any claims made about religion or morality—are common
among evangelical laity as well as clergy. This veneration of the text purports to
remove interpretation, worldly social status, or other contextual elements from
each person’s understanding of God’s will. The Bible and its religious truths are
thought to exist plainly on the page, available for all to see and understand using
a basic, commonsense reading. In that way, scripture is both a source of authority
and a material symbol of religious truth. Being “Bible-believing” (Ammerman
1987; Watt 2002) is an identity category that works implicitly to support the con-
tent of whatever claims are made, even if they are only marginally connected
to specific scripture. To describe something as ‘biblical’ can be a justification in
itself, even without the proof-text. One result is that the Bible, as a book, can be
a prop that is itself a contextual and justifying symbol. Even in situations where
Evangelical pastors are speaking about current events or everyday life, and they
do not necessarily have a direct scriptural reference, they regularly do so with a
Bible visibly present.
The first set of arguments I describe are scriptural references used to empha-
size the boundaries that separate nations from each other, and that often lead to
the direct or indirect conclusion that God intended to make America distinct as
a nation. A number of religious leaders who were major supporters of President
Trump’s efforts to slow or stop immigration focused on what they considered the
Scriptural evidence that God intended nations to be separate and distinct and that
therefore there is divine approval for policies that reinforce such divisions.
For example, Rev. David Jeremiah, a Southern Baptist pastor who founded
“Turning Point Radio and Television Ministries” and heads the Shadow Mountain
Community Church in California, gave a 2016 sermon called “The Bleeding of
Our Borders,” which was followed up by a 2020 DVD version. In it he calls upon
the Old Testament tale of the Tower of Babel, within the context of speaking about
immigration:
Do you know that God’s original plan for humanity was for all of us to live
together in one family, with one common language throughout all the earth?
But then this dude named Nimrod got involved. You remember him? So
Nimrod, the ruler of the Mesopotamian city of Babel, moved to gain power
over all the people of the earth by building this massive tower that would
draw everyone to a central location under his control. And it was man’s first
attempt at a one world government, which, without God, would have brought
about almost unlimited tyranny.
So God put a stop to it. He brought a stop to Nimrod’s power grab simply by
dividing the world’s single language into many. And workers could no longer
communicate with each other, which abruptly ended tower construction. Peo-
ple scattered throughout the earth, grouping according to their new languages.
And you can read all about that in the first verses of Genesis chapter 11.
(Jeremiah 2020)
For many, this may seem a somewhat counterintuitive repurposing of the Tower
of Babel story. In some tellings, God punishes humankind for its hubris, con-
sidering humans presumptuous in building a tower toward heaven and perhaps
even a bit dangerous if they discover they can do anything they choose. In that
interpretation, it is God’s plan to scatter the nations but not because nations or
nationalism are intrinsically good aspects of creation—they are a punishment.
But in Rev. Jeremiah’s telling, the danger is in globalism and Nimrod’s political
ambitions. Nationalism is a goal, not just a means. Indeed, it almost seems that in
Rev. Jeremiah’s version God changes His mind about how to deal with humanity,
and thus blesses nationalism.
Along with the Genesis story of Babel, Rev. Jeremiah uses other references
from Hebrew Scriptures, such as Exodus 23:9 (calling on the faithful not to
oppress the stranger or foreigner) and Leviticus 18:26 (calling on both native-
born and foreigners to obey the law). These two references are put in the service
of criticizing undocumented immigrants and immigration and noting that immi-
grants who do come to the United States need to adjust to life and law here. Rev.
Jeremiah explained:
The term ‘melting pot’ was a descriptive metaphor indicating that the poten-
tially divisive attitudes and customs of the old country would be left behind
as the newcomers blended into a new commonality of purpose. But today, it
seems that the pot is no longer melting. Some incoming groups defy cultural
assimilation. They cluster into enclaves and demand special concessions for
their ethnic customs, their beliefs, their languages, and in some cases, even
their laws. That’s just some problems with legal immigration.
(Jeremiah 2020)
Interestingly, in this case, cultural enclaves and separation are the problem, not
part of God’s plan for healthy, moral societies. Nations, while separated by God,
should be internally homogeneous, at least culturally. Thus, this is presented as
a divine endorsement of immigration, however qualified. When immigrants do
come in legally, and then act appropriately toward existing law and custom, then
Christians have obligations not to oppress them:
The last thing is the thing that we’re all struggling with at this particular time,
and that is in the Old Testament, they were to assist the stranger, and they
were to accept the stranger, but they were also to assimilate the stranger. And
this is where it gets difficult. The Scripture makes it clear that when outsiders
came into Israel, they were to be treated well. But the flip side of the coin was
that strangers and sojourners living among them, if you please, did not have
carte blanche to just live any way they wanted to.
(Jeremiah 2020)
A very similar exegesis was offered by other religious leaders. For example,
Ralph Reed, who came to prominence in Pat Robertson’s Christian Coalition and
then went on to be founder and chairman of the Faith & Freedom Coalition, made
a similar case in a February 12, 2013, op-ed contribution to USA Today. As is
typical, he grounded his case in scripture, and he cites the obligations of both
immigrants and the host society:
In Scripture, the obligation to care for the alien carries a corollary responsi-
bility for the immigrant to obey the law and respect national customs. In the
Old Testament, immigrants who followed the law shared in the inheritance of
Israel. . . . Those who have come to the U.S. illegally must reform. . .
Reed then goes on to point to Scripture as the guide for how the country’s politi-
cal leadership should tackle the contemporary political problems connected to
immigration—in consultation with the “faith community” (a phrase Reed helped
popularize as a way of obfuscating his claim that Christian leaders and doctrine
should be politically preeminent in the United States; note that potential policy
discussions should be guided by the Bible):
As politicians seek to solve the thorny problem of U.S. immigration pol-

icy, they should sit down with the faith community and perhaps open their
Bibles.
(Reed 2013)
Among the “reforms” that Reed delineated for undocumented immigrants

were “learning English,” a clear gesture to the notion that the nations that
God defined and recognizes have clearly defined cultures marked by a certain
homogeneity.
Reed reiterated his political support for the Trump administration’s immigra-
tion policy in general terms in a May 16, 2019 statement from the Faith & Free-
dom Coalition’s website:
This White House-backed plan aligns with the Faith & Freedom Coali-
tion’s immigration reform principles, including strengthening, not under-
mining the nuclear family; promoting respect for the rule of law; meeting
the needs of the U.S. economy, and securing the border and strictly enforc-
ing the law.
(Reed 2019)
While this did not have direct Scriptural references, the importance of a secure
border, protecting the righteous, and law enforcement are all clear. The passage
about “not undermining the nuclear family” has some ambiguity in it. It clearly
could carry some inference that immigrants, particularly the undocumented, are
of questionable moral character. But it could also be a slight distancing from the
Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency’s Trump-era practice of separat-
ing children from their parents in border detention facilities. That practice gener-
ated huge controversy and negative press, and many religious supporters wanted
not to be seen as endorsing it.
The scriptural references commonly found in discussions about borders and
pro-restrictionist immigration policies are disproportionately drawn from the
Hebrew scriptures/Old Testament. Examples from the books of Exodus, Deuter-
onomy, and Proverbs exist on many sites, along with many references to Nehe-
miah (discussed more later). Rev. Jeremiah, in the sermon cited earlier, moved
beyond the common passages from Hebrew scripture. He also pulled in New
Testament references, but again in the service of showing how nations were dif-
ferent from each other and should remain so. He continued:
While worldwide unity was God’s original intent, the national separateness
we experience today is a God-ordained protection against one of the worst
effects of the Fall, and that is man’s prideful craving for power. The Apostle
Paul wrote these words, listen carefully, [reads Acts 17:26.] From one man
He made all the nations, that they should inhabit the whole earth; and He
marked out their appointed times in history and the boundaries of their lands.
Rev. Jeremiah then makes it clear that national boundaries are in God’s plan, and
even designed by him, pulling on the last sentence of the verse:
As Paul explained [in Acts 17:26], God scattered men and set the boundaries
of their dwellings so that they would seek after God. God is not a globalist.
God is a nationalist. . . . He has set the boundaries of every nation. And the
reason he did it is because if you let someone get in charge of the whole
world, you end up with what the Antichrist is going to do in the future.
(Jeremiah 2020)
The Tower of Babel was not just human hubris about wanting to reach heaven;
it was also a violation of divine plan because it imagined a world of complete
human unity and one global nation. God disapproved of that, apparently because
it smacked of globalism, and so created the many languages of the earth and
assigned the resulting nations to their own time and territory. Immigration is a part
of God’s world but only when done acceptably and within the context of knowing
that God approves of nations and national boundaries.
Another example of a discussion of national borders and boundaries comes
from a 2019 post to Crosswalk.com, which is an Evangelical website. A collection
of authors known collectively as the Evangelical Immigration Table considered
the role of national borders in the Bible. They note that the “Israelites’ establish-
ment of fortified cities ‘for protection’ (Numbers 32:17),” was key to the “God-
ordained role of government” to protect its citizens from outsiders (more on walls
and protection below). But their group also articulated the claim that God’s pur-
pose in destroying the Tower of Babel and giving humanity different languages
was to separate and distinguish the “cultures” of humanity from one another. This,
in turn, justifies restricting immigrants from entering the country (Evangelical
Immigration Table 2019).
Scripture and “The Wall”

Beyond the support for symbolic borders and separate nations as part of God’s
plan, another significant dimension of religious defenses of the Trump immigra-
tion approach was the building/extension of the border wall between the United
States and Mexico, in theory running from the Pacific Ocean in California to
the Gulf of Mexico in Texas. Shouts of “build the wall” became ubiquitous at
Trump rallies and even showed up in other public settings—for example, at a high
school football game in Utah, a group of fans started chanting “build the wall”;
in California in 2018, fans of one high school hung a banner that read “Build the
Wall” during a game with a rival team from a predominately Latinx school; it also
happened at a high school football game in Connecticut in 2016, a high school
volleyball match in Texas in 2016, and at high school basketball games in Indiana
and Iowa in 2016 and 2017.
The clear anti-Latino/a tenor of these incidents often put advocates for border
security, and the wall as its most visible manifestation, on the defensive. It became
common for political cartoonists to use images of a wall on the border as a way of
lampooning conservative immigration politics as un-American. Particularly after
the controversy concerning the Trump administration’s decision to separate chil-
dren from families when detaining undocumented migrants, Evangelicals looked
for ways to justify a wall as a form of border security.
Wayne Grudem, a professor of theology and biblical studies at Phoenix Semi-
nary in Arizona, used the website Townhall.com, a conservative political outlet,
to make the religious case for the wall in July 2018, in his post titled “Why
Building a Border Wall is a Morally Good Thing.” Grudem maintained that the
Bible repeatedly views “protective walls” as a good thing. He cited several pas-
sages in Psalms, and noted that King David and King Solomon built strong walls
around Jerusalem, ensuring its security, and acted in accordance with God’s own
efforts:
There was also a spiritual component, for the Lord himself strengthened the
gates in the walls so they would protect the children and the peace and pros-
perity of a city.
Gruden then referenced scripture directly to show how walls provide security
from external threats and ensure internal prosperity:
“Praise the LORD, O Jerusalem! Praise your God, O Zion! For he strengthens
the bars of your gates; he blesses your children within you. He makes peace
in your borders; he fills you with the finest of the wheat.”
(Psalm 147:12–14; Grudem 2018)
When Israel strayed from God’s path, Babylonian invaders broke down the
walls of the city and Jerusalem fell. Grudem called the broken walls “a mark of
shame and derision.” He continued:
The pathetic shame of a city without walls is also evident in this proverb:
‘A man without self-control is like a city broken into and left without walls’
(Proverbs 25:28). The implication is that such a man and such a city are both
headed for destruction.
(Grudem 2018)
Thus, walls are essential in keeping God’s people safe in a world full of evil.
But they do more than just guard against external threats; they are a sign of, and
a way to maintain, the internal character and faithfulness of a people. Grudem
again:
My conclusion from this overview is that the Bible views border walls as a
morally good thing, something for which to thank God. Walls on a border are
a major deterrent to evil and they provide clear visible evidence that a city or
nation has control over who enters it . . .
(emphasis in original)
There is an implicit theory of the state there, involving the effectiveness of author-
ity over the governed population. As Gruden continues, it becomes clear that a
nation must control outsiders so as to preserve internal order:
[This is] something absolutely essential if a government is going to prevent a

nation from devolving into more and more anarchy.
(Grudem 2018)
A number of other evangelical opinion leaders and Trump supporters used the
example of Nehemiah rebuilding the walls of Jerusalem in their defense of the
border wall. For example, at the 2018 Conservative Political Action Committee
summit, Leslie Rutledge, the attorney general of Arkansas, said:
Just as the story of Nehemiah in the good book, Nehemiah was called to build
that wall to protect the city. We are all called to do something. Nehemiah had
naysayers who told him, “Nehemiah get down you can’t build that wall.” He
looked at them and said, “oh no, I can because God called me to build this
wall.”
(Kauffman 2018)
Rutledge is doing two things here. First, she is showing that God approves of
physical walls as barriers to evil and to protect a people; second, she implicitly
equated Israel’s Jerusalem, and the Jews as the covenanted and Chosen people
of God, with the current United States and the American people. The Nehemiah
reference only makes sense as a justification for a wall if what the wall is protect-
ing is innocent or otherwise deserving of God’s favor. It places the American
nation into the story in the role of Old Testament Israel. That this alignment occurs
repeatedly in these references to scripture, but is never an explicit point or pointed
to directly, shows how powerfully conservative Evangelical Protestants assume a
“tribal civil religion” (Williams 2013).
One of the most prominent clergy who supported Donald Trump and his presi-
dency was Rev. Robert Jeffress, senior pastor of the First Baptist Church in Dallas,
Texas. Rev. Jeffress was extremely visible as a Trump defender. He also has a long
record of summoning biblical support for building material barriers on the nation’s
borders. For example, he made comments on Fox News in July 2014, published a
sermon in January 2017, and wrote an opinion piece in February 2018. In another
appearance on Fox & Friends in January 2019, which was cited the next day by
HuffPost (the renamed online site of the Huffington Post), Jeffress was quoted:
The Bible says even Heaven itself is gonna have a wall around it. . . . Not
everybody is going to be allowed in. So if walls are immoral, then God is
immoral. . . . The Bible teaches that the primary responsibility of government
is to maintain order and keep its citizens safe, and there’s nothing wrong with
using a wall to do that.
(Kuruvilla 2019)
Jeffress expanded on that reasoning to NPR’s All Things Considered in

February 2019:
To say that a wall is immoral or, as the pope said earlier this year, unChristian,
I think is beyond reason. Walls are not moral or immoral in and of them-
selves. It depends on the purpose for which they’re being used. And for gov-
ernment to use a barrier to protect its security and its sovereignty I believe is
in keeping with what the Bible says, is the God-given purpose of government,
you know? I preached the sermon on Inauguration Day for President Trump
and his family. And I told the Old Testament story of Nehemiah, whom God
ordered to build a wall around Jerusalem to protect the citizens. And, as an
aside, I said, “Mr. President, God is not against walls.”
(Jeffress, on Martin 2019)
The story of Nehemiah repeatedly figures prominently as providing evidence

for the importance of the physical wall. Just as the Tower of Babel gave a mate-
rial referent to the division of nations into separate lands, God’s command to
rebuild the walls of Jerusalem powers the argument for the southern border bar-
rier. A website called Eternal Evangelism contained a lengthy piece grounded
both in Nehemiah and in polemics about opposing positions on the current border
controversy:
God commands walls throughout HIS word which is left as our rule book that
we MUST FOLLOW! Only a godless, brainless, immoral fool would think
a wall does not work or is not needed between countries, around prisons,
etc. . . .
The author provides more specifics on who these godless, brainless, and immoral
fools are, in keeping with much of politicized Evangelicalism’s consistent fear
of the threat posed by the entertainment industry and secularists (see Williams
2009):
Most all of the godless politicians and hollywood [sic] filth of today live in
“gated” (walled/protected) communities yet they spew their foolish filth out
of their wretched selves! God will cast you all in the eternal lake of Fire . . .
as you cry “tolerance” and “acceptance” 100% in objection to God’s moral
laws!
Then the author returns to Scripture to solidify the point that building the wall is
the work of God:
Nehemiah 6:15–16. . . “So the wall was finished in . . . fifty and two days. . . .
And it came to pass, that when all our enemies heard thereof, and all the hea-
then . . . saw these things, they were much cast down . . . for they perceived
that this work was wrought of our God.”
(Miller 2019)
The importance of walls for protection of the “innocent” is an interesting motif

in many of these arguments. The external world is assumed to be dangerous, with
others—in this case non-Americans—too often looking to do “us” harm and as
noted earlier “us” clearly aligns with God’s people. But the connection between
the “us”—Americans—and the innocent deserving of protection is generally
implicit. The writers regularly draw on the Hebrew scripture for examples, as it
is filled with stories of the travails and triumphs of the chosen people, an ethno-
religious group working to establish God’s kingdom in a promised land. Far fewer
useful examples of this narrative are in the Christian stories of the New Testa-
ment, where Jesus regularly preaches nonviolence, an openness to others, and a
universalistic ethos of care. The writers here implicitly throw their lot in with the
nationalist “chosen” identity which makes America first and foremost a “Christian
nation” but in which the Christian designation is more tribal than universal
(Williams 2013).
Evidence for these implicit alignments also show up in the use of Romans 13
as a scriptural touchpoint by members of the Trump administration, such as Press
Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders or Attorney General Jeff Sessions, when dis-
cussing issues of immigration law and policy:
Let every person be subject to the governing authorities. For there is no

authority except from God, and those that exist have been instituted by God.
Therefore he who resists the authorities resists what God has appointed . . .
(Romans 13:1–2; NRSV)
God’s Chosen Leaders Guide the Nation

As noted earlier, there is a second category of direct scriptural referents in sup-
port of Donald Trump, his presidency, and its approach to immigration. Where
the first set was justifying national boundaries and then physical border walls to
secure those borders, the second set expounds on the God-given purpose and role
of particular people. Not surprisingly, this usually means some recognition of
the specific divine mandate that accompanied Donald Trump into the presidency.
This dovetails with the use of Romans 13 noted above—God was portrayed as
recognizing Trump’s presidency as legitimate and thus the administration’s
expressions of authority must be obeyed.
Donald Trump himself was not personally pious, often displayed very little
knowledge about the Bible or Christianity, and, on top of that, had little concern
that he displayed such limited knowledge. Many of his defenders tried to explain
that he was growing in the faith or was different and pious in private. But unlike
George W. Bush, Trump just wasn’t conversant in the language of Evangelical
religion, and this sometimes presented a challenge to public portrayals of his
faithfulness by those defending him.
One response was to acknowledge that Trump himself was not personally very
religious but that it was immaterial to his status as divinely favored. Numerous
supporters noted that God often chose “imperfect” people to carry out his plans.
For example, Secretary of Energy Rick Perry used just that language in Novem-
ber 2019 (Cummings 2019). Also, Jerry Falwell, Jr. noted that one voted for the
most effective leader to be president; thus, personal piety was secondary—“this
isn’t a vote for pastor-in-chief” (see Kurtzelben 2016).
Ignoring for the moment that issues of personal piety and behavior did, in fact,
seem to be regularly articulated in criticisms of Presidents Bill Clinton and Barack
Obama and vice presidential candidate John Edwards, one might argue that Fal-
well and Perry were, in fact, offering a sophisticated, non-moralized, realpolitik
understanding of politics and political leadership—one that also relied on a cer-
tain separation of religion and politics/church and state.
However, many such supporters of President Trump, including Perry in the
preceding example, could not stop at that secularized rationale. And one result
was a regular delving into scripture to find a person with whom they could
analogize Donald Trump as being God’s favored. Note that the references
supporting Trump weren’t to such lionized American presidents as Abraham
Lincoln or Thomas Jefferson. Rather, a flurry of Trump supporters used refer-
ences to biblical figures—particularly from the Old Testament (e.g., references to
King David or to Cyrus the Great). David, as God’s beloved and king of a united
Israel, was an adulterer, so perhaps there is some face validity in the compar-
ison, not discounting the significant number of articles disputing the analogy
(e.g., Brehe 2020; Cohen 2019).
Referencing Cyrus the Great seems a bit greater stretch. Cyrus was a sixth-
century bce Persian king who conquered Babylon and ended the Babylonian
captivity, a period during which Israelite elites had been forcibly resettled in exile.
This allowed Jews to return to the area now known as Israel and build a temple
in Jerusalem. Cyrus is referenced most prominently in the Old Testament book of
Isaiah, in which he appears as a figure of deliverance. Perhaps the connection to
Cyrus was some longing for a prominent reassertion of American imperial suc-
cesses, or perhaps it was connected to the dimensions of Evangelical eschatology
that posit the necessity of a reunited and powerful Israel in order to manifest the
conditions for Jesus’s Second Coming. In either case, and whether the Trumpian
analogy was with David or Cyrus, the need for scriptural textual support for
Trump among White Evangelicals was clear.
One last example brings together the scriptural legitimation, the Trumpian
affirmation, and the connection to immigration politics. As noted before, many
religious voices that support welcoming immigrants and easing immigration
restrictions point to the flight of Jesus and the Holy Family to Egypt to escape
King Herod (Matthew 2:13–23). Even the Southern Baptist Convention’s 2011
and 2018 proclamations on immigration note that Jesus was a stranger in a for-
eign land, and some pointedly called him a “refugee.” Thus, some defenders of
the Trump anti-immigration work take pains to separate Jesus from this particular
identity.
Paula White, a prosperity gospel preacher, was a great supporter of President
Trump’s and often called the unofficial White House chaplain. In a 2018 interview
with the Christian Broadcasting Network she refuted the idea that Jesus was a
refugee or that the flight to Egypt had any parallels with contemporary immigra-
tion issues. Her conclusion was that Jesus could not have broken any immigration
laws during his family’s flight to Egypt because Jesus was without sin, and there-
fore could not have broken the law.
I think so many people have taken biblical scriptures out of context on this, to
say stuff like, “Well, Jesus was a refugee,” . . . Yes, [Jesus] did live in Egypt
for three-and-a-half years. But it was not illegal. If He had broken the law
then He would have been sinful and He would not have been our Messiah.
(quoted in Burton 2018)
Again, the historical parallel is strained, as there is not much evidence that there
was “immigration law” to break in Egypt of that time. But the alignment of Jesus,
sinlessness, and complete obedience to law is notable. Laws, in this recounting, are
clear, absolute, and just. Any breaking of them constitutes sin, and such sin would
be incompatible with Jesus’s status as Messiah. Granted, White was responding
to a trope used by many progressives to argue against Trump’s policies, so she
wasn’t fighting on her chosen turf. Nor did she have to face follow-up questions
about Jesus allowing his disciplines to labor on the Sabbath and other examples
in which justice seems to trump law in the New Testament (pun intended). The
point here is that, again, scripture is needed as the symbolic grounding for the
righteousness as well as the effectiveness of certain immigration policies.
Conclusion
For the first two centuries of nation building by European colonists, especially
the British and Dutch, the vast majority of people who became Americans were
Protestant Christians. Even those that came primarily for economic reasons, and
often had little in the way of religious motivations or commitments, were Prot-
estant. Thus, Protestant Christianity had a significant role in shaping the general
cultural values and organizational forms that marked English North America.
A significant minority of colonists saw the “New” World as a chance to create
a “New Jerusalem”—an Edenic nation that would embody God’s will on earth
as it left behind the corrupted civilizations of Europe. This new nation would be
above all “innocent”—a pristine example of God’s community that had otherwise
slipped away from the perfection of the creation moment. Like Eden itself, the
United States has a declensionist history narrative that requires action to restore
the nation to its original purity and its God-ordained greatness (Hughes and Allen
1988). This national mythology, fusing demographic and cultural identity into a
“Protestant America,” became increasingly common as the nation achieved inde-
pendence, grew and prospered, and established a regional empire.
The expanding numbers and diversity of immigrants of the late twentieth and
early twenty-first centuries reactivated nativist political sentiment and helped spur
an anti-immigration political movement. This has been accompanied by a rise in
overt Christian nationalism that reasserts the primacy of Protestant Christians as
“true” Americans.
This essay examined the ways in which a specific type of religious discourse,
Christian and Hebrew biblical scripture, helped frame and legitimate anti-immi-
grant nativism and the immigration policies of President Donald Trump. These
claims came from representatives of Trump’s most supportive constituency, White
Evangelical Protestants, and came in a language this constituency was particu-
larly suited to understand. The discourse worked to center scripture as a source
of political as well as religious authority. The result was a robust ideology for
social movement action and political support. It had the appeal of venerable and
sacred examples being used to answer questions about a worldly political issue,
in such a way as to integrate collective identity as “bible-believing” Christians,
with a sense of urgency and moral responsibility to act politically. This combined
intellectual, moral, and emotional responses to the movement framing (Platt and
Williams 2002).
Scholars Peter Andreas (2010) and Wendy Brown (2017), pursuing different
scholarly questions, both note a certain irony in the current political enthusiasm
for border walls. National borders are increasingly irrelevant to the operation of
the twenty-first-century global economy and politics. Capital moves across bor-
ders with the click of a mouse; labor has multiple means of transport across bor-
ders at speeds unknown in history. And yet, there is great popular enthusiasm for
physical border walls in many parts of the world. On one hand, this points to the
materiality available behind the symbol—a wall is hard, immobile, offering the
image of permanence and (perhaps) protection. It has an uncontestable realness.
On the other hand, the popular embrace of the idea is in part also due to the use-
ful ambiguity behind the symbol, as the strong border (or boundary) both clearly
differentiates and offers the idea of protection and security.
This has advantages as an aspect of social movement claims-making. Using a
material referent, but to express a multilayered political position, offers a unity of
reference combined with enough potential ambiguity to allow for multiple con-
stituencies to connect with it. This was then undergirded by the available religious
references that could justify it. Of course, these very references to walls and bor-
ders in the Bible harken back to a historical time when physical walls did in fact
offer collective security and meaningful marked boundaries. But far from making
that image anachronistic, this reassured those who believe that America should be
restored to the pristine national condition that was inherent in the national found-
ing. The call for a wall can be “biblical” as well as consistent with the mythology
of America’s “first times,” marked by the moral purity of the rightness of the
cause.
While “rightist movements tend to be known for what they are against, not for
what they support” (Blee and Creasap 2010, 270), it is also the case that conserva-
tive social movements almost always have a past “golden era” that they want to
harken back to. This era, or the imaginary built on it, is thought to exhibit the
social relations, values, and norms that mark it as a good society and thus impor-
tant as a reference. This impulse could be termed “restorationist” in the sense of
restoring society to a more God-fearing and moral time. This is a clear impulse
in many religiously based social movements: the present is seen as “fallen” from
Grace or from the purity of creation.
In that way, the use of scriptural references by conservative opinion leaders to
justify immigration restrictions, the border wall itself, and the God-given duty of
the political leaders pushing those policies makes sense. There is a clear resto-
rationist subtext in which a contemporary border wall will make the U.S. more
like the biblical Israel. The nation will not just be following practices of which
God approves, it will actually be mimicking His “chosen people” in building a
kingdom of God on Earth. That these elements of political mobilizing rhetoric
fit so smoothly into a longtime religious and political culture in the United States
makes it little surprise, on examination, that such discourse would be so effective
to those eager to hear it.
Note
1 I thank Kelly Hadfield of LUC’s Sociology Department for her research assistance on
this paper and extend appreciation to Ruth Braunstein, Todd Nicholas Fuist, and Grace
Yukich for conversations on religion and collective action. Editors Reed and Goldstein
gave very useful feedback that sharpened the argument.
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12 Elective Affinities Between
Liberation Theology and
Ecology in Latin America
Luis Martínez Andrade
Liberation Theology Today

The social-political context in which liberation theology emerged is no longer the
same; however, the framework of domination of coloniality of power1 continues
to this day. The social-political and cultural structures of capitalist modernity,
that is, have not changed even during a presumed period of democratic transi-
tion. During the 1990s, however, liberation theology, in the context of democratic
transition, emerged and developed in previously underexplored areas of social
existence (Martínez Andrade 2015). It enriched its roots by opening up to ques-
tions of gender, race, and ecology. In doing so, it committed itself to understand-
ing new forms of domination and developing new perspectives on these topics,
from eco-theology (Boff 1997; Barros and Betto 2009) and eco-feminism (Gebara
2000) to decolonial theology (Dussel 2018) and queer theology (Althaus-Reid
2000). In this chapter, I analyze the relation between liberation theology, with a
special emphasis on the work of the Franciscan theologian Leonardo Boff, and
social movements in Latin America, focusing mainly on the Landless Workers’
Movement (MST).
In Cry of the Earth, Cry of the Poor (1997), Leonardo Boff placed the eco-
logical question at the center of his theological, social, and political reflections.
The sigh of the oppressed (the poor of the Earth) is the starting point for his eco-
theological paradigm not least because ecology and the poor have in common
the same trauma, exploitation. The poor majority of the population and the Earth
is exploited by an economic system bent on the creation of surplus value at any
cost. This is an insight that he derives from his holistic conception of humans
and nature and that allows him to develop a radical critique of the harmful con-
sequences that the logic of capitalist modernity has on the poorest populations of
Mother Earth. By analyzing the ecological dimension of Leonardo Boff’s theol-
ogy, we may come to terms with the “elective affinities” between discourses of
ecology and liberation theology. I first explore the political and theoretical elective
affinities between liberation ecology and liberation theology before evaluating
Leonardo Boff’s eco-theology. I then conclude by pointing out that the ecological
question is present not only in liberation theology but also in social movements
in Latin America.
DOI: 10.4324/9781003177821-15
220 Luis Martínez Andrade
Liberation Ecology and Theology: On Their Political
“Elective Affinities”
The word ecology originated in 1866, when the German biologist and philosopher
Ernst Haeckel argued for the need of a discipline that would study the relation-
ship between an organism and its environment. This is how the field of scientific
ecology was created. However, as ecology became a field explored by other dis-
ciplines (such as economics or demography) and by thinkers (such as Kenneth
Boulding, Alexander Tchayanov, and Sergei Podolinsky, among others), it ceased
to have an unequivocal meaning, with the result that political ecology was con-
stituted as a field of inquiry as early as the second half of the twentieth century.
Admittedly, as an heir to the rebellions of the 1960s, the ecology movement devel-
oped primarily in industrialized societies.
For his part, the economist Joan Martínez Alier (2002) proposes the notion of
“Environmentalism of the Poor” to refer to the struggles of local populations in
the global South who oppose the hegemonic model of development—represented
in the logic of both extractivism and deforestation. The term Environmentalism
of the Poor refers to the gospel of capitalist eco-efficiency (techno-scientific ecol-
ogy) and the cult of naturalness (i.e., the sacralization of nature).2 Through this
notion, Martínez Alier proposes that the preservation of an environment favora-
ble to living species is incompatible with the destructive and predatory logic of
capitalism. Faced with this logic, the “Environmentalism of the Poor” mobilizes
the tradition of popular movements in order to elaborate its discourse and state its
demands. Even if these struggles in the global South do not identify themselves
as environmental, they nevertheless are defined by an ecological dimension. By
grasping the environmental question head-on, the struggles of the oppressed show
that the real alternative cannot be realized within the existent framework of devel-
opment. Thus, the “Environmentalism of the Poor” expresses the existence of an
alternative social ethos to the model of accumulation based on the overexploita-
tion of largely nonrenewable resources. In other words, the sociopolitical strug-
gles of communities (peasant or indigenous) in the global South that confronted
the destructive dynamics of the hegemonic development paradigm were ecologi-
cal before their time.
If the “Environmentalism of the Poor” and liberation theology share the rejec-
tion of capitalism, it is because of the intrinsic oppressive logic of this system.
Their distrust of pharaonic projects in the region—hydroelectric dams, agribusi-
ness, and deforestation—is therefore a by-product of this rejection and an ever-
present dimension in these movements. This rejection and distrust, moreover,
suggest that there are certain “elective affinities” between them when it comes to
the environment. Among these, we can identify the following: (a) the critique of
modernity as a project that entails the domination of nature, (b) the questioning
of the ideology of infinite growth, (c) the denunciation of the exploitation of the
Earth, and (d) a holistic approach to the human–nature relationship.
Unlike a depoliticized ecology, the “Environmentalism of the Poor” sees
itself as a counterhegemonic movement for social, economic, and environmental
Liberation Theology and Ecology 221
justice. This expression of political ecology is opposed to the logic of the capital-
ist system and, in that sense, places use value, respect for nature, and social ties at
the center of its civilizational project in much the same way liberation Christianity
does. The “Environmentalism of the Poor” movements, as such, are carriers of
concrete utopia (Bloch 1995) and the seed of future eco-socialist societies (Löwy
2015). The document titled “I Have Heard the Cry of My People” published in
1973 by the bishops of Brazil to oppose the military occupation of the Amazon is
an explicit example of this ecological dimension in liberation Christianity. In fact,
during the 1970s and 1980s, the combined action of basic ecclesial communities,
Communist Party militants, and the Pastoral Care of the Earth in Brazil, strongly
contributed to raising political awareness in the rural world and thus this docu-
ment remains relevant today.
It is in this context of political opportunity that the Landless Workers Move-
ment (MST) and the Pastoral Commission for Land (CPT) came into being in
Brazil. An autonomous social movement, but strongly influenced by liberation
theology and supported by the Church, the MST came into being between the
meeting in January 1984 at the Diocesan Formation Centre of Cascavel in the
State of Parana and the first congress of landless peasant associations in 1985 in
Curitiba. The Pastoral Commission for Land, an organ of the Brazilian Catholic
Church that deals with the problems of the poor in rural areas, for its part, has
focused on the problem of land distribution. From its inception in 1975, it has
rallied with rural workers, not only to denounce the killings and repression suf-
fered by rural activists but also to demand agrarian reform. Ivo Poletto (1997,
65), assessor of the national secretariat of the CPT, defined the CPT’s practice as
follows: (a) being on the side of the landless, those who suffer from the various
forms of social exclusion; (b) living with these marginalized people; and (c) fight-
ing alongside them. Thus, by opposing the deforestation of the Amazon, the CPT
found itself in line with the “Environmentalism of the Poor.” In the face of the
military dictatorship but also under the mandates of the Workers’ Party (under the
leadership of Lula da Silva and Dilma Rousseff), the CPT has mobilized to defend
the oppressed in much the same way liberation theology has and has not hesitated
to denounce the alliance established between governments and agribusiness. It
is no coincidence that one of CPT’s supporters, Marcelo Barros, a Benedictine
monk, developed a theology of the Earth in which the Earth is considered a place
of life, an anthropological, socio-political, and religious totality. From this per-
spective, the cosmogonies of the indigenous communities and the sensitivity of
the peasants are emphasized, as each in its own way respects the Earth’s natural
cycles. Marcelo Barros (2011) also points out the failure of capitalism to maintain
a relationship of respect for nature.
The dynamics inherent in the movement of capital valorization transform land
into a commodity, that is, an object that can be bought or sold. This is why, accord-
ing to Father Barros, by recovering the agrarian and festive style of the liturgy,
the CPT is a channel of expression for the people of rural areas. In this sense,
the liberation of oppressed agrarian communities and land go hand in hand. The
struggle against deforestation, against precarious relations and inhuman working
conditions, against the eviction of farmers from their small lands, and against the
destruction of the land are therefore the main concerns of this Pastoral Commis-
sion. Thus, even if in the 1970s, the CPT had not declared that it was taking on an
ecological concern, it is clear that an ecological dimension was there.
Liberation Ecology and Theology: On Theoretical

“Elective Affinities”
During the 1970s, ecological issues emerged with great force both in the socio-
political sphere and in theoretical reflections. It was also increasingly present in
liberation theology. In this decade, for instance, some theologians, such as Rose-
mary Radford Ruether, started linking the struggle against sexism with ecological
questions. They spoke out strongly against the androcentric nature of theological
discourse, which served not only to keep women marginalized within the power
structures of the church but also to strengthen patriarchy. Although feminist the-
ologies share some common features (criticism of patriarchal structures, andro-
centrism, the domination of women’s bodies), they do not have a homogeneous
discourse.
Influenced by the work of Rosemary Radford Ruether and Dorothee Sölle,
the Brazilian theologian Ivone Gebara has developed a liberation-oriented
ecofeminist theology since the 1980s. Gebara considers it necessary to over-
come the discriminatory and unjust hierarchical relationships of societies and
churches.3 In the 1990s, she developed an ecofeminist theology in which the
poor and nature are designated as victims of the same hegemonic system. In her
book Ecofeminist Intuitions: An Essay to Rethink Knowledge and Religion, for
example, Gebara (2000) explains how women and nature have been exploited by
patriarchal discourse and modern capitalist logic. Ecofeminism in Latin Amer-
ica is a political project that confronts the patriarchal system by interconnecting
the exploitation of nature and women while claiming the traditional spirituality
of communities.
Ingemar Hedström, a collaborator of the Ecumenical Research Department,
pioneered the ecological reflection in liberation theology. His 1986 book We Are
Part of a Great Equilibrium: The Ecological Crisis in Central America (Hedström
1993) is an account of how the dynamics of capital destroy the living conditions of
the poor, that is, their environment. In 1988, in The Return of the Swallows? The
Reintegration of Creation from a Latin American Perspective, Hedström (1988)
calls for eco-theology. In the face of the deadly dynamics of capitalism, expressed
by the pursuit of profit (lucrocentrismo), Hedström (1988, 48) defends an alterna-
tive way of life, i.e., the right of all creatures to live and flourish on Earth: “We
perceive the presence of God, from the earth, because it is the essence of theol-
ogy.” In this book, he identifies two conflicting conceptions of man: anthropo-
centrism and ecocentrism. Also, analyzing the structures of domination imposed
on Latin America since the Conquista, Hendström concludes that the ecological
struggle of peoples is also a struggle for sociopolitical liberation. Capitalism’s
logic is a mystique of death; only a logic of life, that of the liberating God, can
ensure the well-being of men and women as well as respect for the planet. The
struggle for land has played and still plays a decisive role in the socio-religious
imagination of indigenous peoples.
The rejection of the dynamics of capitalist modernity and the wish to transform
today’s society are the expression of an anti-capitalist and anticolonial dimension
of the “Environmentalism of the Poor” and of liberation theology. They both share
a distrust in the destructive logic of the capitalist mode of production, a marked
opposition to the ideology of unbridled consumption, and a desire of social justice.
Leonardo Boff’s Eco-Theology

Considered a major figure in liberation theology, Leonardo Boff not only contrib-
uted to the development of Latin American critical thought but also to the elabo-
ration of an eco-theology of liberation. Since the early 1980s, his work has been
deeply influencing the political conscience of Brazilian peasants, environmental
activists, and left-wing academics. He was also one of the founders of the Brazil-
ian Workers’ Party. Behind a rather prolific production in the theological field
and a not inconsiderable influence on other intellectual fields, lies a charismatic
figure strongly linked to the struggles of the oppressed.4 Since his first writings,
in particular the book The Gospel of the Cosmic Christ of 1971, the ecological
question has been part of his work (Boff 2007). This question will take on new
dimensions with a “paradigm shift” centered on the ecological at the beginning of
the 1990s (Martínez Andrade 2019). It is with this in mind that we will analyze
the shift to the ecological in his theoretical perspective. In the case of civiliza-
tional crises, Boff (2008, 2) placed an emphasis on a new paradigm for living
together:
It could be said: we are not experiencing the end of the world; we are in
fact experiencing the end of a type of world. We are facing a crisis affecting
human civilization. We are in need of a new paradigm for living together.
Such a new paradigm will be based on better relations with the Earth, which
will inaugurate a new social pact between peoples, a social pact forged in
respect and for the preservation of all that exists and is alive. Only if these
changes occur will it make sense for us to start thinking about alternatives
that may present us with new hope.
Among the main spiritual and intellectual sources from which Boff’s thought
assumes a shift, we may identify Saint Francis of Assisi and Teilhard de Chardin.
The interest in these figures is not a passive reception but an active appropriation
on the part of the Brazilian theologian. Franciscan thought has had a very pro-
found effect on the work and trajectory of Leonardo Boff. In his Francis of Assisi,
originally published in Portuguese in 1981, we already see the presence of the
ecological question. This work deals with the crisis of modern bourgeois society
expressed in “the loss of the vital relationship with nature” (Boff 1981, 19) as well
as in the excessive irrationality of capitalistic logic, the latter being responsible
for the high levels of poverty and social marginalization. It is for this very reason
that the condemnation of the capitalist system, as a sociohistorical model that
produces inequality and misery, is crucial.
In fact, regarding the figure of the Poverello, Boff observes that Saint Francis’s
choice for the poor testifies to an abandonment of the world not in the physical,
moral, or cosmological sense of the term but rather in the social sense. Thus,
according to Boff, Saint Francis left behind his social class—and the dominant
order of the time, the society of the majores (“the grown-ups”). He wanted to
deliberately be a minor (a “little one”). He also left behind the style of a power-
fully organized church, with its pyramidal hierarchy, to become a frater, a brother
to all, without any hierarchical title. This sense of fraternity towards the weakest
(feci misericordiam cum illis)—including the creatures of nature, played a crucial
role in the cosmic mysticism of Saint Francis of Assisi.
Inspired by the Franciscan spirit, Boff’s condemnation of consumer society is
aimed at the heart of the capitalist system: private property. Against the spirit of
appropriation, Boff opposes the spirit of expropriation, which is expressed in the
renunciation of bourgeois values, pecuniary concerns, and the desire to accumu-
late wealth, features central to the modern capitalist system. This new way of life
is seen by him as a being-in-the-world-with-everything. This being-in-the-world-
with-everything represents for Boff a whole new way of being-in-the-world, in
other words, a new paradigm of conviviality. Thus, Leonardo Boff proposes a
notion of “cosmic democracy,” developing in fraternity with nature as an alterna-
tive paradigm of socio-nature relations.
In The Gospel of the Cosmic Christ (2007), Boff recovers Teilhard’s thought in
order to show the cosmic force of Christ in evolution: the unity of all reality and
the deep sense of interdependence of all beings. This interest in Teilhard’s work
testifies to a continuity in Leonardo Boff’s thought because, thanks to concepts
such as the “Cosmic Christ” or the “noosphere” and to the perspective open to the
discoveries of science, the Brazilian theologian has thoroughly reflected on the
question of the universe.
If the notion of the “Cosmic Christ” suggests that Christ is to be found through-
out the universe and that consequently he is also present in the kingdoms of ani-
mals and plants, then how can we avoid the allure of pantheism? To answer this
question, Boff uses a term rooted in creation theology, panentheism (Greek: pan =
all; en = in; theόs = God), to shed light on how this attempt may be avoided. While
pantheism asserts that everything is God, that is, all things, stones, mountains, are
part of the divinity, panentheism suggests that even though God is in everything,
not everything is God.
Panentheism presents itself as the formula (or attitude) for escaping panthe-
ism. Although Boff’s approach to cosmic mysticism has been transformed by his
paradigm shift, the presence of figures such as Francis of Assisi and Teilhard de
Chardin in his eco-theological and sociopolitical discourse is noteworthy. This is
why we can speak of a continuity in his intellectual as well as personal trajectory.
This continuity, inflamed by Franciscan sensitivity, was also expressed by discon-
tinuities, a paradox, as it may seem, in his work.
However, his reading of the Teilhardian theses changed as he became more
involved in the study of science, modern physics, and biology, in particular. From
this point of view, his genuine interest in the ecological question also marked a
discontinuity in his exegesis of Teilhard’s work. Thus, in 2006, the work O Evan-
gelho do Cristo Cósmico was republished. Although this new version is part of the
“new paradigm,” the modified and reworked content of the first version has been
preserved as a primary source. For the same reason, the Brazilian theologian warns
in this new edition that it is a question of encouraging a cosmic mysticism,5 which
encompasses sciences, religions, spiritual traditions, and contemporary ecological
sensitivity (Boff 2007). Thus, by drawing on the contributions of contemporary
sciences (namely, the notion of the quantum vacuum dear to quantum physics, the
theory of relativity according to which matter strictly speaking does not exist; the
notion of the cosmological constant in which the universe is presented as isomor-
phic; the discovery of deoxyribonucleic acid—DNA—the carrier of the genetic
information of living beings and, consequently, the trace indicating that we form a
community of life),6 the theologian highlights the homology of the quest for unity
in the whole between contemporary science and cosmic Christology.
During the first half of the 1990s, the life and work of Leonardo Boff under-
went a radical transformation. On a personal level, the theologian permanently
abandoned the priestly ministry on June 28, 1992, because, according to him, “the
present organization of the Church creates and reproduces more inequalities than
it realizes and makes invisible the fraternal and egalitarian utopia of Jesus and the
apostles” (Boff 1992, 165)
For Rosino Gibellini (1995), the ecological dimension is absent from liberation
theology. Although as early as the 1980s other Latin American theologians had
already analyzed the relationship between theology and ecology, it was with the
publication in 1993 of Leonardo Boff’s Ecology, Globalization, Spirituality, that
an eco-theological reflection, centered on the global South, emerged in liberation
theology. By dealing with the question of the relationship with nature in a sys-
tematic way according to different theological axes, Leonardo Boff developed his
own Creation, Trinitarian, Cosmocentric, and Theo-anthropo-cosmic theologies.
In Ecology, Globalization, Spirituality (2009), Boff reflects on the emergence
of the new paradigm in his thinking. If we use the word emergence, it is to under-
line the fact that Boff was undergoing a transformation that was not only personal
but also theoretical. It is worth mentioning that between 1990 and 1993, Leonardo
Boff participated as a speaker in various theological and political events. In addi-
tion, he wrote texts on the ecological issue. So, this period can be seen as the time
when the paradigm shift begins to be more evident. This paradigm shift, however,
does not mean an absolute, or even total, break with his main interests or for-
mer positions (sociopolitical or religious). Thus, we observe not only continuities
(such as concern for nature and victims, the Franciscan sensibility as “aura,” the
Teilhardian conception of the universe, and the critique of capitalist modernity)
but also discontinuities: the holistic approach and the critique of anthropocen-
trism. For this reason, the term (dis)continuity better conveys the idea of a journey
that is never linear.
During the 1990s, influenced by both the holistic perspective and new sci-
ence, Boff’s concern for nature takes on a different tone. Although this concern
has accompanied the theologian since the 1970s, his in-depth study of creation
theology, undertaken between 1985 and 1988 (right after the sentence of utter
reserve or absolute silence imposed by Vatican authorities in 1985), has enriched
his eco-theological perspective. Certainly, Franciscan sensitivity and the Teilhar-
dian perspective played a crucial role in this theological choice. Moreover, the
ecological crisis also contributed during the 1980s to the development of a crea-
tion theology—an innovative interpretation of Genesis theory of origins (Landron
2008). As such, this theology was a fruitful and relevant field for Boff, and his
reflections were well informed by it. To recover the ecological meaning of the
Judeo-Christian tradition, Boff asserts, we must take seriously the contributions of
creation theology in the line of Francis of Assisi, Saint Bonaventure, Duns Scotus,
and William of Ockham because these mystics help us to conceive creation as
the play of divine expression. In this perspective, each being is a messenger and
representative of God.
In general, Leonardo Boff insists that the contributions of creation theology
help recover the ecological sense of the Judeo-Christian tradition. Undoubt-
edly, Catholicism—and the same can be said of other monotheistic religions—is
equally responsible for environmental degradation. However, it seems that there
are other factors (economic, sociopolitical, cultural ones) that have accelerated
the process of destruction of the planet: the ecocidal dynamics of the modern
capitalist system. He wrote in Essential Care. An Ethics of Human Nature:
The liberation of the oppressed will come from themselves. As they become
conscious of the injustice of their situation, they organize themselves and
start to implement practices that aim to structurally transform unequal social
relations. Siding with the poor in their fight against poverty and in favor of
their life and freedom was and still is the registered trademark of commu-
nity groups and churches that started to listen to the cry of the poor, who
can be exploited workers, indigenous Indians, blacks who suffer discrimi-
nation, or oppressed women and marginalized minorities, or those who are
carriers of the Aids virus (those who are HIV positive) or of any other afflic-
tion. Those who are not oppressed but who have allied themselves with the
oppressed are not a few. They, together with and from the perspective of the
oppressed, strive to bring about profound social changes. The commitment of
the oppressed and their allies to a new kind of society, in which the exploita-
tion of the human being and the plundering of the Earth is overcome, reveals
the political strength of the dimension of care.
(Boff 2008, 101)
We cannot neglect the festive side of creation, that is, the celebration of the
rest represented by the seventh day (Moltmann 1993). This tradition of “joyful
rest,” present in the whole Judeo-Christian tradition, is opposed to the produc-
tivism dynamics of capitalism. Certainly, leisure can be objectified by the logic
of capital, and at the same time, it can lead to the establishment of a hedonistic
society in which desires take the place of needs: the consumer society. But “joy-
ful rest” can also break the schizophrenic and destructive dynamics of hegemonic
social structure.
Although in Ecology, Globalization, Spirituality, Boff (2009) already sets out
some of the traits of the new paradigm (i.e., nonlinearity, dynamics, cyclicality,
structured order, autonomy, integration, and self-organization of organisms and
the universe), it is primarily in his book Ecology: Cry of the Earth, Cry of the Poor
that the Brazilian theologian elaborates the concepts of thought that make up the
emerging paradigm, namely, (1) totality/diversity, (2) interdependence/relation-
ship/relative autonomy, (3) relations/fields of force, (4) complexity/interiority, (5)
complementarity/reciprocity/chaos, (6) time arrow/entropy, (7) common/personal
destiny, (8) cosmic common good/special common good, (9) creativity/destruc-
tiveness, and (10) holistic-ecological attitude/negation of anthropocentrism (Boff
1997).
In The Principle of Earth (1995), Boff follows the same path, however, he now
attempts to respond to the question set by ideologues of eco-efficiency which ask
if it is possible to maintain the logic of accumulation and unlimited growth while
at the same time avoid the imbalance in the ecological systems and the degrada-
tion of natural resources. If we do not radically change our model of production
and social reproduction we are headed directly for a catastrophe. For this reason,
Boff recognizes the importance of ecofeminism as a denunciation of rationalism,
authoritarianism, anthropocentrism, and patriarchy. Later, in his book, Reply with
Flourishing, Boff (2004) proposes the creation of a “florestanía,” a citizenship of
the forest in opposition to the paradigm of the deforestation, which is synonymous
with progress. It is worth highlighting that in this book there is a part dedicated
to the role of revolution. In the face of postmodern paradigms which avoid revo-
lutionary discourses of emancipation, Leonardo Boff continues to struggle for a
revolutionary social-political project.
Conclusion
After having shown the political and theoretical elective affinities between libera-
tion ecology and liberation theology and having approached the new dimension
with Leonardo Boff’s “paradigm shift,” it is necessary to highlight that the lib-
eration theology continues to play an important role in the people’s struggles in
defense of the planet.
In an article published on July 3, 1990, under the title “Ecology and Popular
Movements,” the Brazilian theologian Frei Betto (1991, 318) affirmed that the
ecological question is not located outside a capitalist society. The logic of capital,
that is, severely affects the poor and the planet. Environmental struggles are one
dimension of the expression of social antagonisms. For his part, Leonardo Boff
does not only defend the notion of social movements, but as mentioned earlier, he
has been actively involved within MST, among others. For him, citizen power is
constructed from below, through free associations, cooperatives, and trade unions.
In this sense, for Boff there is no revolutionary vanguard in the strict Leninist
sense; rather, there is a historical bloc (Gramsci 1994) in the Gramscian sense,
which contributes to pressuring government in favor of popular interests. For
many years Boff has been advising the leaders of the MST and has been regularly
invited to deliver lectures to the militants, thus his influence is clearly seen in their
projects and daily activities. Furthermore, despite the fact that the option for the
poor continues to be central in his theological-political work, he has incorporated
the planet as another victim of the system. His new theology, as such, opts for
both the poor and the planet. This new addition to his theological take on human
reality is no mere addition. It is an urgent call for saving the source of all life,
Mother Earth.
Spirituality is a fundamental element of the liberation struggles of the social
movements linked to liberation theology that oppose the dynamics of modernity/
coloniality in Latin America (Reed 2020). Already in the first half of the twentieth
century, the Marxist thinker José Carlos Mariátegui (1991) noted the impor-
tance of myths in the process of social-political struggles. Despite the fact that
Mariátegui focused on the role of the of indigenous peasants in Peru, his reflec-
tion around the interconnection between the revolutionary myth (socialism) and
the struggles for the earth could be of great value to understand the importance
of socio-environmental conflicts (Martínez Andrade 2017). For Marcelo Barros
(2011), a Benedictine monk, the popular religious dimension can be ambiguous
(for example, millenarist and not historical). However, if revolutionary social
movements are able to channel this strength in a historical form, they can signifi-
cantly contribute to social transformation. Liberation theology, an expression of
liberation Christianity, does not only incorporate some concepts and categories of
Marxism (class struggle, fetish of the market), it also engages fundamental themes
(in the case of ecology in Leonardo Boff) for the survival of the human race.
Notes
1 The “coloniality of power” refers to the interweaving of economic phenomena and soci-
ocultural processes of racialization in the power and knowledge relations that are taking
place from the modern era, that is, from the sixteenth century onward (Quijano 2000).
2 Inspired by Levinas’s philosophy, Timothy Morton (2010), through ecological thought,
also tries to propose an alternative project to deep ecology and green capitalism. How-
ever, his perspective appears very idealistic and without concrete political expression.
3 Gebara (1999) speaks of God’s “zero-diversity” to qualify the diversity of discourses
about God. In this perspective, respect for ecosystems becomes an ethical prerequisite.
4 As Michael Löwy (2013, 38) states, “undoubtedly among all the liberation theologians
Leonardo Boff has formulated the most systematic and radical criticism of the authori-
tarian structures of the Catholic Church, from Constantine to today. In his opinion these
structures reflect a Roman and feudal model of authority: pyramid hierarchy, making
obedience sacred, refusal of any internal criticism, and papal personality cult.”
5 It is interesting to observe that the theologian Jürgen Moltmann also rehabilitates
the importance of cosmic mysticism in ecological theology (Moltmann and Boff
2016, 46).
6 The notion of “community of life” proposed by Boff (1997) is politically more radical
than that of “networking” elaborated by T. Morton (2010).
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and Politics. London: Routledge.
Barros, Marcelo. 2011. Para Onde Vai Nuestra América. Espiritualidade Socialista para o
Século XXI. São Paulo: Nhanduti Editora.
Barros, Marcelo, and Frei Betto. 2009. O Amor Fecuda o Universo. Ecología e Espiritu-
alidade. Rio de Janeiro: Agir.
Betto, Frei. 1991. Fome de Pão e de Beleza. São Paulo: Siciliano.
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———. 1992. La Nouvelle Évangélisation: Perspective des Opprimés. Paris: Cerf.
———. 1995. Princípio-Terra: a Volta à Terra Como Pátria Comum. São Paulo: Atica.
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———. 2004. Responder Florindo: Crise da Civilização e Revolução Radicalmente
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———. 2007. O Evangelho do Cristo cósmico. A Busca da Unidade do Todo na Ciência e
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———. 2009. Ecologia, Mundialição, Espiritualidade. Rio de Janeiro: Record.
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———. 2000. Intuiciones Ecofeministas: Ensayos para Repensar el Conocimiento y la
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———. 1993. Somos Parte de un Gran Equilibrio: La Crisis Ecológica en Centroamérica.
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———. 2015. Ecosocialism: A Radical Alternative to Capitalist Catastrophe. Chicago:
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———. 2019. Ecología y Teología de la Liberación. Critica de la Modernidad/Coloniali-
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the Making of the Nicaraguan Insurrection and Revolution. London: Lexington Books.
13 Indigenous Spirituality and
the Decolonization
of Religious Beliefs
Embodied Theology, Collectivity,
and Justice
Sylvia Marcos
Departing from Christian spiritualties, indigenous social movements have started

proposing their own “indigenous spirituality,” not Christian, not a “religion,” but
a constellation of beliefs and practices that shelter their indigenous collectivi-
ties and affirm their ancestral roots. These beliefs and practices, which support
their increasingly powerful political struggles for justice, are rooted in ancestral
cosmogonic references. These references are recreated and reconceived today at
an increased pace as communities gain power through their social and political
movements for justice.
Here I propose to review the concept of spirituality and its ambiguous, some-
times contradictory relationships with what is deemed as religion or religious
practices. In Latin America, and particularly in Mexico, this concept of religion is
prominently identified with Catholic beliefs and devotions. This review is crucial
in order to delve into analytical paths that allow us to systematically broaden our
criteria about what can or must be termed religion, religions, religiosity, and spir-
ituality (Leon Portilla and Gossen 1993).
At the same time, it will become apparent that, for these indigenous communi-
ties, collectivity and communality are foundational for political action. To disen-
tangle “indigenous spirituality” as it is lived today from the general concept of
religion requires reviewing the underlying philosophical system that colonizers
brought with them and imposed through their institutions. To comprehend the
depth and vitality of indigenous spirituality requires acknowledging epistemic
differences that do not properly signify a religion but rather a cosmic vision of life
(Marcos 2017a, 2017b, 2019).
This topic cannot be more relevant. Today the more than five hundred com-
munities in Mexico that make up the National Indigenous Conference (Congreso
Nacional Indígena, CNI), which are part of the Indigenous Governing Coun-
cil (Concejo Indígena de Gobierno, CIG), with María de Jesús Patricio as their
spokesperson, are communicating their own forms of spirituality, ceremony, and
ritual, imbricated in their spiritual, material, and political relation to the land and
territory. The universe of the sacred appears closely linked with the earth and pre-
sents fusions and generalized designations that are sometimes not well analyzed
DOI: 10.4324/9781003177821-16
232 Sylvia Marcos
or understood. Furthermore, this all deeply impacts the collective political strug-
gles of communities and villages in the defense of their territory.
How Can This Spirituality Be Understood?

What confronts us as we seek to understand how indigenous people conceive
religion and religiosity is an epistemological rupture—a rupture between two ref-
erential worlds defined by what is generally or conventionally denominated as
religion, with the frequently implicit conceptualization of an anthropomorphic,
all-powerful, dominant male God, and the spiritual world that indigenous embod-
ied ritual invokes, which is what we refer to here as spirituality.
In one of the final declarations of the First Indigenous Women’s Summit
of the Americas, celebrated in Oaxaca in 2002, the following was stated: “for
indigenous peoples, their spirituality and manifestations are not considered a
religion” (Memoria 2003, 143), “spirituality is one of the fundamental tools
in the survival of our peoples” (123), and spirituality is “the cosmic vision of
life” (147).1
In the Raramuri region in Chihuahua, Ricardo Robles, as reported by Magda-
lena Gomez, an expert in indigenous rights, cites the voices of dissent against
the tourist spectacle imposed on their territory by the government and the state.
They declare that “for us, dance is not to entertain people; the Matachines dance
is like praying. We pray when we dance” (Gomez 2008). I heard such an affir-
mation, some time ago, from Magdalena Durán Garcia, Mazahua and council-
woman for the CIG. In addition to systematically specifying the steps, rhythms,
and concatenation of corporeal signs, she affirms that they pray by dancing and
dance to pray.
In a number of previous works, including Taken from the Lips, Gender and
Eros in Mesoamerican Religions, I have focused on deciphering those spiritual
worlds that are not religious, strictly speaking. In order to distinguish peoples’
spirituality from the concepts of Catholicism specifically, we could refer, first,
to the absence of privileged mediators, such as priests, who are only men. The
concept of a masculine and dominating God that must be obeyed is also absent in
their spiritual traditions (Marcos 2006).
Since the invasion of America, soldiers, conquerors, and chroniclers, in their
writings as explorers, extended the term religion to non-Christian examples when
they described the complex civilizations of Mesoamerica (Smith 1995, 702–3,
1998). It is evident that the ritualistic complexity and symbolic depth of rites and
ceremonies present in this part of the world led them to refer to these as a “reli-
gion.” However, in my description and analysis of embodied thought (Marcos
1998), I have proceeded to disentangle what an “embodied spirituality” means
from what is understood as beliefs and practices of Christian religions—specifi-
cally Catholicism. In them, matter and spirit, body and mind, being and doing
pertain to universes that are not only opposite but frequently also antagonistic to
Catholicism.
The Decolonization of Religious Beliefs 233
Philosophical Underpinnings of Colonial Presence
A crucial element to philosophically explain the particularities of this “spiritual-
ity” from a decolonializing point of reference is to begin to remove naturalized
referents that maintain the structures we use to perceive, understand, and organize
the world. It is imperative to begin with essential references to the philosophi-
cal baggage ingrained in our way of knowing, seeing, and learning. The colo-
niality of knowledge (Quijano and Ennis 2000; Lugones 2003, 2020; Mignolo
and Tlostanova 2006, 2007; Millan 2014) endures in our ways of perceiving and
organizing our surroundings and is made invisible in the axiomatic character of
the “evidences” pertaining to our mental perceptions.
The nature–society dualism, similar to other dualisms in our thinking, pos-
tulates that humanity is completely independent of nature and that nature
is equally independent of society. This has shaped how we understand the
world and our own insertion in it, making it almost impossible to think alter-
natively. This way of thinking is based on one of the Cartesian dichotomies.
The Cartesian concept itself is based on the nature–society or nature–human-
ity dichotomy. The predominance of the absolute separation between nature
and society has been taken mostly as evidence in science and philosophy
(Dumont 1986).
This separation, as absurd as it may seem, was the necessary condition for
capitalism to expand. Without this notion, it would have been impossible to grant
legitimacy to the principles of endless exploitation and appropriation that have
guided the capitalist enterprise from the beginning. The economy is the only area
where endless growth is the objective; in other areas, such as biology, such growth
is considered a cancer.
This Cartesian dichotomy allowed, on one hand, nature to be transformed into
a natural resource unconditionally available for human beings to appropriate and
exploit for their sole benefit. On the other hand, it allowed everything that was
considered nature to be objects of appropriation under these same terms. In other
words, nature, in a broad sense, included beings that were close to the natural
world. Women, for example, since they (we) create life, could not be considered
fully competent and human. The “natural inferiority of women” emerges from
this postulate.
The Cartesian comprehension of the world, with its dualism of mutually exclu-
sive and hierarchized categories, was involved in the capitalist, colonialist, and
patriarchal transformation of the world. It is not possible to imagine a transforma-
tive praxis that solves these problems without another understanding of the world,
free from the modern certainties that are often based on Cartesian dichotomous
dualisms.
In contrast, the phrase “epistemologies of the South” (Santos 2014) has been
used to refer to epistemologies that seek to rescue knowledge produced where
colonialist exclusion prevails. This knowledge, which has been made invisible,
suppressed, and has been frequently discarded, offers a source for new paths to
234 Sylvia Marcos
transform the world. It is based on how opposites are complementary and inclu-
sive of each other and where relationality is basic to how we construct thought.
Not incidentally, this knowledge appears in indigenous organizations’ demands
for their rights.2 It is here that the most profound sense of “spirituality” may
be found. “Indigenous peoples . . . are those who have the greatest opportunity
of surviving the storm and the only ones capable of creating ‘something else’ ”
(Galeano 2016).
This other understanding must rescue the common sense of mutual interde-
pendence among society, nature, land, territory, and the relations between human
nature and all other “natures,” such as animal, vegetable, rock, mineral, and cos-
mic. Humanity is inherent to nature and to earth. In the words of a professor
of the Zapatista “Escuelita” at the Centro Indígena de Capacitatión Integral, in
August 2013, “the earth is life. . . , the earth does not belong to us, but rather, we
belong to her” (La tierra no nos pertenece . . . , nosotros le pertenecemos a ella)
Moisés (2015).3
Knowledges (saberes) produced by indigenous populations are foreign to
Cartesian dualism and, on the contrary, conceive ways of understanding the
world, as Subcommander Moises would explain, “how we can think the world,”
“como lo pensamos al mundo” during the meeting Critical Thought Facing the
Capitalist Hydra (EZLN 2015). These knowledges make transformative prac-
tices possible that will jointly liberate the human and nonhuman worlds. It is in
this dimension that one of the most profound meanings of indigenous “spiritual-
ity” is found.
“We must resist capitalism from its most intimate premises and principles,” as
I stated in the same Zapatista meeting.
In other words, we must revise what generally escapes our critical eye
because it has already become the intimate part of how we think the world
and live life. I propose dismantling it from the inside and unraveling the tools
that modern humans use to build and rebuild themselves with a dual, binary
structure.
(Marcos 2015, 16)
I briefly review some of the particularities of indigenous spirituality that reveal

its conception beyond Cartesian dualisms—in other words, the prevalence of a
fluid duality of complementary, asymmetric, and mutually constitutive oppo-
sites as the basic structure of the perception of the world. It is what I have called
(following Agamben) the “Mesoamerican perceptual dispositivo or apparatus”
(Agamben 2007; Marcos 2015).
According to Maria de Jesus Patricio, spokesperson for the CIG,
to all of them, the government, companies and drug lords, we are a nuisance;
we, the indigenous peoples who believe that the earth is sacred and water is
our life, for it also holds the memory of who we are and what we were.
She adds that
the government thinks we have no memory, but we indigenous peoples,

nations or tribes are made up of the steps of our ancestors and that is how
we’ve stayed alive, resisting the stripping of land, the megaprojects such as
aqueducts, mining, gas pipes, wind farms, which bring death . . . to our fami-
lies, our cultures, our ways of organizing, and our peoples.
(Patricio 2018)
Epistemic Background for Indigenous Subversive

Spirituality: A World of Fluid Dual Oppositions, Beyond
Mutually Exclusive Categories
To better comprehend contemporary indigenous spirituality and its active contem-
porary presence, especially as a decolonizing force, it is important to review some
of the tenets of Mesoamerican ancestral “embodied thought” (Marcos 1998).
Duality is the centerpiece of spirituality understood as a cosmic vision of life.
Duality—not dualism—is a pervasive perception in indigenous thought and spir-
ituality. In Mesoamerican cosmology, the dual unity of the feminine and mas-
culine is fundamental to the creation of the cosmos, as well as its (re)generation
and sustenance. The fusion of feminine and masculine in one bipolar principle is
a recurring feature of almost every Mesoamerican community today. Divinities
themselves and all elements from nature are gendered feminine and masculine.
There is no concept of a virile god (e.g., the image of a white-bearded man as the
Christian God has sometimes been represented) but rather a mother/father dual
protector/creator. In Nahua culture, this dual god/goddess is called Ometeotl, from
ome, “two,” and teotl, “god.” Yet Ometeotl does not mean “two gods” but rather
“Two god” or, better, “divinity of Duality.” The name results from the fusion of
Omecihuatl (cihuatl meaning “woman” or “lady”) and Ometecuhtli (tecuhtli, man
or lord), that is, of the Lady and of the Lord of Duality.
Defined as an asymmetric duality of opposites, duality is the essential ordering
force of the universe and is also reflected in the ordering of time. Human gesta-
tion and agricultural cycles are understood within this concept of time-duality, as
are feminine and masculine, but dualities extend far beyond these spheres. For
instance, life and death, above and below, light and dark, and beneficence and
malevolence are considered dual aspects of one reality. Yet, neither pole invali-
dates the other. Both are in constant mutual interaction, flowing into one another.
Mutually exclusive categories are not part of the epistemic background of this
worldview, whose plasticity is still reflected in the ways indigenous women and
men deal with life and conflict. They seldom remain mired in a position that would
absolutely deny the opposite. Their philosophical background allows them both
to resist impositions and to appropriate modern influences into their spirituality.
Fluidity and selectivity in adopting novel attitudes and values speak of the ongo-
ing reconfigurations of their world of reference.
236 Sylvia Marcos
The principle of fluid duality has held indigenous worlds together over the cen-
turies. It has been both concealed and protected by its non-intelligibility to outsid-
ers, and it has guarded this “subaltern Other” from inimical incursions into their
native philosophical depths. The “hard nucleus” (Lopez Austin 1988, 2001) of
indigenous cultures has been a well-kept secret. Even today, among many native
communities in the Americas, exposing this concealed background to outsiders is
considered a risky community betrayal.4
Equilibrium, as conceived in indigenous spirituality, is not the static repose of
two equal weights or masses. Rather, it is a force that constantly modifies the rela-
tion between dual or opposite pairs. Like duality itself, equilibrium, or balance, per-
meates not only relations between men and women but also relations among deities,
between deities and humans, and among elements of nature. The constant search for
this balance was vital to the preservation of order in every area, from daily life to
the activity of the cosmos. Equilibrium is as fundamental as duality itself.
In the fluid and dual universe of indigenous spiritualities, the sacred domain is
pervasive. Strong continuities exist between the natural and supernatural worlds,
whose sacred beings are interconnected closely with humans, who, in turn, propi-
tiate this interdependence in all their activities. Enacting this principle, at politi-
cal meetings, participants start every single activity with an embodied ritual. The
recent (April 19, 2021) ceremony held to send a Zapatista delegation to Europe
illustrates not only embodied ritual but also the feminine/masculine duality per-
vading their world. Speaking for the community was a young Zapatista woman,
wearing the distinctive dress of her community and carrying her child in a shawl.
Addressing the delegation, she handed them the Zapatista banner and admon-
ished them to “take the pensamiento (thought) and semilla (seed) of our organi-
zation” to Europe. Two community elders then concluded the ritual by blessing
each member of the delegation with traditional copal smoke and incense burners.5
Embodied Religious Thought

According to dominant epistemic traditions, the very concept of body is formed
in opposition to spirit. The body is defined as the place of biological data, of the
material, of the immanent. Since the seventeenth century, the body has also been
conceptualized as that which marks the boundaries between the interior self and
the external world (Bordo and Jaggar 1989, 4). In Mesoamerican spiritual tradi-
tions, however, the body has characteristics that vastly differ from those of the
dominant concepts of an anatomical or biological body. Exterior and interior are
not separated by the hermetic barrier of the skin. Between the outside and the
inside, permanent and continuous, exchange occurs. To gain a keener understand-
ing of how the body is conceptualized in indigenous traditions, we can think of
it as a vortex, in a whirling, spiral-like movement that fuses and expels, absorbs
and discards and, through this motion, is in permanent contact with all elements
in the cosmos.
For indigenous peoples, then, the world is not “out there,” established out-
side of and apart from them. It is within them and even “through” them. Actions
and their circumstances are much more interwoven than is the case in dominant
thought, in which the “I” can be analytically abstracted from its surroundings.
Furthermore, the body’s porosity reflects the essential porosity of the cosmos, a
permeability of the entire “material” world that defines an order of existence char-
acterized by a continuous interchange between the material and the immaterial.
The cosmos literally emerges, in this conceptualization, as the complement of a
permeable corporeality.
A Spirituality Embedded in Sacred Earth

The people who incarnate living indigenous traditions have played almost no
part in the formulation of academic theories. They were rarely consulted; silence
was their weapon of survival. Only recently have they learned to use, critically
and autonomously, whatever knowledge has been collected about them. Spokes-
women want to “systematize the oral traditions of our peoples through the elders’
knowledge and practices” (Memoria 2003, 62).
Since the First Indigenous Women’s Summit of the Americas at the end of
2002, we have heard these clarifications:
The spirituality of indigenous peoples has been conceived as a religion, but

for indigenous peoples, their spirituality and its manifestations are not con-
sidered a religion. . . . [However, in ethnographies] many texts and expres-
sions discuss indigenous spirituality [as if it were] indigenous religions. . . .
These principles and values, are based on the cosmic vision of life, of elders
from places with little influence from modernity and Christianity. . . . [They]
have been fundamental for the survival and continuity of indigenous peoples
throughout history.
(Memoria 2003, 146–47)
Indigenous spirituality could be regarded as political cosmo-experiences (cosmo-

vivencias), as Lenkersdorf (2008) defines them, that are grounded in the fluidity of
opposites. Spirituality is, above all, a constellation of embodied practices that com-
plement shared community presences in which the collective identity of the peoples
is lived and expressed. It is this communal strength that feeds contact with the
territory, with earth (tierra), asserting a sense of being present with water at their
sources, rivers or lakes, and a presence on the mountaintop, and inside sacred caves.
Indigenous spirituality is not a series of individual, mental, silent, meditative
exercises done in isolation. It produces a strongly interrelated collectivity that
is at the source of political dimensions. It arises within a porous and permeable
body that incarnates the cosmos, fusing with it. It is a cosmic vision that fluidly
links all beings of the earth: human and nonhuman. When it is expressed, the earth
revivifies, along with all those collectivities that live on it. It is the vibration felt in
Zapatista meetings and celebrations in Oventik and in other indigenous ceremo-
nial spaces when a collective ritual is celebrated: individuals sharing a cosmic
space, immersed in the collective whole.
238 Sylvia Marcos
This ceremonial praxis expresses the intermeshing of human beings with their
environment and with each other as they celebrate their vital insertion in the land,
heavens, water, and winds. Nothing is foreign to it. This cosmic fusion is collec-
tively perceptible and comes to life in celebrations.
Thus, we speak of a community practice that is collective, sonorous, embodied,
mobile, gestural, through which all the elements of nature and territory intercon-
nect. It is where the bonds of communal living are strengthened and the links
with each of the natural elements (earth, sky, sun, water, wind, fire) are revived.
This earthly spirituality is lived independent of disembodied spiritualities; it is
foreign to individualisms of immaterial spiritual paths and appropriated spirituali-
ties. This spirituality fuses the being with the cosmos and, simultaneously, with
the human collective that surrounds it and beyond, with the world of the deceased,
who are present and perceived as always being close.
The fluid duality of opposites, as a philosophical referent, makes it possible
to understand this plurality-in-unity as experienced by indigenous peoples. This
spirituality is always oscillating between opposite poles: between matter and mind
(spirit), singularity and collectivity, feminine and masculine, between the distant
cosmos (the sun and skies) and the incarnated here of the collective I, between the
past of our ancestors (deceased) and the present of our people (alive).
It is the expression of political cosmo-experiences that can also be found in
the rituals of community assemblies when an “agreement” (acuerdo) is achieved.
“There is an agreement” (hay acuerdo) they express with reverence, almost as if
they were standing before the personification of a sacred entity. And this collec-
tive agreement is the formal sign that an embodied communal spirit exists. Indig-
enous spirituality is, in itself, a political stance because it does not exist without a
collective organization (EZLN 2013).
The Modernity of Ancient Spirituality in Indigenous Social

Movements
Among indigenous social movements, claiming the right to develop and define
their own spirituality is a novel attitude, yet one that indigenous people voice
with increasing intensity.6 Beyond claiming a right to food and shelter, a decent
livelihood, and ownership of their territory and its resources, the indigenous are
turning an internal gaze toward their traditional culture. They are also daring to
question the most ingrained influences of Catholic colonization and rejecting the
contempt and disdain with which the Catholic majority views their spirituality,
beliefs, and practices.
Authorized perspectives held by scholars and commentators such as Y. Le Bott
and A. Touraine among others, affirm that indigenous social movements are the
most visible transformational force in Latin American continent.7 Indigenous peo-
ples no longer accept the image that was imposed on them from the exterior. They
want to create their own identity. They refuse to be museum objects, static and
fixed in the past. It is not a question of reviving the past. Indigenous cultures are
alive and participate in a process of permanent change. The only way for them
to survive is to reinvent themselves, re-creating their identity while maintaining
their differences.
Anthropologist Kay Warren offers insights into the genealogy of the pan-
indigenous collective subject. What Warren calls the “pan-Mayan collective
identity” was forged out of the peoples’ need to survive the aggressions of
the state in Guatemala. As distinct ethnic groups defended against their cul-
tural annihilation. Their guides and philosopher-leaders formulated a collective
identity drawn from their inherited oral, mythic, and religious traditions. As
Warren explains, the bearers of cultural wisdom began to set forth an “asser-
tion of a common past which has been suppressed and fragmented by European
colonialism and the emergence of modern liberal states. In this view, cultural
revitalization reunites the past with the present as a political force” (Warren
and Jackson 2002, 11). Whatever the possible explanations for the genesis of
this pan-indigenous collective social subject might be, it engenders a political
collectivity, and one of its central claims is often based on its own self-defined
“indigenous spirituality.” Indigenous women are claiming this ancestral wis-
dom, cosmovision, and spirituality, but theirs is a selective process, and they
are contesting issues within a tradition that constrains or hampers their space as
women. Meanwhile, those practices that allow an enhanced position as women
within their spiritual ancestral communities are held onto dearly, with the com-
munity ensuring their survival.
Addressing the Mexican Congress in March 2002, Comandanta Esther, a Zapa-
tista leader from the southern state of Chiapas, expressed the concern of indig-
enous women in this way:
I want to explain the situation of women as we live it in our communities, . . .

as girls they think we are not valuable, . . . as women mistreated, . . . also
women have to carry water, walking two to three hours holding a vessel and
a child in their arms.
After speaking of her daily sufferings under indigenous customary law, she
added, “I am not telling you this so you pity us. We have struggled to change
this and we will continue doing it” (Marcos 2005). Comandanta Esther was
expressing the inevitable struggle for change that indigenous women face, while
also demanding respect for their agency. They who are directly involved have to
lead the process of change. There is no need for pity and still less for instructions
from outsiders on how to defend their rights as women. This would be another
form of imposition, however well meant it might be. Comandanta Esther’s dis-
course should convince those intellectuals removed from the daily life of indig-
enous peoples that culture is not monolithic, not static. “We want recognition
for our way of dressing, of talking, of governing, of organizing, of praying, of
working collectively, of respecting the earth, of understanding nature as some-
thing we are part of” (3). In consonance with many indigenous women who have
raised their voices in recent years, she wants both to transform and to preserve
her culture.
240 Sylvia Marcos
The need for cultural recognition is the background of the demands for social
justice indigenous women express, against which we must view the declarations
and claims for indigenous spirituality that emerged from the First Indigenous
Women’s Summit of the Americas. Among the thematic resolutions proposed and
passed by consensus at the summit, the following is particularly emblematic:
We re-evaluate spirituality as the main axis of culture.

(Memoria 2003, 61)
The participants of the First Indigenous Women’s Summit of the Americas

resolve: that spirituality is an indivisible part of the community. It is a cosmic
vision of life shared by everyone and wherein all beings are interrelated and
complementary in their existence. Spirituality is a search for the equilibrium
and harmony within ourselves as well as the other surrounding beings.
(60)
We demand of different churches and religions to respect the beliefs and cul-
tures of Indigenous peoples without imposing on us any religious practice
that conflicts with our spirituality.
(19)
When I first approached the documents of the Summit, I was surprised by their
frequent use of the self-elected term spirituality. Its meaning in this context is
by no means self-evident and has little to do with what the word usually repre-
sents in all Christian traditions. When the indigenous women use the word spir-
ituality, they give it a meaning of the presence of the sacred in quotidian tasks,
that clearly sets it apart from Catholic and other Christian traditions that arrived
in the Americas at the time of the conquest and the ensuing colonization: “We
indigenous Mexican women . . . take our decision to practice freely our spiritual-
ity that is different from a religion but in the same manner we respect everyone
else’s beliefs.”8 This stance is strongly influenced by an approach that espouses
transnational sociopolitical practices. Indigenous movements, and in particular
the women in them, are increasingly vulnerable to global capitalism. The pres-
ence of a Maori elder at the summit, as well as the frequent participation of Mexi-
can indigenous women in indigenous peoples’ meetings around the world, have
favored new attitudes of openness, understanding, and coalition beyond their own
traditional cultural boundaries. Through the lens of indigenous spirituality, we
can glimpse the plurality of cosmovisions/cosmologies that pervades the political
struggles of indigenous peoples (Marcos 2013; Rojas Salazar 2012).
Spirituality Forges Political Dimensions

Spirituality creates the basic organized collective nucleus that is at the basis of
grassroots politics. Although spirituality does inspire political demands, it is,
in itself, a “political” proposal. It cannot exist without collective organization.
In a series of massive meetings organized by the Zapatista Army of National
Liberation (Ejército Zapatista de Liberación Nacional, EZLN), within Zapatista
territory, Maria de Jesus Patricio (Marichuy) was presented to their collectives
as the proposed indigenous candidate for the presidency of Mexico in mid-2017.
Marichuy was present in each Zapatista Caracol,9 with massive participation and
approval from tens of thousands of Zapatistas in the, at that time, five Caracoles.
Women rushed together, gathering around Marichuy. Many of them, such as the
women present in Oventik, were brandishing their staffs of command (bastones
de mando). Only women received the participants and initiated ceremonies.
Only women took the floor. It was “la hora de las mujeres”—a time for women.
A renovated expression of emancipating thought, as one Zapatista colleague
expressed it.
It was first a moment of fusion and later of oscillating between opposites, leav-
ing intermediate spaces in its permanent flux. For moments, hours, days, only
one of two poles was present: the feminine. During “la hora de las mujeres,” this
feminine pole was dominant. In, with, and by the women, the absence of dichoto-
mies was manifested, and this was maintained throughout the tour in the thinking
of those who organized it.
Although there was a lengthy pause at the pole inhabited by women and only
women, one could also hear, “It is the peoples’ time,” being chanted every step
of the way through Zapatista territory. The focus flowed from one pole to the
other, from one gender to the collective of the people, even though the female
pole prevailed significantly. The simultaneity and fluidity of nonhierarchically
organized, asymmetric, mutually constitutive opposites could be read in the
embodied political practices of these Zapatista women. All these actions were
supported by an analogically diverse thought that escapes mutually exclusive
categories.
The polarity between the masculine and feminine is just one of the many oppo-
sites that are articulated and encountered, and which meet and oscillate, separated
for moments in this constant ebb and flow of these embodied political spiritual
practices where the collective and the singular, being and doing, feminine and
masculine are interwoven.
A Political-Spiritual Experience
The political and spiritual are also fused in the spokeswoman’s registration with
Mexico’s National Electoral Institute (INE). On October 14, 2017, Maria de Jesus
Patricio, Marichuy, presented herself at the INE to formally register as an inde-
pendent candidate for the presidency of Mexico. She was accompanied and sup-
ported by citizens from various sectors of Mexico: activists, artists, and renowned
philosophers and intellectuals.
Why did Maria de Jesus Patricio register with the INE dressed in ceremonial
attire from her Nahua region? Because she invoked, without words, a reference
to her spiritual community ceremonies. She did not choose to arrive as an urban
electoral candidate dressed according to city expectations. She was not going to
242 Sylvia Marcos
become just another electoral candidate, but rather, she proposed transforming
that tainted secular event by filling it with the strength of the indigenous peoples
she represents.
For her, it had a ritualistic function of indigenous ceremonialism. She did not
want to participate as one more of the many (more than eighty) applicants for
independent candidacy. For everyone in the CNI, this was not simply an electoral
process. It was the restitution and recovery of the spaces and meanings behind
governing for their people: governing by obeying (mandar obedeciendo)—
obeying what the collective, through consensual assembly meetings, has agreed
on. This is ritual in a spiritual sense of the ceremonial, which lies as not only the
innermost expression of their community’s links and expresses the symbols that
she embodies, especially fusion with, but also the political commitment to the
collectivity.
Conclusion
In this brief review of some meanings of indigenous spiritualities, a series of
resilient characteristics stand out, expressing their impact on political action. The
body, the flesh, and matter are not alien to the spirit or the mind. One “speaks”
with one’s body. Spirit is not considered superior to the flesh (an inheritance from
colonial impositions). Prayer is performed through dance and song as a testimony
to how the body is imbricated in the earth and simultaneously connected to the
four corners of their territory and the universe. The collectivity subsumes gen-
ders in a fluid duality. The political cosmo-experience groups all the elements of
earth—land, water, wind, the sun and the moon, humans, and nonhumans—in this
embodied collectivity. These beliefs and practices, rooted in ancestral cosmogo-
nic inheritances, witness and support far-reaching political struggles for justice.
As communities gain power through their social and political movements, their
indigenous spirituality sustains and inspires them as they work for justice, sur-
vival, and self-governance. It is a push toward a new world order, “otro mundo,”
that is, revolution in its deepest sense. And they do this work dancing and pray-
ing! As asserted by the women in the First Indigenous Women’s Summit of the
Americas, “Spirituality is the basis of knowledge” and “Politics begins and ends
in spiritual collectivity.”
Notes
1 The First Indigenous Women’s Summit of the Americas (2002, Oaxaca, Mexico) was a
gathering of more than 300 representatives of indigenous women's organizations from
the Americas to discuss human rights, culture, politics, development, and gender. The
principal document from the four-day meeting is the Memoria de la Primera Cumbre
de Mujeres Indígenas, 2003. Quotations from the Memoria, the raw materials and tran-
scriptions from focus groups and documents from the summit, vary in translation. Some
of the documents are translated into English as part of the document, in which case the
Spanish translation of a particular section has a different page number from the English.
In some cases, the Spanish was not translated in the documents; this is particularly the
case for the position statements, whereas the declarations and plans of action are often in
both Spanish and English in the documents. Unless otherwise noted, all translations are
mine.
2 Examples include the Memoria de la Primera Cumbre de Mujeres Indígenas de América
and publications by the Ejercito Zapatista de Liberación Nacional from meetings such
as El Pensamiento Crítico frente a la Hidra Capitalista I, 2015.
3 La Escuelita Zapatista. In the summer of 2013, Zapatista communities opened their vil-
lages and homes to several thousand people from all over the world so that visitors could
learn about the lives and ongoing struggle of the Zapatistas. The first class was so popular
that two more sessions were organized at the end of 2013 and the beginning of 2014. As
a participant in La Escuelita, each student was assigned a full-time “guardian/teacher”
and lived with a Mayan family in one of thousands of autonomous Zapatista communi-
ties throughout the state of Chiapas. Participants took part in community collective work
in the morning and studied in the afternoon and evening and shared in the daily life of
community members. I should mention here that names among the Zapatistas are often
pseudonyms, first names only, and they can change in order to protect identities.
4 Inés Talamantes, a Native American professor of religious studies who does ethnogra-
phy on her own Mescalero Apache culture, once confided to me that she was forbidden
by her community to reveal the deep meanings of their ceremonies.
5 Camino a Europa video of the ceremony: http://enlacezapatista.ezln.org.mx/2021/04/
12/camino-a-europa/.
6 This theme resounds around the world with other indigenous peoples. See the Maori
claims in Linda Tuhiwai Smith, Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous
Peoples (New York: Zed Books, 1999).
7 José Gil Olmos, interview with Alain Touraine, “México en riesgo de caer en el caos y
caciquismo,” La Jornada, November 6, 2000, 3.
8 “Las mujeres indígenas mexicanas . . . tomamos nuestras decisiones para ejercer libre-
mente nuestra espiritualidad que es diferente a una religión y de igual manera se respeta
la creencia de cada quien” (Mensaje de las Mujeres Indígenas Mexicanas, 1).
9 Caracol is the generic name given to several administrative units within the autonomous
Zapatista territory. On a symbolic level, the caracol not only represents a connection
with the Mayan past as a conch shell was used to summon people to gather as a com-
munity but also points to the future by the reference to the snail (caracol) signaling the
need to slow the current, dominant economic system.
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14 Epilogue
On the Significance of Religion
for Rebellions, Revolutions, and
Social Movements
Jean-Pierre Reed and Warren S. Goldstein
Religion, as many scholars have pointed out, offers political actors transcend-
ent motivation or a utopian horizon (Peterson 1996; Smith 1996; Zald 1982),
a reservoir of moral imperatives through which they can define social prob-
lems and then deem their actions to address them as legitimate and meaningful
(Kniss and Burns 2004; Smith 2017; Wood 2002); collective identity (Lichter-
man 2008; Wuthnow 2011; Reed and Pitcher 2015); social solidarity (Durkheim
1995; Nepstad and Williams 2007); rituals, stories, and other nonmaterial prac-
tices that can work to maintain activism (Wuthnow 2011; Reed 2017; Reed and
Pitcher 2015; Nepstad 2004; Lichterman 2008; Braunstein 2012); prophetic
orientations (Weber 1978; Reed, Williams, and Ward 2016; Boer 2007); demo-
cratic hope (Wood 2002); and emotional energy that sustains their determination
to bring about change (Durkheim 1995). As an institution, religion facilitates
activism in that it supplies movement (revolutionary and otherwise) leaders,
safe havens, and organizational and network structures (Smith 1996; Kniss and
Burns 2004; Morris 1984; Wood 2002). These material resources can, respec-
tively, give direction to collective action, provide a free space for the articulation
of opposition, and facilitate the growth and spread of a movement (McAdam
1982; Morris 1984).
Yet, religion is often regarded and experienced as a taken-for-granted and
order-maintaining cultural model. If it is indeed the case that religion reinforces
the status quo more often than not, this raises an obvious question: How is reli-
gion as an order-maintaining cultural model transformed to function as an order-
transforming cultural model? The answer to this question takes us directly into the
realm of cultural theory. Some cultural theorists have suggested, for example, that
taken-for-granted cultural models contain an adaptive potential that allows their
users to adjust to their social circumstances. Others call attention to the context
in which a taken-for-granted cultural model is transformed, focusing on times of
crisis, unsettled conditions, or lived experience as the factors that facilitate the
transformation of a taken-for-granted cultural model into an order-transforming
one. In the latter two regards, the theoretical insights of Pierre Bourdieu, Antonio
Gramsci, Christian Smith, William Sewell, Ann Swidler, and E. P. Thompson are
useful for making sense of the transformative (and sometimes reactionary) poten-
tial of religion in politics.
DOI: 10.4324/9781003177821-17
Epilogue 247
Gramsci recognizes religion as an adaptable cultural model, although he also
recognizes its role in maintaining the status quo (Reed 2012). According to him,
religion stands for traditional authority and traditional conceptions of how the
world and life function. As a source of popular knowledge that often operates
as conventional wisdom, Gramsci finds religion is often tied to the culture of
the dominant class. This makes religion, like all status quo–oriented ideological
orders, resistant to change. Yet, for Gramsci, religion, as common sense, is elastic,
fluid, and malleable (Gramsci 1987, 326, 419, 421); and as organized culture,
it possesses heuristic and problem-solving capacities (Gramsci 1987, 323, 348,
Gramsci 1990, 10–11, Gramsci 1991, 25). This latter recognition is consistent
with contemporary interpretations. Christian Smith (2017), for example, identi-
fies religion as a system of social practices that facilitates abductive reasoning, a
process of thinking predicated on educated guesses. While Smith maintains that
abductive reasoning is distinct from retroductive, inductive, and deductive reason-
ing, this distinction does not discount religion as a system of social practices that
facilitates the process of thinking—the attribution of meaning to things based on
observation. Gramsci also conveys that since religion is employed in a structured
context of class antagonism and is subject to the realities of lived experience, it
comes in multiple forms according to its social class location. The religion-of-
the-people, for example, already exists in opposition to both officially sanctioned
religious doctrine and the class interests that are represented by it (Gramsci 1987,
420–22). Religion’s inherent adaptable properties, and the fact that religion does
not operate in a social vacuum, open religion to re-signification, rearticulation,
and ultimately to “interior transformation” consistent with political (counterhe-
gemonic) efforts (Gramsci 1987, 420, Gramsci 1991, 190). Religion can work
as an order-transforming force, it follows, because its meaning can be reconfig-
ured—given its inherent features and the demands of lived reality—to mediate the
intentions, interests, and values of actors operating in a political arena.
Swidler’s theorizing of culture as a toolkit similarly underscores how culture,
religious and otherwise, is adaptable. This proposition requires Swidler to dispense
with the notion that culture-as-values determines social action. Instead, she pro-
poses, culture is “a ‘tool kit’ of symbols, stories, rituals, and worldviews,” a res-
ervoir of symbolic vehicles—best understood as cultural predispositions—that is
socially situated and can be activated to formulate “strategies of action” in the face
of problem-solving situations (Swidler 1986, 273). “A culture,” she further notes,
“is not a unified system that pushes action in a consistent direction. Rather, it is
more like a ‘tool kit’ or repertoire . . . from which actors select differing pieces
for [maintaining or] constructing lines of action” (277). Additionally, people may
share similar values, but how a strategy of action is formulated depends on who
is doing the formulating. An actor’s cultural predispositions, that is, are shaped by
her social location while her socially situated cultural predispositions shape how a
strategy of action is formulated. Such an approach to culture allows an analyst, for
example, to make sense of why actors behave the way they do despite often sharing
similar values. To illustrate this latter point she focuses on the culture of poverty
debate, noting that identifying “similarities in aspirations” between middle- and
lower-class actors “in no way resolve[s] the question of whether there are class
differences in culture.” The actions of actors, she continues, are “not determined by
one’s values. Rather action and values are organized to take advantage of cultural
competences” (Swidler 1986, 275). Culture in this sense is adaptable in two ways:
One, an actor can adapt a shared system of values (the larger culture, if you will) to
her social location, and thus establishes a distinct set of cultural predispositions that
are individually and collectively shared by members of the same social location.
Two, as actors formulate strategies of action to solve the different problems they
face, they choose—depending on their social location—from their available cul-
tural predispositions to adapt to their prevailing circumstances. Applied to religion,
these theoretical insights suggest that there are multiple versions of religion and
that the meaning of religion depends on who appropriates it, what specific values
are accentuated, where (and how) these values are appropriated, and under what
context such appropriations are formulated to adapt to the circumstances at hand.
On this latter point on context, Swidler also provides some useful insights for
understanding how an order-maintaining and taken-for-granted cultural model can
be transformed into an order-transforming one. Based on her reading of Weber
(1993), she asserts the position “that culture’s influence varies by context” (2001,
169). To illustrate this point, she identifies two main contexts under which cultural
models operate: unsettled and settled contexts (89–110; 1986, 278–82). In settled
contexts, a cultural model is implicit and accepted. It maintains existent strategies
of action and bolsters an established ethos. An order-maintaining cultural model
such as tradition, custom, or common sense, however, is transformed into an order-
transforming one in unsettled contexts. Why? The instability of unsettled social
contexts makes the conventional employment of taken-for-granted and order-main-
taining cultural models extraneous. When this happens, actors can creatively and
skillfully develop a more explicit, and thus emergent, version of an order-maintain-
ing cultural model rendering it “anew,” as an order-transforming one. In choosing
from their taken-for-granted cultural predispositions and adapting the components
they choose to address the instability of unsettled contexts, actors can develop
alternative lines of action to overcome the instability of unsettled contexts. In so
doing, they transform an order-maintaining and taken-for-granted cultural model
into an order-transforming one. In the context of a political crisis, for example, a
traditional belief system such as religion may be crystallized into a religious ide-
ology—“a highly articulated, self-conscious belief and ritual system . . . offer[ing]
a unified answer to problems of social action”—that can be used to challenge an
unstable status quo in order to overcome it (Swidler 1986, 279). This insight on
the adaptability of cultural models under unsettled contexts is particularly useful
for making sense of revolution (but also rebellions and social movements). With-
out referring to a specific cultural model, William Sewell explains this process of
adaptability and transformation when he explains the impact of the taking of the
Bastille in 1789, an unsettled context, through the cultural orientations of actors:
In times of structural dislocation [political crisis], ordinary routines of social

life are open to doubt, the sanctions of existing power relations are uncertain
Epilogue 249
or suspended, and new possibilities are thinkable. In ordinary times, cultural
schemas, arrays of resources, and modes of power are bound into self-pro-
ducing streams of structured social action. But in times of dislocation, like
the spring and summer of 1789, resources are up for grabs, cultural logics
are elaborated more freely and applied to new circumstances, and modes
of power are extended to unforeseen social fields. In 1789 new arguments
were tried out, new forms of organization were invented, and new ideas
circulated. . . . [But] [e]ven in moments like this, which combined extraor-
dinary freedom with an unusual sense of practical urgency, creativity was
still shaped and constrained by the structurally available forms of thought
and practice.
(1996, 867)
This position on the significance of context for the transformation of a cultural

model is similarly found in the work of Bourdieu, who proposes that h abitus—
that is, taken-for-granted cultural predispositions, including religious ones—
is subject to transformation under conditions of crisis. In the context of an
objective crisis, the disconnection between objective structures (the field) and
subjective structures (the habitus) is immediate and violent. This condition
of disjunction forces the habitus to critique its taken-for-granted orientation
in order to accommodate itself to changes perceived in the field of action
(or larger social environment). As Bourdieu argues, although not always a suf-
ficient condition, an objective crisis “is a necessary condition for a questioning
of doxa” (or that which is taken for granted) and thus creates an opportu-
nity for a habitus to generate reasonable, practical, and logical responses with
which it can act back on a crisis condition in the field of action to overcome it
(1989, 169).
E.P. Thompson’s insight on lived experience is similarly useful for making
sense of the adaptability and transformation of cultural models. He notes the fol-
lowing in The Poverty of Theory: or An Orrery of Errors:
We cannot conceive of any form of social being independently of its organ-

izing concepts and expectations [culture], nor could social being [structured
existence] reproduce itself for a day without thought. What we mean is that
changes take place within social being, which give rise to changed experi-
ence: and this experience is determining, in the sense that it exerts pressures
upon existent social consciousness [and] proposes new questions.
(Thompson 1995, 10)
Lived experience, he further adds,
walks in without knocking at the door, and announces deaths, crises of sub-
sistence, trench warfare, unemployment, inflation, genocide. People starve:
their survivors think in new ways about the market. People are imprisoned:
in prison they mediate in new ways about the law. In the face of such general
experiences old conceptual systems may crumble and new problematics
insist upon their presence [in new ways].
(Thompson 1995, 11)
Taken-for-granted and order-maintaining cultural models such as traditions, cus-

toms, or common sense—including religious ones—can be radicalized under
unstable conditions (as is the case with a social or political crisis), and under
such conditions, many of its components may be crystallized to construct order-
transforming cultural models, explicitly articulated meaning systems (i.e., ideolo-
gies) that can be used to challenge the status quo. This is possible because cultural
models are manifold—“all real cultures contain diverse, often conflicting sym-
bols, rituals, stories, and guides of action”—adaptable, and contextual (Swidler
1986, 277). As such, people can formulate ways out of unstable circumstances by
cohering, defining, and systematizing already available and familiar components
of an existent belief system in oppositional terms, and by using the emerging
understandings that come with the latter cultural work in strategic and challenging
ways as they encounter situations and events.
On the Significance of Religion for Rebellions, Revolutions,

and Social Movements
This edited volume is predicated on the aforementioned insights. In varied con-
texts of social and political crisis, movements emerged—rebellions, revolutions,
and social movements—and religion played a central role in these in various ways:
as transcendent motivation, emotional energy, a reservoir of moral imperatives,
and/or a source of social solidarity, hope, and collective identity. As an institution,
it facilitated political mobilization through organizational and network structures.
Given the political capacity of religion, what then is its significance for rebellions,
revolutions, and social movements? The cases in this volume help answer this
basic question. We now turn to the cases at hand.
On Rebellion and Religion

The chapters on rebellion reveal religion’s central role in governing relationships.
In ancient and nineteenth-century China, religion did so as a political philosophy:
the mandate of heaven (tianming) was at the center of the relationship between
the ruled and their rulers. Tianming was the implicit social contract between them.
As such, it inspired and justified political action against rulers whenever the social
and moral conventions sustaining the social order were violated. Under condi-
tions of stability and abundance—when people’s needs were met—the mandate
of heaven kept an imperial system in place. Stable conditions were a sign of a
ruler’s legitimacy. Under conditions of instability and scarcity, however, the belief
system associated with the mandate of heaven dictated that the ruler could be
deposed on the basis of a people’s willingness to change their fortune (mingyun).
Unstable conditions were a sign that the ruler was ruling unwisely or without
Epilogue 251
virtue; this was reason enough to set rebellions in motion, by either the nobility or
the peasantry. Boer examines this dynamic in two cases of peasant rebellions, one
leading to the foundation of the Han Dynasty in ancient China, the other was the
Taping Rebellion in the nineteenth century. Both cases demonstrate how rebellion
reflects an effort at restoring taken-for-granted political obligations and roles in
governing relationships and how religion is central to this type of process. While
the rebellions in ancient China did not replace the imperial system of governing,
they put in place the Han dynasty, a dynasty that is often regarded as one of the
most successful in Chinese history. The case of the Taping Rebellion, however,
shows how a foreign religion undermined the rebellious effort of the Hakka-led
Taiping Heavenly Kingdom forces, resulting not only in a return to the status quo
ante bellum but also the reformation of the Manchu Qing dynasty.
In ancient Palestine, religion played a vital role, not as a quintessential com-
ponent of a social contract, but as a source of political self-determination against
the Roman empire whose ruthless rule through its emissaries and client rulers—
including priests—meant heavy taxation, cruel repression, debt slavery, tithes,
exploitation, forced tributes from food supplies, the confiscation of land, and the
destruction of Jerusalem and its temple, among other oppressive practices. In the
face of such formidable power and imperial domination, the faith of Judean and
Galilean peasants translated into resilience. This meant relying on, and renew-
ing, a Mosaic covenant that gave them a collective identity, bonded them, called
on them to abide by religious principles that strengthened their unity, required
them to bow to no one except YHWH, and ultimately inspired the peasants to
revolt. Stories of the young David, the rituals of Jubilee and the Sabbath, and
the celebration of Passover, respectively, helped constitute their insurgent identi-
ties; kept their households economically viable, thereby making their resistance
efforts plausible; and triggered the revolt against the Roman Empire. At the end
of the first century, revolt failed. Its failure, however, does not detract from the
reality that religion was a consequential cultural model that was at the center of
the events that made the revolt. In the first century, as noted in Horsley’s chapter,
“religion was not separate from political-economic life, institutions, ceremonies,
and ideologies.” It was a vital component of social, economic, and political life.
The chapter by James Crossley focuses on the role that religion played in the
1381 uprising in England, led by John Ball, a lower clergyman. The economic sys-
tem in which the 1381 uprising took place was feudal. The relationship between
lord and peasant, landlord and tenant was exploitative and was the underlying
cause of the conflict. But, as we see in other cases of pre-Enlightenment rebellion,
the class-based revolt was cloaked in religious garb.
Ball was the ideological driving force behind the uprising. He was anticlerical,
attacking the church. He advocated killing the most powerful lords, along with
the lawyers, judges, and jurors. His preaching was heretical; he had a radical
egalitarianism in his reading of the Bible. He points out that there were no classes
at the time of Adam and Eve. Ball believed in a primitive equality; the origin of
humankind is from one common stock. In the beginning, humans had “all things
in common.” Ball had a vision of a new English society, in which there would
be no serfdom, lords, or exploitation of the peasants because “all come from one
father and one mother, Adam and Eve.” The story of Ball is a revolutionary mar-
tyrology; he was a Christlike figure who was captured, tried, hanged, and drawn
and quartered. The 1381 uprising was not just a rebellion; it was a revolution,
even if a failed one, because it had a vision of a new society.
In this chapter on Ball, Crossley is particularly interested in the religious
dimensions of revolutionary violence. Crossley observes that violence has been
downplayed in the reception of the 1381 uprising. Despite Ball’s preaching advo-
cating violence and the violence that broke out in the uprising, there are neverthe-
less two receptions of him: the revolutionary interpretation that acknowledges the
violence and the reformist one that understates it, the latter of which is hard to do
since shortly after the rebels arrived in London on the feast of Corpus Christi, they
beheaded the Archbishop of Canterbury. This raises the question of revolutionary
violence, which in Crossley’s perspective, is unfortunate but unavoidable:
violence is the collateral damage in a revolution, something that is unfor-

tunately expected when the oppressed are freed from their slavery and the
authority of avaricious and hypocritical rulers and their clergy. Blood and
slaughter are risks inevitably involved for all things to be equal and belong to
the difficult decisions awaiting the would-be revolutionary.
We shall address this question in our conclusion.

Although more strictly a theoretical piece, Löwy’s revisionist account of the
role of religion in Marxism provides its readers with a view of religion’s opposi-
tional potential. In this revision of Marx turning him against himself, religion is
not the “opium of the people” but rather “an expression of real suffering and in one
a protest against the real suffering” (Marx [1843] 1981, 378)1; see also McKin-
non 2005; Reed 2011; Rojo 1988). In light of this dialectical rereading, religion
is much more than an instrument of domination; religion is a discourse with uto-
pian appeal that gives direction to the yearnings of human suffering: freedom
from oppression and domination. Engels’s interpretation of Thomas Münzer—a
sixteenth-century theologian who challenged both established Christianity and
feudal authority in the context of the Protestant Reformation—is at the center of
Löwy’s revisionist account. Münzer became a leader of peasant rebellions in Ger-
many, which challenged the economic and political injustice the peasantry faced
as a result of feudalistic practices. Engels, Löwy maintains, reveals Münzer as
someone whose revolutionary theology and understanding of feudalism in class
terms compelled him, based on the egalitarian principles of early Christianity, to
call for the kingdom of God to be established on earth. Yet, Münzer set himself not
only in opposition to the feudal lords but also to the reformism of Luther and his
support from the middle classes of the emerging bourgs. To Engels, Münzer and
the peasant rebellions he spearheaded represented a religious prefiguring of the
modern communist movement of Engel’s time—a movement defined by a this-
worldly orientation, attuning people to the need to struggle for their economic and
political rights. Engels expected a secular understanding of the human condition
Epilogue 253
that was free of religious mysticism; much to his chagrin, his expectation did not
always conform to the reality of the Christian communism of his day. Religion, as
was the case in the 16th century, continued to inspire calls for social justice, prov-
ing itself resilient in the context of an increasingly modern, and secular, world.
The chapters by Horsley, Crossley, Löwy, and Boer each deal with peasant
rebellions: Horsley in the context of ancient Judea under Roman occupation,
Crossley on the 1381 uprising in England led by clergyman John Ball, the German
Peasant Wars led by preacher and theologian Thomas Münzer, and the peasant
uprising in China justified by the mandate of heaven. In each of these, the theol-
ogy was not just used to justify the rebellion, it was the guiding cultural model
behind it.
On Revolution and Religion

Studying the role of religion in revolutions shows how radical politics are much
more than a secular phenomenon. Revolutions involve the sacred. This is an
insight that has roots in the work of Emile Durkheim, as shown in the introduc-
tion, but that is often discounted simply because of the secular prejudices of con-
temporary scholars. Yet, the historical record shows that religion played a central
role in the French, Nicaraguan, and Iranian revolutions, to name a few. Religion,
as such, has been at the center of the fundamental transformation of societies.
The cases in this volume show religion playing a role in religious protests (Iran),
at the center of processes of revolutionary consolidation and institutionalization
(France), as transcendent motivation (Russia), and as involving organizational
and network structures mobilizing a movement which betrayed revolutionary ide-
als once held as goals in a post-revolutionary context (Zimbabwe).
In the French case explored in this volume, we find nuns navigating the
postrevolutionary phase of the revolution, when French society was subjected to
processes of revolutionary consolidation and institutionalization. Caught in the
middle of the new and old orders, they attempt to find a place for themselves in
a context of rapid and furious secularization as a new secular religion, predicated
on the Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen, clashes with the old religion
of the church. Rapid and furious secularization, in this context, meant that all
institutions in society, including the church, were expected to quickly embrace
the secular in the name of the new and rational republic; tolerance for past modal-
ities was tenuous, at best, or nonexistent, at its worst. What was at stake was
not so much their vocations as nurses and teachers—vocations the new republic
needed desperately—but the fact that, at one point, they were servants, if not
functionaries, of the Catholic Church. Amid the chaos of an emergent society,
they wanted to contribute to its formation. Many nuns were more than willing to
offer their skills as nurses and teachers. Children needed to be educated and the
sick and wounded required curative care. To keep their employment as nurses or
nuns, many were required to swear an oath of loyalty to the new secular state,
renounce their monastic vows, and/or give up their religious garb. Many resisted
and continued to practice their vocation. By 1792, three years after the overthrow
of the monarchy, the suppression of religion, religious congregations, convents,
and churches was in full force. Despite the need for their skills, the nuns were
removed from their posts while church properties were confiscated with greater
haste lest the development of a secular society be corrupted. Before these state
actions materialized, many of them attempted to reconcile their religious identi-
ties with the secularization of French society. They did so by appropriating and
using the language of revolution to assert their right to liberty (self-determination)
and happiness. In the end they failed, but their attempts at asserting their religious
identities amid chaos demonstrate the power of their religious convictions. Their
attempts also tell us something about a potential path that was not taken. The
nuns could have contributed to the formation of a new society. Their skills were
desperately needed. The new secular state, however, stood in the way, revealing
the reactionary traits of secular principles (which can act much like religion) and
undermining the potential complementarity between old and emergent religious
orientations.2
The Russian Revolution is typically thought of as a secular revolution, one that
was strictly driven by a communist movement. If religion played a role in it, it
did so as a conservative force. The case study in this volume, however, provides
an alternative interpretation, one that does not prioritize Marxism over religion or
vice versa. Marxism shared elective affinities with Orthodox Christianity. The fact
that they did so made the revolutionary mobilization of the Russian people plausi-
ble and possible. Additionally, the successful overthrow of the old regime in 1917
was chiefly accomplished by a radicalized population, not by the Bolsheviks, a
vanguard group. The Bolsheviks, that is, operated in a context of mobilization cre-
ated by a radicalized mass who, to begin with, subscribed to Orthodox Christianity,
an order-maintaining and taken-for-granted cultural model that gave orientation
to the Russian people in their everyday lives. The ideology of Marxism, how-
ever, functioned as a new cultural model with order-transforming features—
equality, governance from below, and the commonweal (via the collective
ownership of the means of production)—and it was crafted by revolutionary intel-
lectuals. The latter model had limited purchase in the public; the former broadly
appealed to the masses. Under mobilizational contexts, these two seemingly
antagonistic cultural models converged, giving direction to a vital revolution-
ary movement. What facilitated their convergence? The conventional explana-
tion hinges on the messianism of both models. The case study in this volume,
instead, proposes lived experience and the affinities between some of the cultural
features common to both models. Although unique, in each respective cultural
model, they shared in common the following features: a focus on transcendence
and immanence (utopianism), a praxis orientation (in Orthodox Christianity this
is known as podvig), and militant optimism3 (unwavering commitment to move
beyond the given, knowing that reality can be acted on to be transformed, ekstasis
in Orthodox Christianity). Lived experience, and the fact that Russia was in the
middle of a socio-political crisis, activated the oppositional potential in Orthodox
Christianity, creating the necessary resonance and alignment between the two cul-
tural models for the translation of Orthodox Christianity, an order-maintaining
Epilogue 255
and taken-for-granted cultural model, into an order-transforming one. Combined
as order-transforming models, Orthodox Christianity and Marxism inspired the
masses and made it possible for them to persevere in the face of struggle and the
unknown future they set out to create.
The Iranian case in this volume calls attention to the emotional power of reli-
gious rituals and the protest contexts under which they took place and were used.
This underexplored dimension of the Iranian revolution is significant, as the case
study in this volume demonstrates. At the center of the argument is the Shiʿa
mourning rituals of Muharram, which effectively functioned as sources of emo-
tional energy that made for successful protests that essentially marked the begin-
ning of the end for the Pahlavi dynasty. These mourning rituals are designed to
commemorate the martyrdom of Husayn ibn Ali at the hands of Yazid I, the usurp-
ing ruler of the Umayyad caliphate, during the battle of Karbala, an event that
took place in 680 ce. This martyred event is, in effect, Shi’a Islam’s founding
myth. As commemorated through the Muharram mourning rituals, it has had a
history of conformity to the status quo but it also took the form of street pro-
tests that stressed the need to struggle against injustice and illegitimate authority.
Under growing contexts of political crises in the 1960s and 1970s, the rituals
gained an order-transforming character, animating protests against the Pahlavi
regime. Their broad and growing appeal among the Iranian population in the late
1970s gave them mobilizational strength. At this stage, the rituals assumed a revo-
lutionary role. This can be explained in part because existent organizational and
network structures—mosques and bazars, among others—became active opposi-
tional spaces through which resistance against the regime grew. This growth in
resistance meant power in numbers. Yet the emotional nature of mobilizational
contexts was also key to the unfolding of protests that culminated in revolutionary
victory. The size of protests energized participants. The sharing of mobilizational
spaces created a condition of mutual entrainment that emotionally bonded them,
giving integrity to their political resistance. Revolutionary chants infused with
ceremonial language, always a part of the protests, inspired them. The contexts of
protest at this point became liminal. Instead of paralyzing them, the dread, anger,
hatred, and anxiety felt during these socio-religious protests made it possible for
them to realize, despite their social, political, and economic differences, that they
had an enemy in common. Close to the deposition of the shah, the very organi-
zational and networks structures that had augmented the resistance movement
became networks of affectivity, adding to the growing revolutionary momentum in
place. The experience of participating in socio-religious protests, moreover, gave
confidence to participants. This made it possible for them to persevere in the face
of danger and death. In the end, Shi’a Islam provided a cultural and emotional
opportunity for Iranians to forcefully express their discontent and take the first
steps in constituting a different world for themselves.
Joram Tarusarira and Bernard Pindukai Humbe tell the story of how sectarian
African Independent or Initiated Churches (AICs), aligned themselves with the
nationalist Zimbabwe African National Union-Patriotic Front (ZANU PF) while
they were engaged in a struggle for liberation against British colonial rule but
remained loyal to them when they seized control of the state and became cor-
rupt and oppressive. This fits the dialectical framework that we have presented in
this volume as religion as both a source of liberation and an instrument of domi-
nation. Yet for Tarusarira and Humbe, this alliance poses a quandary since they
assume that the AICs would have remained committed to liberation after the new
regime became corrupt and oppressive. To explain this, they employ the terms
theodicy of liberation and theodicy of legitimation. The theodicy of legitimation
provides accounts that are used to justify the existing order while the theodicy of
liberation leads to perceptions and actions which can challenge it. When theodi-
cies of legitimation no longer provide a plausible explanation, they need to be
modified; otherwise, due to their lack of coherence, they result in a legitimation
crisis. AICS provided a theodicy of liberation against the colonial regime and
missionary churches but then supplied a theodicy of legitimation for the national-
ist Mugabe regime. When Mugabe’s regime failed to deliver economically and
became oppressive, he turned to the AICs for support. Despite socioeconomic
and political instability, the AICs supported the regime. The explanation that
Tarusarira and Humbe provide is that the regime gave the AICs preferential treat-
ment and thus established a mutually beneficial relationship between them. The
AICs provided “a sacred canopy for the ZANU PF regime.” To legitimize the
regime, the AICS portrayed Robert Mugabe, the first president of the new regime,
as the Messiah. ZANU PF politicians pretended to be religious to gain the support
of the AICs. While the AICs raised ZANU PF politicians to prophetic stature, this
did not conform to their corrupt selves. The AICs attacked opponents of the new
regime (including the major opposition party and religious groups that stood in
opposition to the state). Religion was used by the ZANU PF to protect wealth and
power. While there is a mutually beneficial relationship between the AICs and the
ZANU PF, both have lost their moral compass. By not taking moral responsibility,
AICs acted in a manner that Tarusarira and Humbe claim was inconsistent with
Christianity, and thus have a contradictory relationship to it. Thus, we see from
their chapter, the dangers of church–state alliances. When religious movements
stand in opposition to the state, they can be a force for social change, but when
they are allied with the state, they are used to legitimize the established order.
On Social Movements and Religion

Religion, both secular and religious, has been at the center of many social move-
ments. The chapters in this volume focused on social movements build on this
insight. One theorizes the relationship religion has to social movements. Another
analyzes the discursive context under which anti-immigration mobilization in the
United States has been maintained in the twenty-first century. Two others explore
the potential of religion in Latin America. One examines the connection religion
has to environmentalism. The other considers indigenous spirituality as a mode
of resistance. While the latter two chapters are not exclusively centered on active
social movements on the ground, they provide an overview of the ideas that are
likely to influence future collective action. In so doing, one becomes acquainted
Epilogue 257
with emergent oppositional religious cultures in this particular region of the West-
ern Hemisphere (i.e., Latin America).
The chapter that directly theorizes the relationship between social movements
and religion by Anna Peterson expands on the insights of the introduction and
epilogue to this volume. It provides a more comprehensive take on the distinctive
attributes that make religion a powerful political resource: its ideas, capacity to
make connections between everyday life and institutions, and its practices. First,
it identifies the conservative and progressive traits of religion. Religion is, on one
hand, a conservative force because it (1) bolsters the social order by sacralizing
it, (2) is an order-maintaining cultural model, (3) is reactionary, (4) lends itself to
quietistic orientations, (5) justifies inequalities, (6) is a source of blind fanaticism,
and (7) prevents people from identifying the root causes of social problems. On
the other hand, religion is a progressive force because it (1) is a creative force,
(2) provides hope in the face of suffering, (3) legitimizes grievances and protests,
(4) has the potential of becoming an order-transforming cultural model, (5) can
inspire and sustain activism, and (6) provides political actors moral vocabularies
with which they can question injustice and inequality. How are religious ideas
central to social change then? At a very basic level, they make it possible for the
religious to make moral sense of their world before they act upon it. They provide
political actors utopian horizons. Biblical scripture, for example, provides “mod-
els of community, social relationships, and leaders” as well as visions of justice.
Religious ideas can also make abstract ideals, such as truth and justice, concrete
in the minds of political actors. Because religion, as idea and practice, mediates
the relationship between everyday life and institutional practices, it can create
links between local and larger (state, nation, and global) struggles. These connec-
tions, essentially network structures, facilitate the diffusion of movement ideas
and goals. Another advantage that comes with religion are its practices. Religious
practices such as the Gandhian precept “be the change,” celebrating religious fig-
ures, charity, commemorating martyrs, fasting, nonviolent civil disobedience, pil-
grimages, and prayer not only embody religious ideas, they are ready-made rituals
that are often used for political purposes. The chapter by Peterson illustrates the
aforementioned points with specific historical examples.
In what is a novel contribution to the study of religion and social movements
in the United States, the anti-immigration study in this volume by Rhys Williams
details the discursive context under which anti-immigration sentiment was main-
tained in the first two decades of the twenty-first century. The reader is provided
with a historical overview of the connection between nativism and anti-immigra-
tion activism which serves as the background for making sense of the latest wave
of anti-immigration sentiment. Central to this case are intellectual and moral argu-
ments provided by White Evangelical leaders who, while not officially associated
with anti-immigration actions, gave direction to their adherents and the policies
they clamored for. Relying on Old and New Testament scripture, these leaders
justified anti-immigration sentiment based on biblical stories emphasizing the
need for secured borders (Acts 17:26, 32:17; Genesis 11:1–9), a wall (Nehemiah
2:2, 6:15–16; Proverbs 25:28; Psalm 147:12–14), and law and order (Leviticus
18:26). The meaning of the former set of stories refers to how the integrity of the
nation is at stake. The law-and-order stories imply the unlawful conduct of illegal
aliens, hence the need to protect the nation and hold violators accountable. White
Evangelical leaders also employed other stories to legitimate and give credence
to the political leadership behind anti-immigration policymaking. Here the focus
was on President Trump and members of his administration. In their discourse,
White Evangelical leaders, for example, drew parallels between President Trump
and biblical figures. Trump was compared to King David and Cyrus the Great.
The former figure was a beloved but imperfect king. This comparison alluded to
Trump’s imperfections but also his greatness and, as such, the correctness of his
anti-immigration stand. The latter figure was an “anointed” empire builder. While
this comparison had a tenuous connection to the issue of immigration, it alluded to
it indirectly. In this odd comparison, Trump is seemingly portrayed as a leader of a
great nation, if not empire, whose manifest destiny required the unity of a people,
hence the need to police the nation’s border and guard against the foreign-other
whose illegal activities (i.e., breaking immigration laws) were deemed factors that
undermined the unity of a deserving and chosen people. Whether or not the way
the religious stories employed by Evangelical orators make sense, the chapter
draws attention to their strategic use. The articulation of these religious stories
resonated with white conservative Christians. These stories dramatized immi-
gration as an issue making it real to them. They similarly provided a cognitive
map through which moral, social, and symbolic boundaries could be established,
blame to alien-others could be assigned, and the virtues of orators and politicians
in favor of anti-immigration policies could be affirmed. Their effect, ultimately,
reveals religion’s capacity as a discursive context that facilitated and maintained
the formation of a reactionary collective identity and worldview.
In her contribution to the edited volume, Sylvia Marcos takes us into the world
of indigenous spirituality, which is practiced by Mesoamericans in the state of
Chiapas, Mexico—home to the Zapatistas and their movement. Indigenous spir-
ituality is not a religion; it is spirituality. It provides a collective identity and
therefore gives strength to indigenous social movements, making them one of the
most transformational forces in Latin America. Indigenous spirituality is a decolo-
nizing force; it is opposite and antagonistic to Catholic colonialism.
Indigenous spirituality is not based on the Cartesian dualism of nature and
society, which allows for the capitalist, colonialist, and patriarchal exploitation
of nature. In contrast, it is based on duality, which provides an alternative under-
standing of the interdependence of human beings with nature. In dualisms such as
feminine and masculine, life and death, light and dark: “neither pole invalidates
the other;” they are a “fluidity of opposites” that are “in constant mutual interac-
tion, flowing into one another.”
Indigenous spirituality is not just individual; it is collective. Spirituality is prac-
ticed as rituals at which collective identity is expressed. At these rituals, there is a
communal spirit in which those participating “pray by dancing and dance to pray.”
The spiritual collectivity is political. Indigenous spirituality is a political stance
that is organized in the National Indigenous Conference (Congreso Nacional
Epilogue 259
Indígena, CNI). It even fielded one of its leaders, María de Jesús Patricio, as a
candidate for President of Mexico in 2017. During her campaign, she dressed in
ceremonial attire as a visual affirmation of her indigenous spirituality. Women
play a central role in indigenous spirituality as a social and political movement.
They met together at the First Indigenous Women’s Summit of the Americas in
2002.
Indigenous spirituality sustains and inspires social and political movements in
their work for justice, existential security, and self-governance. It is a push for
“another world,” which is “revolution in its deepest sense.”
Luis Martínez Andrade explores the ecological dimensions of Leonardo Boff’s
liberation theology. He shows the “ ‘elective affinities’ between discourses of ecol-
ogy and liberation theology,” which come together in Boff’s eco-theology of lib-
eration. Boff studied creation theology, which is an interpretation of the Genesis
theory of origins that helps “recover the ecological sense of the Judeo-Christian
tradition.” Boff has a notion of the Cosmic Christ in which Christ is found in all
things. Because Christ is Godlike, this is an instance of panentheism (God is in all
things), which is a formula for escaping pantheism (all is in God). Boff was influ-
enced by Saint Francis of Assisi who was opposed to hierarchy and had “fraternity
toward the weakest.” Boff admired Assisi because he left the elite social class to
which he belonged.
Boff, one of the founders of the Brazilian Workers’ Party, has an affinity with the
oppressed. He was an advisor to the Landless Workers’ Movement and the Pasto-
ral Commission for Land, which are part of an autonomous social movement. The
Pastoral Commission for Land is a unit of the Brazilian Catholic Church, which
deals with the problems of the rural poor and is focused on land distribution.
Boff is opposed to consumer capitalism and private property upon which it is
based. The modern capitalist system is “ecocidal.” The logic of capital is destruc-
tive to “the poor and the planet.” Boff sees the self-destructive tendencies of the
capitalistic system in apocalyptic terms: “if we do not radically change our model
of production and social reproduction we are headed . . . for a catastrophe.”
Boff called for a new social paradigm in which there is a better relationship
between humans and nature and humans with each other. He envisions a “cosmic
democracy,” which is in harmony with nature and provides an alternative para-
digm of the relationship between society and nature. In Boff’s eco-theology of
liberation, there is a unity between science and Christology.
Boff’s eco-theology of liberation is part of an “Environmentalism of the Poor,”
which is the struggle by those in the global South who are opposed to the extrac-
tivism and deforestation of “the hegemonic model of development.” This Envi-
ronmentalism of the Poor provides an alternative “to the model of accumulation
based on the over-exploitation of . . . nonrenewable resources.” Environmentalism
of the Poor engages in a critique of modernity, which it sees as responsible for
the domination of nature. In contrast, it has a holistic approach to the relationship
of human beings with nature. It questions the logic of infinite growth and rejects
the exploitation of nature. Environmentalism of the Poor is “a counterhegemonic
movement for social, economic, and environmental justice.”
Conclusion
A word of caution should be noted. While we have seen that rebellions, revolu-
tions, and social movements—when fueled by religious ideology/ideas—can be
a source of progressive social change, they can easily be turned into its opposite
as a force of repression. Moreover, rebellions and revolutions are almost always
marred by violence. As Hannah Arendt (1965) points out, war and revolution are
inextricably interconnected. Revolutions have often been triggered by wars (the
Paris Commune 1871; Russia 1905, 1917; Germany 1918) or resulted in wars
(England 1640–1660, France 1789–1999, Russian 1917, Iran 1979, Nicaragua
1979). Social movements, in contrast, can turn violent, but since they typically
do not attempt to seize control of the state, which has a monopoly on legitimate
violence, they therefore seldom become a driving force behind war. Many social
movements are nonviolent and are sometimes an expression of opposition to war,
like the movement against the war in Vietnam.
Most of the rebellions and revolutions discussed in this volume have been
violent. The messianic peasant movements Horsley describes preceded and led
to the Jewish War. The 1381 English Uprising led by John Ball, who was hanged,
drawn, and quartered, was violent. Like Ball, Thomas Münzer, who inspired
the German Peasant Wars, was tortured and executed. Chinese peasant rebel-
lions inspired by the mandate of heaven, which Boer discusses, were violent, in
particular the Taiping Rebellion, which killed between 20 and 40 million Chi-
nese. The French Revolution, the backdrop of Gressang’s chapter, resulted in
the Napoleonic Wars. The Russian revolutions discussed by Prosic came out of
World War I and led to a civil war between the white and red armies. The Iranian
Revolution, the focus of the chapter by Rahimi, resulted in the Iran–Iraq War.
The Zimbabwe African National Union, discussed by Tarusarira and Humbe, had
a military wing, the Zimbabwe African National Liberation Army, which led the
Rhodesian Bush War against white-minority rule of Rhodesia. The Zapatistas,
which practices indigenous spirituality, is a guerilla group that has been at war
with the state of Mexico.
Social movements like the US civil rights movement can be non-nonviolent
even if they, as a tactic, provoked violent responses against themselves. As Mal-
colm X (1965, 50) pointed out, revolutions are never based on “begging some-
body for an integrated cup of coffee”; “revolutions are based upon bloodshed.”
Despite the best of intentions, rebellions, revolutions, and social movements
can often have “unintended consequences.” And thus the adage from the Gospel
of Matthew quoted by Max Weber (1946, 119): “ ‘All they that take the sword
shall perish with the sword’ ” (Matthew 26:52). In this essay titled “Politics as a
Vocation,” Weber distinguishes between the ethics of intention which, like value
rationality, places primary importance on ultimate ends (values), from the ethics
of responsibility which, like purposive rationality, is concerned not only with ends
but also the means to a given end and secondary consequences, thus attempting to
avoid unintended ones (Weber 1946, 120, 1978, 26). The most famous quotation
Epilogue 261
of Malcolm X, who called for the Black Revolution, is “by any means neces-
sary”—that is, the means are not important; what is important is the ultimate ends.
Social movements, like the civil rights movement, which practiced nonviolent
civil disobedience and followed the ethics of responsibility, are concerned not
only with the ends but with how they get there as well.
In the Introduction, we established that revolutions only occur under dictator-
ships and monarchies, whereas social movements occur in democratic—that is
republican (small r)—societies in which the system flexes. Monarchies and dicta-
torships most often do not flex, and can go in precisely the opposite direction of
increased repression. Pressure from below builds up and can lead to a revolution.
Religion has been, and can be, used as fuel for the fire. The question of the desir-
ability of revolution is contingent and needs to be taken on a case-by-case basis.
When the system is rigid, there is no other outlet. But when the system is capable
not only of reform but of transformation, revolution can take place nonviolently
in a democratic manner, which is the more desirable means.
Notes
1 “Das religiöse Elend ist einem der Ausdruck des wirklichen Elendes und in einem die
Protestation gegen das wirklichen Elendes.”
2 If Durkheim (1995) is correct in asserting that social existence is fundamentally reli-
gious in nature, one may regard the post-victory context as one defined by religious
conflict; between the religion of the old and the religion of the new.
3 This is a term derived from Bloch (1995) that is accurately employed by the author of
this case.
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Index
Abi Talib, Ali ibn 142 ancient Israel, rebellions of 7 – 8

activism, religion and 246 Andrade, Luis Martinez 259
Adam and Eve 72, 76, 78, 80 – 1, 251 – 2 Andreas, Peter 214
African American Pentecostal Anglican Church 9
activist 188 Anglicans 9
African Apostolic Church (AAC) 159, 168 Anglo-Iranian Oil Company 14
African Christianity 158; see also African animal rights movement 193
Independent Churches (AICs) anthropocentrism 222
African Independent Churches (AICs) anticlericalism, Ball’s 78
158, 169 – 70, 255 – 6; alliance anti-immigration 257 – 8
with Zimbabwe African National Antipas 57, 58
Union–Patriotic Front (ZANU PF) Antlitz, Kevin 175
165 – 6; capture by state 166 – 8; Apocalypse of Pseudo-Methodius 76
cartels using ZANU PF for personal Apostles Christian Council of Zimbabwe
gain 168; features of 158 – 60; mutual (ACCZ) 167
benefit between ZANU PF and Archbishop of Canterbury 71, 75, 252
168 – 9; theodicies 160 – 2; theodicy of Arendt, Hannah 6, 260
legitimation 161, 163 – 5; theodicy of Arjomand, Said 141
liberation 160 – 3, 169 Ashura 133, 143 – 7, 149, 153n2
African Indigenous Churches 158 Assisi, Saint Francis of 223 – 4, 226
African Initiated Churches 158 atheism 37
Agamben, Giorgio 4 Aulard, François-Alphonse 11
Agrippa II (King) 57, 58 Axworthy, Michael 138
Aho, James 202
AICs see African Independent Churches Babylonian Exile 7
(AICs) Babylonians 7
Alabama Christian Movement for Human Badiou, Alain 4
Rights 18 Balinese Cockfight 140
Alexeev, Mikhail V. 126n10 Ball, John 8, 72, 251, 253, 260;
Alinsky, Saul 190 anticlericalism 78; Blackheath sermon
allotted life span (tianming) 40, 41, 48 77 – 8; English rebellion (1381) 74 – 9;
Almeida, Paul 185 historical materialism and 72 – 4, 83;
Amanat, Abbas 138 Reformist and revolutionary legacies of
American identity 199 – 200; see also 79 – 83; see also Peasant’s Revolt (English
United States uprising 1381)
American Revolution 80, 83 Baptists 10
Anabaptists 8, 79 bar Giora, Simon 53, 59, 60 – 2, 68 – 9
Ananias (son of Masbalus and Aristeus) 62 Barros, Marcelo 221, 228
Ananus (high priest) 60, 61 Bastille Saint-Antoine 11
Index 265
Battle of Karbala (680CE) 15, 133, 142 – 6, Caracol 241, 243n9
151, 255 Carmelites 92 – 3
Bauer, Bruno 3, 31, 33 Cartesian dichotomies, nature-society
Bax, Ernest Belfort 81 dualism 233 – 4
Baxter, John 80 Cartesian Dualism 234, 258
Bayat, Asaf 139 Catholic Church 10, 102, 164, 166, 253;
Bazargan, Mehdi 152 Brazilian 221, 259
Beghards 8 Catholicism 11, 12, 226; Mesoamerica
Benjamin, Walter 4, 10 232; Mexico 231, 232
Berdyaev, Nikolai 111 – 13 Catholic nuns see French Revolution
Berger, Peter 179 (1789–1791)
Bible 4, 74, 163; Hebrew 42, 64; justifying Cavaliers 9
nation and borders 203 – 7 CBCs (Christian-based communities) 17
“big structures,” everyday life Central American solidarity movement
and 189 – 91 20 – 1
Billings, Dwight 191 Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) 14, 145
Black Death (1348/49) 71 Centro Indígena de Capacitatión
Black Lives Matter 191, 194 Integral 234
Black Revolution 261 Chakrabarty, Dipesh 141
Blanchet, Pierre 150 Chalier, Joseph 10
Bloch, Ernst 3, 4, 34, 119 – 26, 152 charismatic leaders 4 – 5
Bloch, Marc 7 Charles I 9
Boer, Roland 4 Chavez, Cesar 192
Boff, Leonardo 219, 228n4, 259; eco-theology Chernov, Viktor 116
223–7; paradigm shift 223, 227 Chernyshevsky, Nikolai 125, 127n15 – 16
Bolsheviks, Russian Revolution (1917) 13, Chiang Kai Shek 13
110, 113 – 14, 116 – 17, 119 – 21, 123 – 5, China: changing one’s destiny 43 – 5; Liu
126, 254 Bang and Han dynasty 46 – 7; Liu Bang
Book of Songs (Shiji) 41, 43, 44 and the Han Dynasty 46 – 7; mandate of
Börne, Ludwig 31 heaven 40, 41 – 3; peasant revolutions
Boulding, Kenneth 220 40 – 1, 49; peasant revolutions in 40 – 1;
Bourdieu, Pierre 246, 249 people’s needs 45 – 8; Taiping Heavenly
Bourdonnaye, Marie-Françoise de la 95 Kingdom 47 – 8
Boxer Rebellion 50n21 Chinese Communist Party 13, 14
Brazilian Catholic Church 221, 259 Chinese Revolution (1911–1912) 13 – 14
Brazilian Workers’ Party 223, 259 Christian Broadcasting Network 213
Brecht, Bertolt 38, 50n11 Christian Charity in Seignelay 98
Brest-Litovsk peace treaty 113 Christian Church 8
Brethren 8 Christian Coalition 205
Brière, Clair 150 Christian Eucharist 191 – 2
British Petroleum Company 14 Christian idealism 31
Brown decision (1954) 19 Christian Identity movement 202
Brown, Wendy 214 Christianity 12, 14, 38; Bible 74;
Browne, Felicia 83 as communism 36 – 7; early 55;
Buddhism 14, 43 Enlightenment philosophy 37; foreign
Buddhist nationalists 1 teaching of version of 47; laws of nature
Bulgakov, Sergey 123 and 99; primitive 32 – 3, 35 – 6; socialism
Burns, Gene 184 and 33 – 4; Western 121; see also Eastern
Bush, George W. 212 Orthodox Christianity
Christian nationalism 201
Caesar 8, 54, 55, 56, 58, 66 – 7 Christology 259
Calvinism 34, 42, 179 Christ’s death 77
capitalism 220, 222 – 3 Civil Constitution of the Clergy 102, 103n2
266 Index
civil disobedience 192 Crossley, James 251, 252
civil rights movements (US) 18 – 20, 22, Crosswalk.com 207
185, 202, 260 – 1 Cry of the Earth, Cry of the Poor (Boff)
Cleveland John 79 219, 227
Clinton, Bill 212 Cult of Mao 13 – 14
collective action, frames 185 – 6 Cult of Reason 11
collective will, Iran 151 Cult of the Supreme Being 10 – 11
Collins, Randall 133 cultural model 248 – 9
Colonialism, Catholic 258 Cultural Revolution (Chinese
coloniality of power 219, 228n1 1966–1976) 14
colonial presence, philosophical cultural valuation 22n2
underpinnings of 233 – 5 culture 248
Comandanta Esther 239 Cumanus (governor) 65
Committee of Public Safety 11 Cyrus the Great 212, 258
common sense 247
communism: Christianity as 36 – 7; Dabashi, Hamid 142
German 37 Dalian University of Technology, School
Communist Manifesto, The (Marx and of Marxism 44
Engels) 12 Daoism 43
Communist Party Historians’ Group da Silva, Lula 221
72, 82n3 Daughters of Wisdom 100
Communist Party militants 221 David (King) 7, 212, 258
Communist Party of China (CPC) 44 David (young) 63 – 4, 68 – 9, 251
Communist Party of Great Britain 82 al-Dawlah, Mu’izz 144
community experience, Foucault 150 Day of the Protection of the Holy
community of life, notion of 225, 228n6 Virgin 115
Community Rule 66 Dead Sea 8; Dead Sea Scrolls 63
Confucianism 13, 14, 46 – 7 debt slavery 61, 66, 69, 251
Confucius 43 de Chardin, Teilhard 223, 224 – 5
Congo, Democratic Republic of 164 Declaration of the Rights of Man and
congregation-based organizing 190 – 1 Citizen 11, 91, 93, 94, 253
Congregation of Christian Charity 101 deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA) 225
Conservative Political Action Committee de Saint-Just, Louis Antoine 10
(CPAC) 209 destiny 40; changing one’s 43 – 5
Conservativism, Russian Revolution and destiny-and-fortune (mingyun) 40, 44
Orthodox Christianity 114 – 19 Deuteronomy 65, 66
Constituent Assembly 11 Diggers 10, 36
Constitutional Revolution (1905) 146 Diocesan Formation Centre of
contentious collective action 5 Cascavel 221
continuities 225 Discalced Carmelites 92
Convictions of the Soul (Nepstad) 20 discontinuities 225
Corpus Christi 77, 252 dispositivo 234
cosmic Christology 225 divine right of kings, Western notion of 42
cosmic mysticism 225 divine sanction, God’s laws 42
Covenant Code 65 Dobb–Sweezy debate 74
COVID-19 restrictions 166 Doctrine of Imamate 16
creation 189; festive side of 226 – 7; Dong Zhongshu 46
sacredness of nature 188 – 9 Dostoevsky 110
creation theology 226 Dream of John Ball, A (Morris) 81 – 2
critical theory of religion 1 – 3 Duke of Zhou 41, 43, 49n1
Critical Thought Facing the Capitalist Durkheim, Emile 5, 11, 136 – 7, 178, 179,
Hydra 234 180, 253
Cromwell, Oliver 9 dvoeverie (dual faith) 115
Index 267
Eastern Orthodox Christianity: Russian Eucharist 77
Revolution (1917) and 110 – 11; see Evangelical Immigration Table 207
also Orthodox Christianity; Russian Evangelicals 1, 200 – 1, 208, 212
Revolution (1917) everyday encroachments 139
ecocentrism 222 Exodus 66
eco-feminism 219, 222, 227
Ecofeminist Intuitions (Gebara) 222 Faith & Freedom Coalition 205, 206
ecology, term 220 Faith for the Nation campaign 166
Ecology, Globalization, Spirituality (Boff) Falun Gong 14, 50n21
225, 227 Falwell, Jerry, Jr. 212
Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of Fanaticism 187
1844 (Marx) 151 Farhi, Farideh 140
Economic Structural Adjustment Fast Track Land Reform Programme
Programme (ESAP) 164 (FTLRP) 164
eco-theology, 219; Boff’s 219, 223 – 7, 259 February Revolution (1917) 126n10
Edward III (King) 74 Fedayeen 15
Edwards, John 212 feminism 1, 185; eco- 219, 222, 227
effervescence, Durkheimian notion of 136 Feuerbach, Ludwig 3, 31, 32
Egypt 7 Fifth Monarchy 10
ekstasis 121, 254 Filofei’s letters 113
elective affinities 13; liberation ecology First Indigenous Women’s Summit of the
and theology 220 – 2, 222 – 3; liberation Americas 232, 237, 240, 242n1
theology and 118; Weberian 111, 117 Fischer, Michael M. J. 142
Elementary Forms of Religious Life, The Flavian family, imperial propaganda 53 – 4
(Durkheim) 5 Floyd, George 175, 191
El Salvador, solidarity trips 21 food riots 6
embodied spirituality 232, 238 Foran, John 9
emergence 225 Foucault, Michel 133, 134, 150, 151, 153,
empirical credibility 20 154 – 5n16
Engels, Friedrich 10, 12, 72, 252; Foundations of Christianity, The
Christianity and working-class (Kautsky) 181
movement 181; interest in primitive Fox News 210
religion 32 – 4; Marx and on religion and Francione, Gary 193
revolution 31 – 8 Francis (Pope) 201
English Reformation 79 Franciscans 8
English Revolution 9 – 10, 34, 36 Francis of Assisi (Boff) 223
English uprising (1381) 71; see also Frankfurt School 4
Peasant’s Revolt (English uprising Freedom Summer 22n5
1381) French National Assembly, French
Enlightenment 1, 92; rules of convent 99; Revolution 91 – 2, 93 – 4, 95 – 7, 103
thought and religion 102 French Revolution (1789–1791) 10 – 12,
Enlightenment philosophy 37, 38 36, 80, 83, 91 – 103, 153n3, 260; on
Enock, Madzibaba 167 freedom and benefits of teaching 95 – 7;
Environmentalism of the Poor 259; freedom to care for sick 97 – 102;
movements 220 – 2; term 220 intersectionality 103n4; nuns in
environmental values 188 – 9 91 – 103, 105n20; paradox of liberty
Episcopal Conferences 16 and institutional order 92 – 5; religion,
epistemologies of the South 233 gender and agency 102 – 3
Ershad, Husayniyeh 145, 146 Fulton, Brad 188
Essenes 8 Furet, François 146, 153, 153n3
Essential Care. An Ethics of Human
Nature (Boff) 226 Gaius (emperor) 67
Eternal Evangelism (website) 210 Gallus, Cestius 60
268 Index
Gandhi 186, 192 Heine, Heinrich 31
Gaozu 46 Henry, Peter 123
Gapon, Georgy 114 Herod (King) 55, 56, 57, 213
Gebara, Ivone 222, 228n3 Hess, Moses 31
Geertz, Clifford 140, 178, 179 heyats 146, 154n8
Genesis, Tower of Babel story 204 – 5, hidden or twelfth Imam 14, 16, 154n13
207, 210 Hill, Christopher 73
Genesis theory, origins 226 Hilton, Rodney 73
George’s Hill 10 Hinduism 179
German Ideology, The (Marx) 32 Hindu nationalists 1
German Peasant Wars (1525) 182, historical materialism, Ball and 72 – 4, 83
253, 260 History of Great Britain, The (Hume) 80
German Revolution (1918) 13 History of the Earlier Han Dynasty (Gu
German Spartakus 13 Ban) 49n7
Gibellini, Rosino 225 Hobbes, Thomas 35 – 6
Glorious Revolution (1688) 79 Hobsbawm, Eric 73, 180, 184
God-Builders 13 Hodgson, Marshal 144
Goethe Institute 147 Holiness Code 65
Golabdareh, Mahmud 148 holy 122
Goldmann, Lucien 32 Holy Sacrament 95
Gomez, Magdalena 232 Homâkóv, Alekséj S. 126
Gonzague, Marie-Louise de 92 Hong Xiuquan 47 – 8
Goodman, Martin 53 Horkheimer, Max 4
Goodwin, Jeff 184 House Church Movement 14, 50n21
Gospel in Solentiname, The (Cardenal) 17 HuffPost (online site) 210
Gospel of the Cosmic Christ of 1971, The human interest 2
(Boff) 223, 224 Humbe, Bernard Pindukai 255 – 6
Gospels 8, 17 Hume, David 80
Gould, Mark 9 Hunt, Lynn 11
Gracia, Magdalena Durán 232 Husayn ibn Ali 15
Gramsci, Antonio 246, 247 Husayniyyehs 144
Great French Revolution 36 Husayn myth 16
Greeks 7, 8 Hussites 8
grocery riots 6 Hyrcanus, John 60
Grudem, Wayne 208 – 9
Guan Zhong 45 idea 18, 22n1
Guatemala, solidarity trips 21 Idol of the Clownes, or, Insurrection of
Gu Ban 46 Wat the Tyler, with His Priests Baal and
Guchkov, Alexander I. 126n10 Straw, The (Cleveland) 79
Guta RaJehova (GRJ) 159 Idumeans 55, 60 – 2
Guti, Ezekiel 159 Ileto, Reynaldo 186
illusory happiness 180
Haeckel, Ernst 220 immigration, sentiment in United States
Haider, Najam 142 200 – 2, 214
Han dynasty 40, 41, 251; Liu Bang and Immigration and Customs Enforcement
46 – 7 (ICE) 206
Hanshu (Gu Ban) 46, 49n7 Independents 9
Haredi 1 Indigenous Governing Council (Concejo
Hasmoneans 55, 60, 66 Indigena de Gobierno, CIG) 231, 232
heaven: ruler’s mandate by 40; term for 43 indigenous social movements, modernity
Hedström, Ingemar 222 of ancient spirituality 238 – 40
Hegel’s Philosophy of History 112 indigenous spirituality 258 – 9
Hegland, Mary Elaine 154n7 inner experience, Foucault 150
Index 269
inqilab 135 Karbala, Battle of (680CE) 15, 133,
insignificance thesis, Russia and Orthodox 142 – 6, 151, 255
Christianity 114 – 19 Karbala tragedy 144, 151
International Monetary Fund 164 Kautsky, Karl 181
International Workingmen’s Association 34 Keddi, Nikki 138
intersectionality 103n4 Keller, Catherine 182
Iran 9; Pahlavi regime 132, 133, 138, 140, Khomeini, Mustafa 147
147, 148, 152, 153n2, 255 Khomeini, Ruhollah (Ayatollah) 14, 132,
Iranian Revolution (1979) 14 – 16, 132 – 4, 145, 147, 153n2
152 – 3, 260; agency of suffering King, Martin Luther, Jr. 186, 187, 192
152 – 3; emotions and religion 134 – 43; Knighton, Henry 75
mosque-network paradigm 141; Kniss, Fred 184
Muharram rituals 134; prerevolutionary knowledge-impartiality 2
Muharram 143 – 6; religious dimension Koinonia community 192
of 132 – 4; revolutionary Muharram Kriege, Hermann 37
146 – 8; “The Spirit of a World Without Krieger, Leonard 34
Spirit” 148 – 52; Tasua’ and Ashura Kuomintang 13
ceremonies 133, 143 – 4, 147, 149; Kurzman, Charles 134
theoretical models for 135 – 6
Iranian Studies (journal) 154n9 Landless Workers Movement (MST) 219,
Islam 14 221, 227 – 8, 259
Islamic Revolution 132 Langland William 76
Islamists 1 Latin America 256 – 7, 258; concept of
iurodivyi 119 religion 231, see also Mexico
Ivan the Terrible 115 League of the Just 12, 37
Le Bott, Y. 238
Jacobin Club du Manèg 11 Left Behind, The (Wuthnow) 201
Jacobins 10 – 11, 98 Left Hegelianism 38
Jasper, James 184 legalism 46
Jésus, Dorothée de 92 Legge, James 41
Jefferson, Thomas 212 Lenin, Vladimir 13
Jeffress, Rev. Robert 209 – 10 Le Peletier, Louis-Michel 10
Jeremiah, Rev. David 204 – 5, 206 – 7 Levellers 10, 36
Jesus 8, 20, 60, 66, 186, 212; Jesus Christ Levine, Daniel 190
124, 159 Leviticus 65
Jewish War 7, 8, 260 liberation ecology, theology and 220 – 2,
Jim Crow laws 186 222 – 3
Johane Marange Apostolic Church 159 liberation theology 118, 227 – 8; Boff
Johane Masowe Church 159, 162, in 223
167, 168 liberation theory, today 219
John, Gospel of 17, 77 LifeWay Research 200
John Marange Church 167 Lilburne, John 10
John of Gaunt 71 Lincoln, Abraham 212
John of Gischala 58, 60, 61 – 2, 68 Liu Bang 40, 41; Han dynasty and 46 – 7
John the Baptist 75 lived religion 111, 118
Josephus, Flavius 54, 56 – 68 Li Zicheng 40
Joshua 56, 64, 66 Lollards 8
Jubilee Year 251 Louis XVI 10
Judaism 12, 53, 54 – 5, 62, 64 Löwy, Michael 31, 152, 228n4, 252, 253
Judas 66 lucrocentrismo 222
Judean Revolt 53 Ludskanov, A. 123
Judean War, The (Josephus) 54 Lu Jia 46, 50n15
Judeo-Christianity 4 Lukács, Georg 32
270 Index
Luke, Gospel of 17 messianism, Russian 111 – 13, 115
Lunacharsky, Anatoly 13 Methodism 182, 183, 190, 194
Luo Ergang 50n20 Mexico 9, 258; concept of religion 231;
Luther, Martin: ideal of the calling 179; embodied religious thought 236 – 7;
reformism of 252; “two kingdoms” indigenous subversive spirituality
hypothesis 42, 182 235 – 6; modernity of ancient spirituality
Lutheran 34, 42, 49n2 238 – 40; nature-society 233 – 4;
political-spiritual experience 241 – 2;
McAdam, Doug 19 spirituality forging political dimensions
Maccabean Revolt 7, 55 240 – 1; spirituality in sacred earth
McDaniel, Tim 132 237 – 8; understanding spirituality 232
Making of the English Working Class, The Michelet, Jules 11
(Thompson) 181 militant optimism 119, 254; Bloch’s
Malouet, Pierre Victor Baron 94 120 – 2, 124 – 5
Manchu Qing dynasty 251 Miliukov, Pavel 116
Mandate of Heaven 13, 48 – 9, 250; idea of millenarianism 7, 13, 34, 113, 180, 182, 202
45; as secular term 41 – 3; term 40, 49 ming 40, 44
Mann, Tom 73 Ming dynasty 13, 40
Mantle of the Prophet (Mottahedeh) 154n5 mingyun 45; changing one’s destiny 43 – 5;
Mao Tse Tsung 13 destiny-and-fortune 40; term 44
Mao Zedong 14, 48 Mnangagwa, Emmerson 165, 167
Marat, Jean-Paul 10 Moaddel, Mansoor 15
Mariátegui, José Carlos 228 Moises, Subcommander 234
Markos, Sylvia 258 Mojahedin 15
Martinez Alier, Joan 220 Moltmann, Jürgen 228n5
martyr 122 Morning Star (newspaper) 83
Marx, Karl 3, 10, 12, 113, 151; Engels Morris, Aldon 19
and on religion and revolution 31 – 8; Morris, William 81 – 2
religion as opium of people 3, 13, Morton, Timothy 228n2
154n16, 176, 180; sociology of Mosaic Covenant 66 – 7, 251
religion 180 Moses 7, 56, 64, 66, 186
Marxism 31, 252, 254; birth of 12; Block’s Mossadeq, Mohammad 14, 145
militant optimism and 121; China Mother Earth 219
and 45, 48; ideology of 254; Russian Mother Natalie of Jesus 92
Orthodox Christianity and 110; Russian Mottahedeh, Roy 154n5
revolution and 119, 120; utopianism Movement for Democratic Change
of 111 (MDC) 165
Masedza, Shoniwa 162, 168 Münzer, Thomas 252, 260
Matachines dance 232 Mugabe, Robert 163, 164, 165,
materialism 38 – 9n6; historical 72 – 4, 83; 167, 256
religion and 35 – 6 Mugodhi Church 168
Matthew 8; Gospel of 17 Muhammad (Prophet) 15, 142, 186
Matthias (son of Boethus) 62 Muharram: prerevolutionary 143 – 6;
May Fourth Movement 13 protests (1978) 133 – 4, 148 – 52,
Melli Bank (National Bank) 145 152 – 3; revolutionary 146 – 8; staging as
melting pot, term 205 political rallies 154n11; see also Iranian
Melucci, Alberto 185, 192 Revolution (1979)
Mencius 45, 46, 49n10 Mujuru, Joice 167
Mensheviks 13 Müller, M. 116
Mesoamerican community 258; duality multiclass coalitions 22n1
235; embodied religious thought 236 – 7; Münzer, Thomas 182; political
equilibrium 236; fluid duality 236; doctrine 34 – 5
mutually exclusive categories 235; Mutendi, Nehemiah 159, 167
spirituality 232; spirituality embedded in mutual entrainment of emotion 133
Sacred Earth 237 – 8; see also Mexico Mwazha, Paul 159, 167
Index 271
Napoleon 103; Napoleonic Wars 260 Owenites 37
Nashville Christian Leadership Ozouf, Mona 10 – 11
Council 18 – 19
National Convention 11 Pagnucco, Ron 176, 192
National Electoral Institute (INE), Pahlavi regime, Iran 132, 133, 138, 140,
Mexico 241 147, 148, 152, 153n2, 255
National Front 14 Paine, Thomas 80
National Indigenous Conference Palestine: peasant revolt against Roman
(Congreso Nacional Indigena, CNI) 231, 53 – 4; see also peasant revolt (66–70)
242, 258 – 9 panentheism 224
nativism 200, 214 pantheism 224
nature-society dualism 233 – 4 paradigm shift, Boff’s 223, 227
Nazi Holocaust 199 Parish, Steven M. 137
Nehemiah, story of 209 – 11, 257 Passover 65, 251
neo-Hegelianism 32 Pastoral Care of the Earth, Brazil 221
(neo)Marxism/Marxists 1, 3 Pastoral Commission for Land (CPT) 221,
Nepstad, Sharon 20 222, 259
networks of affectivity 255 Patricio, María de Jesús 231, 234 – 5,
New and Impartial History of England, A 241, 259
(Baxter) 80 Pax Christi USA 192
New Model Army of Roundheads 9 peasant revolt (66–70): course of 56 – 62;
new social movements (NSMs) 185 Israelite popular tradition and 67 – 9;
Nicaragua 9; solidarity trips 21 rethinking the role of religion in 62 – 7;
Nicaraguan Revolution 16 – 17 review of 54 – 6; Roman
Niebuhr, Reinhold 187 Palestine 53 – 4
Nietzsche, Friedrich 12 peasant revolutions, China 40 – 1, 49
nihzat 135 Peasant’s Revolt (English uprising 1381)
nuns: caring for sick 97 – 102; Carmelites 71; historical materialism and Ball
92 – 3; freedom and benefits of teaching 72 – 4; John Ball and 71 – 2, 74 – 9; see
95 – 7; French Revolution 91 – 2; liberty also Ball, John
and institutional order 92 – 5; Ursulines Peasant War in Germany, The (Engels)
96 – 7; Visitandines 99; see also French 34, 72
Revolution (1789–1791) Peasant Wars 33, 34
Pentecostals 1, 159, 188
Obama, Barack 212 people’s needs 41, 45 – 6, 48
October Revolution (1917) 117, 120, Perry, Rick 212
127n10 Persians 7
O Evangelho do Cristo Cósmico Peterson, Anna 257
(Boff) 225 Peter the Great 114
Old Testament 8 Petrosoviet 116, 120, 126n10
Ometeotl 235 Pharisees 4, 8, 56, 60, 64, 66 – 7
opium 3, 13, 154n16, 176, 180 Pharoah 65
opportunity structure 18, 22n1, 22n4 Philosophy of History (Hegel) 112
organization 18, 22n1, 22n3 Philosophy of Right (Hegel) 31
organized culture 247 Phoenix Seminary 208
Origin of Russian Communism, The Piers Plowman (Langland) 76, 78
(Berdyaev) 111 – 13 Pleshcheyev, Alexey 123
Orthodox Christianity 254 – 5; Bloch’s Podolinsky, Sergei 220
militant optimism in 119 – 26; podvig 122 – 4, 254; idea of 118; translation
conservatism/insignificance thesis of 122
114 – 19; messianism thesis 111 – 13; podvizhnichestvo 122, 123, 125
Russian Revolution (1917) and podvizhnik 122, 124
110 – 11; see also Russian Revolution podvizhniki 122, 123
(1917) Poletto, Ivo 221
Orthodox mysticism 118 – 19, 122 – 4 political approach 2
272 Index
political cultures of opposition and Reformed Lutheran 34
creation 22n1 religion: activism and 246; critical
Political Process and the Development theory of 1 – 3; everyday life and “big
of Black Insurgency, 1930 – 1970 structures” 189 – 91; ideas and social
(McAdam) 19 change 185 – 9; Iranian Revolution
political process model 18 (1979) 132 – 4; Marx and Engels on
political will, term 153 31 – 8; materialism and 35 – 6; new mode
politics, social movements 176 – 7 of analysis of 38; political nature of
Popular Front 82 3 – 5; positive social effects 2; practices
postcolonialism 1 of social change 191 – 3; resurgence of
postmodernism 1 1; as sacred canopy 179; significance
(post)structuralism 1 for rebellions 250 – 3; significance for
Poverty of Theory, The (Thompson) 249 revolution 253 – 6; significance for social
Presbyterian Church, Scotland 9 movements 256 – 9; social change and
Presbyterians 9 178 – 83, 193 – 4; social movements
Principle of Earth, The (Boff) 227 176 – 7; social movement theory and
principle of hope 120 184 – 5; term 232; see also United States
Progressive Catholicism 190 Religion and Socialism (Lunacharsky) 13
Progressive Catholics 187, 188 religious identity, American 199 – 200
Prosic, Tamara 13 religious institutions, historical role of 176
Protestant Christians, United States Renan, Ernest 34
213 – 14 Reply with Flourishing (Boff) 227
Protestant ethic 179 Republican Party 200
Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of resource mobilization theory 18, 185
Capitalism, The (Weber) 179 Return of the Swallows?, The
Protestantism 79 (Hedström) 222
Protestant Reformation 34, 252 revolution(s) 5. 6, 227; birth of Marxism
Provisional Government (Russia 1917) 12; Chinese Revolution 13 – 14; Cult
116, 119 – 20, 126 – 7n10 of Mao 13 – 14; English 9 – 10; French
Psalms 65 Revolution 10 – 12; German (1918) 13;
Puritan (English) Revolution 8, 9 – 10, 36 history of 8 – 17; Iranian Revolution
(1979) 14 – 16; Marx and Engels on
Qajar period 144 31 – 8; Nicaraguan Revolution 16 – 17;
Qin dynasty 46 Puritan Revolution 9 – 10; revolution
Qing dynasty 13, 40 of 1848 12; Russian (1917) 13;
Qing Empire 47 significance of religion and 253 – 6;
Quakers 10 Taiping Rebellion 13 – 14
queer theology 219 revolutionary 4
queer theory 1 Revolutionary Military Committee 120
Quinet, Edgar 11 Reza Shah 144
Qumran community 8 Rhodes, Cecil John 162
Richard II (King) 71, 76, 78
Reagan administration 21 robber war (4 BCE) 63
realpolitik, Provisional Government 120 Robertson, Pat, 205
rebellions 5 – 6; of ancient Israel 7 – 8; Robespierre, Maximilien 10
history of 6 – 8; significance of religion Robles, Ricardo 232
and 250 – 3 Roerich, Nikolai 122
Red Army, Russia 117 Roman Catholic Church 176
Red Sun 14 Roman Catholic framework, mandate 42
Reed, Jean-Pierre 182, 194 Roman Empire 33, 251
Reed, Ralph 205 – 6 Roman Palestine see peasant revolt
reflection, term 32 (66–70)
Reformation 8, 35 Romans 7, 8, 17
Index 273
Romanticism 115 Shun dynasty 40
Romero, Oscar (Archbishop) 20 – 1, 186 – 7 Sima Qian 45, 46, 49n10
Rousseau, Jean-Jacques 10 Sisters of Charity 100
Rousseff, Dilma 221 Sisters of Saint Joseph 102
Ruether, Rosemary Radford 222 Skocpol, Theda 9, 15, 139 – 40
Russia: October revolution and Red Army sky (tian) 40
117; as Third Rome 111, 112 slave morality 12
Russian La Marseillaise 123 Smith, Christian 2, 185, 202, 246, 247
Russian messianism 111 – 13, 115 Smith, Ian 165
Russian Orthodox Church 13 social bandits 58
Russian Revolution (1917) 13, 254; social change: religion and 193 – 4; religion
Bolsheviks in 13, 110, 113 – 14, 116 – 17, and practices of 191 – 3; religious ideas
119 – 21, 123 – 5, 126, 254; conservatism/ and 185 – 9
insignificance thesis 114 – 19; Eastern social integration 12
Orthodox Christianity and 110 – 11; socialism, Christianity and 33 – 4
messianism thesis 111 – 13; Orthodox social movements 5, 6, 9; Central
Christianity and 114 – 19 American Solidarity movement 20 – 1;
Rustick Rampant, or Rural Anarchy civil rights 18 – 20; history of 17 – 21;
Affronting Monarchy, The (Cleveland) 79 political process models 18; religion and
Rutledge, Leslie 209 politics 176 – 8; religion and theory of
184 – 5; resource mobilization (RM) 18;
sacred canopy 165, 179, 256 significance of religion and 256 – 9
sacrifice 122 sociodicy of liberation 163
Saint Bonaventure 226 Sociology of Religion, The (Weber) 179
Saint-Espirit, Thérèse du 92 Sölle, Dorothee 222
Saint Joan of the Stockyards (Brecht) 38 Solomon (King) 208
St. John’s Episcopal Church 175 Somoza regime 17
St. Luke Jenkenisheni Church 159 Southern Baptist Convention 213
Saint Paul, conversion 4 Southern Christian Leadership Council 18
Salvation Army 38, 167 Southey, Robert 81, 82
Sanders, Sarah Huckabee 211 Soviet Union 112, 119
Sandinistas (FSLN) 16 – 17 Spiritual Churches 160
SAVAK (Iranian Intelligence Agency) spirituality: forging political dimensions
146, 149 240 – 1; indigenous 258 – 9; liberation
Scholem, Gershom 8 struggles 228; Mexico 231; modernity
School of Marxism, Dalian University of of ancient 238 – 40; in sacred earth
Technology 44 237 – 8; term 240; understanding 232;
School of the Americas 21 see also Mexico
scientific objectivity 2 spiritual production 32
Scotus, Duns 226 States and Social Revolutions (Skocpol) 9
Second War of Liberation 164 Steinberg, Marc 102
Second World War 83 Step Forward (Pleshcheyev) 123
secular, term 104n12 stewardship 189
Seitz, Mark 191 story of Nehemiah 209 – 11, 257
Sermon on the Mount 66 stranniki 119, 122, 125
Sessions, Jeff 211 Strauss, David Friedrich 3
Sewell, William 246, 248 Sudbury, Simon 71, 75
Shadow Mountain Community Church 204 Sufi-millenarian movements 144
Shang dynasty 41, 43 Sun Zhongshan (Yat-sen) 50n20
Shariati, Ali 15 Supreme Being 11
Shariatmadari, Ayatollah Mohammad Swidler, Ann 246, 247 – 8
Kazem 148 syncretic cosmopolitanism, Dabashi’s
Shi’a Islam 132, 141, 142, 255 notion of 142
274 Index
Taborites 8, 33 Union of Christian Providence 98
Taiping Heavenly Kingdom 41, 47 – 8, 251 United Christian Movement 19
Taiping Rebellion 13 – 14, 251, 260 United States: American identity 199 – 200;
Taiping Revolution 41 anti-immigration 257 – 8; God’s chosen
Taken from the Lips, Gender and Eros in leaders guiding nation 211 – 13; Protestant
Mesoamerican Religions (Marcos) 232 Christians 213 – 14; religion and collective
Taoism 14 action framing 202 – 3; religion and
Tarusarira, Joram 255 – 6 immigration sentiment 200 – 2; scripture
Tasua’ 133, 143 – 4, 147 – 9 and “the wall” 207 – 11; scripture
tax revolts 6 justifying nation and borders 203 – 7
Taylor, Diana 151 Unthinkable Revolution in Iran, The
Taziyeh, Muharram 144 (Kurzman) 134
Tchaikovsky 125 Uprising of 1381 (English) 71
Tchayanov, Alexander 220 urban mobs 6
Temple 55 Ursulines 96 – 7
Temples of Reason 11 US civil rights movement 185
temple tax 55 US Environmental Protection Agency 189
theodicy of legitimation 158, 161; utopian function, religion 34
African Independent Churches (AICs) utopianism: Marxism 111, 126; Orthodox
and 163 – 5 Christian 13, 111, 119, 121, 126, 254;
theodicy of liberation 158, 160 – 1; African Orthodox mystical 125
Independent Churches (AICs)
and 162 – 3 Valentinov, N. 127n16
Third Rome, Russia as 111, 112 values, culture and 248
Third World revolutionary 9 vapositori 159 – 60, 163, 167, 169
Thompson, E.P. 6, 73, 181 – 3, 189, 246, vapostori 159, 160, 168
249 – 50 Vasilli III 112
Thoreau, Henry D. 117 Vatican II 16, 20
Three Self-Patriotic Movement 14 venguwo tsvuku 159
tian (sky) 40 Vespasian (Roman emperor) 53, 54, 59,
tianming 40; allotted time span 40, 41, 48; 61, 62
concept of 44, 250 Vietnam War 20
Tiburtine Sibyl 76 village communities 55 – 6, 64, 66
Tilly, Charles 6 Visitandines 99
Titus 59, 62 Voltaire 10
Torah 55, 63
Torr, Dona 73 Waldensians 8
totality, reflection 32 Walsingham, Thomas 75
Touraine, A. 238 Warren, Kay 239
Tower of Babel 204 – 5, 207, 210 Warring States 41, 45
Townhall.com 208 Wat Tyler (Southey) 81
Triune God 159 We are Part of a Great Equilibrium
Troeltsch, Ernst 4 (Hedström) 222
Trump, Donald 175, 200 – 2, 203, 206, Weber, Max 4, 111, 179, 260
207 – 9, 211 – 13, 214, 258 Weiner, Dora 99
Tsvangirai, Morgan 165 Weitling, William 12, 37
Tuileries Palace 11 Wellesley College 14
Turning Point Radio and Television Wen Wang 41, 44, 49n2
Ministries 204 Wesley, John 182
Twelfth Imam 16 What Is to Be Done? (Chernyshevsky)
Tyler, Wat 71, 73, 78, 81 125, 127n16
White, Paula 213
Umayyad caliphate 255 White Catholics 201
Union for the Development of Apostolic White Evangelicals 200, 257
Churches 170 White Protestants 201
Index 275
White Revolution (Iran) 145 Zapatista Army of National Liberation
Wilhelm, Friedrich (IV) 12 (Ejército Zapatista de Liberación
Wilhelm II (Kaiser) 13 Nacional, EZLN) 241
William of Ockham 226 zavet 123
Williams, Raymond 190 zealots 59 – 62, 68
Williams, Rhys 257 Zhou dynasty 41
Winstanley, Gerrard 10 Zhu Yuanzhang 13
women, natural inferiority of 233 Zimbabwe 9
Wood, Richard 188 Zimbabwe African National Liberation
“Workers’ Poem” 123 Army 260
World Bank 164 Zimbabwe African National Union 260
worldly asceticism 179 Zimbabwe African National Union–Patriotic
world-view, religion 140 Front (ZANU PF) 158, 255 – 6; alliance
between African Independent Churches
Wutawunashe, Revd 160, 166
(AICs) and 165 – 6; mutual benefits
Wuthnow, Robert 201
between AICs and 168 – 9; support
Wyche, Richard 78 base for elections 159; see also African
Wycliffe, John 75 Independent Churches (AICs)
Zimbabwe Assemblies of God Africa
X, Malcolm 260, 261 (ZAOGA) 159
Zimbabwe Congress of Trade Unions
Yazid 15, 143, 145, 146, 255 (ZCTU) 165
YHWH 66, 251 Zimbabwe Indigenous
yin-yang 40 Interdenominational Council of
yun 40, 44 Churches (ZIICC) 160, 166
yurodivi 122 Zion Christian Church (ZCC) 159
yurodivy 114 – 15, 125 Zi Xia 44
Žižek, Slavoj 4
Zand Dynasty 144 Zizka, Jan 33
Zapatista 234, 236, 243n3, 243n9, 258, Zuo’s Commentary on the Spring and
260; Caracol 241, 243n9; meeting 27, Autumn Annals 43
234; territory 241 Zuozhuan 43

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Religion in Rebellions, Revolutions,

and Social Movements

Religion in Rebellions, Revolutions, and Social Movements demonstrates

Warren S. Goldstein, Executive Director of the Center for Critical Research on

Jean-Pierre Reed is Associate Professor of Sociology, Africana Studies, and

A Quarter Century of the “Clash of Civilizations”

Religion and Democracy

Religion after Deliberative Democracy

Religion in Rebellions, Revolutions, and Social Movements

For more information about this series, please visit: www.routledge.com/

Edited by Warren S. Goldstein and

1 An Introduction to the Critical Study of Religion

2 Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels on Religion and Revolution 31

3 Mandate for Revolution? Reconsidering Chinese Peasant

4 Peasant Revolt Against the Roman Imperial Order

5 John Ball and the 1381 English Uprising: From Rebellion

6 A Second Path: Nuns in the Early French Revolution, 1789–1791 91

8 “The Spirit of the Spiritless World”: The Shiʿa Rituals

9 The Ambivalence of African Independent/Initiated

10 Theorizing Religion, Social Movements, and Social Change 175

11 Mobilizing Religion in Twenty-First-Century Nativism

12 Elective Affinities Between Liberation Theology and Ecology

13 Indigenous Spirituality and the Decolonization of Religious

14 Epilogue: On the Significance of Religion for Rebellions,

Roland Boer is a professor at the School of Philosophy, Renmin University of

Religion itself is a socially constituted reality that always exists in a social

The critical theory of religion, moreover, recognizes that our understanding of

On the Political Nature of Religion: Some Theoretical

Historical Applications of Religion in Rebellions,

The Rebellions of Ancient Israel

The English or Puritan Revolution

The French Revolution

The Revolutions of 1848 and the Birth of Marxism

The Iranian Revolution

Shi’i revolutionary discourse . . . transformed the economic difficulties

no innovative revolutionary propaganda retailed to “the masses” overnight,

The Nicaraguan Revolution

The Civil Rights Movements

By giving contemporary relevance to familiar biblical struggles . . . by

The Central American Solidarity Movement

Münzer’s political doctrine followed his revolutionary religious conceptions

What is suggested in this astounding paragraph is not only the oppositional

The connection between the radical sects and the ‘peasant-plebeian’

With Hobbes, it stepped on the stage as a defender of royal prerogative and

Mandate of Heaven as a Secular Term

Profound was king Wen;

The mandate [ming] is not easily [preserved],

Changing One’s Destiny (mingyun)

The People’s Needs

Liu Bang and the Han Dynasty

Taiping Heavenly Kingdom

A Critical Review of the Historical Political–Economic–

The Course of the Peasant Revolt in 66–70

In the toparchy of Acrabatene (considerably north of Jerusalem) Simon,

Simon’s social-economic movement of independence from the rulers and wealthy

Rethinking the Role of Religion in the Revolt

Particular Examples of How Israelite Popular Tradition May

Ball and Historical Materialism

Ball and the English Rebellion of 1381

The Reformist and Revolutionary Legacies of Ball and 1381

On The Paradox of Liberty and Institutional Order

On the Freedom and Benefits of Teaching

The Freedom to Care for the Sick

Conclusion: On Religion, Gender, and Agency

2 Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels on Religion and Revolution 31

6 A Second Path: Nuns in the Early French Revolution, 1789–1791 91

10 Theorizing Religion, Social Movements, and Social Change 175