Religion, Protest, and Social Upheaval
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Represents some of the best, cutting-edge thinking available on multiple forms of social upheaval and related grassroots movements.
From the January 2017 Women’s March to the August 2017 events in Charlottesville and the 2020 protests for racial justice in the wake of George Floyd’s murder, social upheaval and protest have loomed large in the United States in recent years. The varied, sometimes conflicting role of religious believers, communities, and institutions in such events and movements calls for scholarly analysis. Arising from a conference held at the College of the Holy Cross in November 2017, Religion, Protest, and Social Upheaval gathers contributions from ten scholars in religious studies, theology and ethics, and gender studies—from seasoned experts to emerging voices—to illuminate this tumultuous era of history and the complex landscape of social action for economic, racial, political, and sexual and gender justice.
The contributors consider the history of resistance to racial capitalist imperialism from W. E. B. Du Bois to today; the theological genealogy of the capitalist economic order, and Catholic theology’s growing concern with climate change; affect theory and the rise of white nationalism, theological aesthetics, and solidarity with migrants; differing U.S. Christian churches’ responses to the “revolutionary aesthetics” of the Black Lives Matter movement; Muslim migration and the postsecular character of Muslim labor organizing in the United States; shifts in moral reasoning and religiosity among U.S. women’s movements from the 1960s to today; and the intersection of heresy discourse and struggles for LGBTQ+ equality among Korean and Korean-American Protestants. With this pluralistic approach, Religion, Protest, and Social Upheaval offers a snapshot of scholarly religious responses to the crises and promises of the late 2010s and early 2020s. Representing the diverse coalitions of the religious left, it provides groundbreaking analysis, charts trajectories for further study and action, and offers visions for a more hopeful future.
There is no current text that gathers together so many contemporary luminaries to engage in deep thinking about the relationship between religion and the praxis of justice. Religion, Protest, and Social Upheaval represents some of the most profound and compelling voices in contemporary theology and religious studies to reflect on some of the day’s most urgent social issues. Each of these essays is a tremendous contribution in its own right, but as a collection they fuse breadth and depth in compelling harmony. If recent years have witnessed an acceleration of collective consciousness about the persistent fusion between religion and contemporary movements, this anthology excavates theologies underpinning contemporary structures of both oppression and liberation.---Jack Lee Downey, John Henry Newman Professor in Roman Catholic Studies, University of Rochester.
Matthew T. Eggemeier is Professor of Religious Studies at the College of the Holy Cross. He is the author of A Sacramental-Prophetic Vision: Christian Spirituality in a Suffering World and Against Empire: Ekklesial Resistance and the Politics of Radical Democracy.
Peter Joseph Fritz (Edited By)
Peter Joseph Fritz is Associate Professor of Religious Studies at the College of the Holy Cross. He is author of Karl Rahner’s Theological Aesthetics and Freedom Made Manifest: Rahner’s Fundamental Option and Theological Aesthetics.
Karen V. Guth (Edited By)
Karen V. Guth is Associate Professor of Religious Studies at the College of the Holy Cross. She is the author of The Ethics of Tainted Legacies: Human Flourishing after Traumatic Pasts and Christian Ethics at the Boundary: Feminism and Theologies of Public Life.
Introduction
Matthew T. Eggemeier, Peter Joseph Fritz, and Karen V. Guth | 1
Part I: Upheaval Under Capitalism
1. Capital’s “Secret Orders”: A Du Boisian Lens on the Alt- Right and White Supremacy
Mark Lewis Taylor | 13
2. Protest at the Void: Theological Challenges to Capitalist Totality
Devin Singh | 49
3. As the World Burns: Laudato Si’, the Climate Crisis, and the Limits of Papal Power
Mary Doak | 69
Part II: Race, Aesthetics, and Religion
4. Whiteness and Civilization: Shame, Race, and the Rhetoric of Donald Trump
Donovan O. Schaefer | 93
5. Rootedness on the Slippery Earth: Migration in a Time of Social Upheaval
Nichole M. Flores | 112
6. Christian Responses to the “Revolutionary Aesthetic” of Black Lives Matter
Jermaine M. McDonald | 124
Part III: Migration, Labor Movements, and Islam
7. Caught in the Crosshairs: Muslims and Migration
Zayn Kassam | 143
8. Iftars, Prayer Rooms, and #DeleteUber: Postsecularity and the Promise/ Perils of Muslim Labor Organizing
C. Melissa Snarr | 161
Part IV: Thresholds in Gender, Sexuality, and Christianity
9. Slogan, Women’s Protest, and Religion
Kwok Pui-lan | 177
10. LGBTQ+ Politics and the Queer Thresholds of Heresy
Ju Hui Judy Han | 195
Acknowledgments | 217
List of Contributors | 219
Index | 221
