The Protester, the Dissident, and the Christian (original) (raw)
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Protest and Religion: An Overview
Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Politics, 2019
After decades-long neglect, a growing body of scholarship is studying religious components of protests. Religion’s role as a facilitator, the religious perspective of protesters, the goals of religious actors as participants, and faith-based outcomes of protests have been examined using quantitative and qualitative methodology. Although it is now a thriving research field, due to recent contributions, incorporating faith-based variables in protest research is a challenging task since religion travels across different levels of analysis; effortlessly merges with thick concepts such as individual and collective identity; and takes different shapes and color when it surfaces in various social contexts across the globe. Therefore, at the religion and protest nexus, there are more questions than answers. Research in the field would improve by investing more on theoretical frameworks and expanding the availability of qualitative and quantitative data.
Forms of Speech, Religion, and Social Resistance
CrossCurrents, 2016
Cl audio Carvalhaes This issue T his issue of Cross Currents wants to work at the crossings of several currencies: religious movements, social resistance, public speech/ performance, all within a demarcated global context. The intent of this issue is to examine that which is happening in our societies, from economic structures to street protests that form and shape our feelings, our habits, our laws, our forms of contestation, and consequently, who we are becoming throughout these performative processes and what sort of world we are creating. At first, the whole idea of this issue was intended to expand the notion of public discourses, and within this qualification, the communal aspects of a "sermon," seen as this self-sustained performative event done by a preacher alone. The hope was to expand the notion of individual pubic speaking into larger systems of communal work and social accountability. Having lived in United States for almost twenty years, I have come to realize that here, there is always a grounding sense of the individual who does and thinks and affects reality, always subverting the social by way of the individual who does this, who says that, most often from a community that is not always considered as part of that speech. Coming from Latin America, where I grew up seeing social movements putting down a military dictatorship and electing both a peasant and a woman as presidents of the country, it has been strange to live in this very 1 3 6 .
Give Me That Old Time Religion Called Protest
In 2013, in a response to several actions by North Carolina’s government and governor, Governor Pat McCrory, Rev., Dr. William Barber, president of the North Carolina NAACP, initiated civil disobedience throughout the state through peaceful sit-ins at the legislative building, and marches throughout the state in a campaign now known as Moral Mondays. Two years later, the Moral Monday Movement continues as protestors of the state’s legislative decisions (Medicaid cuts, education cuts, unemployment aid decreases, tax breaks for the wealthy, etc.) continue to draw the ire of some North Carolinians including members of clergy, teacher’s associations, immigration activists, student protestors, and gay rights activists. Given the crucial role that black churches and clergy leaders played in the Civil Rights Movement of the 50’s and 60’s, I want to observe and understand the role that black churches in North Carolina are playing in the Moral Monday Movement. Currently, I am studying eight churches in the Raleigh-Durham area of North Carolina which is also the center of the Moral Monday rallies and protests. Of the eight predominantly black-attended churches, I will interview senior leaders from four of the churches in an attempt to discover how black churches in North Carolina are responding to the Moral Monday Movement. For all eight churches, I will observe their interactions with Moral Mondays through each church’s website, social media outlets, newsletters, and announcement portals.
Resonance - A Theological Journal, 2018
This paper argue that Christian churches should educate their congregants on sociopolitical issues, so that both the church and individual congregants can speak to the world prophetically, as a part of Jesus’ teaching in caring for the weak. Civil disobedience should not be the main means for the church to express social concerns. Rather, a godly life that witnesses Jesus as Lord should be how Christians exert their power to effect changes in society. This witness cannot be short-term, like civil disobedience is so often; it must be sustained and life-long.