The protests and the government’s response have opened to debate all aspects of Turkish social and political life, from freedom of the press to restrictions against participatory democracy to the urban renewal wave that has swept over all Turkish cities within the last decade. Given that Erdoğan’s Justice and Development Party (AKP) comes from a long line of Islamic parties, and that the emergent Occupy Gezi movement represents, among other things, a reaction against the government’s increasing imposition of religious-conservative values on the population, the question of religion and secularism may also be seen as a central dimension of this conflict. Even the central dimension, according to some observers. But do these events really involve the good old “fault line that runs through Turkish society and politics” between “religious conservatives” and “secular, leftist, liberal” people, as a New York Times analysis argues? In other words, is there nothing new under the sun, except perhaps for the fact that the secular citizens are being more vocal and persistent than before?

While religion is a very important factor in the recent events—as in virtually all political conflicts in contemporary Turkey—to see the protests through the secular-vs.-religious framework is to overlook the complexity of what is actually going on. It is also to miss the transformative potential and the genuine novelty of the Occupy Gezi movement.

Surely, the prompt and widespread mobilization of the protesters, many with no prior experience in activism, is partly due to the accumulated resentment that people with non-conservative lifestyles as well as religious minorities feel toward the policies of the government. The most emblematic issue here is the government’s imposition of increasingly strict regulations on the sale and consumption of alcohol. Although the alcohol consumption rate in Turkey is the lowest among the OECD countries and its taxes on alcohol are some of the highest in Europe, the government has recently proposed new legislation that will place further restrictions on the retail sale and public consumption of alcohol. Erdoğan defended the recent legislative proposal in his typical style, declaring that he does not want “a generation that drinks and wanders about wasted day and night,” and suggested that this was a regulation, not a ban: “if you are going to drink, then drink your alcoholic beverage at home.” The proposal followed the removal of outdoor tables in the Beyoğlu district—the heart of entertainment and nightlife in Istanbul—by the AKP-controlled municipal government last summer, as well as Erdoğan’s infamous remark that his government aims to “raise religious generations.” (In response to criticisms, Erdoğan asked rhetorically, “do you expect us to raise an atheist generation instead?”)

The Alevis, a substantial non-Sunni Muslim group in Turkey, have historically approached the Sunni-dominated Islamic parties with suspicion and mostly voted for the secularist Republican People’s Party (RPP). Their demands for equal treatment by the state—e.g., the official recognition of the Alevi cemevis as places of worship—have thus far been denied by the AKP government. In the weeks leading up to the referendum on constitutional amendments in 2010, Erdoğan claimed that “the judiciary is ruled by the dedes” (the Alevi religious leaders), while in his campaign speeches prior to the 2011 elections, he repeatedly referred to the Alevi identity of Kemal Kılıçdaroğlu, the leader of the RPP. These strategic moves sought to mobilize the support of the conservative Sunni constituency in central Anatolia. The latest symbolic affront to the Alevis came on one of the first days of the protests, when the government declared that the third bridge to be built across the Bosphorus will be named after Yavuz Sultan Selim, the sixteenth-century Ottoman sultan whom the Alevis widely dislike on the grounds of a massacre that he carried out against their ancestors. It is very likely that the Alevis have played a central role in the diffusion of the Occupy Gezi movement beyond Istanbul.

But religion was brought into play most explicitly by Prime Minister Erdoğan himself. In his public declarations in the midst of the protests on June 2, Erdoğan claimed that along with “marginal” and “extremist elements,” the RPP was the main force in Occupy Gezi and suggested that it was resorting to street action because it had failed in the ballot box. Refusing any compromise with the movement, he reasserted his determination to remake the Ottoman artillery barracks, which “the RPP mentality,” in his words, destroyed in 1940. He also underlined that a mosque would also be constructed as part of the larger Taksim project.

In a TV interview on the same day, Erdoğan argued that a distinction between “you” and “us” is a fact in Turkey, and proclaimed that “we and people like us have been oppressed in this country for a long time. […] Now this group has won 50% of the vote. But […] some people still want to oppress it.” Erdoğan made sure to remind the viewers that women wearing headscarves were still not allowed to work in civil service. He also defended the attendant in an Ankara subway station who, in a much discussed incident, made an announcement about rules of propriety over the loudspeakers after seeing two students kiss each other on the subway platform. (“In this society, would any mother and father demanding respect for their values want their daughter—I beg your pardon—to sit on the lap of somebody?” Erdoğan asked.) In response to a reporter’s question about the Gezi protests the next day, Erdoğan claimed that there was at least 50% of the country that he could “barely keep at home.” This thinly disguised threat of unleashing civil violence against the protesters was reciprocated by Erdoğan’s supporters four days later. As Erdoğan addressed the crowd from an open-top bus, they chanted: “Let us go, and we will crush Taksim.” Another slogan warned “the minority” not to test their patience.

If one looks beyond the chilling irresponsibility evinced in these remarks, Erdoğan’s political strategy throughout his public pronouncements has been very consistent. He has wanted to portray Occupy Gezi as the work of the secular, westernized elite that seeks to repress the religious, conservative majority through extra-electoral means. Since the late 1980s, Islamic parties in Turkey have consistently increased their votes by claiming to represent the periphery against the secularist center, and Erdoğan’s political career—decisively marked by his imprisonment in 1999 by the secularist courts—has depended on this good old formula. Now, in the face of the challenge posed by the protesters—and in preparation for the local and presidential elections upcoming in 2014—he has played the game that he knows best and aimed to consolidate the religious-conservative constituency of his party.

The irony in all of this is, of course, that he has been the prime minister of Turkey for more than a decade now. The AKP has single-handedly controlled the government for three consecutive terms and gradually brought all sources of bureaucratic opposition under its firm control, including the judiciary, the military, and the civil service. In other words, Erdoğan is crying victimization while his party firmly controls all branches of government, applies immense pressure on the press, and liberally uses police violence against opposition in civil society.

Does the actual picture of Occupy Gezi confirm the existence of a deep fault line between secular and religious citizens that Erdoğan and the New York Times alike posit? It is true that most religious-conservative citizens are not participating in Occupy Gezi, and it is rather safe to assume that many maintain their support for the AKP and for Erdoğan himself. However, there are many significant crosscurrents that complicate this picture. First, Occupy Gezi brings together many different groups, including Kemalists, liberal-minded secular citizens, environmentalists, revolutionary socialists, anarchists, feminists, LGBT groups, highly politicized activists, and young people who simply oppose police brutality and the government’s authoritarian policies. As opposed to what Erdoğan has repeatedly implied, Occupy Gezi is fundamentally different from the Republican Rallies of 2007, which were organized by militant secularist organizations and aimed to prepare the ground for a military coup against the AKP government. While Kemalist groups may chant “we are the soldiers of Mustafa Kemal” during the demonstrations, calls for the military to intervene in the political process are hardly ever heard. Moreover, all participants in the movement seem to share a general respect for religious citizens.

On June 4, the day after newspapers close to the AKP started to advance Erdoğan’s agenda by depicting Occupy Gezi as an anti-religious movement, movement participants announced that alcohol should not be consumed on the park’s premises that day as a sign of respect for the Miraç Kandili, a Muslim holiday commemorating the prophet’s ascent to heaven. Throughout the day, volunteers offered thousands of traditional kandil bagels to anyone entering the park.

More importantly, while constituting a minority in the movement, many pious Muslims, AKP voters, and some Islamic organizations have participated in the protests. One social justice-oriented Islamic group in particular, Anti-Capitalist Muslims, has been part of the campaign against the destruction of the park from the very beginning and has a major presence in the movement. On the Miraç night, following the reading of verses from the Quran, İhsan Eliaçık, a religious author and the intellectual guru of the Anti-Capitalist Muslims, gave a sermon:

Miraç means ascendance. Muhammad the Holy Prophet has brought Islam by ascending to God. Islam means peace. Peace is a state of harmlessness. Do not harm anyone. Greet everyone, greet also those who are different from you. Be brothers and sisters, spread love and compassion. Today this synergy is spreading out from Gezi Park. With God’s grace, completely new things are happening in Turkey.

Then he addressed the religious leaders and politicians in Turkey, alluding in particular to Erdoğan’s reference to the protesters as “a bunch of looters”:

Those who say one does not read the Quran and pray in such places are wrong once again. […] With God’s permission, the prejudices will also collapse and disappear. […] They tell us, “what business do you have there?” We tell them in return, “why are you not here?” They tell us, “there are drunks there, what are you doing there?” We tell them in return, “we can get along with drunks, as long as they are not treacherous.”  They tell us, “they are looters”; they tell us “they are a criminal gang.” We tell them, “people who sleep in the streets and in green parks cannot be looters.” The looter state has forty rooms, and forty tricks are played in each of them. The looters are those who plunder; the looters sit in offices of the state; the looters walk around in neckties; the looters are those who enjoy the spoils. […] The real gang is in the city hall; the real gang is the shopping mall gang; and you are the leader of the real gang. Friends! Congratulations on your resistance; congratulations on your kandil. Be entrusted to God.

The liberation theology of the Anti-Capitalist Muslims shows that it is difficult to categorize the religious circles in Turkey as a single, uniform bloc under the unbreakable spell of Erdoğan’s AKP. The same is true for secular people, many of whom have learned to respect the religious practices of their fellow citizens, including their right to wear headscarves in public institutions. The transformative potential that emerges from the respectful coexistence of different political orientations and social groups in Occupy Gezi should not be underestimated, both in the park and in the movement more broadly. As soccer fans who use homophobic epithets in their slogans against Erdoğan are learning from the LGBT groups in the park why this is problematic, and as many Turks in the movement increasingly seem to empathize with the Kurds now that they are also experiencing indiscriminate police violence and witnessing the indifference of the mainstream media, a transformation is likewise taking place in the relationship between secular and religious citizens who together protest the authoritarian policies of the government and the violent practices of the police. The careful respect that the mostly secular participants in the movement exhibited on Miraç Kandili, voluntarily giving up drinking in public—although they vigorously defend their right to drink in public—and Eliaçık’s statement of solidarity with alcohol drinkers are manifestations of this rapprochement.

What is happening within the confines of the Gezi Park has its limits, of course, in terms of its wider ramifications, but it is indicative of larger political learning processes in a society increasingly suffering from the authoritarian tendencies of the government, Erdoğan’s paternalistic style of rule, and the disproportionate use of force by the police against groups as diverse as soccer fans, university students, and environmental activists.

The authoritarian policies of the Kemalist state elites who imposed a secular, modernist nationalism on an unwilling population have now been replaced by the authoritarian policies of a conservative government that is imposing religious-conservative values and a neo-Ottoman public culture on a diverse society. Neither has respected the autonomy of civil society, minority rights, the freedom of the press, and individual liberties. Whether Turkish society will ever move beyond the political impasse between secularist Kemalists and “religious Kemalists” (A. Altan) will ultimately depend, not on anachronistic political elites who seek to revive and retrench old cleavages, but on religious and secular civil society actors who might build the grounds of their coexistence on the basis of mutual respect for each other’s freedoms. The spiritual experience they have shared in their solidarity recently would be a good point from which to start.

Taksim Meydanı

First, a cautionary word is in order. As a close friend in Istanbul advised me by email several days ago, it is far too soon to pin a single, panoramic interpretation on the demonstrations, which began with a handful of protestors resisting the demolition of Gezi Park, a small strand of sycamores and green space in Taksim Square, to make way for a shopping mall and replica Ottoman-era military barracks. Like a spark in dry underbrush, the disproportionate, violent response of the police to the initial protest ignited the broad-based frustration and dissatisfaction with the decade of Justice and Development Party (Adalet ve Kalkınma Partisi; AKP) rule on the part of a swath of different demographics and groups: old-guard secularists, communists, liberals, Guy Fawkes-masked anarchists, feminist and gay rights organizations, and trade unions, among others. It would be impertinent to reduce the motivations and aspirations of the protestors to a single, uniform political position or identity, even while many of the desires and criticisms that the demonstrators have voiced—calls for greater transparency in governance, frustration over the government’s insatiable appetite for the privatization of urban space—evoke a certain immediate, uncomplicated sympathy. Nor, as Kabir Tambar has cogently noted, is secularist populism entirely new to Turkey’s political terrain. Nevertheless, a few general patterns have emerged from these remarkable protests that bear directly on the forms and fates of secularism in the contemporary world.

Three linked objects of criticism define the Taksim demonstrations: 1) AKP governance in general and the increasingly authoritarian inclinations of Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan in particular; 2) neoliberal transformations of Turkish society and built space, especially in the city of Istanbul; 3) the ostensible influence of conservative Islam, or Islamism, on Turkish politics and public life. It is the link among these three objects of complaint that I want to interrogate here. Arguably, the first two objects of criticism—state governance and the effects of neoliberalism—are neutral in relation to questions of secularism and religion. To adopt and adapt Hussein Agrama’s influential argument (which I discuss in more detail below), debates over governance in the context of neoliberalism do not necessarily take place within the problem space of secularism; they do not imply a partitioning of religion and politics, nor a stipulation as to what the relationship between them ought to be. Zuccotti Park and Occupy Wall Street demonstrate this, as do, from the opposite position, the annual meetings of the World Economic Conference in Davos. In contemporary Turkey, however, political debates surrounding governance and neoliberalism are inseparable from those around Islam and secularism. This, perhaps, is the most astounding lesson that the demonstrations in Taksim offer: neoliberal governance in Turkey has to be understood through and within the problem space of secularism.

One particular image from the demonstrations in Taksim Square encapsulates the dense set of relationships among secularism, the assertion of populist sovereignty, and the critique of neoliberalism. A young demonstrator drapes a banner depicting Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, the founder of the Turkish Republic and charismatic embodiment of Turkish secularism, over a police water cannon. Far from a daisy clogging a rifle’s muzzle, this is not a tableau of simple pacifism. Since its establishment some ninety years ago in the wake of the battered and dismembered Ottoman Empire, the Turkish Republic has been the legatee of Atatürk’s secularist imagination, which envisioned the radical transformation of Turkey from an agrarian, “traditional” society to an urban, modern one. The internal civilizing mission of Kemalism—the secularist state project in Turkey, named after Atatürk himself—has frequently been heavy-handed, even violent, in its suppression of dissent, especially dissent articulated on religious or ethnonational grounds. Thus, as the young protestor in Taksim Square sought to cloak an instrument of police violence in a symbol of national solidarity, he also invoked and implicitly valorized a particular history of authoritarian, homogenizing secularism—he articulated, in Esra Özyurek’s provocative phrase, a “nostalgia for the modern,” in this case a modern secularity intransigently exclusive of religion.

Many loose, careless comparisons have quickly been drawn between the demonstrations in Taksim Square and those in Cairo’s Tahrir Square that initiated the Egyptian Revolution. As I have already implied, however, the relationship between neoliberal governance and secularism in the two contexts could hardly be more different. Egypt, as Agrama argued on this very blog, underwent an “asecular revolution”—the “bare sovereignty” of the Tahrir protestors stood “apart from the modern game of defining and distinguishing religion and politics, and [did] not partake of it.” By contrast, the demonstrations in Taksim posit an inherent link between criticism of neoliberal governance, as practiced and preached by the AKP, and valorization of secularism as a political ideology, expressed by the statist tradition of Kemalism and embodied in the person of Atatürk. Rather than the “bare sovereignty” that Agrama identifies in the context of Tahrir and the Egyptian Revolution, the populist sovereignty of Taksim is rooted in the history of the unquestioned legitimacy of secularist-laicist governance in Turkey, which the protestors have now positioned as the antithesis and antidote to the neoliberal governance of the AKP. It is by no means clear to me that this contrast between two modes of governance—Kemalist-secularist, on the one hand, and neoliberal-AKP, on the other—is absolute or even persuasive, but the protests have succeeded in framing it convincingly as such. In doing so, they have articulated an historically new mode of secularist sovereignty and politics, what we might call anti-neoliberal secularity. Again, to be clear, neoliberalism is not inherently located within the problem space of secularism. In today’s Turkey, however, the questions asked of neoliberalism and the questions definitive of secularism are inextricable from each other. Provocatively, the critique of neoliberalism in Turkey also implies a critique of political Islam and a celebration of secularism. Two conceptually and ideologically distinct questions—to what extent the state and government will continue to be the handmaidens of neoliberalism (an asecular question), and what the relationship is, or ought to be, between Islam and politics (the cardinal secular question)—are inseparable in contemporary Turkey.

How, then, might we think outside the over-determined problem space of secularism in relation to the neoliberal tribulations and transformations currently wracking Turkey? The carnivalesque diversity of the demonstrators themselves suggests that the partition between the secular and the religious is an insufficient rubric for interpreting the Turkish present.  Yet the demonstrations err in reasserting Kemalist secularism as the sole solution to contemporary ills, which are conflated with the problem of AKP governance and embodied in the person of Prime Minister Erdoğan. In contrast to the rigidity of the partition and its constitutive polarities—Kemalism and Islamism—I suggest that we take inspiration from both the carnivalesque ebullience of the demonstrations themselves and from the name of the modest green space that initially inspired the protests—Gezi Parkı, Excursion Park. Indeed, through the motif of the excursion, we can perceive an opening to a radically different reading of neoliberal Istanbul and the politics that undergird it. Throughout the several years that I lived in the district of Kurtuluş, adjacent to Taksim, my own excursions (geziler) as a flâneur through Istanbul’s urban flux consistently bore witness to the instability and porousness of the partitions (taksimler) that demonstrators and the government alike tirelessly invoke.

Allow me to describe one such excursion, beginning from my former fifth-story apartment in Kurtuluş. Descending the steep hill just to the north of Taksim, I enter the valley of Dolapdere, a rather infamous district of Istanbul where older forms of ethnic exclusion have merged with newer modes of neoliberal urban poverty. To my left, a clutch of heavily paunched men squat near the entrance to the modest neighborhood mosque, smoking after prayer; further down, a cluster of giddy children glance somewhat nervously at a few of the young West African men who have recently arrived in droves in the neighborhood. In addition to Turkish, the sounds of Kurmanji Kurdish, Arabic, and Romani filter through the air, already thick with coal-smoke. As I approach Dolapdere’s nadir, I pass sweatshops and smithies where Iraqi immigrants work at open flames; the smell of goat’s head soup, sweet and acrid, assaults my nostrils as I stare upward toward the towers of the new luxury hotels lining Taksim Square, which seem to have sprouted up overnight. Beginning my ascent, I pause to admire the teetering wooden Ottoman facades that appear to grow fewer by the day, clinging to the hillside in the shadows of a massive Armenian Hospital, Sırp Agop Hastenesi. Suddenly, the narrow passage up the incline opens onto the frenetic light and sound of Republic Boulevard, and I turn right toward the bustle of Taksim. Individuals of every imaginable countenance—the beautiful and disturbing farrago of the global metropolis—greet my eyes: the perpetually hunched and deeply-fissured faces of cobblers and shoe-shiners, the platinum blonde indifference of Slavic-accented prostitutes, the haute fashion of Istanbul’s glitterati, out to dine before slumming through the Beyoğlu clubs until morning, the curious, slightly nervous smiles of wealthy tourists from the Gulf, seated outside a falafel restaurant opened by a Palestinian from Hebron. . . .

We should not romanticize this tableau of urban heterogeneity, of course. Beyond the insidious icons of neoliberal privatization—the hotel towers, the ubiquitous consumerism—the multiplicity of global cities such as Istanbul is itself arguably a neoliberal effect. And yet, this multiplicity is also instructive: the rigid partition between secular and religious, and the politics that adheres to this partition, unravels in the bright light of Istanbul’s heterogeneity. To appreciate this staggering diversity thoroughly, I recommend losing oneself, in Walter Benjamin’s sense: “[…] to lose oneself in a city—as one loses oneself in a forest—that calls for quite a different schooling. Then, signboards and street names, passers-by, roofs, kiosks, or bars must speak to the wanderer like a cracking twig under his feet in the forest, like the startling call of a bittern in the distance, like the sudden stillness of a clearing with a lily standing erect at its center.” It may seem a bit naïve, I realize, to prescribe peregrination and losing oneself as a political strategy in a context of inordinate police violence and escalating recriminations on the part of both protestors and the AKP government. And yet, I sense keenly that just this sort of strategic naïveté, which both produced and informed my own excursions in Istanbul, can constitute a key means to thinking and acting outside of the problem space of secularism and the seemingly unassailable partitions that it at once mandates and naturalizes.

* The author would like to thank Arzu Ünal, Kabir Tambar, Karin Doolan, Kelda Jamison and Noah D. Salomon for their invaluable comments and advice.

Increasingly, many of these non-American evangelicals have begun to speak back to the United States, revealing American conditions not only as anomalous but also as subject to influence from abroad. Scholars are recognizing that despite the imperial nature of the “American Century,” influence flows in both directions. People of the two-thirds world have, in fact, shaped American evangelical missionaries and Cold Warriors.

This global reflex often takes progressive shape. Moral Minority: The Evangelical Left in an Age of Conservatism, my history of the small, but energetic, American evangelical left of the 1970s and 1980s, chronicles the activism of just one of many international sources of non-rightist politics. Figures within Latin American Theological Fraternity (FTL) are obscure outside evangelical circles, but they have voiced trenchant critiques of American consumerism and social injustices. As Samuel Escobar, a native of Peru and FTL’s first president, told thousands of delegates at the Lausanne Congress on World Evangelization in 1974, “Christians in the Third World…expect from their brethren a word of identification with demands for justice.” Institutions such as InterVarsity Christian Fellowship, the World Evangelical Fellowship, Christianity Today, Wheaton College, and World Vision have listened to a surprising degree. For example, under pressure from international evangelicals, World Vision de-Americanized in the 1970s, a move that resulted in adding economic development to the organization’s agenda of disaster relief and personal evangelism.

Escobar and World Vision represent the leading edge of what will almost certainly become a larger and stronger global reflex. To be sure, the reflex seems uneven in the context of current North American political orthodoxies. African critiques of libertine sexuality, Asian critiques of American techniques of evangelization, and Latin American critiques of North American consumerism combine in ways that defy the imaginations of most Americans. Indeed, the exotic melody from abroad is rich and complex, and international voices likely will swell to a chorus in the next century as the Global South demographically overwhelms northern and western centers. In a world where 60 percent of all Christians now live outside the North Atlantic region, and in a nation increasingly opened to nonwhite immigrants since the Immigration Act of 1965, global influence will only intensify. As that happens, contemporary manifestations of right-wing evangelicalism may seem even more anomalous.

Let’s take politics first. In his famed work on postmodernism, Fredric Jameson suggests that in postmodern culture, parody gives way to pastiche. While both involve “the imitation of a peculiar or unique, idiosyncratic style, [pastiche] is a neutral practice of such mimicry, without any of parody’s ulterior motives.” Later, however, Jameson adds that the “postmodern political aesthetic [. . .] would confront the structure of image society as such head-on and undermine it from within (in the postmodern, paradoxically, offensive has become at one with subversion [. . .]).” These statements could be seen as contradictory. Isn’t parody a form of subversive offensive, while pastiche, as Jameson describes it, would lack the motives for such an offensive? This is not, as the saying goes, politics as usual.

Enter the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence. Formed almost by accident in 1979, when three gay men put on retired nuns’ habits and strolled through the predominantly gay areas of San Francisco, the Sisters soon became an icon of the gay community in that city and later spread internationally; a member of the national council has told me that there are over 1,100 Sisters in sixty-three chapters worldwide. Though most are white, gay men, the Sisters come in many ethnicities, genders, and sexualities. They can be recognized by their remarkable coronets (wimples) and the long veils cascading down their backs: white for novice Sisters, black for fully professed in formal settings, and any other color for fully professed when informal. They are also easily recognized by the whiteface makeup they wear, and the glam makeup, jewels, and glitter that adorn the whiteface.

The Sisters consider themselves “twenty-first century nuns,” in the tradition of Catholic, Episcopalian, and Buddhist nuns, but they are most closely modeled on the Catholic tradition. Each member undergoes an aspirant period, a postulancy, and a novitiate before becoming fully professed. Some chapters (called “houses,” though the organization is not residential) have formal habits that are unmistakably modeled on Catholic nuns’ habits (in informal settings, most Sisters wear dresses or skirts). Yet they are most definitely not Catholic, or even an explicitly religious organization, though individual members adhere to many varieties of religion, spirituality, and atheism. In fact, conservative Catholics take great offense at the San Francisco Sisters’ annual anniversary celebration, which happens to be on Easter Sunday, and one house has in the past performed an exorcism of the Pope.

The Sisters are a social service organization. They were among the first on the scene when the AIDS crisis struck in the early 1980s and, along with Gay Men’s Health Crisis in New York City, were the first to develop sex-positive safer sex materials. They continue to produce and distribute these materials, along with packets containing safer-sex supplies, to the public at many of their gatherings. They are skilled fundraisers, and the vast majority of the money they raise goes directly back to the community, and especially to lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer (LGBTQ) communities, supporting everything from summer camp for queer youth to police department hate crime initiatives to scholarships for LGBTQ college students. They support a variety of causes, both within and beyond LGBTQ communities, by participating in marches and helping out at gatherings. They often serve as confidantes to individuals in their communities. And, through it all, they pursue their mission: “to promulgate universal [some say "omniversal"] joy and expiate stigmatic guilt.”

Promulgating joy and expiating guilt may not seem political at first glance. But what about a die-in in the middle of San Francisco’s Castro district, in which every time a Sister reads a quotation from Pope Benedict, several other Sisters collapse in the street? What about safer-sex outreach, fundraising to support causes in LGBTQ communities, marching against sexual assault, or—and here’s the key—appearing like Catholic nuns, and then again, very definitely not like Catholic nuns? Jameson argues that parody has given way to pastiche, and yet, in this very postmodern group, I see parody alive and well. This is imitation with an ulterior motive—to heal the guilt that many traditional religions have inculcated in LGBTQ people, to protest against religious homophobia, and to serve the community in ways that traditional nuns have not done and cannot do. This is “offensive . . . at one with subversion.”

Just as the Sisters are postmodern, they are also, somewhat paradoxically, postsecular. This term, drawn originally from a 2001 speech by Jürgen Habermas, refers to an era, in Gorski and Altinordu’s words, “in which religious and secular worldviews could coexist and even enter into dialogue with one another.” Baker and Smith have used the term to refer to sociological perspectives that take into account the rising popularity in many postindustrial societies of non-institutional and anti-institutional forms of religion, such as the religious “nones” they’ve studied, Davie’s “believing without belonging,” and Voas’s and Storm’s versions of “fuzzy fidelity.” It is here that we find the “spiritual but not religious,” as well as Barker’s “soft secularism” (similar to Davie’s “believing without belonging”), “apathetic secularism,” and “hard,” or atheistic, secularism. It is here, too, that we find the Sisters.

I have certainly spoken with Sisters who consider themselves atheists, or who identify as spiritual but see no connection between their spirituality and their work as Sisters. On the other hand, there are many others who describe their spirituality and their Sisterhood as deeply intertwined. Sister Mona Little-Moore, of the Portland, Oregon-based Order of Benevolent Bliss, explained to me that her spirituality, or “philosophy for [her] life,” centers on the belief that “we’re here to learn certain lessons. . . . You repeat your lifetime until you learn the lesson that you have to learn to get to this next plane.” She carries this philosophy over into her work as a Sister, “especially,” she says, “when I’m doing community outreach.” “You know,” she told me, “the Sisters talk about no judgment, no guilt, and I think that’s where my beliefs come in, is that there is no judgment, there is no guilt. You made a mistake, but what did you learn from it, and where are you going to go from there? . . . That’s what I bring to my ministry.”

Sister Krissy Fiction, also of the Order of Benevolent Bliss, is a particularly spiritual Sister—to the extent that she jokingly describes herself as “a spiritual slut.” A member of the United Church of Christ, she is also interested in Gnosticism, Neopaganism, and Buddhism. “Being a Sister,” she told me, “is a manifestation of my spirituality.” She distinguished between the ritual aspect of her spirituality and “the physical expression” of it, and explained that her work as a Sister is that “physical manifestation.” As Sister Krissy, she dedicated herself to the goddess Aphrodite at a Neopagan ritual. “A lot of what I do as Krissy,” she said, “is Aphrodite’s work.” While other Sisters are not as detailed in their responses, many have told me that their spirituality—ranging from vague beliefs to daily conversation with God—is deeply intertwined with their work as Sisters. A few have even spoken of having a calling, or a ministry.

Spirituality has often been cast in sociological writing as self-absorbed and anti-communal—a sort of “bowling alone of the heart,” to borrow from the titles of two well-known books. In fact, there has long been both academic and public concern that the growing popularity of spirituality, when defined as a kind of “religious individualism,” will draw people away from the religious communities that formed such an important part of social life at earlier times in American history (but see McGuire’s Lived Religion). This may not be the case, however. Spirituality draws many of the Sisters to their work and to the close family of each house. As Faver has found, it is not just organized religion that can drive a commitment to activism and community, but also what people today are calling “spirituality.”

Perhaps the upswing in religious individualism in this postmodern, postsecular period doesn’t herald the breakdown of community after all—nor does the rise of a postmodern culture mean the death of parodic political activism. The Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence, though a small organization, may be indicative of larger patterns that we as sociologists have yet to thoroughly study: the roles of postsecular religiosities in community and activism, and the force of parody in postmodern politics.

If you want to be a New Atheist, first and foremost, you need to possess an unrelenting desire to help. The desire may seem at times cruel, but you have to start focusing on a higher good: the goal here is to get the cannibals to put down their wafer and wine glass. It’s not for your wellness, but for the good of mankind. As Georgetown University professor John Haught wrote in his diagnosis of the New Atheists, “To know with such certitude that religion is evil, one must first have already surrendered one’s heart and mind to what is unconditionally good.” The New Atheists may wrap themselves in torn one-liners and haggard scientism, but beneath their cynical swaddle there lies a charming Perfectionism. Charming insofar as it is usually in the body of admittedly sinning and struggling men—if you want to be a New Atheist, you’re going to be a man—so the Perfectionist tendencies will be transporting you from a particularly devilish here to a right-minded necessary there. “Religion must die,” Maher argues, “for mankind to live.” Their descriptions of religion may be flat-footed, but it’s all for an endgame that surpasses their previous personal struggles. They are not converting you to their model lives (every New Atheist will happily tell you of wayward days with hookers or Hezekiah), nor to their model educations (every New Atheist parlays a populist revolution). Rather, they are converting you—as swiftly as possible, as dramatically as possible—to their ontology of the now. Apocalypse is coming, and although the New Atheists name the source and form of this apocalypse differently, if you want to be a New Atheist, you had better pull on your Oneida pants and start shoveling in an Adventist diet, because these are some millennial folk. “The irony of religion,” Maher remarks at the end of Religulous, “is because of its power to divert man to destructive forces the world actually could come to an end.”

Like millennial believers everywhere, New Atheists don’t possess much interest in the historicity of their promises and prophesies. You won’t see New Atheists entering the atheist historical fray, positing, for instance, whether the tradition to which they are contributors began in ancient Greece or the eighteenth-century. Although atheist materials have multiplied in recent years, key debates in its historiography remain unsettled since its history is, save for some critical exceptions, relatively unstudied. Was the first atheist work Baron d’Holbach’s The System of Nature, or was it Lucretius’s De rerum natura, written the first century before the Common Era? Does atheism require the early modern classificatory tiptoes of the eighteenth-century, or can we label it whenever and wherever someone questions the location of the divine relative to man, and suggests maybe a doubting relationship is better than a devoted one? For the purposes of ongoing scholarship (not only on the atheist, but also on the related subjects of the secular and the invention of religion) let us bracket the necessary complexities of that archival conversation and say that whatever came before in the annals of atheism, in the last ten years the stance has pullulated. Due, in no small part, to the oddity of its prominence, this stance has been quickly cauterized under a categorical collective.

To gather anyone under any label—here, the New Atheist—is a violent turn, forcing coherence into a thinker’s resolutely individuating ways. And there are real differences among the New Atheists, since among them we count a physicist, an evolutionary biologist, a pundit, a graduate student in neuroscience, and a philosopher, each geographically and institutionally far flung. Their formal reception underlines the perceived and real differences of content in their productions. I think it is safe to say that there is a reason Richard Dawkins received the attentions of Terry Eagleton and Marilynne Robinson while Sam Harris did not, and there is a reason that Daniel Dennett’s Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon has received some reviews in academic journals, whereas nary a one has taken up Christopher Hitchens’s God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything. This is not to suggest a divide between acceptably geeky texts and popularizing, pandering ones; rather, it is to emphasize that these texts have been written by a set of observers with an array of licensure and accreditation commensurate, then, to the postulated audiences of their writing and the methodologies of their proofs. To dispense henceforth with any subtlety on that matter is not to dispense with subtlety—in the end, the differences among New Atheists are as intriguing as those among the fundamentalist dissenters in early-twentieth century America. But we’re dealing with a product that seeks to entertain and not equivocate, so let’s release our stuffy differentiations and join in the collapsing fun.

If you want to be a New Atheist, you are worried a lot. You are worried about the Bible and the Koran, about Talibans and new Inquisitions, about Jerry Falwell and, even more insidiously, Mother Teresa. You’re worried about the candy-covered comforts of hegemony dressed as salvation and you’re worried about mystical communion alone on a countryside ramble. You are worried about belief and practice and leadership and laity. “From the perspective of the new atheists, religion is all one entity,” a New Yorker review of Hitchens explained, and “those who would apologize for any of its forms […] are helping to sustain the whole.” But the form that worries the New Atheists most isn’t the makings of religion, but what it in turn makes. If you want to be a New Atheist, you have to be worried about the progeny. Like antebellum Protestants staring at the high walls of a hilltop convent school or homophobes advocating Prop 8, your worry is that Those People Have Your Children. Textbooks and curriculum, prayer circles and promise rings: the problem is less that adults adhere to such idiocy, but that they abduct our most precious natural resource, and then shove it back into the world reprogrammed. The problem is that we’ve abdicated our Progressive promises to fuse ethics and public education, allowing a certain pluralism to seep into our child-rearing and pedagogical philosophies. Difference is for hippies, the New Atheists say; what we need now is some sensible positivism. Don’t worry about capitalism—it is. Don’t worry about nationalism or science—they will be. These totalizing discourses contribute to the New Atheist’s dream of a reasonable public sphere with ordered laboratory tactics demarcating its every policy move. If unimpeded, science and capitalism work with predictable clarity and world-resolving peace, the New Atheists say; if unimpeded, religion elects morons to the presidency. As with homophobia and nativism, New Atheist antagonism to the religious is framed positively as a protective maneuver toward the little lost lambs, the children and citizens who haven’t had the time or money to think. “Being without faith,” Maher offers in a rare moment of reflexivity, “is a luxury of people fortunate enough to have a fortunate life.” The New Atheists transpose their fortune onto you: you, too, can be freer than you are, if only you’ll relinquish the belief that restraint does you any material good.

Not every New Atheist is a libertarian, but left to their own devices the whole lot would happily remove as many non-S&M ties that bind as possible. Dividing between what they know, and what they know nobody can know, the New Atheists argue that their new ideologies of truth might be more benign than theological ones, that the loss of religious faith in the modern period is a good thing, that the Holocaust is a sign that everything after has to be checked and checked again by doubters rather than believers. “I sell uncertainty,” Maher explains, cleanly. “I preach the gospel of I don’t know.” The good news of his knowing not to know—not to know, that is, despite his knowing of what it is to know—includes a patterned set of replies to the religious by the New Atheists. First, the compassionate reply: “It’s only natural.” Second, the materialist revelation: “It’s manmade.” And third, the medical intervention: “You’re sick from it.” If you want to be a New Atheist, you begin your reading of the religious with an expansively evolutionary sympathy. Of course you’re religious, they remark, it’s been around forever, and it seems nearly biological in its inevitability. Noting the persistence of beliefs makes you seem game, and historical—two things that will win you points from those who suspect you’re just a rabble rouser. You, the New Atheist, should nod with understanding. It is, after all, a very convincing mode, a restful spot on the developmental chart, like the bad posture of Homo neanderthalensis. Who would want to sit up straight when slouching is so much more, well, natural?

At some point you have to leave the Bronze Age, the New Atheists press, and realize that every slouch is caressed by something invented by other men to cradle you into political and personal submission. Remember: the manmade is manipulation. It tugs at your primal fears, and boxes you in like bike helmets, seat belts, and safety locks. We may, as David Hume long ago diagnosed, have a natural tendency to be bewitched, but such “solace,” Maher explains, “comes at a terrible cost.” Stand up, and be a man. Let go of manmade things, and relinquish the psychopathology that restricts you. What is religion? The New Atheists reply, with clarion diagnostic consistency: Religion is something that sells you something invisible so you may feel that which you cannot find elsewhere. It is something for which there is insufficient evidence. It is something people do because they have always done it, not because they know how to think about it. Religion is irrational, it is emotional, and it is instinctual. Religion is entrapment (the New Atheists say, explicitly). Religion enslaves you with its wiles, then forgets to remove the handcuffs. It is a mountebank fortune teller reading entrails, not a trustworthy captain consulting his compass. It massages and preys and toys and plays and screws you over, time and again, with a promise it won’t keep because of its irrationality and its whimsy. Religion is, by the definition of these New Atheists, a know-at-all with no knowledge. It makes “a virtue out of not thinking.” After reading a lot of New Atheist screeds on the subject, religion seems to be a lot like everything these virile pundits want most not to be. It sounds, actually, a lot like a girl.  And while no New Atheist would deny the possibility of female rationality, they would deny that anyone religious could evade emasculation before religion’s mountebank authorities and its invented gods.

Religion as effeminacy is nothing new. Nor indeed is the accusation that religion is socially sanctioned lunacy. Treating it as a neurological disorder, however, sets the New Atheists within a long tradition of critical misogyny. Under the guise of protecting your children, in the effort to best serve your sweet flock of idiots, if you want to be a New Atheist you have reclaimed a New Virility to counter your post-industrial masculine alienation.  This minstrel virility plays out in demonstrations of protective strength, plowing away at the big two nemeses (Christianity and Islam) in the interest of protecting the little guy. It is also exhibited in grand tours of scientific proof, or plodding expulsions of religious duplicity.  In The End of Faith, Sam Harris sets up a demolition cruise to contest headlining religious artifacts in some sort of obstacle course for logic: the Ten Commandments, creationism and intelligent design, anti-abortion stances, opposition to HPV vaccines, biblical prophesies, and the problem of theodicy. Harris and the other New Atheists establish situations to counter as if to build their own sense of strength. They design tests for which they made the questions and the answers. This is perhaps why Maher’s visit to the Institute for Science and Halacha inspires such wincing. It’s not exactly cheating, but it’s also not exactly fair. Hyperbolizing their efforts to “outsmart God,” Maher sets himself up as the only one seeing the irony. But, like noting that religions are inconsistent with their scriptures, or that money is made from a televangelist’s DVD, the debunker ends up coming off less knowing than megalomaniacal. “You’d think if you had the power to raise the dead, you’d have the power to jump a fence,” Maher remarks. If you want to be a New Atheist, you have to believe that there is no such thing as an easy mark, just an available one.

The fight for satisfying victory may have historical sources. Just as evangelicals co-opted the talk of war, New Atheists wrest it back. “In the bloom of resurgent Christianity,” James Turner summarizes, “these aging doubts sprouted with new vigor.” This is our New World Order, they propose, and you girly believers cannot have it. The contrasts between the New Atheists (Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, Sam Harris, Christopher Hitchens, Mark Lilla, and Victor Stenger) and the familiar Old Atheists (Robert Green Ingersoll, H.L. Mencken, Samuel Porter Putnam, Mark Twain, and Benjamin Franklin Underwood) are many, but in one thing they are united. Those Lyceum grandstanders practiced a similar parlance of entertainment and ruthless reasonableness in post-apocalyptic shutters of violence. In the wake of 9/11 (and the Civil War), atheism emerges in part to salve and armor emasculated Reason. If seventeenth and eighteenth century atheists were, in part, responding to revisions of and rebuttals to theological and ecclesiastical portraits of g/God, then nineteenth and twenty-first century incarnations responded to evangelical assertiveness. As James Turner has pointed out, evangelical culture in the nineteenth century played a critical role to provoking the development of a fulmination of unbelief. Robert Green Ingersoll described his late-nineteenth century moment as an “age of investigation, of discovery and thought,” in which the mere appearance of “science” would destroy “the dogmas that misled the mind and waste the energies of man.” But it was not so—religion continued. The “Golden Age of Freethought” debunkers relied upon the promises of Biblical criticism, Comtean positivism, and Progressive social planning to map their new worlds. If you want to be a New Atheist, you have to live in a world where those prophesies of demolished dogmas never came true, and when the evangelicals are still, to your shocked disbelief, still here.

And so, you do what every believer has ever done: you produce. In the nineteenth century, atheists and freethinkers produced grassroots newspapers to provoke a movement: The American Nonconformist, The Freethought Ideal, Freethinker’s Magazine, and The Truth Seeker among scores of others. Publishing presses (like Truth Seeker Company, Freidenker Publishing Company, J.P. Mendum, and Peter Eckler Company) were incorporated and associations were begun. Rarely, however, were such organizational collectives engendered outside of theatrical crowds. The American Humanist Association, the American Association for the Advancement of Atheism, the Atheist Alliance, American Atheists, American Secular Union, and National Liberal League never succeeded in drawing sizable membership rolls. If you want to be a New Atheist, you’ve given up on the development of a social movement. Instead, what you’re seeking is to sell a product that convinces your buyers of a substitution for their invisible products. If you are a New Atheist, you want your readers to buy you. In 2007, articles in the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal breathlessly accounted for the New Atheism’s profitability. As Maher advocates repeatedly for what Jesus would and would not approve, as he decides that Puerto Rico would be an unlikely place for the Second Coming, what he really wants is for his voice to inspire your own to be like his. “You do not possess mental powers that I do not,” Maher explains. The worst part about Religulous—the worst part about being a New Atheist—isn’t, in the end, that you are sexist or simple or a little light on the science. The worst part is that if you want to be a New Atheist, you most likely will not be very winning. Would that Maher had convinced us in our comparative tour to consider the beliefs that sustain us and him in our smirks as much as those which prostrate us before false idols and Puerto Rican messiahs.  Would that he had shown us not only why they believe as they do, but how we come to laugh as we do.  “I don’t find this Jew funny,” the man in the mosque rants. “I know comedy. He’s never made me laugh and his show sucks.”  Wondering why myth works, or how scripture saves, seems less funny than desperate.  Would that Maher had sought to answer not merely why faith survives but also how humor functions, and why the man ever thought it would predictably emerge from this Jew.  Between his heckler’s ethnic expectations and Maher’s juvenile bigotry lies not only the territory of religious studies, but also the fodder for a higher form of incisive criticism and tragic hilarity.

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The occasion for religious environmentalism is the same as that for secular environmentalism: an environmental crisis manifesting itself in global climate change, vast quantities of pollutants, devastating species loss, and widespread environmentally caused illnesses. Religious environmentalism originates in an informed awareness of the magnitude of the environmental crisis and an understanding of that crisis in religious as well as scientific, social, or economic terms.

The movement shows itself in new forms of theology, which have reinterpreted scripture and demanded that, as theologian Larry Rasmussen puts it, we think about God “from the standpoint of earth community.” There have been extremely powerful statements by institutional leaders—e.g., the Pope, the heads of the National Council of Churches and the World Council of Churches, the world’s Sikh community. And there have been thousands of examples of self-consciously religious people participating in environmental activism for—at least in part—religious reasons. We have seen interpretations of the Koran that forbid dynamite fishing in Tanzania and of the Torah that question whether or not SUVs are kosher. The World Council of Churches has challenged the “prevailing economic paradigm” that shapes the global environmental crisis and Buddhist monks have organized against Asian deforestation. The Pope has called on us to return Nature to being the “sister of humanity,” and American Lutherans have demanded the Home Depot stop selling lumber from old growth forests.

Of particular interest here are some widespread, indeed nearly universal, characteristics of religious environmentalism.

The movement typically entails an often newly found and historically significant respect for indigenous traditions, a willingness to engage in shared political work both with other religions and with secular groups, and a frequent appeal to universal concerns defined in terms of “life,” “humanity,” “the earth,” or “creation.” Powerful statements by Catholic leaders in a variety of settings have indicated respect for the spiritual ecological wisdom of indigenous peoples, a striking development for a church that for centuries repressed all earth-honoring traditions. On the local level there are many instances like the Interfaith Global Climate Change Network, which has chapters in eighteen states and includes Protestants, Catholics, Jews, Buddhists, Hindus, Muslims, and Native Americans in its membership. In Zimbabwe, a religious coalition of local Christians working with local spirit medium groups created an organization with three million members and dozens of paid staff who planted eight million trees in an attempt to restore a ravaged landscape.

Beyond the world of faith, well-publicized statements signed by religious and scientific leaders have challenged the environmental consequences of America’s energy policy, and the Sierra Club and the National Council of Churches cooperated on a television ad in defense of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. Indeed, the Sierra Club now spends over $100,000 a year to partner with religious groups on local issues of pollution and conservation. In both contexts, well known, often extremely strong, barriers to cooperation between religion and science and religion and secular politics were overcome.

The ecological vision of most world religions is now centered on the concept of “ecojustice,” a comprehensive social and ecological vision of the interconnection of all of life. The “eco-justice” task forces of several major denominations assert that every kind of political oppression has a role in ecological degradation, and that social inequality makes groups more likely to suffer from pollution. In short, they believe that we cannot heal injustice without transforming our relations to nature—and vice versa.

Interestingly, religions have not only adopted the environmental justice perspective, they helped create it. The United Church of Christ commissioned the first comprehensive study of environmental racism in the U.S. and organized the First Annual People of Color National Environmental Leadership Summit in 1991, which formulated the “Principles of Environmental Justice.” These actions have had profound effects on all the leading environmental organizations and even on the federal government: President Bill Clinton ordered that environmental justice be taken into account in all national policy decisions.

This comprehensive perspective of ecojustice offers hope for a new kind of politics, one that will transcend both blind faith in the “market” and a moribund liberalism of separate and competing interest groups. When liberalism is defined in terms of limited interests—economic, racial, gender, etc.—society is necessarily defined as a zero-sum game. Inescapable antagonism obstructs a democratic tradition rooted in the conviction that at least sometimes a common, civic, public purpose can predominate. It is doubtful that anything even approaching an adequate response to the environmental crisis will be possible without something like that sense of shared purpose. Additionally, ecojustice also has implications for the less developed world. We have seen that in Sri Lanka and Mongolia, for example, religious leaders and grass-roots organizations emphasize Buddhist values in their commitment to human-centered, ecologically sound economic development.

There is also a near universal tendency of religious environmentalism to move religions to the left. Inevitably, confrontation with the causes of the environmental crisis leads to a confrontation with global capitalism, militarism, and political repression. To capitalism environmental problems are externalities, and must remain so. To militarists every environmental problem takes a back seat to every military one. And repressive governments are too concerned with maintaining their own power to worry about ecosystem health.

This move to the left extends even to culturally and politically conservative communities. America’s Evangelical community has given rise to the vital Evangelical Environmental Network, and the religious right as a whole has been split over environmental issues, with activists taking well publicized moves to make clear that environmental concern is not solely the province of granola eating old hippies like the author of this essay. A split on this issue, however, portends at least the possibility of a split on others, and in any case necessarily leads to the questioning of unfettered corporate power.

Finally, it should be noted that in reorienting theology and engaging in environmental activism religions have not lost their specifically religious character. The leader of the world’s 300 million Orthodox Christians has called environmental pollution a “sin.” The environmental justice movement early on created the widely used “Principles of Environmental Justice,” which begins by reaffirming the “sacredness of mother earth.” Religious environmentalism means that religious sensibilities have been extended into the environmental realm, not just that Lutherans or Buddhists or Jews will simply join the Sierra Club.

I would argue that this is a good thing, and that religion as religion has a distinct and vital contribution to make to secular movements for democracy, peace, justice and sustainability. I also believe (and have argued elsewhere) that environmentalism is by far the most spiritually oriented of political movements.

But these are issues to be taken up by others of my writings. Here I have indicated how religions, in their new and greener form, are vital parts of the global movement for ecological sanity. If there is a question about whether or not religious participation in the world of public politics is a good thing, these facts would seem to suggest that a resounding “yes…at least sometimes” is the only rational response to that question.

The real question is why these younger evangelicals are attracted to Obama in the first place. The same article finds an answer in “the recent broadening of the evangelical agenda to encompass social-justice and global-poverty issues.” But that simply begs the question: why are evangelicals—particularly younger ones—turning to such issues? Journalists and bloggers have pointed to leaders who are driving attention to such international issues and geopolitical inequality; but even there, the real reason comes back to the broadening of evangelicals themselves. That is, evangelicals have become a remarkably global people.

Ask many Americans about their international experiences, and you are likely to get stories of backpacking through Europe after their junior year, a family ski-trip to Canada or a cruise in the Western Caribbean. Ask an evangelical Christian, and you are just as likely to hear about two weeks in rural Ghana building a school, seven days in Oaxaca teaching in a church, or an experience living in a South African shanty while performing evangelistic dramas in the streets. Evangelicals, contra their isolationist or xenophobic image, have become a well-traveled group, going to places usually reserved for anthropologists and peace corps volunteers.

As reported in Robert Wuthnow and Stephen Offutt’s article in this summer’s Sociology of Religion, Wuthnow’s Global Issues Survey found that, in the 1990s, 12 percent of church-going teenagers went on a short volunteer trip to another country—a tenfold increase from those who grew up in the 1970s. Wuthnow further reveals that more than 1.6 million Christians per year go on such trips. I suspect that among those typically identified as evangelicals for the purposes of political polling (i.e., white, suburban, conservative Protestants), the percentage of travelers is higher than among respondents as a whole. Just as important, most of those involved in these congregations have seen many reports of such trips (the ubiquitous PowerPoint slide show of smiling children gathered around a white teen), learning about the conditions of urban Haitians and Mongolian herders “first hand” from those who have been there.

Anyone who regularly travels internationally has probably seen these groups of teens with matching t-shirts, often emblazoned with both a stylized map of the country they’re visiting as well as a Bible verse, tromping through the airport, vacation Bible school curricula tucked into multiple duffels. These groups make an easy target for snarky anthropologists (like me) or cynical liberals (also, often, like me), and these trips have drawn considerable criticism from leaders within evangelicalism. But as someone who has both participated in and is now studying what evangelicals call “short-term missions,” these travels are not without effect on both guests and hosts.

Kay Warren, wife of California megachurch pastor Rick Warren, is often credited with her husband’s move to emphasize social justice and expand the scope of evangelical politics. Last year she visited Wheaton College and shared with my anthropology class her vision for church-based social movements. Asked what inspired her to push the agenda, she shared a story of her first visit to Uganda, where she sat with a woman dying from AIDS. With tears in her eyes (and in the eyes of many of us), she laid out the call she felt God put on her life to do something about what she’d seen.

In a 2002 editorial in the New York Times, Nicholas Kristof declared evangelicals the “newest internationalists.” He admitted it was a surprising label for a group “usually regarded by snooty, college-educated bicoastal elitists . . . as dangerous Neanderthals,” but in his travels he’d encountered Christian groups working in humanitarian projects throughout the world. Although he was speaking primarily of Christian aid organizations, the thousands of church, college and parachurch groups sending small groups of teens and adults around the world contribute to this global outlook.

This new globalism constitutes a distinctly different movement from the Christian globalism of the past. Foreign missions have long been a significant element of Christianity, and everything from the popular books of Victorian missionaries to the stadium crusades of Billy Graham have brought a certain global consciousness to rank-and-file Christians. Unlike that removed and professionalized globalism, however, this is a globalism of the rank-and-file itself. As millions travel to various sites, and millions more hear from their friends and family members about these travels, they gain personal contact with a world that was once just so many pieces of yarn stretched from the picture of a missionary family to their location on the map of the Missionary Bulletin Board in a church basement.

Moreover, this is not a one-way globalism. It is not simply a neocolonial movement redux. These newest internationalists are part of more complex global flows that carry influence in multiple directions. In their article on the Global Issues Survey, Wuthnow and Offutt cite the flows of people, resources and knowledge as far more multidirectional than in the past. While acknowledging the enormous disparity of wealth and influence between American Christians and those in many other countries, they note examples of Brazilian Pentecostal broadcasts finding significant play in the New York City Spanish language market and Ghanaian gospel hip-hop gaining a hearing in Atlanta congregations. In my own research on short-term Christian volunteerism, I have found that those who make these trips or meet with foreign visitors in their home congregations often are struck by similarities. Statements such as “even though I couldn’t speak Spanish [or Portuguese or Chinese or Amharic], I knew we were worshipping the same God” reflect a belief in a unity and connection with non-Western Christians that few evangelicals personally experienced in the past.

This sense of connectedness has appeared in some overtly political, and controversial, ways. The decision of a number of U.S. Episcopal congregations to align themselves with African dioceses over the controversial appointment of gay bishop Gene V. Robinson (chronicled in Miranda Hassett’s recent book Anglican Communion in Crisis) reflects both the sense among these American Christians of their unity with Christians in the Global South and the conviction among the African leadership that their influence is needed in an apostate American church. More often, however, this sense of unity and global connectedness manifests itself in less practical ways. This globalism does not radically displace the identity of Christians in the United States; a 2006 article by Robert Priest argues that globalism does not necessarily prompt many to change much about their lives in concrete ways. What it can do, though, is unsettle a confident American exceptionalism and trouble simplistic patriotism.

Thus the allure of Obama. Though he may be too out-of-step with some traditional American evangelical concerns—abortion, gay marriage—his internationalism makes him the kind of candidate who appeals to the global evangelical. For younger evangelicals, like younger voters generally, his personal international experience is seen as a strongly positive element of his resume. As a politician, his tendency to see the world in terms of cooperation rather than competition may find powerful resonance with the newest internationalists.

“There is a thirst for two things in this country – a thirst for spirituality and a thirst for social justice”.
– Jim Wallis (2008)

When people hear the words “progressive” and “evangelical” together, a sort of cognitive dissonance occurs. Meshing the notions of Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson with ideas of social justice is not something most people easily understand. For the people inside this new movement, however, being an evangelical and progressive is a natural fit.

This spring I went to a fundraiser for Tom Periello, a Democratic candidate for Congress in Virginia. The small crowd was generally young and professional, and after talking to them it was clear that this was not just about raising money, it was about changing the dynamic between religion and politics and creating a new progressive religious movement. In the crowd were movement activists including members and employees of Sojourners, Common Good Strategies (CGS), and Catholics in Alliance for the Common Good (CACG), all organizations that are part of a new social movement that is aligning Catholics, evangelicals, and other Christians.

Members of this progressive religious movement see their work as fundamentally different from other conservative religious activists. As one founding member told me “How can you be a Christian and not care about issues like poverty and health care?” Like the others I spoke with, he told me the 2004 election was a turning point and call to action, expressing concern for social justice, a hope for something better in 2008, and an affirmation that faith has a new voice in politics.

The Roots of a Movement

Many social movements in the United States have gotten their roots from within religious communities; from the abolitionist movement and temperance movement, to modern civil rights and anti-abortion debates, religious groups and churches have offered their voice and power to social movement activism. While many of these movements worked toward specific goals through a variety of religious organizations, there has also been a previous history of social movement action occurring because of conflicts within religious organizations. Most notably of course is the Protestant Reformation, which sprang from within the Catholic Church as a result of corruption. Many people became disillusioned with the Catholic Church because they saw too close of a connection between the Catholic Church, government, wealth, and power.

One could argue that we are witnessing something similar among evangelicals in the United States. The close alignment between many evangelical leaders and the Republican Party over the last 30 years has resulted in a growing dissatisfaction from some evangelicals about the appropriateness of these close ties. Once thought of as an unstoppable alliance between the Republican Party and the conservative evangelical movement, there has been a new movement from evangelicals to advocate for policies that are more traditionally aligned with the goals of the Democratic Party.

In a recent article, Pastor Rev. Rich Nathan of the Vineyard Church of Columbus stated, “Lots of people feel that the evangelical label has been taken captive by a very narrow political program . . . Folks don’t feel that that represents them. Many of the so-called evangelical leaders are saying, we didn’t elect these people, they don’t represent us.” This sense that religion has become captive to politics has sprouted a growing frustration from evangelicals and a new call to action for many.

The New Movement

This sentiment is congruent with recent research by E.J. Dionne and John Green (among others), which points to an increasing tension and a chance that the alignment between evangelicals and Republicans is fraying in some circles. While some may be unaware of this movement, there are many evangelicals who have fundamentally different notions of what it means to be a Christian than the Religious Right. This attitude that being a real Christian means moving beyond the three issues of gay marriage, abortion, and stem cell research normally associated with the evangelical movement is spreading. New organizations, networks, and political alliances created since the 2004 Presidential election are part of a new social movement that combines what many would see as conservative religious ideas with central aspects of progressive politics.

While several recent news articles have begun to cover this change, including a story in Newsweek and a cover story in Campaigns and Elections, few have noted that this phenomenon is part of a larger organized social movement effort. Made up of five organizations, four new—We Believe Ohio, Common Good Strategies, Catholics in Alliance for the Common Good, and Faith in Public Life—and one long standing—Sojourners—these loosely connected groups were founded by religiously and politically committed individuals who see each other as kindred spirits, fighting for a political cause that is fueled by their religious beliefs. Members of these groups knew each other before the 2004 Presidential election, but it was not until the wholesale failure of the Bush administration to address issues of social justice that they began to come together in various organizations and form sustainable movement activity.

Even though religious actors have always had a part in progressive social movement and political activity, these alliances have usually come from within the mainline and liberal religious traditions. This new alliance between evangelical activists and the Democratic Party has surprised many, perhaps especially some of those within evangelical churches. The last time I met with members of these groups was at the fundraiser in Washington DC for Mr. Perriello. On Mr. Perriello’s website there is a glimpse into his ideas about the role of religion in politics.

Since 2004, Tom has helped to launch a political and social movement in this country that is credited with shifting the national debate about America’s national priorities. He helped found FaithfulAmerica.org and Catholics in Alliance for the Common Good, which brings together faith communities to fight for children’s health care, supporting a minimum wage, environmental stewardship, and responsible solutions in Iraq. Inspired by the prophetic vision of Dr. King, Wilberforce, and Micah, Tom believes that American must reverse the erosion of our commitment to the common good.

At the fundraiser, audience members discussed how they became part of the movement. One CACG employee related to me how he quit his previous job to join CACG after hearing about their work. He found their name in a newspaper article and asked what he could do to help the cause, leaving his former occupation behind for the movement. This integration of a personal call to action with a political cause was most apparent after Mr. Perriello’s speech when one of the audience members urged others to give to the campaign stating, “As a person of faith it is often hard to grasp sacrifice, but as a first world Christian I try to give till it hurts and I urge you to do the same.”

This mixture of religion and progressive politics bridges the gaps between religious traditions. While Mr. Perriello is Catholic, he is part of the movement effort that includes evangelical actors. His campaign is being run by Eric Sapp, a former Capitol Hill staffer and evangelical activist. Additionally, Mr. Sapp is not only Mr. Perriello’s campaign organizer he is also one of the co-founders of Common Good Strategies, a Democratic consulting group which is central to the movement’s new political efforts. CGS is currently working in four states (AZ, MI, OH, and VA) to create grass-roots movement networks within these states, hoping to create sustainable, new, politically active, but religiously grounded, movements within these states.

In addition to specific campaigns, there has also been a more general integration of religious messages into public discourses by the Democratic Party. For example, the first ever debate among leading Democratic candidates about religion and the role of faith in their public lives was conducted in April 2007. Sponsored by Sojourners Call for Renewal (a liberal evangelical group that is headed by Jim Wallis), the forum included segments with Senator Hillary Clinton, Senator Barack Obama and former Senator John Edwards about the role of religion in their political decisions.

Following on this theme, in April 2008, the organization Faith in Public Life sponsored The Compassion Forum, a two-day conference that according to founders “will offer candidates an unprecedented opportunity to reach religious voters.” What was perhaps most curious about this discussion was not who was present (both Clinton and Obama participated), but who was not present, John McCain. McCain was the only candidate to turn down his invitation to attend and has publicly stated he does not believe faith should play a large part in the election. This almost complete reversal by the two parties has left many commentators wondering who the religious vote will go to this election.

Barriers to Mobilization

The strategy of using politics built on religious ideals has been successful for the Republicans; however, whether or not a similar strategy will have the same impact for Democrats remains to be seen. While they may be less organized than the political right, the religious left consists of about 7% of the public, which is not much smaller than the 11% who identify themselves as members of the “religious right.” The importance of these numbers, and what they can mean for political races, is what the Democratic Party is banking on in 2008.

However, one clear stumbling block for the Democrats are Republicans like Mike Huckabee, who promote many of the same policies of help to the poor and health care for all, but do it under the banner of the Republican Party. With Republicans like Hukcabee on board, they could steal the thunder from the Democratic Party and any hopes of an alliance between themselves and evangelicals. Of course, since the Republican nominee will be John McCain, who is far less connected to the religious voting population, the chances for a Democrat to make inroads to religious voters is greater than probably expected.

A second problem the movement faces is one shared by all social movements, creating and maintaining local movement activity. While it may seem that the old Religious Right movement is disintegrating in many ways, building a new progressive religious movement is not a certainty. Finding that sustaining movement activity was much more difficult than anticipated, organizers have engaged in a strategy to build a permanent political base by working with young religious people. One way they are doing this is to run a campaign over the summer known as “Common Good Summer.”

Playing on the ideas of Freedom Summer, which organized college students to reach out to Southern blacks during the Civil Rights movement, Common Good Summer would bring college students from the Washington, DC area together to increase the level of local, sustainable, progressive religious movement activity. The Common Good Summer participants would in effect become mini field directors, setting up canvasses, phone banks, outreach, and mapping of faith communities. Of course, the goal is not only to generate voters for the 2008 election, but also to create lifelong activists similar to the young men and women who were part of Freedom Summer. As one of planners of Common Good Summer stated, “The training and enthusiasm will help us with this election, but we’re hoping it will also provide them with the resources and understanding of how we are running this race that will seed similar efforts in future campaigns throughout the country.”

The final problem that this new movement faces is obstacles from within the Democratic Party. While many party leaders are excited to bring religion on board and beat the Republicans at what was once their game, there are others within the party who view the separation of church and state and the maintenance of a strongly secular state as paramount to winning over religious voters and elections. However, since most people in the United States view the intersection of religion and politics as natural—with two-thirds arguing that the President should have strong religious values, a statistic that has not changed much over time—the likelihood that these secular groups will have their voices heard seems to be somewhat diminished. This intersection of politics, religion and activism from within religious groups has the power to change, but it can also find itself mired in a world of politics that disregards norms of right and wrong. Of course, the next step is to see how well these efforts pan out in 2008 at the ballot box.

Early in the twentieth century William James raised the question of the moral equivalent of war. We have seen the use of war as a metaphor in such things as the war on poverty, the war on drugs, and so forth—but the metaphor never seems to be as effective as real wars. I suppose it would be too much to ask if we could mobilize a religious war against selfishness, ignorance, and sinfulness in each of us according to our own faith, in part because, I suppose, we have been fighting that war all along. In any case there are enormous threats on the horizon and a popular culture that seems more apprehensive than at any time in my life, with fear of the future replacing the certainty of progress. But anxiety and fear have often fueled extremely regressive movements and there is no certainty that they will move people in the right direction. There is also the great danger that anxiety and fear can immobilize rather than stimulate to action. It is a delicate balance.

Surely secular philosophies have ways of dealing with the fragility of solidarity, even at the national level, and the ease with which humans can be frightened into a negative solidarity against alleged enemies. But if the religions may have capacities to strengthen and generalize a sense of solidarity so that it reaches truly global proportions, they can do so only in and through self-criticism. Let me say it plainly: Christianity, and especially Protestant Christianity, has contributed significantly to the institutionalization of human rights and human solidarity—I might give the American example of the religious roots of the Bill of Rights, but I must add the significant role of Evangelicals in leading the social gospel movement that helped (with the assistance of Catholics motivated by Catholic social teachings) to create in the middle years of the 2oth Century what became the beginnings of a welfare state in the US.

Yet Christianity and especially Protestant Christianity have also contributed to an emphasis on individual piety that makes the secular notion of radical autonomy attractive. Max Weber saw the relation between the Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. The anthropologist Webb Keane has shown the relation between global Protestantism and neoliberal economics. It is in these regards that I would say that religion is part of the problem as well as part of the solution. And if Christianity can make a contribution to the creation of global solidarity only through self-criticism, such is the case with all the other religions, and secular philosophies as well. There is no way of sorting out the good guys from the bad guys in our present world crisis. We all need each other, but we need critical reason and profound faith reinforcing each other.

What the world requires now must go on at many levels—religious, ideological, political—and at the global, national and local levels. But one thing that is required is very evident, however difficult to achieve. We must now turn the idea of being citizens of the world into a practical citizenship, willing to be responsible for the world of which we are citizens. I truly believe that there are millions of citizens of the world in every country willing to make the necessary commitments. Whether they are anywhere in the majority, so that the politicians will listen to them instead of pandering to the short-term interests of their constituents, is doubtful. What we need is to turn a growing minority into an effective majority.

For those of us in the United States, a classical example might be instructive. As far as I know, the first usage of the idea of being citizens of the world originated with the Stoic philosophers in the ancient Mediterranean. They thought of themselves as kosmou politai, literally citizens of the world. But for us it is worth remembering that even the Roman stoics always used the term in Greek—there was no Latin translation. Sheldon Pollock speculates, following Ovid, that this was because the Romans thought their task was “to transform the kosmos into their polis, or rather to transform the orbis into their urbs, the vast world into their own city.” If one looks at George Bush’s National Security Strategy of September 2002, one can see that he claims the oversight of the entire world for the United States, which might explain why Americans have been relatively hesitant about becoming citizens of the world. It is the world that must recognize our primacy, not we that must recognize the primacy of the world.

Because I see neoliberalism as the source of our deepest global problems, it might be thought that I am opposed to it altogether. That would be as foolish at this point in history as to be opposed to capitalism altogether. What I worry about are the destructive consequences of the naturalization of neoliberalism, so that it has no effective challenge. I agree with Jürgen Habermas—whose work I will touch on in my next post—that world politics needs to catch up with the world economy so that an effective structure of regulation can be created that will protect the environment and the vulnerable of the earth, who are paying the price while only a few are reaping the benefits. If this is a political challenge it is also a religious challenge. I am convinced that religious motivation is a necessary factor if we are to transform the growing global moral consensus and the significant beginnings of world law into an effective form of global solidarity and global governance.

[This is the second of three posts drawing on material from a paper presented at From Silver to Gold: The Next Twenty-Five Years of Law and Religion, a conference at Emory University. A version of the full paper will be published in a forthcoming conference volume.---ed.]