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  • Emily Winter Contemporary Religion article

    Rights statement: This is an Accepted Manuscript of an article published by Taylor & Francis Group in Journal of Contemporary Religion on 22/12/2016, available online: http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/13537903.2016.1256648

    Accepted author manuscript, 755 KB, PDF document

    Available under license: CC BY: Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License

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An activist religiosity?: exploring Christian support for the Occupy movement

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Published
<mark>Journal publication date</mark>15/01/2017
<mark>Journal</mark>Journal of Contemporary Religion
Issue number1
Volume32
Number of pages16
Pages (from-to)51-66
Publication StatusPublished
Early online date22/12/16
<mark>Original language</mark>English

Abstract

While Christian involvement in progressive social movements and activism is increasingly recognized, this literature has rarely gone beyond conceptualising religion as a resource to consider instead the ways in which individual activists may articulate their religious identity and how this intersects with the political. Based on ten in-depth interviews with Christian supporters of the London Occupy movement, this study offers an opportunity to respond to this gap by exploring the rich meaning-making processes of these activists. The article suggests that the location of the Occupy camp outside St Paul’s Cathedral was of central importance in bringing the Christian Occupiers’ religio-political identities to the foreground, their Christianity being defined in opposition to that represented by St Paul’s. The article then explores the religio-political meaning-making of the Christian Occupiers and introduces the term ‘activist religiosity’ as a way of understanding how religion and politics were articulated, and enacted, in similar ways. Indeed, religion and politics became considerably entangled and intertwined, rendering theoretical frameworks that conceptualise religion as a resource increasingly inappropriate. The features of this activist religiosity include post-institutional identities, a dislike of categorisation, and, centrally, the notion of ‘doings’—a predominant focus on engaged, active involvement.

Bibliographic note

This is an Accepted Manuscript of an article published by Taylor & Francis Group in Journal of Contemporary Religion on 22/12/2016, available online: http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/13537903.2016.1256648