Contested Spaces
Contested Spaces
Notes
Religion and human spirituality is contested. A struggle goes on between grass-roots, egalitarian, progressive outcroppings and elite attempts to subvert/control. As Prothero notes " story. American religion has also been pulled and pushed by elites who have sought to mold American religious ideas and institu- tions in their own image. The creativity and multiplicity of American religion would appear to be rooted, therefore, not in the uncontested actions of populists but in the contest for hegemony between populists and elites that continues to characterize American religious life."[1]
America 1780 - 1930
In America, "Religious populism has been a residual agent of change in America over the last two centuries, an inhibitor of genteel tradition and a recurring source of new religious movements. Deep and powerful undercurrents of democratic Christianity distinguish the United States from other modern industrial democracies. "[2]
In America, spiritualist movements like Swedenborgianism, Mesmerism, Christian Science, psychic research and other avant-garde alternatives to Christianity where grass roots resistance, "popular rather than elite phenomena and were motivated by a democratic impulse" [3] characterized by
- a denial of the clergy as a separate order of men who needed to be deferred to.
- an exaltation of "religious ecstasy" / mystical experience
- an openness to dreams/visions as normal inspirational occurrences "long held in check by the church." [4]
- desire to overthrow coercive and authoritarian structures and make Christianity into a "liberating force." [5]
In America in the period 1780 to 1830, evangelicism was a popular, popular, common, unpretentious, local affair. "Increasingly assertive common people wanted their leaders unpretentious, their doctrines self-evident and down-to-earth, their music lively and sing- able, and their churches in local hands. It was this upsurge of democratic hope that characterized so many religious cultures in the early republic and brought Baptists, Methodists, Disciples of Christ, and a host of other insurgent groups to the fore. The rise of evangelical Christianity in the early republic is, in some measure, a story of the success of common people in shaping the culture after their own priorities rather than the priorities outlined by gentlemen such as the framers of the Constitution."[6]
Note it is an open question to what extent "populist" and democratic religions are in fact populist or democratic. In as much as these institution ape the Zoroastrian Frame they can probably be said to reflect elite ideology shaped in a way acceptable to those with progressive tendencies, but designed with subversion of these tendencies in mind.
Indigenous Spirituality
"Indigenous prophet movements in the Americas have historically engaged the most threatening and dangerous Other, the White Man. The savants of the Northwest Amazon region of South America have mostly sought to defy the destructive power of White Man's knowledge by disclosing hidden, internal sources of conflict and conserving religious traditions. A long succession of prophetic leaders from the mid-nineteenth century to the present has sustained the continuity of ancestral traditions even at great risk to the leader's lives."[7] Prophetic movements center around a return to a primordial state of connection, or awaiting a special time or a moment of transformation. [8]
Additional Reading
Hatch, Nathan O. The Democratization of American Christianity. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989. - An examination of the contested spaces of early American religious life during the period 1780 to 1830 where popular religion undermined and democratized tradition, conservative, elite religions like Catholicism.
Prothero, Stephen. “From Spiritualism to Theosophy: ‘Uplifting’ a Democratic Tradition.” Religion and American Culture: A Journal of Interpretation 3, no. 2 (July 1, 1993): 197–216. https://doi.org/10.2307/1123988. - A look at the elitist roots of Theosophy
Footnotes
- ↑ Prothero, Stephen. “From Spiritualism to Theosophy: ‘Uplifting’ a Democratic Tradition.” Religion and American Culture: A Journal of Interpretation 3, no. 2 (July 1, 1993): 197–216. https://doi.org/10.2307/1123988 p. 212
- ↑ Hatch, Nathan O. The Democratization of American Christianity. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989. p. 4
- ↑ Nanda, Meera. “Madame Blavatsky’s Children,” 2010. https://www.academia.edu/27289493/Madame_Blavatskys_children_pdf p. 297.
- ↑ Hatch, Nathan O. The Democratization of American Christianity. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989. p. 10.
- ↑ Hatch, Nathan O. The Democratization of American Christianity. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989. p. 11.
- ↑ Hatch, Nathan O. The Democratization of American Christianity. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989. p. 9.
- ↑ Wright, Robin M (Robin Michael). “Wise People of Great Power: Jaguar-Spirit Shamans Among Baniwa of the Northwest Amazon.” Journal for the Study of Religion, Nature and Culture 10, no. 2 (2016): 170–88. p. 170. https://doi.org/10.1558/jsrnc.v10i2.27247.
- ↑ Wright, Robin M (Robin Michael). “Wise People of Great Power: Jaguar-Spirit Shamans Among Baniwa of the Northwest Amazon.” Journal for the Study of Religion, Nature and Culture 10, no. 2 (2016): 170–88. p. 170. https://doi.org/10.1558/jsrnc.v10i2.27247.
