Contested Spaces
Caution. This article/definition is in draft form and at this time may constitute no more than rough notes, reminders for required content, or absolutely nothing at all. Content is subject to revision.
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]
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]
"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."[4] Prophetic movements center around a return to a primordial state of connection, or awaiting a special time or a moment of transformation. [5]
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.
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.
- ↑ 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.
