Can religion change the world?

Ryan Schram

Mills 169 (A26)

ryan.schram@sydney.edu.au

31 May 2017

Available at http://anthro.rschram.org/2667/12

Gravers, Mikael. 2012. “Monks, Morality and Military: The Struggle for Moral Power in Burma—and Buddhism’s Uneasy Relation with Lay Power.” Contemporary Buddhism 13 (1): 1–33. doi:10.1080/14639947.2012.669278.

Hertzberg, Michael. 2014. “The March of the Monks: On the Political Repertoire of Buddhist Monks in Sri Lanka and Myanmar.” In The Great Diversity: Trajectories of Asian Development, edited by Christopher M. Dent and Camilla Brautaset, 103–16. Wageningen, Netherlands: Wageningen Academic Publishers.

Adams, Brad. Burma–Crackdown: Repression of the 2007 Popular Protests in Burma. Human Rights Watch. New York, December 2007. http://www.hrw.org/sites/default/files/reports/burma1207web.pdf.

Bellah, Robert N. 1967. “Civil Religion in America.” Daedalus 96 (1): 1–21. http://www.robertbellah.com/articles_5.htm.

Hirschkind, Charles. 1997. “What Is Political Islam?” Middle East Report. http://www.merip.org/mer/mer205/what-political-islam.

Communicator–Message–Code–World

Liberalism values the message over the code and its context

• [Communicator–Message]…Code…World

Many other cultures conceptualize communication in terms of its effects

• Communicator…[Message–Code–World]

This is not simply a “cultural” difference in the sense of Us/Them or East/West. To some extent, all cultures have to recognize that communication really happens in the second model. Even if one's ideology places value on the first model, there are still situations in which that gives way to the second.

Today, I would like to put forward a claim for us to debate:

Historically, religious movements are more effective at achieving social change than any other kind of mass political movement.

We can of course debate the individual terms. Even so, the claim can still be made. Religion has more influence on society than mass participation in politics.

What do you think?

• Abolitionism: In the UK and US, and possibly in Australia
• Temperance
  • Women's Christian Temperance Union
  • Carrie Nation (see Nation 1909, 130)
• Religion and social capital (Levitt 2001, 2007, Hertzberg 2014)
• Spiritual politics as a radical critique of society (Badiou 2003).
• Christian nationalism in PNG

Badiou, Alain. 2003. Saint Paul: The Foundation of Universalism. Translated by Ray Brassier. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press.

Bellah, Robert N. 1967. “Civil Religion in America.” Daedalus 96 (1): 1-21. http://www.robertbellah.com/articles_5.htm

Hirschkind, Charles. 1997. “What Is Political Islam?” Middle East Report. http://www.merip.org/mer/mer205/what-political-islam.

Levitt, Peggy. 2001. The Transnational Villagers. Berkeley, Calif.: University of California Press.

_. 2007. God Needs No Passport: Immigrants and the Changing American Religious Landscape. New Press.

Nation, Carry Amelia. 1909. The Use and Need of the Life of Carry A. Nation. Topeka: F. M. Steves & Sons. http://archive.org/details/useandneedoflife00natirich.