An activist religiosity? Exploring Christian support for the Occupy movement

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.

Keywords:

• Christianity
• social movements
• Occupy
• activism
• religious identity

Acknowledgements

This article is based on the findings of my MA dissertation and I am very grateful to my supervisors Professor Linda Woodhead and Dr Bronislaw Szerszynski for their guidance and support. I am also indebted to the feedback from the referees of the Journal of Contemporary Religion, which helped me greatly to develop this article. This work was supported by the Economic and Social Research Council (ES/J500094/1).

Notes

1. This description of events is based upon the accounts of four people who were involved: George, Sam, Siobhan, and Symon.

2. All the interviewees’ names appear here as they requested. Hereafter, I refer to the interviewees by their first names.

3. The discussion of St Paul’s is not complicated here by additional references to Sheffield Cathedral. However, I draw upon Joe’s and Ash’s religio-political identities.

4. Accounts vary, but five people were named.

5. Dave Tomlinson’s The Post-Evangelical (1995) also highlights some of these trends, including church de-conversion, dislike of institutions and hierarchies, and increased emphasis on intuition. Gordon Lynch’s (2002) consideration of post-evangelicalism in the context of Generation X is also useful.