Introduction: Religion and Politics

Theories of social movements have been built, for the most part, from studies of western democracies in which the differentiation of secular and religious institutions and norms is unusually pronounced. The result of focusing on such secularized societies has been a tendency to see religions as furnishing social movements with organizational (and occasionally ideological) resources – but little more. Thus scholars have often emphasized ways in which churches serve as mobilizing networks, and have sometimes also noted the importance of religious beliefs and symbols as a source of collective action framing. Less frequently, however, have they ventured beyond a purely instrumentalist perspective to explore the expressive dimensions of religious conviction in processes of contention.

In this chapter our focus is on cases drawn from Chinese and African societies that have diverged from the secularized path of change in the West. China (in both its communist and precommunist incarnations) has not institutionalized the sort of church-state separation and attendant freedoms of religion that are taken as hallmarks of liberal democratic polities. In Africa, even where institutional differentiation and religious freedom are evident, popular beliefs about other-worldly entities and sacred legitimations of secular authority continue to inform routine and nonroutine politics. The reasons for these distinctive patterns of church-state relations and belief systems need not concern us here, but one result is that the intersection of religion and politics assumes quite different – and in some respects more transparent – consequences in our cases than may be evident in many western democracies.