Handbook of the Sociology of Religion

(WallPaper) #1

Activism in an Urban Religious District 413


Dichotomous typologies such as these are built on the assumption that there is in
fact a fundamental distinction between worldliness and otherworldliness. This assump-
tion obstructs social scientific understanding of black religion, and organized religion
in general, in at least two important ways. First, it suggests that religious people can-
not use ostensibly otherworldly ideas for secular activist purposes. If some theologies
are taken to be political opiates (recall that Karl Marx dubbed religion the “opiate of
the masses”), others are considered amphetamines for activists. Moreover, both are
thought to act unambiguously. That is, no religious tradition can be both worldlyand
otherworldly. No church can change orientations, chameleon-like, to fit the context or
issue at hand. The second limiting assumption is that seemingly otherworldly religious
practices (such as “shouting” or “getting the holy ghost”) do not have practical, even
political, implications for the faithful.
Lincoln and Mamiya (1990), who are concerned with the historical development
of black religion, and are reluctant to squeeze churches into starkly binary categories,
declare that black churches are in fact suspended in perpetual tension not only be-
tween “otherworldly and this-worldly,” but between “resistance and accommodation,”
“priestly and prophetic functions,” “universalism and particularism,” “communal and
privatistic,” and “charismatic and bureaucratic” (10–16; see also Baer and Singer 1992).
At various historical junctures, particular black churches swing toward one pole or an-
other. While the tension model nominally escapes the trap of binary typology and
allows us to appreciate some of the complexity and fluidity of black religion, it still
describes a “dialectical” process. This assumes that world and otherworld, and other
paired categories, are “polar opposites” (Lincoln and Mamiya 1990: 11) in black reli-
gious thought and practice. The tension between the two is never resolved, but is expe-
rienced in every era by religious actors who struggle to remain true to the transcendent
amidst the pressing social, political, and economic exigencies of their time.
Lincoln and Mamiya (1990:12) concede that
[t]he otherworldly aspect, the transcendence of social and political conditions, can
have a this-worldly political correlate which returns to this world by producing an
ethical and prophetic critique of the present social order. In some instances, escha-
tological transcendence can help to critique the present.


Still, no sociological study of black churches directly challenges the idea that worldly
and otherworldly ideas and practices are clearly distinct, polar opposites in the first
place.
In this chapter, I question the usefulness of the worldly/otherworldly paradigm as
a way of thinking about activism, retreatism, and all the combinations thereof, among
black religious organizations. I take my conceptual cue from historian Evelyn Brooks
Higginbotham (1993), who describes the black church as “a complex body of shift-
ing cultural, ideological, and political significations” whose “multiplicity transcends
polarity – thus tending toblurthe spiritual and secular, the eschatological and politi-
cal, and the private and public”(16; emphasis added). I concur also with the sociologist
Nancy Ammerman (1997a: 213), who states that religious practices in general


cannot be confined to a realm we call “otherworldly.” Like all other either/or di-
chotomies, that one serves us no better. Those very “otherworldly” experiences are
often in clear dialogue with the situations of everyday life....These are practices that
implicate this world in the very midst of providing points of transcendence.
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