Religion, Mobilization, And Social Action

Religious social action groups are emerging as key movers in sweeping sociopolitical changes world-wide. Although their inspiration is religious, their goals are secular. This volume considers the role of such groups by examining regions and nations where change has been most dramatic. Areas researched include: Western Europe, North America, the Amazonian rain basin, Malaysia, Japan, Russia, Northern Ireland, and Israel. The movements studied are as diverse as Conservative Judaism, Roman Catholicism, Sun Myung Moon's Unification Church, the New Christian Right, and Indonesian Muslims. In each case social action groups are studied to understand how they evolve within the current political context in order to change it.

A cutting-edge analysis of how religious social action groups are defying secularization and using religion to press for social change.

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A challenge to the long-standing assumptions in sociology that secularization is an inevitable, unilinear process reducing the significance of religion in modern society, and that globalization, or international connectedness, is one of its prime causes. Explores the roles of religious movements and organizations around the world that are mobilizing their participants for social change, and argues that the overlap between religious beliefs and social change is neither modern nor coincidental. Annotation c. by Book News, Inc., Portland, Or.

ANSON SHUPE is Professor of Sociology at the joint campus of Indiana University and Purdue University, Fort Wayne.

BRONISLAW MISZTAL is Professor of Sociology at the Catholic University of America. He has authored or edited several volumes, both in English and in Polish, including Religion and Politics in Comparative Perspective (Praeger, 1992).