From the Struggle for Independence to the Religious Conflict

The chapter deals with the chaotic situation of 1990 when the struggle for independence was intermingled with the religious revival in the acute form of radical Islamism and the process was gradually shifting to the revival and activities of political organizations. At the same time, religion was intertwined with politics and criminal activity. In investigating the conflicts in which Islamic radicals were involved, it was very difficult to distinguish the ideology of religious fundamentalism from criminal activities related to drug and arms business, people trafficking, and kidnapping. Crime, in its turn, was directly in the political and power groups that were closely linked to radicals. Thus, the North Caucasus republic, called Chechnya by Russians, appeared directly in the center of Russia's recent history, threatening its state and social security.

Anticlerical Discourse in Modern Russian Science

One can often read about the religious revival that came about in Russia after the collapse of Soviet power, both in the media and in scientific literature. According to opinion polls, the majority of Russians are believers, mostly orthodox Christians. The Russian state clearly patronizes religion, at least some specific ("traditional") religions. In socio-political discourse, the prevailing view is that religion is a good thing, and if sometimes religion is a source of problems, it is associated with some deviations from the norm, a perversion of the very essence of religion. This point of view can easily be found in Russian scientific periodicals. However, a critical attitude towards the growing role of religion in Russia is also often expressed in Russian science. The article highlights the main reasons for the dissatisfaction of scholars with the current state of affairs. It is also shown that such works have no influence on the religious situation in Russia. Although anti-clerical sentiments are quite clearly expressed in Russian science, they do not fall into the socio-political discourse, since there is simply no such force in Russia that could consistently promote the principle of secularism. In search of an additional electoral resource and a replacement for the Soviet ideology, the authorities did everything to enhance the importance of religion and strengthen the authority of religious leaders. As a result, today, despite the fact that the real level of religiosity of the population is apparently much lower than is commonly believed, politicians (even opposition ones) are not ready to openly doubt the positive role of religion, fearing PR problems.

Political Reforms as Religious Revival: Conceptual Foundations of Tanzimat

Parallel to Arab Nahḍah, Ottoman modernization program is associated with the Tanzimat, a period of drastic social, political and institutional transformation. The word tanẓīmāt itself, however, merely means “regulations” or “reorganization” and very little has been done in investigating the conceptual or ideational foundations of Tanzimat reforms. The question at stake here is how these series of reforms were justified and legitimized within the Ottoman political culture. Accordingly, this paper focuses on reform debates among Ottoman bureaucrats and statesmen in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries and proposes the concept and doctrine of taǧdīd (renewal) as a key to understanding Ottoman reform and religious transformation. Ottoman reformers at the turn of 19th century resorted to the doctrine of centennial renewal in order to both criticize the moral shortcomings of Ottoman political system and legitimize innovation. Within this logic, Ottoman reformist sultans and politicians have frequently been referred to as muǧaddids, that is restorers. This paper will present an account of the concept of taǧdīd based on Ottoman political and historical writing from the period. I argue that Ottoman reform was inseparable from the logic of religious revival and that Ottoman debates should be considered as part of and discussed in relation to the 18th-century Muslim revivalism which has attracted growing attention in the last decade.

The time–space tactics of Chinese Buddhist and Taoist believers under state–religion tension

This study explores the experience of elderly rural Buddhist and Taoist believers in communist China where the ruling party has maintained decades-long regulatory control over religion. Based on ethnographic observation and oral histories, the analysis begins with how the actors made sense of and coped in their relationship with the state during the fieldwork period (May–June 2020) when state regulations restricted public religious practice because of COVID-19. The analysis then looks back on how practitioners experienced tightening state ideological control from the early 2010s to before COVID-19; further back at the religious revival during the opening and reform (1980s–2010s); and finally, the Cultural Revolution period (1960s–70s) when strict atheistic measures were imposed. Their narratives reveal the practical logic (habitus) which practitioners used to mediate their resistance against and compromise with the authoritarian state. Specifically, four logical modes that involve actors’ different time–space tactics were identified, namely state–religion disengagement, state–religion enhancement, religious (dis)enlightenment, and karma. The implications of these ostensibly conflicting modes of thinking in mediating the actors’ resistance–compliance interface in contemporary China are discussed.

Charismatic Christianity’s Impact on Growth and Revival in Singapore: The Case of the Methodist Church from 1889–2012

This paper aims to explain patterns of Charismatic revival by utilizing a quantitative lens on church growth in Singapore during the mid-1900s. The research digitized and then analyzed data from the archives of the Methodist Church of Singapore between the years 1889 and 2012. The annual conference reports recorded several variables over this 123-year period such as church membership, baptisms, and professions of faith. In recent years, it also records the average Sunday attendance at each of 23 churches throughout Singapore. This paper presents a qualitative and quantitative analysis of the historical data and concludes that, in line with predictions from the cognitive science of religion (CSR), religious revival can serve to energize religious communities that are primarily reliant on rituals with high frequency and low-arousal (see Whitehouse 2004). Typically, high frequency and low-arousal rituals allow for high levels of consensus and social identification among large religious groups. However, as a byproduct of their high frequency and low-arousal, the repeated rituals are predicted to suffer from the effects of tedium, which lowers motivation for the information presented during the rituals and can have negative effects on group cohesion. The ethnographic and historical records investigated within the theory of Divergent Modes of Religiosity (DMR) have suggested that short bursts of reinvigoration can be used to revitalize motivation in doctrinal religions. While the data from Singapore’s Clock Tower Revival events in the 1970s suggest that such an event did occur, the DMR, as traditionally formulated, is unable to capture the dynamics of Singaporean Christian demographics because 1) it does not clearly account for the high number of converts who have entered the religion and 2) it cannot account for the sustained presence of high-arousal rituals in the Pentecostal and Charismatic churches in Singapore since the Clock Tower Revival. Demographic data from Singapore, in particular the Singaporean Methodist church, complicate CSR’s current approach to tedium because it appears that the religious communities in Singapore have not only sustained their motivation, they have grown since the initial revival period in the 1970s, suggesting that new amendments to our approach to tedium in doctrinal religions may be appropriate (Lane, 2021, 2019; Lane, Shults, & McCauley, 2019). As such, this paper discusses how the data from the Methodist church in Singapore are more easily explained through the use of a new approach toward understanding social cohesion in religions that relies on a cognitive (i.e., information processing) approach that links social and personal information schemas with rehearsal, memory, and personal experiences. The theory also aims to formulate its claims with sufficient specificity to be modeled in computer simulations (Lane 2018, 2013) to be further tested against other historical groups, which this paper discusses in regards to future directions for the research.

Ukraine and Russia

This chapter describes the intertwined religious and political histories of Russia and Ukraine, focusing on church–state relations and religion’s role in relations between the two nations. It analyzes the common origins of these countries in medieval Kyivan Rus’, and the ongoing debate about the significance of the decision to accept Orthodox Christianity in 988 to both the relationship between church and state and the cultural orientation of Russians, Ukrainians, and Belarusians. It traces the legacy of separate religious development in the medieval era; changing church–state relations in Russia; the use of religion as a mode of governance; the civilizational debate about Orthodoxy and European identity; the experience under the Soviet regime; religious revival amid the collapse of communism; and post-communist tensions about the role of religion in a pluralist society, and about competing visions of a ‘Russian World’ on one hand and autocephaly for Ukrainian Orthodoxy on the other.

Armed Conflict and Religious Adherence Across Countries: A Time Series Analysis

A fundamental question in the comparative sociology of religion is: What are the drivers of cross-national differences in religiosity? The existential insecurity argument raises the expectation of higher levels of religiosity in contexts of social crisis. We test this argument against countries’ armed conflict experiences, employing global longitudinal data on religious adherence over almost half a century. We did not find evidence of religious revival when measuring the consequences of armed conflict with a 5-year lag, indicating that armed conflict-related social crises do not tend to lead to sudden changes in the religious adherence of a country. However, we did find more consistent indications of a higher proportion of religious people when using accumulated measurements of armed conflict, highlighting the importance of investigating the armed conflict history of a country when assessing its religious consequences. Our results show that countries with a more devastating experience of armed conflict tend to present higher proportions of religious adherence in comparison with countries with a less devastating armed conflict history. We concluded that armed conflict tends to partially drive religious persistence in societies that have experienced it, and that the pace at which this takes place is gradual rather than immediate.

What Reason Wrought

This chapter recognizes scholarly debates about the Enlightenment; some indict the movement for failing to live up to its ideals. Nonetheless, the Founding Fathers were traditionally understood to have been shaped by Enlightenment values. These curricula reject that understanding. They repudiate Enlightenment values, including secularism, tolerance, the social sciences, social reform, internationalism, and those values’ possible influence on the new nation. The curricula instead indict the Enlightenment as godless and reject its appreciation of reason and science as threats to the authority of the Bible. The genuine eighteenth-century Enlightenment is, for these curricula, the religious revival known as the Great Awakening. These textbooks also assert that France’s commitment to humanism warranted divine punishment in the French Revolution, and that its reprehensible politics differentiate it from American virtues. This chapter concludes with some implications of what rejecting the Enlightenment entails for modern America culture.

Reviving Religion

This book uses Graham’s crusades in London, Berlin, and New York as a prism through which to explore the powerful dynamics of the transatlantic revival of the 1950s. It was a movement that affected political discourses, theological debates, and ordinary faith, and witnessed a tremendous exchange of ideas and issues, hopes and fears, people and practices. It produced intense national debates about the future of faith under the threat of secularization. It was shaped by transnational ideological frameworks such as the Cold War and consumerism, and it strengthened the international awareness of German, British, and American Christians within and beyond the evangelical community. These were the dynamics, changes, and processes that came together during Graham’s altar call in Europe. This first chapter embeds Billy Graham’s revival meetings in the religious landscapes of the United States, the United Kingdom, and Germany in the 1950s, a time characterized by secularization fears and hopes for a religious revival. It introduces the planning process behind Graham’s revival meetings, which was marked by lively transnational exchanges between American, British, and German organizers. In the wake of World War II, the so-called crusades provided a focus for contemporary debates among church officials, theologians, and ordinary Christians about faith, politics and society, and a possible modernization of religious life. The chapter shows how the endorsement and criticism developing around Graham split congregations and denominations, meanwhile allowing an ecumenical community of Graham supporters to emerge. Graham’s revival style challenged the evangelical communities in particular to embrace a more worldly faith.