Abstract
This article examines the formative influence of the organizational field of religion on emerging modern forms of popular political mobilization in Britain and the United States in the early nineteenth century when a transition towards enduring campaigns of extended geographical scale occurred. The temporal ordering of mobilization activities reveals the strong presence of religious constituencies and religious organizational models in the mobilizatory sequences that first instituted a mass-produced popular politics. Two related yet analytically distinct generative effects of the religious field can be discerned. First, in both cases the transition toward modern forms of popular mobilization was driven by the religious institutionalization of organizational forms of centralized voluntarism that facilitated extensive collective action. Second, the adoption of different varieties of the same organizational forms led to important divergences. The spread in the United States of societies for moral reformation—in contrast to their non-survival in Britain—steered popular politics there towards a more moralistic framing of public issues. These findings indicate the importance of the organizational field of religion for the configuration of modern forms of popular collective action and confirm the analytical importance of religion’s organizational aspects for the study of collective action.
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Notes
Similarly, in her loving reconstruction of nineteenth-century US voluntary organizations, Skocpol (2003) does not thematize religion even if many of the organizations she discusses, such as the temperance movement, were driven by religious concerns. When discussing the reasons for the rise of such organizations, she devotes ten pages to the formative influence of the Civil War and only a brief paragraph to religion (Skocpol 2003, pp. 37, 46–57). There, too, the important factor is not religion as such but rather the competitive religious market created by the state where, after disestablishment, “each denomination had to organize and attract devoted congregants or risk eclipse.”
A similar interpretive move is used by Drescher (1987) to explain the sources of popular mobilization against colonial slavery. Starting from the observation of a remarkably strong presence of Methodists in antislavery campaigns, he concludes that the underlying cause must have been artisans’ distinctive attitudes towards labor, since the majority of the Methodists were artisans. The possibility that Methodists engaged in a political mobilization as members of a religious organization is not even entertained.
As the first historian of the Catholic Association wrote, in this early period of interdenominational cooperation, when Catholics—including O’Connell—were still involved in the administration of these societies, “men who had never met before, and are not likely so soon to meet again, were found seated at the same committee board, devising sublime changes, organizing magnificent revolutions, for the instantaneous getting up of a new manufacture of intellect in the country” (Wyse 1829, vol. 1, p. 232).
This is why Young’s claim that Methodism was a “sect” with an intensely local and “centrifugal” character is rather puzzling.
The most important secessionist organizations were the Methodist New Connexion (1797), the Independent Methodists (1806), the Bible Christians (1819), the Primitive Methodist Church (1820), the Tent Methodists (1822), the Protestant Methodists (1829), the Arminian Methodists (1833), and Wesleyan Reformers (1850).
If these numbers in the single digits appear less than overwhelming, one must keep in mind that they underestimate the impact of Methodism by counting only those who met the strict requirement of formal membership and leaving out more casual attendees. As late as 1853, Horace Mann (1853, p. lxxviii) suggested that the total attendance of Wesleyan societies was no less than three times the number of registered members. Furthermore, the growth of Methodist membership must be considered in light of the declining rates of commitment to the established Church of England. There the proportion of those who “passed” the far less costly ritual of loyalty, Easter Day communion, in the same period fell from 9.9 to 7.9 of the adult population (rates computed by Gilbert 1976, pp. 27–32). By contrast, Quaker membership peaked at around 60,000 in the seventeenth century, a number smaller than the number of Wesleyan Methodist members in 1796 (Vann 1969, pp. 159–160).
Although the Revolution itself has been hailed as a major innovation in politicized collective action (Tarrow 1998, pp. 37–38), its effects on popular politics were complex and often contradictory, sometimes antithetical to genuine popular mobilization. While the various revolutionary struggles opened possibilities for ordinary people to enter politics as they mobilized against colonial elites (Jensen 1970), these mass struggles were eclipsed by mobilization orchestrated through already constituted and coercive authorities, such as town meetings or provincial and colonial assemblies. Although employing the rhetoric of associationalism, the various associations, committees, and societies created by these authorities were typically bodies of vigilantes who enforced conformity and punished non-compliance. In this sense, they were less an innovation than an intensification of Tilly’s “parochial” repertoires of communal violence (Champagne 1967; Countryman 1981, pp. 138–148; Irvin 2003; Rapoport 2008). On the marked difference between coercive revolutionary committees and post-revolutionary voluntary associations, see Countryman (1981, p. 294).
The Constitution of the New England Anti-Slavery Society—where the words “sin” or “confession” were never mentioned—put it in the following way: “we consider it our imperious duty to diffuse, as widely as possible, a knowledge of just and correct principles on the subject of slavery; to arouse the consciences of the wise; to enlighten the understanding of the ignorant; and incessantly to appeal to every principle of humanity, benevolence, justice and natural affection, in behalf of that degraded and wretched class of our colored brethren, who are retained in ignominious and cruel bondage” (New-England Anti-Slavery Society 1832, p. 25).
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Comments and suggestions by Rogers Brubaker, Hannah Brückner, Anette Fasang, Phil Gorski, Damon Mayrl, Sam Nelson, and Laurence Winkworth, as well as the Theory and Society Editors and Reviewers are gratefully acknowledged. The Yale University A. Griswold Faculty Research Fund and Collegium Budapest Institute for Advanced Studies provided research support.
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Stamatov, P. The religious field and the path-dependent transformation of popular politics in the Anglo-American world, 1770–1840. Theor Soc 40, 437–473 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11186-011-9148-2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11186-011-9148-2