Content area
Abstract
This study investigates how religion functions as an organizational, psychological, and cultural resource for black political mobilization. Few studies have explored the way different dimensions of religion affect political activism. In past works, African Americans have been stereotyped, at least in the social science literature, as having an otherworldly religious orientation that deflects attention away from worldly concerns such as politics. Employing resource mobilization and micromobilization theory, this study considers religion as a resource for political mobilization.
The analysis uses primary archival sources, interviews, participant observation and survey research, along with secondary sources to reconsider the role of religion in black mobilization during the Civil Rights Movement. It then demonstrates how individual religious beliefs and practices currently affect different modes of political action.
From an organizational perspective, the study shows that the internal structure of religious institutions is associated with the extent of political engagement within those institutions. Hierarchically structured congregations are less prone to church-based activism than religious institutions organized and governed by congregants. Religious institutions give congregants the opportunity to learn political skills and to hear information regarding political affairs. They also supply material and non-material resources for political action. These factors can have a direct bearing on political action. Because of historical factors, they are presently a strong determinant of African-American political mobilization.
From a psychological perspective, the study demonstrates how religious beliefs and commitments can stimulate political action by nurturing feelings of political efficacy and by promoting non-material incentives for collective action. In a causal model of organizational and psychological sources of black mobilization, it indicates how internal religious beliefs can be positively and independently associated with feelings of perceived political efficacy and interests in political issues, factors that directly promote political action.
From a cultural perspective, the study illustrates how religious symbols and rituals operate as political resources in the process of mobilization. Religious culture can shape the way actors frame strategies for action. Religious symbols and rituals can legitimize political goals.
These organizational, psychological, and cultural facets of religion work interactively to promote black political mobilization. Earlier scholars may have erroneously attributed the lack of black mobilization in the South during the Jim Crow era to the otherworldly tenets of African-American Christianity. Yet religious political action may have been deeply affected by material sanctions against political engagement imposed before the Civil Rights Movement. When opportunity structures for participation expanded and sanctions against participation eased, religiously-based resources seem to have been forged for black mobilization.
