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“Not Left-Wing, Just Human”: The Integration of Personal Morality and Structural Critique in Progressive Religious Talk

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 July 2017

Todd Nicholas Fuist
Todd Nicholas Fuist*
Affiliation:
Illinois Wesleyan University
*
Address correspondents and reprint requests to: Todd Nicholas Fuist, Department of Sociology and Anthropology, Illinois Wesleyan University, 1312 Park Street, Bloomington, IL 61701. E-mail: tfuist@iwu.edu.
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Abstract

Researchers have posited a bifurcated discursive field with regard to United States politics, with secular progressives at one pole and religious conservatives at the other. This division is typically understood to be both ideological and stylistic, with secular liberals possessing a robust language for speaking about structural inequality but lacking transcendent rhetoric about morality, and conservatives having the opposite discourses available to them. Yet this view steers us away from groups that complicate this picture, such as progressive religious communities. This article uses qualitative data collected among progressive religious groups to demonstrate that, through their ability to integrate discussions of structural inequality and personal morality, these communities create a rhetorical style that blends critical discourses with calls for righteousness. To understand different rhetorical positions, we have to examine the on-the-ground meaning making represented by politicized talk within communities that provide actors with the categories of identification which make social action possible.

Type
Articles
Information
Politics and Religion , Volume 11 , Issue 1 , March 2018 , pp. 169 - 191
Copyright
Copyright © Religion and Politics Section of the American Political Science Association 2017 

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Footnotes

I would like to thank Courtney Ann Irby, Ruth Braunstein, and Rhys H. Williams for comments on earlier versions of this article.

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