ABSTRACT
Religion is too busy conducting funerals, expounding theology, collecting tithes, burning incense, and offering opening prayers at local Kiwanis luncheons to be mobilizing protests, boycotts, and insurrections. Religion typically is in the business of supplying meaningful world-views and moral systems that help to integrate and harmonize societies; of providing comforting theodicies to those distressed and suffering; of rendering ideologies that legitimate the oftentimes unjust status quo. For the world-views, moral systems, theodicies, and organizations of religion can serve not only to legitimate and preserve, but also to challenge and overturn social, political, and economic systems. Religion offers some important and sometimes unique solutions to this problem of motivation. Religion, as a major creator and custodian of powerful symbols, rituals, icons, narratives, songs, testimonies, and oratory, is well-positioned to lend these sacred, expressive practices to the cause of political activism. Organized religion is well-equipped to provide, when it so desires, these key resources to social movements.
