Building movements through active refusal

Abstract

In this latest issue of Culture and Religion, we have a series of articles that raise questions on how communities are formed and how they look to survive. Through different emphases, the articles provide interesting reflections on how religious communities define their collective identity, as well as how they pursue their freedom from institutional rules, historical structures and even the disciplining of gendered language. Sophayo Kamrang Varah et al.’s essay ‘The influence of religion on beliefs of stewardship, dominionship and controlling god towards pro-environmental support’, for example, shows how spirituality and spiritual identity are linked critically to the relationship of the community with the land, as well as the centrality of ancestral belief systems. This rejects or refuses an all-controlling God and centres the spirituality of nature and is this predicated on stewardship rather than dominion. It also highlights the importance of literature and folklore, that is, forms of storytelling, in building this collective identity, and particularly in how it affects the Christian identity of the Tangkhul Naga community that was studied for this project. In two of the articles featured, we also have a continued focus on how narratives are developed, particularly in how communities are breaking apart and then rewriting stories and building identities that are closer to their lived experience. One of these articles is Gabriel Apata’s ‘How Pentecostalism Emerged as a form of Resistance to Racial Oppression in the US’, which argues for Pentecostalism as the first organised black Protestant movements of the postbellum years, finding roots for this in African culture and black cultural expressionism, and particularly centring Lewison’s argument that Classic American Pentecostalism developed out of the religious expression of slave communities. Apata notes five cultural influences: oral, theology and witness, maximum participation and inclusion of dreams and visions, and the link between body and mind that make up this grassrooted and spontaneous theology. In making this argument, Apata’s work also links back to previous editorial arguments we have made regarding transformation and transgression, and asks us to consider what occurs when we centre an ontology of spirit. Valentina Romanzi’s ‘God says “gay rights”: queering Christian theology in the Good Omens fandom’ continues this theme of the breaking up of a narrative and how religious communities express narratives in grassroots or ‘crowd’ based forms. Romanzi’s focus is fanfiction as a site of collective CULTURE AND RELIGION 2021, VOL. 22, NO. 1, 1–5 https://doi.org/10.1080/14755610.2021.2227308