Identity Politics and the Fragmenting of the 1970s Evangelical Left

2011 ◽  
Vol 21 (1) ◽  
pp. 81-120 ◽  
Author(s):  
David R. Swartz
Keyword(s):  
Identity Politics ◽  
Social Action ◽  
New Left ◽  
Conservative Politics ◽  
Cultural Conservatism ◽  
Religious Cultures ◽  
1960S And 1970S ◽  
Evangelicals For Social Action ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
Economic Injustice

AbstractIn the early 1970s, a group of progressive evangelicals challenged the mid-century cultural conservatism of their tradition. Activists associated with Reformed, Anabaptist, and neo-evangelical institutions denounced militarism, racism, sexism, economic injustice, and President Richard Nixon's “lust for and abuse of power.” When this coalition met in 1973 to issue the Chicago Declaration, delegates effused a profound sense of optimism. The evangelical left held very real potential for political impact.Within a decade, however, the movement seemed to be in disarray. This article suggests the centrality of identity politics to evangelicalism in the 1970s and outlines the fragmentation of the progressive evangelical coalition along gender, racial, and theological lines. The formation of the Evangelical Women's Caucus, the growing stridency of the National Black Evangelical Association, and the divergence of Anabaptist-oriented Evangelicals for Social Action and the Reformed-oriented Association for Public Justice sapped the evangelical left of needed resources and contributed to its impotence into the 1980s. The forces of identity politics, which also plagued the broader political left, were powerful enough to sabotage even a group of evangelicals with remarkably similar theological convictions, religious cultures, and critiques of conservative politics. The story of the fragmenting evangelical left, however, reflects more than broader culture's preoccupation with identity. It points to often-overlooked religious elements of the broader left. And alongside the New Left and the New Right, the evangelical left's debates over racial, sexual, and theological difference added to the disruptions of the liberal consensus in the 1960s and 1970s.

Religious Non-Affiliation

2021 ◽  
pp. 172-193
Author(s):  
William V. Trollinger
Keyword(s):  
Republican Party ◽  
Christian Right ◽  
Past Century ◽  
Right Wing ◽  
Cultural Changes ◽  
Conservative Politics ◽  
The Past ◽  
1960S And 1970S ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
Political Success

For the past century, the bulk of white evangelicalism has been tightly linked to very conservative politics. But in response to social and cultural changes in the 1960s and 1970s, conservative white evangelicalism organized itself into the Christian Right, in the process attaching itself to and making itself indispensable to the Republican Party. While the Christian Right has enjoyed significant political success, its fusion of evangelicalism/Christianity with right-wing politics—which includes white nationalism, hostility to immigrants, unfettered capitalism, and intense homophobia—has driven many Americans (particularly, young Americans) to disaffiliate from religion altogether. In fact, the quantitative and qualitative evidence make it clear that the Christian Right has been a (perhaps the) primary reason for the remarkable rise of the religious “nones” in the past three decades. More than this, the Christian Right is, in itself, a sign of secularization.

Speech or conduct?

2018 ◽  
pp. 263-284
Author(s):  
Christopher Hutton
Keyword(s):  
Identity Politics ◽  
Hate Speech ◽  
Case Law ◽  
Culture Wars ◽  
Trademark Law ◽  
Personal Names ◽  
1960S And 1970S ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
Linguistic Behaviour ◽  
Media Corporations

This chapter offers an analysis of the key forms of linguistic censorship found within common law jurisdictions and examines their legal rationale in terms of the distinction between speech and conduct. Case law domains examined include blasphemy, public order offences, obscenity and key literary trials, broadcasting, popular music, trademark law, and personal names. The culture wars of the 1960s and 1970s over censorship involved a two-way clash between the establishment and progressive activists. Today, issues such as hate speech, misogyny, and online trolling offer a challenge to notions of social liberation through the ending of taboo. Identity politics provides a framework for understanding the harm associated with certain forms of linguistic behaviour. While in many domains law has retreated from linguistic censorship, legal systems as well as global social media corporations continue to debate whether and how to control linguistic expression in different domains.

Sociology, theories of

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jeffrey C. Alexander
Keyword(s):  
Social Action ◽  
Social Life ◽  
Sociological Theory ◽  
Empirical Processes ◽  
Sociological Research ◽  
Fundamental Properties ◽  
History Of ◽  
1960S And 1970S ◽  
Post War ◽  
The 1960S

Throughout the history of sociology, three types of theorizing have co-existed, sometimes uneasily. ‘Theories of’ provide abstract models of empirical processes; they function both as guides for sociological research and as sources for covering laws whose falsification or validation is intended to provide the basis for a cumulative science. ‘Presuppositional studies’ abstract away from particular empirical processes, seeking instead to articulate the fundamental properties of social action and order; meta-methodological warrants for the scientific investigation of societies; and normative foundations for moral evaluations of contemporary social life. ‘Hermeneutical theory’ addresses these basic sociological questions more indirectly, by interpreting the meanings and intentions of classical texts. The relation between these three forms of theorizing varies historically. In the post-war period, under the institutional and intellectual influence of US sociologists like Parsons and Merton, presuppositional and hermeneutical issues seemed to be settled; ‘theories of’ proliferated and prospects seemed bright for a cumulative, theoretically-organized science of society. Subsequent social and intellectual developments undermined this brief period of relative consensus. In the midst of the crises of the 1960s and 1970s, presuppositional and hermeneutical studies gained much greater importance, and became increasingly disarticulated from empirical ‘theories of’. Confronting the prospect of growing fragmentation, in the late 1970s and early 1980s there appeared a series of ambitious, synthetical works that sought to reground the discipline by providing coherent examples of how the different forms of sociological theory could once again be intertwined. While widely read inside and outside the discipline, these efforts failed in their foundational ambitions. As a result of this failure, over the last decade sociological theory has had diminishing influence both inside the discipline and without. Inside social science, economic and anthropological theories have been much more influential. In the broader intellectual arena, the most important presuppositional and hermeneutical debates have occurred in philosophy and literary studies. Sociological theorists are now participating in these extra-disciplinary debates even as they have returned to the task of developing ‘theories of’ particular institutional domains. The future of specifically sociological theory depends on reviving coherent relationships between these different theoretical domains.

Conceptual Art and identity politics: from the 1960s to the 1990s

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nizan Shaked
Keyword(s):  
Civil Rights ◽  
Identity Formation ◽  
Identity Politics ◽  
Conceptual Art ◽  
New Left ◽  
The United States ◽  
Gay Liberation ◽  
Alternative Spaces ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
Action Groups

This chapter asks how a precisely articulated set of practices, defined by artists in the 1960s as Conceptual Art, evolve into a broad notion of conceptualism, and how the latter had expanded into its present forms. It shows how, in the United States context, some of the most important strategies of conceptualism developed through the influence of contemporaneous politics, more specifically the transition from Civil Rights into Black Power, the New Left, the anti-war movement, feminism, and gay liberation, as well as what later came to be collectively named “identity politics” in the 1970s. A range of artists who have self-defined as conceptualists synthesised Conceptual analytic approaches with an outlook on identity formation as a means of political agency, and not as a representation of the self, a strategy that significantly expanded in the 1970s. Two major aspects of identity politics have impacted the field. The first, activist and administrative, consisted of protests against existing institutions, the developments of action groups and collectives, and the subsequent formulation of alternative spaces. The second was the bearing that it had on artistic strategy, form, and subject matter. This chapter focuses on practices that took a critical outlook on identity formation.

From Syndicalism to Seattle: Class and the Politics of Identity

2005 ◽  
Vol 67 ◽  
pp. 1-21 ◽  
Author(s):  
Verity Burgmann
Keyword(s):  
Working Class ◽  
Identity Politics ◽  
Labor Movement ◽  
Class Identity ◽  
Politics Of Identity ◽  
Corporate Globalization ◽  
1960S And 1970S ◽  
Raymond Williams ◽  
Political Communities ◽  
The 1960S

In the first half of the twentieth century the labor movement promoted the notion of separate working-class values and interests—evident for example in American and European syndicalism, British interwar Communism and Australian interwar Laborism—and was thus identifiable as a social movement. Like the new social movements of the 1960s and 1970s, this prewar identity politics successfully mobilized imagined political communities. By contrast, the retreat from emphasis on class difference and the turn to “equality of opportunity” politics, which Raymond Williams identified at midcentury and warned against, demobilized and weakened the labor movement. With class-based inequalities increasing from the 1970s, the decline of working-class identity politics ensured that the discrepancy between the objective importance of class and its subjective significance became especially marked. However, a newly forged identity politics of the world's economically exploited has recently reemerged in the movement against corporate globalization. From syndicalism to Seattle, we have witnessed the rise, retreat and resurgence of class identity politics.

scholarly journals Ethnic, Immigrant, and Racialized Women in Canada: A Historiography

2012 ◽  
Vol 3 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Julie Dinh
Keyword(s):  
New Left ◽  
Women's History ◽  
Fair Share ◽  
Gender History ◽  
Bottom Up ◽  
Complex Integration ◽  
1960S And 1970S ◽  
And Gender ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
Women’S History

Since the emergence of ̳new left‘, bottom up approach to history in the 1960s and 1970s, women‘s and gender history has become a rich field for historians. Ethnic and immigrant women‘s history, as part of this larger movement, has seen its own fair share of growth. This paper examines the emergence of racialized women‘s history in Canada and analyzes the increasingly inclusive and complex integration of this field through the works of notable authors in recent decades.

scholarly journals A brief note on the history of psychosurgery in Japan

2017 ◽  
Vol 43 (3) ◽  
pp. E13 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jiro Nudeshima ◽  
Takaomi Taira
Keyword(s):  
Psychiatric Disorders ◽  
New Left ◽  
Negative Influence ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
Neurosurgical Treatment ◽  
History Of ◽  
1960S And 1970S ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
Surgical Treatments ◽  
Left Movement

In Japan, there has been no neurosurgical treatment for psychiatric disorders since the 1970s. Even deep brain stimulation (DBS) has not been studied or used for psychiatric disorders. Neurosurgery for psychiatric disorders has been thwarted by social taboos for many years, and psychiatrists today seem to simply ignore modern developments and therapies offered by neurosurgery such as DBS. As a result, most patients and their families do not know such “last-resort” options exist.Historically, as in other countries, frontal lobotomies were widely performed in Japan in the 1940s and 1950s, and some Japanese neurosurgeons used stereotactic methods for the treatment of psychiatric disorders until the 1960s. However, in the 1960s and 1970s such surgical treatments began to receive condemnation based on political judgment, rather than on medical and scientific evaluation. Protest campaigns at the time hinged on the prevailing political beliefs, forming a part of the new “left” movement against leading authorities across a wide range of societal institutions including medical schools. Finally, the Japanese Society for Psychiatry and Neurology banned the surgical treatment for psychiatric disorders in 1975. Even today, Japan’s dark history continues to exert an enormous negative influence on neurosurgery for psychiatric disorders.

Labor History and Public History: Introduction

2009 ◽  
Vol 76 (1) ◽  
pp. 2-5 ◽  
Author(s):  
Thomas Miller Klubock ◽  
Paulo Fontes
Keyword(s):  
Working Class ◽  
Social History ◽  
Public History ◽  
Labor History ◽  
New Left ◽  
The United States ◽  
Working Class History ◽  
History Of ◽  
1960S And 1970S ◽  
The 1960S

Labor history and public history have had a long relationship in the United States, as James Green argues in Taking History to Heart, dating back to Progressive-era historians like Mary Ritter and Charles A. Beard. Labor historians like Phillip Foner, who identified with the “Old Left,” made labor history public history through ties to labor organizations and the Communist Party. Then, during the 1960s, historians identified with the “New Left” and inspired by E.P. Thompson, worked to extend social history and working-class history “from the bottom up” beyond the confines of the academy, even as they shifted their focus from the institutional histories of unions and political parties, to make the history of “ordinary people” and “everyday life” public history. The organization of history workshops and the proliferation of oral history projects reflect the ways in which historians of the working class made their practices public history in new ways during the 1960s and 1970s while expanding the sphere of both “the public” and “labor” to include histories of women, gender and patriarchy, and ethnic and racial minorities.

scholarly journals The "Revival" of Abram Leon

2019 ◽  
Vol 21 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Tal Elmaliach
Keyword(s):  
New Left ◽  
The United States ◽  
Jewish Question ◽  
Public Attention ◽  
Political Perspective ◽  
Middle East Conflict ◽  
1960S And 1970S ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
Influential Book ◽  
Second World

The Jewish Question: A Marxist Interpretation, by Abram Leon, was the most influential book among critics of Zionism during the New Left era. It was first published in 1946 but did not receive significant public attention in the next two decades. However, during the late 1960s and early 1970s, it became a bestseller in terms of theoretical Marxist literature. Focusing on its re-publication in the United States in 1971, this article explores why the book's popularity transformed, almost overnight. Its main argument is that although current research deals mostly with Leon’s theoretical importance, the book’s revival in the 1960s and 1970s should be explained from a social and political perspective. Leon’s claims against Zionism, which had been developed in the late 1930s, lost their relevance after the Second World War as a result of the establishment of the state of Israel as well as the crisis of the global Left in the 1950s. They gained new importance only under new conditions: the rise of the New Left’s interest in the Middle-East conflict, the struggle between the anti- and pro-Zionist Jews of the New Left following the Six-Day War, and internal debates among the anti- and pro-Zionist Jews themselves. The "revival" of Abram Leon therefore reveals the ideological, organizational and social ties between the Old and the New Left, as well as the general interaction between ideology and social and political conditions.

Social science and American liberalism

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Harry Hendrick
Keyword(s):  
Identity Politics ◽  
New Left ◽  
Child Rearing ◽  
Parents And Children ◽  
The Social ◽  
American Liberalism ◽  
The Face ◽  
The Creation ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
Liberal Individualism

The chapter begins by surveying the social, economic and political developments that led to the decline of American liberalism in the 1960s in the face of a conservative revival. It argues that, largely under the influence of the New Left, feminism, and identity politics, one response of American liberalism was to reconfigure classical liberal individualism. A principal feature of this process was the creation by psychologists of an alternative parenting 'style' to the so-called 'permissiveness' (and individualism) of the Spock years. In explaining this transition, the chapter discusses the interrelationships between the collapse of liberalism, the reaction against authority, and the emergence of the 'new behaviorism'. It argues that these were instrumental in the creation and popularization of an alternative to the alleged failure of 'permissive' parenting (which was held to have weakened liberalism), namely that of psychologist Diana Baumrind's 'authoritative' style, which created a contractual 'interdependence' between parents and children, thereby stigmatizing an 'unconditional' approach to child rearing.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document