‘More like a tavern than a school house’: Family strife, religious change, and the founding of Oundle Grammar School, 1556–1578

The convoluted and contested foundation of the Grammar School at Oundle, Northamptonshire, in 1573 illustrated the complexities involved in giving concrete shape to pious wishes in 16th-century post-mortem bequests. Although the founder was Sir William Laxton (d. 1556), the key figure was his widow, the assertive matriarch Dame Joan Kirkeby-Luddington-Laxton, the richest woman of early Elizabethan London. This paper analyses the politics, religious context, and family strife of this dispute, and in so doing illuminates the contours of early Elizabethan London.

Violence in Pacific Islander Traditional Religions

An Element on the role of violence in the traditional religions of the Pacific Ilands (Melanesia, Micronesia and Polynesia) and on violent activity in islander religious life after the opening of Oceania to the modern world. This work covers such issues as tribal warfare, sorcery and witchcraft, traditional punishment and gender imbalance. and moves on to consider reprisals against foreign intruders in the Pacific and the continuation of old types of violence in spite of massive socio-religious change.

Racism and Religious Intolerance: A Critical Analysis of the Coloniality of Brazilian Christianity

This article examines the persistence of religious intolerance experienced by practitioners of Afro-Brazilian religions. Drawing from recent reports and historical resources on religious intolerance, it approaches religious diversity in Brazil from a decolonial perspective, pointing to the contradiction between the image of Brazil as a place where religious change and plurality occurs with minimal conflict and the painful reality experienced by practitioners of Afro-Brazilian religions. Picturing religious intolerance and racism as two faces of the same coin, it argues that both must be resisted. The article concludes with a call for a religious-racial literacy which is intercultural in nature and promises a path to overcome the insidious persistence of racism and religious intolerance. Such a way forward, however, demands a de-centering of Brazilian Christianity, despite its religious majority status, in favor of an epistemic humility which gives full consideration to the knowledge, memories, and lived experience of Afro-Brazilian religious practitioners.

Nordic Europe

This chapter examines religious change in the five Nordic countries: Sweden, Denmark, Norway, Finland, and Iceland. Immigration came later to these countries than in many other parts of Europe, but it has transformed Sweden, Norway, and Denmark into relatively diverse societies; Finland and Iceland remain more homogeneous. In spite of these differences, the religious outlook is changing right across the Nordic countries with a decline in membership in the majority churches, falling indices of religious belief and practice in most of them, growing numbers of people who place themselves outside the faith communities, and multiplying forms of spirituality that lie beyond religious institutions altogether. The chapter addresses the implications that these changes have for religion and state relations, and the role of religion in politics, the media, and civil society.

Ireland and the United Kingdom

This chapter examines the role of religion in Ireland and the United Kingdom in four stages, focusing on how divisions between Protestantism and Catholicism have contributed to political tensions and, at times, violence: (a) from the colonization of Ireland by Britain until the end of the Irish Civil War in 1923, when religion was used both to justify colonialism and to oppose it; (b) state-building in the early twentieth century, when religion impacted politics and society in ways that diverged from the wider European Christian democratic movement; (c) a period of secularization in the late twentieth century; and (d) a period of religious change, but at the same time persistence, in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. It concludes by examining the impact of religion on the 2016 Brexit referendum vote, arguing that Brexit has destabilized political and religious relationships between the islands, with particular reference to Northern Ireland and Scotland.

A Theory of Political Backlash: Assessing the Religious Right’s Effects on the Religious Field

A growing body of evidence suggests that the rise in religious disaffiliation can be partly attributed to a political backlash against the Religious Right. Yet the concept of “political backlash” remains undertheorized, limiting our ability to evaluate how backlash against the Religious Right has impacted the religious field as a whole. This article develops a general account of how political backlash against a radical actor can impact participants within a given field, distinguishing between broad backlash, narrow backlash, and counter backlash. It then applies this framework to the case of the religious field. An analysis of available evidence suggests that backlash against the Religious Right has had ripple effects beyond the rise of the “nones,” including a rise in “spiritual” identification, positive attention to the “Religious Left,” depoliticization of liberal religion, and purification and radicalization within the Religious Right itself. This article encourages religion scholars to connect dots between trends that have not been understood as related, and deepens our understanding of the relational nature of religious change. More generally, it offers a framework for understanding how backlash against radical actors can shape entire fields.