Indigenizing the Goddess

The Glastonbury Goddess religion in the South West of England began in the 1990s by a small group of women dedicated to reviving the Goddess of the land surrounding Glastonbury, interpreting and revitalizing myths and legends in relation to her, and reclaiming the Goddess as their own after centuries of male Christian dominated religion. Hugely successful, the group have constructed what they claim to be the first Goddess Temple dedicated to the indigenous goddess of Glastonbury in over 1500 years. The article will argue that territorialization, or “re-territorialization,” is one of the main strategies of this indigenizing process, and is carried out through the use and development of Glastonbury Goddess material cultures, ritual creativity and narratives, as well as international Goddess training programmes. Prompting the reclamation of local Goddesses in different parts of the world, the Glastonbury Goddess religion is having local and global reach.

A Match Made in Heaven? Southern Evangelicalism and the Rise and Fall of Agrarian Populism in the 1890s

The agrarian populist movement of the late nineteenth century remains among the largest social movement and third-party revolts in American history. It embodied a full-scale critique and mobilization against the inequities of the Gilded Age, and its influence stretched well into the Progressive and New Deal eras. While most accounts of the movement and party’s emergence and rapid demise have centered on economic conditions and interests, we link movement and third-party emergence and failure to the institutional arena second only to partisan politics in its impact on southern society at large, namely organized religion, particularly evangelical Protestantism. This article offers the first systematic analysis of the extent to which organized religion in the South channeled the mobilization of agrarian populism. The results both support and contradict the argument that agrarian populism was rooted in organized southern religion by suggesting that evangelical Protestantism channeled the mobilization of the Farmers’ Alliance movement but not the People’s Party. While white southern evangelical religion served as a potent cultural resource and mobilizing structure for the movement, the move to partisan politics helped create a disjuncture between movement and party from which Populism never recovered.

Race, Culture, and Religion in the American South

The South still commonly appears as the land of the Bible Belt, of evangelical Protestant hegemony. Despite the rapidly increasing immigration from all parts of the world to the region, there is still justification for such a view. To study religion in the South, then, is to examine the influence of a dominant evangelical culture that has shaped the region’s social mores, religious minorities (including Catholicism, Judaism, and non-Christian immigrant religions), cultural forms, charged racial interactions, and political practices. In no other widely dispersed region, save for the Mormon regions of the Rocky Mountain West, does one family of religious belief and expression hold such sway over so many people and throughout such a large area. The biracial nature of evangelicalism in the South, as well, lends it a distinctive history and culture that alternately puzzles, repulses, and fascinates outsiders. The South may be the Bible Belt, but, like Joseph’s coat, it is a belt of many colors, embroidered with a rich stitching together of words, sounds, and images from the inexhaustible resource of the scriptures. The rigid Bible Belt conservatism associated with the common understanding of religion in the South contrasts dramatically with the sheer creative explosiveness of southern religious cultural expression. Indeed, southern religious influences lay at the heart of much of 20th-century American popular culture. And it contrasts with a rapidly changing contemporary South in which Buddhist retreat centers and Ganesha temples are taking their place alongside Baptist and Methodist churches.