Resurgent Religion,Resurgent Patriarchy? Strictly Observant Religion,Gender,and the State

Abstract

A triple transformation is shaping societies around the world: the rise of strictly observant religion, the backlash against gender equality, and the growing influence of neoliberalism and authoritarianism in state affairs. While each of these phenomena has been intensively studied by social scientists, we know very little about their overlapping confluence. This introduction to the Special Issue “Strictly Observant Religion, Gender and the State in the 21st Century” outlines how we might make sense of the increasing traction of liberal sexual politics and the concurrent rise of neo-traditionalist movements. Rather than providing a unified theory, we propose the concept of “strictly observant religion,” a “social system which aims at structuring all aspects of life around strict adherence to religious doctrines”, as defined by Tobias Müller in his contribution to this special issue. As such, it serves as a heuristic tool to study these macro-transformations through thick descriptions of people’s striving, believing, and struggling. By locating the collection’s contributions in current debates and summarizing key insights, we outline possible pitfalls and pathways for future research in the sociology of religion, feminist theory, and political sociology.

A Triple Transformation

In recent decades, we have witnessed momentous social changes that have reshaped societies at the intersection of three important sociocultural phenomena: the rise of strictly observant religion, the contested advancement of gender equality, and the transformation of the state through neoliberalism and authoritarianism. Each of these currents has been explored individually in literature, however, the way they interact, challenge, and promote each other is not yet adequately understood. This “triple transformation” of religion, gender, and the state requires urgent academic attention because the multifaceted and complex interactions at this particular intersection have given rise to unprecedented political currents and reinventions of traditional norms that shape societies today.

Contrary to the secularization thesis that predicted the eventual withering away of religion and religiosity, we are witnessing a resurgence of what we call ‘‘strictly observant religion,’’ in which believers are expected to strictly follow a set of rules that determines a large part of their lives. As the widening literature on the topic suggests, the most prominent indicators for the rise of strictly observant religion are the rising popularity of Global Pentecostalism (Burke, 2012; Gaddini, 2022; Harding, 2001), Islamic Revivalism (Inhorn, 1996, 2012; Isidoros & Inhorn, 2022; Mahmood, 2005, 2016; Parvez, 2017), and Hasidic Judaism (Kravel-Tovi, 2018; Stadler, 2009; Taragin-Zeller, 2023). These developments have radically transformed the landscapes of religion, gender, and politics (Marty, 1988; Scott, 2018; Selby, 2012; Yountae, 2023).

Parallel to and often in conflict with the rise of strictly observant religion, movements for gender equality and feminism of all stripes have proliferated globally. Their impact ranges from UN agendas to grassroots networks, achieving significant gains for instance in LGBTQ+ rights, access to abortion, and combating sexual violence, gaining widespread attention through campaigns such as #MeToo. This means that strictly observant religious groups are confronting a radically changing landscape of sexual morals and gender-related policies. They are often participants in the conflicts around same-sex marriage, the racialized moral panic about “rapefugees,” and the mainstreaming of equality, diversity, and inclusion agendas. This has sparked an equally global reactionary backlash that is at the core of right-wing and far-right populism and authoritarianism. They rally around ethnonationalist imaginations of “the people” allegedly in defense against distorted tropes of “woke ideology,” “cancel culture,” and “critical race theory.” In turn, these religious and gender-related dynamics have shaped and are shaped by the partial dismantling of the welfare state under the banner of neoliberalism. Coupled with the global rise of right-wing authoritarianism, this has helped to expand market and ethnonationalist logics into all aspects of social life, with devastating consequences especially for those most marginalized along the axes of race, class, gender, sexual orientation, ability, and migration status, among others (Andrews, 2021, pp. 189–208; Bassel & Emejulu, 2017; Brown, 2019; Emejulu & Sobande, 2019).

This poses a sociological puzzle: How can we make sense of the significant gains toward liberalizing sexual politics and the concurrent rise of strictly observant, traditionalist, and neo-fascist religious movements? The religious zeal infusing campaigns to roll back hard-won liberties that became evident in the debate around the Supreme Court’s overturning of Roe v. Wade’s abortion rights or the gendered democratic backsliding in Turkey point to the imminent need to understand the resurgent power of religion in the 21st century. The dramatically shifting landscape of sexual politics demonstrates a pressing need to analyze the volatile relationship of gender relations, state intervention, and religions that are constantly reorganizing, adapting, and reinventing tradition.

This Special Issue on “Strictly Observant Religion, Gender and the State in the 21^st century” responds to this challenge by tackling three major questions. First, how do strictly observant religious groups interact with and contest the state regarding gender and sexuality? Second, how do changing sexual practices and laws affect different religious communities, particularly strictly observant groups? Third, how does feminist religious activism challenge the ethical, personal, and political categories upheld by both religion and the state?

By addressing these questions the Special Issue intervenes in two vibrant academic debates across various disciplines. First, it seeks to rethink the theories, vocabularies and methodologies we use to understand strictly observant religious groups, and their intimate entanglement with patriarchal beliefs and practices (see Almond et al., 2003; Brekke, 2011; Harding, 2001; Kravel-Tovi, 2018; Marty, 1988; Stadler, 2009). It analyzes how strictly observant religious groups challenge two basic principles within contemporary societies: gender equality and the modern state’s promise of religious freedom. Echoing the early work of Riesebrodt who understood fundamentalism as “patriarchal protest movement” (1993, 2000), the Special Issue investigates what role gender plays in the persistence of strictly observant, fundamentalist, (ultra)orthodox, traditionalist, and socially conservative religious groups in their interaction with state actors at local, national and global levels. They particularly build on the existing literature on strictly observant religious groups’ positions and practices in favor of and against the empowerment of women (Brink & Mencher, 1997; Burke, 2012; Kandiyoti, 1988; Taragin-Zeller, 2018; Wadud, 2006), the advancement of LGBTQ+ rights (Massad, 2002; Pratt, 2007) and the reconfiguration of the family (Joseph, 1993, 2005).

Secondly, the contributions seek to advance the debate about the conditions for, articulations of, and obstacles to social change at the intersection of gender, religion, and the state. It does so by focusing on religious groups that were historically particularly resistant to transformations toward equal and non-oppressive gender relations (Avishai et al., 2015; Connell, 1995; hooks, 1984; Riesebrodt, 2000). Notwithstanding this resistance, in religious settings that are traditionally patriarchal and permeated by non-liberal worldviews, as the studies of Fader (2009, 2020), Inge (2016) and Mahmood (2005) demonstrate, women play an increasingly important role in organizational structures and successful recruitment. At the same time, asymmetrical gender relations remain a pivotal building block of the socio-political character of these groups. Inspired by Mahmood’s (2005) critical reflection on feminist theory through her analysis of the women’s mosque movement in Egypt, the contributions also try to understand ambiguous and alternative forms of agency, including its nuances that remain illegible in the binary grid of oppression and resistance (see Bilge, 2010; Bucar, 2010; Zion-Waldoks, 2015). Going beyond the dichotomy of oppression and resistance also urges us to pay attention to the often understudied and under-theorized role of masculinities in strictly observant religion and pious feminist movements (Isidoros & Inhorn, 2022; van Klinken & Chitando, 2021; see Müller, forthcoming). In addition, as critics of Mahmood have pointed out, we also need to investigate the many other facets of subjectivity that make up people’s complex lives beyond their designations as pious, secular, liberal, feminist, etc. (Schielke, 2009; see Hornbacher-Schönleber, forthcoming). Similarly, understanding the state not primarily as a unified, centralized actor, but as a social relation (Jessop, 2016; Müller, 2021) with many hands (Morgan & Orloff, 2017) allows us to reveal how its most penetrating power unfolds at its margins (Das & Poole, 2004). This also helps us to uncover “Unorthodox Alliances” (Kravel-Tovi, forthcoming) where we would not expect them, for instance between the Haredi sector and the government’s campaign against domestic violence, or the Wahlverwandschaften, the elective affinities between neoliberal capitalism and millennial Pentecostalism, which Connolly (2005) has called the “Evangelical-Capitalist Resonance Machine.” These examples indicate why the religion-gender-state nexus is a key arena of contestation that helps us to understand the mechanics of social change, including spectacular rollbacks of hard-won liberties. The contributions in this Special Issue seek to further this objective by providing methodological and conceptual frameworks to advance both empirical investigation and theoretical analysis of such contestations. By shedding light on the multidimensional intersections of sexual and religious politics, the contributions strive to elucidate how these interactions can either catalyze or impede social change.

Studying Strictly Observant Religion, Gender, and the State

The sociological debate on religion since the middle of the last century has been shaped by the emergence and critique of the secularization thesis (Müller, 2020; Stolz, 2020). This perspective is closely linked to a teleological understanding of modernity suggested by Max Weber, in which rationalization, calculability, and material wealth would eventually lead to the decline of religion. The Iranian Revolution in 1979 and the rise of political Pentecostalism in the form of the Moral Majority in the United States in the 1980s led to a reorientation toward religion (Harding, 2001). After the collapse of the Soviet Union, the term “fundamentalism” was the prism used to capture what was considered the final frontier of liberal democracy, the main force resisting the proclaimed end of history, with Martin Marty, one of the directors of the seven-year Fundamentalism Project ironically lamenting “Too bad we’re so relevant” (1996). After 9/11, the war on terror became a dominant global political framework, and producing knowledge on religion, particularly those currents in Islam that were dubbed variously extremist, fundamentalist, Salafist, and jihadist, became a major political and academic imperative (Amir-Moazami, 2018; Mahmood, 2012; Mamdani, 2005; Müller, 2017). Throughout, the very real issue of the patriarchal gender politics dominating conservative religion was instrumentalized as a racialized marker for securitization, militarization, and racist anti-immigration politics (Abu-Lughod, 2013; Amir-Moazami 2022; Fernando, 2014; Puar, 2007).

Instead of a moral panic about conservative religion or a misplaced liberal teleological optimism of the withering away of (patriarchal) religion, empirical evidence suggests that we have been witnessing two synchronous and at times conflicting tendencies: First, secularization and transformation of religion into less organized spirituality, particularly in Western Europe and among more educated, urban and middle-class demographics (Künkler et al., 2018; Stolz, 2020). Second, different forms of conservative religion are on the rise, not least through the proliferation of Pentecostalism in sub-Saharan Africa, Latin America, and East Asia, various Islamic revival movements across and beyond the Muslim world, the ascent to power of right-wing Hindu nationalism in India, and the rise of Haredi or ultra-Orthodox Judaism particularly in the United States, United Kingdom, and Israel. The religious support of right-wing strongmen such as Bolsonaro, Erdoğan, Modi, Netanyahu, Orban, Putin, and Trump shows, however, that the organizational capacity of religious groups and the cultural resonance of religious language is deeply influential in contemporary politics and state governance (see Brown, 2019; Gorski & Perry, 2022).

Not least because of its origin as self-description of some early 20^th-century Protestants and its connotations with “the repugnant cultural other” (Harding, 1991), the term fundamentalism is not a suitable contender to capture these religious developments. While many such groups are indeed morally, sexually, and socially conservative, their economic and political orientation might well be centrist or even progressive, which limits the term’s usefulness for capturing these religious phenomena. What unifies many of these groups, in contrast to liberal, laissez-faire, and ecumenical practices, is that they request from believers a strict adherence to the rules and rulings of religious authorities. The mandated practices and ways of life are propped up by different social systems of pedagogics, hierarchy, and economics which render deviation from the rules often very costly in terms of the familial, relational, and financial impact it can have. At the same time, these stringent social-ethical systems can provide believers with considerable degrees of stability, life in community, protection, and purpose. While these groups display a considerable degree of diversity, we suggest to call these forms “strictly observant religion”, which can be defined as “a social system which aims at structuring all aspects of life around strict adherence to religious doctrines and mandated practices established by religious authorities through social, emotional and financial regimes of control, discipline and punishment” (Müller, forthcoming).

This means that they are distinguished from forms of religiosity that leave religious prescriptions mostly up to the discretion of the individual, and those where no significant social systems of discipline exist that seek to enforce adherence to the mandated practices. Within most religious traditions and currents, some groups and sectors might fall within the remit of this term while others might not. As many of the papers in this Special Issue demonstrate, it is precisely in the contestation of strict observance of religious and gendered social norms that new religious subjectivities emerge (see Dokumacı, forthcoming; Hornbacher-Schönleber, forthcoming; Kravel-Tovi, forthcoming; Taragin-Zeller, forthcoming). In this way, we see strictly observant religion as a heuristic that opens up the analysis of a field where submission, discipline, authority, and agency are frequently contested and reshaped.

The contributions assembled here offer a diverse set of theoretical, methodological, and empirical approaches investigating how gender and sexuality emerge as crucial arenas of socio-political assertion and change that unsettle and reaffirm both strictly observant religion and nation-states in the 21st century (Asad, 2003; Asad et al., 2009; Navaro-Yashin, 2002; Pateman & Mills, 2007; Yuval-Davis, 2011). Taken collectively, the papers offer three specific contributions that traverse various disciplines represented by the different authors, including sociology, political science, social and political anthropology, religious studies, gender studies, and development studies, analyzing case studies from different Jewish, Christian, and Muslim contexts. The empirical settings are marked by significant geographical diversity, from Ankara and Addis Ababa to London and Lyon, interrogating the entanglements of religious, colonial and political histories.

First, they offer insight into a critical moment regarding the rapid transformations of gender relations instantiated by the disruptive effects of the #MeToo movement, the legalization of same-sex marriage, and the radical questioning of male religious authority in Christian, Muslim, and Jewish contexts. At the same time, in the political climate of rising authoritarian, patriarchal, and homophobic leadership among right-wing and far-right groups (see Brown, 2019; Butler, 2024), religious activism pushing very conservative gender politics continues to thrive nationally and transnationally, including in some of the countries discussed by the contributors: Brazil, France, Israel, Turkey, and the United Kingdom. The papers offer a timely academic analysis of how strictly observant religion is unsettled by gendered dynamics while at the same time itself unsettling these dynamics at this critical point in history.

Secondly, the papers contribute to addressing the pressing question of how social change is affected by and how it affects religion and gender. While rapid changes in these fields are widely recognized (see Butler, 2009, pp. 101–136; Eliasoph, 1998; Philips, 2007), the papers address the too often neglected question of the contexts, vocabularies, materialities, media, and social formations through which these changes appear. Ethnographically detailed studies of gender and strictly observant religious groups with their imbued aversion to some forms of change, such as “innovation” in Islam or “unbiblical” practices in Western Christianity, offer particularly interesting insights into how change occurs in highly restricted sociocultural settings (e.g., Harding, 2001; Jouili, 2015; Stadler & Zeller, 2017; Strhan, 2015). This enables us to situate different experiences of religion with regard to changing gender dynamics and thereby advance our understanding of their diverse roles in social change.

Third, the papers urge scholars to think about the often uneasy and still insufficiently theorized relationship between intersectional feminism, religion, and the nation-state (see Bilge, 2010; Singh, 2015; Yuval-Davis, 2011). Based on the assumption that class, race, and gender are necessarily complementary analytical angles (see Yountae, 2023), several papers demonstrate why intersectional feminism is a vital lens to explain surprising alliances and incremental changes in strictly observant religious contexts (see Kravel-Tovi, forthcoming; Müller, forthcoming; Taragin-Zeller, forthcoming). In turn, the contributions explore how religion and theology challenge some basic assumptions within intersectional feminist scholarship and help feminists to re-evaluate the implications and possibilities of different political strategies (see Dokumacı, forthcoming; Hornbacher-Schönleber, forthcoming; Istratii, forthcoming).

The Special Issue proposes three themes of particular significance for the study of the triangular intersection of strictly observant religion, gender, and the state. Our first theme, state entanglements, brings together articles by Michal Kravel-Tovi and Romina Istratii that explore interactions and mutual influences of various levels of state interventions on the intersection of gender and strictly observant religion. In particular, the papers investigate the collaboration of ultra-orthodox religious authorities with local government in Israel and how a lack of institutional dialogue between religious and state authorities in Northern Ethiopia ignores the real-life experiences of Orthodox Christians. For the second theme, reconfigurations of tradition, papers by Camille Lardy, Torkel Brekke and Tobias Müller examine three exemplary ways in which conservative religious groups reinvent and propagate patriarchal norms: through conservative mobilizations for “family values” by Catholics in France, white nationalist far-right religious activism in Norway and a Brazilian Pentecostal church’s propagation of “entrepreneurial heroic masculinity” in London. In the third section, progressive conjectures, papers by Pınar Dokumacı, Sophia Hornbacher-Schönleber and Lea Taragin-Zeller offer theoretically innovative and critical approaches to thinking about feminist activism in strictly observant religious contexts such as the relations between secular and religious feminist activists in Turkey, the transformative potential of female agency in Jewish-Muslim interfaith activism in the United Kingdom, and the subjectivities of leftist Muslim activists in Java, Indonesia.

Based on these in-depth empirical case studies, the papers offer fresh perspectives on key issues in the study of religion, gender, and politics: the relationship between the state and minority communities, social change regarding sexual and gender norms, alternative evaluations of agency, re-imaginations of tradition and identity, reconfigurations of masculinity within and beyond patriarchy, and the changing face of religious authority with regards to the role of women.

Shifting Entanglements of State and Religion

The type of engagements and relations that come into focus when studying the entanglements of religion and the state depends on the understanding not only of religion but also of the state. In many investigations of religious politics, the state is taken for granted as an entity based on the rule of law within a constitutional framework that delineates its boundaries. However, as critical theories of the state have pointed out, the most significant power of the state lies in being able to demarcate its own legitimate sphere of action. In other words, to determine where it starts and where it begins, to act as “producer of principles of classification” (Bourdieu, 2014, p. 165), is one of its defining features. As outlined above, investigating the state not through its centralized design, but through the effects it has in the everyday lifeworlds of people is an important perspective to understand how the state comes to matter. It is also an important antidote to taking the official relations between state and religion according to a certain legal or political arrangement as a sociologically satisfying account of how the politics of religion shape people’s lives. Instead, a relational perspective on the state allows us to account for surprising forms of interaction arising out of necessity, complicity, and resistance.

Kravel-Tovi’s paper traces a particularly surprising dynamic at the intersection of strictly observant religion, gender, and the state in what has been called the Haredi #MeToo movement in Israel. Kravel-Tovi explores how in this “revolution from within the Haredi Jewish sector” the relationship between ultra-Orthodox Jews and the Israeli state is reconfigured in attempts to tackle sexual violence. Since state institutions are frequently perceived with suspicion, the religious authorities and community leaders usually claim that processes internal to the Haredi sector are best suited to deal with matters such as intimate partner violence. However, a sign of a potential “Haredi spring” are increased collaborations between state and communal actors against sexual violence. Kravel-Tovi homes in on the troubled expectations of the participants of an event on sexual violence where Rabbi Chaim Kanievsky, one of the highest Haredi religious authorities at the time, told them to obey the Mandatory Reporting Law on sexual violence and “Go to the police, discreetly.” This ruling to report Haredi perpetrators to state authorities disrupts many traditional norms, from the taboo of sexual violence and female expectations of modesty to the primacy of communal over state institutions. This shows how through attempts to address the issue of sexual violence “unorthodox alliances” are formed that establish new ways of communication and cooperation, transforming both religious and political dynamics at the “margins of the state.” While warning us of romanticizing these fragile coalitions, Kravel-Tovi argues that they do open up possibilities of transforming the participation of Haredi Jews in civic life and enhance cultural sensitivity among state actors in service provision particularly for women who are survivors of both violence and communal ostracism.

The ambivalent role of the state in tackling gender-based violence is also the subject of Istratii’s contribution based on fieldwork in Ethiopia. She sets out to criticize the rhetoric by which the state tries to inoculate itself against unwelcome worldviews and legitimates its intervention in the most intimate spheres of its citizens. One such tool is the use of the term “religious fundamentalism” in both Western and non-Western contexts, particularly emphasising its alleged opposition to modernity, secularism, and mainstream feminist ideals. By focusing on such portrayals in the current literature on gender, development, and religion, Istratii criticizes the lack of reflexivity in applying the label “fundamentalist” to religious communities without considering the Western secular foundations of feminism and feminist theory. The paper argues for a more nuanced approach to countering gender-based violence by advocating for a closer engagement with respective religious traditions through the study of theological teachings and lived experiences. Istratii illustrates this approach with a case study on conjugal abuse in an Orthodox Täwahәdo community in Ethiopia, highlighting the complex associations between religious tradition, gender norms, and the potential of Orthodox theology to respond to the problem of conjugal abuse. Istratii emphasizes the need for culturally sensitive approaches to address gender-based issues. The paper also highlights the historical intertwining of state and religious affairs in Ethiopia, despite constitutional provisions for their separation. In this way, the article delineates the importance of understanding the complex nexus of state, religious institutions, and feminist initiatives in diverse cultural contexts like Ethiopia; to effectively respond to gender inequalities and intimate partner violence careful negotiation and collaboration are needed.

Tradition Reconfigured

Religious revivals are often marked by indignation about the perceived decline of morality, religious fervor, and the God-given institutions of intimate relations such as heterosexual marriage. The political project of revivalism is often motivated by the restitution of something that is considered lost, so “traditionalism begins when tradition can no longer be taken for granted” (Bourdieu, 2014, p. 256). However, as the book “The invention of tradition” (Hobsbawm & Ranger, 1983) famously spells out, every invocation of tradition is also an act of recasting it, transforming both the remembered past and the social relations of the present. Strictly observant groups’ rewritten versions of the past are used to give legitimacy to the types of observance they propagate and the authorities they invoke. While in the Abrahamic faiths references to holy scriptures are of great importance, addressing contemporary social questions from ethical dating behavior to the program of religious political parties requires significant acts of translation and interpretation. Against many religious groups’ claims that their social and moral imperatives are directly derived from divine text or inspiration, however, as with any other social practices, the societies in which they unfold have a major impact on what counts as tradition.

The seismic changes in traditional and sexual values in Europe is a central target of the Catholic Church seeking to reassert its place in the political landscape. Lardy’s contribution delves into the intricate relationship between Catholics and Muslims during the 2012 to 2013 protests against same-sex marriage in France, known as La Manif Pour Tous. She explores how French Catholics strategically recruited Muslim participants to avoid being perceived as religiously intransigent and to uphold a liberal-secular image of Catholic religiosity. Despite such efforts, Lardy highlights that the media’s characterization remained skeptical toward the protesters’ acclaimed “liberally religious” stance. She suggests that French Catholics, particularly those of the upper class, view themselves as “citizens” in the public sphere who are able to present themselves in secular terms while simultaneously acknowledging their religious identity. The study introduces the concept of thresholds of “intransigence” by recognizing the shifting and contextual limits that determine at what point a subject is perceived as strictly religious in the public sphere. Lardy’s contribution reveals internal disagreements among Catholics during the protests, with some factions, such as Civitas, being considered too intransigent and excluded from La Manif Pour Tous. The analytical framework of registers of intransigence not only enhances our understanding of French Catholicism’s “flexible (in)visibility” in the public sphere but also of the possibility of religious agency in societies shaped by a “liberal-secular matrix” (Amir-Moazami, 2022, p. 615). The article contours the complexity of strictly observant groups’ negotiation of public visibility, ideological divisions, and the blurred lines between secular and religious subjectivity within French Catholicism.

In addition to the political activism of different churches, the conservative religious revival in Europe manifests through the rise of Christian nationalist parties. While the ascendance of white Christian nationalism in the United States has received much scholarly attention (see Gorski & Perry, 2022), its dynamics in European societies with declining formal religious activities (Stolz, 2020) are less well known. Brekke’s contribution addresses this gap by analyzing one such party, the Partiet de Kristne (the Christian Party, now renamed Konservativt, Conservative), and its resistance to the liberalization of family laws in Norway. Brekke argues that this party shares characteristics of the Christian right combining “strict socio-religious conservatism” and literalist interpretations of the bible with neoliberal economic policies. While Norway is often considered a secular and progressive country, being among the first countries to allow same-sex partnerships in 1993 and same-sex marriage in 2009, Brekke shows how the Christian right has been a key player in holding back and pushing against these legal liberalizations. The relatively secular character of the public sphere in Norway makes it difficult for religious arguments, let alone literalist interpretations of religious texts, to gain popular traction. The paper draws on social movement theory to develop the concept of “theological opportunity structures” to refine our understanding of the possibilities of religious arguments in the public sphere. It claims that the viability of religious arguments is facilitated and constrained by their varying resonance with the theological frameworks that are familiar among the intended audiences. While the Christian Party was able to win voters disaffected with the old conservative parties’ partial embrace of LGBTQ rights, it is still a fringe phenomenon without representation in the national parliament. Brekke concludes that this is because of the constraints set by the structural pressure to translate their strictly religious demands into human rights language, rendering their discourse inconsistent for most people in Norway.

The rise of Pentecostal churches across the globe is one current dynamic that troubles the distinctions between tradition and innovation as well as the direction in which religious developments spread. In Europe, some of the most rapidly growing Pentecostal churches originate in formerly colonized countries in Latin America and Africa. Müller’s contribution analyzes what happens when these churches take root in former colonial metropolises marked by racialized marginalization. The paper investigates how the neo-Pentecostal Universal Church of the Kingdom of God, founded in Brazil in 1977, attracts women and men from mostly Black and other ethnic minority communities through deeply gendered promises of success in the areas of “love, health and finances.” The church’s gendered political theology is closely connected to an understanding of the economy as a space for unlimited opportunity and material blessings from God. The pastors propagate a political economy of masculinity in the regular “Love School” events and the “IntelliMen” online courses designed explicitly for men. They construct an image of “manhood of God” where the religious struggle against the “demons” of laziness, homosexuality, promiscuity, addiction, and poverty leads to the desired state of a monogamous heterosexual marriage and economic prosperity in a highly volatile neoliberal economy. Merging the traditionalist trope of the man as a martial fighter and the late capitalist figure of the savvy investor, what emerges is a specific iteration of hegemonic masculinity that Müller calls “entrepreneurial heroic masculinity.” Congregants are encouraged to become faithful self-entrepreneurs in a world that is imagined without the social structures of state, society, and a racialized capitalist economy. The entrepreneurial heroic masculinity propagated by this Pentecostal church is mutually reinforcing with a Protestant ethics of individual entrepreneurship, promising instant success in the ruins of welfare states ravaged by neoliberal capitalism (see Brown, 2019).

The three different reformulations of tradition discussed in this section show that the religio-political realities on the ground are not adequately captured by either exclusive focus on the resurgence or decline of religion in Europe’s public spheres. Rather, we can observe how different locations in modern society’s social fabric enable and constrain certain ways of reaching out to new members and influencing public debates. At times this creates surprising alliances, such as neoliberalism’s self-help and entrepreneurship ethos with socially conservative Pentecostals, or between conservative Catholics and Muslims in street demonstrations that are carefully policed by a political culture of laïcité. While very conservative religious parties struggle to gain large vote shares, both neoliberal conservatism and the populist right are using the resonance of religious tropes, including racialized Islamophobia, to bolster up their ethnonationalist projects (see Cremer, 2023).

Feminist Conjectures

The feminist struggle for gender equality and women’s rights has always involved an intricate and complex relationship with the state. On the one hand, there have been significant accomplishments over the past few decades, most notably including improved access to education, sexual freedoms, and increased visibility and representation. However, despite these advances and accomplishments, there is still much ground to cover in terms of inclusivity and diversity, as well as the protection and broadening implementation of these hard-won rights and freedoms. Moreover, in the current socio-political environment marked by rising authoritarian populism and religious conservatism across different regions and religions, feminist struggles for rights and freedoms face a constant threat of backlash. As a result, the partial liberalization of archaic family laws and prohibitive state interventions into people’s most intimate personal spheres continue to be fueled by the pressure from feminist movements that are in themselves highly heterogeneous. Similarly, tensions over the movements’ underlying whiteness have led to seminal interventions in feminist theory such as the anthology All the women are white, all the blacks are men, but some of us are brave (Hull et al., 1982) and the Combahee River Collective statement (1982). While agency and autonomy have been central to feminist struggle, the secular roots of feminism as an emancipatory project of Western Enlightenment have also led to further bifurcations between white, liberal and “other” feminists. As noted above, Mahmood’s (2005) study of pious Muslim women in a conservative Islamic piety movement in Egypt has offered a further critique of the underlying assumptions of liberal mainstream feminism by addressing women’s agentic engagements with conservative religion. This idea of agency-as-religious-compliance stands in direct contrast to the prototypical account of liberal feminist agency, that is, agency-as-resistance and/or oppositional consciousness (Bucar, 2010; Dokumacı, 2020; Singh, 2015). For example, in many European countries, self-appointed “critics of Islam” are elevated to national prominence by providing them with a platform from which they often propagate generalizing condemnations from an alleged “insider” perspective (Amir-Moazami, 2011). This critique of the religious and racialized Other’s patriarchy leaves the cultural, ethnic, and (post)colonial underpinnings of national public spheres intact. At the same time, it obfuscates the possibilities for more refined movements of critique that involve relational understandings of pious women’s autonomy (Dokumacı, forthcoming) and the “ambivalent subjectivities” (Hornbacher-Schönleber, forthcoming) to inhabit feminism in different religious settings. As “conscripts of secularism” (Müller, 2022), many progressive and feminist projects such as some forms of Marxism and liberalism have defined themselves in opposition to religion, creating continuous tensions in the possibilities of solidarity across secular/religious differences (see Fernando, 2014).

Dokumacı’s article explores precisely this tension by investigating the interpersonal relationships between secular and pious feminists in Turkey using a relational theoretical framework. Moving beyond differences in perceptions of the secular, the sacred, and the state, Dokumacı’s paper urges us to reconsider the radical disagreement between the two groups by identifying alternative feminist vocabularies of disagreement in the narratives of these women. The analysis reveals that, according to self-proclaimed pious feminists, the main point of dissent with secular feminists lies in the latter’s perceived inability to comprehend pious women’s autonomy and ability for critical thinking beyond strict religious observance. Secular feminists, on the other hand, express concerns about the limits of feminist friendship and sisterhood within their own organizations and emphasize the need for trust and loyalty in forming and maintaining collaborations. Dokumacı’s contribution contends that the lack of understanding and communication between the groups has led to a deep-seated disagreement that results in the necessity of relationally rethinking and re-linking debates on pious women’s agency and feminist relationships. According to Dokumacı, in this way, civil society activism can potentially and gradually form communicative openings and help to reshape radical political disagreements on feminism, secularism, and religiosity, especially in contexts marked by heightened societal distrust and authoritarian pro-conservative state policies.

Conservative state policies and an increasing degree of societal distrust along the axes of race and religion also shape post-Brexit Britain. This brings us to another site of “unorthodox alliances”, in Kravel-Tovi’s terms, which is Nisa Nashim, the UK’s largest female interfaith network that is led by Muslim and Jewish women. Taragin-Zeller’s contribution argues that this group is part of, but also critical of the male domination in the proliferation of interfaith initiatives. Through detailed ethnographic observation, Taragin-Zeller shows how the allegedly private space of the home where a cup of tea is shared becomes a space where the meaning of British citizenship is challenged and transformed. Against the background of a public sphere whose religious registers are still predominantly Christian, particularly at a national level, Muslim and Jewish women challenge the way the project of British citizenship creates gendered expectations of men and women, frequently imbued with particular ethnic and racialized assumptions. The same can be true for feminist spaces. For instance, Taragin-Zeller relates how a Muslim woman offered herself to speak about religion on a feminist panel, only to be rebuffed by the organizers, who, looking at her head covering, laughed and said that the audience would not be interested in her perspective. In contrast to the experience of women belonging to religious and ethnic minorities when relating to the state or a public sphere coded as white and Christian, the Jewish-Muslim interfaith activities create new spaces where sharing experiences of discrimination and feminist struggle creates opportunities for refashioning the representation of one’s own faith, choices and political subjectivity. In this way, Jewish and Muslim women coming together disrupts the gendered and racialized images of both supposedly submissive strictly observant religion and British citizenship. The paper shows that this minority alliance opens up spaces for joint reflection on experiences of being othered, and to expand the meaning of good citizenship beyond the gendered assumptions that Britishness with its Christian inflection frequently entails.

Like the Jewish and Muslim women Taragin-Zeller discusses, the protagonists of Sophia Hornbacher-Schönleber’s contribution are navigating the tension between their more progressive politics and the embodied patriarchy that continues to shape interactions within religious groups. She explores the internal conflicts and unequal treatment faced by female activists within leftist Muslim communities in Java, Indonesia. Hornbacher-Schönleber shows us that these challenges stem from the inherent contradictions between the female participants’ role as leftist activists and the societal expectations regarding their adherence to the ideals of being good Muslim women. The article contributes to the literature on Islamic ethics and Muslim female subjectivity by transcending the conventional focus on piety, which has dominated existing literature, and by delving into the social and political dimensions of Islamic ethical conduct. According to Hornbacher-Schönleber, female activists within the movement do not perceive a contradiction between their Muslim and leftist identities, which challenges prevailing notions of observant Islamic female subjectivity. She argues that this two-sided struggle decisively shapes their participation in progressive political spheres. In so doing, the article demonstrates that these young women navigate a more complex understanding of ethical freedom that balances personal and political autonomy while remaining committed to their Muslim identity. In prioritizing social morality over personal piety, Hornbacher-Schönleber suggests that their position shows us that new forms of progressive Muslim female subjectivity are possible, highlighting the transformative potential of their struggle.

Pathways for Future Research

The conceptual and geographic spread of the inquiries presented above demonstrates that investigating the triple transformation of gender, religion, and the state poses a series of pressing challenges for sociology and the study of religion. In her postscript, Stadler identifies three important avenues for future research: the impact of digital technology, the role of youth and generational shifts, and the global-local dynamics of the spread of and resistance to fundamentalist ideologies. The contributions in this Special Issue provide some empirical starting points on how to do this, from the generational tensions between student activists and seasoned Islamic Marxist leaders in Java to the vibrant online cultures of patriarchal “Love School” in Pentecostal London. At the same time, the authors urge us to pause and reflect on the normative implications of the analytical instrumentarium we use when studying strictly observant religious groups, which in many societies are often experiencing the violence of the race-religion nexus (see Topolski, 2018). Strictly observant religious groups are often discursively framed to occupy what Trouillot calls the symbolic organization of the “savage slot”, the “space for the inherently Other” (2003, pp. 1, 9). Trouillot urges us to uncover not only the colonial entanglements of the historical emergence of his own discipline, anthropology, but to radically rethink social scientific inquiry in light of its role in enabling the reification of the West through the perpetual reconstruction of the savage slot.

This means that the analytical instruments used to interrogate the gendered dimensions of religion and the state need to be interrogated for their provenance and the political projects they enable. This becomes most evident in the multiplication of labels such as “extremist,” “radical,” or “literalist,” in which allegedly scientific categories are directly translated into vehicles to restrict freedoms and organize escalated violence through surveillance, militarization of communities, and intensified scrutiny of women’s bodies. Future research needs not only be attentive to these patterns but also make the proliferation of such concepts, their impacts, and the complicity of academic research in lending them credibility the subject of inquiry. Questions that might be conducive to this might be, what work do different categories of political normativity in the fields of gender and religion such as fundamentalist, strict observance, and piety, do in different contexts? How is the traveling of such patterns of analysis linked to the directions in which religious movements spread, particularly where religious dynamism is most evident in former colonized contexts (see Yountae, 2023)? What are the geographies of mobile racialization, patriarchy, and feminism in the spread of religious practice? As the contributions by Taragin-Zeller and Hornbacher-Schönleber demonstrate, focusing on the margins both of the state and strictly observant communities needs to be recovered as a key site of theorizing, since internal tensions and contradictions are most likely to break open religious and political orthodoxies. Similarly, studying the difficulties in creating unexpected alliances such as those described by Kravel-Tovi, Lardy, and Dokumacı requires us to find new loci and modes of feminist subjectivity beyond the binary of resistance and subordination. Instead, as Michel Foucault pointed out, we need to examine the generative functions of power, producing new knowledges, oppressions, and avenues for liberatory projects. Doing so also allows us to use the confluence of strictly observant religion, gender, and the state as the site of theorizing the possibilities and limitations of social change where it might be least expected but most fervently pursued, which holds the potential to make major contributions to the most perennial questions that continue to haunt social and political sciences.