While EP Thompson recognizes the regressive potential of popular religion, his work also makes it possible to evaluate this cultural scheme as a vehicle of political resistance. This article seeks to make a case for the significance of popular religion in a politics of resistance through an unorthodox interpretation of The Making of the English Working Class. A close reading of the history of orthodox and sectarian Methodism presented in this work reveals popular religion as a contentious custom and a vehicle of political resistance.
AdornoTW (1973) Negative Dialectics. New York, NY: Continuum.
2.
AdornoTW (1992) Notes to Literature, Vol. 2. New York, NY: Columbia University.
3.
AndersonP (1980) Arguments Within English Marxism. London: NBL and Verso.
4.
BenjaminW (1969) Illuminations. New York, NY: Schocken.
5.
BlochE (1964) Thomas Münzer, Théologien de la Révolution. Paris: Les Lettres Nouvelles.
6.
BlochE (1970) Man on His Own: Essays in the Philosophy of Religion. New York: Herder and Herder.
7.
BlochE (1972) Atheism in Christianity: The Religion of the Exodus and the Kingdom. New York, NY: Herder and Herder.
8.
BlochE (1986) The Principle of Hope. Oxford: Blackwell.
9.
BorerTA (1998) Challenging the State: Churches as Political Actors in South Africa, 1980–1994. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press.
10.
BourdieuP (1991) Genesis and structure of the religious field. Comparative Social Research13(1): 1–44.
11.
BrittainC (2006) From a beautiful mind to the beautiful soul: Rational choice, religion, and the critical theory of Adorno and Horkheimer. In: GoldsteinW (ed.) Marx, Critical Theory, and Religion: A Critique of Rational Choice. Boston, MA: Brill Academic, 151–178.
12.
DaimW (1973) Christianity, Judaism, and Revolution. New York, NY: Frederick Ungar.
13.
EmirbayerMGoodwinJ (1996) Symbols, positions, and objects: Toward a new theory of revolution and collective action. History and Theory35: 358–374.
14.
EngelsF (1966) Peasant War in Germany. New York, NY: International.
15.
FrenchM (1992) The War against Women. New York, NY: Summit.
16.
FrommE (1966) The Dogma of Christ, and Other Essays on Religion, Psychology, and Culture. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston.
17.
GamsonW (1992) The social psychology of collective action. In: MorrisAMuellerCM (eds) Frontiers in Social Movement Theory. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 53–76.
18.
GirardiG (1968) Marxism and Christianity. New York, NY: Macmillan.
19.
GirardiG (1988) Marxism confronts the revolutionary religious experience. Social Text19/20(Autumn): 119–151.
20.
GoldmannL (1964) The Hidden God: A Study of Tragic Vision in the Pensées of Pascal and the Tragedies of Racine. London: Routledge & Keegan Paul.
21.
GoldsteinW (ed.) (2006) Marx, Critical Theory, and Religion: A Critique of Rational Choice. Boston, MA: Brill Academic.
22.
GramsciA (1975) Quaderni del Carcere. Turin: Einaudi.
23.
GutiérrezG (1973) A Theology of Liberation: History, Politics, and Salvation. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis.
24.
HabermasJ (1992) Postmetaphysical Thinking: Philosophical Essays. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
25.
HabermasJ (1998) Between Facts and Norms: Contributions to a Discourse Theory of Law and Democracy. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
26.
HabermasJ (2002) Religion and Rationality: Essays on Reason, God, and Modernity. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
27.
HalévyE (1971) The Birth of Methodism in England. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.
28.
HammondJLHammondBB (1962) The Age of the Chartists, 1832–1854: A Study of Discontent. Hamden, CT: Archon.
29.
HammondJLHammondBB (1968) The Town Labourer: The New Civilization 1760–1832. Garden City, NY: Anchor.
30.
HobsbawmEJ (1957) Methodism and the threat of revolution in Britain. History Today2: 115–124.
31.
HobsbawmEJ (1959) Primitive Rebels: Studies in Archaic Forms of Social Movement in the 19th and 20th Centuries. New York, NY: WW Norton.
32.
HorkheimerM (1970) Die Sehnsucht nach dem ganz Anderen: Ein Interview mit Kommentar von Helmut Gumminor. Hamburg: Furche Verlag.
33.
HorkheimerM (1972) Critical Theory: Selected Essays. New York: Herder and Herder.
34.
HorkheimerM (with Adorno TW) (1973) Dialectic of Enlightenment. London: Allen Lane.
35.
HorkheimerM (1978) Dawn & Decline: Notes 1926–1931 and 1950–1969. New York, NY: Seabury.
36.
HorkheimerM (1995) Critical Theory. New York, NY: Continuum.
37.
JasperJ (1997) The Art of Moral Protest: Culture, Biography, and Creativity in Social Movements. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.
38.
JohnsonR (1979) Three problematics: Elements of a theory of working-class culture. In: ClarkeJCritcherCJohnsonR (eds) Working-Class Culture: Studies in History and Theory. London: Hutchinson, 201–237.
39.
KautskyK (1953) Foundations of Christianity. New York, NY: SA Russell.
40.
KayeH (1984) The British Marxist Historians: An Introductory Analysis. London: Polity.
41.
KennyM (2000) Socialism and the romantic self: The case of Edward Thompson. Journal of Political Ideologies5(1): 104–126.
42.
KiernanVG (1995) The Lords of Human Kind: European Attitudes to Other Cultures in the Imperial Age. London: Serif.
43.
LundskowG (2006) The concept of choice in the rise of Christianity: A critique of rational-choice theory. In: GoldsteinW (ed.) Marx, Critical Theory, and Religion: A Critique of Rational Choice. Boston, MA: Brill Academic, 223–248.
44.
LuxemburgR (1971) Internationalismus und Klassenkamp: Die Poinischen Schriften. Neuwied: Luchterhand.
45.
MacKendrickKG (2006) Intersubjectivity and religious language: Toward a critique of regressive trends on Thanology. In: GoldsteinW (ed.) Marx, Critical Theory, and Religion: A Critique of Rational Choice. Boston, MA: Brill Academic, 179–204.
46.
McKinnonAM (2006) Opium as dialectics of religion: Metaphor, expression and protest. In: GoldsteinW (ed.) Marx, Critical Theory, and Religion: A Critique of Rational Choice. Boston, MA: Brill Academic, 11–30.
47.
MarxK (1935) The eighteenth brumaire of Louis Bonaparte. In: BurnsE (ed.) A Handbook of Marxism. New York: International, 116–131.
48.
MarxK (2009) Towards a critique of Hegel’s philosophy of right: Introduction. In: McLellanD (ed.) Karl Marx: Selected Writings. New York: Oxford University Press, 71–82.
49.
MirandaJP (1974) Marx and the Bible: A Critique of the Philosophy of Oppression. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis.
50.
MirandaJP (1980) Marx Against the Marxists: The Christian Humanism of Karl Marx. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis.
51.
MirandaJP (1982) Communism in the Bible. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis.
52.
MooreB (1978) Injustice: The Social Bases of Obedience and Revolt. New York, NY: ME Sharpe.
53.
MorrisA (1984) Origins of the Civil Rights Movement. London: Collier Macmillan.
54.
NashJC (1996) Religious rituals of resistance and class consciousness in Bolivian tin-mining communities. In: SmithC (ed.) Disruptive Religion: The Force of Faith in Social-Movement Activism. New York, NY: Routledge, 87–104.
55.
NepstadSE (1996) Popular religion, protest, and revolt: The emergence of political insurgency in the Nicaraguan and Salvadoran churches of the 1960s–80s. In: SmithC (ed.) Disruptive Religion: The Force of Faith in Social-Movement Activism. New York: Routledge, 105–124.
56.
NepstadSE (2004) Convictions of the Soul: Religion, Culture, and Agency in the Central America Solidarity Movement. New York: Oxford University Press.
57.
OsaM (1992) Pastoral mobilization and symbolic politics: The Catholic church in Poland, 1918–1966. Unpublished PhD dissertation, Department of Sociology, University of Chicago.
58.
OttM (2005) Reclaiming the revolutionary substance and potential of religion: The critical theory of religion. Michigan Sociological Review19 (Fall): 155–177.
59.
OttM (2006) The notion of the totally ‘other’ and its consequence in the critical theory of religion and the rational choice theory of religion. In: GoldsteinW (ed.) Marx, Critical Theory, and Religion: A Critique of Rational Choice. Boston, MA: Brill Academic, 121–150.
60.
OttM (ed.) (2007) Future of Religion: Toward a Reconciled Society. Boston, MA: Brill Academic.
61.
PalmerBD (1981) The Making of EP Thompson: Marxism, Humanism, and History. Toronto: New Hogtown.
62.
PalmerBD (1994) EP Thompson: Objections and Oppositions. London: Verso.
63.
PerkinH (1969) The Origins of Modern English Society, 1780—1880. London: Routledge & Keegan Paul.
64.
PollettaF (2002) Freedom is an Endless Meeting: Democracy in American Social Movements. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.
65.
RayR (1999) Fields of Protests: Women’s Movements in India. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.
66.
RojoS (1988) La religion, opium du people et protestation contre la misere réele: Les position de Marx et le Lénine. Social Compass35(2–3): 197–230.
67.
ScottJC (1976) The Moral Economy of the Peasant: Rebellion and Subsistence in Southeast Asia. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.
68.
ScottJC (1985) Weapons of the Week: Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.
69.
ScottJC (1990) Domination and the Arts of Resistance. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.
70.
ScottJW (1996) The evidence of experience. In: McDonaldT (ed.) The Historic Turn in the Human Sciences. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 379–406.
71.
SegundoJL (1984) Faith and Ideologies. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis.
72.
SewellWJr (1990) How classes are made: Critical reflections on EP Thompson’s theory of working class formation. In: KayeHJMcClellandK (eds) EP Thompson: Critical Perspectives. Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 50–77.
73.
SiebertR (1965) The Critical Theory of Religion: The Frankfurt School. Berlin: Mouton.
74.
SiebertR (1979) Horkheimer’s Critical Sociology of Religion: The Relative and Transcendent. Washington, DC: University Press of America.
75.
SiebertR (1994) From Critical Theory to Critical Political Theology: Personal Autonomy and Universal Solidarity. New York: Peter Lang.
76.
SiebertR (2006) Toward a dialectical sociology of religion: A critique of positivism and clerico-fascism. In: GoldsteinW (ed.) Marx, Critical Theory, and Religion: A Critique of Rational Choice. Boston, MA: Brill Academic, 61–114.
77.
SilversteinM (1991) The uses and utility of ideology: Some reflections. Pragmatics2(3): 311–323.
78.
SteinbergM (1999) Fighting Words: Working-Class Formation, Collective Action, and Discourse in Early Nineteenth-Century England. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.
79.
SteinbergM (2002) Toward a more dialogic analysis of social movement culture. In: MeyerDSWhittierNRobenettB (eds) Identity, Culture, and the State. New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 208–225.
80.
ThompsonD (1984) The Chartists: Popular Politics in the Industrial Revolution. New York, NY: Pantheon.
81.
ThompsonEP (1955) William Morris: Romantic to Revolutionary. London: Lawrence & Wishart.
82.
ThompsonEP (1957) Socialist humanism: An epistle to the philistines. New Reasoner1: 105–143.
83.
ThompsonEP (1966) The Making of the English Working Class. New York, NY: Vintage.
84.
ThompsonEP (1968) The Making of the English Working Class. Harmondsworth: Penguin.
85.
ThompsonEP (1971) The moral economy of the English crowd in the eighteenth century. Past and Present50: 76–136.
86.
ThompsonEP (1977) Folklore, anthropology, and social history. Indian Historical Review3(January): 247–266.
87.
ThompsonEP (1978) Eighteenth-century English society: Class struggle without class?Social History3(2): 133–165.
88.
ThompsonEP (1993) Customs in Common: Studies in Traditional Popular Culture. New York, NY: The New Press.
89.
ThompsonEP (1995) The Poverty of Theory: Or an Orrery of Errors. London: Merlin.
90.
TuckerRC (1972) Philosophy and Myth in Karl Marx. London: Cambridge University Press.
91.
WalzerM (1965) The Revolution of the Saints: A Study in the Origins of Radical Politics. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
92.
WalzerM (1985) Exodus and Revolution. New York: Basic Books.
93.
WearmouthRF (1937) Methodism and the Working-Class Movements of England, 1800–1850. London: Epworth.
94.
WearmouthRF (1945) Methodism and the Common People of the Eighteenth Century. London: Epworth.
95.
WearmouthRF (1954) Methodism and the Struggle of the Working Classes, 1850–1900. Leicester: Edgar Backus.
96.
WearmouthRF (1959) Methodism and Trade Unions. London: Epworth.
WilliamsRHBlackburnJ (1996) Many are called but few obey: Ideological commitment and activism in operation rescue. In: SmithC (ed.) Disruptive Religion: The Force of Faith in Social Movement Activism. London: Routledge, 167–185.
99.
WrightBRawlsAW (2006) Speaking in tongues: A dialectic of faith and practice. In: GoldsteinW (ed.) Marx, Critical Theory, and Religion: A Critique of Rational Choice. Boston, MA: Brill Academic, 249–284.
100.
WoodEM (1982) The politics of theory and the concept of class: EP Thompson and his critics. Studies in Political Economy9 (Fall): 45–75.
