Abstract
This article examines how the engagement of diverse religious organisations and individuals in grassroots politics impacts the nature of politics and coalition building through a case study of an urban grassroots political coalition in Australia: the Sydney Alliance. Based on eight-months of exploratory ethnographic fieldwork in one campaign team, this article argues that whilst religious organisations bring significant symbolic and institutional resources to political coalitions, and can be flexible coalition partners, they tend to moderate both conservative and progressive political tendencies within a coalition and demand focused attention from organisers and leaders to manage the coalition dynamics. This article examines the way many religious activists understand their political action to be an inherent and necessary part of their religious practice: problematizing the characterisation common in much social science literature that religious engagement in more progressive politics primarily serves political, and not religious, ends. In doing so, it shows how political action can be directed both outward towards the work, and inward towards the ‘church’.
Highlights
In this article, I examine the work of one urban grassroots political coalition in Sydney, Australia, that brings religious actors from multiple Christian denominations, Jewish organisations, and Islamic groups into political coalition with trade unions and secular community groups
I use this case study to argue, firstly, that while religious institutions and communities bring significant symbolic resources into political action, having religious people engaged in political life as religious people—not leaving their religious identity and beliefs at the door to the public sphere—requires constant management, negotiation, and compromise
Political action is often understood as being central to religious practice: participants serve both political and religious goals (Yukich 2013) by participating in the Alliance
Summary
I examine the work of one urban grassroots political coalition in Sydney, Australia, that brings religious actors from multiple Christian denominations, Jewish organisations, and Islamic groups into political coalition with trade unions and secular community groups. The religious participants in the coalition are mobilised as religious actors: their religious identity and membership in a religious community is viewed positively by the coalition as a source of political power. I use this case study to argue, firstly, that while religious institutions and communities bring significant symbolic (and other) resources into political action, having religious people engaged in political life as religious people—not leaving their religious identity and beliefs at the door to the public sphere—requires constant management, negotiation, and compromise. For the religious participants in this study, religion is always and necessarily political. These highly political religious actors are an example of the complex interplay between religious belief, practice, and political life. I argue that there is no easy division to be made between ‘the religious’ and ‘the political’—inasmuch as some religious participants in the Sydney Alliance view their political action as a necessary part of their religious practice, others speak of taking political action to—in some sense—redeem or reform
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