Scales of religio-political action: The local and the ‘civil’ in contemporary US evangelicalism

Abstract

It is often assumed that religio-political action must necessarily take place on the socio-spatial scales of the urban, national, or global. This view stems from a more fundamental assumption that modern religious action occurs at a local, private scale, and its political expression is a challenge to the supra-local scales of the state, the market and civil society. This notion is integral to the macro-sociological concept of desecularisation. Through a detailed empirical analysis of a recent, high-profile instance of religio-political action – the 2008 Saddleback Civil Forum on the Presidency – this paper argues that certain instances of such action are misunderstood if seen as inter-scale conflicts of desecularisation. Instead of mobilising individuals for broader scale state-political action, some types of religio-political action can mobilise individuals for a locally scaled, non-political religious action.