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Since Roe v. Wade, abortion has continued to be a divisive political issue in the United States. In contrast, it has remained primarily a medical issue in Britain and Canada despite the countries’ shared heritage. This book looks beyond simplistic cultural or religious explanations to find out why abortion politics and policies differ so dramatically in these otherwise similar countries. It argues that political institutions are the key. In the United States, federalism, judicial review, and a private healthcare system contributed to the public definition of abortion as an individual right rather than a medical necessity. Meanwhile, the book explains, the porous structure of American political parties gave pro-choice and pro-life groups the opportunity to move the issue onto the political agenda.

Emotions are back. Once at the center of the study of politics, emotions have receded into the shadows during the past three decades, with no place in the rationalistic, structural, and organizational models that dominate academic political analysis. This collection of chapters aims to reverse this trend, reincorporating emotions such as anger, indignation, fear, disgust, joy, and love into research on politics and social protest. The tools of cultural analysis are especially useful for probing the role of emotions in politics, the book argues. Moral outrage, the shame of spoiled collective identities, or the joy of imagining a new and better society, are not automatic responses to events. Rather, they are related to moral institutions, felt obligations and rights, and information about expected effects, all of which are culturally and historically variable.

A Shared Future analyzes contemporary political work for racial equity in the United States within a social movement sector known as faith-based community organizing. In collaboration with faith communities and other organizations, some faith-based community organizing coalitions work for racial equity within their own structures and in the wider society. The book draws on the National Study of Community Organizing Coalitions and on interview, ethnographic, and documentary data to analyze how racial equity fits within the movement’s longstanding work against economic inequality in society and policy paralysis in government. Part I analyzes the organizational infrastructure, leadership, and diversity within the overall movement. Part II analyzes the transition from the movement’s historic emphasis on a ‘race-blind’ organizational culture to a systematic focus on racial equity within one network of coalitions. The PICO National Network serves as a case study for the role of leadership, ideas (especially ‘implicit bias’ and ‘targeted universalism’), and the dynamic use of religious faith in their pursuit of racial equity and organizational transformation. The book argues that some sectors of faith-based community organizing are strategically positioned to be nationally significant actors against economic inequality, policy paralysis, and racial injustice – but that the movement as a whole must develop greater strategic capacity if it is to play that role. The final chapters of the book consider the role of organizational challenges and innovation in building strategic capacity, and draw on democratic theory to suggest how political activists, religious leaders, and democratic funders can build ethical democracy in America.

Historically, American religions have not been involved with the environmental movement, but during the early 1990s activists from a variety of religious traditions established a small number of independent, non-profit religious environmental movement organizations (REMOs) and launched a new movement. The rise of religious environmentalism raises intriguing questions about movement emergence, the development of a new type of movement organization, and the creation of new religious traditions. This book explains how religious environmentalism emerged despite various religious barriers, and why the new movement organizations follow a logic and set of practices that set them apart from the secular movement. Drawing on interviews with leaders of sixty-three REMOs, the book tells three new stories. First, this book is an account of how entrepreneurial activists tap into and improvise on a variety of theological, ethical, and symbolic traditions in order to create a compelling call to arms and strategies to mobilize religious audiences. Second, the book offers a novel theoretical explanation of movement emergence and institutionalization that is rooted in the concept of “embeddedness.” I show how such decisions about mobilization and framing, alliances and contention are constrained and facilitated by their embeddedness or deep connections to specific religious organizations, audiences, and systems of meaning. Third, this book integrates theories about cultural innovation and social movement emergence and development. I show how activists borrow and rework resources from various religious traditions to create new meanings about religion and nature and the religious person’s duty to the natural world.