How Religion Can Be Used to Build a New Future

One of the most compelling things about religion is that its sacred texts reveal so much to us about the power that lives in the stories we tell. If we can start to change the story we tell ourselves and each other about religion—to illustrate its destructiveness and its seductiveness, its capacity for informing rigidity and rebellion—we may be abl... See more

Understanding religion’s immense power and influence might just help us identify how to wield it toward a different, more equitable future.

If religion has become synonymous with violence or regression or injustice, it’s not just because it is embedded in so many matrices of power. It’s also because the people who are challenging the hegemony and seeking to carve out a different future have been overlooked, erased, or ignored. This is the destructive power of cultural norms.

To imagine a different future, a more complicated view of religion can be a powerful tool.

As the critic Saba Mahmood says: “To critique a particular normative regime is not to reject or condemn it; rather, by analyzing its regulatory and productive dimensions, one only deprives it of innocence and neutrality so as to craft, perhaps, a different future.”

When we throw our hands up at religion and flatten its role in our lives, societies, and institutions, we allow hegemonic power to go unchecked.

Religion is just one of many categories of power that can inform violence in the world—be it structural, cultural, or direct. When we understand these kinds of violence as interrelated, we can better work towards dismantling it and creating peace.

Direct peace is brought about by the coalition’s fundraising, mutual aid, and community building. These are all examples of promoting peace not necessarily by changing the hearts and minds of “the other side,” but by situating violence in a way that helps us realize who, exactly, is most victimized by abuses of power—and how we can rise together to... See more