International conference in the context of the CRC 1472 „Transformations of the popular” at the University of Siegen

The CRC 1472 „Transformations of the popular” at the university of Siegen (https://sfb1472.uni-siegen.de/) proposes the following central hypothesis: The transformations of the popular, which began in Europe around 1800, sharpened the distinction between low culture and high culture. During the course of the 20th century a competitive distinction between the popular and the nonpopular became dominant. The popular has, in fact, become a very important feature of cultural self-understanding in the globalised present. The purpose of the CRC is to devise a theory of the popular that accounts for this development. The CRC understands the transformations of the popular in the following ways: On the one hand, society is transformed by the growing role of the popular; on the other hand, the understanding of what is regarded as popular and why it attracts attention is transformed. These transformations reverse the burden of proof of what should become popular or remain unpopular. High culture has come under increasing pressure to justify its unpopularity or to popularise its alleged elitism. At the same time, it is becoming increasingly difficult to explain why something that is popular should not deserve attention.

The proposed conference focuses on the potential for conflicts that those developments included in the field of religion in the 19th and early 20th centuries. Specifically, the conference considers the so-called “Revival Movements” that attempted the theological self-empowerment of Christian laymen and laywomen. Defying the resistance of the academic theology and traditional churches, those movements – also called ‘pietism’ – have spread transnationally since the 19th century.

The conference shall investigate – based on examples from different international “Revival movements”:

- How lay people challenged the authority of theologians and church officials – regarding essential features of Christian doctrine and living
- where resistance, resilience, and accommodation can be observed on the side of religious high culture
- in which cases and forms self-empowering laypeople successfully rejected the elitist interpretative domination in the field of theology
- which types of “popular piety” but also theological lay discourses can be understood as types of “popular theology” (“theologia popularis”)
- which role the protestant argument of the “priesthood of all believers” played for justifying themselves as “lay theologians”
- in which way the proclaimed attempts at Re-Christianisation showed considerable intersections with religious traditions that are not in conformity with the ecclesiastical traditions and offered laymen and laywomen options to develop an exclusive religious self-understanding independent of the official church

We invite speakers to ask:

- to what extent since the emergence of “Revival Movements” and their partial institutionalisation as alternative communities and churches stable high-low distinctions still exist, and
- to what extent institutionalisations of “Revival Movements” set up their own internal high-low distinctions, eventually, and
- to what extent relativisations of stable high-low distinctions took place, especially through the preordination of the quantitative as the yardstick for measuring attention and thus popularity

In this way, the conference offers an historiographical approach to the “Revival Movements” as religious processes of self-maturity that includes the deeper theoretical understanding of the popular that seems to be crucial for this part of Church history. The conference will take place in cooperation with the Interdisciplinarian Working Group Revival Movements of the Historical Commission for Pietism Research.

You are invited to prepare a contribution to this conference. Please, send us the title and an abstract (1,500 characters) by the end of November 2022.