Ezra's Bookshelf

The Politics of Ritual

by Molly Farneth · 232 pages · ~4 hrs

Religion & SpiritualityPolitics & Government

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Molly Farneth argues that rituals are not merely cultural traditions or personal expressions but essential tools of democratic politics. When athletes kneel during the national anthem, when activists hold candlelight vigils, when protesters march in formation, they are performing rituals that create solidarity, mark moral boundaries, and stake political claims. Farneth, a scholar of religion and ethics, examines how ritual performance functions in democratic life by drawing on thinkers including Emile Durkheim, Judith Butler, and Jeffrey Stout. She shows that rituals do political work that arguments alone cannot accomplish: they create shared emotional experiences, make abstract commitments tangible, and forge bonds between strangers who may have little else in common. The book examines specific cases where rituals have shaped political movements, analyzing how the form of collective action matters as much as its content. Farneth distinguishes between rituals that open democratic space by including diverse participants and those that close it by enforcing conformity or excluding dissenters. She explores how rituals can both challenge and reinforce existing power structures, depending on who performs them, in what context, and with what intent. The book addresses the tension between ritual's conservative tendency to preserve tradition and its radical potential to imagine new forms of community. Farneth also examines what happens when rituals fail, when they are co-opted, emptied of meaning, or used to manipulate rather than to unite. The result is a sophisticated account of how embodied, collective practices sustain and transform democratic politics in ways that purely deliberative models of democracy fail to capture.

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