Todd Nicholas Fuist
Biographic Data
| ID | 281819 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Todd Nicholas Fuist |
| GIVEN NAMES | Todd Nicholas |
| FAMILY NAME | Fuist |
| SIGNATURE | FUIST T N |
| AFFILIATIONS | Illinois Wesleyan University |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-0375-3238 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 25 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 84 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 24 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 1 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2011 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 6 |
Who Leaders Are and How They Lead: A Review of Theorizing and Research on Social Movement Leadership
While sociologists typically avoid “great man” theories of social change which emphasize the actions of individuals, social movement leaders are an important area of sociological inquiry if we wish to fully understand movement dynamics. Further, a growing body of work across multiple fields finds that leadership is distributed across teams, not entirely held by individuals, providing sociologists with a unique set of tools to understand social mo…
While I would love to facilitate a revolution, that’s actually not my job”: The strategic imaginaries underpinning the “activist’s dilemma”
Both public discourse and academic work often focuses on whether activists help or harm their movement by using “radical” action. However, underpinning this question are frequently unexplored assumptions about who the audiences of an action are and what behavior will impact them. To analyze these assumptions, I develop the concept of strategic imaginaries—how movements collectively picture other actors, envision the consequences of actions, and c…
Bringing power down to earth: A multidimensional model of power
Participating in the Kingdom While We Are Reaching for It: Prefigurative Faith and the "Living Out" of Religion and Politics
How do people understand the connection between religion and politics in their daily lives? To answer this question, I use the lens of prefigurative faith. Referring to efforts to create desired futures through behavior in the present, prefigurative faith is well suited to examine faith communities who focus on righteous behavior and personal relationships they believe will achieve larger goals. Through examining data on how progressive religious…
Good News for Common Goods: Multicultural Evangelicalism and Ethical Democracy in America
The Holy Vote: Inequality and Anxiety Among White Evangelicals, by Sarah Diefendorf
Journal Article The Holy Vote: Inequality and Anxiety Among White Evangelicals, by SARAH DIEFENDORF Get access The Holy Vote: Inequality and Anxiety Among White Evangelicals, by SARAH DIEFENDORF. Oakland, CA: University of California Press, 2023, 242 pp.; $29.95. Todd Nicholas Fuist Todd Nicholas Fuist Illinois Wesleyan University, USA [email protected] Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Sociology of Religion, s…
Towards a sociology of imagination
Let's Call Ourselves the Super Elite”: Using the Collective Behavior Tradition to Analyze Trump's America
The mid‐twentieth century “collective behavior” school asserted that (1) collective behavior—the actions of crowds, movements, and other gatherings—had distinct dynamics; (2) such action was often “nonrational,” or not governed by cost‐benefit calculation; and (3) collective behavior could pose a threat to liberal democracy because of these features. While this tradition fell out of scholarly favor, the 2016 election has given us empirical reason…
Jesus Would Turn the Tables Over: Five Dimensions of Authenticity Applied to Countercultural Christianity
This paper draws on extant literature to identify five dimensions that are deployed by a wide range of social groups to claim and achieve authenticity in variety of social settings: being honest or real, forgoing external rewards or compensation, coming from or living in the right place or time, embodying or participating in something, and consuming correctly. We then demonstrate the utility of these five dimensions of authenticity in action by a…
Religion and progressive politics in the United States
In recent decades, scholars interested in the role of religion in American public life have largely focused on the Christian Right or the role of religion in civic life. Compared to these extensive literatures, relatively little attention has been paid to the role of religion in liberal/progressive politics. Progressive religious voices are more widespread and more racially, socioeconomically, and religiously diverse than is typically recognized.…
Not Left-Wing, Just Human: The Integration of Personal Morality and Structural Critique in Progressive Religious Talk
Researchers have posited a bifurcated discursive field with regard to United States politics, with secular progressives at one pole and religious conservatives at the other. This division is typically understood to be both ideological and stylistic, with secular liberals possessing a robust language for speaking about structural inequality but lacking transcendent rhetoric about morality, and conservatives having the opposite discourses available…
Lifestyle Movements as Social Networks: The Connections between Everyday Politics and Larger Collective Action in an Indian Feminist Movement
The sociology of social movements has often drawn a fine line between individualistic 'lifestyle movements' and more politically oriented collective action. Yet, this distinction belies the fact that seemingly individualistic movements can generate cognitive maps and associational ties necessary for wider mobilization. Drawing on a qualitative study of the Indian men's feminist movement Men's Action to Stop Violence against Women (MASVAW), we exa…
Religion and Progressive Activism: New Stories About Faith and Politics
William A Mirola, Redeeming Time: Protestantism and Chicago's Eight Hour Movement, 1866-1912
It Just Always Seemed Like it Wasn't a Big Deal, Yet I Know for Some People They Really Struggle with It: LGBT Religious Identities in Context
Scholarly examinations of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) religious identities have typically focused on 'identity reconciliation,' which assumes that being both LGBT and religious is a 'contradiction,' and posits a 'coherent' identity as a desired end goal. The present research draws on a qualitative study of three LGBT-identified congregations to demonstrate that there are a variety of ways in which LGBT religious people approach…
Civil Religion
Multimedia Review: Religion, Gender, and Power in Mad Max: Fury Road
Talking to God Among a Cloud of Witnesses: Collective Prayer as a Meaningful Performance
There has been much work on the effects that individual prayer has on a variety of social-psychological indicators, yet there remains a lack of research on collective prayer. While it is tempting to assume that collective prayer may be analyzed as the aggregate of individual prayers, the research presented in this article suggests that worshipers pray differently when in community than when by themselves. To understand the role of collective pray…
Civil Religion and National Politics in a Neoliberal Era
Civil religion, or the connection of the nation‐state, its history, destiny, and people, to understandings of transcendence or divinity, is in crisis both as a theoretical concept and as a politico‐cultural phenomenon. The crisis has been brought about by the weakened capacity of the nation‐state to generate collective identity and a version of ‘charismatic’ authority. We argue that this has resulted in a shift from the widely accepted conceptual…
Teaching and Learning Guide for: Culture Within Sites, Culture as Resources, and Culture as Wider Contexts: A Typology of How Culture Works in Social Movement Theory
The Dramatization of Beliefs, Values, and Allegiances: Ideological Performances Among Social Movement Groups and Religious Organizations
The recent 'performative turn' in sociology has meant a renewed interest in the dramaturgical aspects of social life. This has appeared in the literature on social movements as a concern with the performance of opposition, usually within public protest events. This focus on performance as a tactic to be used in public displays of meaning by political actors misses how social performance is woven into our everyday lives. This paper presents a revi…
Culture Within Sites, Culture as Resources, and Culture as Wider Contexts: A Typology of How Culture Works in Social Movement Theory
Sociologists of social movements agree that culture matters for studying collective action, and have proposed a variety of theoretical concepts to understand culture and mobilization, including framing, free spaces, and collective identity. Despite this, what we mean when we say “culture matters” remains unclear. In this paper, I draw on 30 years of social movement theory and research to construct a typology of three ways that culture is seen as …
Lines that matter, lines that don't: Religion, boundaries, and the meaning of difference
Recent work in cultural sociology has noted the importance of boundaries for understanding intergroup relations. Within the sociology of religion, this has manifested in research into interreligious conflict and cooperation. However, the current literature often assumes that boundaries have fixed qualities and generate clear consequences for group interaction. In this article, we draw on two data sets, comprising interviews and ethnographic data …
Beyond the Liberal-Conservative Divide: Assessing the Relationship Between Religious Denominations and Their Associated LGBT Organizations
Sacred Space: The Quest for Transcendence in Science Fiction Film and Television by Douglas E. Cowan
Beyond the Liberal-Conservative Divide: Assessing the Relationship Between Religious Denominations and Their Associated LGBT Organizations
It Just Always Seemed Like it Wasn't a Big Deal, Yet I Know for Some People They Really Struggle with It: LGBT Religious Identities in Context
Scholarly examinations of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) religious identities have typically focused on 'identity reconciliation,' which assumes that being both LGBT and religious is a 'contradiction,' and posits a 'coherent' identity as a desired end goal. The present research draws on a qualitative study of three LGBT-identified congregations to demonstrate that there are a variety of ways in which LGBT religious people approach…
Religion and Progressive Activism: New Stories About Faith and Politics
Let's Call Ourselves the Super Elite”: Using the Collective Behavior Tradition to Analyze Trump's America
The mid‐twentieth century “collective behavior” school asserted that (1) collective behavior—the actions of crowds, movements, and other gatherings—had distinct dynamics; (2) such action was often “nonrational,” or not governed by cost‐benefit calculation; and (3) collective behavior could pose a threat to liberal democracy because of these features. While this tradition fell out of scholarly favor, the 2016 election has given us empirical reason…
The Dramatization of Beliefs, Values, and Allegiances: Ideological Performances Among Social Movement Groups and Religious Organizations
The recent 'performative turn' in sociology has meant a renewed interest in the dramaturgical aspects of social life. This has appeared in the literature on social movements as a concern with the performance of opposition, usually within public protest events. This focus on performance as a tactic to be used in public displays of meaning by political actors misses how social performance is woven into our everyday lives. This paper presents a revi…
Towards a sociology of imagination
Talking to God Among a Cloud of Witnesses: Collective Prayer as a Meaningful Performance
There has been much work on the effects that individual prayer has on a variety of social-psychological indicators, yet there remains a lack of research on collective prayer. While it is tempting to assume that collective prayer may be analyzed as the aggregate of individual prayers, the research presented in this article suggests that worshipers pray differently when in community than when by themselves. To understand the role of collective pray…
Civil Religion and National Politics in a Neoliberal Era
Civil religion, or the connection of the nation‐state, its history, destiny, and people, to understandings of transcendence or divinity, is in crisis both as a theoretical concept and as a politico‐cultural phenomenon. The crisis has been brought about by the weakened capacity of the nation‐state to generate collective identity and a version of ‘charismatic’ authority. We argue that this has resulted in a shift from the widely accepted conceptual…
Jesus Would Turn the Tables Over: Five Dimensions of Authenticity Applied to Countercultural Christianity
This paper draws on extant literature to identify five dimensions that are deployed by a wide range of social groups to claim and achieve authenticity in variety of social settings: being honest or real, forgoing external rewards or compensation, coming from or living in the right place or time, embodying or participating in something, and consuming correctly. We then demonstrate the utility of these five dimensions of authenticity in action by a…
Culture Within Sites, Culture as Resources, and Culture as Wider Contexts: A Typology of How Culture Works in Social Movement Theory
Sociologists of social movements agree that culture matters for studying collective action, and have proposed a variety of theoretical concepts to understand culture and mobilization, including framing, free spaces, and collective identity. Despite this, what we mean when we say “culture matters” remains unclear. In this paper, I draw on 30 years of social movement theory and research to construct a typology of three ways that culture is seen as …
Participating in the Kingdom While We Are Reaching for It: Prefigurative Faith and the "Living Out" of Religion and Politics
How do people understand the connection between religion and politics in their daily lives? To answer this question, I use the lens of prefigurative faith. Referring to efforts to create desired futures through behavior in the present, prefigurative faith is well suited to examine faith communities who focus on righteous behavior and personal relationships they believe will achieve larger goals. Through examining data on how progressive religious…
Religion and progressive politics in the United States
In recent decades, scholars interested in the role of religion in American public life have largely focused on the Christian Right or the role of religion in civic life. Compared to these extensive literatures, relatively little attention has been paid to the role of religion in liberal/progressive politics. Progressive religious voices are more widespread and more racially, socioeconomically, and religiously diverse than is typically recognized.…
Multimedia Review: Religion, Gender, and Power in Mad Max: Fury Road
Lines that matter, lines that don't: Religion, boundaries, and the meaning of difference
Recent work in cultural sociology has noted the importance of boundaries for understanding intergroup relations. Within the sociology of religion, this has manifested in research into interreligious conflict and cooperation. However, the current literature often assumes that boundaries have fixed qualities and generate clear consequences for group interaction. In this article, we draw on two data sets, comprising interviews and ethnographic data …
Sacred Space: The Quest for Transcendence in Science Fiction Film and Television by Douglas E. Cowan
Beyond the Liberal-Conservative Divide: Assessing the Relationship Between Religious Denominations and Their Associated LGBT Organizations
Culture Within Sites, Culture as Resources, and Culture as Wider Contexts: A Typology of How Culture Works in Social Movement Theory
Sociologists of social movements agree that culture matters for studying collective action, and have proposed a variety of theoretical concepts to understand culture and mobilization, including framing, free spaces, and collective identity. Despite this, what we mean when we say “culture matters” remains unclear. In this paper, I draw on 30 years of social movement theory and research to construct a typology of three ways that culture is seen as …
Lines that matter, lines that don't: Religion, boundaries, and the meaning of difference
Recent work in cultural sociology has noted the importance of boundaries for understanding intergroup relations. Within the sociology of religion, this has manifested in research into interreligious conflict and cooperation. However, the current literature often assumes that boundaries have fixed qualities and generate clear consequences for group interaction. In this article, we draw on two data sets, comprising interviews and ethnographic data …
Civil Religion and National Politics in a Neoliberal Era
Civil religion, or the connection of the nation‐state, its history, destiny, and people, to understandings of transcendence or divinity, is in crisis both as a theoretical concept and as a politico‐cultural phenomenon. The crisis has been brought about by the weakened capacity of the nation‐state to generate collective identity and a version of ‘charismatic’ authority. We argue that this has resulted in a shift from the widely accepted conceptual…
Teaching and Learning Guide for: Culture Within Sites, Culture as Resources, and Culture as Wider Contexts: A Typology of How Culture Works in Social Movement Theory
The Dramatization of Beliefs, Values, and Allegiances: Ideological Performances Among Social Movement Groups and Religious Organizations
The recent 'performative turn' in sociology has meant a renewed interest in the dramaturgical aspects of social life. This has appeared in the literature on social movements as a concern with the performance of opposition, usually within public protest events. This focus on performance as a tactic to be used in public displays of meaning by political actors misses how social performance is woven into our everyday lives. This paper presents a revi…
Civil Religion
Multimedia Review: Religion, Gender, and Power in Mad Max: Fury Road
Talking to God Among a Cloud of Witnesses: Collective Prayer as a Meaningful Performance
There has been much work on the effects that individual prayer has on a variety of social-psychological indicators, yet there remains a lack of research on collective prayer. While it is tempting to assume that collective prayer may be analyzed as the aggregate of individual prayers, the research presented in this article suggests that worshipers pray differently when in community than when by themselves. To understand the role of collective pray…
William A Mirola, Redeeming Time: Protestantism and Chicago's Eight Hour Movement, 1866-1912
It Just Always Seemed Like it Wasn't a Big Deal, Yet I Know for Some People They Really Struggle with It: LGBT Religious Identities in Context
Scholarly examinations of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) religious identities have typically focused on 'identity reconciliation,' which assumes that being both LGBT and religious is a 'contradiction,' and posits a 'coherent' identity as a desired end goal. The present research draws on a qualitative study of three LGBT-identified congregations to demonstrate that there are a variety of ways in which LGBT religious people approach…
Religion and Progressive Activism: New Stories About Faith and Politics
Religion and progressive politics in the United States
In recent decades, scholars interested in the role of religion in American public life have largely focused on the Christian Right or the role of religion in civic life. Compared to these extensive literatures, relatively little attention has been paid to the role of religion in liberal/progressive politics. Progressive religious voices are more widespread and more racially, socioeconomically, and religiously diverse than is typically recognized.…
Not Left-Wing, Just Human: The Integration of Personal Morality and Structural Critique in Progressive Religious Talk
Researchers have posited a bifurcated discursive field with regard to United States politics, with secular progressives at one pole and religious conservatives at the other. This division is typically understood to be both ideological and stylistic, with secular liberals possessing a robust language for speaking about structural inequality but lacking transcendent rhetoric about morality, and conservatives having the opposite discourses available…
Lifestyle Movements as Social Networks: The Connections between Everyday Politics and Larger Collective Action in an Indian Feminist Movement
The sociology of social movements has often drawn a fine line between individualistic 'lifestyle movements' and more politically oriented collective action. Yet, this distinction belies the fact that seemingly individualistic movements can generate cognitive maps and associational ties necessary for wider mobilization. Drawing on a qualitative study of the Indian men's feminist movement Men's Action to Stop Violence against Women (MASVAW), we exa…
Let's Call Ourselves the Super Elite”: Using the Collective Behavior Tradition to Analyze Trump's America
The mid‐twentieth century “collective behavior” school asserted that (1) collective behavior—the actions of crowds, movements, and other gatherings—had distinct dynamics; (2) such action was often “nonrational,” or not governed by cost‐benefit calculation; and (3) collective behavior could pose a threat to liberal democracy because of these features. While this tradition fell out of scholarly favor, the 2016 election has given us empirical reason…
Jesus Would Turn the Tables Over: Five Dimensions of Authenticity Applied to Countercultural Christianity
This paper draws on extant literature to identify five dimensions that are deployed by a wide range of social groups to claim and achieve authenticity in variety of social settings: being honest or real, forgoing external rewards or compensation, coming from or living in the right place or time, embodying or participating in something, and consuming correctly. We then demonstrate the utility of these five dimensions of authenticity in action by a…
Towards a sociology of imagination
The Holy Vote: Inequality and Anxiety Among White Evangelicals, by Sarah Diefendorf
Journal Article The Holy Vote: Inequality and Anxiety Among White Evangelicals, by SARAH DIEFENDORF Get access The Holy Vote: Inequality and Anxiety Among White Evangelicals, by SARAH DIEFENDORF. Oakland, CA: University of California Press, 2023, 242 pp.; $29.95. Todd Nicholas Fuist Todd Nicholas Fuist Illinois Wesleyan University, USA [email protected] Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Sociology of Religion, s…
Bringing power down to earth: A multidimensional model of power
Participating in the Kingdom While We Are Reaching for It: Prefigurative Faith and the "Living Out" of Religion and Politics
How do people understand the connection between religion and politics in their daily lives? To answer this question, I use the lens of prefigurative faith. Referring to efforts to create desired futures through behavior in the present, prefigurative faith is well suited to examine faith communities who focus on righteous behavior and personal relationships they believe will achieve larger goals. Through examining data on how progressive religious…
Good News for Common Goods: Multicultural Evangelicalism and Ethical Democracy in America
Who Leaders Are and How They Lead: A Review of Theorizing and Research on Social Movement Leadership
While sociologists typically avoid “great man” theories of social change which emphasize the actions of individuals, social movement leaders are an important area of sociological inquiry if we wish to fully understand movement dynamics. Further, a growing body of work across multiple fields finds that leadership is distributed across teams, not entirely held by individuals, providing sociologists with a unique set of tools to understand social mo…
While I would love to facilitate a revolution, that’s actually not my job”: The strategic imaginaries underpinning the “activist’s dilemma”
Both public discourse and academic work often focuses on whether activists help or harm their movement by using “radical” action. However, underpinning this question are frequently unexplored assumptions about who the audiences of an action are and what behavior will impact them. To analyze these assumptions, I develop the concept of strategic imaginaries—how movements collectively picture other actors, envision the consequences of actions, and c…
Sociology (22 works) · Religion and Society Interactions (15 works) · Political science (13 works) · Epistemology (12 works) · Law (12 works) · Philosophy (10 works) · Religion, Society, and Development (10 works) · Politics (9 works) · Law (8 works) · Gender Studies (7 works)