Religion, Ritual, and Political Leader Cults

Dear Colleagues,

This Special Issue of Religions on Religion, Ritual, and Political Leader Cults addresses the question of the relationship between religious phenomena and political leader cults. To what extent are religious concepts like “cult” or “ritual” useful in describing and understanding phenomena ranging from the Stalin cult in the 1930s to the veneration of Mao’s mangoes during the cultural revolution to the mass rallies at Hugo Chávez’ funeral in 2013? (Plamper, Jan. The Stalin Cult: A Study in the Alchemy of Power. Stanford and New Haven: Hoover Institution and Yale University Press, 2012; Leese, Daniel. Mao Cult: Rhetoric and Ritual in China's Cultural Revolution. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011; Chau, Adam Yuet. "Mao’s Travelling Mangoes: Food as Relic in Revolutionary China." Past & Present 206, no. suppl 5 (January 1, 2010 2010): 256-75; Márquez, Xavier. "Two Models of Political Leader Cults: Propaganda and Ritual." Politics, Religion & Ideology 19, no. 3 (2018): 265-84). Are there useful conceptual boundaries between popular admiration, mass veneration, and religious ritual? Is the construction of charismatic authority through political leader cults comparable to the construction of charisma in religious settings? How should we characterize the continuum of practices found in leader cults vis-à-vis similar practices in religious phenomena? Are there parallel processes of semantic inflation in political and religious cults?

Existing literature on political leader cults has tended to focus on their legitimating functions (e.g., Strong, Carol, and Matt Killingsworth. "Stalin the Charismatic Leader?: Explaining the ‘Cult of Personality’ as a Legitimation Technique." Politics, Religion & Ideology 12, no. 4 (2011/12/01 2011): 391-411; Luqiu, Luwei Rose. "The Reappearance of the Cult of Personality in China." East Asia 33, no. 4 (2016): 289-307) or on the production and interpretation of cult artifacts, from paintings to hagiography to posters (Plamper 2012; Apor, Balázs, Jan C Behrends, Polly Jones, and EA Rees, eds. The Leader Cult in Communist Dictatorships. Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004). This issue focuses on the practices that might justify understanding certain political phenomena as cults of the leader, ranging from large-scale mass rallies to informal rituals to intimate ceremonies focused on the leader (Marquez 2018).

Some work exists that focuses on cult practices and counter-practices, much of it in the countries of the Soviet world and in China (e.g., Tikhomirov, Alexey. "Symbols of Power in Rituals of Violence: The Personality Cult and Iconoclasm on the Soviet Empire's Periphery (East Germany, 1945-61)." Kritika 13 (2012): 47-88; Tumarkin, Nina. Lenin Lives! The Lenin Cult in Soviet Russia. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1983). This issue aims both to re-focus scholarly attention on cult practices (including rituals and other forms of “cult communication”) and cult reception (including counter-rituals) rather than cult artifacts or top-down cult production, as well as to broaden the geographical focus of the study of leader cults. We thus welcome both theoretical studies and case studies of leader cults from a wide variety of regions, on topics including the emergence of practices of “leader worship”; the boundaries between cult and non-cult phenomena, and the usefulness of religious concepts to understand practices of leader worship; the distinction between practices of worship or charismatic construction from other forms of political followership and admiration; political leader cult reception and “cult communication” at the grassroots level; and any other topic reflecting on the use of religious concepts in the study of leader cults.

Dr. Xavier Marquez
Guest Editor

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• political leader cults
• charisma
• charismatic authority
• ritual
• communication