The politics of gender and sexuality has become a principal battleground on which religious authority contests the reach of individual rights, and control over women's bodies and family life sits at its center. Faith-based mobilization has proven capable of shaping law and reversing settled entitlements. In the United States, decades of organizing by the religious right culminated in the 2022 overturning of the constitutional right to abortion, remaking the legal landscape for reproductive autonomy across much of the country. In Poland, the alliance of the governing party with the Catholic Church produced a near-total abortion ban in 2020 that triggered the largest protests since the fall of communism. Across regions, religious institutions and movements mobilize against reproductive rights, LGBTQ+ recognition, comprehensive sex education, and reforms to family law, framing these as defenses of the natural family, moral order, and cultural authenticity against a corrosive liberalism. The mobilization is frequently transnational, as conservative religious networks share strategy, funding, and legal templates across borders while rooting their appeals in local tradition. What makes this terrain analytically rich is that it sets two languages of legitimacy against each other, the language of individual rights and bodily autonomy against the language of religious morality and communal integrity, with the state as the contested arbiter. The struggle also exposes fault lines within traditions, as feminist and progressive religious voices dispute conservative claims to speak for the faith. The central questions concern why gender and sexuality have become the sharpest edge of religious political mobilization, how faith-based movements translate moral commitment into binding law, whether the resulting rollbacks represent a durable reversal or a contested moment, and what the collision between religious authority and bodily autonomy reveals about the limits of rights in religiously plural societies.
Religion, Gender, and Contested Rights: Faith-Based Mobilization and Bodily Autonomy
Type
Open Panel
Language
English
Chair
Discussants
Description
Onsite Presentation Language
Same as proposal language
Panel ID
PL-3950






