In 1981 liberation theologian José Porfirio Miranda argued that the parable of the weeds in Matthew was a clear guide for a radical politics in the modern world. According to the Mexican mathematician and union adviser, Jesus' explanation that “the farmer sowing seeds is the Son of Man, the field is the world, the good seed the citizens of the Kingdom” was an injunction to achieve justice and freedom in the present. This earthly incarnation of the Kingdom of God was a central pillar of resistance to capitalism among middle-and lower-class groups in Latin America in the last third of the twentieth century, from human rights activism in the Southern Cone to Central America's revolutionary insurrections.

In the last fifteen years or so, a generation of European social historians, armed with an integrated understanding of society, class, culture, and politics, has demystified the history of religion. In particular, they have probed the complicated relationship between institutional and popular belief in the time when Roman Catholicism formed the ideological mainstay of landed power in the precapitalist European countryside. Even apart from the Reformation, they have shown that orthodox religion faced a raft of powerful popular challenges. Superstition, magic, and other “pagan”—or folk—carryovers still survived. Even when accepted, orthodox religion often underwent subversive transmutation at the hands of supposedly docile and devout underclasses who reinvested its practices with new meanings, reappropriated its symbols for their own ends, and sometimes thereby used it as a resource against the predations of society's rulers. In the process, they transformed the Church's own religion from a theology of subjugation into an arena for popular struggle, resistance, expression, and assertion.

More than three decades have passed since Marc Karson analyzed the Catholic church's critical role in impeding the growth of socialism in the American labor movement. He was not the first to make the argument; Progressive Era socialists were acutely aware of Catholics' outspoken opposition, and David Saposs outlined Karson's arguments as early as 1933. However, the evidence marshaled by Karson, first in a 1951 article and later in American Labor Unions and Politics, 1900–1918, so clearly detailed facets of Catholic antisocialism that his thesis has become the conventional wisdom. With few exceptions, historians depict the church as a potent enemy of socialism, heartily welcomed by trade union leaders.

Religion is becoming a crucial issue in women's history. Tired of portraying women as misguided victims, historians have begun to show how women have used religion, especially radical religion, to gain added status or at least impart meaning to their lives.l But in this new portrayal we must be careful to untangle the threads of female religious symbolism from the realities of women's lives, to examine the contrast between the opportunities for women in radical religion and the restrictions placed upon them by established churches and chapels. Furthermore, we must consider that religion is vital to the construction of masculinity in strengthening patriarchal power but also in revealing the needs of men, especially plebeian and working-class men, to cope with their lack of power.