Exploring the Postsecular : The Religious, the Political and the Urban [1 ed.] 9789004193710, 9789004185449

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Exploring the Postsecular

International Studies in Religion and Society Series edited by

Lori G. Beaman and Peter Beyer, University of Ottawa

VOLUME 13

Exploring the Postsecular The Religious, the Political and the Urban

Edited by

Arie L. Molendijk, Justin Beaumont and Christoph Jedan

LEIDEN • BOSTON 2010

This book is printed on acid-free paper. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Exploring the postsecular : the religious, the political, and the urban / edited by Arie Molendijk, Justin Beaumont, and Christoph Jedan. p. cm. — (International studies in religion and society ; v. 13) ISBN 978-90-04-18544-9 (hardback : alk. paper) 1. Religion and sociology. 2. Cities and towns—Religious aspects. I. Molendijk, Arie. II. Beaumont, Justin. III. Jedan, Christoph. IV. Title. V. Series. BL60.E97 2010 306.609’051—dc22 2010010421

ISSN 1573-4293 ISBN 978 90 04 18544 9 Copyright 2010 by Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, The Netherlands. Koninklijke Brill NV incorporates the imprints BRILL, Hotei Publishing, IDC Publishers, Martinus Nijhoff Publishers and VSP. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, translated, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without prior written permission from the publisher. Authorization to photocopy items for internal or personal use is granted by Brill provided that the appropriate fees are paid directly to The Copyright Clearance Center, 222 Rosewood Drive, Suite 910, Danvers, MA 01923, USA. Fees are subject to change. printed in the netherlands

CONTENTS Preface ................................................................................................ List of Contributors ..........................................................................

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PART ONE

EXPLORING THE FIELD: INTRODUCTORY ESSAYS Transcending the Particular in Postsecular Cities ...................... Justin Beaumont Cutting through the Postsecular City: A Spatial Interrogation ................................................................................. Kim Knott

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PART TWO

CONCEPTUALIZING THE POSTSECULAR Spaces of Postsecularism ................................................................. Gregor McLennan Contrasting Modernities: ‘Postsecular’ Europe and Enspirited Latin America ............................................................................... Bernice Martin How Ethnocentric Is the Concept of the Postsecular? .............. Michel Leezenberg The Transformation of Religious Culture within Modern Societies: From Secularization to Postsecularism ................... Wilhelm Gräb Voicing the Self in Postsecular Society: A Psychological Perspective on Meaning-Making and Collective Identities ........................................................................................ Hetty Zock

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contents PART THREE

URBAN THINKING AND THE RELIGIOUS ‘God Made the Country, and Man Made the Town’: Some Observations on the Place of Religion in the Western (Post)Secular City ......................................................................... Arie L. Molendijk Making Sense of Sacred Space in the City? ................................. Maaike de Haardt Inscribing the General Theory of Secularization and its Basic Patterns in the Architectural Space/Time of the City: From Presecular to Postsecular? ........................................................... David Martin

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Religion and the Salvation of Urban Politics: Beyond Cooption, Competition and Commodification ....................... Luke Bretherton

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Theo-Ethics and Radical Faith-Based Praxis in the Postsecular City .................................................................................................. Paul Cloke

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The End of the Secular City Dream: The Case of Ankara ......... Nihan Özdemir Sönmez

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Postsecularism or Late Secularism? Faith Creating Place in the US ........................................................................................ Candice Dias and Justin Beaumont

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Virtual Re-Evangelization: Brazilian Churches, Media and the Postsecular City ............................................................................ Martijn Oosterbaan

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PART FOUR

PUBLIC USES OF RELIGION Beyond the Secular? Public Reason and the Search for a Concept of Postsecular Legitimacy ........................................... Christoph Jedan

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Restraints on Religious Reasoning in the Political Square? ...... Andy F. Sanders

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Public Reason and Inclusionism as Pseudo-Inclusionism ........ Anke Schuster

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Neoliberalism for God’s Sake: Sectarian Justifications for Secular Policy Transformation in the United States .............. Jason Hackworth

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The Uses of Religion in Public Institutions: The Case of Prisons ............................................................................................ James A. Beckford

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Index of Names .................................................................................

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PREFACE Religion is back on academic and political agendas in a major way. ‘As I’ve said many times, I believe that change comes not from the top-down, but from the bottom-up, and few are closer to the people than our churches, synagogues, temples, and mosques’. Barack Obama spoke these words in the Summer of 2008, proposing a new partnership between the White House and grass-roots groups, ‘both faithbased and secular’, in keeping with a tradition of such initiatives since the days of the Clinton administration. Obama added that his initiative endangered in no way the constitutional separation of church and state. Somehow the religious re-emerges in the secular and the public. Even the political role of religion is appreciated by so-called secular intellectuals formerly rather critical of religion. These developments have led observers to speculate about a new ‘postsecular’ age, particularly among scholars of prominence such as Jürgen Habermas, Charles Taylor and José Casanova. Looking at where exactly religion re-emerges in the secular, it seems also intriguing that urban environments play a prominent role, contrary to views that cities are merely places of a secular disengagement from a variety of faiths. Arguably it is in ‘the urban’ that the shift from the secular to the postsecular in terms of public space, building use, governance and civil society is most intensely observed and experienced. The constellation of the religious, the political and the urban—as our subtitle has it—is by no means easy to describe and analyse, nor to theorize. In this volume we have chosen primarily for a theoretical perspective (while retaining an openness to empirical manifestations of the central conceptual ideas) to address contemporary relations between religion, politics and urban societies. The primary focus is on the relations between public religion, deprivatization of religion and theorizations of modernity and modernities, with the secondary and closely related focus on theorizing postsecular urbanism including the role of faith based organizations (FBOs) in cities. In our view the concept of the postsecular does not imply that we now live in a radically different age compared with half a century ago when Harvey Cox’s The Secular City first appeared. In the mid-1960s

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Cox observed links between secular cities and processes of urban secularization, for instance with the liberation theology movements for social justice in Latin America and elsewhere. We use the term postsecular to indicate that within the secularized social structures of late modern capitalism religions are very much present and will not disappear—irrespective of some persistent aversion to the idea among certain liberal and secularist commentators. In other words, the label of the postsecular refers to the limits of the secularization thesis and the continuing realization of radically plural societies in terms of religions, faiths and beliefs within and between diverse urban societies. It also refers to the public role and function of religion and religious organizations in our contemporary world. And if we consider ‘the postsecular’ as the indication of diverse religious, humanist and secularist positionalities—and not just an assumption of complete and total secularization—it is precisely the interrelations between all of these dimensions and not just the religious aspect on its own that must be taken into account. These complex interrelations are in need of closer scrutiny from different disciplinary backgrounds and on the basis of different methodologies. In their own way, scholars from disciplines such as Human Geography, Urban Studies, Contextual Theology, Sociology, Political Philosophy as well as Religious Studies are interested in the postsecular and contribute to a rapidly increasing stock of theory. We attempt in this volume to spearhead the much-needed dialogue between different disciplines and methodologies. The first and introductory part of the volume is an exemplar of such a dialogue. In their essays Justin Beaumont and Kim Knott outline the theoretical underpinnings and intuitions of this volume in more detail, from an urban studies and religious studies perspectives respectively but importantly each advancing deep into the territory of the other’s methodology and literature. In essence we have an urban studies approach that takes religious studies seriously and a religious studies perspective that is enriched by an urbanist agenda. The subsequent three parts of the book continue with this dialogue between the disciplines and methodologies. The second part analyses the concept of the postsecular. Is this a useful concept? What is meant by it? Is it an intrinsically biased, Eurocentric concept? Although the perspective of these papers is primarily conceptual, most of the authors also put the conceptual framework of the postsecular to a test, by using it to analyse societal and religious changes. This part relates

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closest to recent and heated controversies in sociology and particularly sociology of religion over an alleged postsecular turn in social theory. Unhinging hitherto sacrosanct assumptions of modernity (and the plural modernities), rationality and ‘the Enlightenment’, without recourse to outmoded postmodernist arguments, lies at the heart of these contributions. The third part focuses on the urban, theoretically and empirically, and its relation to religious practices and groups. Special attention is paid to the role played by FBOs and the political and psychological issues that groups and individuals face in a postsecular society. The contributions in this part relate to current discussions within urban geography and contextual theology. Themes include the reassertion of the sacred in concepts of urban space and community development, connections between the growth in Pentecostal Christianity, as well as neoliberal globalization, new governance arrangements in cities and new modes of public service delivery. The fourth part analyses the public roles of religion. Arguably, secularist reservations with respect to a public role of religion were nowhere as visible as in liberal theories of public justification. The concept of a ‘public reason’ was used to argue for moral constraints on the use of religious arguments in public political argument. The first three chapters analyse conceptually how far such moral restraints are legitimate and how far a more relaxed stance on the public uses of religion can be systematized into a postsecular stance on public justification. The last two chapters show through concrete case studies how religion assumes important public roles in the justification of political stances and has an unquestioned presence in public institutions. The volume stems from a joint conference of the Faculty of Spatial Sciences and the Faculty of Theology and Religious Studies, held in November 2008 at the University of Groningen, The Netherlands. Both the volume and the conference were made possible by generous grants from the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences (KNAW), the Groningen Research School for the Study of the Humanities and the Faculty of Spatial Sciences of the University of Groningen. We would like to thank the boards of these institutions as well as the board of the Faculty of Theology and Religious Studies for their support of this initiative. Marijke Wubbolts provided invaluable help organising the conference, Ineke Smit improved the English of the non-native speakers and Job Zondag and Niels de Jong assisted in the preparation of the manuscript. Our gratitude goes to them all. Last, but not

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least, we would like to thank the contributors for their papers and the stimulating way in which they engaged in such an exciting multidisciplinary exchange. Arie L. Molendijk, Justin Beaumont and Christoph Jedan Groningen, 18 December 2009

LIST OF CONTRIBUTORS Justin Beaumont, Ph.D. (2000), Durham University, is Lecturer in Urban Geography and Planning at the Faculty of Spatial Sciences, University of Groningen. He has published on questions of urban governance and politics, reconfiguring questions of social justice and most recently faith-based organizations in struggles against urban deprivation. He is co-editor of Postsecular Cities: Religious Space, Theory and Practice (London: Continuum, 2010) and Spaces of Contention (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2010). James A. Beckford, Fellow of the British Academy, is Professor Emeritus of Sociology at the University of Warwick and PresidentElect of the Society for the Scientific Study of Religion. His recent books include: Social Theory and Religion (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), Muslims in Prison: Challenge and Change in Britain and France (with D. Joly & F. Khosrokhavar, Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2005), Theorising Religion: Classical and Contemporary Debates (edited with J. Walliss, Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006) and The SAGE Handbook of the Sociology of Religion (edited with N.J. Demerath III, London: Sage, 2007). Luke Bretherton is Senior Lecturer in Theology and Politics at King’s College London, Convenor of the Faith & Public Policy Forum at King’s and Reviews Editor for the journal Political Theology. The primary focus of his current research is an Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) funded project entitled: ‘Christianity, urban politics and pursuit of the common good through broad-based coalitions: the case of the Citizens Organizing Foundation’. His books include Hospitality as Holiness: Christian Witness Amid Moral Diversity (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006) and Christianity and Contemporary Politics: The Conditions and Possibilities of Faithful Witness (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010). Paul Cloke is Professor of Human Geography at the University of Exeter. He is also Adjunct Professor at the University of Canterbury, New Zealand, and he is Honorary Fellow of the Royal Society of New Zealand as well as a Fellow of the UK Academy for the Social Sciences.

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He has published 180 papers and chapters and 23 books, and he is Founder Editor of Journal of Rural Studies. His long-standing research interests have been in social and cultural geographies of rural change and governance. However, over the last ten years, he has pursued a parallel interest in geographies of ethics, and has specifically targeted the issues of responding to urban homelessness and the ethics of consumption. Candice Dias is a Ph.D. candidate in the Urban and Regional Studies Institute at the University of Groningen. Her research examines the activities of faith-based organizations in the cities of Philadelphia (USA) and Rotterdam (The Netherlands) to understand their role as agents and facilitators of social cohesion in heterogeneous neighbourhoods in transition. Wilhelm Gräb is Professor of Practical Theology at the Humboldt University Berlin and Director of the Institute of Sociology of Religion. He received his Ph.D. in Theology at the University of Göttingen (1979) and got his Habilitation at the University of Göttingen (1987); from 1993 to 1999 he was a Professor of Practical Theology at the University of Bochum. His book publications include: Lebensgeschichten— Lebensentwürfe—Sinndeutungen: Eine Praktische Theologie gelebter Religion (Gütersloh: Kaiser/Gütersloher Verlagshaus, 1998); Sinn fürs Unendliche: Religion in der Mediengesellschaft (Gütersloh: Kaiser/ Gütersloher Verlagshaus, 2002); Sinnfragen: Transformationen des Religiösen in der modernen Kultur (Gütersloh: Kaiser/Gütersloher Verlagshaus, 2006). Maaike de Haardt is Catharina Halkes/Unie NKV Professor for Religion and Gender at Radboud University Nijmegen and a Lecturer in Systematic Theology and Gender Studies at Tilburg University. She received her Ph.D. in Theology at Tilburg University (1993) with a study on the theology of death and dying and is currently interested in the question how art, culture and everyday life as primary sources can inform and transform systematic reflection on religion, more specific Christian religion. Recent publications focus on film, food, literature and the city in relation to ‘divinity’ as well as the problematic dimensions of monotheism.

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Jason Hackworth is an Associate Professor of Geography and Urban Planning at the University of Toronto. He has written on a variety of urban topics including gentrification, public housing, and neoliberalism. His most recent book is The Neoliberal City (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2007) and currently he is working on a book dealing with the role of religious charities in the US welfare safety net. Christoph Jedan is a Lecturer in Ethics at the Faculty of Theology and Religious Studies, University of Groningen. He received his Ph.D. in Philosophy at the University of Bonn (1999) and was awarded a Habilitation at the Humboldt University of Berlin (2006). His current research interests are Stoic philosophy and the role of religion in politics. His book publications include Willensfreiheit bei Aristoteles? (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2000) and Stoic Virtues: Chrysippus and the Religious Character of Stoic Ethics (London/New York: Continuum, 2009). Kim Knott is Professor of Religious Studies at the University of Leeds and Director of ‘Diasporas, Migration and Identities’, a research programme funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council. She is author of The Location of Religion: A Spatial Analysis (London: Equinox, 2005) and Hinduism: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), and is currently engaged in research on secular values and discourses, in the media and other public institutions. She is General Secretary of the European Association for the Study of Religion. Michiel Leezenberg teaches in the Department of Philosophy, and in the M.A. program Islam in the Modern World at the University of Amsterdam. His current research interests concern, among others, the foundations and history of the modern humanities and the intellectual history of the modern Islamic world. In the academic year 2009–10, he was a fellow at the Netherlands Institute for Advanced Study (NIAS), working on the project ‘Creating new public spheres: The formation of national languages in the Ottoman empire’. Among his publications are Contexts of Metaphor (Amsterdam: Institute for Logic, Language and Computation, 2005) and a Dutch-language text book on philosophy of science for the humanities, co-authored with Gerard de Vries.

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Bernice Martin is Emeritus Reader in Sociology in the University of London (Royal Holloway College). Her research and publications have mainly been in the Sociology of Culture (e.g. a book on the cultural impact of the 1960s, A Sociology of Contemporary Cultural Change, Oxford: Blackwell, 1981), and on the Sociology of Religion. For the past twenty years she has worked with David Martin on Pentecostalism and has published a series of articles about aspects of the movement. She is currently completing a book on the implications of contemporary Pentecostalism for debates in social theory. David Martin is Emeritus Professor of Sociology at the London School of Economics and a Fellow of the British Academy. His current interests are in Pentecostalism, secularization, religion and violence, and the sociology of music, particularly the reception history of Händel. His books include A General Theory of Secularisation (Oxford: Blackwell, 1978), Does Christianity Cause War? (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997) and Pentecostalism—The World Their Parish (Malden MA: Blackwell, 2002). Gregor McLennan is Professor of Sociology and Director of the Institute for Advanced Studies at the University of Bristol. He is the author of Marxism and the Methodologies of History (London: Verso, 1981); Marxism, Pluralism and Beyond (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1989); Pluralism (Buckingham: Open University Press, 1995); Exploring Society (Auckland: Pearson Education, 2000); and Sociological Cultural Studies: Reflexivity and Positivity in the Human Sciences (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), also editor of several volumes of social and political theory, including The Idea of the Modern State (with David Held and Stuart Hall, Milton Keynes: Open University Press, 1984). He is working towards a book-length critical assessment of postsecular social theory. Arie L. Molendijk, Ph.D. (1991), University of Leiden, is Professor of the History of Christianity and Professor of the Philosophy of Religion at the University of Groningen. He has published extensively on the history of 19th and 20th-century philosophy and theology in Germany and the Netherlands, including a monograph on Ernst Troeltsch: Zwischen Theologie und Soziologie (Gütersloh: Mohn, 1996). His latest book is The Emergence of the Science of Religion in the Netherlands (Leiden: Brill, 2005).

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Nihan Özdemir Sönmez was born in Ankara in 1965. She earned B.CP and M.CP. degrees at the Middle East Technical University (Ankara), Department of City and Regional Planning, in 1987 and 1990 respectively. She completed her Ph.D. (The Transformation of Squatter Settlements into Authorised Apartment Blocks: A Case Study of Ankara, Turkey) at the University of Kent at Canterbury (UK) in 1998. Currently she is an Assistant Professor at Gazi University (Ankara), Department of City and Regional Planning. Her research interests are the social and political implications of urban planning and management decisions. Martijn Oosterbaan studied Cultural Anthropology at the University of Amsterdam. He completed his dissertation research on Pentecostalism and Mass Media in Brazil at the Amsterdam School for Social science Research (ASSR/UvA). Currently he is a postdoc at the Faculty of Philosophy, University of Groningen, a researcher in the NWO research project New Media, Public Sphere and Urban Culture (2010) and Assistant Professor at the Department of Anthropology at Utrecht University. He has published on Pentecostalism and mass media in Brazil. At present his research focuses on Brazilian migration to Europe in relation to questions concerning transnationalism, religion, diaspora and new media. Andy F. Sanders is Professor of the Philosophy of Religion and Director of the Graduate School of Theology and Religious Studies at the University of Groningen. He is a Member of the Center for Theological Inquiry (Princeton) as well as co-founder, and former secretary, of the Netherlands Society for Philosophy of Religion. Among his publications are Michael Polanyi’s Post-Critical Epistemology (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1988), Theology and Philosophy of Science (Kampen: Kok, 1991, in Dutch) and several edited volumes, such as recently, D.Z. Phillips’ Contemplative Philosophy of Religion (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007). Anke Schuster is currently finishing a Ph.D. in philosophy. Her thesis is on the role of religious arguments in public discourse. It presents an argument for a role-differentiated approach to public reason based on a distinction between citizens and office-holders.

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Hetty Zock, PhD (1990, University of Leiden), is KSGV Professor in Spiritual Care and Senior Lecturer in Psychology of Religion at the University of Groningen. Her works include A Psychology of Ultimate Concern: Erik H. Erikson’s Contribution to the Psychology of Religion (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2004/1990), At the Crossroads of Art and Religion (ed., Leuven: Peeters, 2008), and psychological studies of popular cultural phenomena such as Harry Potter. She is currently working on identity formation and the role of spiritual care in a secularized, globalized context.

PART ONE

EXPLORING THE FIELD: INTRODUCTORY ESSAYS

TRANSCENDING THE PARTICULAR IN POSTSECULAR CITIES Justin Beaumont Critical enquiries on postsecularism, in general, and the more recent and hitherto largely underexplored postsecular city in particular, lie at the centrepiece of the chapters that comprise this volume. Their precise meaning for understanding and explaining pluralities and their interconnectivities in cities in late capitalist societies remain poorly understood. This introductory essay makes an attempt to chart this theoretical terrain to conceptualize the changing relations between religion, politics and urban societies.1 Against the charges of Eurocentricity and indifference to multicultural diversity, my argument is two-fold. First, if we apply postsecularism to urban thinking we have a potentially robust means for transcending the particularities of difference between diverse social identities in cities. Second, this transparticularity, if understood carefully and applied diligently, can be mobilized for a new politics of urban reconnectivity as counter to the most divisive and invidious effects of globalization. The fusion of these theoretical and political concerns with ongoing empirical enquiries into faith-based organizations (FBOs) in cities requires sensitive analysis, with this essay and the volume at large just the beginning. The central aim of this essay is to define the meaning of postsecularism in the theory and practice of urban life. This aim stems from the key observation that it is in the urban that the shift from secular to postsecular in terms of public space, building use, governance and civil society is most intensely observed and experienced. The essay explores the changing dynamics between religion and the postsecular in order to understand the growing resurgence of faith, belief and spirituality in the urban and public realms in recent years. Everywhere we look questions of secularism and alleged postsecularism feature within academic, policy and media circles. My purpose is an engagement with

1 This essay draws substantially from ongoing work with Chris Baker in the UK (see Beaumont and Baker 2010), in addition to the variety of ideas that framed the conference resulting in the current volume.

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various lines within the academic literature as a foundation for the chapters that follow in the volume. 1. Theoretical and Political Rationale Despite such recent works on urban religion (Ward 2000; Carnes and Karpathakis 2001; Carnes and Yang 2004; Baker 2007) contemporary relations between religion, politics and urban societies at the critical nexus between political economy, new geographies of religion and cultural practices remain poorly understood. These theoretical and political issues have an added significance as notions of transnationalism, postnationalism and multiculturalism (Koopmans and Statham 1991; Appadurai 1997; Tarrow 2005; Strangroom 2009) come under intense and critical scrutiny, while tensions mount between diverse ethnicities, social identities and ‘faith communities’ (Beckford et al. 2006; see also Beyer and Beaman 2007) with particularly virulent expression in cities. The sensitivities are compounded in light of recent research into religion and politics and the wider issue of academic freedom (Yiftachel and Ghanem 2004; Slater 2004). Religions and their various institutional dimensions have long played a central role in processes of social transformation and political projects for social change. The renewed interest in the role of religion in society and politics can be traced to a postsecular turn in continental philosophy, for instance with Marcel Gauchet’s (1999) Christianity as religion of the end of religion, Jacques Derrida’s (2001) religion without religion, Jean-Luc Marion’s (1991; 2002) religion as a saturated phenomenon and Phillip Blond’s (1997) set of alternatives to relativism and nihilism (cf. Caputo and Scanlon 1999; 2005). The latter postmodernist connotation shows how the long-standing western metaphysics—that the human mind is naturally created for the knowledge of the transcendent and eternal Being—has been radically destabilized and deconstructed, prompting recognition of human fallibilities, imperfections and metaphysical yearning for hope in the face of uncertainties. Leading critical social theorists and political philosophers like Jürgen Habermas (2002; 2006), Hans Joas (2000) and Martin Matuštík (2008) have noted an emergent ‘postsecular society’ that stresses spirituality within secular institutions (cf. McLennan 2007; Gorski and Altinordu 2008). It is hardly necessary to mention that religion has also been placed squarely on the political agenda by theologians, as, for instance,

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by John Milbank in his project of a radical orthodoxy (see Milbank 2005; Milbank et al. 1998). By virtue of their wider historical applicability these bodies of thought show that it is a dangerous fiction to equate contemporary fascination in religion, faith and belief in contemporary politics and society with post-9/11 (and 7/7) paranoia with Islamophobia (Ramadan 2004; Gottschalk and Greenberg 2007; Allen 2009) and an often odious identification of radical Islamism with terrorism (Ayubi 1991; Fuller 2004). We concede, however, that the spiral of events that ensued (the reprisals of the Bush-Blair alliance in Kabul and Baghdad as part of their ‘war on terror’, and the further response of Islamist organizations in the form of bombings in Madrid and London), remind us of the tense and problematic relations between religion and politics, and the scalar linkages between global political reaction and urban spectacle (see Gale 2007). More specifically, it draws our attention to the growing significance of institutional representations of diverse faiths and faith-based social action in cities. Hitherto distinct concepts of neoliberalization and deprivatization of religion are central to the argument, related to recent discussions about the re-enchantment of the real, critiques of the Weberian secularization thesis and the purported rise of the postsecular society. In the frame of these observations we are confronted almost daily with assertions about the possibilities of religions in general and FBOs in particular, for tackling social and political issues. Around the same time as the appearance of Charles Taylor’s (2007) magnum opus, A Secular Age, the online journal Eurozine published a series of articles, including contributions by Jürgen Habermas, José Casanova and Danièle Hervieu-Léger, on European postsecularism2 and The Economist published a special report devoted to religion and public life across the globe.3 Combined with recent governments in the US and the UK revalorizing FBOs in matters of social policy, urban regeneration and social cohesion in state-regulated urban policies, the European public sphere is dense with unresolved questions about the 2 The articles address postsecular tendencies and religion in the new Europe, asking about public and private realms of religion, European Islam and European identities and solidarities in the context of transnational migration and religious diversity (see: www.eurozine.com/articles/2007–10–19–leggewie-en.html, accessed 21 May 2008). 3 The Economist, 01 November 2007, Faith and Politics: New Wars of Religion (see: www.economist.com/opinion/displaystory.cfm?story_id=10063829, accessed 21 May 2008).

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ways religion and faiths imbricate in the social and political concerns of the day. On this basis it is less convincing to refer to a simple opposition between a religious US and a secular Europe (cf. Berger et al. 2008) and was the impetus for the EU-7FP FACIT (2008–10) project: Faith-based organizations and exclusion in European cities of which I am a lead partner.4 In my view the concept of the postsecular does not infer that we now live in a radically different age compared with half a century ago when Harvey Cox’s (1990) The Secular City first appeared. In the mid 1960s Cox observed links between secular cities and processes of urban secularization, for instance with the liberation theology movements for social justice in Latin America and elsewhere (see the essay by Knott in this volume for more detailed engagement with Cox’s work). Rather I use the term to indicate that within secularized social structures of modern late capitalism, religions, referring both to religious actors and organizations, are very much present and will not disappear irrespective of widespread aversion to the idea among certain liberal and secularist commentators. In other words, postsecular refers to the limits of the secularization thesis (Berger et al. 1999; Martin 2005; Davie 2007) and the ever-growing realization of radically plural societies in terms of religion, faith and belief within and between diverse urban societies. If we consider postsecular as the indication of diverse religious, humanist and secularist positionalities—and not merely an assumption of complete and total secularization—it is precisely the interrelations between these dimensions and not just the religious that are taken into account and the focus of attention (see Beaumont 2008). Rather than signify a blanket term for multiculturalism, postsecularism unhinges the conflation of ethnicity/culture with religion/faith, thus focusing the latter as a distinct conceptual category in the relational conceptualization of urban diversity. By the postsecular city I attempt to bring together in conceptual and theoretical terms these debates, issues and discussions. Against the charge of ideology construction, I note there are political forces, certainly in the US but also increasingly in the UK, that valorise religions in matters of urban poverty reduction, for example, where indeed the term tends towards ideological justification for a minimal welfare state apparatus, individual responsibilization and spiritual renewal, with

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See project website: www.facit.be.

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‘new urban right’ connotations (Peck 2006). There are countless other perspectives, not least the involvement of various churches with other actors in the Netherlands contesting the rightwards shift in government policies and raising awareness of worsening hardship for people in poverty in what is commonly seen on the outside as a robust and generous welfare state (Nicholls and Beaumont 2004; Beaumont and Nicholls 2008). There are of course a great many variations. In the end there is a complex and perplexing political (and call that ideological if you will) ambiguity when considering the postsecular city that requires careful consideration and analysis.5 Another bone of contention relates to the purported Eurocentricity of the concept, articulated from a transnational and world systems analysis strand within political geography. Given the recent proliferation of commentaries since Habermas’s claims for a postsecular society (Habermas 2002; 2006; Habermas and Ratzinger 2007), in European and especially German contexts, this charge would appear prima facie justified. These roots in Habermasian postmetaphysical thought when combined with transnational migration in Europe, challenges of multiculturalism and the growth of European Islam are questions that we cannot ignore. My deployment of the term, however, is more concerned with opening up possibilities for new interconnectivities between diverse social realities (presecular, secular, postsecular, transsecular, for example) within neoliberal globalization that were limited by hitherto totalizing and prevailing notions of modernization and secularization. A certain analytical coherence is potentially revealed when researching urban contexts outside the global core in cities like Mumbai, Abu Dhabi and Beijing, for example,6 notwithstanding fears of ascendant Islam, Islamist radicalization and maintenance of a European identity (see Byrnes and Katzenstein 2006). The current

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The recent proliferation of media, political and academic attention to the British historian and theologian Phillip Blond serves to underline the intense ambiguities, politically, ethically and ideologically, within debates on postsecularism. His brand of Red Toryism stressing radical communitarian traditionalist conservatism is just one of numerous permutations of the concept. 6 Ever since Independence in India (1947) the ideology of secularism was widely perceived as the best hope for protecting the country’s diverse religious communities from communal friction. Today continued communal rioting, the rise of Hindu nationalist movements (Hindutva) and events like the devastation of the Babri mosque in Ayodhya have undermined the secularist consensus and led to an ideological rift between proponents of secularism, on the one hand, and Hindu nationalists on the other (see Bhatt 2001; Sharma 2004; Ruthven 2007).

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global financial meltdown further undermines false distinctions between core and peripheral cities in the global economy.7 2. Ascendency of Public Religions8 The public resurgence of religion is arguably one of the defining features of the 21st century, contrary to the modernist and secularist assumptions of much of the 20th. Globalized societies across the world are found situated in the midst of a series of contradictory processes including simultaneous and dialectical secularization, alongside increasing deprivatization of religion, faith and belief and its re-emergence as a shaper of cultural, political, economic processes. On the latter I refer to the growing significance of faith based provision of public services, especially welfare, the impact of new places of worship on urban and suburban spaces, the resurgence of Pentecostalism and its connection with neoliberal globalization and their joint impact on mega and global cities, especially in Southeast Asia, Africa and Latin America. These dynamics have led in recent times to the idea of the postsecular society, particularly within postsecular sociology. For example, Peter Berger et al. (1999), in a reformulation of his original secularization thesis of the 1950s and 1960s, claims that it is now more accurate to talk about the processes of desecularization. He refers to the exponential growth of those religious forms labelled ‘furious’, ‘supernaturalist’, fundamentalist or conservative at the direct expense of those more liberal or mainstream forms of religion that make an effort to conform to a perceived modernity. Meanwhile, Jürgen Habermas as mentioned in the previous section has spoken of a postsecular society (see Habermas 2005; 2006). Postsecular culture, on his reckoning, must openly recognize religion not as a set of private beliefs but as an all-embracing source of energy, for the devout and also for society at large. Alongside and of course mutually imbricated with these shifts in sociological perspectives are ongoing approaches to the spaces of religion reflected in the concept of new geographies of religion (Kong 1990; 1993a; 1993b; 7 I am developing new research with Jason Hackworth (Toronto), who also contributes to this volume, on ‘spaces of postsecular engagement’ which pays specific attention to the restructuring of the landscapes of houses of worship in Toronto. Condominium development and churches for new immigrant groups dominate certain former industrial sites in the inner core. 8 This section draws extensively from Beaumont and Baker (2010).

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2001)9 and recent anthropological forays into spaces of modernity in relation to the urban (see Hancock and Srinivas 2008 and contributions therein). The relative speed and complexity of the public religion debate, discernable during the 1980 and 1990s (Casanova 1990), but refracted more powerfully in recent times by the intense mediatization of events such as 9/11 and 7/7, has led to a plethora of theories about the nature of what we might call the postsecular city. Following Beaumont and Baker (2010) I will summarize seven key strands in the debate. The re-emergence of the sacred in the development of urban space and community development. This theme has emerged as an increasingly prevalent trope pioneered by Australian planner Leonie Sandercock and her concept of the postcolonial, multicultural city as Cosmopolis (1997). Her critique of the modernist planning tradition, with its reliance on rational, scientific, technocratic (and thus top-down) models of planning gives way to what she defines as a postmodern tradition based on memory, desire and the sacred, which valorizes the wisdom and tacit knowledge inherent in many local communities and which is unlocked via performative rather than rational consultations (cf. Sandercock 2006). The themes of her work have since been developed by Fenster (2004), Bergman (2008) and Winkler (2008), among others, indicating the contemporary relevance of these ideas. The urban where the dynamics of religious/secular change are revealed and expressed with greatest intensity. Central to the core assumptions and leading problematic of the volume, existing ideas suggest that global cities as well other cities within the system of neoliberal globalization which act as hubs for globalization, communications and media technology (exporting conflicting cultural and religious messages), help produce multiple, split and sometimes conflicting identities based on class, ethnicity and others. Cities therefore become ‘hot spots’ or sites for split loyalties and demands, and the negotiation of multiple identities which need to include both religious and secular dimensions (Goh 2003).

9 Peter Hopkins (Newcastle), Lily Kong (Singapore) and Betsy Olson (Edinburgh) have led the renewed emphasis on geographies of religion to include hitherto absent dialogue between otherwise hostile sub-disciplines, like economic geography. The tensions between neoliberal urbanization and the political economy of neoliberalism with geographies of religion marks a conceptual step forward.

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The return of the language of virtue in respect to public life and the search for mutual understandings of the common good. This search finds its expression in overlapping areas of concern at the growing polarization and discrimination between social and cultural readings of cities, including contextual theology, and their political economy/ neo-Marxist detractors. In the words of Ash Amin, much urban space is characterized by ‘growing urban segregation (. . .) an eroding urban commons, and increased legitimacy for group isolationism in private and public life’ (Amin 2006). The focus for this overlapping dialogue is the emergence of what Cochrane has described as an ‘urbanism of hope’ (Cochrane 2006)—in other words, the possibility, in the terms of Lefebvre’s notion, of a transformed and renewed ‘right to the city’. This articulation of an urbanism of hope is closely linked to the belief of the importance of ethics, values and indeed sacredness and spirituality (in its broadest sense) as building blocks in the construction of the city. Once the focus of this debate switches into the ethical domain, then clearly theologians and faith-based practitioners have much to contribute, including theologies of hope, i.e. narratives of overlapping and alternative structures and projects run by FBOs. In this context see Graham and Davey (2008), Baker (2008) and critiques of the values underpinning what British theologian Graham Ward has called the ‘cities of endless desire’ (Ward 2000). The connection between the growth of Pentecostal Christianity and neoliberal globalisation. Mike Davis’s (2006) Planet of Slums drew a stark picture of the exclusion of poor people from work in relation to the dramatic rise in slum living across much of the Global South. Sympathetic to but departing from classical Marxist accounts, Davis argues that grass-root religious organisations, particularly evangelical Pentecostals also other local congregations and FBOs, have often become refuges of last resort for the desperately derived individuals and their families within shanty town developments of cities like Lima, Peru and Rio de Janiero, Brazil. He claims that FBOs and charismatic preachers are tending to fill the void left by the retreat of secular social movements and political activism. More generally, the connection between Pentecostalism and neoliberal globalisation revolves around well-established link between Protestant religion and wealth creation and the development of global markets through the creation of Christian Empires from the 15th century onwards (Weber 1959; cf. Fischoff 1944; Green 1973). More recent research in South East Asian

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cities such as Singapore (Goh 2003) has teased out some of the recent manifestations of these connections. The re-engagement of faith and politics, especially in the contentious areas of governance and public service delivery. The shift towards not only deploying but actively resourcing faith based engagement in civil society, public policy and public service delivery within most European contexts is one of the most documented academic and policy areas within the past five years. Much of this discourse within the UK has centred on the practical contribution faith groups make in the areas of urban regeneration, social cohesion and at a wider level, the remoralisation of British society (see Beaumont 2008a; 2008b; 2008c; Beaumont and Dias 2008; Farnell et al. 2003; Lowndes and Chapman 2008; Scott et al. 2008). As well as the enhanced public profile of faiths, there has been a shift away from traditional philanthropic approaches towards encouraging a market model of delivery. To some extent, the European context is catching up with longer established traditions of faith based social enterprise in US, Australia and Hong Kong (Davis et al. 2008). A key debate has therefore emerged as to whether religion has mutated from being a vanguard of social reform into an uncritical provider of cheaper public services to hard to reach social groups within a ‘contract’ culture. The contested understanding of multiculturalism under the impact of recent high-profile cases of religious freedom of expression. This theme has emerged powerfully in recent times in relation to recent cases in UK, France and the Netherlands involving the wearing of veils, crucifixes and bangles in public institutions such as schools or in the premises of corporate businesses such as global airlines. A recent touchstone for this issue in the UK was a public lecture by the Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams (Williams 2008) where he suggested that certain aspects of civil law for ethnic and religious minorities (such as marriage and divorce within Muslim communities) might be dealt with by more culturally appropriate legal frameworks such as Sharia Law. He was clear that all British citizens should have a right to universal protection under existing human rights (and therefore secular) frameworks, but that a system of supplementary jurisdiction was appropriate to an increasingly multi-faith and multicultural society in which postsecular citizens have to negotiate multiple identities. Taking these seven thematic guides as an overall marker, within the urban geographical literature I have pioneered new research with two

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special issues, the first addressing FBOs and human geography (see Beaumont 2008c; Beaumont and Dias 2008) and the second FBOs and urban social issues (Beaumont 2008a; 2008b). Both are related to the ongoing EU-7FP FACIT project with an edited collection underway at The Policy Press and the forthcoming edited volume, Postsecular Cities (Beaumont and Baker 2010). While these efforts reflect the tide of change within urban scholarship a great deal more needs to be done to capture, sharpen and deepen the conceptual and analytical implications of these inquiries for urban theory. The nexus between the political economy of neoliberalism and geographies of secularism and the postsecular remains poorly understood for reasons that are not always clear. One possible reason relates to tensions, if not downright hostility, from certain quarters of neo-Marxist political economy towards sociocultural perspectives on cities more amenable to religion. Religion, Spirituality and the Social Sciences (Spalek and Imtoual 2008), by contrast, brings together an international panel of contributors to explore ways of engaging with issues of religion and spirituality when carrying out social science research. The title therefore contributes importantly to a growing recognition that hitherto sacrosanct Enlightenment rationalist and humanist assumptions within the social sciences have come under duress as questions of faith, religion and belief resurface within discussions about alleged postsecular society (see Taylor 2007; Habermas; 2002; 2006; McLennan 2007). This interest tallies with ongoing debates within sociology and political philosophy on secularity and postsecularity, for instance at the Institute of Advanced Studies (IAS), University of Bristol (UK), as well as the recent Levey and Modood (2009) enquiries into secularism, religion and multicultural citizenship. Within the theological literatures, there are small number of titles that engage with theological and the philosophical understandings of the contemporary urban experience (see Ward 2002; Gorringe 2005) but for the most part reflect the requirements of a church/theologically oriented readership in which a full engagement with urban place as space is either absent or at best partially articulated. Baker (2007) engages the most systematically with urban space from a public theology perspective, but the emphasis within his work is more related to postcolonial readings of the city and concerned with thirdspace theoretical orientations rather than the postsecular per se. In my view the postsecular becomes the organizational and conceptual umbrella

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under which postcolonial themes are developed as one among many others. 3. Conclusion This essay contributes to a relative new debate within urban studies broadly conceived on a range of conceptual themes and issues for the advancement of our knowledge. These include: (1) new and innovative relations between critical/radical urbanism, on the one hand, and understandings of theories of religion, faith and belief in a postsecular context on the other; (2) combining insights on state restructuring, rescaling and the urbanization of political action, with changes in the governance of religious institutions and their consequences for the urbanizing relations between religion, politics and intrinsic diversities within cities; (3) exploring relations between religion, politics and postsecular urban society at the political economy and humanist nexus in the current era of neoliberalization; (4) deepening insights on relations between religion, political mobilization and social movements, particularly neo-Alinsky style mobilizations with belief and justice as framing principles; (5) relations between neoliberalization, deprivatization of religion, the Weberian secularization thesis and the revalorization of FBOs and religions more generally in the social and political processes of cities; and (6) mutually constitutive relations between the social and the spatial, especially the urban, as well as new approaches to religion, modernity and modernities, critical social theory, urban theory, ethics and political action in theory and practice. It is not my intention to uncritically defend research on religion, faith and spirituality in the analysis of cities, nor is it my aim to join the neo-Marxist bandwagon in denouncing research on these themes as undermining core Enlightenment ideals. I claim that theoretical forays into these themes will help nourish the social and policy concerns for emerging challenges in urban societies, without undermining human rights, freedom and well-being and the fostering of peaceful co-existence of diverse social groups, often with a faith orientation (Banchoff 2007; Wallis 2005; Claiborne 2006; Sacks 2003). The theoretical issues in public religion and deprivatization of religion will interest the recent policy concern, for instance in the Netherlands (see Donk et al. 2006) and also more generally, with religion—and as a consequence diverse social, ethnic and cultural identities—in the

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public domain. By focusing on FBOs as a relatively under-explored arena within civil society, the chapters that comprise the volume will contribute to the achievement of democratic ownership and active and equal participation by diverse people. The outcomes will help understand ways for more democratic governance of societies at all levels by paying attention to a specific sector within civil society and its relation to the state and transnational processes at a variety of scales. References Allen, C. (2009) Islamophobia. Aldershot: Ashgate. Amin, A. (2006) ‘The Good City’. Urban Studies 43, 1009–23. Appadurai, A. (1997) Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization. Delhi, India: Oxford University Press. Ayubi, N. (1991) Political Islam. London: Routledge. Baker, C. R. (2007) The Hybrid Church in the City: Third Space Thinking. Aldershot: Ashgate. —— (2008) ‘Contemporary Renewal in the Centre of the City’. In Ballard, P. (ed.) The Church at the Centre of the City. Peterborough: Epworth Press. Banchoff, T. (2007) Democracy and the New Religious Pluralism. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Beaumont, J. R. (2008a) ‘Introduction: Faith-Based Organizations and Urban Social Issues’. Urban Studies 45, 2011–17. —— (2008b) ‘Faith Action on Urban Social Issues’. Urban Studies 45, 2019–34. —— (2008c) ‘Dossier: Faith-Based Organizations and Human Geography’. Tijdschrift voor Economische en Sociale Geografie 99, 377–81. —— and Baker, C. (eds) (2010) Postsecular Cities: Religious Space, Theory and Practice. London: Continuum. —— and Dias, C. (2008) ‘Faith-Based Organizations and Urban Social Justice in The Netherlands’. Tijdschrift voor Economische en Sociale Geografie 99, 382–92. —— and Nicholls, W. J. (2007) ‘Between Relationality and Territoriality: Investigating the Geographies of Justice Movements in The Netherlands and the United States’. Environment and Planning A 39, 2554–74. Beckford, J., Gale, R., Owen, D., Peach, C. and Weller, P. (2006) Review of the Evidence Base on Faith Communities. London: Office of the Deputy Prime Minister. Berger, P., Davie, G. and Fokas, E. (2008) Religious America, Secular Europe? A Theme and Variations. Aldershot: Ashgate Publishing. Berger, P., Sacks, J., Martin, D., Weiming, T., Weigel, G., Davie, G. and An-Naim, A. A. (1999) The Desecularisation of the World: Resurgent Religion and World Politics. Grand Rapids MI: Eerdmans Publishing. Beyer, P., Beaman, L. (eds) (2007) Religion, Globalization, and Culture. Leiden and Boston MA: Brill. Bhatt, C. (2001) Hindu Nationalism: Origins, Ideologies and Modern Myths. Oxford: Berg Publishers. Byrnes, T. A. and Katzenstein, P. J. (eds) (2006) Religion in an Expanding Europe. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Caputo, J. D. and Scanlon, M. J. (eds) (1999) God, the Gift, and Postmodernism. Bloomington IN: Indiana University Press. —— (eds) (2005) Augustine and Postmodernism: Confessions and Circumfession. Bloomington IN: Indiana University Press.

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Carnes, T. and Karpathakis, A. (eds) (2001) New York Glory: Religions in the City. New York: New York University Press. Carnes, T. and Yang, F. (eds) (2004) Asian American Religions: The Making and Remaking of Borders and Boundaries. New York: New York University Press. Casanova, J. (1990) Public Religion in the Modern World. Chicago IL: University of Chicago Press. Claiborne, S. (2006) The Irresistible Revolution. Grand Rapids MI: Zondervan. Cochrane, A. (2006) Understanding Urban Policy: A Critical Approach. Oxford: Blackwell. Cox, H. (1990) The Secular City: Secularization and Urbanization in Theological Perspective, 25th anniversary edition. New York: Collier Books. Davey, A. (2008) ‘Better Place: Performing the Urbanisms of Hope’. International Journal of Public Theology 2, 27–47. Davie, G. (2007) The Sociology of Religion. London: Sage. Davis, F., Paulhaus, E. and Bradstock, M. (2008) Moral, But No Compass: Government, Church and the Future of Welfare. Chelmsford: Matthew James Publishing. Davis, M. (2006) Planet of Slums. London: Verso. Derrida, J. (2001) Acts of Religion. Edited with an introduction by Gil Anidjar. London: Routledge. Donk, W. B. H. J. van de, Jonkers, A. P., Kronjee, J. G. and Plum, R. J. J. M. (eds) Geloven in het Publieke Domein: Verkenningen van een Dubbele Transformatie. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press. Farnell, R., Furbey, R., Shams al Haqq Hills, S., Macey, M. and Smith, G. (2003) ‘Faith’ in Urban Regeneration? Engaging Faith Communities in Urban Regeneration. Bristol: Policy Press. Fenster, T. (2004) The Global City and the Holy City: Narratives on Knowledge, Planning and Diversity. Harlow: Pearson Prentice Hall. Fischoff, E. (1944) ‘The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism’. Social Research XI, 62–8. Fuller, G. E. (2004) The Future of Political Islam. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Gale, R. (2007) ‘The Place of Islam in the Geography of Religion: Trends and Intersections’. Geography Compass 1, 1015–36. Gauchet, M. (1999) The Disenchantment of the World. Translated by Oscar Burge. Princeton NJ: Princeton University Press. Goh, R. (2003) ‘Deus ex Machina: Evangelical Sites, Urbanism and the Construction of Social Identities’. In Bishop, R., Phillips, J. and Yeo, W.-W. (eds) Postcolonial Urbanism: Southeast Asian Cities and Global Processes. New York and London: Routledge. Gorringe, T. (2002) A Theology of the Built Environment: Justice, Empowerment, Redemption. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Gorski, P. S. and Altinordu, A. (2008) ‘After Secularization?’. Annual Review of Sociology 34, 55–85. Gottschalk, P. and Greenberg, G. (2007) Islamophobia: Making Muslims the Enemy. Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers. Graham, E. (2008) ‘What Makes a Good City? Reflections on Urban Life and Faith’. International Journal of Public Theology 2, 7–26. Green, R. (ed.) (1973) The Weber Thesis Controversy. Lexington MA: D. C. Heath and Company. Habermas, J. (2002) Religion and Rationality: Essays on Reason, God, and Modernity. Cambridge MA: The MIT Press. —— (2005) ‘Equal Treatment of Cultures and the Limits of Postmodern Liberalism’. Journal of Political Philosophy 13, 1–28. —— (2006a) ‘Religion in the Public Sphere’. European Journal of Philosophy 14, 1–25.

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—— (2006b) Time of Transitions. Translated by Gareth Schott. Cambridge: Polity Press. —— and Ratzinger, J. (2007) The Dialectics of Secularization: On Reason and Religion. Fort Collins CO: Ignatius Press. Hancock, M. and Srinivas, S. (2008) ‘Spaces of Modernity: Religion and the Urban in Asia and Africa’. International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 32, 617–30. Joas, H. (2000) ‘Social Theory and the Sacred: Response to John Milbank’. Ethical Perspectives 7, 233–43. Kong, L. (1990) ‘Geography and Religion: Trends and Prospects’. Progress in Human Geography 14, 355–71. —— (1992) ‘The Sacred and the Secular: Exploring Contemporary Meanings and Values for Religious Buildings in Singapore’. Southeast Asian Journal of Social Science 20, 18–42. —— (1993a) ‘Ideological Hegemony and the Political Symbolism of Religious Buildings in Singapore’. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 11: 23–45. —— (1993b) ‘Negotiating Conceptions of Sacred Space: A Case Study of Religious Buildings in Singapore’. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 18, 342–58. —— (2001) ‘Mapping “New” Geographies of Religion: Politics and Poetics in Modernity’. Progress in Human Geography 25, 211–33. Koopmans, R. and Statham, P. (1991) ‘Challenging the Liberal Nation-State? Postnationalism, Multiculturalism, and the Collective Claims Making of Migrants and Ethnic Minorities in Britain and Germany’. American Journal of Sociology 105, 652–96. Levey, G. B. and Modood, T. (eds) (2009) Secularism, Religion and Multicultural Citizenship. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Lowndes, L. and Chapman, R. (2007) ‘Faith, Hope and Clarity: Faith Groups and Civil Renewal’. In Brannan, T., John, P. and Stoker, G. (eds) Re-Energising Citizenship: Strategies for Civil Renewal. Basingstoke: Palgrave. Marion, J.-L. (1991) God Without Being. Translated by Thomas A. Carlson with a foreword by David Tracey. Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press. —— (2002) Being Given: Towards a Phenomenology of Giveness. Translated by Jeffrey L. Kosky. Palo Alto CA: Stanford University Press. Martin, D. (2005) On Secularization: Towards a Revised General Theory. Aldershot: Ashgate. Matuštík, M. B. (2008) Radical Evil and the Scarcity of Hope: Postsecular Meditations. Bloomington IN: Indiana University Press. McLennan, G. (2007) ‘Towards Postsecular Sociology?’. Sociology 41, 857–70. Milbank, J. (2005) Theology and Social Theory: Beyond Secular Reason. Revised edition. Oxford: Blackwell. —— Pickstock, C. and Ward, G. (eds) (1998) Radical Orthodoxy: Suspending the Material. London: Routledge. Nicholls, W. J. and Beaumont, J. R. (2004) ‘The Urbanization of Justice Movements? Possibilities and Constraints for the City as a Space for Contentious Struggle’. Space & Polity 8, 119–36. Peck, J. (2006) ‘Liberating the City: Between New York and New Orleans’. Urban Geography 27, 681–713. Ramadan, T. (2004) Western Muslims and the Future of Islam. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Ruthven, M. (2007) Fundamentalism: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Sacks, J. (2003) Dignity of Difference: How to Avoid the Clash of Civilisations. London: Continuum.

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Sandercock, L. (1997) Towards Cosmopolis: Planning for Multicultural Cities. Hobokon NJ: John Wiley & Sons. —— (2006) ‘Spirituality and the Urban Professions: The Paradox at the Heart of Planning’. Planning Theory & Practice 7, 65–7. Scott, P. M., Baker, C. and Graham, E. L. (eds) (2009) Remoralising Britain: Social, Ethical and Theological Perspectives on New Labour. London: Continuum. Sharma, J. (2004) Hindutva: Exploring the Idea of Hindu Nationalism. London: Penguin Global. Slater, D. (2004) ‘Editorial Comment: Academic Politics and Israel/Palestine’. Political Geography 23, 645–6. Spalek, B. and Imtoual, A. (eds) (2008) Religion, Spirituality and the Social Sciences: Challenging Marginalisation. Bristol: The Policy Press. Strangroom, P. (2009) Identity Crisis: Against Multiculturalism. London: Continuum. Taylor, C. (2007) A Secular Age. Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press. Tarrow, S. (2005) The New Transnational Activism. New York: Cambridge University Press. Wallis, J. (2005) God’s Politics. San Francisco: Harper Collins. Ward, G. (2000) Cities of God. London: Routledge. Weber, M. (1959) The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons. Williams, R. (2008) ‘Civil and Religious Law in England: a Religious Perspective’, The Archbishop of Canterbury (7 February 2008). See www.archbishopofcanterbury .org/1575, accessed 21 October 2008. Winkler, T. (2008) ‘When God and Poverty Collide: Exploring the Myths of Faithsponsored Community Development’. Urban Studies 45, 2099–116. Yiftachel, O. and Ghanem, A. (2004) ‘Understanding “Ethnocratic” Regimes: The Politics of Seizing Contested Territories’. Political Geography 23, 647–76.

CUTTING THROUGH THE POSTSECULAR CITY: A SPATIAL INTERROGATION Kim Knott In terms of the mainstream liberal-left discourse which currently dominates discussion about how we run our society, the orthodoxies of a secular state have become incontestable truths. However, on the ground, things have moved on. Whether due to the burgeoning confidence of the country’s devout immigrant groups, the global importance of Islam, or to some less easily definable ‘Age of Aquarius’ zeitgeist, Britain is becoming re-spiritualised—and government, albeit rather clumsily, is responding to that.1

In an article on ‘The rise of religion’ in Catalyst, the magazine of the Commission for Racial Equality,2 Alex Klaushofer deftly summarized the current context in Britain for interrogating this notion of the postsecular. She noted some of the key players: the mainstream secular left, those with ethnic religious, religio-political and spiritual interests, and government. Furthermore, she distinguished discourse from ‘things on the ground’, the ideological from the material, a useful distinction for this interrogation. I will return to her observations later. My aim here will be to ‘cut through the postsecular city’ in two ways: first, by examining the idea of the postsecular city in relation to debates about the City of God and the secular city, and, secondly, by interrogating two substantive cases, the British cities of Leicester and Liverpool. I will use a spatial approach, focusing on a field of knowledge-power relations constituted by ‘religious’, ‘secular’ and ‘postsecular’ positions, the boundaries between them and the controversies which arise at these boundary points. What does it mean to speak of the postsecular city? Can a city be ‘religious’, ‘secular’ or ‘postsecular’, or is it a matter of how it is contested and represented rather than what it is and what goes on in it? In order to answer this, several issues need considering.

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Klaushofer (2006). The Commission for Racial Equality was subsumed within a new and more inclusive statutory body, the Equality and Human Rights Commission, in October 2007. 2

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• What is meant by postsecular and how does it relate to its ideological forebears the religious and the secular? • Is it appropriate to apply such terms, normally used to denote ideological beliefs and values and their political and social entailments, to bodies like cities? What constitutes the city as an entity to which the term postsecular might be applied? • Can existing British cities, as physical, social and mental spaces, be described as postsecular? 1. What is Meant by Postsecular, and How Does It Relate to Its Ideological Forebears, the Religious and the Secular? A review of the term postsecular shows it to be utilized in various contexts since the late 1990s: to signal the return of religion or the renewed visibility of religion in contemporary culture and politics (Vries and Sullivan 2006; Habermas 2008), to denote either a postmodern religious position or a theological return to orthodox religion (Blond 1997; Caputo 2001; Ward 1999; Smith 2005), as a key symbol in the critique of modernist or secularist politics or ideology (Abeysekara 2008), to imply a new ethical and/or faith-based political approach to public life, consumption and global issues in late modernity (Curry 2007; Hamilton 2008), in work on the post-Soviet state and its politics (Kyrlezhev 2008; Morozov 2008), and with reference to contemporary art or writing that has a spiritual dimension or context (King 2005; McClure 2008). When applied to the city, these variant uses and attendant meanings have different implications. I will focus in particular on the first and second of these, though will also make brief reference to the third and fourth. In my earlier work, in order to explore the contemporary location of religion in ostensibly secular contexts, I considered the relationship between the religious, secular and postsecular and proposed a dialectical field of religious and secular knowledge-power relations (2005a: 71–7, 124–6). I will not rehearse the historical account of these terms and their interconnections (61–77; cf. Taylor 2007; Fitzgerald 2007a), but it is important to say a little about the third camp in this field (see Figure 1). Emerging from the engagement of the religious and the secular in the context of postmodern thought, I took the postsecular to mean a re-sacralization or return to the religious (often couched in the language of spirituality) which took seriously secular values such

cutting through the postsecular city Religious

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undecided, agnostic, those wishing to bring opposing positions together

Post-secular Struggles between camps Struggles within camps

Figure 1: The religious/secular field and its force relationships

as the importance of the self, human flourishing and human destiny, diversity, choice and freedom (2005a: 74–6, 163–9). I concurred with Hanegraaff, who wrote of a third stance (which he referred to as New Age holism) emerging ‘as a reaction to established Christianity, on the one hand, and to rationalistic ideologies, on the other’ (1996: 515), and with Caputo that this was not a simple imitation of an earlier position, but ‘a reiteration for a post-secular time’ (2001: 131–2). I suggested this dialectical field to be a site of struggle in which religious and secular, but also postsecular positions were co-produced and contested (Knott 2005a: 125). Within it I included not only confessional exponents, such as ardent theists or hard-line secularists, but also those in the middle ground, the undecided or deliberately agnostic (as well as intellectuals and scholars of all persuasions who comment upon the field and its relations). The field is one in which knowledge-power is expressed and mobilized, and in which controversies between positions (either within a single camp or across different camps) reveal some of the deeply held views and values that constitute the field and mark out its territorial areas and lines of engagement. As I will show, investigating such controversies helps to uncover some of the unspoken norms of late-modernity regarding the religious, secular and postsecular.

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Representing the field and its force-relationships in this way, as a field of struggle, acknowledges the language of opposition and warfare often used by religious, secular and postsecular exponents in debates and arguments. It sets them apart from one another, and highlights the boundaries between them which are discursively constructed, negotiated and policed by those on opposing sides. It highlights their territories and boundaries as spaces open to investigation. Chimerical as such boundaries are—at some times and places appearing substantial and impenetrable, but on other occasions seeming to be porous and insubstantial—they come into focus and present themselves for examination on the occasion of public controversies like The Satanic Verses controversy, the death of Theo van Gogh, the Danish cartoons crisis, debates on abortion and homosexuality, and the place of religion in the public sphere. Analysing such boundaries and the disputes that occur around them is important for understanding what the terms religious, secular and postsecular mean to people, how they use them to defend their own positions and attack those of others, and how the balance of power shifts between them (Knott 2005a; 2008a; 2008b). Recent theoretical work (Asad 2003; Scott and Hirschkind 2006; Fitzgerald 2007a; 2007b) has uncovered the historical and colonial formation of the category religion in the context of others such as secular, politics, society, nation and economics, and in relation to secularization and the enforced location of religion in the private rather than the public domain. Timothy Fitzgerald has examined the historical emergence of a counter-category of ‘non-religion’ (for which the appellation secular, a term with its origins in Christianity, has commonly been used), as that which falls outside religion, beyond the private and within the public domain constituted by the nation state, its institutions, laws, norms, values and practices (2007a; 2007c). ‘Non-religion’, according to Fitzgerald, is an entailment of the conceptualization of ‘religion’ (Fitzgerald 2007c: 6): The conceptualization of ‘religion’ and ‘religions’ in the modern sense of private faith, or the related sense of personal adherence to a soteriological doctrine of God, was needed for the representation of the world as a secular, neutral, factual, comprehensively quantifiable realm whose natural laws can be discovered by scientific rationality, and whose central human activity is a distinct ‘non-religious’ sphere or domain called ‘politics’ or ‘political economy’. By ‘non-religious’ I do not necessarily mean ‘hostile to religion’, but, more often, neutral towards religion, tolerant of religion (. . .) The crucial logic is separation into two essentially different domains.

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Elsewhere Fitzgerald refers to these two domains as ‘religion’ and ‘the secular’. The distinction between the two is unstable, in so far as it changes as the meanings of ‘religion’ and the ‘secular’ are repeatedly contested (2007c: 7–8). Of the early nineteenth century, for example, Fitzgerald writes that older Christian uses of ‘religious’ and ‘secular’ as temporal run alongside and compete with the more recently emerging ideological construction of the ‘non-religious’ secular (8). What is clear, however, is that the two, religion and the secular, are co-produced. The invention of one leads to the co-invention of the other (Fitzgerald 2007a: 99). As I shall show below in relation to current theological debates about the postsecular city, the notion of the postsecular is produced dialectically and with reference to the religious and the secular. Fitzgerald’s work is invaluable for historicizing the category of the secular and connecting it to the nation state and public life, and thereby providing a potentially useful resource for grounding the notion of the postsecular as the renewed visibility of religion within that context. I would suggest that, on the basis of this theoretical work on historical and colonial formations, a key attribute of the postsecular is the breaching of the theoretical boundary between public and private domains, the formal return of religion to debates about matters of public importance, of religious bodies to the table of government and of religion to public spaces. Such a view is in conformity with a conception of secularization as the retreat of religion from public life rather than a decline in religiosity per se. This return or invitation back to the table suggests a halt to the process of secularization thus conceived. It may also, of course, denote a re-sacralization, as I suggested earlier. 2. Is It Appropriate to Apply Such Terms, Normally Used to Denote Ideological Beliefs and Values and Their Political and Social Entailments, to Bodies like Cities? What Constitutes the City as an Entity to Which the Term Postsecular Might Be Applied? Cities are complex constellations of places, people, buildings, institutions, goods, capital and ideas, and intersections of natural and manmade routes, relationships, diasporas and transactions. If I look through the lens of the spatial methodology I have employed for several years (Knott 2005a; 2005b), informed by the social theory of Lefebvre (1991),

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Foucault (1986 [1968]) and Massey (1994), then I would describe cities as embodied and dynamic, as having physical, social and mental dimensions, and as exhibiting the properties of configuration, extension, simultaneity and power.3 Furthermore, drawing on Lefebvre’s conceptual triad (1991: 33–42; Knott 2005a: 35–58), and in so far as they are produced through spatial practices, dominant representations and symbolic acts of resistance and celebration, cities are variously perceived, conceived and lived. Simultaneously, they are at once large, diverse, complex and ungraspable material conurbations—‘things on the ground’—and whole and partial representations—discursive, artistic, scholarly and technical, but also subjective and fleeting: things in the air. Taking the first of these modes, I am not sure to what extent it is appropriate to describe actual material cities and the way in which people perceive and inhabit them as postsecular,4 but will consider this further in the case studies below. Primarily, my focus will be on the second mode, representations of the city as postsecular. As Lefebvre made clear, since the late 1960s, there has been a shift of interest away from ‘things in space’ to the ‘production of space’ (1991: 36–7), whether material, social or mental space, in which product and production process are inseparable (37). He drew attention to the importance of representation as a tool for the analysis of spaces, particularly in the modern period (45). Taking the example of JudaeoChristian ideology and churches, he asked, ‘What is an ideology without a space to which it refers, a space which it describes, whose vocabulary and links it makes use of, and whose code it embodies?’ (44). Working with this idea, he distinguished perceived, conceived and lived moments, three aspects in a conceptual triad, equating these with spatial practice, representations of space, and spaces of representation (33, 38–9; Knott 2005a: 36–40). It is the second of these, the conceived aspect in which dominant, powerful representations by public officers, policy-makers, planners, technicians, engineers, the media and business, which I shall turn to in the final section in consideration of representations of two British cities (cf. Knott 2005a: 44–51). Before that, it is Lefebvre’s third ‘lived’ space (cf. Soja 1996) that will be to the fore as I examine the way in which theologians of different persuasions 3

See Knott (2009) for a spatial analysis of a multicultural city high street. Tel Aviv has frequently been referred to as a ‘secular city’ (Kummer 1995), and recently scholars have asked if New York is indeed ‘postsecular’ (Carnes and Karpathakis 2001). 4

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have sought to represent the City of God, the secular city, and new emerging realm of the postsecular as radical spaces of possibility for Christians (cf. Gorringe 2002). The postsecular city is an intellectual construction, one that is both theological and secular philosophical; it is, I would suggest, a response to earlier scholarly and popular conceptions of the city/City as either ‘secular’ or ‘of God’. Beginning with Augustine of Hippo’s fifth century theological exposition on the divine city and its counterpart, I will examine several contexts in which these ideas have been debated in order to see what lies behind this contemporary notion of the postsecular city. Augustine wrote of The City of God as: [A] book in which I have taken upon myself the task of defending the glorious City of God against those who prefer their own gods to the Founder of that City. I treat of it both as it exists in this world of time, a stranger among the ungodly, living by faith, and as it stands in the security of its everlasting seat.5

To the City of God, he juxtaposed ‘the city of this world, a city which aims at dominion, which holds nations in enslavement, but is itself dominated by that very lust of domination’.6 Augustine wrote of the city of this world as a site of struggle between the enemies of God, Christ’s detractors and the city’s godless pagans, and the defenders and servants of Christ and his martyrs. The site is Rome, of course, but the struggle is eternal and beyond the borders of this one historical city. Augustine held together the entwined conceptions of the material city in the world and the ideal city, suggesting that the former could and should express and take on the characteristics of the latter. But the material city was more often than not the ‘ungodly city’ or the city corrupted by luxury and idleness. This distinction between the ideal City of God and the real worldly one, the struggle to clear a godly path through the latter and even to create God’s kingdom on earth, have been common themes for Christians of all kinds. In the nineteenth century, for example, the popularity of the evangelical poster ‘The Broad and the Narrow Way’ and its widespread use in the mission field in Europe and Africa testified to the widespread Christian view of the secular, urban world as simultaneously attractive but misguided, pleasurable but damaging,

5 6

Evans (2003: 5). Evans (2003: 5).

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leading ultimately to damnation (Kirkham 1888; Millward 2002). Twentieth century depictions of the broad and the narrow way make visual allusions to the contemporary secular world as a place of materialism, family breakdown, prostitution, drugs, violence and warfare (Millward 2002). Often associated with the left and the left hand, as opposed to the right hand of God and the narrow right hand path, the secular world and secular city are seen as ruled by Satan, and represent ‘man’s preference for himself over God’ (Swanson n.d.; Knott 2005a: 151–2). In these depictions, the goal of the City of God remains narrow and difficult, but ultimately rewarding. Moving from popular to theological accounts, Augustine’s critique of the worldly city, its gods, values and practices was the model for John Milbank’s Theology and Social Theory: Beyond Secular Reason (2001 [1990]), a veritable ‘postmodern City of God’ according to one reviewer (Wetzel 2004: 271). In Milbank’s work the focus is not on the city as such, but on the failure of the worldview of secular humanism, doomed to repeat earlier mistakes in ‘reimagining nature, human action and society as a sphere of autonomous, sheerly formal power’, in privatizing the spiritual and separating the theological from the political (Milbank 2001: 9). Milbank and his radical orthodox colleagues have sought to revitalize an old debate with relevant contemporary, postmodern arguments, once again countering the worldly reification of the secular city, revivifying the ideal of the City of God and reconnecting domains that they believe should never have been separated, the theological and the political. Graham Ward has noted, however, that the modern city too has been idealized (and exemplified in the celluloid city of Metropolis), mimetically presented as ‘a secularised version of the City of God (. . .) a place where all human desires might be met, a city without a church because the moral perfection of each human being has been fulfilled’ (1999: 140).7 So the metaphor of the ‘City of God’ is a powerful one which continues to communicate several ideas: that there is an ideal divine city to which Christians aspire, and a secular one that, for some, is its material and ungodly opposite, and for others is a secular humanist reflection of the Augustinian ideal. To radical orthodox theologians, the secular city represents the erroneous assumption that there can be an autonomous non-religious domain separate from God. When used

7

Metropolis (1927), a silent film directed by Fritz Lang.

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in more popular Christian parlance it denotes a realm that is human rather than God-centred, worldly, ungodly and corrupt, but nevertheless full of temptation. This widely-held Christian interpretation of the autonomous and ungodly secular city was challenged in the mid-1960s by Harvey Cox in his book of the same name in which he argued for a ‘revolutionary theology’ that saw God as present within the secular, religiously plural city, and against the idea of two separate and incompatible realms, one religious and good and the other secular and evil (Cox 1965). For Cox, the ‘secular city’ was not a cause of anxiety, and secularization not ‘the anti-Christ’; rather they represented the promise, danger and responsibility of freedom (1965: 177; cf. Cox 1990). Cox’s plea is reiterated by more recent theologians who have argued for the place of the sacred and spiritual within the fabric of the city (Pattison 2000; Gorringe 2002; Sheldrake 2001). The term postsecular, it seems, could be claimed equally by theologians from both radical orthodoxy and urban liberation theology, by those who seek to critique and go beyond the secular city and secular reason, distinguishing it from God’s city, and those who desire to uncover the sacred and spiritual within the secular city. These are two distinctive late modern theological responses emerging from rather different theological perspectives on the meaning and nature of the secular. In this volume, Paul Cloke’s essay seeks to bridge the two positions by focusing on going beyond secularism through theo-poetics and faith-based praxis in the city. But the notion of the secular city does not only appear in the various arguments of orthodox and liberal theologians, and in the polemic of Evangelical Christians that we saw earlier. Occasionally—though rarely—it is embraced by secularists themselves. The Declaration of the Council for Secular Humanism, for example, calls for the ideals of the secular city (critical reason, autonomy, the rights of the individual, the value of human happiness here and now, ethical judgements formulated without recourse to religion) to be upheld in a world engulfed by obscurantism and irrationalism (Council for Secular Humanism 1980). Generally, however, the secular city is a theological concept (as indeed the postsecular city may turn out to be). Lying behind both of these terms is religion. The secular city is the antithesis of the religious one, the City of God. Fitzgerald (2007a) might say that the secular city is the city of non-religion, an entailment of idealizing a religious city or City of God. The postsecular city, no less than its secular forebear,

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implies religion—albeit indirectly—signalling its return either by way of public invitation or re-enchantment. If religion is the shadow outside the gates of the secular city, waging critical war upon it, then in the postsecular city it has crossed the boundary, made incursions and inroads, and arguably begun to transform its secular host. Although my principal task in this chapter s not to examine this potential for transformation, in the next section we will witness some of the ways in which religion is being accommodated, recognized and re-instated in conceptions of the city. Furthermore, other papers in this volume explore the various ways in which faith based movements and organizations are increasingly making a difference in contemporary cities (see, for example, chapters by Cloke and also Bretherton). Nevertheless, territory, and the right and power to authorize how it is conceived, is ground that is not given up lightly. The dominant secular order, as we shall see below, continues to exert itself while making space for religion on its own terms. 3. Can Existing British Cities, as Physical, Social and Mental Spaces, Be Described as Postsecular? In a lecture at the Nexus Institute, University of Tilburg, in March 2007, Jürgen Habermas considered what might be meant by ‘postsecular society’ (Habermas 2008). Such a society, he said, must at one time have been a secular state, thus implying that, irrespective of any other defining features, the term postsecular must mean after the secular and refer to the return of religion to public life from its private haven. More than that, however, Habermas referred to ‘a change in consciousness’ arising from a global awareness of relativity and loss of certainty in late-modernity, of the increasing influence of a diversity of religions in public life, and the presence of immigrant communities and attendant problem of social integration (see Klaushofer quotation above). The sense of ‘secularistic certainty that religion will disappear worldwide in the course of modernisation is losing ground’ (Habermas 2008), and the agenda has now changed with new questions raised about tolerance and the development of effective and ethical social relations. Evidence of this condition and the questions associated with it is not hard to find, particularly in the media and on the Internet: What role should religion play in the public sphere? UK: Christian or secular? Is Islam good for London? These are just a few of the issues

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debated in Britain in recent years (Theos 2007; 2008; McElvoy and Barney 2007). If we return now to Klaushofer’s article with which we started, we are given a taste of the return of religion to contemporary British cities, and of the way in which it is being received both by those who are sympathetic and those who feel challenged by this new order (Klaushofer 2006): Over the past decade, a quiet revolution has been transforming the relation between church and state in Britain. New Labour, determined to get to the parts of local communities that other governments have failed to reach, has abandoned the modern orthodoxy that religion should be kept out of public policy, and gone all-out to involve faith groups in civic renewal. On the ground, public service providers have been equally busy trying to meet the needs of religious groups. Councils and housing associations have been trying to provide homes near mosques, separate toilets and bathrooms for holy ablutions, and different sitting rooms for men and women. There are experienced councils like Leicester City, which, with 40 per cent of non-Christian believers, has been working with faith groups since the mid-1990s, and the London Borough of Kensington and Chelsea, which wrote the first local authority handbook for working with faith groups (. . .) And the pace of this growing involvement is unlikely to slow down: the Equality Act (. . .) imposes a new duty on public service providers to eliminate discrimination on the grounds of religion or belief.

Klaushofer goes on to note that faith groups have themselves noticed the difference over a ten year period with a more open attitude developing among national and local government bodies, and a recognition that religious identity is as important as ethnic or national identity for many people. Her interview with the Executive Director of the National Secular Society produced a rather different response, however. For Keith Porteous-Wood the trend was catastrophic and terrifying (Klaushofer 2006): ‘There’s something special in the government’s mind about religious people,’ he says. ‘They push on the door and it’s open. I push on the door and it’s bolted.’ He [Porteous-Wood] describes himself as ‘ten times more unhappy’ with the situation than he was a few years ago: ‘The extent of religious influence is just stunning.’

This metaphor of the door is a potent one, reminding us that the boundary that once kept religion at bay beyond the confines of the public realm has been breached; secularists are the ones who now feel they are the outsiders (Knott 2008a). The depth of the religious

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versus secular controversy is revealed in other metaphors in the article. The metaphor of war is used by an embattled secularist (‘true clash of civilisations’); the metaphor of inclusion and dialogue by a commentator sympathetic to religion (‘religion is [now] part of the national conversation’).8 In the earlier quotation Klaushofer suggests several arenas in which religion is now on the rise in civic New Labour Britain. She focuses on renewal and regeneration, and equality. To these can be added culture, education, community cohesion and countering extremism. In all of these, whether in terms of political rhetoric, local and national policy and provision, or legislation, religion—to be explicit, faith communities, faith-based organizations and matters of faith and belief—is indeed now part of the conversation (cf. Smith 2004). But is this return of religion an imitation of an earlier position, or a reiteration for a postsecular time (Caputo 2001: 131–2)? The secular public place to which religion now returns, its characteristics and context, is quite different to the one from which religion was excluded several centuries ago. Furthermore, religion itself has changed, both in its response to secular humanism and the public sphere, and in terms of its multiplicity: many religions rather than one, with a common agenda of increased public visibility as well as differences of belief, practice, values etc. In all of these senses, there can be no simple imitation of an earlier position. I turn now to an examination of the two cities of Leicester and Liverpool, primarily through their virtual presence on the Internet. How are they represented by official civic bodies and other local organizations, and to what extent are they contested (cf. Sönmez in this volume)? How is religion placed in these representations? Is secularity explicitly referred to, or unwittingly present? Is secularism reified or challenged? Can we speak of the emergence of a postsecular city? As before, when I considered theological and popular Christian notions of the City of God and the secular city, the focus is on representations. These Internet representations are those that Lefebvre referred to as ‘conceived’, as ‘representations of space’, distinguished as I suggested earlier from both ‘perceived’ and ‘lived’ spaces (1991: 33, 38–9). This distinction is important because it signals those areas that I will not consider and where further work remains to be done, particularly in

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Toynbee and Bunting referred to in Klaushofer (2006).

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investigating and understanding how material cities are experienced by citizens and migrants, and may be imaginatively constructed or produced as postsecular (cf. Soja 1996; see Cloke and also Bretherton in this volume). In considering the two cities of Liverpool and Leicester, the arena on which I shall focus is culture, like the others listed above one from which religion was ostensibly absent for much of the 20th century in Britain. Culture at its high end referred to the arts, theatre, opera, classical music, and, at its low and popular end, to such activities as film and TV, sport, pop and rock music, musical theatre, pub games, coach trips, soaps, tabloid newspapers and gossip magazines. Quite simply, it did not include religion. Increasingly, as the century proceeded, the secular culture of ethnic minorities was also included: reggae, hip hop and rap, bhangra and Bollywood. And yet if we look now at Liverpool, European City of Culture 2008, we see that religion is indeed represented and included as part of the cultural face of Liverpool. In fact, apart from listings of some of the city’s religious societies (including secularist and humanist), and a pledge by the city council to fulfil the terms and spirit of equality legislation on religion and belief (Liverpool City Council 2009), most references to religion appear in the context of the city’s cultural life, principally its tourism. The city’s two cathedrals, its synagogue, and the earliest mosque in Britain (currently under renovation) are key sites in its proud architectural history—along with the Liver Building, Albert Dock and The Cavern. In fact, it is through the ‘Visit Liverpool’ website that access to information about these places of worship can be accessed, presented as it is for other, non-religious, buildings, in terms of historical details, opening hours, entrance fees and location (VisitLiverpool. com). Information about the city’s ‘Walk of Faith’, music, dance and children’s events organized by faith communities, and the north west of England’s ‘Multi Faith Tourism Association’, with its kite marque of excellence awarded for a warm welcome, can be found if you click through the web pages (VisitLiverpool.com). Two things are striking. First, it is ‘faith’ not ‘religion’ that is to the fore. Religion was the enemy of the secular, whereas faith has recently become its friend (Stringer 2002). Its acceptability, however, is constrained—at the moment at least—by the terms of the state at the local level. It is presented through the lens of tourism and architectural heritage, reinforcing the idea that faith is somehow exotic, associated with cultural tradition, and to be valued for its capacity to open up

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that tradition to visiting outsiders. It remains ‘other’, while contributing to key government goals of cultural heritage and social cohesion. Furthermore, the key faiths celebrated and authorized by this cultural feast of tourism are mainstream: Anglicanism, Catholicism, Judaism and Islam (VisitLiverpool.com). We do indeed see their ostensible, if constrained, return to the public table, but where in this public celebration are the postmodern religious or alternative spiritualities about which scholars such as Hanegraaff (1996), Heelas and Woodhead (2005) and Heelas (1996) have been writing in the last two or three decades? If we turn now to Leicester, although the references to religious listings, equality issues, and culture and leisure events can again be found, a rather different picture emerges. As Klaushofer noted in the quotation at the outset of this section, Leicester City is heralded as an ‘experienced council’, one that has worked with faith groups for more than a decade (clearly reinforcing the idea, it should be added, that prior to the mid-1990s religion was excluded from public participation). The reason for this may be two-fold, that Leicester’s diverse population has demanded that religion be taken seriously (in 2001, 45% Christian, 15% Hindu, 11% Muslim, 4% Sikh, 17% of no religion, and 7% religion not stated), and that Leicester established an effective Council of Faiths as early as 1986 (Leicester City Council 2009; Inter Faith Network 2007: 64). Whatever the reasons, the field of religious, secular and postsecular debate seems to be well-trodden in the city. ‘Radical Leicester’, with its ‘progressive spirit’ (Gould 1900) and associated with the ‘principle of controversy (. . .) to question and try all assertions’ (Patterson and Holyoake, cited in Hawtin 1972), is known for its history of dissent and tolerance (Gould 1900; Butt 2004). In 1972, in his celebration of Britain’s earliest Secular Society (founded in 1851), Fenner Brockway went so far as to assert that ‘what Leicester thinks today the nation should think tomorrow’ (Brockway 1972). Leicester’s non-conformist tradition (over the centuries incorporating Lollard, Puritan, Quaker and secular Chartist thought and practice) is seen as the historical context for the development of secularism in the city, situated from 1881 in its Secular Hall. Still used weekly for lectures and debates on such issues as evolutionism versus creationism, faith schools, secular philosophies, religious dress etc, it is associated with the promotion of a civic society based on equality and human rights without transcendental or supernatural reference (Leicester Secular Society n.d.). ‘Freedom of belief and thought, open dialogue,

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participation, co-operation and friendship’ are stressed, values which are not entirely out of conformity with those sentiments expressed by the Leicester Council of Faiths where reference to the transcendent and supernatural might be expected to be the norm rather than the exception (Leicester Secular Society n.d.; Inter Faith Network 2007: 64). So, Leicester is characterized historically by its dissent, dialogue and radicalism—and, indeed, ‘radical’ is one of the words used today in the vision statement of Leicester’s Anglican cathedral (Leicester Cathedral n.d.)—rather than by any particular and exclusive religious or secularist vision. But that tradition in turn can create tensions, as a recent controversy suggests. In the late 1990s, an exhibition entitled ‘Faith in Leicester’ was held at the cathedral, presumably in order to reflect religious diversity within the city and to contribute to a deeper understanding of multi-faith Leicester. The response this provoked in two Christians was reported on the website of an evangelical Anglican group called ‘Reform’, a network ‘committed to the reform of ourselves, our congregation and our world by the gospel’ (Reform 2009). The response was entitled ‘Will any religion do? Layworker leaves Cathedral in tears’ (Dunseth 1997): [The] exhibition (. . .) seemed actively to promote the idea that it does not matter what you believe so long as you have faith (. . .) It covered faith in Buddha, Krishna, Mohammed and the New Age (. . .) In the display ‘the Houses of Faith’ was written: ‘We come from different religions but we are interlocked together in our search for Truth.’ Our Careforce worker and I had to leave the Cathedral. She was in tears. We seemed surrounded by everyone else’s God but our own. We do not object to being informed about other religions, but we do object to our Christian Cathedral being used as a commercial for ‘any faith will do!’ Who will speak out against such disgraceful disregard of loyalty to God and the Ten Commandments if Reform does not grow and stand up and fight for THE Faith?

This controversy is symptomatic of a long-standing struggle between evangelical and liberal exponents within the same Christian denomination. The contemporary urban phenomenon of religious diversity, itself part of what we might mean by postsecular city, provokes different responses even within a single—admittedly large—faith community. Clearly what constitutes faith, a concept so much to the fore in the public domain at present, is not resolved. It is not a stable concept any more than religion is. It is simultaneously an emic Christian

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category and an etic term of convenience for government and public bodies to signal that which religious people of all kinds share which those who are non-religious do not. In this case, an opportunity for the church to use culture (an exhibition) as a medium for raising the public profile of religion in general and faith in Leicester in particular became a site in the struggle over matters of religious truth. As we saw in Figure 1, struggles within a single camp, in this case the—Anglican Christian—religious one, are as much a feature of the dialectical field of religious/secular knowledge-power relations as are those between camps, such as those between secularists and religious exponents represented in debates held weekly at Leicester’s Secular Hall. These cases suggest to me that, even in dynamic cities like Liverpool and Leicester, the one seeking to reinvent itself at the cutting edge of contemporary culture, the other self-identifying as radical and dissenting, a coherent picture of postsecularity does not emerge. As material, social and mental spaces, these cities, and their representations and values, are heterogeneous with regard to the religious, secular and postsecular. Even if there was complete agreement about what the term postsecular means, we would I think find it difficult to establish incontrovertible evidence for the city as a singularly postsecular space, though there are clearly signs that religion has re-entered the public domain and has had to adapt in order to do so. Looking at the sites—material and discursive—where religion now has a public presence, and focusing on the controversies and points of tension between different exponents (whether within a single religious, secular or postsecular camp or across the boundaries) reveals a scene that is simultaneously more religious, more secular (or secularist) and postsecular. The fact that religion is on the rise, represented by faith, and that it has breached the boundary of what was commonly deemed to be a secular public domain has raised the stakes for everyone, irrespective of their ideological orientation. That there are new opportunities for religion in the current climate and that this has thereby torn open the secular as a wholly non-religious public space is not in question. What remains to be clarified is what postsecular can really mean in this context. Does it merely signify ‘after the secular’, a new situation pertaining once religion is back at the table of the state, or does it signify a new kind of religion that is informed and changed by its historical experience of exclusion and changing relationship with the modern nation state and the condition of the secular? Does the concept of the postsecular refer only to

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representations of the city, or can it be used to denote a real material transformation, a shift in social and political relations and in the ethics and culture of urban life? Unlike some other chapters in this volume, the focus of this chapter has not been postsecularity ‘on the ground’, but an examination of a range of competing theological and civic representations of the city: religious, secular and postsecular. However, as both Lefebvre (1991) and Soja (1996) cautioned and this examination of two contemporary British cities has signalled, distinguishing between real cities ‘on the ground’ and imagined cities ‘in the air’ is impossible as physical, social and mental spaces intersect and overlap. Furthermore, it may indeed be counter-productive when the aim is to understand how space—in this case the contemporary postsecular city—is produced and represented, whom it serves and, ultimately, how people live in it and make it their own. References Abeysekara, A. (2008) The Politics of Postsecular Religion: Mourning Secular Futures. New York: Columbia University Press. Asad, T. (2003) Formations of the Secular: Christianity, Islam, Modernity. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Blond, P. (ed.) (1997) Post-Secular Philosophy: Between Philosophy and Theology. London and New York: Routledge. Brockway, F. (1972) ‘Preface’ to Hawtin, G. A Century of Progressive Thought: The Story of Leicester Secular Society. http://www.leicestersecularsociety.org.uk/history_ hawtin.htm, accessed 2 April 2009. Butt, S. (2004) ‘Leicester’s faith foundations’. Leicester Chronicler, http://www.leicesterchronicler.com/faith.htm, accessed 2 April 2009. Caputo, J. D. (2001) On Religion. London and New York: Routledge. Carnes, T. and Karpathakis, A. (eds) (2001) New York Glory: Religions in the City. New York and London: New York University Press. Council for Secular Humanism (1980) A Secularist Humanist Declaration. http:// www.secularhumanism.org/index.php?page=declaration§ion=main, accessed 2 April 2009. Cox, H. (1965) The Secular City. London: SCM. —— (1990) ‘The Secular City 25 years later’. Religion Online, http://www.religiononline.org/showarticle.asp?title=1861, accessed 2 April 2009 (first appeared in The Christian Century). Curry, P. M. (2007) ‘Post-Secular Nature: Principles and Politics’, Worldviews: Environment, Culture, Religion 11, 284–304. Dunseth, G. (1997) ‘Will Any Religion Do? Lay Worker Leaves Cathedral in Tears’. Reform http://www.reform.org.uk/pages/tabloid/1997/religion.php, accessed 2 April 2009. Evans, G. R. (ed.) (2003) St Augustine: City of God. London: Penguin Classics. Fitzgerald, T. (2007a) Discourses on Civility and Barbarity: A Critical History of Religion and Related Categories. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press.

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—— (2007b) Religion and the Secular: Historical and Colonial Formations. London and Oakville CT: Equinox. —— (2007c) ‘Introduction’. In Fitzgerald, T. (ed.) Religion and the Secular: Historical and Colonial Formations. London and Oakville CT: Equinox. Foucault, M. (1986 [1968]) ‘Of Other Spaces’ (Des espaces autres). Diacritics 16, 22–7. Gorringe, T. (2002) A Theology of the Built Environment: Justice, Empowerment, Redemption. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Gould, F. J. (1900) A History of the Leicester Secular Society. http://www.leicestersecu larsociety.org.uk/history_gould.htm, accessed 2 April 2009. Habermas, J. (2008) ‘Notes on a Post-Secular Society’ (Blätter für deutsche und internationale Politik). www.signandsound.com/features/1714.html, accessed 2 April 2009. Hamilton, C. (2008) The Freedom Paradox: Towards a Post-Secular Ethics. Crows Nest, New South Wales: Allen and Unwin. Hanegraaff, W. (1996) New Age Religion and Western Culture: Esotericism in the Mirror of Western Thought. Leiden: Brill. Hawtin, G. (1972) A Century of Progressive Thought: The Story of Leicester Secular Society. http://www.leicestersecularsociety.org.uk/history_hawtin.htm, accessed 2 April 2009. Heelas, P. (1996) The New Age Movement. Oxford: Blackwell. —— and Woodhead, L. (2005) The Spiritual Revolution: Why Religion is Giving Way to Spirituality. Oxford and Malden MA: Blackwell. Inter Faith Network for the UK (2007) Inter Faith Organisations in the UK: A Directory. Fourth edition. London: Inter Faith Network for the UK. Klaushofer, A. (2006) ‘The Rise of Religion’. Catalyst: Debating Race, Identity, Citizenship and Culture 22 September 2006. http://chinesesex.herechina.net/sitearchive/catalyst magazine/Default.aspx.LocID-0hgnew0kn.RefLocID-0hg01b00100600h.Lang-EN .htm, accessed 2 April 2009. King, M. (2005) ‘Art and the Postsecular’. Journal of Visual Art Practice 4, 3–17. Kirkham, G. (1888) History and Explanation of the Picture: The Broad and the Narrow Way. London: Morgan and Scott (reprinted by P. N. Millward, 1997, http://picture swithamessage.com/78/cat78.htm?931, accessed 3 April 2009). Knott, K. (2005a) The Location of Religion: A Spatial Analysis. London and Oakville CT: Equinox. —— (2005b) ‘Spatial Theory and Method for the Study of Religion’. Temenos: Nordic Journal of Comparative Religion 41, 153–84. —— (2008a) ‘“Pyhä” Uskonnollisen ja Maallisen Välisen Rajan Haastavana Kategoriana’ [‘The “Sacred” as a Tool for Contesting the Boundary Between the Religious and the Secular’]. In Mahlamäki, T., Pyysiäinen, I. and Taira, T. (eds) Pyhä: Raja, Kielto ja Arvo Kansanomaisessa Uskonnossa [Sacred: Boundary, Prohibition and Value in Popular Religion]. Helsinki: Finnish Literature Society. —— (2008b) ‘Inside, Outside and the Space In-Between: Territories and Boundaries in the Study of Religion’. Temenos: Nordic Journal of Comparative Religion 44, 41–66. —— (2009) ‘From Locality to Location and Back Again: A Spatial Journey in the Study of Religion’. Religion 39, 154–60. Kummer, C. (1995) ‘Tel Aviv: Secular City. Where Israel Meets the Modern World’. The Atlantic Online December 1995, http://www.theatlantic.com/issues/95dec/ telaviv/telaviv.htm, accessed 6 April 2009. Kyrlezhev, A. (2008) ‘The Postsecular Age: Religion and Culture Today’. Religion, State and Society 36, 21–31. Lefebvre, H. (1991) The Production of Space. Oxford and Cambridge MA: Blackwell (first published in French, 1974).

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Leicester Cathedral (n.d.) Vision Statement of Leicester Cathedral. http://www.cathe dral.leicester.anglican.org/Vision.html, accessed 2 April 2009. Leicester City Council (2009) Religions, Faiths and Beliefs. http://www.leicester.gov .uk/your-council—services/lc/religions, accessed 2 April 2009. Leicester Secular Society (n.d.) Leicester Secular Society: The Oldest Secular Society in the World—Formed 1851. http://www.leicestersecularsociety.org.uk/, accessed 2 April 2009. Liverpool City Council (2009) Faiths, Beliefs and Religion. http://www.liverpool.gov. uk/Community_and_living/Faiths_beliefs_and_religion/, accessed 2 April 2009. McClure, J. A. (2008) Partial Faiths: Postsecular Fiction in the Age of Pynchon and Morrison. Athens GA: University of Georgia Press. McElvoy, A. and Barney, K. (2007) ‘Is Islam Good for London?’ The Evening Standard 15 November 2007. http://www.thisislondon.co.uk/standard/article-23420892– details/Is+Islam+good+for+London/article.do, accessed 6 April 2009. Massey, D. (1994) Space, Place and Gender. Cambridge: Polity. Milbank, J. (2001 [1990]) Theology and Social Theory: Beyond Secular Reason. Oxford: Blackwell. Millward, P. N. (2002) Pictures with a Message. http://pictureswithamessage.com/ index.htm?743, accessed 3 April 2009 (images of ‘The Broad and the Narrow Way’. http://pictureswithamessage.com/78/cat78.htm?931). Morozov, A. (2008) ‘Has the Postsecular Age Begun?’. Religion, State and Society 36, 39–44. Pattison, G. (2000) ‘Defending the City’. Cultural Values 4, 338–51. Reform (2009) http://www.reform.org.uk/, accessed 2 April 2009. Sheldrake, P. (2001) Spaces for the Sacred: Place, Memory and Identity. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Scott, D. and Hirschkind, C. (eds) (2006) Powers of the Secular Modern: Talal Asad and his Interlocutors. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Smith, G. (2004) ‘Faith in Community and Communities of Faith? Government Rhetoric and Religious Identity in Urban Britain’. Journal of Contemporary Religion 19, 185–204. Smith, J. K. A. (2005) Introducing Radical Orthodoxy: Mapping a Post-Secular Theology. Milton Keynes: Paternoster Press. Soja, E. W. (1996) Thirdspace: Journeys to Los Angeles and Other Real-and-Imagined Places. Cambridge MA: Basil Blackwell. Stringer, M. (2002) ‘Introduction: Theorising Faith’. In Arweck, E. and Stringer, M. (eds) Theorising Faith: The Insider/ Outsider Problem in the Study of Ritual. Birmingham: Birmingham University Press. Swanson, M. (n.d.) ‘Right Belief in a Left-Handed World’. http://www.orthodox.net/ articles/right-belief-in-a-left-handed-world.html, accessed 2 April 2009. Taylor, C. (2007) A Secular Age. Cambridge MA and London: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. Theos—The public theology think tank (2007) Debate: What Role Should Religion Play in the Public Sphere? 6 September 2007, http://www.theosthinktank.co.uk/What_ role_should_religion_play_in_the_public_sphere.aspx?ArticleID=886&PageID=47 &RefPageID=11, accessed 2 April 2009. —— (2008) Debate: UK Christian or Secular? 15 March 2008, http://www.theosthink tank.co.uk/UK_Christian_or_secular.aspx?ArticleID=1931&PageID=47&RefPageI D=11, accessed 2 April 2009. VisitLiverpool.com (2009a) Faith: Places to Visit. http://www.visitliverpool.com/faith/ places-to-visit, accessed 2 April 2009. —— (2009b) Faith Tourism. http://www.visitliverpool.com/site/what-to-do/faith-tour ism, accessed 2 April 2009.

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Vries, H. de and Sullivan, L. E. (eds) (2006) Political Theologies: Public Religions in a Post-Secular World. New York: Fordham University Press. Ward, G. (1999) ‘The Secular City and the Christian Corpus’. Cultural Values 3, 140–63. Wetzel, J. (2004) ‘Splendid Vices and Secular Virtues: Variations on Milbank’s Augustine’. Journal of Religious Ethics 32, 271–300.

PART TWO

CONCEPTUALIZING THE POSTSECULAR

SPACES OF POSTSECULARISM Gregor McLennan In The Sociology of Philosophies, Randall Collins (1998: ch. 1) describes how the initial binary structure of an intellectual field typically broadens out into a more fluid and contested ‘space of attention’, then settles down into something like six more nuanced ‘nodes’, before eventually passing away as the priorities of a new epoch take over. In this chapter, I deploy Collins’s schema heuristically to shape the spreading idea of postsecularism, identifying and appraising four positions—‘epistemic dialogism’, ‘spiritualized progressivism’, ‘poststructuralist vitalism’, and ‘new feminist politics’—that are situated between two others, ‘immanent transcendentalism’ and ‘ironic modernism’. Immanent transcendentalism is my label for Charles Taylor’s panoramic destabilizing of secularist intuitions about modernity and modern social analysis in his book A Secular Age. Not sharing the widespread opinion that Taylor’s arguments are compelling, I produce Ernest Gellner’s ironic modernism as an effective foil. Gellner’s and Taylor’s career-length interests, and their characterizations of individual thinkers and cultural eras, are remarkably similar; yet their philosophical tempers strikingly diverge. They represent, if you like, the social-theoretical equivalent of the ‘Dawkins debate’, in which the intensity of Dawkins’s scientistic atheism is furiously matched by subtler ‘believers’ than Dawkins has time for, who delight in returning the charge of ‘fundamentalism’. And yet, that is not quite right. Gellner and Taylor are included within the postsecular spectrum, rather than standing militantly outside it, because I am taking postsecularism to signal not completely unapologetic stances for or against secularism/secularity, but minimally reflexive, distanced stances. And, just to clarify, my concern is with intellectual stances: the way in which assumptions about the secularity of modern society, and about secularist inclinations in critical social science generally, are being approached afresh in meta-theoretical conversations and debates. This does not mean that ‘secularism’—a very crude term, let’s admit—is being overthrown as such; rather it is being subject to scrutiny and possible reconfiguring. Just as the ‘post’ in the best kind of postmodern theorizing signalled something like

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‘infra-modern’ rather than straightforward ‘anti’ or ‘after’ the modern, so too with postsecularism as I utilize the term: not anti-, or after-, but infra-. I think I can legitimately pursue this line of enquiry on socialtheoretical postsecularism whilst sharing Jim Beckford’s and Bernice Martin’s sceptical view of the concept (see their chapters in this volume) for purposes of substantive sociological investigation. 1. Habermas: ‘Epistemic Dialogism’; Unger: ‘Spiritualized Progressivism’ In Beyond Naturalism and Religion (2008) Jürgen Habermas systematizes a number of his recent papers that, prompted by ‘9/11’, sought to mediate between people of faith and those of none. Habermas considers himself to be personally ‘unmusical’ when it comes to religion, and his ethical commitment is chiefly to cosmopolitan, dialogic democracy. However, any genuinely all-inclusive cosmopolitan democracy, Habermas now thinks, must become much more positive about the expression of religion in politics if it wants devout citizens not only to feel included but to be able to positively contribute to the democratic public culture. Religious citizens, he insists, do have to be prepared to accommodate to the four inescapable conditions of modern secular life—religious pluralism, the universalism of law, the authority of science, and profane popular morality. But the onus falls upon secular citizens too to enter into the mutual learning process without which democratic interaction will stall. Secularists, just like the religious, have to overcome initial ‘cognitive dissonance’ by appreciating not merely that religion remains a vital source of moral energy in society, but, more radically, that religions have truth-content too. Only by achieving such epistemological equivalence is the ‘enlightened common sense’ that Habermas thinks key to political and social progress going to be properly cultivated. This postsecular variant can accordingly be designated ‘epistemic dialogism’. One significant difficulty with Habermas’s new underpinning for multiculturalism is his linked series of presumptions, a) that the majority of citizens in liberal states are secularist, b) that they are consciously secularist, and, c) that secularism simply means ‘non-believing’. All of these strike me as mistaken, or at least misleading. For one thing, the sociological jury is still divided on matters such as the significance of ‘believing without belonging’, and how to characterize those not

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uncommon feelings that, even if there is no God, there is some kind of Lifeforce at work in and through mundane existence. Moreover, few not-especially-religious citizens sit down and explicitly conclude that theirs is a ‘secular’ state of consciousness exactly. Finally, being secular does not equate to ‘non-believing’, not least because many religious people are secularist, understanding that secularism is a necessary condition of religious peace and survival in a markedly pluralist world. And all that is before we consider the ways in which religious commitment intervenes in secular processes in the largest ‘secular’ society in the world today, the USA. Second, Habermas draws from these suppositions a further questionable implication, that it is secularist naturalism rather than religious revivalism that stands as the principal barrier to the development of an enlightened common sense. Here, Habermas seems to have unthinkingly re-hashed a familiar but dubious piece of polemic, that secular life somehow lacks the experiential richness attainable in the religious mode, along with a correspondingly diminished imagination. Third, Habermas’s proposal that the key task is to get deeply religious people and naturalistically inclined minds to take a more epistemically charitable attitude towards one another is unpromising. People who hold ingrained views on matters of truth and causality are unlikely to change their minds ahead of practical political engagement around situationally shared problems. Ideological tensions are seldom relieved by exhortations to get to the cognitive core of the dispute in a calm and all-seeing way. The more hopefully political strategy would be to accept epistemic incommensurability, the harder to work on moral commonalities and shared social predicaments in the cause of progressive understanding. The socio-legal theorist Roberto Unger takes forward this latter sort of humanistic universalism, offering a position that, whilst secular overall, recognizes the energizing quality of religion, especially its intense sense of personal encounter and higher-order responsibility. According to one of Unger’s trademark statements, if we are going to deny God, then this can only be in order to make people more ‘godlike’. Unger’s outlook can therefore be described as ‘spiritualized progressivism’. Unger’s three-volume Politics: A Work in Constructive Social Theory (1987) challenged the ‘necessitarianism’ of major traditions of social thought. Emphasizing human ‘plasticity’ and irreducible social agency, as against the kind of ‘false necessity’ in social life that Unger feels the concepts and theories of social science only underline, his

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drive was to play down our context-reinforcing thinking in the cause of developing our context-breaking collective and individual strategies. In Democracy Realized (1998), these ideas were taken further under the rubric of ‘democratic experimentalism’, including substantial proposals for a deepened social democracy. An important precondition (and outcome) of the latter was supposed to be the inculcation of a widespread ‘high-energy’ and even ‘prophetic’ social personality. With the publication in 2007 of The Self Awakened: Pragmatism Unbound, Unger brings this aspect of his general thinking squarely into the postsecular arena. Like Habermas, Unger is affirmative about modernity and its progressivist potential. He thoroughly approves the ambition of Western thought over 300 years to overthrow all attachment to ‘the perennial philosophy’ that once was dominant, and that he says remains a standing temptation outside the West. Against all illusory quests to escape the reality of embodiment and temporality through ascent into some changeless, eternal realm, governed by the mind of God, Unger endorses— ‘to the hilt’ (2007: 78)—the utter historicity of things. Ourselves as ‘dying organisms’, our societies and ideas, indeed nature itself, and even nature’s laws: all are fully time-ridden. This unsentimental cast of Unger’s thinking underpins a commitment to emancipation from all ‘enslaving superstitions of the mind’, and from the ‘idolatory’ of those who continually seek to substitute a theological for a political vocabulary (2007: 31, 49). For Unger, no ‘evanescent spiritual substance (. . .) escapes nature and its laws’, and whilst he can accept that religious doctrines of salvation provide existential ‘comfort’, they do not fare well at the bench of truth. As for ‘allegorizing salvation’ in humanfriendly, this-worldly terms, this only ‘eviscerates’ holy traditions and ‘undoes’ their historical integrity (2007: 67, 90, 140–1). Clearly, Unger departs from Habermas’s epistemic dialogism at this point. Despite these background materialist inclinations, Unger’s ethical temperament is militantly anti-naturalist, pressing him towards compromise with religious conceptions of human value. Naturalism and necessitarianism, he argues, place ‘transformative will and imagination under a spell’ that must be broken decisively (2007: 1, 35). Echoing Vico, the starting point is that humanity can only truly know that which it has made. So the metaphysical attributes that Unger formulates as central to collective social life—futurity, contingency, agency and experimentalism—are not remotely applicable in the forever ‘strange’ setting of the natural world. Unger thus warns persistently

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against erecting an image of ‘superscience’ as the model for social understanding. Instead, we need to reinvigorate our sense of individual and human capacity. We are natural beings, of course, but we are also ‘radical originals’, people who are constitutionally untamed by whatever constrains them. Where is the motivation to break with social fatalism to come from? Contrary to standard secularism, Unger envisages a central role for religious consciousness in our ‘ascent’ to progressive society and to human ‘greatness’. He sketches out a kind of spiritual upgrading—‘the self awakened’—that will take us firstly from a state of ‘narcoleptic daze’ to an intermediate condition of ‘presence, attention, involvement’; then onwards again to the advanced perceptual and ethical modalities of compassion, self-sacrifice, and mercy. In achieving these demanding virtues, we are touched by the divine, and gain a ‘taste of the eternal’. In this second, higher awakening of self, we can only be ourselves by going beyond ourselves, by ‘making good on the infinity within us’. ‘Once discovered’, a sense of the absolute beckons to the higher self: ‘it is irresistible; it must be lived out’ (2007: 215–29). In appraisal, it is not evident that, given his starting points, Unger needs to invest in the religious register so intensely. If there is a problem about motivation for radical change in secular vein, there might be other ways of disputing religion’s claimed monopoly on spirituality, creativity, and aspiration. Unger’s emphasis on our much-untapped powers of reinvention, for example, overlaps with the ‘capacitarian’ approach to human flourishing advocated by Martha Nussbaum and others. The latter offers its own kind of global uplift whilst keeping its feet pretty much on the ground. No doubt it could be given a further injection of inspirational vocabulary, but Unger takes the infinity of our surplus capacity straight to the heavens, where it still can find no peace. A conceptual gulf then begins to develop between Unger’s affirmation of ordinary human striving and the saintly absolutism of the higher consciousness. Disappointment for most people, and disappointment in them, rises up as a significant danger here, and hardly a progressive one. As the visionary prose rolls on, the stated priority of the strategic and interventionist part of Unger’s programme over the contemplative part gets increasingly strained, and it culminates in bathos—‘life over everything’ is the over-scripted, almost vacant closing phrase. Unger says that his religious conception of self stands only as an optional ‘orientation’ rather than a prerequisite for transformative social change (2007: 222), but this is not hugely persuasive,

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given that the chapter in which that orientation is outlined and recommended carries the title of the book as a whole. As for the whole question of naturalism (and anti-naturalism), this is too sweepingly dealt with. Characteristically, Unger gives a useful formula with which we can re-track the well-worn lines of these debates: theorists should see themselves as lawyers rather than philosophers, and as advocates rather than judges (2007: 37). But we cannot ultimately convince people of anything if we simply equate social science with advocacy, and Unger himself rules out any vulgar reading of the radical pragmatism he favours by insisting that, properly understood, pragmatism by no means brackets out truth and truth-seeking. Yet truth-seeking is about discovering how things work in the world, the better to understand how things might become, a quest for which firmly naturalistic premisses are needed as well as humanist ones. We could even say that Unger’s rejection of necessity and naturalism generates its own low-horizon fatalism, failing to grasp how indispensable are ‘distanced’ and abstract perspectives for generating striking and creative interpretations of the near-at-hand. 2. Connolly: ‘Poststructuralist Vitalism’; Braidotti/Butler: ‘New Feminist Politics’ Neither Habermas nor Unger are much taken by the kind of ‘continental’ social theory that has succeeded both Marxism and its deconstruction. But it is within that sprawling range of reflections that postsecularism has received its most sympathetic interpretations. That there is a variety of positions available here needs to be underlined in bold—‘poststructuralist’ thinking covers the whole postsecular spectrum, not just one type of space within it. Thus, moves are in play which pull the centre of gravity sharply towards the ‘believing’ edge— such as claiming de Certeau for the cause of radical orthodox theology (Ward 2000); or Maffesoli’s (1996: 5) post-Durkheimian injunction that we must grasp the new ‘tribal’ social sacred in the manner of apophatic theology; or Agamben’s (2001) specification of the ‘coming community’ as the recognition of love and God in the all in all of ‘being-thus’. Yet there are counter-tendencies too. Rorty and Vattimo (2005), for example, engage convivially on the prospect of religion without any theists or atheists, but Rorty’s effort to put aside his secularist formation turns out to be gestural, and the overarching conver-

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sation is accordingly flat. Meanwhile, in post-Marxist circles—as Paul Cloke’s chapter in this volume brings out—interesting crossovers are at work. Žižek (2001, 2003) has been arguing that in a secular world (one that is hardly ‘beyond belief’), the Judeo-Christian heritage must be defended, and Eagleton (2009) has been coming out (again) as a Catholic and courier for the message of St. Paul. Yet neither of these thinkers appears significantly to withdraw their Leninist or materialist commitments. Alain Badiou, another admirer of Paul, frequently characterizes his own mathematically universalistic ontology, and his singularistic ethics, by reference to eternity, infinity, immortality, ordeal, evil and grace. ‘Every politics of emancipation rejects finitude’, he says (Badiou 2006: 142), thus seeming to parallel Unger’s summoning of higher realms and deeper reference-points. And yet, again like Unger, in Badiou’s postsecularism there is simply no possibility of God, no possibility of conventionally understood transcendence, or of anything other than emergent immanent unfoldings, triggered by ultrasituated ‘events’ (Badiou 2001: 134; Hallward 2001: xxxvii). At best, then, these developments represent, in Derrida’s phrasing, ‘religion without/beyond religion’ (Derrida 2002; Caputo 1997), which could just as plausibly be construed as the diverse and ongoing secularization of the Secular. Such comprehensive ambivalence can be discerned further in the statements of three of the more accessible authors associated with poststructuralist motifs. In his manifesto Why I am Not a Secularist (1999), William Connolly insists that the kinds of distinctions that are typical of secular social thought—public and private, reason and emotion, fact and morality, the cognitive and the visceral—have completely broken down. Secularists, he says, uphold such distinctions mainly in order to screen out any ‘metaphysics of the supersensible’, and so those distinctions themselves stand, precisely, as metaphysical commitments. Viewed in that light, secular philosophies can be regarded, and possibly pitied, as essentially ‘winter’ doctrines, formulae in search of an impossible moral stabilization and cognitive purity. But if instead we develop an ‘impious reverence for life’, embracing rather than disavowing desire, the intangible and the impure, and accepting wholeheartedly the mixedness of modes of apprehension whereby we grasp the ‘protean energies’ that flow through the organization of all things, then we are better placed to avoid the political exclusionism that necessarily results whenever the ‘irrational’ is intellectually stigmatized or empirically ignored. What then emerges is a more pluralistic, life-

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enhancing ethical stance, one that requires us to abjure altogether the traditional contraposition of social science to religious world-views. ‘Multiple loyalties’ could then be cultivated, a spiritual attitude that might be nothing less than the very soul of the ‘democratic adventure’ (Connolly 1999: 24, 54, 88, 95). Rosi Braidotti’s (2008) outline of the ‘postsecular turn in feminism’ is almost identical. Challenging any necessary connection between secularism and either critical theory or the feminist heritage, Braidotti points to the strong element of spirituality in those favoured lineages, and also to the ‘core’ element of faith in the various neo-humanisms that abound today. Braidotti situates these observations within a larger attempt to drag feminism out of a merely ‘negative’, exclusively oppositional mode of engagement with currents and ideas that do not reinforce the familiar image of political women as the ‘secular and rebellious daughters of the Enlightenment’. These moves can be made, she thinks, by combining an ‘affirmative’ philosophical neo-vitalism with a positive political approach to religious groups, the latter often being in the forefront of all that needs changing in the world, and whose ranks already contain progressive thinking (feminist theology, for example—and not only Christian feminist theology). Such a feminist repositioning is all the more urgent in a ‘world at war’, in which masculinism and heteronormativity are constantly valorized, and in which images of the liberated West versus backward Islam run rampant. The specifically political angle here is even more firmly driven home by Judith Butler (2008): we are in a situation in which patriarchal and racist politics lie entwined at the heart of contemporary state violence (not least in the French authorities’ manipulation of uprisings in the banlieue as the predictable extremism of children of absent fathers; and in the sexual torture of Abu Ghraib ‘justice’). The use of notions of liberated sexual politics/women as the test of Islam’s democratic adequacy cannot merely be accidental in this context; it is the result of the coercive logic of secularist modernity itself. The time has come, therefore, to be accelerating long-standing feminist dissatisfaction with the division between state/public/men and religion/private/ women. This leads us to problematize the very idea of ‘secular time’ (Butler), and to promote new ways of thinking ‘in spite of the times’ (Braidotti). In discussion of these significant interventions, we may start by wondering why neo-vitalism plays such a prominent role. The answer seems to be that if it is secularists that envisage political critique as subsisting—impossibly—quite apart from wider metaphysical commit-

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ments, then postsecular approaches must not make that same mistake. Vitalism then steps forward as the appropriate meta-ethic because it open us outwards towards ‘inter-relations with non-human, posthuman and inhuman forces’, yet without compelling us to take these interfaces in an absolutely religious or non-religious way (Braidotti 2008: 16). We should immediately note that these promotions of neovitalism tend to be rolled out as declarations—there is little precise philosophizing as such. Connolly’s postsecular theorizing in particular comes across as freewheeling rumination rather than acute argumentation, no doubt in part due to the widespread poststructuralist suspicion of ‘rationalist’ modes of appraisal. Yet this borders on the irresponsible: if neo-vitalism is to stand as the new intellectual hegemon, it must thoroughly convince as well as provoke. Unfortunately, a few problems emerge in that regard. For example, Braidotti’s call to move beyond the goal of producing ‘counter-subjectivities’, towards a vitalist ‘practice of affirmation’ and the nurturing of ‘generous bonds’ (2008: 15–18), is more easily issued than answered. Appearing thoroughly to endorse the ‘creative potential’ that surges through the very pores of being, we soon learn that such receptivity has definite limits. ‘Classical’ vitalism, for example, stands in Braidotti’s (2008: 13) eyes as tainted by fascistic political connotations, and if the buzz of ‘multiple modes of interaction with heterogeneous others’ certainly includes Muslims, it seems to not to include the Pope’s sort of religious heterogeneity, or the vitality of the heterosexual family, or the surges and creativity evident in all manner of competitiveness and conflict as part ‘life itself ’. So this is not fully open-ended vitalism after all, but a highly selective, moralizing brand. Nothing wrong with that perhaps, except that the high ground has been claimed on the basis of overcoming the ‘negativism’ that inevitably accompanies such politicized moralizing. As for neo-vitalism’s traffic with the ‘inhuman’ and ‘posthuman’, again the connotations of non-discriminatory apprehension are entirely misleading, because we are certainly not talking about the positivity of nuclear weapons systems, Hurricane Katrina, corpse-tampering, or virus-spreading. In short, the bracing open-ness of radical neo-vitalism turns out not to be for real, partly because vitalism itself, when unconnected to very specific scientific discourses and substantive claims, constantly threatens to slide towards all-purpose vacuousness. Further doubts accumulate when neo-vitalist postsecularism fails to make good its impression of being, in fact, non-secular. For example, on the basis of no detailed argument, Braidotti takes it for granted that

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secularists cannot be ‘spiritual’; that spirituality intrinsically belongs, as it were, to the religious side of things. This is a blinkered view. Why should the undoubtedly spiritual aspects of a whole number of accentuated experiences involving a sense of cosmic awe or inner transformation or intimations of the sublime uniquely be associated with religious revelation rather than secular humanist appreciation? Such heightened moments, after all—Braidotti’s ‘sense of belonging to the world as a process of perpetual becoming’ (2008: 13)—can be found in science, adventure, sport, parenthood, and art, and they can be cultivated into practices of the self that require no reference whatever to supernatural beings or divine influence, grace and mercy. Indeed, it is clearly the case that, empirically, just such ‘secular spirituality’ is significantly on the rise. A related conflation has it that because there is an element of ‘faith’ in contemporary neo-humanist contributions, these movements, once again, signify a religious rather than secular sensibility. But humanist ‘faith’ is more appropriately couched as hope rather than devotion, and its concepts of persons and projects differ decisively from any version of humanism requiring that human virtues ultimately be derived from God’s will. It is intellectually negligent to occlude this central difference, even if we seek—as we should—to pursue productive and harmonious political alliances between people of faith and progressive unbelievers. Part of the confusion in such postsecular arguments appears to lie in the—undoubtedly true—perception that progressive modernism partakes of images of human purpose and destiny coming out of the Judeo-Christian traditions. But we must be careful here not to commit the ‘genetic fallacy’: all ideas partake of whatever context brings them into being, without them being forever destined to be determined by that formative context. It would seem particularly incumbent upon neo-vitalists to respect this law of creative emergence. So whilst, manifestly, the very idea of the secular is a Christian invention, no ‘essentialist’ future projections can be made from that historical baseline. Anyway, it is not as if writers like Braidotti and Connolly are as markedly non- or anti-secular as they sometimes make out. Braidotti advocates ‘immanent, not transcendental theory’, and a ‘materialist’ version of ‘philosophical monism’. The last thing she wants, in fact, is a ‘secularized version of theological concepts’ (Braidotti 2008: 13). But this is clearly an invitation to better, more consistent and attractive secular principles, not an injunction to collapse secularism into reli-

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gion. Connolly, for his part, eventually gets round to admitting that, far from under-writing religious piety, or even establishing parity between religious and non-religious mentalities, his stance is probably better understood as ‘ironic evangelical atheism’, signalling only a ‘nontheistic gratitude for the (. . .) plurivocity of being’ (Connolly 1999: 159). As one reviewer on an Islamicist web journal correctly observed, the outlook that Connolly summons up here, and his consistently agonistic posture, are ‘only intelligible within a secularist worldview’. Above all, he ‘does not deliver a single confessional reflection’, and exudes merely ‘a dogmatic claim of uncertainty’ that genuine believers could only experience as disingenuous (http://www.islam21.net/pages/keyis sues/key5–10.htm). Neo-vitalism is less central to Judith Butler’s critique. She focuses insistently on the way in which notions of freedom progressing over time sanction racist coercion against ‘backward’ and ‘not yet arrived’ cultural difference, actively prohibiting the legitimate expression of ‘traditional religious beliefs’. Secular figures of the one time, homogeneous time, mature time, this time, she argues, ignore the many times that are in play, the complex ‘intersections of histories’ that characterize our multiple modernity. Secular time, by contrast, has served as nothing other than ‘state discourse’, though perhaps not in an ‘unalloyed’ secular way, given that it is laced through by background religious apologetics—Catholic in the case of France, Protestant elsewhere—which conspire to exclude and prohibit the ‘norms of Islamic community’ in particular (Butler 2008: 1–2, 12–13, 18). For all its directness, this analysis, like those of Connolly and Braidotti, is hamstrung by its underlying theoretical wavering. On the one hand, Butler steadily conveys the sense that there are utterly indissociable connections—‘historical, rhetorical and logical alliances’ (Butler 2008: 19)—between modernity, state violence, ‘cultural assaults on Islam’, and secular time; connections that result, as a matter of necessity, in all sorts of politically awful consequences. But, then again, it is also accepted that such fused associations, even if they run deep, are contingent. Butler is thus aware of the dangers of resorting to ‘cultural wholism’ in this matter, such that the different times and cultures are perceived to be so completely ontologically distinct that each is ‘conceived as self-sufficient’ (Butler 2008: 1). Yet, if that is a misconception, if cultural wholism is inappropriate, then there must be nothing wrong in principle with a (complex) secular view of the time that, today, we all inescapably share. The situation, in that case, is not in fact

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one of radically incommensurable historicities, all jaggedly juxtaposed out there. Talk of ‘multiple modernities’ certainly flags up important and unsettling differences, but that signature phrase makes no conceptual sense except by reference to a broader societal commonality. Moreover, as with the others, Butler is not finally disavowing secularism. Her onslaught against hegemonic global violence does suggest that secular values are hollow and dangerous per se; yet overall it is the ‘uses’ to which they are put that are damnable (2008: 3). Analytically, the recommendation is not to ditch secularism tout court, but to reject any version whereby it is thought to ‘succeed[s] religion sequentially’. The corrective still turns out to be a secular view, only one that would ‘reanimate it [religion] as part of its ideas of cultural and civilization’ (2008: 14). Actually, given the severe drubbing of all dominant forms of secular (plus Catholic) politics that Butler metes out, and her overriding concern not to alienate religious minorities, it is not clear how this position could generate a strong enough ethic to really animate or ‘reanimate’ most people. This is because what emerges is an essentially ‘facilitative’ conception aiming to encourage ‘a discursive matrix for the articulation and disputation of values, and a field of contestation’ (2008: 13). Nevertheless, even this notably ‘thin’ norm, that our overriding value is the responsible mediation of the probably more substantive values of others, is unmistakeably modern, secular and liberal in character. 3. Taylor: ‘Immanent Transcendentalism’ In A Secular Age, Charles Taylor gives an interpretation of modernity and our current condition that holds out some promise of transcendence beyond, yet within and through, the immanent. To clear the ground for this postsecular possibility, Taylor strives to expose the damaging ‘unthought’ that lies behind the familiar ‘secularization thesis’ of mainstream social science, namely the assumption that no question of God, belief, hope and redemption has anything to do with our modern knowledge-building practices (2007: 427–30). But this professional assumption, Taylor argues, is nothing but a secularist bias, born out of doctrines designed to ‘keep at bay’ the ‘moral malaise’, the ‘terrible flatness’, and the ‘aching lack’ of over-rationalized being in the modern era. Taylor does not wish to turn the clock back, or altogether to reject the ‘immanent frame’. Yet he does insist that

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secularity—which lies at the heart of the ‘modern social imaginary’—is not a matter of secularism as such. We have certainly gone, over many centuries, from a situation in which everyone believed in God to one in which that stands as only one option amongst others, and in which secularism, at least among critical intellectuals, has established itself as the ‘default option’. Nonetheless, openness to the prospect of an otherwise unavailable ‘fullness’ remains a very ‘live option’ within today’s ‘galloping spiritual pluralism’, in which reflexivity is everything and decisive truth impossible (2007: 300). It follows that social analysts as well as active citizens are under an obligation not to close out the possibility of transcendence, including the transforming power of ‘God’s pedagogy’. Working forwards from medieval Christendom, with occasional references to ‘pre-Axial’ systems, Taylor relates how it was that ‘we’ got from a fused, sacred sense of being in the world to the fractured mentality of the secular age. The story is told of how the ‘bulwarks of belief’ were steadily broken down. From an enchanted world (‘charged’ objects, portentous occurrences, spirits actively entwined with earthly doings) to a disenchanted world; from a porous self (people ‘possessed by’ and ‘receiving’ supernatural influences) to a buffered self; from subjectivity prone to and seeking of God’s love and intervention to a fortress-like, self-sufficient self, keeping the world and its deeper currents at a distance; from God’s functional kingly cosmos to an impersonal, causal universe; from a life close-to-chaos, punctuated by timely revelry and periodic symbolic overturnings to disciplined and purified conduct; from multiple, simultaneous, higher, and ‘kairotic’ times to a singular linear time; from ‘vertical’ social relations and ethical norms to ‘horizontal’ ones; from a sociality collectively orientated to the divine, to a society of individuals governed by the hidden hand of mutual benefit; from the ‘incarnation’ of mystery and inspiration within our very bodies, to intellectualistic ‘excarnation’. Being largely a history of ideas, Taylor paints a long series of thoughtpictures and thinker-portraits. Augustine it was who first presented the compound logic of the distinction between the earthly/heavenly city, without which secularism makes no historical sense. Lipsius’ neoStoicism first contrasted the virtues of detachment and constancy at the expense of a compassion reflective of God’s love. Descartes was the theorist of the mechanical universe and the ethics of disciplined, reasoned charity. The natural law philosophers confirmed that men are reasonable and sociable, and thus rights-worthy. Deism, with its

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impersonal order under a creator, but not interventionist, God represents the ‘great disembedding’ of Spirit out of its previously mundane setting. And then comes the ‘turning point’, when, after the ‘anthropocentric turn’ taken by various Enlighteners, ‘exclusive humanism’ emerges, shorn of all theological trappings. From here, the modern social imaginary consolidates, governed by characteristic ‘metatopical spaces’ (civil society, the public sphere), and ‘metatopical agencies’ (above all, the people). The world of pastoral mediation and trials of access starts to disappear; hell is ‘eclipsed’, divinity itself is eclipsed, and exclusive humanism enthrones the idea that social actions and meanings involve nothing whatever outside intra-human relations. Throughout this scenario, Taylor accepts that ‘something’, and something that has been on a rather ‘long march’, deserves the name of secularization (Taylor 2007: 426). But he vehemently opposes the customary ‘subtraction story’ of secularization, whereby illusory supernaturalism is stripped away under the fierce sun of science, leaving only what was always there anyway: rational human nature, and human flourishing as the sole source of the good. For one thing, the shift to immanence represents inward ontological relocation rather than evacuation of all supra-empirical grounding. Prior to the high modern era, moreover, virtually every move towards the secular was motivated by strong religious concern. The Reformation, for example, was just one in a long series of ‘rages for order’ starting in late medieval Christendom, through which ecclesiastics attempted to purify or sanctify lay culture. The gradual escape from God has thus been parasitic on the need to make God more present in everyday life. Relatedly, Taylor insists that the coming of secularity traces not a linear but a ‘zig-zag’ pattern, each bout of reforming or secular zeal generating social resistance and doctrinal re-specification. Episodes of revivalism are recounted in that light, and the ‘expanding universe of unbelief’ in Victorian times is framed within a larger nova effect triggered by the original polarity between exclusive humanism and religious responses. All in all, Taylor asserts, the ‘whole modern package’ can’t simply be held to ‘beat out’ the religious package, partly because creative artists have created ‘subtler languages’ through which multiple temporalities can still be read and the ineffable glimpsed. If there is a kernel of truth in secular modernism, the persistence of intense ‘cross pressures’ show how the moral space is more definitively structured by the draw to spiritual transformation, and resistance to that pull. Even in our ‘age of authenticity’ the sacred continues to erupt, sometimes

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in ‘neo-Durkheimian’ forms (One Nation under God), sometimes in moments of ‘post-Durkheimian’ effervescence (raves, pilgrimages, grief for Princess Di). The inexhaustible push for (re)incarnation and ecstasy is expressed indirectly through increasingly explicit sexual mores, health consciousness, therapy and carnival. Taylor scrutinizes what secular humanist thinkers offer by way of resolving our common ‘dilemmas’—the persistence of violence, the ‘mutilation’ of ordinary sensuousness, the meaning of life, ultimately deeming them to be ‘very unconvincing’. If immanent closure is ‘permitted’, Taylor concludes, it is not ‘demanded’; the transcendent cannot just be ‘sloughed off’. Thus we stand at the unquiet frontiers of modernity: restless at the barriers of the purely human sphere (2007: 726). Taylor’s extraordinary edifice is founded upon a lifetime of serious reflection, and it is refreshing to see someone of his stature bringing his habitual anti-naturalism to a personal culmination. In terms of the impact of the argument, moreover, his is certainly the weightiest endorsement to date of the idea that the secular age is, in effect, a postsecular space of significant debate. A number of critical angles nevertheless spring to mind on absorbing this long and repetitive opus. One is that, other than through references to a handful of philosophers, Taylor produces little serious support for his principle hypothesis— that ‘exclusive humanism’ has been hegemonic in Western liberal culture for the last 300 years (rather than, say, the last 40). Secondly, throughout A Secular Age, Taylor’s treatment of opposing views is often cursory. Of course, for any such personal and ideological project, some kind of ‘tilting towards the believer’ (2007: 7) is to be expected. But almost as soon as substantial contrary positions have been introduced, they are instantly dispatched as ‘wholly uncompelling’. Thus, in the only comment (2007: 258) on Feuerbach’s historically significant argument, all Taylor can say is that he simply ‘can’t agree’, on account of ‘all the malaise’. Steve Bruce’s hypothesis that religion will probably fade due to gradual indifference rather than outright refutation is found to be ‘deeply implausible’ because Taylor ‘can’t see the “demand for religion” just disappearing like that’ (2007: 434). He then acknowledges that Bruce himself is not, in fact, an ‘eliminationist’. Nussbaum’s influential statement of the ‘capacities’ approach to human flourishing is (tendentiously) characterized as making a distinction between internal and external transcendence and then favouring the former. This will not do, Taylor rules, because true transcendence is that which completely ‘wrench[es] us out of

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the human mould’ (2007: 629), an amended definition that cuts right against his ongoing acceptance that for all moderns, transcendence is an option within the immanent frame, not absolutely outside it. Further rhetorical asymmetries abound. Having trounced the standard ‘subtraction’ story of how religion is ‘beaten out’ by science (without discussing any subtle or considered version of this argument), Taylor indulges in a huge ‘subtraction story’ of his own. Accordingly, any kind of scientific rationalism appears to be in business for nothing other than ‘keeping the lack at bay’, sucking the very life and richness out of things, over-ridingly fixed upon ‘denying transcendence’. As noted earlier, he bemoans how the debate about secularization is ‘bedevilled’ by secularist sociologists bent on screening out the veritable ‘unthought’ that governs their dogmatic un-receptivity (roughly, the assumption that ‘this is all there is’); but the underlying ‘unthought’ that drives this very characterization (that there had better be something else) completely escapes sceptical scrutiny. One ‘take’ on the immanent order is said to tend to ‘closure’, the other to ‘open-ness’ (i.e. openness to transcendence). But only the first is pronounced to be a matter of ‘spin’, indeed it is deemed nothing less than a ‘disability’, a ‘false aura’, ‘clouded’, ‘cramped’. Finally, the ‘closed world structures’ of modern ‘evidentialist epistemology’ are considered to be nothing but ‘pictures holding us captive’, as though stentorian reminders of the ever-unattainable beyond are not themselves an equivalent kind of imprisoning. 4. ‘Philosophic History’: Gellner versus Taylor If Taylor’s conceptual and rhetorical register is surprisingly weak, this might not be thought sufficient to wreck the whole enterprise, being a story of moral modernity that Taylor has told several times over the years, notably in Hegel and Modern Society (1979) and Sources of the Self (1988). I want to continue my assessment of this by comparing Taylor’s overall project to that of Ernest Gellner, who covered similar themes and thinkers in books of the same vintage—Legitimation of Belief (1974), Plough, Sword and Book (1988), Reason and Culture (1992a), and Postmodernism, Reason and Religion (1992b). Although Gellner’s parallel trajectory—which we can think of as ‘ironic modernism’—is not referenced by Taylor, there are considerable overlaps between the two thinkers, as well as elementary antagonisms. They

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share in common for example the view that social science needs to be underpinned by ‘philosophic history’; that Marxism’s understanding of the relationship of ideas to economic motivation/function is unacceptably reductionist; that reason and religion have been intimately and decisively bound up with one another; and that rationalistic modernism undermines people’s need for emotional fulfilment and cultural identity. However, Gellner would almost certainly have criticized Taylor’s postsecularism for its excessively idealist mode of socio-historical understanding, and for its related romanticist view of our current alienation. One form that idealism takes in the contemporary human sciences is a hermenuetic perspective on knowledge, pivotal to which is the claim that the social disciplines cannot be scientific in any regular sense, because self-understandings and perceived experience must form an integral part of any viable secondary account. This internalist concern to place self-identity at the core of social insight led Taylor, famously, to provide the philosophical specification for a multiculturalist ‘politics of recognition’ (Taylor 1992). The same concern drives his current work too, most obviously in the claim that the secularization thesis can be given very short shrift, simply on account of its hermeneutic deficiency, that is, its failure to conform to ‘our best phenomenology’ (Taylor 2007: 5, 609). According to the latter, ‘everyone understands’ the ‘lack of thickness’ in the culture, and recognizes modernity’s constitutive inability to quell our ‘aching for fullness’ (Taylor 2007: 305–7). But this is overkill hermeneutics. As Gellner consistently pointed out against excessive varieties of ‘internalism’, from post-war Wittgensteinianism to postmodern relativism, the self-conceptions of cultural actors, though quite properly constraining our social analyses of their situations, by no means determine or exhaust those analyses. Meanings do not exclusively constitute the social world, in other words; nor are they ever wholly transparent to their creators (Gellner 1992b: 63–71). The great danger that Gellner saw in the ‘cult of selfexplanatoriness’ which marks social theory whenever ‘externalist’ or causal explanations are felt to be dispensible, is that the lifeworlds and ideologies under examination tend to get simply ‘re-endorsed’ by the over-appreciative theorist (Gellner 1974: 106, 145). For Gellner, this amounts to a dereliction of intellectual duty, particularly so in the modern (post)industrial world, when the lebenswelt has lost any semblance of natural, spontaneous community or expressivity. The very use of terms like lebenswelt could be seen as a rather sad attempt by

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academics to contrive a substitute ‘homeliness’ in the study, where little remains on the ground outside (Gellner 1974: 198–9). Without a stronger sense of empirical constraint, what Taylor thinks of as ‘our best phenomenology’ may be no more than one person’s impressionism. What exactly, for example, is to count as telling evidence for something as vague as ‘aching for fullness’—do we now have to translate things like existential angst, educational underperformance, lack of self-esteem, youthful violence, social inequality, and the rest into this even looser register? And how many people has Taylor consulted in deciding that everyone understands that what is lacking in modern culture is ‘thickness’? In fact, is the ‘everyone’ of 1892 the same ‘everyone’ of 1982? And is the variety of practices that people engage in to repair whatever sense of spiritual lack they feel always appropriately designated as religious? Taylor tends to deflect such requests for decisive specificity, by disparaging what he sees as the dominant preference in philosophy for ‘evidential epistemology’. The point about evidence and surface facticity, he says, is that their significance is governed by background ‘schemata’, which being generated by ultimate metaphysical values are themselves beyond the reach of empirical scrutiny. Gellner, by contrast, suggested that after Hume and Kant, the schemas of neither Reason nor Culture could never again be treated as self-sustaining, immune to the search for truly independent justification. Like it or not, ‘empiricism places culture on trial’ (Gellner 1992a: 166–70). This more stringent approach would certainly lead us, for example, to critique Taylor-like constructions of a supra-historical ‘we’, endowed with common experience and sense of (loss and recovery of) self through very different epochal formations. For Gellner, ‘the real subject of philosophic history’, is ‘collective change of identity’ over time (Gellner 1988: 194, emphasis added), forcing us to pay attention to the discontinuities and irreversible turning points in human species development. Gellner also noted (1992b: 64) that hermeneutic-idealist sociology is often, ‘at root’, Hegelian, and this further pinpoints the provenance of Taylor’s effort to forge a dialectic of continuity and change in the matter of the coming (and going) of secularism. Taylor does not explicitly draw out the parallel between his own sort and Hegel’s Phenomenology, but the terrible negativity and flatness of the modern moral order can be brought under two aspects that show the convergence. In a first perception, we witness a straightforwardly ‘mutilating’ cultural regression, generating a diminished sense of human accomplishment

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and expectation, and leaving unmet that awful, aching sense of lack. But under another horizon of possibility, this experiential and cognitive negation might itself be negated. Moral modernity might then be regarded as the externalized expression, the socio-material form, and the historically alienated ‘moment’ of human consciousness as it ascends, zig-zaggedly, towards self-realization. Indeed, Reflexive Spirit could only come to full and final self-realization through recognition of the necessity of its having this negative moment, with the latter then taking on fresh, transformed significance as it gets preserved, in and through being superseded. Taylor spends a brief chapter denying that his approach to secularism and its discontents is unduly idealist in character, but it is one of his least committed passages. He does concede that he could have provided more in the way of sociological analysis, but the problem is not just the lack of space devoted to socio-economic and political factors; there also seems to be an intrinsic reluctance to grant legitimacy to social science explanation. For example, in Taylor’s discussions of contested visions of the nineteenth century, page after page is given over to poetic and romanticist projects that sought to save something of lost spirituality, whilst the conditioning social processes of industrialism, urbanization, market capitalism, institutional differentiation, empire and state formation receive only brief incidental comments. This culturalist bias produces a relentlessly one-note message to the effect that utilitarianism and scientism in the bourgeois age were repressive and soul-crushing. It is as though, after 160 years of social and cultural enquiry, Dickens’s Hard Times still says it all. A Secular Age loses ground here when compared with Sources of the Self, because in the earlier work the ‘modern moral order’ was more appropriately regarded as having two sides, with positivism and romanticism closely entangled, feeding off each other. 5. Conclusion In this chapter, I have emphasized that, being a spectrum rather than just a position, postsecularism contains spaces, elements, and inclinations that are not directly religious as such, nor give special encouragement to religion or even spirituality, at least as traditionally understood. And I have built up to a sustained critical commentary on Taylor, because A Secular Age has been hailed as a masterwork,

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seemingly beyond reproach. Gellner’s ironic modernism for its part might be thought to fall outside the postsecular spectrum altogether. But because he accepts that there can be no neutral or final ground upon which the ‘cognitively expansive and morally mute’ worldview that he subscribes to can be decisively demonstrated to be superior to the ‘morally satisfying and cognitively stagnant’ worldview that he criticizes, his too is a postsecular option. Gellner therefore owns up to the element of ‘fundamentalism’ in his commitment to Enlightenment rationalism (Gellner 1992b), just as the theoretical visions he opposes must be acknowledged as ‘self-ratifying’ (Gellner 1988: 201). All this can be graphically illustrated by the final chapter of A Secular Age, entitled ‘Conversions’, where Taylor gives a new twist to Thomas Kuhn’s terminology of ‘paradigm change’. Kuhn, albeit whimsically, described the moment of dramatic transition in scientific knowledge as being akin to the experience of religious conversion. After all, given the existence of competing rationalities stemming from different paradigms, rationality per se could hardly be expected to arbitrate between those competing paradigms at the point of crisis. The Kuhnian turnover thus feels more like revelation than revolution. Taylor takes this image one step further. What if the most drastic paradigm switch of all is the one that altogether shifts us out of the public sphere of scientific-rationalist legitimation of belief into the subjective testing-ground of conversion—the revelation of revelation, so to speak? Urging us to trust in ‘God’s pedagogy’, and to learn from exemplary or saintly acts of loving charity, Taylor trusts that the confining immanent frame must needs finally be breached, leaving us once again ever-open to transcendence. For reflective neo-secularists like Gellner—and myself—this fond hope represents not a broadening, but a dramatic narrowing of human vision, sustained by a series of intellectual misperceptions. But perhaps no argument can ever resolve the matter, and in any case, Gellner felt that his own cognitively driven worldview could certainly not match the levels of emotional involvement offered by hermeneutic-salvationist projects. What we are then left with, Gellner had to conclude, was an unremittingly tragic situation. Recently updating that sentiment, John Gray (2007) prescribes a ‘Stoical’ philosophical outlook as the only feasible management strategy for the painful disjunction between cognitive and moral progress that history patently reveals. Against the grain of such diagnoses, more optimistic secularists, together with many unbelieving postsecularists, will continue to hold that a symbi-

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otic relationship between objective understanding and fulfilling social relationships is not to be ruled out, at least over the longer term. And the postsecular turn will have contributed to that possibility if it can be conceived as legitimately including the space to develop the kind of complex naturalistic socialism that the terms secularism and atheism only very crudely capture. References Agamben, G. (2001) The Coming Community. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Badiou, A. (2001) Ethics. London: Verso. —— (2006) Metapolitics. London: Verso. Braidotti, R. (2008) ‘In Spite of the Times: the Postsecular Turn in Feminism’. Theory, Culture & Society 25, 1–24. Butler, J. (2008) ‘Sexual Politics, Torture and Secular Time’. British Journal of Sociology 59, 1–23. Caputo, J. D. (1997) The Prayers and Tears of Jacques Derrida: Religion without Religion. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Collins, R. (1998) The Sociology of Philosophies: A Global Theory of Intellectual Change. Cambridge MA: Harvard University/Belknap Press. Connolly, W. E. (1999) Why I Am Not a Secularist. Minneapolis: Minnesota University Press. Derrida, J. (2002) Acts of Religion. London: Routledge. Eagleton, T. (2009) Trouble with Strangers: A Study of Ethics. Oxford: Wiley Blackwell. Gellner, E. (1974) Legitimation of Belief. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press —— (1988) Plough, Sword, and Book: The Structure of Human History. London: Collins. —— (1992a) Reason and Culture: The Historic Role of Rationality and Rationalism. Oxford: Blackwell. —— (1992b) Postmodernism, Reason and Religion. London: Routledge. Gray, J. (2007) Black Mass: Apocalyptic Religion and the Death of Utopia. London: Allen Lane. Habermas, J. (2008) Beyond Naturalism and Religion. Cambridge: Polity Press. Hallward, P. (2001) ‘Translator’s Introduction’ to Badiou (2001). Maffesoli, M (1996) The Time of the Tribes. London: Sage. Rorty, R. and G. Vattimo (2005) The Future of Religion. New York: Columbia University Press. Taylor, C. (1979) Hegel and Modern Society. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. —— (1988) Sources of the Self. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. —— (1992) Multiculturalism and the ‘Politics of Recognition’: An Essay. Princeton: Princeton University Press. —— (2007) A Secular Age. Cambridge MA: Harvard University/Belknap Press. Unger, R. M. (1987) Politics: A Work in Constructive Social Theory. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. —— (1998) Democracy Realised: the Progressive Alternative. London: Verso. —— (2007) The Self Awakened: Pragmatism Unbound. Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press.

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Ward, G. (2000) The Certeau Reader. Oxford: Blackwell. Žižek, S. (2001) Beyond Belief. London: Routledge. —— (2003) The Puppet and the Dwarf: the Perverse Core of Christianity. Cambridge MA: MIT Press.

CONTRASTING MODERNITIES: ‘POSTSECULAR’ EUROPE AND ENSPIRITED LATIN AMERICA Bernice Martin The rationale of this paper is to show the value of Charles Taylor’s analysis for a comparison between the religiously vibrant scene in Latin America and the uniquely secular context of Western Europe. However, I have reservations about the idea of ‘postsecularity’. It is highly debatable whether contemporary Europe is ‘postsecular’, even though the classical secularization thesis is in some disarray. If there is anything qualitatively new about the position of religion in the West that might be caught by the term ‘postsecularity’, it lies in the processes of global mobility that result in the presence in all global cities of religious sub-populations who have not been formed by the cultural history that made the West ‘secular’ in Charles Taylor’s sense. The rise of an exclusively secular perspective as the ‘default position’ in the West has preoccupied Taylor for at least the last twenty years and formed the major theme of his two most influential books, Sources of the Self and A Secular Age (Taylor 1989; 2007). For that reason I am doubtful whether ‘postsecular’ is the most useful label for Taylor’s work. But, the term has acquired currency, and Taylor is one of the contemporary philosophers directly challenging the dominance of secularist assumptions in social philosophy. I begin, therefore, with a consideration of the paradoxes underlying the emergence of the term ‘postsecular’. A cynical sociologist of religion might suggest the increasing use of the term ‘postsecular’ indicates that Europeans who had taken for granted the irrelevance of religion in modern society have been forced to revise their views by the appearance of Muslims in the public sphere of Europe and North America, and of Islamist terrorism as a feature of global politics. As a consequence, some of them have belatedly recognized that religion is a powerful force in America, not quite as moribund in Europe as used to be assumed, and growing like wildfire in the developing world. But there is more to it than this. The association of secularization with the advance of modernity and science has been one of the most pervasive assumptions in sociology, a central plank of the theoretical

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models and methodological prescriptions of the founding fathers, and seemingly validated by the decline of European Christianity and the rise of the influential secular perspective in the West that is anatomized in Charles Taylor’s work. All the social sciences, as offshoots of the European Enlightenment, had secular assumptions built in from the first. Even the sociology of religion, which might be expected to harbour some empathy for the religious perspective, has traditionally insisted upon ‘methodological atheism’, which in practice it is as likely to support reductionist assumptions and definitions (religion as a secondary manifestation of something more ‘real’, such as ‘deprivation’, the fear of death, or an assumed need for comfort, or certainty, or economic advantage) as to guarantee the predicated scientific ‘objectivity’ (Beckford 2003; Davie 2007; 2008). In 1965 David Martin wrote an article arguing that the secularization thesis was as much secularist ideology as science, and frequently involved self-fulfilling prophecy masquerading as disinterested theory and selective observation presented as objectivity (David Martin 1965; 1966). The sociological community paid little attention. But in 2006 José Casanova suggested that the dominance of a secularist knowledge regime among social scientists and public commentators was the main reason public expressions of religion were regarded as a problem (Casanova 2006). In Public Religions in the Modern World Casanova had shown that, despite what the secularization theory claimed about religion having become ‘privatized’, religion had never in fact been absent from the public sphere either in Europe or America, irrespective of whether there was a formal separation of state and Church (Casanova 1994). Casanova was widely acclaimed as having transformed the field. Are the empirical changes in the situation of religion sufficient to explain why Casanova’s argument about secularist bias can now be taken seriously as evidence of a ‘postsecular turn’, while David Martin’s, forty years earlier, was not? 1. Religion since the Mid-Twentieth Century: Empirical Developments From the 1960s onwards, Latin America saw an enormous growth of popular Protestantism, mainly Pentecostalism, especially among the mobile poor who were flocking to the burgeoning megacities. These cities quickly became honeycombed with store-front churches with

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a bewildering variety of names, and later dotted with converted cinemas, warehouses and purpose-built megachurches, in some places even whole Pentecostal sub-sectors, all claiming and proclaiming an increasingly visible city presence for the new faith (David Martin 1990; 2002; Freston 2007). There was also a parallel, though weaker, revival in Latin American Catholicism, some of it through liberation theology but much of it as a direct response to, and imitation of, the Pentecostals. Formally Catholic ever since the Conquest, Latin America has become roughly 10% Protestant. In some places, such as Guatemala, and perhaps Haiti, as much as a third of the population is now some variety of Evangelical, while in parts of urban Brazil and Chile it is not unusual to find the numbers of regularly practising Protestants roughly equal to regularly practising Catholics. There are currently some 60 million Latin American Evangelicals, 40 million of them Pentecostal. The Pentecostal/Evangelical revolution spread to Africa and Asia, the Far East and China, with growth peaks in the 1980s and 1990s (Meyer 1999; Gifford 2004; Maxwell 2007; Soothill 2007; Anderson and Tang 2005). It now covers around a quarter of a billion people. Next to the Islamic revival (Islam is the faith of around one and a quarter billion people, worldwide), the growth of Pentecostalism constitutes the most significant shift in global religious ecology in the last half-century. Over the same period, beginning in the early 1960s, Western Europe experienced an unprecedentedly steep decline in the most obvious indices of institutional religious vitality across the whole range of the Christian churches (Bruce 2002). It also saw the diffusion of a personalized ‘spirituality’, often with a New Age feel, both inside and outside the churches (Sutcliffe and Bowman 2000; Heelas and Woodhead 2004; Partridge 2004), and a small sprinkling of eclectic New Religious Movements (Lucas and Robbins 2004; Arweck 2007). Eastern Europe was a different story again. Despite decades of state sponsored atheism and the suppression or domination of the Church by the state, the fall of communism between 1989 and 1991 sparked off a resurgence of many of the repressed ethno-religions of the mostly Orthodox East (David Martin 1996; Hann 2006; Müller 2008). The fluid period immediately after the collapse of the Soviet hegemony accelerated the growth of many forms of popular Protestantism and, on a smaller scale, of New Religious Movements that had gained a foothold in Soviet times. Though religious tolerance forms part of all the new postsocialist constitutions, religious pluralism remains contested in many parts of the region, particularly by Orthodox hierarchies who tend to oppose the

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intrusion of what they see as alien forms of religion. The resurgence of ethno-religious nationalisms, Christian and Muslim alike, reawakened the sense that a religious ‘fault line’ ran through Eastern Europe where Christian and Muslim populations overlapped on the borderlands of the old Ottoman Empire, and incidentally gave a surface plausibility to secularist attacks on religion as the primary cause of war rather than nationalism which might as easily have been blamed. The reemergence of a pattern politically suppressed since 1917–18 might, perhaps, more appropriately be described as de-secularization rather than postsecularity (Judt 2005; Pace 2007). The global movement of population since the 1950s, particularly from the erstwhile colonies of the European imperial powers, brought significant Muslim as well as smaller Hindu and Buddhist minorities into secular Europe (Makrides 2007; Allievi and Nielsen 2000; Nielsen 2004; Silvestri 2008). Particularly since the 1990s, increasing numbers of migrants from the Pentecostal heartlands of the global South have also set up communities and founded churches and megachurches in the sophisticated cities of Europe, both East and West—there is even a prominent, Nigerian-led, Pentecostal megachurch in Kiev (Wanner 2007; Adelaja webpage; Asamoah-Gyadu 2009). The juxtaposition of religiously active migrant communities, many of them now established for several generations, alongside the mainly religiously dormant nominal Christian population of Europe, raises new issues about the political role of religious communities as well as the rights of individual believers as citizens within pluralist democracies. The events of September 11th, 2001 in New York and the subsequent ‘war on terror’ threw an intense political spotlight on to the Muslim minority, while Turkey’s application to join the European Union compounded the highly charged issue of Islam and the public realm in Europe. The possible admission of Turkey, a Muslim society with a secular, democratic constitution but a ruling Islamic party, prodded the EU to consider how far it was implicitly a Christian, or post-Christian, club, and how far it was a secular construction. The writing of a preamble to the proposed constitution of the EU in 2003–04 intensified the debate about the Christian roots of Europe (Ratzinger and Pera 2006). This was the occasion that drew Jürgen Habermas into a widely publicised exchange of papers with the then Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger about the public role of religion (Habermas 2008).

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2. Implications of these Developments These changes in the institutional vitality and the political clout of religion, above all its interweaving in the socio-political nexus of many emerging modern societies, are the context for changing perceptions of secularity and postsecularity. The long-term presence of a sometimes militant and always communitarian Islam in Europe and, alongside that, the religious rhetoric of the Bush administration of the USA in the Iraq war and the ‘global war on terror’, riveted the attention of social theorists and public commentators in the West on the renewed political salience of religion, as did, for example, the Balkan conflict and the war in Chechnya. Habermas, one of the public intellectuals credited with developing a ‘postsecular’ perspective, had largely ignored religion until this concatenation of circumstances prompted him to incorporate religious groups into his theory of the communicative conditions for cosmopolitan democracy and political legitimacy within nation states and in the international community (Habermas 2002; 2003; 2006; 2008). Few post-war European social scientists, unlike their American counterparts, had paid any more attention to religion than Habermas. It was effectively sidelined from the mainstream concerns of the social sciences for most of the second half of the twentieth century, and the sociology of religion was often dismissed as an eccentric exercise in market research for doomed religious establishments or as preoccupation with marginal new movements. Until the rise of political Islam, Muslim minorities were mostly subsumed under the sociology of ethnic and class relations rather than being perceived primarily as religious groups (Silvestri 2008). Even within the sociology of religion there was so little expectation of a religious revival within Christianity that two decades elapsed between the dramatic rise of Pentecostalism in Latin America in the 1960s and the emergence of a substantial literature on the new movement in the 1990s.1 It took a further two decades before 1 The great scholar of classical Pentecostalism, Walter Hollenweger, continued to publish on the subject, and Christian Lalive D’Épinay, published an account of Latin American Pentecostalism in English in 1969 that reflects Latin American paradigms, seeing Pentecostals as continuous with the rural millenarian tradition of peasant Catholicism, and the pastorate as a mutation of the authority structure of the hacienda. In the 1980s there was very little indigenous research that was theoretically or comparatively informed, and the main publication before 1990 was Jean-Pierre Bastian’s account which repeated Lalive D’Épinay’s interpretation (Lalive D’Épinay 1969; Bastian 1986).

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Pentecostalism was acknowledged more widely as a globally significant movement which was not simply a facet of American cultural imperialism. In Europe the liberation theology movement in the Catholic Church after Vatican II was generally seen as ‘progressive’ by public commentators because of its radical political programme, but Evangelicalism, where it was noticed at all, was usually perceived as an American phenomenon with a populist and ‘reactionary’ character rather than an emancipatory project (Lehmann 1996; Vasquez 1998; Corten 1999). The numbers of Pentecostals were at first widely disbelieved, and then, once the size of the movement became unmistakable, it was tarred with the ‘reactionary’ brush. Well into the 1990s, Pentecostalism was still being deplored, notably by what David Lehmann called the Latin American ‘erudite elite’, as a ‘fifth column’ for North American neoliberal economics in the wake of the Third World debt crisis. It became routine, not only in the mass media but even among academic commentators (notably in the Fundamentalism Project), to equate Muslim and Christian ‘fundamentalisms’ (Marty and Appleby 1991; Eisenstadt 1999), as Habermas also does, partly on the grounds of their ‘literalist’ (though, in reality, usually selective) reading of their sacred texts. What this equation misses is sociologically and politically more important than what it catches. Pentecostals in the developing world are unlike both the American Religious Right and militant Islam in crucial ways. They are generally pacific as well as voluntaristic, they entirely lack a violent revolutionary wing and mostly eschew theocratic ambitions. Yet, while it has become de rigeur to take some account of Islam there is much less urgency to understand Pentecostalism, first because it does not pose a global terrorist threat, and second, because, it has made very little headway in Western Europe, except among gypsies and third-world migrants. Public commentators and policy makers are not forced to wrestle with the problem of Pentecostalism’s influence in the European public sphere, in spite of the often noisy and colourful presence of its churches in most of Europe’s great cities. In fact, most of these churches remain migrant ghettoes with little direct involvement with the host population. Occasional local controversies arise over planning permission for new megachurch complexes when burgeoning migrant congregations outgrow their original city premises, and there have been hints of moral panic about Pentecostal exorcism as a form of ‘child abuse’ in some African and Brazilian churches. So far, however, Pentecostals in Europe have not become a conspicu-

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ous thorn in the side of public policy, even though they tend to be conservative on most ‘moral issues’. They might be caricatured with impunity, though, in fact, they are seldom thought important enough to warrant such attention. (The case is very different, of course, in those developing societies where the spread of Christianity is a threat to the local ethno-religious monopoly—from Iran to India—where proselytism can lead to murder and massacres. Even in cities such as London, Pentecostal and Islamic competition for the souls of young men, in particular, among Afro-Caribbean and Asian minorities, can be the occasion of potentially violent conflict.)2 The rise of a world-wide, transnational Pentecostal movement, together with the Islamic revival, and the politically potent resurgence of ethno-religiosity in some of the newly independent states of the old Soviet empire, constitutes the most obvious counter-evidence to the thesis of secularization as intrinsic to the process of modernization. All three are closely associated with modernization, and are not, as was widely canvassed in the 1980s, anti-modernizing or ‘re-traditionalizing’ movements. The more extreme versions of a unilinear, universal secularization thesis, accordingly, have been largely abandoned in the social sciences in favour of what S.N. Eisenstadt called ‘multiple modernities’ (Eisenstadt 2000). At the same time, Europe has had to accommodate the presence of increasingly self-conscious Muslim minorities as players in the public sphere, and it is this, much more than the world-wide Pentecostal revolution, that has given rise to the notion that Western Europe itself has entered a ‘postsecular’ condition. 3. ‘Multiple Modernities’ and the Exceptional Secularity of Western Europe Even among sociologists who take culture as seriously as institutions, it is generally accepted that something it is reasonable to call ‘secularization’ has occurred in Western Europe, even though it is far from complete and takes a surprising variety of guises. What the empirical evidence from the rest of the world has put in doubt is not so much the secularity of Europe as the presumption that the European pattern is bound to be replicated in every modern society. Eisenstadt’s concept of ‘multiple modernities’ has provided a neat label for 2

Personal communication, Luke Bretherton.

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something that had been accepted piecemeal in comparative sociology over several decades. Both New Left writers of the 1970s and their critics agreed that there were many routes to capitalist modernity, even in Europe (Perry Anderson 1974a; 1974b; Kumar 1978). Those analyses focused mainly on the variety of relations between state, economy and society. David Martin was probably the first to make the detailed case in relation to religion in Europe in his 1978 A General Theory of Secularisation, which looked at variables such as social differentiation, ‘historical filters’ (including the role of religion in the national myth), and the historical relationship between religion and the state, in explaining the very considerable differences in the degree and pattern of secularization among European societies (David Martin 1978). Casanova’s work on the role of public religions in the modern world continues this kind of analysis (Casanova 1994). Europe itself is a case of multiple modernities. Critiques of the more extreme (and extreme positivist) versions of the secularization thesis in relation to Europe have often involved an exploration of cultural and structural continuities in the role of mainstream religion in even the most secularized societies. The new historiography of nineteenth century confessional renewal in Europe is an important aspect of this. Casanova’s documentation of religion’s uninterrupted presence in the public sphere is another example. It has also been the thrust of Grace Davie’s work, including her analysis of ‘vicarious religion’ (Davie 2006; 2008a). Danièle Hervieu-Léger’s nuanced account of cultural memory in Europe and the way historic Catholic patterns and structures are replicated within French laïcité, is another instance of this sort of corrective (Hervieu-Léger 2000; 2001; 2008). Different versions of the European Enlightenment, some running through the churches (Britain, Germany) while others (the French supremely), engage in a war to the death with religion, are often cited as part of the reason for national cultural continuities and continent-wide variations in patterns of secularization (David Martin 1978; Himmelfarb 2004). All this dents the idea that there is one endlessly replicated template of secular modernity even within Western Europe. Some scholars concerned with the new ‘spiritualities’ and the New Age penetration of popular culture go much further. They believe these phenomena are sufficiently widespread and significant to constitute evidence of the general ‘re-enchantment’ or ‘Easternization’ of European culture (Campbell 1999; Partridge 2004; Flanagan and Jupp 2007).

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Even the most uncompromising proponents of the secularization of Europe, such as Steve Bruce and David Voas (who make the institutional and statistical case), and Callum Brown (who argues the end of a dominant Christian discourse), do not deny these variations and continuities, or the emergence of a new variety of personalized ‘spirituality’, but they attribute little weight to these phenomena compared with the retreat of mainstream Christianity from its institutional and cultural dominance (Bruce 2002; Bruce and Voas 2007; Brown 2000). There is room for debate here. Nevertheless, there is a general agreement that the depth and reach of secularizing processes have been greater in Western Europe than anywhere else: that, of course, is why the reappearance of religion is a problem. Even Grace Davie, who for many years argued that religion in Europe had not declined so much as changed its form, has rolled back somewhat from this position to accept that in certain respects Europe is uniquely secularized (Davie 2002; Berger, Davie and Fokas 2008). The debate has now moved on, and the broad consensus so far is for what Peter Berger was probably the first to call ‘European exceptionalism’, a position Grace Davie, in particular, has made her own. 4. The Postsecular Turn An important strand of the secularization thesis concerned the emergence and eventual dominance of secular or ‘scientific’ thought. The case for European exceptionalism incorporates the view that the secular forms of thought that emerged out of the European Enlightenment have a broader influence in Europe than elsewhere in the modern world, including America. This, of course, underlies the complaints of David Martin and José Casanova about the dominance of a secularist knowledge regime in the social sciences, and its distorting effects on work on religion. The time-lag in recognizing the growing Muslim presence in Europe as a religious phenomenon, and in fully registering the emergence of a massive Pentecostal movement in the developing world, can be at least partly attributed to the same cause. What is now being suggested is that this secularist knowledge regime is being called into question by a ‘postsecular turn’ in social theory. This has two aspects, and theorists associated with the development often display both. The first is that social theory has begun to take seriously the presence of religion and of new forms of spirituality (which are often

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neither unambiguously ‘religious’ nor unequivocally ‘secular’) within predominantly secular social contexts and forms. Much of the evidence on which this draws has been gathered over decades by scholars of religion in the humanities and the social sciences, often as part of critiques of an exaggerated, Euro-centric and ideologically inflected secularization thesis, and more recently in response to the new political salience of Islam in Europe and of ethno-religious nationalism in the societies of Eastern Europe, notably Serbia, Romania and Russia. What appears to be new is that certain distinguished theorists, such as Habermas and Taylor, have become convinced that these phenomena are not socially insignificant. It is not just a question of how far religious residues and mutations still permeate the ‘post-Christian’ European population. Global processes of physical mobility and electronic communication have transplanted religious lifeworlds from the global South into the cities of Europe. The consequence may well be a qualitatively new set of interactions and processes that require religious groups of many sorts and secular citizens to take account of each other within the spaces, institutions and cultures of the cosmopolitan city. The problem here is not with recognizing that something new is afoot but with the label ‘postsecular’ to designate it, not least because it presumes a pre-existing secular’ stage (in Europe?) which is part of a linear development (Asad 2003; Leezenberg 2010). An assumption of that sort was precisely the flaw in the secularization and modernization theses that the concept of multiple modernities was meant to correct. More is being claimed, however, where the ‘postsecular turn’ indicates a radical challenge to Enlightenment secular ‘naturalism’ as a method of inquiry and analysis. Some observers include Charles Taylor in this second category, including Gregor McLennan (McLennan 2007 and his contribution to this volume). But McLennan’s chapter in this book also shows that the secularist knowledge regime in sociology is not giving up the ghost easily. McLennan advances the secularist presuppositions of Ernest Gellner as self-evidently superior to what he calls Charles Taylor’s ‘Hegelian fantasy’. McLennan’s criteria are certainly not postsecular. The continuing power of Enlightenment prescriptions is particularly clear in the work of Habermas who advocates inclusion of religious groups in his Rawlsian model of public reasoning, and is usually credited with coining the term ‘postsecular’. In the Introduction to his most recent book of essays he explains his own position as mediator

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between the secularism of the scientific worldview and the metaphysics of revealed religion: ‘fallibilistic but non-defeatist postmetaphysical thought differentiates itself from both sides by reflecting on its own limits’ (Habermas 2008: 5–6). Habermas is even-handed enough to ask for conceptual charity from the secularist as well as from the religious participants in the communicative processes of the democratic public sphere. He also acknowledges a tradition of rationality in all the Axial religions and a modicum of legitimate truth claims, as well as moral energy that ‘rescue[s] from oblivion’ human suffering and failure, including the devastations of cultural and social rationalization (Habermas 2008: 6). But the communicative game must still be played largely by Enlightenment rules, notably the crucial requirement of academic debate: self-criticism. If the process of argumentation is to live up to its meaning, communication in the form of rational discourse must allow, if possible, all relevant information and explanations to be brought up and weighed so that the stance participants take can be inherently motivated solely by the revisionary power of free-floating reasons.3

The precondition of radical detachment that Habermas stipulates involves what Charles Taylor calls ‘the buffered self ’, or the ‘punctual self ’, ‘disembedded’ from its social location (Taylor 1989). It is a construct of Enlightenment ideas (notably out of John Locke in this case) that was a central part of the knowledge regime the social sciences took on as constituting ‘scientific method’, the recipe for objectivity. Yet, for all the philosophical sophistication of the rest of his framework, Habermas’s criterion of reflexive detachment looks politically and sociologically naïve because it requires religious citizens, many of whom have precisely not been formed by the European Enlightenment, to behave as if they had. The inference that such detachment is no big problem for secular citizens may be just as doubtful, even when they have been formed by post-Enlightenment cultures. Moreover, politics seldom operates like an academic seminar or a scientific workshop. It is clear enough why Habermas invokes this principle since his whole life’s work has been an attempt to transcend the nationalistic manipulation of affect in the National Socialism of his boyhood in Germany. He clings to Enlightenment principles such as this, and insists on the secular nature of public space, as bulwarks of democracy against 3

Habermas 2008: 49, my emphasis.

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barbarism. Yet the principle of detachment is a poor recipe for understanding why his rules of communication cannot be easily applied in the very situations most fraught with the dangers he wants to avoid. If you could get would-be suicide bombers and their fellow citizens in Europe to become sufficiently heuristically ‘disembedded’ from their context of identity and belief in order to engage in a ‘democratic’ conversation you would not have had the problem in the first place. Even in social scientific argument the principle of detachment has come under criticism from phenomenological, linguistic and other theoretical traditions of social thought. Habermas is well versed in these traditions and in principle somewhat sympathetic to them—he declares himself fully convinced that the human mind is a product of intersubjective processes. Yet the standard Enlightenment trope of individualized detachment still forms the problematic central plank of his formula for communication between religious and secular citizens in a democracy. 5. Charles Taylor’s Theory I turn now to Charles Taylor, first to consider whether his methodology and arguments are more radically postsecular than those of Habermas, before using features of his analysis to think through the significance of certain crucial differences between enspirited Latin America and secular Europe. In his chapter in this volume Gregor McLennan characterizes Charles Taylor as a Hegelian idealist, who ignores the importance of structural and institutional analysis. McLennan (in this volume) characterizes Taylor’s position as ‘immanent transcendentalism’. This reading collapses the main thrust of Taylor’s substantive cultural analysis into its normative tailpiece, more particularly the fifth part of A Secular Age (Taylor 2008: 537–772). Certainly Taylor is sceptical about many of the intellectual procedures of secular reasoning. Indeed, much of his work is an excavation of the genealogy of these procedures, and, particularly in chapter 15 of A Secular Age, he shows how the epistemological rules of argument enshrined in ‘the naturalism of disengaged reason’ operate to exclude any transcendent possibility, or rather to postpone it decisively in the required chain of reasoning (Taylor 2007: 539–93). It might well be argued that this aspect of Taylor’s argument does indeed constitute a ‘postsecular turn’

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in philosophical reasoning. Yet his critique of the flaws in the reasoning and presuppositions of certain prominent champions of secularism employs nothing beyond the normal tools of critical reasoning. Taylor makes clear his own preference for a transcendent perspective on some aspects of meaning and human experience, but his substantive analysis takes place entirely within the ‘immanent frame’ (there are no postulates about God, or Idea, as causal factor). The main body of his account is not dependent on his normative preferences or his theological convictions. To read the cultural map he offers you do not have to opt for the transcendent perspective he favours. The main project of Taylor’s last five books, from Sources of the Self (Taylor 1989), through The Ethics of Authenticity (Taylor 1992), The Varieties of Religion Today (Taylor 2002) and Modern Social Imaginaries (Taylor 2004) to A Secular Age (Taylor 2007), (which incorporates the main arguments of all the others), is a descriptive and interpretive account of the emergence of the modern self, the modern moral system and a purely immanent frame as the unique cultural achievement of the West. The material he draws on is often textual and cultural rather than empirical and sociological, but he is aware of the social and institutional changes that underpin his hermeneutic history. Chapter 12 of Sources of the Self is an explicit defence against the charge that he is writing an ‘idealist’ history (Taylor 1989: 199–207). Taylor argues that although he has mainly looked at developments in philosophy and religious outlook, with side glances at popular mentalities, and has not examined the changes to political structures, economic behaviour, military and bureaucratic organization in early modern Europe, this does not mean he regards them as insignificant or even subordinate in the causal chain. He argues strongly for multiple causation: ‘what is striking is the way in which such a monumental change in self-understanding is fed from a multitude of sources’ (Taylor 1989: 199), and roundly rejects reductively materialist explanations of cultural change. Ideas are inevitably embedded in, and also often in tension with, practices that can be empirically observed and analysed, but those ideas are part of the web of causation. Many sociologists of religion and culture from Max Weber onward have held the same view. Indeed, it is possible to read Sources of the Self and A Secular Age as two largescale exercises in constructing Weberian ideal types of three cultural constructions that characterize the modern West: the modern identity, the modern moral system and the immanent frame.

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In A Secular Age Taylor draws on the work of anthropologists, historians, (particularly of France), and sociologists, and begins his argument from three facets of the secularization thesis, each of which has a trajectory at least partly independent of the others. The first is the idea that God has disappeared from public spaces; the second is that faith and religious practice have declined; the third is that, once belief is no longer axiomatic, what it means to believe undergoes a radical transformation. It is, perhaps, in his dealing with the third thesis that he comes closest to being a philosopher of ‘postsecularity’ in that he explores the epistemic and philosophical bases of some of these transformations of what it means to ‘believe’. But even here he is descriptive and analytic, specifying the origins and rationale of the various positions. Taylor’s eclectic fusion of phenomenological, hermeneutic and other approaches, including an indispensable basis in the history of ideas, is not in itself new. It is the connections he makes between disparate fields of observation that make the story compelling. This involves phenomenological arguments about what is hidden within the taken-for-granted, but revealing the hidden realities under the apparently self-evident empirical surfaces has been the trade of the social sciences since their beginnings, whether the key to the hidden level was seen as evolution, function, Marxist class struggle or whatever. In his account of Taylor’s theory, Gregor McLennan ignores an aspect of the argument that needs to be carried over from Sources of the Self into any reading of A Secular Age. The problematic from which Sources takes off is the invisible nature of the moral sources of ‘the modern moral system’ and the ‘modern identity’. Taylor’s argument is that the ‘frameworks’ that structure identity by orienting modern persons to ‘the good’ have become ‘occluded’. In A Secular Age he explicitly uses the Wittgensteinian idea of the ‘picture’ of reality in which the most basic assumptions exist in the ‘basement’, hidden from the actors who live inside its taken-for-granted construct of reality. Taylor’s project in both books is to expose this hidden layer, particularly its moral content, in order to see why certain things are taken for granted that could not be arrived at, or justified by, the dominant ‘naturalist’ paradigm of secular thought that denies the need for, and the validity of, any moral ontology or transcendent reference. In Sources Taylor excavates these invisible sources in a closely argued intellectual history that shows how the Christian master narrative, which had itself incorporated elements of Classical philosophy, became embedded in various strands of the Enlightenment master

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narrative in increasingly secularized form, and further mutated in Romantic and Modernist ‘visions’ (this, because the arts are as important as philosophical thought in this development). This process has resulted in a strikingly high level of agreement about ‘the modern moral system’ and a high degree of obfuscation about its sources, particularly its Christian sources. The moral imperatives are the dignity of the individual, increasingly coded as ‘human rights’; the duty of preventing human suffering and promoting well-being (in A Secular Age this tends to be referred to as ‘human flourishing’); and an affirmation of the value of ordinary life. He traces these imperatives to three main sources: the original theistic, Christian grounding; the ‘naturalism of disengaged reason’, by which the Enlightenment reworked and secularized, for example, the doctrine of the imago dei into the value of human dignity, and the gospel injunction to love your neighbour into the universal duty of benevolence or ‘sympathy’; and Romantic and Modernist visions of Nature as spiritual and moral force, which derive from a modern ‘pagan’ mutation of the Christian doctrine of divine Creation, allied with a revival of the classical Greek doctrine of the identity of the cosmic and the moral order. The main conceptual moves that accomplished these mutations were: the ‘turn inwards’ to the idea of a ‘deep self ’ within, which starts with Augustine and ends in Romantic expressivism and Darwinian and Freudian intellectualism; the affirmation of the value of ordinary life above both warrior heroism and virtuoso religious asceticism and mysticism, which was crucially boosted by the Reformation emphasis on the mundane sphere of work and domesticity as the site of spiritual concern, before mutating into a variety of secular forms, including Romantic expressivism; and the idea of the Voice of Nature, initially conceived as an aspect of the voice of God or providential order, and then transmuting into secular forms such as the amoral instinctualism associated with Schopenhauer and Darwinianism, or reverting to modern forms of pagan mysticism. The final element in the argument of Sources traces the historical sequence by which the modern moral order became embedded, notably the way it was ‘rendered immanent’ in the relatively stable, ‘civilized social order’ that eventually emerged from the post-Reformation settlement. Here Taylor draws explicitly on historians and sociologists. His conclusion suggests that what makes secular ‘naturalism’ attractive is often the moral priorities built into it quite contingently by these historical processes, but which could not be adduced from its secular premises.

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A Secular Age continues the analysis from another angle. Here the problematic is how the dominant ‘picture’ of reality in Western Europe changed from a religious to a secular one over the last five hundred years. In Europe and the North Atlantic today it is normal to assume there is only an immanent dimension to reality, whereas elsewhere, and in past ages, the existence of a transcendent dimension is taken for granted. The emergence of an exclusively humanistic construct and a wholly immanent perspective on reality was the unique achievement of the West. It was not a simple ‘subtraction story’, that is, a tale of how the immanent frame was revealed as the final truth by the progressive removal of obfuscating veils. Rather it was an unlikely achievement in which each episode in the various secularization stories was neither inevitable nor predictable from the vantage point of what came before. Taylor carefully delineates not only the different empirical and conceptual components of the term secularization, but through a running contrast between France and Britain, and Europe and America, he indicates that secularization is a multiplicity of stories, each with significantly different trajectories and characteristic constructions of modernity. He begins with the features of the world ‘picture’ of Latin Christendom around 1500 that constituted the ‘bulwarks of belief’, notably constructions of time and the cosmic order as they inflect the structure of the ‘social imaginary’. The social and the cosmic order were both conceived hierarchically, and the immanent and the transcendent had regular points of intersection. Sacred time, or eternity, invaded or touched secular time through liturgical rituals and monarchical ceremonial, while secular space was punctuated with sacred spaces such as churches and pilgrimage sites. The Great Chain of Being encompassed everybody: social hierarchy and cosmic hierarchy were linked through monarchs and Popes at the twin apex, and by priests and monks who mediated between the secular and sacred order. The heavy disciplines of the Christian moral order were leavened by periodic liminal release through such occasions as fiestas and carnival that mixed Christian and pre-Christian ritual. Taylor pinpoints a series of crucial moves. The idea of the intersection of sacred and secular time is eroded in favour of a unitary conception of time as identical for everyone. Cumulative episodes of what he calls ‘Reform’ in Latin Christendom, (of which the Reformation is one decisive example, though not the last), impose the Christian moral structure more effectively and attempt to eliminate the tradi-

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tional releases of ritualized liminality. This is associated with the rise of the Disciplinary Society in which sex and violence are restrained, partly through the Church’s intermittently successful attempts to subjugate the warrior ethic of a social elite, and partly through the invention of ‘civility’ which curbs public display of bodily functions and makes privacy possible. New social imaginaries emerge in which relations are horizontal rather than vertical, the conception of an autonomous individual becomes ‘thinkable’, and ‘public opinion’ appears as a political force. These wholly contingent developments together created a crucial turning point, which Taylor refers to as Providential Deism, where transcendent goals were progressively sidelined as purely human flourishing was increasingly prioritized. This stage of secularization combined the idea of the ‘buffered self ’, disembedded from the ‘paleo-Durkheimian’ social order; a disenchantment of the world and the concomitant investment of all agency in humans rather than in transcendent forces and entities; and the assumption that both the cosmos and humans were fundamentally benevolent. That moment of decisive secularization of the picture of the world made possible a ‘nova effect’ which multiplied the range of thinkable pictures of reality, including for the first time, an exclusive humanism. The post-Darwinian undermining of the assumption of cosmic and human benevolence gave rise to a new problem of meaninglessness, and splintered into a new set of modern pictures of reality, many of them derived from Nietzsche. These include varieties of exclusive secular humanism that Taylor believes are impressive and attractive because of the stoic heroism of their ethic rather than through what he thinks is the doubtful consistency of their intellectual rationale. The 1960s brought an even more radical turn to the self that turned into a ‘supernova’ of new combinations of possible pictures of reality. He maps the most significant of these ‘pictures’ of ‘authenticity’ derived from ‘a narrative of self-authorization (. . .) told in many registers’ and ranging from the heroic confrontation of cosmic and personal meaninglessness, to exhilaration at the spectacle of the power and immensity of an indifferent and impersonal universe, and/or at the limitless possibilities of human self-realization. The final part of A Secular Age, which attracts heavy criticism from Gregor McLennan, starts with Taylor’s account of the epistemology and the underpinning moral assumptions of the exclusively immanent secular naturalism that is intellectually privileged in Western modernity. Taylor believes that the immanent frame accommodates both

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Open and Closed World Structures, that is, open or closed to transcendence. Taylor asserts, and the anthropological record in modern societies shows, that few people remain consistently within Closed World Structures. The bricolage of world pictures between which we typically move arises from what Taylor calls the ‘cross pressures’ resulting from the co-existence of many such pictures. This co-existence ‘fragilizes’ them, not by relativizing them all, as Peter Berger argues (Berger 1980), but because few of them serve satisfactorily every dimension of human existence and experience. This is where Taylor uses the term ‘human fullness’ to indicate the aspirations for fulfilment built historically into the modern identity. McLennan finds the term incoherently Romantic, while I regard it as unavoidably imprecise but anthropologically accurate as a reflection of the modern principle of promoting human happiness. Taylor gives several examples of secular world pictures that fall short on this aspiration to ‘fullness’, including disastrous consequences when the dispassionate rationality of the disembedded ‘buffered self ’ is carried over from the pursuit of scientific knowledge or bureaucratic impartiality into personal relationships. People in the West today, therefore, typically inhabit more than one picture, or move with apparent ease from one to another, some of them in search of what might be called transcendence-within-immanence, often through visual art, or music, or new forms of spirituality-without-religion. Taylor also probes the underside of the modern moral system. Violence and extreme sexuality had often been sacralized in preAxial religions, but were de-legitimated in principle by all the Axial religions. The cumulative process of ‘Reform’ in Latin Christendom had repressed, or at least de-sacralized, these features in its ever more effective imposition of the Christian moral order. These repressed features always tend to reassert themselves, for example, in time of war, even where the religions of peace and brotherhood are dominant, and, in consequence, have become implicated in the structures of power. Today these repressed features also return explicitly in some exclusively humanist positions within the immanent modern frame. Taylor shows that neither secular nor Christian pictures of the world have succeeded in taming these disruptive human propensities. He also illustrates some of the ethical dilemmas that arise where the values of immediate human flourishing contradict other long-term values in the modern moral system, and gives examples of conversion to and from a purely secular frame.

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From the viewpoint of the sociology of religion, Charles Taylor’s account of the current cultural landscape of Western Europe and the North Atlantic and his map of pictures of reality after the supernova of the sixties fit neatly the evidence argued over by sociologists of religion in response to the secularization thesis. Taylor’s analysis enables us to refine the interpretation of this often ambiguous and paradoxical empirical evidence about old mutating residues of Christianity and new forms of behaviour and expression that are not quite secular. We can abandon many unproductive disagreements about whether something is ‘really’ religious or not, by placing it on the map Taylor has provided. Within and between the myriad world pictures available today there is a large measure of promiscuous recombination of familiar elements. Eastern and Western Axial religions are ransacked for items to fit new, eclectic mixes. This describes many of the New Religious Movements but also applies to mainstream confessions and the secular commercial world of New Age therapies and products. For instance, in Britain the Alpha course and many conservative Evangelical congregations have picked up stylistic and psychological formulae from the pagan hippies of the turn to ‘authenticity’. Taylor’s account also highlights aspects of cultural life in late modernity that dip under the radar of serious analysis. I have argued elsewhere that literary and film genres such as fantasy, horror and the occult provide bolt-holes from the tyranny of strict secular immanence (Bernice Martin 2006; 2007). Their mass market attraction, and the reason why they are seen so often by the guardians of serious intellectual standards as mere escapism, is that they operate a moratorium on the epistemology of the purely immanent frame, and so allow the return of the transcendent in imagination if not in ‘real’ life. One has to wonder why avowed secularist writers such as Philip Pullman and Terry Pratchett use a form distinctively peopled with images of transcendence and permeated by non-utilitarian, morally heroic values directly traceable to the invisible Christian core of the modern moral system, while believing they are advancing a hard-headed secularist cause. Of course, Taylor has never argued that the secular ‘naturalist’ frame achieved a total monopoly even in Western Europe. What he claims is that it first became ‘thinkable’ and was eventually naturalized in Western culture as the default option, particularly though its dominance among an intellectual elite. A nice illustration of this, directly pertinent to the argument below, occurs in Sara Maitland’s exploration

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of silence as a route to mystical experience where she suggests that the post-Romantic, post-Freudian ‘normal’ modern self has strong boundaries while the permeable self of the ‘mad’ and the religious, open to the transcendent Other, is assumed to be delusional (Maitland 2008). But the naturalist frame is always supplemented by other world pictures, some of which allow for the return of the repressed transcendent. Most of the phenomena analysed under the rubric of ‘vicarious’ or ‘invisible’ religion, or the new ‘spiritualities’ can be accommodated here without suggesting that religion is making a radical come-back in places from which it had all-but disappeared, or that western society has arrived at a new postsecular stage of the evolutionary march. The question remains whether this global supernova of pictures of the world is likely to be the source of new religious or cultural wars. Some critics have suggested that Taylor takes too little account of the split in the United States between the two halves of the American ‘culture wars’ in which one side, the so-called Christian ‘fundamentalists’ reject much of the Enlightenment’s secular legacy and thus remain, at least partly ‘pre-secular’. An analysis of which Enlightenment ideas are rejected and which are incorporated in the world picture of American Evangelicals would doubtless reveal just that selectivity and recombination of elements that Taylor indicates. After all, even the most extreme end of the Evangelical spectrum may reject Darwinian evolutionary theory, but it accepts the rest of natural science and the procedures of scientific method. Indeed, Evangelicals tend to be over-represented in applied science and technology and they frequently deploy arguments based on consequentiality, often taken over from social science. They, too, practise selective bricolage, and operate perfectly successfully within the immanent frame for most purposes: both the Human Genome Project and the Julliard School of Music have an evangelical director (Lindsay 2007). Similar considerations may apply in the case of the Latin American Pentecostals, to whom I now turn. 6. Secular Europe and Enspirited Latin America I arrive finally at the question of how Charles Taylor’s analysis might be used to frame the differences between secular Western Europe and enspirited Latin America out of which the Pentecostal revolution erupted so unexpectedly in the 1960s.

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Latin America may well provide yet another set of multiple modernities, but did the continent as a whole effectively by-pass, or quarantine the effects of, the European Enlightenment? After all, it had been intimately linked with Europe, primarily with Iberia, ever since the Conquest. Yet today, analysts of the Pentecostal revolution habitually regard Latin America as an ‘enspirited’ culture, particularly at the popular level, with only a very small elite group that has naturalized the purely immanent frame as its default option. Most sociologists see this ‘enspirited’ state as one of the cultural pre-conditions of Pentecostal take-off in the developing world. For most of the Latin American population it is as if what Charles Taylor identifies as the decisive historical turning point in the West had never happened. In Europe it involved three elements: the ‘buffered self ’, disembedded from its ‘paleo-Durkheimian’ context; the disenchantment of the world and the assumption of all agency by humans; and the benevolence of the cosmos and of humanity along with human flourishing as the moral major imperative. Latin America has not become disenchanted. It is full of spirits, demons, angels, transcendent entities with powerful agency and influence on, even control of, human actors. Yet once people enlist a supremely powerful transcendent agent, the Holy Spirit or Jesus Christ, on their behalf, the individual can become an effectively autonomous agent in a wholly new, and distinctively modern, sense. Birgit Meyer has suggested, in relation to Ghanaian Pentecostals, that where the self is conceived as a space intrinsically open to possession by spirits, (Sara Maitland’s ‘permeable self ’) the protective presence of the Holy Spirit may act as the equivalent of becoming a ‘buffered self ’ immune to invasion by supernatural agencies (Meyer forthcoming). Yet this immunity is always threatened, always liable to require further exorcisms. Buffering is provisional and precarious, and the individual is for ever exposed to the assaults of supernatural enemies. Nevertheless, Pentecostals undeniably have a new sense of individual agency, a ‘can do’ attitude linked to hope and optimism and opposed to traditional fatalism. This is clearly part of the process of the modernization of the individual in the Pentecostal lifeworld even though the Pentecostal self is not the strongly bounded self of the western secularist. Other elements in the European turn are even more equivocal in Latin America. There is little evidence of the ‘disembedding’ that accompanied the ‘buffered self ’ and made it the ‘punctual self ’, capable of the disinterested rationality that is Habermas’s communicative

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ideal. Indeed, its absence is one of the sources of the unreliability, corruption and clientilism that have for so long disfigured the public and political life of Latin America. Yet there is also an enormously important process by which the individual and the nuclear family in the Pentecostal movement disembed themselves from the ‘paleo-Durkheimian’ social order, to enter a new, potentially mobile, transnational ‘imagined community’ of equals. This gives Pentecostals an edge in preparing them to survive, and even thrive in a mobile, globalized world. Yet even here there are ambiguities. Instances of psycho-social illness relieved by exorcism and ‘spiritual warfare’, especially in neoPentecostal churches such as The Universal Church of the Kingdom of God, are often plausibly related to the strain of dependence in extended family households reconstituted after migration to the city (Chesnut 1997; Martin 1995). Again, Birgit Meyer’s Ghanaian evidence suggests that the difficulty of fully severing obligations to extended kin often underlies witchcraft accusations in Pentecostal churches (Meyer forthcoming). The crucial European shift from transcendent ends to purely human flourishing has an equally paradoxical half-echo in Pentecostalism. The fusion in the movement of Christian and indigenous religious traditions has resulted in a neat unity of transcendent and human ends to advance human flourishing. Iberian Catholicism officially enshrined ascetic world-denying messages and exemplary suffering as salvific— though in practice priests were seldom even held to celibacy, which the indigenous society anyway found incomprehensible. The form of popular, syncretistic Catholicism in the colonial Church, sheltered indigenous traditions that made no distinction between material, physical and spiritual well-being, and assumed that the purpose of religion was to advance them all at the same time. Suffering was largely hived off to women, who were expected to resort to the example and protection of the Virgin Mary. Pentecostalism took on board this fusion of transcendent ends (the salvation of souls) and human well-being (the salvation of bodies and guarantee of material comfort), so that the tension felt between the two aspects in Latin Christendom has been largely bypassed. This was a feature of the autonomous new Pentecostal churches in the 1960s that so dismayed observers in the mainstream Christian churches, particularly their intelligentsia (Lehman 1996; Aconteceu 1990). As for the attachment of the women to the sufferings of the Virgin as a mirror and validation of their own, they left her in droves for the power of the Holy Spirit to eliminate their suffering,

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and exerted their utmost spiritual efforts to draw their men, the source of most of their removable sufferings, into the new movement with them. The positive Pentecostal approach to physical and mental wellbeing, and above all, to the body and material prosperity, particularly in the charismatic ‘third wave’ churches, distinguishes the movement from earlier forms of Protestantism and renders highly ambiguous the classic Weberian distinction between this- and other-worldly priorities in ‘religions of brotherhood’. Its impact on economic behaviour can be double-edged, on the one hand replicating the Halévy thesis about how early Methodism moulded a self-disciplined workforce out of a chaotic migrant mass of the poor, and on the other, especially in some neo-Pentecostal groups, suggesting an elective affinity not with the ascetic Calvinist entrepreneurs of Weber’s Protestant Ethic but with the gamblers and risk-takers of contemporary finance capital and the celebrity manipulators of image and spectacle in sport, entertainment and media (Bernice Martin 1995; Meyer 2007). What I am suggesting is that, for contingent and historical reasons, important elements in Latin America’s enspirited, ‘enchanted’, culture were the fertile soil out of which a vast Pentecostal movement emerged. Some of these elements easily accommodated certain crucial features of the construction of the modern identity in the West, but without requiring a decisive secularization. Of course, Pentecostalism itself, as a fusion of poor white and poor black religion in America, already carried some of these crucial modern elements but they needed the elective affinity of the indigenous popular religious culture of Latin America to ensure the Pentecostal break-through. Another problem not inherently solved by the idea of multiple modernities, underlies the uncertainty about whether a version of European secularity may in the long-run overtake the rest of the world. One does not need a universal, unilinear myth of modernity in order to wonder whether some kind of convergence may take place in the longer run between societies that are currently rather distinct. Once the unique achievement of constructing the purely immanent frame has occurred, it does not have to be invented again from scratch. It already exists as part of the global repertoire of pictures of reality, and has very considerable prestige through its association with modern science and some of the most powerful societies in the geo-political system. It would be surprising if it did not acquire converts over time. After all, the movements for nationalist independence in Latin America from Simon Bolivar onwards, were inspired by European Enlightenment

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ideas. They contributed to the emergence of social imaginaries that stressed horizontal over vertical relations just as in the West, and this shift did percolate down to the popular classes, even if the full programme of secularization of world picture did not, or not yet. Pentecostal moderns, like some American Evangelicals, have no problem reconciling expectations of imminent apocalypse with plenty of canny thought for the morrow in this immanent world, or in embracing every available technology and organisational innovation with mistrust of historical Biblical scholarship. If Charles Taylor is correct we should not be surprised to find compartmentalization and bricolage here as much as among the apparently secular populations of Western Europe. A recent article by Andrew Dawson is a good illustration. He describes a sector of urban professionals in Brazil who have put together a distinct pattern of bricolage which is different from that of their Pentecostal fellow citizens but consonant with Charles Taylor’s characterization of the recombination of elements in the modern supernova of world pictures (Dawson 2008). They are unhappy with Cartesian rationality and combine a version of traditional rural millenarianism with the catastrophic ecological anticipations of the New Age as the vehicle of their reflexive construction of self. It is neither religious nor secular. It uses distinctively Brazilian components alongside globally available New Age themes. Is it postsecular or presecular, or is the distinction meaningless? References Aconteceu (1990) No. 548: Special Supplement on the Autonomous Pentecostals, Unsigned, Rio de Janeiro: CEDI (Centro Ecuménico de Documentaçáo e Informaçáo). Adelaja, S. Webpage, www.pastorsunday.com. Allievi, S. and Nielsen, J. S. (eds) (2000) Muslim Networks and Transnational Communities in and Across Europe. Leiden and Boston: Brill. Anderson, A. and Tang, E. (eds) (2005) Asian and Pentecostal: The Charismatic Face of Christianity in Asia. Oxford: Regnum. Anderson, P. (1974) Passages from Antiquity to Feudalism. London: Humanities Press (reprinted 1996 London: Verso). —— (1974) Lineages of the Absolutist State. London: Humanities Press (reprinted 1996 London: Verso). Arweck, E. (2007) ‘Globalization and New Religious Movements’. In Beyer, P. and Beaman, L. (eds) Religion, Globalization, and Culture. Leiden and Boston: Brill, pp. 253–80.

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Asad, T. (2003) Formations of the Secular: Christianity, Islam, Modernity. Stanford, California: Stanford University Press. Asamoah-Gyadu, J. K. (2009) ‘Spirit, Mission and Transnational Influence: Nigerianled Pentecostalism in Eastern Europe’. Paper presented at the Global Pentecostalism (GloPent) Conference. University of Birmingham, Feb. 5–7. Bastian, J.-P. (1986) Breve Historia del Protestantismo en América Latina. Mexico City: Casa Unidade Publicaciones. Beckford, J. A. (2003) Religion and Social Theory. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. —— (2004) ‘New Religious Movements and Globalization’. In Lucas, P. C. and Robbins, T. (eds) New Religious Movements in the Twenty-First Century. New York and London: Routledge, pp. 253–63. Berger, P. L. (1980) The Heretical Imperative: Contemporary Possibilities of Religious Affirmation. London: Collins. ——, Davie, G. and Fokas, E. (2008) Religious America, Secular Europe? A Theme and Variations. Aldershot: Ashgate. Brown, C. G. (2001) The Death of Christian Britain: Understanding Secularization 1800–2000. London: Routledge. Bruce, S. (2002) God is Dead: Secularization in the West. Oxford: Blackwell. Bruce, S. and Voas, D. (2007) ‘The Spiritual Revolution: Another False Dawn for the Sacred’. In Flanagan, K. and Jupp, P. (eds) (2007) A Sociology of Spirituality. Aldershot: Ashgate, pp. 43–62. Campbell, C. (1999) ‘The Easternization of the West’. In Wilson, B. and Cresswell, J. (eds) New Religious Movements: Challenge and Response. London: Routledge, pp. 35–48. Casanova, J. (1994) Public Religions in the Modern World. Chicago, Illinois: Chicago University Press. —— (2006) ‘Religion, European Secular Identities, and European Integration’. In Byrnes, T. and Katzenstein, P. (eds) Religion in an Expanding Europe. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 65–92. Chesnut, R. A. (1997) Born Again in Brazil: The Pentecostal Boom and the Pathogens of Poverty. New Brunswick, New Jersey and London: Rutgers University Press. Corten, A. (1999) Pentecostalism in Brazil: Emotion of the Poor and Theological Romanticism. Basingstoke: Macmillan. Davie, G. (2002) Europe: the Exceptional Case. Parameters of Faith in the Modern World. London: Darton, Longman and Todd. —— (2006) ‘Vicarious Religion: A Methodological Challenge’. In Ammerman, N. (ed.) Everyday Religion: Observing Modern Religious Lives. New York: Oxford University Press, pp. 21–36. —— (2007) The Sociology of Religion. London: Sage. —— (2008a) ‘Thinking Sociologically About Religion: Contexts and Clarifications’. In Barker, E. (ed.) The Centrality of Religion in Social Life: Essays in Honour of James A. Beckford. Aldershot: Ashgate, pp. 15–28. —— (2008b) ‘From Believing without Belonging to Vicarious Religion: Understanding Patterns of Religion in Modern Europe’. In Pollak, D. and Olson, D. V. A. (eds) The Role of Religion in Modern Societies, London: Routledge, pp. 165–78. Dawson, A. (2008) ‘New Era Millenarianism in Brazil’. Journal of Contemporary Religion 23, 269–84. Eisenstadt, S. N. (1999) Fundamentalism, Sectarianism and Revolution: The Jacobin Dimension of Modernity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. —— (2000) ‘Multiple Modernities’. Daedalus 129, 1–30. Flanagan, K. and Jupp, P. (eds) (2007) A Sociology of Spirituality. Aldershot: Ashgate.

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Freston, P. (2007) ‘Latin America: The “Other” Christendom’. In Beyer, P. and Beaman, L. (eds) Religion, Globalization, and Culture. Leiden and Boston: Brill, pp. 571–94. Gifford, P. (2004) Ghana’s New Christianity: Pentecostalism in a Globalising African Economy. London: Hurst. Habermas, J. (2002) Religion and Rationality. Cambridge: Polity. —— (2003) The Future of Human Nature. Cambridge: Polity. —— (2006) ‘Religion in the Public Sphere’. European Journal of Philosophy 14, 1–25. —— (2008) Between Naturalism and Religion. Cambridge: Polity. Originally published (2005) as Zwischen Naturalismus und Religion, Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. Hann, C. and the ‘Civil Religion’ Group (2006) The Postsocialist Religious Question: Faith and Power in Central Asia and East-Central Europe. Berlin: LIT. Heelas, P. and Woodhead, L. with Seel, B., Szerszynsky, B. and Tusting, K. (2004) The Spiritual Revolution: Why Religion Is Giving Way to Spirituality. Oxford: Blackwell. Hervieu-Léger, D. (2000) Religion as a Chain of Memory. Cambridge: Polity. —— (2001) ‘The Two-Fold Limit of the Notion of Secularization’. In Woodhead, L. with Heelas, P. and Martin, D. (eds) Peter Berger and the Study of Religion. London: Routledge, pp. 112–26. —— (2008) ‘Religious Individualism, Modern Individualism and Self-Fulfilment: A Few Reflections on the Origins of Contemporary Religious Individualism’. In Barker, E. (ed.) The Centrality of Religion in Social Life: Essays in Honour of James A. Beckford. Aldershot: Ashgate, pp. 29–40. Himmelfarb, G. (2004) The Roads to Modernity: The British, French and American Enlightenments. New York: Knopf. Judt, T. (2005) Post-War: A History of Europe since 1945. Harmonsworth: Penguin. Kumar, K. (1978) Prophecy and Progress: The Sociology of Industrial and Post-Industrial Society. Harmonsworth: Penguin. Lalive D’Épinay, C. (1969) Haven to the Masses: A Study of the Pentecostal Movement in Chile. Lutterworth: London. Leezenberg, M. (2010) ‘How Ethnocentric Is the Concept of the Postsecular?’. In this volume. Lehmann, D. (1996) Struggle for the Spirit: Religious Transformation and Popular Culture in Brazil and Latin America. Cambridge: Polity. Lindsay, D. M. (2007) Faith in the Halls of Power: How Evangelicals Joined the American Elite. New York: Oxford University Press. Lucas, C. and Robbins, T. (eds) (2004) New Religious Movements in the Twentieth Century. New York and London: Routledge. Maitland, S. (2008) A Book of Silence. London: Granta. Makrides, V. N. (2007) ‘Religion in Contemporary Europe in the Context of Globalization’. In Beyer, P. and Beaman, L. (eds) Religion, Globalization and Culture. Leiden and Boston: Brill, 548–69. Martin, B. (1995) ‘New Mutations of the Protestant Ethic Among Latin American Pentecostals’. Religion 25, 101–17. —— (2006) ‘Dark Materials? Philip Pullman and Children’s Literature’. In Garnett, J., Grimley, M., Harris, A., Whyte, W. and Williams, S. (eds) Redefining Christian Britain: Post-1945 Perspectives. London: SCM, pp. 178–89. —— (2007) ‘Continuities in Christian Culture: A Reply to Callum Brown’. In Stenhouse, J. and Knowles, B. (eds) Christianity in the Post Secular West. Adelaide: ATF, pp. 53–84. Martin, D. (1965) ‘Towards Eliminating the Concept of Secularisation’. In Gould, J. (ed.) Penguin Survey of Social Sciences. Harmonsworth: Penguin, pp. 169–82. —— (1966) ‘Utopian Elements in the Concept of Secularisation’. In Matthes, J. (ed.) Internationales Jahrbuch für Religionsoziologie 2. —— (1978) A General Theory of Secularisation. Oxford: Blackwell.

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—— (1990) Tongues of Fire: The Explosion of Protestantism in Latin America. Oxford: Blackwell. —— (1995) ‘Bedeviled’ in Fenn, R. K. and Capps, D. (eds) On Losing the Soul: Essays in the Social Psychology of Religion. New York: State University of New York Press, pp. 39–66. —— (1996) Forbidden Revolutions: Pentecostalism in Latin America, Catholicism in Eastern Europe. London: SPCK. —— (2002) Pentecostalism: The World Their Parish. Oxford: Blackwell. Marty, M. and Appleby, R. S. (1991) Fundamentalisms Observed, volume I. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press. Maxwell, D. (2007) African Gifts of the Spirit: Pentecostalism and the Rise of a Transnational Religious Movement. Oxford: James Currey. McLennan, G. (2007) ‘Towards Post-Secular Theory?’. Sociology 41: 5, 857–70. Meyer, B. (1999) Translating the Devil: Religion and Modernity Among the Ewe in Ghana. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. —— (2007) ‘Pentecostalism and Neo-Liberal Capitalism. Faith, Prosperity and Vision in African Pentecostal-Charismatic Churches’. Journal for the Study of Religion 20:2, 5–28. —— (forthcoming) ‘Religious and Secular, “Spiritual” and “Physical” in Ghana’. Müller, O. (2008) ‘Religion in Central and East-Central Europe. Was There a Re-Awakening After the Breakdown of Communism?’. In Pollak, D. and Olson, V. A. (eds) The Role of Religion in Modern Societies. London: Routledge, pp. 63–92. Neilsen, J. S. (2004) Muslims in Western Europe. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Pace, E. (2007) ‘Globalization and the Conflict of Values in Middle Eastern Society’. In Beyer, P. and Beaman, L. (eds) Religion, Globalization, and Culture. Leiden and Boston: Brill, pp. 503–26. Partridge, C. (2004) The Re-Enchantment of the West. Volume I: Alternative Spiritualities, Sacralisation, Popular Culture, and Occulture. London: T. & T. Clark/ Continuum. Ratzinger, J. and Pera, M. (2006) Without Roots: The West, Relativism, Christianity, Islam. New York: Basic Books. Silvestri, S. (2008) ‘Unveiled Issues: Europe’s Muslim Women’s Potential, Problems and Aspirations’. King Baudouin Foundation website, www.kbs-frb.be. Soothill, J. E. (2007) Gender, Social Change and Spiritual Power: Charismatic Christianity in Ghana. Leiden and Boston: Brill. Sutcliffe, S. and Bowman, M. (eds) (2000) Beyond the New Age: Exploring Alternative Spirituality. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Taylor, C. (1989) Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity. Cambridge MA: Cambridge University Press. —— (1992) The Ethics of Authenticity. Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press. —— (2002) Varieties of Religion Today: William James Revisited. Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press. —— (2004) Modern Social Imaginaries. Raleigh-Durham: Duke University Press. —— (2007) A Secular Age. Cambridge MA and London: Belknap Press/Harvard University Press. Vasquez, M.A. (1998) The Brazilian Popular Church and the Crisis of Modernity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Wanner, C. (2007) Communities of the Converted: Ukrainians and Global Evangelism. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. —— (2008) Interview for Christianity Today, Jan. 29, www.christianitytoday.com.

HOW ETHNOCENTRIC IS THE CONCEPT OF THE POSTSECULAR? Michiel Leezenberg In recent years, the concept of the postsecular—made popular, if not coined, by the German philosopher Jürgen Habermas—has steadily gained ground as a way of calling attention to new, or renewed, forms of public and politicized religiosity. At first blush, the term seems to capture social and historical phenomena that are quite real, not to say immediately obvious to anyone following contemporary events with some attention. But what kind of concept is it? Is it an analytical category denoting a particular kind of polity or society, or a historical term indicating a particular phase of social development? In this paper I will argue that it is a less than fully elaborated or defined, let alone explanatory, concept; and that—in its formulation by Habermas at least—it smuggles all kinds of unwarranted and indeed unwanted assumptions into the debate. I will try to explicate some of these assumptions (most importantly, centering around the very particular—if not unique—experience of the modernization of Western Europe, and involving an idea of linear temporality and discrete spatiality), and then argue for an alternative account, drawing in materials from the Muslim world and to a lesser extent from the contemporary Far East; this alternative involves a genealogical critique of the kind originally developed by Michel Foucault (1984 [1967]; 1975), and developed for the colonial and postcolonial Muslim world by Talal Asad (1993; 2003). Foucault’s brief statement opens the way towards a more properly genealogical analysis of space—and temporality—and in particular of the public-private and sacred-secular oppositions. This genealogical perspective, however, should be supplemented with a characterization of the secular-religious and public-private oppositions on the one hand and the secular-postsecular distinction on the other, not in terms of (symbolic or physical) spaces and temporal periods, respectively, but rather as semiotic categories. Such a semiotic perspective, I will suggest, may better explain the continuing appeal of secularist doctrines, which seem to defy or ignore the demonstrable failure of the secularization thesis. In these terms, I will then briefly discuss processes of

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modernization and secularization in the Islamic world, and especially the recent debates about so-called ‘post-Islamism’, especially in the urban context of present-day Iraq. 1. Habermas I do not know if Habermas was the first author to use the term ‘postsecular’, but he is undoubtedly the most influential one. Originally using it in his famous October 2001 German Peace Prize lecture Glauben und Wissen (Habermas 2001), presented in the wake of the September 11 assaults, it was restated and further elaborated in some of Habermas’s later writings (2008a; 2008b). But even though he first uses the term in a context in which Islam is obviously the main referent for a discourse of novel, politicized and even violent forms of religion, Habermas never pays any great attention to the historical and conceptual particularities of the Muslim world. Instead, he continues talking in terms of analytical categories directly derived from the historical experience of—and from some of Habermas’s own writings on—modern Western Europe, in particular the rise of the modern secular liberal public sphere, which crucially involves, and normatively demands, the public use of reason and the privatization of practices of religion. It is far from clear, however, that Habermas’s philosophical vocabulary can be straightforwardly applied to non-European religions and contexts. In fact, his analysis is self-consciously—even defiantly— Eurocentric; thus, he argues that the term ‘postsecular’ can only be applied to some, not all, Western societies (Habermas 2008b): A ‘post-secular’ society must at some point have been in a ‘secular’ state. The controversial term can therefore only be applied to the affluent societies of Europe or countries such as Canada, Australia and New Zealand, where people’s religious ties have steadily or rather quite dramatically lapsed in the post-War period.

This restriction to Western Europe and some of its Anglo-Saxon satellites allows him to dismiss the oft-repeated refutations of the secularization thesis as ‘premature’, and to once again safely relegate the apparent counter-example posed by the persistence of public religion in the United States to a kind of ‘American exceptionalism’. Thus, and in part basing himself on José Casanova’s (1994) conceptual and geographical refinements of the concept of secularization, Habermas tries

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to salvage the secularization thesis by restricting it to Western Europe; in other words, what turns out to be the exception worldwide remains the model and reference point for his philosophical analysis (2008b). By extension, given these alleged roots in the Western European experience of modernization-as-secularization, the term ‘postsecular’ simply does not apply to other parts of the world; whether affluent or not, the argument would run, these have not gone through any process of secularization, and hence cannot possibly be qualified as postsecular. If this were all there was to it, my argument would be finished here: if we are to believe Habermas, the postsecular is indeed a thoroughly Eurocentric notion, and we should not be ashamed of it. In fact, however, Habermas’s argument is rendered problematic by a breathtaking number of unwarranted conceptual, empirical and normative assumptions; therefore, the question of the postsecular should be posed anew, not only in non-Western contexts, but also more generally.1 I will try to tease out some of Habermas’s assumptions below, trying to establish what can be salvaged of the initially plausible view that we are currently witnessing a ‘deprivatization of religion’, or a move away from secularist assumptions long held to be self-evident for and by progressive thinkers. The first question concerns the conceptual status of the postsecular. Is it an empirical analytical concept, a normative ideal, or a mere catchphrase not backed by any substantial philosophical argument or analysis? One is tempted to think that the third of these options applies: in his 2001 lecture on faith and knowledge, Habermas characterizes a postsecular society as one in which ‘religious communities persist in a secularized environment’; a constellation which in his opinion refutes earlier and stricter formulations of the secularization thesis. Thus, the postsecular displays an obvious, if loose, analogy with earlier neologisms coined by Habermas and others, such as the ‘postmodern’, the ‘post-metaphysical’, and the ‘post-national’; no precise definition or more detailed empirical characterization is given. It is also hard to see what is strictly post-secular about this persistence of, let us say, pre-secular or non-secularized communities; their persistence need not even clash with the thesis that society at large has become secularized. 1 Indeed, the interrelated and mutually formative influence of an allegedly secular modern West and an allegedly not yet secularized non-Western world may well be far more pervasive and important than is often thought (cf. Veer 2001).

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In Habermas’s later writings the idea that the postsecular marks a particular historical phase following or replacing an earlier secular, secularist or secularized one, becomes more pronounced. Here, it also becomes a more recognizably epistemic notion characterized in terms of beliefs: thus, Habermas (2008a: 139) argues that a postsecular society is ‘epistemically attuned’ to the continued existence of religious communities; as such it displays an affinity to what he calls ‘post-metaphysical’ thinking, which abstains from big ontological questions but still maintains a strict separation between faith and knowledge; postmetaphysical thinkers and postsecular individuals, he continues, are agnostic but willing to learn from religion. Put differently, Habermas here characterizes the postsecular as primarily a matter of consciousness: it involves not only the recognition that religious communities continue to exist, but also a loss of the (hitherto firm) secularist conviction that religion will eventually disappear in the continuing process of modernization. This suggests that in its fuller elaboration Habermas’s notion of the postsecular is also a normative notion, which reflects or embodies the delegitimation of earlier political-philosophical convictions (notably, those associated with the liberal-secular nation state) that had been taken for granted in earlier discussions. What does remain in Habermas’s secularist-modernist analysis, however, is the assumption that religions are by definition a thing of the past, and that the appeal to religious authority is by definition an indication of the ‘obstinate survival of pre-modern modes of thought’ (2008b).2 In the same paper, Habermas appears to simply assume that fundamentalism is by definition anti-modern: The fastest-growing religious movements, such as the Pentecostals and the radical Muslims, can be most readily described as ‘fundamentalist’. They either combat the modern world or withdraw from it into isolation. 2 The English translation (‘Whether or not we consider the application of the predicate “post-secular” appropriate for a description of West European societies, one can be convinced, for philosophical reasons, that religious communities owe their persisting influence to an obstinate survival of pre-Modern modes of thought—a fact that begs an empirical explanation.’) is incorrect here, and hence needlessly puzzling. The German original reads: ‘Auch wenn man die Beschreibung “postsäkular” für westeuropäische Gesellschaften empirisch für richtig hält, kann man aus philosophischen Gründen davon überzeugt sein, dass Religionsgemeinschaften ihren bleibenden Einfluss nur dem zähen—soziologisch erklärbaren—Überleben vormoderner Denkweisen verdanken’ (my italics).

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This suggests that for all his post-secularist posturing Habermas’s outlook remains thoroughly secularist and modernist. This normative background becomes clearer in Habermas’s remark that fundamentalism may be construed as a long-term result of ‘violent colonization and failed decolonization’, that is, of ‘failing modernization’ (2008a: 115). This view is common among modernizationtheoretical views of colonialism, but it contains serious empirical flaws. One would be hard pushed, for example, to see present-day forms of Christian fundamentalism in the United States as the long-term result of British (let alone Dutch) colonial rule in the seventeenth century or the eighteenth-century War of Independence; and one would need a much more elaborate account of what the alleged failures of modernization amount to in Turkey (which has never been colonized in the first place). Thus, Habermas’s remarks appear to be predicated not on any detailed historical investigation, but rather on the normative assumption that successful modernization is secular or at least non-fundamentalist. In other words, despite suggestions to the contrary, Habermas remains firmly committed to a number of residual secularist beliefs, both in the descriptive guise of European modernization-as-secularization and in the normative guise that a successful modernization should result in a polity based on secularist principles. The abstract model underlying all this, I think, is one of a linear temporality that sees modernity—whether or not finished and whether a project or an achievement—as involving a linear, and irreversible, progress away from the ‘premodern’. This linear temporality is reflected in the—still—predominant pictures of scientific progress, societal emancipation, and functional differentiation that also inform Habermas’s writings. Furthermore, Habermas presupposes a distinction between the public and the private, or more precisely, assumes that politics self-evidently involves the ‘public use of reason’. A similar problem emerges here: just as the postsecular involves a misleading linear temporality of historical progress seen as the progressive branching out of autonomous spheres of human activity, often formulated in terms of a linear and irreversibly incremental division of labour and ‘functional differentiation’, so the public-private distinction which it presumes involves a misleading spatial imagery of public and private as distinct, or disjoint, spheres or spaces. Just as one cannot be in two places at the same time, this imagery suggests, one cannot simultaneously be public and private, or religious and secular.

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This linear temporal imagery suggests that these developments are, or should be, irreversible, and implies that new articulations of religion in politics are strictly speaking anomalies, because they go against the current of progress, but also because they violate a prior functional differentiation of the spheres of politics and religion into autonomous areas of human activity. Such a modernization-theoretical assumption of linear temporality has of course been refuted by empirical-historical developments of various kinds, but it remains an attractive figure. For Habermas the most important problem resulting from this assumption of a linear temporality is that it turns the public assertion, or reassertion, of religion in a secularized environment into something anomalous or unwanted almost as a matter of definition. Thus, the concept of the postsecular may be seen as Habermas’s attempt to accommodate such new public voices of religion as legitimate, without sacrificing his theoretical architecture, his secularist normative assumptions, or his modernist perspective of linear progress.3 One can appreciate this attempt to capture a present-day religious dynamism; but, at least in its Habermasian formulation, it fails to do justice to the typically if not essentially contested character of religion, and its potential role as an arena or focus of struggles for power and cultural legitimacy. 2. Religious, Secular and Post-secular: A Genealogical and Semiotic Perspective By consistently criticizing notions such as that of the postsecular or the public use of reason, however, we may in fact miss something essential about them. After all, much the same may be said about comparable terms, for example ‘modern’ and ‘postmodern’, ‘secular’ and ‘national identity’: the persistent appeal of such expressions is in stark contrast to their lack of an uncontested or clearly delineated meaning. I think this point does not simply reveal a deplorable immunity to critical sense or empirical refutations on the part of those who use such terms, but actually points to a significant aspect of these concepts themselves. That is to say that the notion of modernity as essentially or ideally secularized and secularist is not merely a theoretical hypothesis that

3 Starting from the Habermasian idea of the postsecular, McLennan (2007) discusses to what extent the discipline of sociology is itself driven by an ultimately secularist project.

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has been empirically refuted and proven normatively problematic; it is also, and perhaps more importantly, a convenient ideological representation. Hence, we should perhaps look for explanations of its persistence rather than belabour the oft-repeated announcements of its demise. One alternative account is supplied by Foucault (1986), who suggests that spatial oppositions like that between public and private space are not simple givens, but are remnants of a premodern sanctified conception of space that are ‘still nurtured by a hidden presence of the sacred’. In other words, for Foucault time may have been desanctified or secularized in the nineteenth century, but space was not. He does not elaborate on this—characteristically dense and suggestive— statement; but he would presumably add that the replacement of eschatological time by worldly time in the form of historical progress is not matched by a similar secularization or reconceptualization of space. For the present argument, this would suggest that the oppositions between public and private, and religious and secular, are based both on a modern secularized linear temporality of progress and on a premodern, discontinuous spatiality of the sacred. This analysis is complicated by Foucault’s notion of the heterotopia, a kind of ‘other space’ that is simultaneously mythic and real; in all cultures, he suggests, there are such real places or ‘enacted utopias’, where that culture’s other real sites are simultaneously represented, contested and inverted. In primitive societies there are sacred or forbidden places, such as the cemetery; in modern societies, he continues, there are ‘heterotopias of deviation’, such as the prison, the psychiatric hospital or the retirement home. Moreover, heterotopias can undergo changes in function: premodern cemeteries have a religious function within the sacred space of the church in the centre of the city; modern cemeteries, by contrast, are generally located on the city’s outskirts, and have been secularized, or as Foucault puts it ‘become atheistic’. Most importantly for our present discussion, Foucault concludes with the suggestion that European colonialism may have involved the construction of ‘heterotopias of compensation’, i.e. the attempt to build other spaces that are as orderly and well-designed as existing European spaces were messy (and, one might add, conflictuous). In fact, this is one of the rare occasions when he explicitly refers to colonialism, on which he is otherwise strangely silent. He sees this colonial ambition reflected in the Puritan societies established in New England and in several Jesuit colonies in South America, thus implying

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that both the colonizing movement and the new forms of spatial organization that accompanied it were at least partly driven by religious zeal. Despite the qualitatively different experience of the Islamic Middle East, most of which was colonized less completely (if at all) and in a later period than the one Foucault refers to, one may well ask to what extent forms of nineteenth-century urban planning were similarly driven by a (quasi-)colonial and (quasi-)religious concern for the population’s well-being. Yet, suggestive as it is, Foucault’s analysis is far from complete. Apart from a further elaboration of (quasi-)colonial conditions, one would also like to see further explication and refinement of the suggestion that space and time are neither physical givens nor Kantian forms of Anschauung, but are discursively and semiotically constituted, and hence are saturated with changing, superimposed, contradictory and contested meanings. A particular space or sphere is itself also a sign that is in part constituted by discursive processes; I will elaborate on this point below. An influential continuation of this genealogical line of argument, which does take into account the (post-)colonial Muslim world, was formulated by Talal Asad (2003), who suggests that secularist views such as Habermas’s pay insufficient attention to the genealogy of the concept of the secular presupposed in their analyses. By extension, the concept of the sacred or the religious should equally be subjected to a genealogical analysis that traces its history as part of a wider undertaking (Asad 1993). In a series of famous articles, Asad has argued—at times more suggestively than conclusively—that the anthropological category of religion in terms of symbolic actions not geared to practical, or ‘rational’, ends is a distinctly modern phenomenon, and is rooted in a specifically European post-Enlightenment experience; likewise, the modern Western concept of the secular was shaped in part through the encounter with the non-Western world (Asad 2003). In a complex argument, Asad attempts to show that the presentday sense of the secular has developed alongside a reconceptualization of myth, from uses we would qualify as secular and literary to a view that increasingly treats myth as by definition transcendent and irrational. This suggests, however, that Asad’s brand of genealogy focuses—in this case at least—less on specific (non-discursive) practices of power than on changing word meanings in evolving verbal practices, such as those of theology, literary criticism and the like. Especially revealing in

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this respect, I think, are Asad’s frequent references to word meanings as described and established in written and published authorities such as the Oxford English Dictionary and the Encyclopedia Britannica (e.g. 1993: 56–9; 2003: 23–4, 31). Now this recourse to lexicography involves not only an appeal to a very particular kind of linguistic authority; it also reflects a particular view of the functioning and legitimation of language forms—that is, it reflects a particular ‘language ideology’, as it has been called by some anthropologists (cf. e.g. Silverstein 1979): it treats the published dictionary as a codified and apparently uncontested authority on what words really mean. The etymological appeal to a Greek or Latin ‘origin’ of, say, religion in Latin religio, which at times can also be found with Asad, and indeed in many other authors, reflects another such language ideology. Thus, it appears that a genealogical critique of both the linear temporality and the sacral spatiality assumed in the notion of the postsecular may be usefully supplemented by a semiotic perspective focusing on ideologies of language. Here I take my cue from Susan Gal’s (2002) argument that the public-private opposition is not a neutral analytical tool, but an ideological and semiotic notion: it suggests that one may perhaps best understand the persistence of such and other oppositions by trying to provide an account of the discursive practices in which they function and assume a political and economic significance. Such a semiotic approach may serve as a complement rather than an alternative to the more prominent socio-historical and typological approaches (2002: 79). On a semiotic perspective, public and private are not two particular places, domains or spheres of action, let alone distinctive institutions or practices; rather, Gal argues, they are both cultural categories that in part constitute the very oppositions they refer to, and indexical signs that acquire different contents depending on their context of use. Gal (2002: 91) partly explains the apparent stability of the publicprivate distinction across different periods, places, and situations from its so-called fractal character, i.e. the fact that it can be, and generally is, reproduced at different levels, for instance through the distinction between civil society and the state, and between different kinds of gendered activity within the family. As such, it is a peculiar kind of indexical sign like here or there, acquiring a determinate content only in a particular context of use. Gal further adds that the public-private distinction as politically and economically significant is an ‘ideological elaboration’, that is, a metadiscursive or metalinguistic operation, on

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the pragmatic possibility of indicating proximity and distance by using indexical signs. Much the same, I would argue, may be said about the religioussecular distinction and the secularization thesis: the content of both is determined only in part by social phenomena and developments, and equally dependent on the contexts in which they are used. Secondly, these notions also involve a metalinguistic or metadiscursive dimension of commenting on, and regimenting, other signs, practices and, by extension, speakers. Thus, by employing such terms as ‘secular’ and ‘modern’ speakers may situate themselves or their social environment as progressive and emancipated, as opposed to some other opponent equally contextually determined; at the same time, by framing themselves and others as either secularized or religious, they also make implicit judgments as to which voices are legitimate. In so far as this ideological usage involves both metalinguistic usage and other regimentations and re-articulations of particular words, it may be qualified more precisely as a linguistic ideology. Thus, a semiotic approach that calls attention to language-ideological and metalinguistic factors may usefully serve as a complement to genealogical approaches such as Foucault’s (1975; 1986) and Asad’s (1993; 2003): it not only traces the history of notions of temporality and spatiality and of concepts such as those of the religious and the secular, and the public and the private; it also calls attention to the ongoing shifts in, and contestations of, the very meanings of such terms, and more broadly to the conceptual importance of changing linguistic practices and ideologies in explaining religious change in society. 3. Postsecularism and Postislamism in the Islamic World As argued above, Habermas’s analysis is deeply problematic even on its own, philosophical, terms and even when applied to developments in Western Europe. The conceptual and other problems of his analyses become even clearer when one looks at the non-Western world. Here, I will focus on the Islamic Middle East, although I will include a few brief remarks on the (post-) Confucian Far East as well. In his various writings Habermas displays an astonishing lack of familiarity with and interest in even the most basic historical and social developments in the Muslim world, or even among Muslim immigrants in Europe. Thus, when discussing Islam in the Netherlands, he

how ethnocentric is the concept of the postsecular? 101 refers to a small number of literary authors (such as Margriet de Moor, Ian Buruma and Geert Mak) rather than to more solidly empirically based social-scientific studies, even though those are plentiful and not difficult to find. More generally, in so far as he refers to academic works on the Muslim world at all he tends to rely on outdated or ideologically problematic literature, most prominently the writings of Bernard Lewis, which are conveniently reductionist and clear-cut in their vision of good and evil but not necessarily reliable as a guide to the contemporary Middle East and its past. Unfortunately, in this Habermas is by no means alone among Western European intellectuals. According to Lewis’s influential vision, religious and political radicalism in the present-day Islamic world have nothing to do with either domestic power struggles, colonialism and decolonization, or neo-imperialistic involvement of especially the United States, but should all be explained from a generic civilizational jealousy of modern Western technological and economic achievements, and from an equally generic frustration at having lost an earlier position of civilizational pre-eminence. Although not backed by any substantial or convincing documentary evidence, Lewis’s views have proved remarkably popular with Western commentators, including, besides Habermas, John Rawls, Avishai Margalit, Ian Buruma and Hans Magnus Enzensberger.4 However, the more important question for our purposes is how to transcend the narrow focus on the historical experience of Western Europe when it comes to questions of secularization and ‘religious modernization’. In classical Weberian style Habermas suggests that developments in Europe, notably the Reformation and the Enlightenment, are unique; to a lesser extent, he also looks at American history since the Declaration of Independence and the proclamation of its staunchly secularist constitution. Yet, the Islamic world has had more than its share of secularizing developments and secularist movements. In so far as these have been studied it is primarily from a social-historical perspective discussing the relations between liberal and/or secularist5 power elites and pious masses, often informed by modernization-theoretical assumptions; but here I would like to describe how a genealogical 4 I have no room to elaborate on this point here, but I think its consequences are important enough to merit a separate discussion. 5 Perhaps needless to say the two need not coincide. For example, the Kemalist elites in Turkey—especially as embodied in the army officer corps—have always been, and continue to be, staunchly secular; but they are not liberal at present, let alone in the more remote past.

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and semiotic perspective might provide a different picture. I can only sketch the barest outlines of such an account here; I will focus on the Ottoman empire, keeping in mind that experiences have been rather different in Iran under the Safavid and Qajar dynasties, or in India under the Muslim rule of Mughals and others. The classical Ottoman empire was not a theocracy. It was not the ‘ulama or men of religious learning who exercised power, but rather the worldly rulers or sultans, who increasingly relied on an expanding bureaucracy that not only included large numbers of non-Muslims but was also strictly subservient to the ruler rather than to religious dignitaries. In theory, the sultan’s decrees were bound by, or subordinate to, the revealed law or shari’a, but in practice he wielded a considerable personal discretion, promulgating laws considered to belong to qanun rather than the shari’a. It was also the sultan’s court that appointed the highest religious dignitaries. In other words, the clergy was generally subordinated to the state. Superficially, then, the Ottoman empire would seem to feature a secularist polity or a secular society, but one should then discuss the question in how far it can be meaningfully described in such terms at all. The empire did not know anything remotely like the distinctions between state and society, or between private and public, on which modern forms of secularism are predicated. Ottoman rulers did not reign over an abstract ‘society’ but over a flock or re’aya, the more strictly civilian population which (in theory at least) was, and had to remain, separated from the class of soldiers or asker; re’aya and askeri were never classed together as ‘society’, nor opposed as were ‘society’ and ‘state’ in the European context; nor did this opposition, incidentally, coincide with that between Muslims and minorities (dhimmis): especially in the Balkan regions there were Christian soldiers in Ottoman service; and in Istanbul the bureaucracy counted numerous Greeks and Armenians. Further, despite a steadily expanding bureaucracy it is difficult to speak of a ‘state’ as distinct from the personality of the ruler. Likewise, the rule of the sultans can hardly be said to be based on a separation of church and state, in so far as there was hardly anything like a uniform and universally authoritative ‘church’ to be separated from the state or the sultan’s rule in the first place. The first serious attempts at modernization in terms of conscious governmental policies concerning the population at large started in the eighteenth century—if one disregards the early modern attempts by Ottomans, and more importantly their neighbours the Safavids in

how ethnocentric is the concept of the postsecular? 103 Iran, to impose a particular form of Islam on the bulk of the population. Such interventions may perhaps be seen as early expansions of the reaches of the state. More importantly, in the eighteenth century Ottoman state bureaucracy steadily expanded, encroaching onto territory hitherto considered the privilege of religious scholars (notably, education); this expansion created a need for simpler forms of language to allow larger and less well educated groups of bureaucrats to take office (cf. Mardin 1961). During the same period something like a public sphere emerged, primarily in the Ottoman coffee houses. The comparative interest of this development remains to be acknowledged; thus, in his famous 1962 study, Habermas (1989 [1962]) has argued that the emerging bourgeois public sphere in Western Europe was secular, and assumes it was monolingual; in the Ottoman public sphere, by contrast, religion and religious reform movements appear to have played a more important role, and moreover, this sphere was—initially at least—strongly multilingual (cf. Leezenberg 2007). The respective roles of religion and what Habermas would call the ‘public use of reason’ in this public sphere have hardly been explored; but what matters most here is that in the Ottoman case its emergence involved a gradual change of the meaning of the traditional concept pair ‘âmma-khâssa: from denoting the opposition between illiterate masses and educated elite it came to denote the public-private distinction in something close to the liberal sense (ibid.). The expansion of the state was also accompanied by a reorganization of religious and secular spaces. The steady growth of urban tekkes, or Sufi lodges, was treated with suspicion by the authorities, leading to the total ban on Sufi orders in 1920s Turkey (though not in the ther emerging post-Ottoman nation states). Likewise, the Quranic schools or medreses faced increasing competition from new state-based and private schools as well as from missionary educational efforts. In the same period, new national identities started to emerge; this development has often been described as a transformation of the religious identities distinguished by the so-called millet system into secularized national ones,6 but the process was far more complicated, often involving the interaction and redefinition of both nation and religion, and indeed the very emergence of a kind of identity politics that had not

6

Cf. K. Karpat (1982) for an early analysis of this transformation.

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existed before. One crucial, but at present widely open, question in this context is to what extent the emerging Ottoman public sphere brought new forms of temporality and spatiality; but there are indications that these did indeed undergo significant changes. In his famous Imagined Communities (1991), Benedict Anderson has argued that the emergence of nationalism was accompanied by a shift from a fundamentally ahistorical ‘Messianic time’ to a more secularized and linear time of national history in the form of historical progress, and from a premodern spatiality of an indeterminate dynastic realm to the modern space of a clearly delimited territorial state (1991: 19–28). Especially in the Ottoman empire, however, these suggestions appear to presume rather than to establish a linear process of secularization and territorialization. In short, one cannot simply consider the Ottoman empire as either secular or non-secular; modernization there certainly was, but in many respects developments reflect a particular—if not unique— local constellation of religious and political factors. This also holds for the republic of Turkey, which from the 1920s onward has pursued a consistent and largely authoritarian secularist policy, involving for instance the abolition of Sufi orders and religious schools, and the outlawing of headscarves and other overtly religious forms of dress. Although the resulting polity can hardly be called ‘liberal’, especially in its authoritarian early years, the present-day Turkish state is still militantly secularist, as witnessed also by the constitutional court’s recent condemnation of the governing AK Party for violating the state’s secularist constitution. Of course, a lot can and should be said about laiklik, the Turkish variant of French laicité; but it should be clear that one cannot describe it as ‘pre-modern’ or ‘not yet fully secularized’; in fact, one could call the recent rise of Islamist politics in the country as rather more unambiguously ‘post-secularist’ than the continuing presence of Christian communities and Christian Democratic political parties in countries such as Holland or Germany. But the more interesting questions, I think, do not center around the particular trajectories along which the various states of the Muslim Middle East have modernized; rather, they concern the question of how the very category of ‘religion’ itself has been transformed in the process. Due especially to the emergence of a public sphere and the rise of identity politics in the nineteenth century and to the creation of nation states crucially involving political mass mobilization in the early twentieth, but also due to steady processes of urbanization, a wholly new conception of the religious emerged within the context

how ethnocentric is the concept of the postsecular? 105 of newly emerging—and often violently contested—territorial nation states, new institutions of (Western-inspired) learning and new varieties of predominantly secular mass politics. All this provides suggestive material for the history, or genealogy, of secularism in the Muslim world in the recent past; but there are also indications pointing to the complexities of the present. For example, authors such as Asef Bayat (2007) have argued that recent developments have ushered some Muslim societies into a phase of ‘post-Islamism’, even if their states remain/are as Islamic, or Islamist, as ever. In Bayat’s formulation, post-Islamism is both a condition of earlier politicized and even revolutionary ideologies of Islam losing breath, if not legitimacy, and a project of transcending such earlier politicized forms of Islam. Post-Islamism is not a form of secularism, as it need not involve giving up on Islamism (let alone on Islam as a religion). Rather, it is the adaptation of politicized Islam to novel circumstances. In its purest form, this kind of post-Islamism emerged in the Iranian society of the 1990s, when the initial revolutionary fervor and Khomeini’s charismatic leadership had disappeared, and when representatives of the so-called ‘new theology’ (kalam-e no), most famously represented by the influential thinker Abdolkarim Soroush, sought to redefine the core of Islam as a private faith (iman) rather than a public, and even political, form of activism, such as had been influentially formulated by the likes of Ali Shari’iati. Comparable developments, however, can also be seen elsewhere in the Islamic world, according to Bayat’s (and others’) argument. The concept of post-Islamism has been severely criticized, however. Various authors have argued that it does not apply to countries other than Iran, and cannot even be applied without problems to Iran itself: that is, as an analytical category post-Islamism may be as problematic as it is suggestive. My point here, however, is not to discuss the usefulness of this concept, but merely to call attention to the dynamism that can be seen in the contemporary Muslim world, a dynamism that seems to escape Habermas entirely. One should equally beware of overgeneralizing: developments in Turkey differ significantly from those in the Arab world and Iran. In the Arab Middle East, one might roughly identify a postsecular era that coincides with the end of the Eastern Bloc, a staunch ally of a good many Arab states, and with the concomitant demise of communism as a viable and popular political ideology; but this era coincides almost exactly with the emergence of a post-Islamist constellation in Iran. In post-Cold War Turkey, by

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contrast, the radical secularism that went largely unchallenged for decades was increasingly opposed by a brand of Islamism that is in many respect more liberal and pro-European than its Kemalist predecessors in politics, let alone the army elite. In other words, present-day forms of politicized religion in the Middle East have complex histories that cannot simply be qualified as a narrative of secularism followed by a post-secular condition, and equally resist reduction to an outdated master narrative of unenlightened pre-modern stagnation or failed modernization. One wonders to what extent similar arguments apply to other parts of the world: for example, in how far does the waning political influence of the evangelical Right in the United States mark a ‘postevangelical’ turn in American society? And can we see ‘post-Hinduist’ tendencies in contemporary India, or ‘post-Confucian’ trends in China, Taiwan, Korea and Japan (let alone the expatriate communities from these countries)? In fact, this last term has been used to indicate the contemporary cultural dynamism in East Asia (Hahm 2001, Thoraval 2007): thus, Hahm argues that in South Korea postmodernism has led to a re-evaluation of Confucianism, and more particularly of the neo-Confucian synthesis of Buddhist metaphysics, Confucianist ethics and Taoist religious devotion, as against the modernist criticisms that neo-Confucianism constituted an obstacle for social, political and intellectual progress—a line of criticism that had long been hegemonic among both nationalist and communist circles in these countries.7 In this sense, these states have also had their secularist phase: notably, mainland China, of course, had even been forcibly de-Confucianized during the earlier decades of communist rule, and especially during the cultural revolution. Hahm’s analysis can be seen as an attempt to counter the authoritarianism implicit in contemporary appeals to specifically ‘Asian values’ of alleged (neo-) Confucian origins, such as obedience and loyalty to parents, group and rulers, at the expense of a critical attitude and political participation: for him, a post-Confucian context should allow the affirmation of democratic politics and the liberation of subjected forms of knowledge, rather than authoritarianism and identity politics.

7 Hahm erroneously identifies postmodernism with the writings of Heidegger and Gadamer, but that does not matter here.

how ethnocentric is the concept of the postsecular? 107 For our purposes the core of Hahm’s argument is that a postConfucian context or constellation presupposes not only a modernist marginalization or even rejection of Confucianism, but also the redefinition of Confucianism as a religion or a philosophy (cf. Goossaert 2007), in a discursive operation, or change of meaning, that required a wholesale conceptual reorganisation of key elements of the Chinese vocabulary. Modern Confucianism may indeed be called a ‘religion’ only against the background of the modern nation state, with its (Western-inspired) modern institutions of learning, and with new concerns for the morality of its citizens. In short, the experiences of both the Muslim Middle East and of the (post-) Confucian Far East appear to defy reduction to Habermas’s categories, and may be more profitably analyzed in genealogical and semiotic terms: the different parts of the modern world have gone through distinct (but possibly converging) trajectories of modernization, and show broadly comparable rearticulations of the religious and the secular, the public and the private, and so on. One intriguing, but open, question is whether and why all these different regions do in fact share a quasi-liberal master narrative of progress, national identity and freedom, and why this master narrative appears to be so tenacious. I have no answer to that question, but can only point to some of its ingredients below. 4. Islam and the (Post-)Secular City Now, how do these considerations apply to the study of contemporary urbanism, whether in the Muslim world or Western Europe? More concretely, is there anything essentially novel about the contemporary city which might be qualified as ‘postsecular’, and if so, how could we go about studying it? Let me make a few suggestions here, based on my earlier fieldwork in the region (Leezenberg 2006). A first, and relatively trivial, observation is that contemporary forms of religious revival are typically novel urban articulations rather than reassertions of rural religious traditions, even if on occasion they pose as such. They presuppose such prototypically urban, or ‘modern’, phenomena as literacy, education, public visibility and, perhaps most importantly, various mass communication media. Although ‘premodern’ and ‘rural’ bonds of loyalty to a tribe or Sufi order (tariqa) have by no means disappeared, they have been rearticulated and redefined in their urban

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settings (cf. Leezenberg 2006: 154–6). The relatively recent rise of Salafi forms of Islam as opposed to the more entrenched varieties of Sufism also appears a strongly urban phenomenon: recruitment and mobilization appear to focus initially on the bigger cities, from where the new recruits are then sent out to the countryside for further proselytizing. A second basic point to keep in mind is to make a clear distinction between cities in the contemporary Muslim world, and Western European cities with a substantial population segment of immigrant Muslim backgrounds. Grouping together the experience from cities as far apart as Baghdad and Bradford, or Istanbul and Amsterdam, under a generic label of ‘(post-) Islam’ may mask more than it clarifies. Thus, contemporary Iraqi society is as postsecular as any, having witnessed the rise of new kinds of sectarianism and ethnic rivalries at the popular level; most importantly, a violent Sunni-Shi’ite divide arose that had never existed before, and moreover led to urban gang warfare between and within the various quarters. The demise of the—formerly formidable—Iraqi Communist Party and the rise of new Islamist political actors (most notoriously, al-Qa’ida-type organizations carrying out suicide bombings that increasingly target fellow Muslims, but also the various religious parties engaging in civilian politics) could equally well be qualified as postsecular. Iraq, however, constitutes a uniquely violent laboratory of post-war and post-totalitarian urbanism that may hardly serve as a model for normative and conceptual explorations, except in so far as it mounts the most serious challenge yet for liberal political theories that see the establishment of civil society as marking an end to conflict and the imposition of a monopoly of violence by the state. Likewise, the proliferation and strengthening of relations of patronage tends to blur the distinctions between state and society, and between public and private. Post-Saddam Iraq has witnessed a polycentric reproduction of the formerly more monolithic and centralized Iraqi welfare state. Especially the bigger cities have seen rapid—and often violently contested—patterns of clientelization that could already be seen in the Kurdish region a decade earlier (cf. Leezenberg 2005; 2007b). For the foreseeable future conflict will remain the rule rather than the exception in Iraq, with urban religious movements, urbanized tribal groups and mystical orders, party militias and criminal gangs becoming increasingly difficult to distinguish from each other. It remains to be explored how and in how far this novel constellation has brought new articulations of the opposition between the

how ethnocentric is the concept of the postsecular? 109 religious and the secular. In the Kurdish North the political opposition between the main parties, the Kurdistan Democratic Party (KDP) and the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK), has led to an enduring territorial separation of the nominally unified autonomous region (herêm) of Iraqi Kurdistan into two one-party statelets. This political-territorial separation has at times been explained, if not legitimized, by an appeal to allegedly enduring cleavages between the tribal North and the more urbanized South of the region; between speakers of the Northern Badini and the more Southern Sorani dialects; and even between the Naqshbandi and Qadiri Sufi orders. Although each of these superimposed oppositions vastly oversimplifies the much more complex patterns of political mobilization, recruitment and clientelization, they suggest that secular and religious forms of representation and legitimation do in fact display a considerable overlap. A different situation altogether obtains in the cities of Western Europe, with its relatively well-entrenched and institutionalized (not to mention relatively peaceful) roles of the state. Here, the most significant development is probably the emergence of new forms of individualized religion, which are script-based, electronically mediated, and increasingly deculturalized and deterritorialized (especially, but by no means exclusively, among youths of Moroccan descent, who increasingly, and increasingly vocally, distance themselves from the rural and principally orally transmitted forms of religiosity of their parents).8 Especially the rising proliferation of the Internet has led to entirely new kinds of communication, to new legitimations and contestations of religious and other authority—that is, to wholly novel semiotic processes. One important semiotic process is formed by the new ideological oppositions between Muslim immigrants and the allegedly secularized and emancipated society surrounding them. In recent years, a generic category of ‘Muslim’, assumed to be associated with backward, unenlightened and premodern modes of thought and forms of life, and with violence, intolerance and sexual repression, has been indiscriminately imposed upon entire population groups as a social stigma as much as it has been claimed in self-definition. That does not mean, of course, that such self-definitions and redefinitions do not occur. On the contrary, in immigrant contexts rather more than in the Muslim world

8

Cf. Roy (2004).

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stricto sensu one may witness the emergence of new forms of what may safely be dubbed ‘do-it-yourself Islam’: employing cut-and-paste techniques from the Internet, and relying on slim brochures rather than the massive volumes of premodern Islamic learning, young urban Muslims in diaspora contexts engage in a kind of shopping for religious authority rather than maintaining the unquestioning loyalty to local village imams or immigrant ‘ulama sponsored by their countries of origin that was more characteristic of their—often illiterate or semi-literate—parents. In other words, new forms of ‘deculturalized’ and ‘deterritorialized’ religion emerge, involving new media and new kinds of religious authority. Intriguingly, such new kinds of Islamic self-assertion also presuppose a largely secularized environment (cf. Roy 2004). Habermasian accounts of postsecularism fail to appreciate what is new about such individual developments and collective movements: in so far as they generically take ‘religion’ as a convenient shorthand for ‘legitimate religious authority’, they precisely miss the novelty of this deterritorialized and decultured struggle for such authority. Habermas’s conflation of religious orthodoxy and religious conservatism risks overlooking, for Muslims and Christians alike, the very conflicts over new forms of religious authority. It is tempting to construe mosques and Muslim organizations as contemporary heterotopias; but it is more important to explore their changing location and visibility, and especially the conflicts over the meaning of these symbolically and emotionally charged phenomena: are they sacred spaces or security concerns? Are they loci of prayer and morality, or hotbeds of resistance to integration, of homophobia, misogyny and even violent radicalism, as populist critics assert? If not, why is this discourse about security issues so tenacious? Likewise, dominant discourse about the domestic space of the Muslim family imposes a different kind of temporality: like the harem before, the Muslim home tends to be represented or imagined as a heterotopia of a radically different (premodern, religion-saturated, and unenlightened) temporality, morality and sexuality than the urban space surrounding it. Here, too, a semiotic focus might yield insights overlooked by Habermas’s line of analysis. For the Middle East, I would think, the notion of the ‘postsecular’ is analytically less useful than a focus on the new kinds of communication, especially private satellite television channels and Internet. I think this emergence of privatized and international media of mass communication in a neoliberal but still authoritarian context does

how ethnocentric is the concept of the postsecular? 111 indeed amount to yet another ‘structural transformation of the public sphere’ in the Habermasian (1989 [1962]) sense; although this new public sphere is clearly transnational, it is generally divided along strict linguistic lines and hence has in fact supported new articulations of older forms of nationalism, as indeed of various kinds of religious exclusivism. In short: the study of religion in contemporary urbanism might profit from an approach that looks at religious changes in terms of changing linguistic practices and ideologies. 5. Conclusion Where does this leave us with respect to liberal secularist and modernization-theoretical approaches to the study of religion? What, if anything, can be salvaged from the Habermasian concept of the ‘postsecular’? It should be clear that Habermas’s use of the term is deeply problematic: the postsecular is not a neutral analytical category but a normative notion that has deep secularist and modernist assumptions; besides its empirical and historiographic shortcomings it presupposes a residual secularism and a problematic public-private distinction, and takes the (Western European) liberal nation state as a self-evident framework. It also carries unwarranted, and indeed misleading, assumptions of a linear temporality and a dubious spatial imaginary of societal spheres. An empirically more sophisticated and normatively more promising approach would trace the history, or genealogy, of religion and secularism against a background of changing metadiscursive regimes, and would involve the wholesale reconfiguration of spheres such as those of the religious and the secular, or the political and the moral. That is a daunting task indeed; but I think it may help to not only get a better idea of what is novel, traditional, particular and common about the various contemporary rearticulations of religion in different parts of the world, but also to explain why master narratives of secularism and secularization persist even in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary.9

9 This paper was originally presented at the conference on the Postsecular City in Groningen; it incorporates material from a talk on ‘Fundamentalism and Modernity’, presented at the seminar Europe: The Endless Struggle against Fundamentalism, Tehran, June 2008. I would like to thank he convenors and participants of both events, notably Arie Molendijk, Birgit Meyer, Simon Oliai, Dariush Shayegan, and Roberto Toscano for their constructive feedback.

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Anderson, B. (1991) Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. Second edition. London: Verso. Asad, T. (1993) ‘The Construction of Religion as an Anthropological Category’. In Asad, T., Genealogies of Religion: Discipline and Reasons of Power in Christianity and Islam. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. ——. (2003) ‘What Would an Anthropology of the Secular Look Like?’ In Asad, T., Formations of the Secular. Palo Alto CA: Stanford University Press. Bauman, R. and Briggs, C. (2003) Voices of Modernity: Language Ideologies and the Politics of Inequality. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Bayat, A. (2007) Islam and Democracy: What is the Real Question? Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press. Casanova, J. (1994) Public Religions in the Modern World. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Cheng, A. (ed.) (2007) La pensée en Chine aujourd’hui. Paris: Gallimard. Foucault, M. (1975) Surveiller et punir. Paris: Gallimard. —— (1986 [1967]) ‘Of Other Spaces’. Diacritics 16, 22–7. Available online at http:// www.foucault.info/documents/heteroTopia/foucault.heteroTopia.en.html. Gal, S. (2002) ‘A Semiotics of the Public/Private Distinction’. Differences 13(1): 77–95. Goossaert, V. (2007) ‘L’invention des ‘religions’ en Chine moderne’. In Cheng (2007), 185–214. Habermas, J. (1989 [1962]) The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere. (trans. of Strukturwandel der Öffentlichkeit, Frankfurt 1977 [1962]). Boston: MIT Press. —— (2001) Glauben und Wissen. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp. —— (2008a) Between Naturalism and Religion. Cambridge: Polity Press. —— (2008b) ‘Notes on a Postsecular Society’. Available online at: http://www.signandsight.com/features/1714.html. Hahm, C. (2001) ‘Postmodernism in the Post-Confucian Context: Epistemological and Political Considerations’. Human Studies 24: 29–44. Karpat, K. (1982) ‘Millets and Nationality: The Roots of the Incongruity of Nation and State in the Post-Ottoman Era’. In Braude, B. and Lewis, B. (eds) Christians and Jews in the Ottoman Empire. New York: Holmes-Meier, pp. 141–70. Leezenberg, M. (2005) ‘Iraqi Kurdistan: Contours of a Post-Civil War Society’. Third World Quarterly 26: 631–48. —— (2006) ‘Urbanization, Privatization, and Patronage: The Political Economy of Iraqi Kurdistan’. In Jabar, F. A. and Dawod, H. (eds) The Kurds: Nationalism and Politics. London, San Francisco and Beirut: Saqi Books. —— (2007a) ‘Comparatieve Filosofie van het Koffieleuten’. Krisis 25(2): 25–45. —— (2007b) ‘Geweld in Irak: Islam, Stalin of Mafia?’ In Harten, P. van and Meijer, R. (eds) Irak in chaos. Amsterdam: Aksant. Mardin, S. (1961) ‘Some Notes on an Early Phase of the Modernisation of Communications in Turkey’. Comparative Studies in Society and History 3: 250–71. McLennan, G. (2007) ‘Towards Postsecular Sociology?’ Sociology 41: 857–70. Roy, O. (2004) L’islam mondialisé. Paris: Seuil. Silverstein, M (1979) ‘Language Structure and Linguistic Ideology’. In Clyne, P., Hanks, W. F. and Hofbauer, C. L. (eds) The Elements: A Parasession on Linguistic Units and Levels Including Papers from the Conference on Non Slavic Languages of the USSR. Chicago: Chicago Linguistics Society, pp. 193–247. Thoraval, J. (2007) ‘La tentation neo-pragmatiste dans la Chine moderne’. In Cheng (2007), 103–34. Veer, P. van der (2001) Imperial Encounters: Religion and Modernity in India and Britain. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

THE TRANSFORMATION OF RELIGIOUS CULTURE WITHIN MODERN SOCIETIES: FROM SECULARIZATION TO POSTSECULARISM Wilhelm Gräb Let me begin with Jürgen Habermas. His well-known idea that we live in a postsecular society implies a specific understanding of what is meant by the term postsecular (Habermas 2008): ‘I have thus far taken the position of a sociological observer in trying to answer the question of why we can term secularized societies “post-secular”’. In these societies religion maintains public influence and relevance, while the certainty of secularists that religion will disappear worldwide in the course of modernization is losing ground. However, if from now on we adopt the perspective of participants we face a quite different, i.e. normative, question (Habermas 2008): How should we see ourselves as members of a post-secular society and what must we reciprocally expect from one another in order to ensure that in firmly entrenched nation states, social relations remain civil despite the growth of a plurality of cultures and religious world views?

The theory of postsecularism maintains that religions and religious communities are being transformed, while remaining important social factors in modern societies. They have to change in order to be compatible with a modern democratic social environment. Postsecularism is a correction of secularism. Secularism submits that religion does not play a role in public affairs and is disappearing more and more from the public sphere. In opposition to the thesis of secularism, Habermas emphasises that religions are sources of meaning and moral norms which modern societies cannot do without, but that they have to translate their positions into a language which is understandable for non-religious persons, too. Thus, a religious position is not one political stance among many, but goes beyond a variety of political positions and initiatives. Religion is a personal thing, not a private matter but a topic of the inner world in which ethical and political intentions develop. In this respect the term ‘postsecular’ reminds us of the distinction between religion and the Church, or between religious denominations

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and spirituality as a promise for the fulfilment of the human potential. This is an insight first formulated by liberal Protestant theologians in the early 19th century. In this paper I will attempt to show that the term ‘postsecularism’ covers the wide transformation of religion into a dimension of personal experiences and convictions which are not limited to religious institutions and communities. The term also confirms that secularization has taken place, but denotes a differentiation of church and state, religion and politics, as well as a decline in church membership and a loss of power for religious institutions. Nevertheless, religion is still a deep source for moral convictions and the meaning of life. It is an experience which is involved in many spheres of our everyday life, especially the moral and aesthetic dimensions. In this sense, modern societies have never been secular societies. Thus, the term ‘postsecularism’ is also a result of our forgetting that religion can be understood as a personal experience close to aesthetic experiences, an understanding of religion which was developed by liberal Protestant theologians in the early 19th century. 1. Secularization as Disengagement from the Church It is evident that in East Germany large parts of the population have become disengaged from the Church (Entkirchlichung) (Daiber 1995: 108–23). Within the former GDR Christian churches seem to represent only a minority of the population. But the fact remains that churches in eastern Germany still exist as religious institutions and that they enjoy the same rights as churches in the west of Germany.1 The churches as religious institutions indicate the social presence of Christianity throughout Germany. After the collapse of the GDR, the social influence of the Church was not as easily accepted as had been in West Germany. There were certain areas of conflict such as the collection of a ‘church tax’ by state tax offices, religious instruction in public schools and the contracts of army chaplains (Pollack and Pickel 2000).2 In Brandenburg the state government has not established religious instruction as a stan1 The regional constitutions of the new Länder (1992–3) acknowledge the churches’ status as corporations under public law confirmed by both the constitution of the Weimar Republic and the Basic Law of the German Federal Republic dating from 1949 (see Daiber 1995: 64–9). 2 About the contracts of army chaplains, see Daiber (1995: 90–4).

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dard subject, as is required in the German constitution (Grundgesetz Art. 7.3). The state government has introduced a curriculum for ethics and religious instruction (‘LER’, Lebenskunde-Ethik-Religionskunde) instead of a curriculum for religious education for which Church and government would share responsibility (Fauth 2000).3 The churches in eastern Germany, however, do have an institutional strength unusual for a social minority. As in the west of Germany, they represent the public sphere of Christianity and institutionalize the organization of moral and religious interests. For obvious historical reasons this interest is rarely expressed by membership in the Church. A differentiated view on the relationship between religion and Christianity, church and society in eastern Germany is therefore necessary, and we have to analyse in particular the way churches situate themselves in the context of a secular (but not non-religious) society. Eastern Germany still lacks the paradigm of secularization that was discussed in West Germany during the 1960s and 1970s. In West Germany the secularization debate helped to establish a wider view on churches as religious institutions in societies. Theology was able to acknowledge religious practices as differing from normative dogmatic notions, although those practices might contradict traditional prescriptions concerning commitment to the Church and Christian life. 2. Secularization as a Differentiation of the Specific Social Function of Religion The term ‘secularization’ denotes a kind of self-description that was used by modern Western societies to depict social changes in the relationship between religion and culture, church and state. Some time ago ‘secularization’ was used as a tendentious term against claims of authority made by the Church.4 Today, the term is employed as a category of interpretation for cultural changes in the relationship between religion, the Church and society (Hahn 1997). Thus, secularization denotes the impact of processes of social differentiation on religious institutions. A secularized society can be recognized by the fact that its churches have lost their direct influence on political and governmental 3 4

For the chronology of LER, see www.Brandenburg.de/land/mbjs/schule/32.er3.htm. See the detailed study of the history of the term by Hermann Lübbe (1965).

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power, science, law and education. In a secular society church and state are separate social fields with autonomous institutions. Churches or religious communities with a constitution of their own are responsible bodies of religion, while law, education and economy possess their own specific forms of organization. Religion is neither responsible for everything, nor does it interfere in everything. This change of status does not exclude religion from being a relevant social field, in more than just its organizational aspects. Even in secularized societies religion is needed in crisis situations, both for the individual and for the whole of society. There is no doubt that in modern, Western societies churches have lost some of their significance. This is evident in the mere notion of secularization. In the same process, however, we find the emergence of a postsecular society in which religion as a personal matter still remains an important source of deeper experiences of meaning and moral motivations. Secularization as a juridical category denotes the priority of the political and moral sphere over religious affiliations and ideological imprint. As a descriptive and hermeneutic category of cultural change, secularization refers to the functional differentiation of religion in modern society. Religion, with its social functions, becomes autonomous in terms of its institutional and organizational aspects, as do other social fields like politics, the economy, science, education, art and especially mass media (Gräb 2002). The political sphere begins to follow an exclusively political logic. An autonomous work of art claims to be judged aesthetically, detaching it from the Church and Christian iconography. Scientific results, even when they can be bought and sold, have to be judged by a scientific public and not by economists. Social systems are developing in an autopoietic way, possessing functionally specialized media of communication, as Niklas Luhmann has shown in his systems theory, which can convincingly be applied to the secularization of modern societies (Luhmann 1982; Luhmann 1984). Systems, including the religious system, differentiate themselves socially, causing interferences with other structures within the social system. Religious faith can also become highly important in other social systems, especially when those systems are not able to refer by their own means to something final and unidentifiable within the significance that all of their operations share. Therefore, secularization should not be confused with the assumption that religion has suffered a loss of significance or function. Secularization can be defined .

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as the functional differentiation of religion. There is some evidence to suggest that what in modern times we call religion is a result of this process of differentiation, even if it differs from what the Church calls religion. Only the European Enlightenment could have created this special function of religiousness, which is increasingly becoming free of political, economic, moral and educational functions, but can inform a personal life with a deeper sense of meaning and moral motivations. Strictly speaking, the emergence of a special function of religion as an autonomous sphere of human potential freed from political, juridical, moral and educational implications is a specific result of the modern history of Protestantism. Nevertheless, this is at the same time a process of religious transformation in which religion develops a new understanding of itself as a personal experience of meaning and finds new influences in the other spheres of society, e.g. the moral and political sphere. The transformation of religion to an inner, personal experience of meaning and moral motivation has been called postsecularism. This term includes the modern, functional differentiation of society as well as an understanding of the personal identity of human beings interacting with the religious dimension as a part of finding meaning and a moral purpose in life. 3. The Differentiation of the Notion of Religion in Modern Christianity In the context of modernity the term ‘religion’ is often used in a formal sense. It is understood as the relationship between human beings and the absolute, and therefore can be referred to as the conditio humana. This notion of religion is a result of the European Enlightenment, which itself was partly a result of the religious wars. This formal concept of religion was created during the second half of the 18th century by Christian theology and the philosophy of religion. As Herder says, religion is something that, because of its customs and doctrines, separates human beings from each other but is universal when referring to the human heart and its relationship to the absolute.5 Thus, the 5 ‘Religion spricht das menschliche Gemüth an; sie redet zur Partheilosen Ueberzeugung. In allen Ständen und Classen der Gesellschaft darf der Mensch nur Mensch seyn, um Religion zu erkennen und zu üben. In alle Neigungen und Triebe des Menschen greift sie, um solche mit sich zu harmonisieren und sie auf der rechten Bahn zu führen. Wenn Religion sich von Lehrmeinungen scheidet, so lässt sie jeder ihren Platz; nur

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Christian theology of Enlightenment has drawn a distinction between the Church’s symbols and rituals, including its theology, and the individual’s orientation toward the meaning of life. The theology of the Enlightenment taught people to differentiate between religion in a public and in a private sense (i.e. religion as a personal decision), between church and state, religion and politics. A misunderstanding concerning the close connection between religion and ethics, which was maintained during the Enlightenment by Christians in favour of the social function of religion, was finally cleared up as well. Friedrich Schleiermacher distinguishes between religion, metaphysics and ethics by ascribing to religion a constitutive role in the organization of people’s self-relatedness and their relationship to the world, as well as in processes of social and cultural construction. The social function of religion, as Schleiermacher puts it, consists of creating and fostering a sense for the absolute in the individual. Schleiermacher also distinguishes between religion and the Church. Churches and religious communities are social institutions aimed at communicating, organizing and representing religious consciousness. Still, this communication is not restricted to churches and religious communities. Schleiermacher concentrates on the phenomenon of art having freed itself to aesthetic autonomy, so that it is able to stimulate the religious sense for the infinite. Schleiermacher here refers to the work of the painter Caspar David Friedrich (Gräb 2000b). The cultural autonomy of religion consists of the fact that it provides a way of coping with the concrete and finite by referring to the absolute and infinite. This means that other areas of life, especially ethics and politics, do not need to articulate themselves in explicitly religious terms. However, the cultural autonomy of religion does not mean that those other areas of life are not connected with religion. Religion is not responsible for everything, but its special function— creating and fostering a culture of addressing the absolute—is still relevant for questions of absolute meaning, deeper moral convictions and regard for society in general. Where this insight takes place, i.e. that religion is not connected to everything but has the responsibility for the whole as a dimension of personal life, the transformation of modern society from secularism to postsecularism is obvious.

sie will nicht Lehrmeinung seyn. Lehrmeinungen trennen und erbittern; Religion vereinet: denn in aller Menschenherzen ist Sie nur Eine’ (Herder 1967 [1789]: 135).

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We recognize the postsecular character of religion when the individual and the society as a whole are confronted with the incomprehensible and the absurd, as happened, for instance, after 9/11. Whenever something happens that pushes people to the limits of their ability to understand, to judge, or to suffer, the churches are full. And these are the same churches which are empty during most normal Sunday services. The usual disengagement of wide parts of the population from the Church is still a characteristic of European societies; we still confront secularization. But at the same time, the growing importance of religious logic is a characteristic of postmodernity connected with postsecularism. The increasing complexity of modern society, combined with a consciousness of crisis, creates personal strategies for the search for an absolute truth. A society that follows the particular logic of its several social fields does not bother about the sense of the whole, or the question of how to establish absolute norms in the fields of politics, ethics, art, education, economy and law (Riesebrodt 2000). 4. The Emergence of the Postsecular Form of Religion The complexity of the functionally differentiated and globalized society causes an increasing rather than decreasing need for religion, because it intensifies the social problem of reference that only religion is able to solve. Religious meaning, which grasps the meaning of the whole, has the ability to deal with the simultaneity of the identifiable and the possible against the horizon of the unidentifiable and the uncontrollable. Whether moral or political claims have to be justified, or human dignity and the status of the embryo are discussed, or technical and economical development are questioned—there is always a consciousness of crisis, which is promoted by the increasing complexity of modern society. What is required is religious coping, self-assertion in the absolute and boundaries marked by humanity and human rights. At the same time, such boundaries are often abused in favour of particular political, moral, or economic interests. There is always a danger that religion will be abused by violent, terroristic fundamentalism. The social problem of reference that religion has to solve has not vanished after the Enlightenment. Modernity has started to produce religions in a new, postsecular way (Gräb 2000a). Christianity as a specific source of the meaning of life and moral potential is still present in

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the culture of modern, Western societies, of course, including their institutions, churches, social welfare programs, academies, theology departments and religious education in schools. However, the social influence of the Church has declined further and further during the last 200 years. A reformatting has taken place within the religious field, which does not lead to the end of religion but to its transformation into a personal experience. Various new actors have also entered the religious field (Bourdieu 2000). 5. The Diffusion of Religion into Religiousness In postsecular societies the Christian religion as articulated by doctrine and represented by churches is beginning to merge into free-floating forms of religiousness. The emergence of new forms of religiousness is a characteristic of our time (see Taylor 2002). Religion exists in various forms of expressive individualism, in personal convictions and attitudes. Different areas of life can be occupied by religious energy— which explains the rise of nationalism during the 19th and 20th century, although the sacralization of collective identities disagreed with religion then, too. In postsecular societies religion appears as a sacralization of individuality and subjectivity, ensuring for itself the absolute ground from which it comes. Religion expresses itself as a personal search for meaning in the religious connotation of aesthetic experience, in the concentration on the radiance of aesthetic culture and also in the audio-visual culture of cinemas, TV and other forms of sacralization of earthly existence, e.g. in sports arenas, wellness and health centres (Böhme 2002). The constitutive character of this postsecular form of religion consists in creating a transcendent context for what is uncontrollable, providing goals for life courses and legitimating collective and personal concepts of identity. This function is fulfilled, on the one hand, by the churches, which since the 19th century have been transformed into centres of religious and spiritual communication and Christian community life. On the other hand, relatively autonomous areas of life such as family, the state, art and the economy have emancipated themselves away from fulfilling institutionalized religious functions. At the same time, they were full of religious intentions and potential meaning. In postsecular societies Christianity has been institutional-

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ized (verkirchlicht), which means that the Church, while withdrawing from society, claims to possess the sole responsibility for Christianity. But outside the churches new forms of Christianity have also been developing regarding its symbols, rituals and concepts of meaning—or even mere questions—which are now used by secular actors in politics, ethics and aesthetical culture. Christian promises of meaning and salvation are still essential, although their form has been altered, as can be seen from the sacralization of the nation-state or the East German practice of youth dedication (Jugendweihe) (Döhnert 2000). Since the 1920s when the journalist Carl Christian Bry wrote about hidden forms of religiousness (Bry 1924), we have been confronted with freefloating forms of religiousness, including various syncretisms that quite often cannot even be recognized as explicitly religious forms, or have to be traced back to non-Christian traditions (Drehsen, Gräb and Korsch 2001). Dietrich Rössler has summarized the discussion about the institutionalization (Verkirchlichung), secularization and privatization (for him the sign of postsecularism) of Christianity by speaking of a threefold form of modern Christianity (Rössler 1986). Rössler says that Christianity (1) explicitly expresses itself through the form of institutionalized Christianity, the Church, (2) has implicitly entered the secular society, its political and moral culture, fundamental human rights, family upbringing, celebration culture, educational institutions, art, mass media and their products and (3) is interwoven with the religious attitudes of individuals, their inner world and their participation in the communication between Church and society. Christian religion cannot be identified with the Church but has been secularized, i.e. it has dissipated into society and has been privatized or, better, individualized, and thus has become a question of individual attitudes. By keeping its social significance, religion is no longer restricted to churches and participation in their community life. The notion of a ‘civil religion’ (R. N. Bellah) has been employed to indicate that the significance of religion for the whole of society has been maintained, although churches, denominations, religious communities and institutions are no longer supported by a majority of the population. Postsecular religion maintains its social significance by merging into personal attitudes and convictions and in this way into the culture, in spite of the fact that it is no longer a leading system.

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In Germany it can be observed that churches and their services are in demand when the society is confronted with the inscrutable, the tremendous and the absurd. The churches are asked to make statements when there is discussion about basic values, e.g. in bioethics. The fact that politics and ethics refer to religion shows the significance religion possesses for society as a whole, in spite of the loss of influence suffered by churches and religious institutions. While religion, being pluralized and individualized, is merging into culture and religiousness, civil religion relies upon churches and Christian communities. Civil religion is the secular form of institutionalized religion. Institutionalized religion in the form of civil religion stands for social integration, ethics, fundamental moral values and the symbolization of autonomous religious communities and churches. Civil religion is based on maintaining exclusive attention for the relationship between religion, ethics and politics. However, commentators are insufficiently aware of the dispersal of religion into religiousness, so that non-religious cultural aspects are filled with religious meaning, as can be seen for instance in advertisements, the cult status of brands, consumption, holidays, spa resorts, sports, cinema and TV (Gräb 2002). Religious functions once fulfilled by the churches are now taken on by cultural institutions and free-floating social actors, which are not generally considered to be religious: e.g. the icon-like cult status of brands, football arenas with their secular liturgies and films telling stories about how to be happy beyond one’s wildest dreams. 7. The Aesthetic Transformation of the Social Presence of Religious Symbols and Rituals The great promise of today’s urban culture is also the epiphany of form. Passers-by are invited to take a rest, rethink their own biography and encounter others and themselves. In the modern civil society, influenced since the second half of the 19th century by industrialization, democracy, rural exodus and urbanism, there are new opportunities for the individual to become autonomous. Urban life has allowed individuals to free themselves from social commitments regarding

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politics, agrarian production, class hierarchies and religion, which have lost their meaning, as Georg Simmel points out in his analysis of the development of modern urban culture since the 18th century.6 For Simmel, the great promise of freedom that modernity has made to the individual consists in the loosening of class ties and the release from ancient hierarchies and religious traditions. Life in a modern society should encourage human beings to rely on their individual skills and to develop an individual personality. At the same time, Simmel foresaw a danger in the fact that urban life might push individuals too hard. Life in Berlin around 1900 caused Simmel to assume a predominance of the objective mind (objektiver Geist) over the subjective mind.7 Urban life proffers abundant opportunities to develop a personality, to participate in scientific and aesthetic learning and to enjoy the richness of culture. But the individual is less and less capable of grasping what is being offered, especially as the division of labour demands a high standard of specialization. In urban life human beings lose themselves instead of developing a personality and gaining personal identity. They acquire a blasé attitude because they do not want to let anything get to them. According to Simmel, nervousness and an indifferent attitude (Blasiertheit) are the main characteristics of city dwellers. Being blasé—today we would call it ‘cool’—means possessing a peculiar indifference toward the development of a personality, self-realization, education and aesthetic experience. With the overwhelming range of goods being offered, one is reluctant to get involved in anything, even if it is important and valuable. Modern or postmodern culture still holds great promise, however, including possibilities for individual freedom, self-discovery, selfrealization and self-education. What has been given up is the ideal of the integrity of personality, which Simmel still favoured. Today, freedom and self-realization in profession, family and religion do not require a coherent and goal-orientated personality that is controlled through ethical norms. In Simmel’s time, the freedom of the individual was a question of ethics and politics.

6 Urban life allows human beings to free themselves from ‘vergewaltigenden, sinnlos gewordenen Bindungen politischer und agrarischer, zünftiger und religiöser Art’ (the requirements of politics, agrarian life, guilds and religion that have now become oppressive and inane), see Simmel (1995 [1903]: 130). 7 Simmel (1995 [1903]: 129).

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During the past decades a profound change has taken place. Individual freedom, still the most important trait of modernity, is now mostly limited to its aesthetic form. Freedom is identified with the abundance of possibilities and the infinite experience of life, changing the outline of one’s life from time to time, or expressing authentic individuality through aesthetic forms such as fashion. There has been a shift away from the predominance of politics and ethics to aesthetics, a phenomenon which has been called ‘postmodernism’. This shift has also led to postsecularism. The quest for a life of one’s own, the need for a consistent and authentic expression of oneself, is a characteristic of postmodernism. What is objectively there, represented by institutions, is no longer decisive and neither are ethical norms or a general interest in things (Höhn 1998). Aesthetic culture has become a place of infinite self-discovery and self-testing. Our urban spaces and mass media provide a wide range of opportunities for encountering others, tarrying, or entertainment. Museums, theatres, cinemas, churches and shopping malls offer symbols and stories that may encourage different life styles. There is great openness and no hierarchy. Nothing is objectively ‘given’, everything can be redefined by a new construction of the self. Whether one looks at advertising slogans, grand emotions in the cinema, pictures in museums, or symbols and rituals in churches, on TV, or at the registry office, there are no prescriptions on how to live one’s life. All people are free to acquire what fits into their biography, or what might be helpful, vitalizing, agreeable and nice. The great promise of aesthetic culture is the improvement of life by making human beings aware of as many opportunities as possible. An increase of meaning is suggested by perfect weddings on TV or in special churches, by the symbolic realization of a variety of life styles without obligating the individual to rely on ready-made answers. 8. Churches and Religious Communities in the Postsecular Culture The symbolic reality of the postsecular culture also includes church space: the celebration of liturgies, the telling of histories of salvation and the promise of blessings. The symbolic world of Christianity is still represented here. Life is interpreted from a Christian perspective of meaning, ensuring that that life is based on God and on His pres-

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ence. The liturgies of church services stage and articulate the specific symbolic world of Christianity. In addition to this, churches become peculiar places of aesthetic and spiritual experience when there are concerts or exhibitions. However, churches no longer represent and sacralize the political and social order. Christian doctrines are considered to contribute to a public discussion about basic values, but there is no vantage point from which to prescribe what human beings have to believe and how they have to lead their lives. By designing their architecture and staging their liturgies, churches have become centers of spiritual experience. Their space is filled with beautiful stories that can mediate an ‘invention of God’, as Thomas Mann puts it in the end of his Joseph novels. These stories provide a revelation for human beings who are searching for God, a revelation of religious feelings and of human spiritual self-interpretation, which is directed toward the absolute (Tillich). Churches offer the richness of their symbolic world to strollers and passers-by, as do museums, cinemas and promenades in their specific ways. Passers-by enter a city church, linger on there for a while, pick up one thing or another of what they have heard and take it with them when they leave—this is primarily the spiritual comfort of the fact that God is with them. To come into a church does them good if they feel touched by something, if they have encountered something that moves them deeply. The result of such a form of modern Christianity will not be a pure dogmatic belief, though. Beliefs are now being combined that for a long time seemed to be incompatible. Perhaps this is an appropriate way of practicing a religion, especially in our times, when pluralism (above all, religious pluralism) and patchwork identities have become the norm. However, many of the originally Christian ideas that pervade our society are not transparent with respect to their religious background; regarding their Christian origins, they are more anonymous than civil religion, and they have been deprived of their contents. The religious language used in advertisements only relates to non-religious content, e.g. consumption. In the postsecular culture, religiousness tends to manifest itself merely through its therapeutic and aesthetic side effects. Thus, religiousness has lost its function as an orientation of life toward transcendence, toward acknowledging the absolute, toward God, and does not manifest itself through the establishment of a religious community. Every now and then the question is raised whether religion still

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exists as religion, or whether religious issues and symbols are merely ornamental, with life in general oriented only toward consumption and aesthetics. But still, the crucial question is—theologically—why this orientation towards aesthetics, pleasure, happiness and dolce vita expresses itself in religious language and religious symbols. Christianity and churches should not withdraw from cultural transformation by keeping up their traditional doctrines and closing themselves off in the inner circles of parish life. Theology has to observe creative moments of religiousness, which occur in the same persistent processes of modernization that are often the cause of social crises. Finally, Christianity has to maintain itself culturally, which means that it has to rely on its original power. Christianity is a religion of individuality in the sense that human beings can always find self-assertion in God. Whether Christianity can maintain itself culturally depends on how it uses its potential for the interpretation of life in the context of the problems and questions of modern society. There are many problems imposed on modern societies that require a religious attitude. Advertisement, cinemas, talk shows and murder mystery series are responding to modern problems as well. The postsecular situation in general, or the fact that religion has not vanished although the influence of the churches is diminishing, can be explained by society’s need for answers given from a religious perspective. Modern societies tend to create existential situations that specifically provoke questions with religious implications—which can only be answered by religion. 9. Resistance against Secularization as an Explanation for Postsecularism in Postmodern Societies Questions of a religious nature are imposed on human beings by the hardship of a society dominated by technology, industry and an unleashed economy. How can human existence claim its place beyond economic principles of performance and possession? What is my value if I cannot or may not work? What is the meaning of human existence if every individual has become replaceable, if any other person can occupy their position, whether in a professional role or personal, intimate relations? How can I bear the fact that the significance I attach to my life is something as transitory as my mortal self? What do people lack who have got everything but have no control over their lives as a whole? Can we approve of life in a world in which so many things have to be rejected?

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Human expectations concerning religion are being reformatted in this regard (Gräb 2002). In a postsecular city, most people no longer believe in the doctrine of the Church or in the Bible, but are searching for wisdom and spirituality. Certainty is in demand. Human beings want to be in touch with the absolute; they are looking for mystic experiences and ways of experiencing themselves as deeply touched by God. The demand for religion is related to mysticism; it is an inner need of individuals who are searching for individuality. Religious rites and confessions are relevant as long as they have a certain effect on the subject: a feeling, an atmosphere, ecstasy, emotion and trance. Religion becomes a device to achieve psychic transcendence. The demand for religious experience eludes all influence that churches as traditional institutions may have had on individuals and their religion. The importance of the social integrative function of religion is decreasing while its biographical integrative function becomes more important. Religion no longer holds society together but integrates the personal identity of individuals (Gräb 2000a). In the face of catastrophes threatening society the social integrative function of religion is again in great demand. However, the most important aspect is that religion supports processes of self-interpretation and self-assertion. It is the requirements of modern society that are responsible for this complex development. More and more frequently individuals are dependent on life conditions they cannot influence. The great social systems of politics and economy are controlling the whole. As, on the one hand, individuals cannot influence anything, but, on the other hand, they want to be autonomous, at least by creating their personal habitat, there is a lot of experimentation with the meaning of life. Religion makes autonomy possible and is therefore becoming a religion of individuals. Postsecular religion is no longer a question of a local constitution or defined affiliation. In any case, this religion of individuals can be serious and may require theological answers. It is common knowledge that explaining the world or interpreting history is not a task of religion and that religion has nothing to do with the origin of the universe and its expansion in space, or God’s hand over the history of mankind. The task of religion is to situate the position and therefore the meaning, ground and purpose of our finite individual existence in a universe that remains unfathomable to science and history. Religion is not interested in what was, is and will be, but rather searches for an interpretation and symbolization of the meaning in relation to the

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transpragmatic and absolute conditions (in terms of meaning) of our variously conditioned individual lives. Postsecular religion interprets the meaning of life stories. It is the interpretation and symbolization of what our life means to us which we cannot grasp, know and explain objectively because it evades us again and again. What is it that actually sustains us? This is the question of religion today, and we are faced with it when we lose what has been supporting us: family, a partner, health or work. What can sustain us if all of this or at least some of it is lost, if all immanent meaning is gone and all thoughts and actions come to nothing? Those who have religion have their identity and certainties founded on an absolute ground. They feel that they find refuge in a spiritual reality which cannot get lost, whatever may happen. They understand what is meant if someone tells them: You are never alone. You have not lived your life in vain. A religious attitude responds to this kind of spiritual comfort. Such spiritual comfort provides a basic trust in existence, which is maintained in times of crisis. Wherever religion appears there is a search for a consistent position in life and stabilizing factors for existence, in spite of fragmentary and ambiguous social experiences. Nevertheless, free-floating forms of the social presence of religiousness are appropriate in a society that provides only a mere framework for religious institutions. Churches and Christian communities have to adapt themselves to this situation. They have to share their symbols and stories with human beings in order to enable them to take what they need for interpreting their lives. However, such processes of acquisition depend on the continuing social presence of religious institutions. A postsecular society knows this and gives these organizations the support they need. References Barth, U. (1998) ‘Säkularisierung’. Theologische Realenzyklopädie 29, 603–34. Böhme, H. (2002) ‘Religion und Moderne’. In Gräb, W. and Weyel, B. (eds) Praktische Theologie und Protestantische Kultur. Gütersloh: Gütersloher Verlagshaus, pp. 17–34. Bourdieu, P. (2000) Das religiöse Feld: Texte zur Ökonomie des Heilsgeschehens. Edited by S. Egger, A. Pfeuffer and F. Schultheis. Konstanz: UVK. Bry, C. C. (1924) Verkappte Religionen. Gotha and Stuttgart: Perthes. Daiber, K. F. (1995) Religion unter den Bedingungen der Moderne. Die Situation in der Bundesrepublik Deutschland. Marburg: diagonal-Verlag. Döhnert, A. (2000) Jugendweihe zwischen Familie, Politik und Religion. Leipzig: Evangelische Verlagsanstalt.

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Drehsen, V., Gräb, W. and Korsch, D. (eds) (2001) Protestantismus und Ästhetik: Religionskulturelle Transformationen am Beginn des 20. Jahrhunderts. Gütersloh: Gütersloher Verlagshaus. Fauth, D. (2000) Religion als Bildungsgut—Sichtweisen in Staat und evangelischer Kirche: Religionspädagogik im bildungspolitischen Diskurs um das Schulfach LER und den Religionsunterricht im Bundesland Brandenburg. Würzburg: Religion-undKultur-Verlag. Gräb, W. (2000a) Lebensgeschichten, Lebensentwürfe, Sinndeutungen: Eine Praktische Theologie gelebter Religion. Second edition. Gütersloh: Gütersloher Verlagshaus. —— (2000b) ‘Der kulturelle Umbruch zur Moderne und Schleiermachers Neubestimmung des Begriffs der christlichen Religion’. In Barth, U. and Osthövener, C.D. (eds) 200 Jahre ‘Reden über die Religion’: Akten des 1. Internationalen Kongresses der Schleiermacher-Gesellschaft. Halle 14.–17. März 1999 (Schleiermacher-Archiv 19), Berlin and New York: de Gruyter, pp. 167–77. —— (2002) Sinn fürs Unendliche: Religion in der Mediengesellschaft. Gütersloh: Gütersloher Verlagshaus. Habermas, J. (2008) ‘Notes on a Post-Secular Society’. Available online: http://www .signandsight.com/features/1714.html (last accessed on 08/03/2009). Hahn, A. (1997) ‘Religion, Säkularisierung und Kultur’. In Lehmann, H. (ed.) Säkularisierung, Dechristianisierung, Rechristianisierung im neuzeitlichen Europa: Bilanz und Perspektiven der Forschung. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, pp. 17–31. Herder, J. G. (1967 [1789]) ‘Christliche Schriften, 5. Sammlung: Von Religion, Lehrmeinungen und Gebräuchen’. In Suphan, B. (ed.), Sämtliche Werke XX. Hildesheim: Olms, pp. 133–265. Höhn, H. J. (1998) Zerstreuungen: Religion zwischen Sinnsuche und Erlebnismarkt. Düsseldorf: Patmos. Lübbe, H. (1965) Säkularisierung: Geschichte eines ideenpolitischen Begriffs. Freiburg and München: Alber. Luhmann, N. (1982) Funktion der Religion. Second edition. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. —— (1984) Soziale Systeme. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. Pollack, D. and Pickel, G. (2000) Religiöser und kirchlicher Wandel in Ostdeutschland 1898–1999. Opladen: Leske + Budrich. Riesebrodt, M. (2000) Die Rückkehr der Religionen: Fundamentalismus und der ‘Kampf der Kulturen’. München: Beck. Rössler, D. (1986) Grundriß der Praktischen Theologie, Berlin and New York: de Gruyter. Simmel, G. (1995 [1903]) ‘Die Großstädte und das Geistesleben’. In Simmel, G. (1995) Aufsätze und Abhandlungen 1901–1908 (Gesamtausgabe 7). Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, pp. 116–31. Taylor, C. (2002) Die Formen des Religiösen in der Gegenwart. Trans. by K. Wördermann. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp.

VOICING THE SELF IN POSTSECULAR SOCIETY: A PSYCHOLOGICAL PERSPECTIVE ON MEANING-MAKING AND COLLECTIVE IDENTITIES Hetty Zock We traveled the length of Coney Island Avenue, that low-slung scruffily commercial thoroughfare that stands in almost surreal contrast to the tranquil residential block it transverses, a shoddily bustling strip of vehicles double-parked in front of gas stations, synagogues, mosques, beauty salons, bank branches, restaurants, funeral homes, auto-body shops, supermarkets, assorted small businesses proclaiming provenances from Pakistan, Tajikistan, Ethiopia, Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Russia, Armenia, Ghana, the Jewry, Christendom, Islam . . .1

This is how Joseph O’Neill, an Irish-born writer who was raised in Holland, evokes the colourful cultural diversity of New York, a city which may be characterized as a postsecular city par excellence. What strikes me in this quote is the dazzling heterogeneous mixture of cultural activities and identities: the economic and commercial business of the globalized capitalistic world, mixed with national, ethnic and religious identities which cannot be sharply distinguished.2 All are found together on ‘a shoddily bustling strip’ of New York. According to Edward W. Soja, cultural heterogeneity is the first characteristic of what he calls the ‘postmetropolis’—the postmodern urban structures of the last 30 years. The more specific globalizations of capital, labor, and culture have had the cumulative effect of producing the most heterogeneous cities in history, and this extraordinary diversity (often too simply labeled multiculturalism) has become the landmark of postmodern urbanism (Soja 2001: 41).

Cultural heterogeneity is the main characteristic of postsecular society, and it is in megacities such as New York where this comes to the fore. 1

Joseph O’Neill, Netherland (2008: 146). As Gerd Baumann (1999) has lucidly shown, cultural identities are constructed with the help of diverse social markers, of which nationality, religion and ethnicity are the most important ones. 2

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When I was visiting Ellis Island last year, the ranger in charge proudly told the audience that because of its very long history of international immigration, New York had always been the city with the greatest amount of languages spoken in the world: as much as 23 languages in 1800. Perhaps this is not correct, but apparently the public self-image the City of New York enhances and promotes is that it welcomes all people of the world, promising them that they can feel at home here. In a similar vein O’Neill speaks of ‘the distinctive largeness of experience that a simple walk down a Manhattan street can summon’ (2008: 180–1). However, it is not easy to put this ideology—or dream—into practice. Urban and global theorists stress not only the diversity of cultural identities in our time but also the increasing complexity of symbolic communication this brings: all the different cultural collectives have their own ‘codes’ (Castells 2002)3 and what psychologists call ‘emotion rules’ (Hermans and Dimaggio 2007: 47)—ways of behaving and interpreting behaviour in public. The postmodern city has become a metaphor for living in a myriad of imagined communities, extended to the extreme because of Internet and other electronic ways of communication in our digital information age (Hermans 2004a). We are constantly engaged in many discourses, which are often conflicting and power-laden. ‘With globalization economics becomes metaphorics. The sites of power are now within people’s minds’, as Castells notes (2002: 246). Cultural misunderstandings abound, and, as we all know, this goes especially for the conflicts in which religious and ethnic identity elements are involved. Therefore, individuals are required to develop strong communicative skills and imaginative, creative capacities in order to be able to deal with diversity. Postsecular society, with its increasing complexity of religious-symbolic communication due to the deinstitutionalization of religion on the one hand and the hybrid mix of religious-economic-political activities on the other, also calls for a psychological examination. The perspective taken in this chapter is that of psychological identity theory. Point of departure is the conviction among identity theorists that modernity has made it increasingly difficult to establish a cohesive sense of self and a meaningful personal and social identity. Identities have become 3 ‘Thus, in the absence of a unifying culture, and therefore of a unifying code, the key question is not the sharing of a dominant culture but the communicability of multiple codes’ (Castells 2002: 399).

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plural and hybridized. Globalization has complicated this task even more because of the rapid pace of changes, the enormous amount of cultural perspectives to choose from, and the feelings of uncertainty and insecurity that global environmental and terrorist threats evoke. Hence imaginative and creative skills are becoming more important, and the emotional task of coping with insecurity gets harder. This is even more relevant because meaning in life is increasingly found in one’s personal life-story instead of in established cultural traditions and institutions (cf. Baumeister 1991; McAdams 1993). It is the individuals who have to choose and put their own self together, making creative use of various cultural sources. What do these insights mean for urban studies? I will argue that in researching social (religious, political, economic) interactions in the postsecular city, more attention should be paid to the individuals who are at the centre of these processes. As personal and collective identity processes are closely intertwined, we cannot understand urban societial and cultural phenomena without looking at individual psychological processes. I will introduce the theory of the dialogical self, developed by the Dutch personality and cultural psychologist Hubert Hermans, as an excellent tool to throw light on identity processes in a global, culturally heterogeneous context (Hermans and Dimaggio 2007). Why Hermans? First, his starting point is that individual and collective identity processes are closely related: culture and self, society and identity are mutually inclusive (2004a: 297).4 The ‘other’ is an inherent part of the self. Second, his cultural-psychological theory is rooted in narrative psychology and constructivist thinking. He has a dynamic view on identity formation as personal construction, seeing identity as a cultural, linguistic phenomenon constituted by language and meaning-making. Identity is a meaning-making practice (cf. Fuhrer 2004). Third, he takes into account the role of social power, hierarchical positions and societal conflict, and argues that dialogical capacities are of the utmost importance in the complex and often conflictive interactions in our culturally diverse world (Hermans 2006). Fourth, he employs an intrinsically social and societal theory of emotions. Hermans’ theory of the dialogical self has been taken up by social scientists (psychologists, sociologists, anthropologists, neuroscientists and cognitive scientists) as well as scholars from the humanities 4 Georg Simmel stressed the mutuality of person and culture in a similar way. See also the contribution of Wilhelm Gräb in this volume.

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(cultural theorists, theologians, philosophers, art historians) as a tool in analysing the bane and boon of living in a globalized world. The theory is used by practitioners (psychiatrists, psychotherapists, [pastoral] supervisors and counsellors) and by researchers alike. So, the dialogical self has already proved to be a powerful bridging concept in interdisciplinary research.5 The outline of this chapter is as follows. First, I will sketch the main lines of the theory of the dialogical self (1). Next, I will discuss the complex task of combining global and local identities (2), and investigate religion as a defensive form of localization (3). I will conclude with some remarks on the usefulness of the theory of the dialogical self for researching religion in postsecular societies (4). Along the way, I will illustrate my argument by stories from Joseph O’Neill’s post-9/11 novel Netherland. 1. Hubert Hermans on the Dialogical Self It may be useful to start with some terminological clarification. Hermans uses the terms ‘identity’ and ‘self ’ often interchangeably, and does not give exact definitions. When in this chapter I speak about ‘identity’ I have in mind the umbrella term used in the social sciences, indicating the identity of persons as well as groups (personal and collective identities); when I use the term ‘self ’, I refer to psychological processes involved in both personal and collective identity formation. However, it makes no sense to make a radical distinction, as the terms overlap to a high degree. Hermans originally developed his theory of the dialogical self as a tool for clinical psychology and psychotherapy. He defines the dialogical self as ‘a dynamic multiplicity of “I positions” in the landscape of the mind, intertwined as this mind is with the minds of other people’ (2007: 36). The ‘I’ refers to the self-reflexive and evaluating capacities of a person—down to a symbolic point in the self where experience is evaluated and identity is constructed. Thus, the ‘self ’ is not seen as a static, unchanging core (consisting of innate traits that are realized), but as a dynamic process which is inherently cultural. As already men-

5 In 2000, the International Society for Dialogical Science was founded. The society publishes a journal (The International Journal of Dialogical Science) and organizes international conferences.

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tioned, ‘the other’—other persons and collectives—is part of the self. Hence, the terms used by Hermans (‘mind’, ‘self ’ and ‘I’) should not be seen as indicative of an individualistic and inner-psychological way of thinking. The self has a temporal-spatial nature. The I can take different positions, and thus tell about itself from different perspectives. For instance, I can tell about myself as a Dutch citizen or world citizen, as the daughter of my parents, an inhabitant of Groningen originally raised in Rotterdam, a liberal Protestant, a university teacher, etc. Besides these social I positions (I as member of specific social and cultural groups), Hermans distinguishes personal I positions (I as lazy, I as ambitious).6 All I-positions manifest themselves in ‘voices’, telling a story about the self. All voices are coloured by the ideas, values, expectations and behavioural patterns (the ‘codes’ and ‘emotion rules’) of the several social and cultural groups one is part of. Cultural identities and groups manifest themselves in the form of ‘collective voices’. For instance, when I speak about myself as a Dutch woman or as a liberal protestant, I speak as a member of a specific group; but this voice is also coloured by my personal experience, life history and ambitions. So, all cultural voices that speak in the self are personal reconstructions of collective voices. On the other hand, a personal I-position, such as ‘I am ambitious’, is coloured by my social background—by what is expected from a woman in my family and in the academic milieu. It is in this sense that ‘others’ are part of the self (individual others such as family members, friends, colleagues and partners and collective others). Culture and self, identity and society cannot be separated (Hermans 2004a: 297). Inner psychological processes and outer cultural processes can only be understood as interacting. ‘There is no essential difference between the positions a person takes as part of the self and the positions people take as members of a heterogeneous society’ (Hermans 2002: 147). Self-development in Hermans’s view is a dialogical process between internal and external voices, in which external and internal dialogues

6 This raises the question about the nature of the spatial aspects of the self (e.g. ‘taking positions’). The spatial terminology is more than a useful metaphor. Hermans supports the theory of the dialogical self with developmental and neurolinguistic insights into the spatially neurobiological basis of all human functioning, which has a parallel in the spatial, three-dimensional world.

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are closely connected. He speaks of ‘voicing the self ’ (1994: 31), a phrase which I have taken up in the title of this paper. The voices are involved in an inner dialogue, in which some voices are more dominant than others, depending on the context. Hermans speaks of ‘dominance relations’ between the voices, which are influenced by, among other things, ‘social dominance’. Voices may be in conflict with each other, and voices may be suppressed. There are also collective voices in the self that may be experienced as threats: negative and stereotyped views of others on what it means to be Dutch, or how a woman in academic life ought to behave. Although Hermans argues, on the basis of cognitive and neurobiological insights, that all self-development is dialogical, he states that in the global context dialogicality is hugely stressed. Although the self is by nature ‘multivoiced’, the cultural heterogeneity and the pace of cultural and technological change in our era have led to the extension of this process and the increase of the number of cultural voices. As self and society are mutually inclusive, the societal diversity will lead to a greater diversity in the self, which will get more ‘multivoiced’. This has pros (the opening up of new horizons) as well as cons: selfdevelopment is becoming more complex, uncertainty increases and inner and outer crises are getting more intertwined. Let me illustrate the interaction between individual and collective dialogical processes by Hans van den Broek, the protagonist of Netherland. Hans is a Dutch banker who lives with his family in post9/11 New York. He works as an equities specialist in the financial heart of the world, Wall Street. Hans, his wife Rachel, a British-born lawyer, and their young son Jake have to leave their nice loft in TriBeCa because of the damage done to the neighbourhood, and temporarily move to the shabby-glamorous Chelsea hotel. The outer societal catastrophe—the shattering of the foundations of the US, and even of Western society—brings to the surface an inner crisis: their marriage is cracking, and Rachel, who no longer feels safe in New York and hates the immoral Bush administration, is returning to London, taking their son with her. Unlike his wife, Hans does not know how to evaluate the situation. Rachel considers him a ‘political-ethical idiot’ (100).7 Hans is in a void, performing his job mechanically and joylessly. During weekends he does not know what to do. He is at a loss, 7

Isolated numbers between brackets refer to Joseph O’Neill, Netherland (2008).

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inclined to just lie on his bed or wander aimlessly around New York. Memories come back from his youth in The Hague and from the time he lived in Britain, courting Rachel. Once every six weeks or so he goes to London to visit his son and to talk with Rachel about the state of their marriage. Things do not improve in this respect. A very moving scene depicts Hans sitting in his hotel room at night with his laptop, steering Google earth to the London house where his wife and son are lying asleep—a brilliant illustration of the impact of modern technology on long-distance emotional relationships. Hans is looking at his son’s window and the blue inflated swimming pool in the garden— but cannot get in touch with him. In Hermans’s terms: while Rachel retreats to a British-European, progressive-political I-position, Hans drifts from one I-position to the other. He cannot identify with any of them, let alone get these positions to engage in an internal dialogue. He is homeless and feels as if he does not belong anywhere. The societal and cultural crisis and his marriage crisis thus converge in a personal identity crisis. The rest of the novel describes how Hans gradually reorganizes his fragmented I-positions into a new whole, with the help of the cultural collective identities available to him in New York, in turn helping to constitute the city’s collective identity. 2. The Tension Between Global and Local Identities In theorizing about the dialogical self in the global, multicultural context, Hermans joins social theories about globalization and its counterforce localization. He refers here to Meijer and Geschiere (1999) and to R. Robertson’s idea of ‘glocalization’ (Robertson 1995). The homogenizing tendencies in globalization imply ‘a continued or even intensified heterogeneity that stresses cultural differences and even oppositions’ (Hermans and Dimaggio 2007: 32). Local identities are increasingly cherished; think, for instance, of the popularity of ‘canons’ and local dialects. The cover of the first American edition of Netherland (O’Neill 2008) is a splendid illustration of the tension between global and local identities: on the horizon we see the skyline of Manhattan, representing the global identity of economic and political power. In front there is what at first sight looks like a sentimental, nostalgic scene of a green lawn with people playing cricket, sheltered by a tree. It looks a pleasant, restricted and safe space. When you have a closer look at the picture

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you see people of various ethnicities watching, some of them in blazer and flannels; one spectator is wearing a turban; and we see two children, one white and one black, busy with score board numbers and various bits of cricket gear. The cover picture, whether intentionally or not, perfectly illustrates the New York sub-culture that will succeed in connecting Hans again to his various cultural selfs and in conquering his personal crisis. As a boy, living in The Hague, he had played cricket. In New York he is introduced to the game again by Chuck Ramkissoon, a man from Trinidad, who takes Hans in tow. Chuck is a counter-figure of Hans, as vibrantly alive and combining global and local identities as Hans is stuck down and inert. He is a streetwise, ambitious man, the embodiment of the American dream. He loves his new country and constantly wears a baseball cap (although he abhors the game). Hans jokingly remarks that the only suitable epitaph for Chuck’s tomb would be: ‘Chuck Ramkissoon—Yank’. Chuck drives Hans around the most diverse neighbourhoods of New York. He earns his money in a kind of fishy business, running a forbidden Trinidad gambling game (‘weh weh’). He is involved in illegal, half-criminal activities, which the naive and lethargic Hans does not seem to be aware of (or does not want to be aware of ). When Hans has finally returned to London to join his family, Chuck’s murdered body will turn up in a river. It is Chuck who introduces Hans to areas of New York hitherto unknown to him, such as Coney Island Avenue, where Chuck and he ‘came upon a bunch of South African Jews, in full sectarian regalia, watching televized cricket with a couple of Rastafarians in the front office of a Pakistani-run lumberyard’ (O’Neill 2008: 146). All over New York, migrants from the West Indies—from Pakistan, India and Africa—are playing cricket in public parks. It is so ironic: the migrants from diverse areas had learned the game from the colonial Great Britain, and have reappropriated it into a new New York local identity that transcends ethnic, national and religious boundaries. Hans, who belongs nowhere, is playing cricket with them, as the only white man among blacks. For him it is a temporary identity. Yet cricket in Netherland is more than a local identity that binds minority groups together: it is pictured as an identity with global features. Chuck has a life mission: he wants to introduce cricket to the US as the national sport, replacing baseball, convinced that cricket can indeed bring together people from different national, ethnical and religious backgrounds. He founds the New York Cricket Club, and

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names himself president. He buys a strip of land, at the outer edge of Brooklyn, to build a decent cricket ground. I’m saying that people, all people, Americans, whoever, are at their most civilized when they are playing cricket. What’s the first thing that happens when Pakistan and India make peace? They play a cricket match. Cricket is instructive, Hans. It has a moral angle. I really believe this. (. . .) Look at the problems we’re having. It’s a mess, and it’s going to get worse. I say, we want to have something in common with Hindus and Muslims? Chuck Ramkissoon is going to make it happen. With the New York Cricket Club, we could start a whole new chapter in US history. (O’Neill 2008: 211)

For Chuck, cricket is a global identity. For Hans, it is a temporary local identity which connects him to his long-dead father, who encouraged him when he was playing cricket as a boy, standing at the boundary and yelling: ‘Goed zo Hans, goed zo jongen’. (‘Well done, my boy.’) Now it is Chuck who encourages Hans when he is playing cricket in New York. It is symbolic that after a match in which Hans finally succeeds in hitting the cricket ball in an American/English way (hitting it in the air, and not keeping it low as he was taught in The Hague), applauded by Chuck, that Hans finally takes charge of his life, and decides to go back to London to save his marriage. He succeeds in combining all his various social and personal identities—as a son, a husband, a father and a banker, as befits someone with Dutch, English and American roots—in a new I-position that takes the lead in his inner dialogue. In Hermans’s terms, this is called a ‘third position’8 which integrates and transcends oppositions between other I-positions. To phrase it in another language game: Hans has established a new sense of meaningful identity. In the last pages of the book, Hans, again settled in London, receives the news of Chuck’s death. He again gets on to Google Earth, and this time surfs to New York, to Brooklyn, to the cricket field he and Chuck had so laboriously tried to create; the grass has turned brown and the equipment shed has vanished. Chuck’s global dream has not become true, but it has been the leading force in his life, combining his diverse identity elements—the various personal and collective voices—into a meaningful whole. For both Hans and Chuck, although in different ways, cricket has functioned as a ‘promoter position’, that is: a central, unifying and synthesizing I-position that enables a repertoire of 8

See Hermans 2003 and 2006: 44–45.

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I-positions, and guards the continuity of the self while at the same time keeping space for discontinuity (Hermans 2004b; 2006: 46). Netherland is a novel that focuses on a personal crisis, and as such does not aim to analyse the local/global cultural identity of cricket from the perspective of power relations. This could be a relevant task for a psychologist/sociologist. Treasuring local identities may lead to violent conflicts between groups. Hermans shows that psychological emotion theories can help to understand the increase of localizing forces, and even to foster constructive external dialogues between rivalling groups (Hermans 2006 and 2007). He points out that the increasing uncertainty brought by globalization (heterogeneity, ambiguity, complexity, unpredictability and impossibility to control and understand everything) does lead to defensive localizations as a counterreaction. He explains this psychologically by referring to two contrasting tendencies in the self. On the one hand, the self is open to ‘otherness’ and to an uncertain future (that is, the possibility to constantly include new perspectives and voices in the self ).9 Here lies the self ’s potential for innovation and creativity. On the other hand, there are strong biological needs for stability which may lead to the exclusion of otherness and ‘other’ perspectives.10 This ‘entails the risks of a defensive and monological closure of the self and the unjustified dominance of some voices over others’ (2007: 35). So, human beings are ‘hard-wired’ to be open and flexible and inclined to closure at the same time. Too much uncertainty and feelings of insecurity lead to closure and defensive localizations, and restrict dialogial processes.11 In this case, external dialogues are no longer open and symmetrical, but asymmetrical, and a negative identity is imposed on ‘other’ groups.

9 Hermans speaks of ‘the experience of uncertainty (in the neutral sense of the term) as an intrinsic feature of a dialogical self’ (Hermans and Dimaggio 2007: 34v). 10 Bhatia and Ram (2001) state that Hermans skilfully combines two perspectives of the self—what J. Valsiner calls the ‘self-full’ and ‘self-less’ view of self, that is the self as continuous, stable and unified on the one hand, and the self as discontinuous, instable and plural; the first, ‘modernist’, position paying more attention to the psychological characteristics and ontogenetic development of the self, and the second, ‘postmodernist’, position accounting for the fluid structure of the self, as it is constantly influenced by a plurality of perspectives. 11 The multivoiced dialogical self ‘is conceived of as open to an ambiguous other and is in flux toward a future that is largely unknown (. . .) this uncertainty challenges our potential for innovation and creativity to the utmost, and at the same time, it entails the risks of a defensive and monological closure of the self and the unjustified dominance of some voices over other’ (Hermans and Dimaggio 2007: 35).

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3. Religion as a Defensive Localization Hermans rarely speaks about religion, and if he does it is only in the context of defensive localizations. He follows Catherine Kinnvall (2004) when she argues that globalization has intensified ‘ontological insecurity’ and ‘existential uncertainty’ (Hermans and Dimaggio 2007: 40). What Kinnvall calls ‘homesteading’ is a strategy for coping with feelings of homelessness and maintaining a secure identity. This is dangerous because of the excluding and ‘othering’12 mechanisms at work here. A sense of secure self and identity is built on a dichotomy between ‘us’ who are superior, and the ‘others’ who are inferior. This is the basis of much violent social conflicts. Kinnvall uses psychoanalytic theories to make her argument, in particular the work of Julia Kristeva. Similar insights are found in other psychoanalytic theories.13 Following Kinnvall, Hermans notes: ‘Particularly (institutionalized) religion and nationalism are identity markers in times of rapid change and uncertain futures’ (Hermans and Dimaggio 2007: 40). So, religion figures as a possible defensive form of localization. This is not very new either. Theologians and social theorists have often accorded to religion the function of coping with contingency (Lübbe 1990; Luhmann 1984). It has to be asked here if this always needs to be a defensive, localizing one. Many authors point to the globalizing, binding functions of religion; for instance, Islam or Christianity could bind people with various cultural, social and ethnic backgrounds together. Erik Erikson, for instance, has argued that religion can manifest itself in both ways: in a defensive form of countering the threat of a loss of collective identity, and in an open form as a connecting force; as a power with both destructive and constructive potentials (Erikson 1969; Zock 2004: 166–171). Further, attention may be drawn to the growing importance of ‘faith-based organizations’ that at this moment play an important role in the social and cultural infrastructure of cities, for instance by organizing help for the homeless and educational projects.

12 A similar line of reasoning can be found in Gerd Bauman and Andre Gingrich, Grammars of Identity/Alterity. A Structural Approach (2005) who speak about the mechanisms of ‘selfing’ and ‘othering’. 13 See for instance Erik H. Erikson’s view on ‘pseudospeciation’ and Ernst Schachtel’s distinction between the longing for security and protection on the one hand (the principle of embeddedness), and the longing for discovering the unknown, for freedom (principle of transcendence) on the other.

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Religion as a meaning-system may fulfil various functions in postsecular societies (Maton et al. 2005). Anyhow, it is important to look at the individual psychological background of religious behaviour, as this to a large extent determines the role institutionalized religion as a collective force may play. In Netherland, institutionalized religion figures neither as a defensive localization, nor as a global, binding perspective, nor as a sociocultural force; it is simply not that important, and only appears as a social marker of diffuse cultural phenomena. It is cricket which is presented as having a globalizing, binding function. At the end of the book, the dream falls apart; the new cricket field is lying waste, and the stadium Chuck had in mind will never be built. America will not be saved by cricket. However, as Faruk Patel, one of the characters in Netherland who had backed Chuck in his cricket ambitions and is described ‘a millionaire guru’, tells Hans when they meet in London after Chuck’s death: My idea was different. My idea was, you don’t need America. Why would we? You have the TV, Internet markets in India, in England. These days that’s plenty. America? Not relevant. You put the stadium there and you’re done. Finito la musica (O’Neill 2008: 251).

So there is hope for cricket as a global identity, by way of the virtual world of the media, in a cultural environment in which the role of places and material spaces is getting increasingly less important. 4. The Usefulness of the Theory of the Dialogical Self for Researching Religion in Postsecular Societies— Some Concluding Remarks A psychological perspective on individual motivation and identity processes is required for adequate research into religion and other cultural meaning-making practices in postsecular societies. Hubert Hermans’s theory of the dialogical self is an apt theoretical frame for interdisciplinary research in this respect. It can shed light on the complex interaction between internal dialogues (inner processes of selfdevelopment) and external dialogues (societal development). His theory highlights in particular the emotional impact of living in a global, culturally and religiously heterogeneous context and the way people cope with uncertainty in that situation. It is in big postsecular cities such as New York that existential anxiety comes to the surface and the search

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for meaning is on edge, because of the dizzying mix of new local and global identities found there. ‘New York is a very hard place to leave’, a colleague of Hans’s sighs on the first page of Netherland (3). In this sense the postsecular city of New York is a metaphor for the postmodern condition humaine. It is in the big, metropolitic regions that we have to establish a ‘home’, a meaningful identity. With respect to the study of religion in postsecular cities, Hermans’s work offers the following points of attention: • Researchers should always map first what the religious phenomenon they are studying consists of, that is: with what different (sub) cultures and cultural activities (ethnic, national, social, economic and political) it is connected. • Researchers should analyse the different religious voices and their positions in internal and external dialogues, while paying attention to the dominance relationships (the power relations) of the collectives religion is linked to. • Researchers should analyse how the external dialogues between groups interact with the internal dialogues of the individuals participating in those groups. What is the role of emotional processes and development in this context? Here we have several psychological and psychoanalytic theories to choose from. • Researchers should ask to what extent religious voices and activities are linked with on the one hand local identities, and global identities on the other. Do they serve as defensive localizations or do they stimulate openness? And, of course, read novels like Netherland, which picture imaginatively the individual and collective endeavours, uncertainties and longings of postsecular society. References Baumann, G. (1999) The Multicultural Riddle: Rethinking National, Ethnic, and Religious Identities. New York and London: Routledge. —— and Gingrich, A. (2005) Grammars of Identity/Alterity: A Structural Approach. New York and Oxford: Berghahn Books. Baumeister, R. F. (1991) Meanings of Life. New York: Guilford. Bhatia, S. and Ram, A. (2001) ‘Locating the Dialogical Self in the Age of Transnational Migrations, Border Crossings and Diasporas’. Culture & Psychology 7(3): 297–309.

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Castells, M. (2002) ‘Conclusion: Urban Sociology in the Twenty-First Century’. In: Susser, I. (ed.) The Castells Reader on Cities and Social Theory. Malden and Oxford: Blackwell, pp. 390–411. Erikson, E. H. (1969) Gandhi’s Truth: On the Origins of Militant Nonviolence. New York: Norton. Fuhrer, U. (2004) Cultivating Minds: Identity as Meaning-Making Practice. London and New York: Routledge. Hermans, H. J. M. (1996) ‘Voicing the Self: From Information Processing to Dialogical Interchange’. Psychological Bulletin 119(1): 31–50. —— (2002) ‘The Dialogical Self as a Society of Mind’. Theory & Psychology 12: 147–60. —— (2003) ‘The Construction and Reconstruction of a Dialogical Self’. Journal of Constructivist Psychology 16: 89–130. —— (2004a) ‘Introduction: The Dialogical Self in a Global and Digital Age’. Identity: An International Journal of Theory and Research 4(4): 297–320. —— (2004b) ‘The Dialogical Self in Movement: State of the Art’, Keynote address at the Third Conference on the Dialogical Self, Warschau, August 26–9. —— (2006) Dialoog en Misverstand: Leven met de Toenemende Bevolking van Onze Innerlijke Ruimte. Soest: Nelissen. —— and Dimaggio, G. (2007) ‘Self, Identity, and Globalization in Times of Uncertainty: A Dialogical Analysis’. Review of General Psychology 11(1): 31–61. Kinnvall, C. (2004) ‘Globalization and Religious Nationalism: Self, Identity, and the Search for Ontological Security’. Political Psychology 25: 741–67. Lübbe, H. (1990) Religion nach der Aufklärung. Second edition. Graz: Styria. Luhmann, N. (1984) Religious Dogmatics and the Evolution of Societies. New York and Toronto: Edwin Mellen Press. Maton, K. I., Dodgen, D., Santo Domingo, M. R. and Larson, D. B. (2005) ‘Religion as a Meaning System: Policy Implications for the New Millennium’. Journal of Social Issues 61 (Special issue). McAdams, D. P. (1993) The Stories We Live By: Personal Myths and the Making of the Self. New York: Morrow. Meyer, B. and Geschiere, P. (eds) (1999) Globalization and Identity: Dialectics of Flow and Closure. Oxford: Blackwell. O’Neill, J. (2008) Netherland. New York: Pantheon Books. Robertson, R. (1995) Globalization: Social Theory and Global Culture. London: Sage. Soja, E. W. (2001) ‘Exploring the Metropolis’. In: Minca, C. (ed.) Postmodern Geography: Theory and Praxis. Oxford and Malden MA: Blackwell, pp. 37–56. The International Journal of Dialogical Science. www.dialogicalscience.com. Zock, T. H. (2004) A Psychology of Ultimate Concern: Erik H. Erikson’s Contribution to the Psychology of Religion. Second edition. Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi.

PART THREE

URBAN THINKING AND THE RELIGIOUS

‘GOD MADE THE COUNTRY, AND MAN MADE THE TOWN’: SOME OBSERVATIONS ON THE PLACE OF RELIGION IN THE WESTERN (POST)SECULAR CITY Arie L. Molendijk In the First Assembly District of New York there were, in 1880, 44,000 people, seven Protestant churches, and 1,072 saloons—one hundred and fifty-three saloons for every church. These churches are open, probably, seven or eight hours a week, the saloons sixteen or more hours a day. While the Gospel of our Lord Jesus Christ is preached from one church seven or eight hours, the gospel of death and hell is preached from each of a hundred or a hundred and fifty of these ‘synagogues of Satan’ a hundred hours.1

For the author of these words it is evident that the city is much more endangered than the countryside by perils such as lawlessness, intemperance, liquor, immigration and superstition. The above observation on the power of the saloon against that of Protestantism was made by Josiah Strong (1847–1916), one of the founders of the Social Gospel movement, which fought the social ills of industrialization and urbanization on the basis of the Christian faith. Josiah Strong wrote these words as an introduction to a study by a fellow clergyman, Samuel Lane Loomis, on ‘modern cities and their religious problems’. Pastors were among the very first to address the relationship between social issues of urbanization, industrialization and poverty on the one hand, and the role of religion, parishes and churches on the other (Brown 2001: 18–30). In most cases the city was seen as the source of vice and of the decline of faith and participation in church rituals. The famous line ‘God made the country, and man made the town’ summarizes nicely the reserves on behalf of many believers about the city as a place that is a danger to true faith. The line was written in 1784 by the English poet William Cowper (1731–1800), a converted evangelical. The poem, on the topic of the sofa (a subject demanded by a ‘lady, fond of blank verse’) contrasted the town and the country. Probably referring to the city of London (the ‘she’ in the poem

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may also refer to a wealthy city dweller), the poet writes (Cowper 1785/1849: 569): That, through profane and infidel contempt Of holy writ, she has presumed to annul And abrogate, as roundly as she may, The total ordinance and will of God; Advancing Fashion to the post of Truth, And centring all authority in modes And customs of her own, till sabbath rites Have dwindled into unrespected forms, And knees and hassocks are wellnigh divorced.

According to this text, there is no respect any more for the Holy Scriptures, the will of God, authority and church ritual—an analysis that is shared by many conservative and perhaps also by not-soconservative Christians at the beginning of the twenty-first century. During his memorable visit to the United States in April 2008 Pope Benedict XVI urged the crowd at the New York Yankee Stadium to concede the authority of the Church, while acknowledging at the same time that ‘authority’ and ‘obedience’ are by no means ‘easy words to speak nowadays’ (New York Times, April 21, 2008). Seen from a present-day perspective the process of urbanization and the growth of cities—let alone megacities—had hardly begun at the time Cowper wrote his poem. According to one estimate the proportion of Europeans living in towns of over 10,000 inhabitants rose very gradually, from 6 percent in 1500 to 8 percent in 1600, 9 percent in 1700 and 10 percent in 1800, and then had leapt to 29 percent by 1890 (McLeod 1995: 4). Since then the rise of cities, megacities and urban agglomerations has been spectacular, and nowadays almost half of the world population live in urban areas. According to a recent estimate of the United Nations (2007), the world population is expected to increase by 2.5 billion in the next four decades, passing from 6.7 billion to 9.2 billion in 2050, urban areas absorbing all the population growth. There is also a huge statistical project that gives a survey of churches and religions in the modern world and tries to measure the Christian outreach. The ‘metroscan’ presented there shows that since 1900 the proportion of urban Christianity has dropped from an estimated 69% to under 40% in 2000, which was caused mainly by the population increase and the spectacular rise of cities and megacities in non-Western countries (Barrett, Kurian and Johnson 2001/I: 531ff.).

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One can question the helpfulness of such an accumulation of data, and dispute the correctness of these compilations and the underlying view of what religion (Christianity) is about, but it gives us something to start with and at least shows how important the urban dimension is to religion. However, I will not give a numerical analysis here, as this article is much more concerned with the question of how the process of urbanization is related to religion—and Western Christianity in particular—and, conversely, how religions—more in particular religious organisations—adapt to this new milieu and play a role in the urban environment. This is not to deny that Christianity was from the very beginning also an urban movement.2 The tension pervading and to a certain degree even structuring this whole paper is that between the urban community as the perceived site of the secular and even the antireligious on the one hand, and the actual—often strong—presence of religion in the city on the other. To some extent this is the tension between perception (‘the myth of the secular city’) and down-to-earth realities, but there is more to be said, as I hope to show in this exploration of what is in my view basically a transformation of the place of religion in the secular and postsecular city. Being no specialist in the field of urban religion, I will only be able to offer some eclectic remarks of a more or less phenomenological or at least qualitative nature, and obviously do not pretend to be exhaustive. Reflecting on two key sociological texts by Georg Simmel and Louis Wirth, I will first present some observations about how urbanism predisposes to certain ways of life, which in turn are important to religious beliefs and practices. 1. Urbanism and Religion One of the great early theoreticians of space and urban culture was the German sociologist Georg Simmel (1858–1918), and in the following I will take up some of his basic insights. Although social interaction and forms of sociation have a clear spatio-temporal dimension that according to Simmel deserves serious study, at the same time he stresses that space is basically ‘the actually ineffectual form, in whose modifications 2

I will keep annotation to a minimum, but would like to mention two important books in this context: Meeks (1983) and Stark (2006).

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real energies are manifested’ (Simmel 1903a; italics mine). Space as such is what makes actual forms and interaction possible. Simmel here refers to Immanuel Kant’s definition of space as the possibility of being together.3 It is the specific forms within space that matter. Simmel clarifies his point as follows (1903a: 137): If an aesthetic theory declares that an essential task of plastic art is to make space palpable to us, then it fails to acknowledge that our interest only applies to the particular forms of things, but not to space or spatiality in general—the latter constituting only the conditio sine qua non of forms, but neither their distinctive essence nor their causative factor.

The sociologically interesting fact now is that there are quite different forms of being together. On the special character of the urban way of coexistence Simmel wrote a celebrated und also much-criticized essay ‘The Metropolis and Mental Life’ (1903b). The essay goes back to a lecture given in the winter of 1902–03 on the occasion of an exhibition on the modern, big city (Grossstadt) in Dresden. In this lecture the metropolis stands for the specifically modern way of life, and the crucial question for Simmel is then. how people accommodate themselves to external forces that threaten their individuality. Simmel has been accused of one-sidedness, of paying hardly any attention to urban power relations and the stratification according to gender, social class and ethnicity (Frisby and Featherstone 1997: 12). Still it is worthwhile to examine his remarks on what it means to the human psyche to live in a big city. Although scholars living in late modernity and moving around the globe from conference to conference are inclined to laugh a bit at Simmel’s remarks that the metropolitan type of individuality brings with it the intensification of nervous stimulation, we should not neglect the difference (even if it is declining) between rural and urban areas in this respect, and even between a small town such as Groningen, where the pace of life is still somewhat slower (with the exception of the life-threatening bikes that can come from any corner) and the metropolis. Vis-à-vis the emotional relationships of small-town life, the metropolitan psyche is inclined to deal with unexpected and everchanging impressions intellectually, calculating in more abstract ways. 3 Simmel (1903a: 138); Kant (1781/1787: A 374): ‘Raum [ist] die Vorstellung einer blossen Möglichkeit des Beisammenseins’ (‘the representation of the mere possibility of being together’).

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This state of mind also fits in nicely with the prevalent money economy of the city, where goods are no longer produced for customers who order them but for the anonymous market. Qualitative values are reduced to quantitative ones, and activities are integrated into a stable and impersonal time schedule. The corresponding mental attitude is one of reserve, not to say distrust, which on various occasions may appear to be cold and heartless. Simmel’s observations shed light on exchanges in the anonymity of the metropolis, although they do not apply to kernels of sociability in neighbourhoods and urban organizations where people do meet and socialize. But compared to small-town relationships it is easier for urban dwellers to be reserved about their private life. Simmel’s analysis must be taken more in a typological sense than he himself was probably prepared to do. The reverse side of this attitude of reserve is—as Simmel points out—a hitherto unprecedented kind and level of personal freedom. The self-preservation of small groups requires rigid boundaries and does not allow for the same degree of freedom that can be established in larger social formations (Simmel 1903b: 180): To the extent to which the group grows—numerically, spatially, in significance and in content of life—to the same degree the group’s direct, inner unity loosens, and the rigidity of the original demarcation against others is softened through mutual relations and connections.

With broad strokes Simmel depicts the historical development as he saw it. Whereas in the eighteenth century man—and the word is correct here—was called to free himself from his bonds in state and religion, in morals and economics, the nineteenth century demanded ‘the functional specialization of man and his work’ (Simmel 1903b: 175, 184). The city is the typical locale of freedom (Stadtluft macht frei), as the relations of people are (functionally) extended far beyond the area of immediate activity. ‘Rather is the range of the person constituted by the sum of effects emanating from him temporally and spatially. In the same way, a city consists of its total effects which extend beyond its immediate confines’ (Simmel 1903b: 182). According to Simmel individual freedom is the logical and historical complement of such extension, and is to be understood not only as a negative ‘freedom of mobility and elimination of prejudices and petty philistinism’ (Simmel 1903b: 182), but also as a means to express our own individuality (Unverwechselbarkeit). The old struggle ‘with nature for livelihood [food]’ is transformed ‘into an inter-human struggle for gain, which

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here is not granted by nature but by other men’ (Simmel 1903b: 182). This process promotes differentation, refinement and the enrichment of the needs of the public, which according to Simmel must lead in turn to larger personal differences. From a structural point of view that concentrates on individuals who ‘sell’ things to others and try to fulfil their own—sophisticated— needs, this analysis may appear convincing, but the question arises how precisely people can assert their individuality in this basically economic process. Simmel addresses this problem, too, and in this context points to the ‘specifically metropolitan extravagances of mannerism, caprice, and pretentiousness’ (Simmel 1903b: 183; translation corrected), which allegedly are ways of asserting difference without content. The deepest reason for the urban urge towards the most individual personal existence is what Simmel calls the preponderance of the ‘objective spirit’ over the ‘subjective spirit’. The many products of culture (for instance in law, art, and science, as well as in household products) incorporate an amount of spirit, behind which (most) individuals trail at an ever-increasing distance. The division of labour demands one-sided accomplishments that are potentially detrimental to the individual’s personality. This is a serious problem, as is evident from Simmel’s following characteristic (1903b: 184): The individual is reduced to a negligible quantity, perhaps less in his consciousness than in his practice and in the totality of his obscure emotional states that are derived from this practice. The individual has become a mere cog in an enormous organization of things and powers in order to transform them from their subjective form into the form of a purely objective life.

Simmel ends his essay by stating that the metropolis is the area where the struggle between these impersonal forces and the individual’s quest for qualitative uniqueness and irreplaceability takes place, and that— whether we are sympathetic or antipathetic to these processes—it is not our role to judge, but merely to understand the vicissitudes of the metropolis. Still, most readers will wonder how these opposite tendencies can be reconciled. On the basis of this sketch one is inclined to conclude that the hard-won freedom is at risk of being annihilated by the depersonifying tendencies of the market and the metropolis. It is hardly convincing to claim that the more personal freedom and identity are threatened, the more people will struggle to save and establish the uniqueness of their personality.

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Before I examine the consequences of Simmel’s social-psychological view of the metropolis for religion, I first want to take a look at another classical sociological text on urban culture: Louis Wirth’s essay ‘Urbanism as a Way of Life’ (Wirth 1938). This text was clearly influenced by Simmel, but has a more general sociological outlook. I will primarily discuss those observations that are not found in Simmel’s text. For instance, Louis Wirth (1897–1952) presents a working definition of a city ‘as a relatively large, dense, and permanent settlement of socially heterogeneous individuals’ (Wirth 1938: 66). Adding heterogeneity as a separate characteristic is defended by the author on the grounds that the city shows a kind and degree of heterogeneity of population which cannot be wholly accounted for by the law of large numbers, or adequately represented by means of a normal distribution curve. ‘Because the population of the city does not reproduce itself, it must recruit its migrants from other cities, the countryside, and (. . .) from other countries. The city has thus historically been the meltingpot of races, peoples, and cultures’ (Wirth 1938: 69). It is remarkable that religions are not listed separately here, but they are an important factor in urban society and Wirth may have thought they were included under the rubric of culture. Referring to Simmel’s essay on the metropolis, Wirth stresses the fact that increasing numbers of interacting individuals may lead to more differentiation between them and specialized, segmented roles. The old bonds of solidarity in rural societies tend to be replaced by mechanisms of competition and formal control. Adaptability and mobility are important in the urban environment; these assets, however, require the acceptance of instability and insecurity. Urban life involves a much greater degree of interdependence between individuals, implying a ‘volatile form of mutual interrelations over many phases of which the individual as such can exert scarcely any control’ (Wirth 1938: 81). Because of their ‘virtual impotence’ as individuals, Wirth argues, urban dwellers are bound to organize themselves in order to obtain their ends. ‘This results in the enormous multiplication of voluntary organizations directed toward as great a variety of objectives as there are human needs and interests’ (Wirth 1938: 81). Notwithstanding the many organizations in villages, their rapid spread and growing influence is in this view first and foremost an urban phenomenon.

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Although Simmel strongly stresses the gain of freedom in the city, both his analysis and Louis Wirth’s tend to highlight the losses and disadvantages inherent in the urban environment. This tendency is strengthened by the comparison to the—somewhat idealized—countryside, which apparently does not have these inflictions or to a lesser degree. Typical is what Wirth wrote in 1938: ‘Personal disorganization, mental breakdown, suicide, delinquency, crime, corruption, and disorder might be expected under these circumstances to be more prevalent in the urban than in the rural community’ (Wirth 1938: 82). According to the available evidence, this is indeed the case. Many facts seem to confirm the costs of urbanization in terms of stable bonds and security. It can be asked, of course, if these costs are to be attributed solely to the rise of the city, the metropolis or even the postmetropolis (Soja 2001). This is unlikely, but insofar as the city is a chiffre of the (post)modern condition the analyses of Simmel and Wirth still have an important kernel of truth. Contemporary sociologists claim that we are getting out of control and living in a ‘runaway world’ or a ‘risk society’ (Giddens 1999; Beck 1992). These characterizations are linked to a process of intellectualization and reflection (which according to Simmel and Wirth is typical of the urban). The German sociologist Ulrich Beck introduced the term ‘reflexive modernization’ to capture the accompanying uneasiness: modern society is undercutting its own formations of class, sex roles and nuclear family; and technological progress can have catastrophic results (Beck 1994).4 The term ‘risk’ is significant in itself. In premodern societies concepts such as fate, luck or the will of the gods were used in cases where we now tend to use the word ‘risk’. In the past people were looking backwards in order to understand, whereas now we are principally looking forward in order to act. ‘Risk isn’t the same as hazard or danger. Risk refers to hazards that are actively assessed in relation to future possibilities. It comes into wide usage only in a society that is future oriented—which sees the future precisely as a territory to be conquered or colonised’ (Giddens 1999: 22). These ideas of the engineerability of the future and the necessity of permanent change as such are certainly not found in the essays by Simmel and Wirth, but notions of flexibility, mobility and changing relations of interdependency between individuals are. In this sense these early urban soci-

4

I developed these thoughts in an earlier article; see Molendijk (2000/2001).

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ologists gave a perceptive analysis of changing relationships between individuals and the concomitant rise of insecurity. What do these observations mean for religion? First, I would suggest a contrast between these observed tendencies and (important motifs of ) religion. Whereas the modern mindset suggests that contingencies are there to be managed, the religious mind has a deep sense that this is not the whole truth. Not all evil can be instrumentally managed (let alone solved); there are sorrows to be endured, stories (of misery and hope) to be told, and contingencies that are best met in ritual. In this respect religion can and does play an important role. On a theoretical level this insight is expressed in the view of religion as the caterer for the ‘ultimate contingencies’ (Kontingenzbewältigungspraxis), above all death (Lübbe 1975: 177–78; Lübbe 1990: 149–178). This view does not, however, imply that religion is reduced to quietism, accepting (human) suffering. This brings me to a second observation. More often than not religion has a strong institutional and specifically practical-social dimension, supporting the poor and fighting social injustice. Although the influence of the old established churches may be waning, the same need not be true of religious organizations as such. To understand this a slight digression is in order here. In modern Western history we have seen a general transformation: with the loosening of old ties (especially in this context the loosening of the intimate connection between church and state under the ancien régime) new forms of interconnectedness are built, and voluntary organizations have been the key to this process. Since the birth of the nation-state and the emergence of an independent public sphere in the late eighteenth century, religious organizations have played a prominent role educating the ‘common people’, struggling against ‘social evils’ such as poverty, prostitution and abuse of alcohol, and missionizing the metropolis as well as the colonies. And although this varies from country to country and region to region, religious institutions—prominent among them what has been recently named Faith-Based Organizations (FBOs)5— 5 The definition of FBOs is much disputed, but for orientation I here refer here to that is used in the FACIT programme: ‘[W]e define FBOs as any organization that refers directly or indirectly to religion or religious values, and that functions as a welfare provider or a political actor’. The American government acknowlegdes in principle any organization as a FBO that claims this title. A popular understanding of FBO is voiced by Marvin Olasky, who claims: ‘Most folk I talk with understand it as a political way of saying religion’ (quoted by Jones 2003).

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have a strong presence, especially in cities, improving social conditions (helping the poor and elderly and fighting for a healthy working environment), and empowering people economically, socially and spiritually. This focus on the individual and his/her concerns is key to the Christian message, and is—at least—an attempt to counterbalance the pressures on people who are considered not much more than a cog in the wheel of a machine and who are reduced to the economic value they produce. 2. The (Post)Secular City In intellectual—or at least theological—history the notion of the secular city is pre-eminently connected with the best-selling book with the same title written by Harvey Cox in 1965. The thesis of the book was—as Cox explained in the twenty-fifth anniversary edition—‘that God is just as present in the secular as in the religious realms of life, and we unduly cramp the divine presence by confining it to some specially delineated spiritual or ecclesiastical realm’ (Cox 1965/1990: xii). Drawing on authors such as Karl Barth and, especially, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Cox invites his readers ‘to discern the action of God in the world and to join in His work’ (Cox quoted after Gustafson 1966: 14). Cox does not believe that the historical process of secularization— defined as a decline in the public power of religious institutions and a corresponding change in a culture’s self-definition—necessarily leads to secularism as an ideology or worldview (Cox 1975). Charles Taylor has recently explored a similar thesis in a huge volume on how Western society has changed from one in which it was virtually impossible not to believe in God, into one in which faith is an option among others (Taylor 2007). Both authors claim that the changing place of religion in the modern world does not mean that it simply disappears. However, it is not Cox’s theological agenda as such, but his view of the secular city which interests me here. In his book the urban stands for a way of living and coexistence ‘in which diversity and the disintegration of tradition are paramount’ (Cox 1965/1990: 4). Plurality and functional relationships prevail. ‘The urban center’—Cox continues— ‘is the place of human control, of rational planning, of bureaucratic organization—and the urban center is not just in Washington, London, New York, and Peking. It is everywhere’ (Cox 1965/1990: 4). The city appears to be a symbol of the modern predicament, with anonymity

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and mobility its main characteristics—captured in the images of the man at the giant switchboard and the man in the clover leaf. The style of the city is characterized by the motives of pragmatism and profanity (embodied in John F. Kennedy and Albert Camus, respectively). This sketch of (American) urban culture in 1960s is not unlike that Simmel and Wirth’s, but it seems not very specific, which is probably one of the reasons why it has been so severely criticized. One of the most fierce and devastating critiques was given by Andrew Greely, who argues that Cox has simply overlooked the results of sociology, especially the work of the Chicago school of Robert E. Park, and is not really seeing what is happening in American cities. Outside ‘the ivy-covered ivory towers of theological schools’ real estate agents, politicians and journalists are very much aware of the outstanding role of religion. The Federal Government knows it when it relies on the advice of religious agencies in the war on poverty. The civil-rights leaders know it with their heavy reliance on clergical leadership. The community organizers know it when they rely on the clergy to be the key people in their efforts.6

Greely also contested the view that in the modern world (in the terms of the German sociologist Ferdinand Tönnies) Gemeinschaft was simply replaced by Gesellschaft. This criticism points to the danger of over-generalizations concerning the changes in modern or, for that matter, postmodern societies. The secular city may be an apt metaphor for processes of modernization, differentiation and pluralization, but the term does not fully capture urban realities. Nevertheless, it points to certain phenomena that are real and important and of consequence for religion. The pluralization of world views and life styles has led to conflict, but in many other cases has also led to a certain degree of tolerance of fellow city dwellers, even to a modus of non-involvement (terrible examples of isolation and stress, strengthened by the density of the city and the near-physical contact with passers-by, illustrate this). On the other hand, citizens take all kinds of constructive initiatives, participating in organizations and founding interest groups. And—as argued in the previous section—religions and religious organizations often have a strong presence in the city. In this sense the secular city has never

6

Callahan (1996: 106).

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existed, and is only an extrapolation of the alleged decline of the social role of religion in modern society. Decline of the participation in the traditional main-line churches is real, but does not amount per se to a pervasive secularization of the urban sphere as such. The decline is sometimes countered by initiatives of other religious groups and the churches themselves. The topic of secularization as such is too complex to be dealt with in the context of this essay, but a few remarks may be made. The first thing to note is that Cox’s classic is a fine example of how forceful this paradigm has been (and still is, I would maintain), and how theologians might interpret secularization in terms of emancipation. Like Simmel, they saw the loosening of authoritative constraints as gaining freedom in search of an authentic, personal belief. Further, it is important to see why the paradigm of secularization has been so persistent. I will mention two, quite different factors. First, the experience of dechristianization and the rapid decline of church membership in Western European countries has shaped the views of many Western intellectuals and scholars on the future of Christianity and religion in general. Second, it is important to note that the theory of secularization is so powerful because it contains the core of sociological modernization theories, that is, the theorem of the increasing differentiation of societal spheres. It is argued that one—and probably the most pervasive— meaning of secularization is the differentiation of the secular spheres from religious institutions and norms (Casanova 1994: 211).7 Nowadays the secularization paradigm is being criticized more and more, as it does not seem to capture important facts of modern, Western religious history. Of course, the separation between church and state implies a loss of power on behalf of the churches, but it does not mean that religion has been completely privatized or that religious organizations no longer play a role. The establishment of a public sphere in the Enlightenment period has not forbidden a public role of religion; instead, it has opened up new opportunities. Modern churches can adapt themselves to the new liberal paradigm by evolving from state-oriented into society-oriented institutions, and free citizens can—and did—found organizations with a religious purpose. It is

7 The other two meanings are secularization as the decline of religious beliefs and practices, and secularization as the marginalization of religion into the private sphere.

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argued that the nineteenth and early twentieth century saw an almost unprecedented degree of religious activity, and the period is even characterized as the second confessional era (Blaschke 2000; McLeod and Ustorf 2003). Yet, a case can be made for the proposition that even if the secularization thesis does not throw much light on Western, religious history since the Enlightenment, a radical change took place in the 1960s. To some extent this is true (McLeod 2007), but even for the last fifty years it can be argued that this change—although it has hit the traditional churches very hard—is not best interpreted in terms of decline, but rather in terms of transformation and pluralization. Closer scrutiny shows that the metaphor of the secular city—even if it is still powerful—has lost much of its plausibility. This leaves us with the question what to make of the ‘post-secular (city)’ in the title of this volume. One way to make sense of it is to connect the term with the postmodern turn: one may interpret the late-twentieth and early twenty-first century predicament as a transition into a different kind of world, characterized by globalization, virtual networks and postmegacities. According to the influential architect Rem Koolhaas, the twentieth century is over. ‘It has nothing new to teach us anymore’. But where are we heading? Koolhaas captures the situation as follows: ‘The irony is that we still don’t know if postmodernism was the end of Modernism or just an interruption. Was it a brief hiatus, and now we are returning to something that has been going on for a long time, or is it something radically different? We are in a condition we don’t understand yet’ (Ouroussoff 2008). To what extent are terms such as postmodernism or postmodernity helpful to understand what is happening today? At the very least the terms express an uncertainty about where we are and where we are going, as well as an uneasiness about the project and the alleged blessings of modernity. In whatever direction our reflections go, I would suggest that the post-secular city in the Western world is not something radically different from the allegedly secular city. Above all, the term points to the rising awareness on the part of scholars, citizens and policy makers that the secular city in a strict sense has never existed, but that religion is part of urban culture and in one form or another shapes the social relations in the (post) modern world, which as such has become very much an urban village—with huge differentiations and heterogeneities on the one hand, and nuclei of coexistence and bonding on the other.

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The city evokes ambivalent emotions. The city is often seen as a scene of desolation and merciless capitalism, whereas the countryside is praised for its connectedness to nature and to God, and the ways it offers of being together ‘on a human scale’. This picture can and must be relativized (and there are praises of the city as a site of religion as well; McLeod 1995: 8), but the image remains very persistent. The countryside seems to represent—and not only for Rousseauians—what is lost and what is remembered somewhat nostalgically. This imagery also applies to the field of religion, as the title of this essay indicates. Texts about the place of religion in the city tend to be informed by the contrast with the countryside, which is allegedly fading away in the growing process of urbanization. The opposition is very much a diachronic one: the rural being swept away in the process of history by urbanization. Talking about the secular city reinforces these tendencies and inclinations, as—for those who still might not know—the city is apparently secular and hence opposed to religion. This is no real surprise, as the above has shown that the city is basically seen as the locus of modernity, and modernity, of course, is very much seen as opposed to religion. Notwithstanding the prevalence of the image of the city as secular, religion is very persistent in the urban sphere. Its precise location and role may have changed, but religious organizations cater for human needs, fight for social justice and empower people economically, socially and spiritually. Religion still bonds and takes care. The communities of the city are no longer those of the village, but are based on voluntary association of individuals. You don’t engage simply because of the ties to your family or neighbourhood, but because you choose to do so (which is not to deny that social mechanisms do influence such decisions). The heterogeneity of the city may make it more difficult to engage (because it is not self-evident that you should), but there is a gamut of possibilities for engaging in a variety of activities, groups and associations—also of a religious nature. This is not an empirical essay and I do not want to suggest that the force of religion is unbroken, or that ‘secularization’ does not also refer to very real processes of disengagement and decline in participation, but the claim that the city by definition is a locus of irreligion is simply not true. Traditions may no longer be self-evident, ways of being together and belonging may change, but new possibilities do emerge

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as well. The image of the city as a locus of many opportunities (that the country does not offer) also applies to the religious sphere. Churches as well as faith-based organizations cater for social and religious needs, which may be particularly strong in the urban setting—as it is a place of hope (to improve one’s fate) as well as misery. The fact that people generally come (flee) to the cities out of economical need must not obscure the fact that they (may) have other needs as well—among them that of belonging, of recognition, of empowerment, maybe of transcendence—, which all are needs traditionally catered for by religions. That is obviously not to say that the post-secular city is a religious city. The city is basically a secular structure, faith has become an option (in the same way as atheism is an option), but that does not mean that there is no role for religion in urban societies. As ‘sex and the city’ are intimately related to each other, so are ‘religion and the city’. Both sex and religion are grounded in human needs, but the difference between the two is that religion has stronger institutions in the public domain; under the ancien régime this was the established, top-down organized church, while nowadays we have bottom-up organizations that pursue the needs of individuals—economically, socially and spiritually. References Barrett, D. B., Kurian, G. T. and Johnson, T. M. (eds) (2001) World Christian Encyclopedia. A Comparative Survey of Churches and Religions in the Modern World. 2 vols, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Beck, U. (1992) Risk Society: Towards a New Modernity. London: Sage. —— (1994) ‘The Reinvention of Politics: Towards a Theory of Reflexive Modernization’. In Beck, U., Giddens, A. and Lash, S. (1994) Reflexive Modernization: Politics, Tradition and Aesthetics in the Modern Social Order. Cambridge: Polity Press, 1–55. Blaschke, O. (2000) ‘Das 19. Jahrhundert. Ein Zweites Konfessionelles Zeitalter?’ Geschichte und Gegenwart, 26: 38–75. Brown, C. (2001) The Death of Christian Britain. Understanding Secularisation 1800– 2000. London and New York: Routledge. Callahan, D. (ed.) (1966) The Secular City Debate. New York and London: MacMillan. Casanova, J. (1994) Public Religions in the Modern World. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press. Castells, M. (2002) ‘Conclusion. Urban Sociology in the Twenty-first Century’ (2000). In Susser, I. (ed.) The Castells Reader on Cities and Social Theory. Malden MA and Oxford: Blackwell, pp. 390–406. Cowper, W. (1785/1849) ‘The Task’, ‘The Sofa’, Book I. In Grimshawe, T. S. (ed.) The Works of William Cowper: His Life, Letters, and Poems. New York: Robert Carter & Brothers, pp. 569. Cox, H. (1965/1990) The Secular City: Secularization and Urbanization in Theological Perspective (1965, 1966). 25th Anniversary Edition. New York: Collier Books.

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—— (1975) ‘The Secular City. Ten Years Later’. The Christian Century, 28 May, 544–7. Frisby, D. P. and Featherstone, M. (eds) (1997) Simmel on Culture: Selected Writings. London etc.: Sage. Giddens, A. (1999) Runaway World: How Globalisation is Reshaping Our Lives. London: Profile Books. Gustafson, J. M. (1966) ‘A Look at the Secular City’. In Callahan, D. (ed.) The Secular City Debate. New York and London: MacMillan, pp. 12–16. Jones, J. (2003) ‘No Hard Definition of “Faith Based” ’. In The Non-Profit Times. Jan. 1, 2003 (available online: http://www.allbusiness.com/specialty-businesses/non-profitbusinesses/458156-1.html) Kant, Immanuel (1781/1787) Kritik der reinen Vernunft. Ed. by Raymund Schmidt, Hamburg: Felix Meiner, 1976. Loomis, S. L. (1887) Modern Cities and Their Religious Problems. With an introduction by Rev. Josiah Strong, New York: The Baker & Taylor Company. Lübbe, H. (1975) ‘Vollendung der Säkularisierung—Ende der Religion?’. In Lübbe, Fortschritt als Orientierungsproblem: Aufklärung in der Gegenwart. Freiburg i.B.: Rombach, pp. 169–81. —— (1990) Religion nach der Aufklärung. Graz etc.: Styra. McLeod, H. (1995) ‘Introduction’. In McLeod (ed.), European Religion in the Age of Great Cities 1830–1930. London and New York: Routledge, pp. 1–39. —— and Ustorf, W. (eds.) (2003) The Decline of Christendom in Western Europe 1750–2000. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press. —— (2007) The Religious Crisis of the 1960s. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press. Meeks, W. A. (1983) The First Urban Christians: The Social World of the Apostle Paul. New Haven and London: Yale University Press. Molendijk, A. L. (2000–2001) ‘A Challenge to Philosophy of Relgion’. Ars Disputandi: The Online Journal for Philosophy of Religion 1, http://www.roquade.nl/ad/cgibin/2001/index.html. Ouroussoff, N. (2008) ‘The New, New City’. The New York Times Magazine, 6 June 2008. Simmel, G. (1903a) ‘The Sociology of Space’ (1903). In Frisby and Featherstone (eds) (2007), 137–70. —— (1903b), ‘The Metropolis and Mental Life’. In Frisby and Featherstone (eds) (2007), 174–85 (German orig.: ‘Die Grossstädte und das Geistesleben’, Aufsätze und Abhandlungen 1901–1908, vol. 1, Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1995, pp. 116–31). Soja, Edward (2001) ‘Exploring the Postmetropolis’. In Minca, C. (ed.) Postmodern Geography: Theory and Praxis. Oxford and Malden MA: Blackwell, pp. 37–56. Stark, R. (2006) Cities of God: The Real Story of How Christianity Became an Urban Movement and Conquered Rome. San Francisco: Harper. Taylor, C. (2007) A Secular Age. Cambridge MA and London: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. United Nations (2007) World Urbanization Prospects The 2007 Revision—Highlights (available online: http://blogs.uct.ac.za/blog/amandla/2008/02/28/world-urbanization-prospects.-un). Wirth, L. (1938) ‘Urbanism as a Way of Life’ (1938). In Reiss, A. J. (ed.) (1964) On Cities and Social Life: Selected Papers. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, pp. 60–83.

MAKING SENSE OF SACRED SPACE IN THE CITY? Maaike de Haardt For some years now I have been trying to develop ‘a theology of everyday life’.1 As a feminist systematic theologian I am convinced that in our contemporary situation we need a style or form of theological reflection that is firmly rooted in everyday life and practice, rather than exclusively in the theoretical traditions, ideas and views that accompany these practices (Haardt 2002; 2004; Isasi-Diaz 1996; Pilario 2005). To carry out this program and to overcome purely abstract models of reflection we have to start in concrete places, thus honouring the insight that all knowledge is embodied in gender and context. For that reason I have earlier looked at ‘everyday practices’, exploring the theological relevance of food and eating and of gardening, for example, and followed the activities of a Catholic women’s organization, looking for the religious dimensions in their social work (see Haardt 2002). All this and my interest in contemporary reflections on ‘the divine’ have brought me to explore further what I have thus far called ‘a sense of presence’ or ‘a sense of wonder’, i.e. a kind of sensibility that, according to the French cultural theorist and historian Michel de Certeau, ‘allow[s] people to stay alive’, and which can be found only by looking at the actual places where people live their lives from day to day (Certeau, Giard and Mayol 1998). De Certeau used the by now famous and often quoted image of standing on top of the World Trade Centre, surveying the city from above and getting the bird’s eye view that shows the city as a well-organized, structured whole. This view is the perspective of the city cartographers, and he contrasted this with the experiences of those who live in the city and walk the streets—the diverse, fragmented city life unseen by the cartographers (Certeau 1984: 91–3).2 1 I am fully aware of the problematic character of the phrase ‘everyday life’. I use it here as a ‘shorthand for voices from “below”: women, children, migrants and so on’ (Highmore 2002: 1) and as such it is intended as a critical term, making visible the invisible and a challenge to use new ways of thinking and new ways of perceiving. 2 As stated, this quote is famous and is often used, also in spatial and urban theory. Massey, however, points out the ironic fact that de Certeau, in trying to overcome

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In this approach everyday life is the centre and starting point for theological reflection. The quest for actual places and the methodological questions of where and how to find as well as describe them as a theologian has recently led me to those geographers and cultural theorists for whom place and space are central in their thinking. Feminism, with its emphasis on everyday life, also emphasized the importance of ‘place’ and ‘space’. Here we only have to think of Adriane Rich’s famous article ‘Notes towards a Politics of Location’ (1986), or Mary Daly’s relentless insistence on the importance of Women’s Space (2006). But this had not led feminists in religious studies to spatial or geographical theory until very recently. For me, the discovery of a different and, in a sense, ‘new’ discipline was a kind of revelation—‘making space for place’ seemed to open up a new and promising means of theological reflection (Haardt 2006). And it was via spatial theory that the city came into focus. Before going into the theory, let me start with some ‘lived experiences’ of the city. At this moment there are about 300,000 foreign domestic workers living and working in Hong Kong, half of whom come from the Philippines. These women experience various kinds of oppression due to differences in physical, social and human geography, as well as in political and religio-cultural beliefs and practices. These differences are tied up with racial, ethnic and gender identities in Hong Kong as well as in the Philippines. Gemma Cruz, in her wonderful study of the theological implications of migration exemplified by this group of Filipina domestic helpers, describes the different but nevertheless interwoven strategies of submission, accommodation and resistance to which these women resort in order to deal with their situation as foreign domestic workers. These strategies are political, economic and religio-cultural, and public as well as private in nature (Cruz 2006). The distinction commonly applied between submission and resistance does not adequately characterize the specific situation and the often intelligent and creative strategies used by this group of domestic workers. These women often choose a third way, i.e. accommodation— neither accepting the oppression nor contesting it. Within these three modes religion is an important part of this struggle. For these women oppositions such as theory-praxis, elite-popular, mastery-resistance, space-time in his move from summit to street actually reinstates what he aims to overcome (see Massey 2005).

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Sunday Mass is the highlight of the week and a powerful means of support, communication, friendship and hope. It is both a religious and a social event. For a number of Filipinas, it does not matter where they worship or in which church. Moreover, ‘[i]f there is no church building available for them, the Domestic Helpers find places, create and build their own “church” out of parks, gyms and auditoriums’ (Cruz 2006: 81). This appropriation of public space forms a part of their attempts to survive as human beings with dignity and integrity. There are other strategies in which these women explicitly use public space and turn this often hostile space into a space of their own. The Economist reports (quoted in Cruz 2006: 89): Once a week, on Sundays, Hong Kong becomes a different city. Thousands of Filipina women throng into the central business district, around Statue Square, to picnic, dance, sing, gossip and laugh. They snuggle in the shade of the HSBC building, a Hong Kong landmark, and spill out into parks and streets. They hug. They chatter. They smile. Humanity could stage no greater display of happiness.

For Cruz all these strategies and struggles for full humanity and liberation are theologically relevant. She states that insofar as this struggle ‘marks the daily life of the domestic helpers and is forged in faith, it has a sacramental character. For the act of struggle itself is an experience of Gods presence (. . .)’ (Cruz 2006: 96). This analysis of the actual situation of Filipina domestic workers provides the central themes of this contribution: the city as an important place for feminist reflection on religion; the possibilities of speaking of the city as a sacred space; and the relevance of feminist and urban spatial theory to a reflection on urban religion in everyday life. In this respect, the description of the domestic workers in Hong Kong offers an intriguing example since it demonstrates the intense complexity of religion(s) in relation to the question of the city as a sacred space or place. Is it possible to speak of the specific places to which these Filipina domestic helpers go to reinstate their dignity and humanity as sacred places? Does it make sense to speak of Hong Kong—or any other city—as a sacred space while this city harbours so much injustice and suffering? Why is it theologically relevant or religiously sensible, especially from a feminist perspective, to speak of cities, or perhaps better, to speak of certain places in cities as sacred places? Can we describe the religion of the Filipinas as ‘urban religion’ and what does this mean?

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Nowadays, and on a global scale, the majority of people live in cities, either by choice or by necessity. At this time half of the world’s population live in urban environments, and the United Nations expects that by 2030 60% of the inhabitants of the world will be living in cities. Most of this urbanization is taking place and will take place in the southern hemisphere (see Vreeken 2006: 11). This seems to be an inescapable demographical development. For many people, this prospect is the ultimate horror because for them the city is first of all a place of decay, destruction, consumption, pornography and violence. In general, one can speak of a strong cultural anti-urbanism, also reflected in philosophy and theology. Even today, when—at least in Western Europe—the actual distinction between city and country, between province and metropolis is less marked than before, the popular belief still persists that it is better for children to be raised outside the big city, in small towns, villages or suburbs. The city still has a bad image. But whatever we think of the cities and the existing images of it, we cannot deny that in reality the city is the place where the majority of people go in search of a better life, where they hope to realize their opportunities and dreams. The city is the place where, in fact—even in what can be considered unbearable conditions—people still have more opportunities to survive or to provide for their families’ survival than they would have had in ‘the country’. The enormous urban development that has taken place worldwide since the 18th century and has recently led to the so-called urban crisis is one of the reasons why the city has returned in Western cultural, philosophical and theological reflection. This return followed the more general ‘spatial turn’ that was already taking place in the humanities, and which had also been influenced by the growing urbanization, at least in the field of geography. In addition to simply counting and describing, i.e. in addition to positivist geography and its ‘epistemological inhumanities of scientific rationality’ (Rose 1993: 43), Marxist and humanist geographers felt an increasing need to interpret these urban developments. In light of these developments, the theologian Kathryn Tanner has spoken of urban resurgence as one sign of the times in her introduction to Spirit in the Cities (2004: x). Cities may have lost their influence with the population shift and the general de-industrialization of the West, but they have currently regained their position of centrality

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due to the technical infrastructure, service and entertainment sectors that support the job and city-hopping lifestyle of the economic elite. From an economic perspective it is in the cities that the exchanges of international finance and the complex co-ordination of multinational corporations intersect. In cities, low-paid and unemployed workers from all over the world are drawn into the urban structure of global capitalism; thus, the city becomes a microcosm of the uneven development of global capitalism. Moreover, cities are central to neoliberal globalization. In fact ‘the increasing concentration of humanity is in part a product of it’ (Massey 2007: 9). Cities are the place where ‘the extremes touch’, where the most privileged and the most oppressed meet. Furthermore, it is in the 21st-century metropolis (i.e. New York, London, Sao Paulo, Hong Kong, Seoul) rather than the old European cities where such traditional contrasts as North-South, East-West, rich-poor, developed-underdeveloped, town and country, are breaking down. According to the well-known sociologist Saskia Sassen downtown New York and downtown Sao Paulo are deeply connected, much more than downtown Sao Paulo is connected to its own periphery (Sassen 1998). These global urban developments lead Tanner to state that space is the second ‘sign of the times’, by which she refers to the renewed interest in space. What is most characteristic of this spatial reflection is its new understanding of the term ‘space’, in which political and ideological dimensions are implicated. This means that space is no longer considered an empty container through which historical processes flow but as both the product of social processes and an influence on them. Also, according to Keith and Pile, it is precisely ‘the spatialities of urban regeneration and the politics of diaspora’ that illustrates these themes (1993: 2). Thus, it is not strange that, as the feminist geographer Doreen Massey states in her renowned article ‘Politics and Space/Time’, that space is ‘very much on the agenda these days’, even though its meaning is not at all clear, mostly unacknowledged, and even, referring to Lefebvre’s Production of Space, strongly contested (Massey 1994: 255). The specific feminist interest in space becomes clear when Massey points out the fact that space is a feminine-gendered concept and that, again in a highly dualistic and gendered way, it is opposed to time. In general, space is considered to be static, flat, and ‘passive’, with no constructive and political power at all. In other words, space, just like women, is defined by sheer absence, by lack. This traditional, dualistic

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and gendered spatial approach is challenged by the recent return of ‘space’ in the cultural discourse, even though it took feminist analysis to point to its gender dimensions (Rose 1993). The actual economic and demographic urban developments are a great challenge to the Western worldview that is constructed partly on this specific space-time opposition, since it is constructed on many other contrasting and spatial images as well. As Foucault (1986 [1967]: 23) says: And perhaps our life is still governed by a certain number of oppositions that remain inviolable, that our institutions and practices have not yet dared to break down. These are oppositions that we regard as simple givens: for example between private space and public space, between family space and social space, between cultural space and useful space, between the space of leisure and that of work. All these are still nurtured by the hidden presence of the sacred.

To these oppositions I would add the contrast between the sacred and the profane as fundamental to the construction of the Western worldview, because this dualism has also strongly influenced the general cultural image of the city. Although there is hardly anyone outside theology and religious studies who discusses the city or the country explicitly in terms of sacred and profane, it is not difficult to find deep traces of these value judgements everywhere. Even when the transcoding of dualism shows elements of instability—i.e. it is not always clear what counts as the higher or the lower value—in most cases sacredness is identified with ‘good’, with tradition, with roots, safety and morality, and its profane opposite with ‘bad’ or ‘evil’, with history, modernity, alienation and fragmentation (Massey 1994: 258). This cultural dualistic and, more often than not, highly gendered stereotype is applied to the city in both literary imagination (Tinkler-Villani 2005) and in philosophy and theology (Ward 2000). Most of the time the city is identified as ‘bad’, as ‘evil’, as deeply profane, as sinful and alienating, and the countryside is its opposite: ‘good’, ‘safe’, ‘of a high moral standard/content’. This a belief is still prevalent in different forms in science, culture and religion in general. The sociologist Richard Sennet blames Western Christianity, more specifically Augustine’s distinction between the city of God and the human city, for this highly dualistic and deeply ambivalent, if not negative, evaluation of the city (Sennet 1992). But the agnostic Sennet is not the only one who blames Christianity for this. According to the Protestant biblical scholar Dieter Georgi (2005: 316):

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Christian religion and Christian theology have caused many of the catastrophic developments we face in the cities of today, although theology and religion hardly feel responsible. Responsibility was, rather, covered up or altogether avoided by noble retreat, an allegedly spiritual way out.

However, given the fact that so many people, especially women, turn and need to turn to the city for a different life and hope for a better future, it is important and theologically relevant to rethink the cultural and religious image of the city, and to re-imagine it in order to support the struggles of those who inhabit cities. Furthermore, in my view, it is equally important for theologians to turn to actual cities and the dynamics that can be found there in order to find places of hope, support, survival and community. Is it possible to speak of these places as sacred city spaces? In other words, I am convinced that it is important for theology to abandon its traditional aversion to the city, although a healthy form of ambivalence will probably do no harm. Through this aversion theology reinforces the ‘profanity’ of the city, instead of acknowledging and supporting the urbanity of the people who actually live and believe in the city. It is therefore not enough to reflect on the religious meaning of the city in a way that focuses only on its symbolic meaning, on the spirit, the civitas, the ideal, the utopian city that represents the ‘city of God’. This approach leaves aside the ‘urbs’, ‘that assemblage of walls, traffic arteries, and ‘infrastructure’ that materially constitutes an urban place’ (Hawkins 1986: xii), as a possible part of the religious vision. After all, it is in these physical places that the Filipina domestic helpers and so many others create their own space and practices, their beliefs, hopes, friendship, political actions, and even their many other (albeit passive) strategies of resistance and accommodation. If they did not have the streets, the parks, the gyms, the marketplaces and the churches, i.e. if they did not have the actual urban space, they simply could not survive. In this contribution I will explore the interest in the feminist theological relevance of both space and city by looking at the work of urban theorists and geographers, more specifically, Edward Soja and his appropriation of the works of Henry Lefebvre.3 I hope to find 3 I would like to thank Dr. Christl M. Maier, who brought the work of Soja and his concept of ‘Thirdspace’ to my attention. Maier, who is a biblical scholar, participated in the Construction of Ancient Space Seminar, an AAR/SBL seminar in which Soja’s work was explored for its application to biblical and cultural studies (see: http://www .case.edu/affil/GAIR/Constructions/Constructions.html; last accessed 10 March 2008).

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elements in their approach by which to counter some of the negative views of the city and to open up a kind of theological space for a reflection that validates and acknowledges the lived experiences of the city. With reference to the ‘sense of presence’ mentioned above, I could also say that I am searching primarily for an approach that at least offers the possibility or the opportunity to speak of ‘presence’ in the everyday environment of urban people, exploring the possibilities that a spatial and geographical approach can offer for this project. That is, I am trying to speak theologically of the city as a place with at least sacramental or sacred potential, and I am looking for places in the city where that potential is and can be actualized. Alluding to the title of a book by the well-known Dutch theologian H. M. Kuitert (2002), I can reframe my central question as follows: ‘Can the city be, for a time, a place of God?’ My contribution here is an exploratory first step in a field that, in my view, should be promising for future feminist systematic reflection on religion. 2. The Spatial Turn and the City Since the beginning of the 1990s not only geography, critical cultural and social theory, but also anthropology, literary theory and history have taken a ‘spatial turn’. Central to this spatial approach is the acknowledgement of spatiality, of space itself, as an analytical and explanatory power. According to the German historian Karl Schlögel (2003: 67), it is an indication that ‘something is happening’ when interest in ‘space’ emerges simultaneously from different perspectives and in different academic disciplines. In his view, this spatial turn, this recent new interpretative key, was the result of several intellectual crises in which the previous framework of interpretation, the timehistory framework, lost its self-explanatory power. The foundation for this transformation has been laid by fundamental changes in the experiences of time and space in the 20th century, together with the processes of globalization and the fast growth of new technologies as well as the accompanying production of simultaneity and dissimultaneity in the same place. Schlögel considers the 1989 fall of the Berlin Wall and 9/11 to have been the catalysts for this spatial revolution. Further elements that he mentions are the crisis of industrial modernity, notably the crisis of the urban and metropolitan centres, the renewed interest in the body as the ultimate reference of subjectivity, as well as the

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crisis of historicism and its ‘great, time-related, narratives’, plus the environmental crisis. These events—with, according to Schlögel, a surprising blind spot for gender and gender reflection—led to the emergence and re-emergence of a Marxist approach together with a strong focus on space and place (Schlögel 2003: 62–5). It was in the field of geography, notably in the works of geographers such as Edward Soja, David Harvey and Doreen Massey, that this new space-oriented approach first came to the fore and, partly via their works, entered the social sciences and the humanities in general. In a way it could be said that this spatial turn and the neo-Marxist approach corresponded to a great deal of the feminist theory already existing. It is not strange, then, that some feminist geographers criticized Harvey and Soja for their male bias and neglect of these insights (Massey 1994). This spatial turn was accompanied by a kind of (re)discovery of the works of Henry Lefebvre, at least in the English-speaking world (Scott and Soja 1996: 44; Gardiner 2000). It was not until 1991 that Lefebvre’s famous The Production of Space, originally published in French in 1974, was translated and published in English. As far as I can see it became, at least in the Anglo-Saxon world, one of the most influential theoretical works in this field, even though interpretations of it vary greatly. According to Soja, Lefebvre’s theory of space can be considered one of the most significant philosophical projects in the 20th century (Soja 1996: 44). His theoretical framework, whether or not received via Soja, is also used by religious studies scholars and theologians, and the same variety in the use and interpretation of his work can be seen here as in other disciplines (Sheldrake 2001; 2007; Gorringe 2002; Inge 2003; Kort 2004; Knott 2005; Baker 2007). Nevertheless, the frequent use of Lefebvre’s work is at least a sign of both the emerging importance of spatiality and of the creativity Lefebvre’s works still generate in the study of religion. Other key thinkers with respect to this spatial turn who are also influential in the study of religion include the humanistic geographer Yi-Fu Tuan (1974), who coined the concept of ‘topophilia’ (love of place), and the philosopher Edward S. Casey, who, influenced by Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty, advocates a phenomenological approach. Casey has made it his life’s work to bring ‘place’ into the philosophical discourse again, and it is also Casey who has an explicit ontological and epistemological preference for ‘place’ above ‘space’.

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For him, place is the location of the physical body while the notion of space only ‘gives room for a body’ (Casey 1997: 94). Neither approach has been immune to feminist criticism (Rose 1993), but nevertheless their emphasis on embodiment and on the recognition that the experience of place brings out something significant about the world are important elements in the reflection on the meaning of both place/ space and religion, as demonstrated in Jonathan Z. Smith’s by now famous classic To Take Place (1987). As stated above, Edward Soja is one of the leading figures in ‘geography’s reinvention of its field in the 1980s and early 1990’ (Miles, Hall and Borden 2004: 453). He is mentioned in one breath with David Harvey and Doreen Massey, and is one of the authors who integrated the work of Henry Lefebvre into his own spatial approach and reflection on the city. He used Lefebvre’s The Production of Space as a theoretical model in his Thirdspace (Soja 1996) as well as in its sequel Postmetropolis (Soja 2000). In both studies Soja brings together different disciplines such as social sciences, philosophy and cultural studies, including post-colonialism, race, gender and ethnic perspectives. While Thirdspace more or less set the theoretical stage for his urban reflections, Postmetropolis is its applied sequel, with wide-ranging discussions and descriptions of the geohistory of cities. In this latter work Soja starts with the earliest origins of the city and ends with the contemporary developments of what he calls ‘postmetropolis’, for which Los Angeles represents the exemplary urban region. It is this bringing together of Lefebvre’s theory of space and urbanism with Soja’s own integration of postcolonial, gender and race reflections—notably his use of the work of bell hooks (pseudonym of Gloria Jean Watkins) in his own thinking as well as his appropriation of these engaged theoretical strands for his descriptions and interpretation of the city—that makes Soja’s reflections stimulating. Does this approach to space and city therefore have something to offer to a feminist theologian searching for clues as to what determines or influences the space/spatiality of the sacred? Will it shed light on the question of how ‘spatiality’ informs our ‘sense of the sacred’ as well as our descriptions of sacredness? Does this approach offer a means of reflection that will enable us to consider the city—against all odds—a sacred space? Or, more precisely, will it offer me space to transgress the sacred-profane dichotomy in relation to the city? Let me formulate the urgency of this project once again, this time by a quote from Elizabeth Wilson: ‘[W]e will never solve the problems of the city unless we like

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the urban-ness of urban life.’ (Wilson 1991: 158) For Wesley Kort, who also points to the equation of profanity and evil, the question ‘whether or not the city can be freed from its cultural captivity as the epitome of profane history’, can only be answered affirmatively, but realizing this perspective is not as easy as it sounds (Kort 2004: 216). Central to Lefebvre’s work is his conviction that space as ‘social’ space is a ‘social’ product (Lefebvre 1991). This implies that, in addition to time, sociality and history, space also becomes an important part of interpretation. When we say that ‘everything’ occurs in time, we consider space to be an empty container simply waiting to be filled with time, relations and meaning. However, according to Lefebvre every society produces its own space and has its own towns, cities and relations to the country. The materiality of space and place is strongly advocated, together with the conviction that every society produces its own spaces that are characteristic of each social formation. It is for that reason that Lefebvre’s descriptions and analysis focus on architecture, city planning, urbanism, on the actual design of routes and localities in the organization of everyday life and urban reality. What is stated here is that ‘social reality is not just coincidentally spatial, existing “in” space, it is presuppositionally and ontologically spatial. There is no unspatialized social reality. There are no aspatial social processes’ (Soja 1996: 46). Whether we are speaking of abstractions, representation or ideology, there is always, however implicit, a spatial dimension: ‘the social production of human spatiality is becoming as fundamental to understanding our lives and our life in the world as the social production of our histories and societies’ (Soja 1999: 262). This ontological trialectic of spatiality-sociality-historicality is a more encompassing, ‘thirding’, way of conceptualizing and understanding our lives, our life words and the world, according to Soja. He speaks of ‘the trialectics of being’. Therefore, it is important that none of the elements should have an a priori privileged position above the others, and it should be recognized that they are interactively related to one another.4 Nevertheless, because of the long-standing omission of spatiality, Soja proposes at least a temporary and cautious privileging of spatiality (Soja 1999: 263). This insight into both the construction and the importance of spatiality is relevant to all levels of 4 It is often said that Soja overemphasizes the space element at the expense of history (Schlögel, Knott and Kort). Soja does not agree and speaks of a rebalancing without diminishing the importance of history.

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knowledge formation: epistemology, theory building, empirical analysis and praxis, and the transformation of knowledge into action. If everything also occurs in space, this means that spaces are not neutral or ‘given’ and they are in a continuous process of being produced. Therefore, according to Soja, spatial knowledge is a source and stimulus for radical openness and creativity. It resists singular causality and is transdisciplinary (Soja 1996: 48). This trialectics of being is followed by the ‘trialectics of spatiality’. Here Soja follows Lefebvre in his three perspectives on the production of space in society. Again, Soja emphasizes that it is important to note that these three perspectives of socially produced space can be distinguished from one another only in theory. They exist at the same time and are intertwined in a trialectic relation. The first perspective, perceived space, corresponding to Lefebvre’s spatial practices and Soja’s Firstspace, refers to the world directly experienced, to material space. These practices are subject to mathematical ordering and empirical measurement, and this perspective refers to the way people generate, use and perceive space (Lefebvre 1991: 38): It embodies a close association (. . .) between daily reality (daily routine) and urban reality (the routes and networks which link up the places set aside for work, ‘private life’ and leisure). This association is a paradoxical one, because it includes the most extreme separation between the places it links together.

Spatial practice ensures a kind of continuity and cohesion, although this is not to say that this is coherent in the intellectual sense of the word. It implies a level of competence and a specific level of performance that can be evaluated only empirically, because, as Kim Knott states, it involves practical perceptions, common sense and being taken for granted. ‘It incorporates a repertoire of gestures, bodily movements and behaviours which may take account of the physical and social spaces in which they occur, but which are only partially disciplined by them’ (Knott 2005a: 163). Secondspace, Lefebvre’s conceived space, is more subjective and ‘imagined’, says Soja. It refers to the concepts, metaphors and images used by planners, architects, engineers, geographers and other scientists. It is more open and idealistic than Firstspace, at least in its explanatory emphasis. ‘If Firstspace is seen as providing the geographers empirical text, then Secondspace represents the geographers major ideational and ideological “discourses”, the way we think and write about this

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text and about geography in general’ (Soja 1999: 266). On this point Lefebvre is more outspoken. For him, conceived space, the conceptualized space depicted by language, metaphor, maps and drawings, is the dominant space and is filled with power and control as we relate to and experience space. It is the mental space of the scientist and ‘all of whom who identify what is lived and what is perceived with what is conceived’ (Lefebvre 1991: 38). This reminds me of the ‘Manhattan image’ mentioned above in which de Certeau presented his criticism of science. Here it seems that Lefebvre parallels de Certeau’s distinction between the highly rationalized concept of the city, and the city as lived and experienced, hence always fragmented, diverse and only partially known. At the same time, Lefebvre—and Soja with him— opposes the thought that it is possible to separate pure form, that is empty space or imagined space, from the ‘impure’ content, i.e. lived experiences, everyday practices. For them, this opposition belongs to the many dualisms—pure-impure, imagined-real, theoretical-empirical, macro-micro—they aim to overcome. Therefore, Lefebvre points to the body and the importance of the body as the starting point and destination of his theory of spatiality: ‘each living body is space and has space: it produces itself in space and it also produces that space’ (Lefebvre 1991: 170). What is needed is a different perspective. Thirdspace, i.e. lived space or representational space, represents for Soja a summons to another way of thinking beyond the binary oppositions that characterize Firstspace and Secondspace, as the material and the mental, respectively. For Lefebvre, according to Soja, this dualism is one of the many and in the meantime generally recognized dualisms that run throughout Western thinking and social theory. For Lefebvre, the third term, lived space, is necessary to break open these dualisms and their either-or logic in favour of a ‘both and also’ position. This ‘both and also’ is not the same, Soja emphasizes, as an ‘in-between’ position, since the latter does not escape either-or logic (Soja 1999: 48). As lived space, Thirdspace is space as directly lived through its associated images and symbols, and hence the space of ‘inhabitants’ and ‘users’, but also of some artists and perhaps of those, such as a few writers and philosophers, who describe and aspire to do no more than describe. This is the dominated—and hence passively experienced— space which the imagination seeks to change and appropriate. It overlays physical space, making use of its objects (Lefebvre 1991: 39). Lived space, in Lefebvre’s Marxist vocabulary, has the potential to counter

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the repressive and alienating spaces of the consumer society of neocapitalism and in that sense transcends it. For Lefebvre, this space is associated with the underground side of social life. None of this is, in a sense, completely new or strange, especially not to those who are familiar with feminist and/or cultural theory. It comes as no surprise, therefore, that Soja pursues this line of thinking on lived space, Thirdspace, by bringing in other thinkers and new directions that resound with more contemporary relevance. He wholeheartly acknowledges that the most creative contributions in the field of geographical imagination and Thirdspace have come from feminist and postcolonial (cultural) studies (Soja 1999: 275).5 The work of bell hooks especially has been very influential in Soja’s elaboration of the concept of Thirdspace. For both spatial feminist and postcolonial thinkers, as for Soja himself, the work of Michel Foucault has been fundamental. His concept of heterotopologies functions prominently in spatial reflection, be it in geography, cultural studies or, more recently, in religious studies (Knott 2005b) and theology (Sander 2006). Via hooks and others Soja relates Thirdspace to the marginal and the radical openness of the marginal, thereby demonstrating the claim that, through the encompassing Thirdspace perspective, spatial knowledge is the source and stimulus for radical openness and creativity. Lived space receives a communicative meaning and provides a ground for collective struggle against all forms of oppression. According to Soja, it is here, in this Thirdspace consciousness, that a new sociospatial movement, a community of resistance, is beginning to develop, and new coalitions beginning to arise, where new ways for building bridges are sought and the foundation for solidarity and political praxis can be found (Soja 1999: 276–7). 3. The City and the Sacred? What, then, can all this mean for an interpretation of contemporary cities as potential ‘sacred spaces/places’ in a model in which space is no longer looked upon as an ‘essence’, as an object distinct from the point of view of subjects? Can this spatial model be productive in the creation of a ‘third’ term beyond the sacred/profane dualism? 5 Thirdspace is also the name of an academic Internet journal of feminist theory and culture (http://www.thirdspace.ca/journal/index).

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Is there a ‘religious meaningfully lived space’ in/through the city and what would this mean? In other words, how is one to make theological sense of Robert Orsi’s (1999: 43) claim that there are distinct urban religious experiences and practices and that the industrial and postindustrial cities have been the scene of a unique religious creativity? For Lefebvre and Soja, contemporary neo-capitalism has produced a kind of urbanism that is gradually being transformed into what Soja called ‘postmetropolis’. This ‘postmetropolis’ followed the urban crisis of the 1960s, although there are no strict definitions and distinctions between these forms of metropolis. Following the spatial analyses given above I would argue that the institutional churches of Western Christianity are part of the dominant Secondspace strongly criticized by Lefebvre. To the extent that they, too, participated in the processes that characterize modernity, in their focus on the do’s and dont’s of Christianity, in the rationalization of content and forms of belief, in their dogmatic approach as the sole correct interpretation, their power structures and hierarchy etc., I belong to those theologians who are convinced that the Church and theology are part of the modern or postmodern problem, insofar as they see themselves as the ‘master planners’ and the directors, guards and judges of the ‘essential’ Christian meaning of life and correct Christian religious practices. And, of course, they support the strong distinction between sacred and profane space/place and therefore have a very complicated relation to the city. However, there is more religion and more Christianity than this idealistic and/or ideological sacred space of institutional Christianity, even if the churches locate their sacred spaces firmly in the places they approve of. And, true, these spaces would indeed be perceived by most people as specifically ‘religious or Christian space’. But metropolis or postmodern metropolis are not ‘pure’ or simple forms. All cities, according to Soja, are hybrid forms with changing realities. This implies that the institutional power to determine what counts as sacred space has lost its obvious character, and is contested by many, including critical feminists, postcolonial thinkers ‘and a great many ordinary believers’ (although for ‘secular’ people, this ‘traditional’ sacred meaning of certain places is often far less contested but simply accepted). Furthermore, many ‘sacred’ places have lost the power/quality to evoke their ‘sense of sacredness’, or have becomes places that are open to a ‘different’, ‘other’, interpretation of ‘sacredness’ than the traditional (Christian) definition. Robert Orsi, in his introduction to Gods of the City points to Mircea Eliade’s highly

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negative view of the religious possibilities of the city, a view that also informed his famous and much used description of the sacred as opposed to the profane. ‘The religious sense of urban populations [in industrial societies] is gravely impoverished. The cosmic liturgy, the mystery of nature’s participation in the Christological dream, have become inaccessible to Christians living in a modern city’ (Orsi 1999: 75). But, as Orsi correctly noted, without referring to any theory of spatiality (1999: 44): The specific features of the urban (and perhaps post-urban) landscape, which differ from city to city, are not simply the setting for religious experience and expression but become the very materials for such expression and experience. City folk do not live in their environments; they live through them. Who am I? What is possible in life? What is good? These are questions that are always asked, and their answers discerned and enacted in particular places. Specific places structure the questions, and as men and women cobble together their responses, they act upon the spaces around them in transformative ways. This is the architecture of urban religion.

What should we think in this respect of the many traditional places of worship that have been transformed, for practical or principal reasons, into multi-religious places of prayer, ritual, meditation? What should we think of places that have been transformed into, or intentionally designed as, even less specifically religious ‘places of silence’ open to everyone? Do we see a concrete blurring of the sacred-profane boundaries? Or what are we to think of places that are ‘multifunctional’, that are used for explicitly religious activities on Friday or Sunday and for many other activities during the rest of the week? In my view these are important developments, opening up possibilities for regaining or strengthening ‘a sense of presence’ in a place where traditional frames of religion and common-sense religious knowledge are no longer obvious. These are not necessarily or explicitly Christian-‘determined’ or-‘coded’ experiences, nor specific Christian interpretations of this ‘sense of presence’, although this could be and certainly is the case in many situations. Many experiences of ‘presence’ that are not interpreted in line with a specific religious tradition manifest a kind of ‘basic sacrality’, as Goedroen Juchtmans would say. This notion refers to an ‘experience of an intensifying, deepening or uplifting self-transcending power that encompasses the whole of life or to an experience that relates a person to the ultimate concern’ (Juchtmans 2008: 55). In an explicitly Christian or, perhaps better, Catholic interpretation, this

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would be called a sacramental experience. Sacramentality here refers to the insight that ‘everything is, in principle, capable of embodying and communicating the divine’ (Haardt 2001: 45). This line of reflection does indeed offer possibilities for going beyond the sacred-profane opposition, since in the light of actual recent developments and experiences it loses it relevance and explanatory power. What is more: only if this distinction is left behind is it possible to acknowledge a broad spectrum of ‘different’ or ‘other’ religious and spiritual practices, experiences and activities as religiously valuable. Postmetropolis, with all its cultural, religious, economic, ethnic, sexual and gender diversity, offers—for better and for worse—enormous possibilities to counteract the dominance of Secondplace and opportunities to develop ‘different’ social and hence different religious spatialities. I would like to return to the Filipina domestic helpers in Hong Kong. Once a week, they transform the inner city, the streets and the parks of Hong Kong into their own ‘sacred space’ where they worship, organize their festivals and parties, and also develop political strategies to encounter the many forms of injustice they suffer as migrant women in a strange and hostile city. And however ‘traditional’ their liturgies may seem in our eyes, however ambiguous traditional Filippino Catholicism may seem to be, it cannot be denied that these ‘lived spaces’ have sustaining, critical, accommodating and liberating power for these women. These women construct their own sacred spaces and are themselves constructed by these spaces. The parks and streets of Hong Kong are not stable ‘sacred spaces’. On Monday the streets belong to the economic and other spaces again, but nevertheless their ‘sacred’ quality does not disappear altogether. It is still possible, even in the rush hour, while passing the street to remember and to long for the sacramental presence that they were able to evoke and in a way still carry with them. Again, the simple sacred-profane distinction does not work here either. Or perhaps, with Lefebvre, it is both and more—both, because ‘sacred space’ does not escape the fundamental ambiguity [that is] inherent in all symbolism. But then the same goes for ‘profane space’, which at first sight is a rational or logical concept but just as loaded with ambiguous symbolism as its counterpart. This example also shows how body and place are intertwined, how identity, religious identity and the actual place where and through

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which this identity is being constructed are inextricable. For that reason Sheila Briggs, after many trips to and in the city of Los Angeles (Soja’s example of postmetropolis), proposes extending the notion of incarnation to the urban landscape. In Briggs’s definition, incarnation, as ‘the ability of humanity to be God-bearing and to signify the divine’, could be an important notion for making theological sense of the city. And it seems to me that the Filipinas represent this incarnational presence of God. However, according to Briggs, it is ‘not just flesh and blood, muscles and membrane, but also concrete, brick, steel and glass [that] are the physical space of our humanity’ (Briggs 2004: 5)—incarnation, then, ‘in flesh and stone’.6 To this we should, however, add sand, grass, water, gardens and parks as the elements of ‘incarnational presence’. Would this approach open up a theological and cultural revision of the appreciation of the city? The Hebrew word makom, place, refers to a place where events of human and divine significance have occurred, according to Benden Lane (2002: 418). In popular speech in the Netherlands, we call Amsterdam, the city that for many exemplifies sin, Mokum, the Yiddish equivalent of makom. It would be nonsense to consider cities, past or contemporary, ‘cities of God’. But without a strong sacred-profane opposition, why should we? In my reflection cities are certainly not ‘cities of God’ but neither are they ‘cities without God’. In my theological interpretation they can be considered bearers of incarnational presence—using a notion derived from Christian philosophy and theology. And it is probably partly in the less remembered or noteworthy parts of the cities, in the lived space of everyday practices of women and men, that we should look for traces of this presence and find other inspiring images of the amazing variety and richness of encounters cities have to offer. References Baker, C. (2007) The Hybrid Church in the City: Third Space Thinking. Aldershot: Ashgate. Briggs, S. (2004) ‘Taking the Train: A Theological Journey through Contemporary Los Angeles County’. In Tanner, K. (ed.) (2004) Sprit in the Cities: Searching for Soul in the Urban Landscape. Minneapolis: Fortress Press, pp. 1–19.

6

Referring to Richard Sennet’s book Flesh and Stone.

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Casey, E. (1997) The Fate of Place: A Philosophical History. Berkeley: University of California Press. Certeau, M. de (1984) The Practice of Everyday Life. Vol. 1. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press. ——, Giard, L. and Mayol, P. (1998) The Practice of Everyday Life. Vol. 2. Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press. Cruz, G. T. (2006) Into the Deep: A Theological Exploration of the Struggle of Filippina Domestic Workers in Hong Kong. Doctoral Thesis Radboud University Nijmegen. Daly, M. (2006) Amazon Grace: Recalling the Courage to Sin Big. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Foucault, M. (1986 [1967]) ‘Of Other Spaces’. Diacritics 16, 22–7. Available online at http://www.foucault.info/documents/heteroTopia/foucault.heteroTopia.en.html. Gardiner, M. E. (2000) Critiques of Everyday Life. London: Routledge. Georgi, D. (2005) The City in the Valley: Biblical Interpretations and Urban Theology. Atlanta: Society of Biblical Literature. Gorringe, T. J. (2002) A Theology of the Built Environment: Justice, Empowerment, Redemption. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Haardt, M. de (2001) ‘Bodiliness and Sacramentality’. In Selling, J. A. (ed.) Embracing Sexuality: Authority and Experience in the Catholic Church. Aldershot: Ashgate, pp. 42–57. —— (2002) ‘“Kommt, esset mein Brot”: Exemplarische Überlegungen zum Göttlichen im Alltag’. In Meyer-Wilmes, H. (ed.) Tango, Theologie und Kontext: Schritte zu einer Theologie des Alltags. Münster: LIT Verlag, pp. 5–32. —— (2004) ‘Changing the Subject, Changing the Method? Systematic Implications of a Turn to Everyday Practices’. Annali di Studi Religiosi 5: 357–67. —— (2006) ‘Incarnation in the City? Some Tentative Explorations of the City as a Locus for Theology’. Journal of the European Society of Women in Theological Research 14: 133–42. Hawkins, P. S. (ed.) (1986) Civitas: Religious Interpretations of the City. Atlanta: Scholars Press. Highmore, B. (ed.) (2002) The Everyday Life Reader. London: Routledge. Inge, J. (2003) A Christian Theology of Place. Aldershot: Ashgate. Isasi-Díaz, A. M. (1996) Mujerista Theology: A Theology for the Twenty-First Century. Maryknoll NY: Orbis Books. Juchtmans, G. (2008) Rituelen thuis: van christelijk tot basaal sacraal. Een exploratieve studie naar huisrituelen in de Tilburgse nieuwbouwwijk De Reeshof. Tilburg and Groningen: Instituut voor Liturgiewetenschap, Rijksuniversiteit Groningen and Liturgisch Instituut, Universiteit Tilburg. Keith, M. and Pile, S. (eds) (1993) Place and the Politics of Identity. London and New York: Routledge. Knott, K. (2005a) ‘Spatial Theory and Method for the Study of Religion’. Temenos 41: 153–84. —— (2005b) The Location of Religion: A Spatial Analysis. London and Oakville: Equinox. Kort, W. A. (2004) Place and Space in Modern Fiction. Gainsville: University Press of Florida. Kuitert, H. (2002) Voor een tijd een plaats van God. Baarn: Ten Have. Lane, B. C. (2002) Landscape of the Sacred: Geography and Narrative in American Sprituality. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press. Lefebvre, H. (1991) The Production of Space. Oxford: Blackwell Publishers. Massey, D. (1994) Space, Place and Gender. Cambridge: Polity Press. —— (2005) For Space. London: Sage Publications. —— (2007) World City. Cambridge: Polity Press. Miles, M., Hall, T. and Borden, I. (eds) (2004) The City Cultures Reader. Second edition. London: Routledge.

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INSCRIBING THE GENERAL THEORY OF SECULARIZATION AND ITS BASIC PATTERNS IN THE ARCHITECTURAL SPACE/TIME OF THE CITY: FROM PRESECULAR TO POSTSECULAR? David Martin For a long time I have thought about translating a revised version of my A General Theory of Secularization (Martin 1978) as far as possible in spatial terms, using a framework loosely based on Edward Shils’ contrast between ‘centre’ and ‘periphery’, and focusing on the architectural dispositions of capital (or central) cities, like Paris or Berlin, often as contrasted with ‘peripheral cities’ like Strasbourg or Munich. These dispositions represent physically the various distributions and relations of secular and sacred power as they change over time. They visibly demonstrate whose flag or emblem flies in the high and holy place and indicate how the ways in which such symbolic statements are confronted and contested. In a short postscript I shall make some tentative references to spirituality as an expression of the postsecular, a notion which is not only difficult to pin down but maybe not all that amenable to spatial representation. I also underline some of the less obvious genealogies implied in the main body of my argument. 1. Preliminaries: The General Theory First of all I need to indicate the nature of the ‘General Theory’, recollecting for the record that since 1965 I have always argued that secularization was both a descriptive and a prescriptive concept and that it is best understood as a linked set of general tendencies heavily inflected by particular histories. The world is not destined to follow in the steps of either France or Sweden, and the Western European pattern is not universally normative. I have always been clear that modernity is not all of a piece, a position also arrived by different routes by such eminent commentators as Peter Berger, Jose Casanova and Schmuel Eisenstadt. In the context of modernization, which began very early in Britain and late (say) in Albania, the general theory assumed there were some

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general empirical tendencies towards secularization. These empirical tendencies were channelled by processes of functional differentiation, which in turn were inflected by the relation of the myth of the nation to religion, whether positive or negative, and by the thrust of the national version of the Enlightenment. France was a nation where the myth of the nation and its version of the Enlightenment were both negative towards religion and the USA a nation where they were both positive. Relations of hostility or friendliness, with respect either to religion and the nation, or to religion and Enlightenment, or both together, were often dramatized in crucial dramatic events. Major examples are the Anglo-American revolutions of 1642–60, 1688–89 and 1776–86, the French Revolution of 1789 and the Russian Revolutions of 1917 and 1989. One also needs to take into account the failure of revolution, for example in Germany in 1848 and 1919, bearing in mind that the myth of the German nation and the thrust of the German Enlightenment, were relatively favourable to religion. One also needs to take into account the enlightened autocracies in Germany, Austria and even in Turkey and Russia, that achieved an interim and partial top-down ‘modernization’ until they collapsed under the pressures of the 1914–18 war. Below I briefly indicate the kind of architectural emplacements created by these imperial systems, and their later reincarnations in ‘enlightened’ dictatorships. Other important influences on the course of secularization are whether the religion is Protestant, Catholic or Orthodox; whether it is a monopoly, as in Latin Europe or Scandinavia, a duopoly, as in Germany and the Netherlands, or a competitive free market, as in the USA; and whether a nation has been oppressed, as in the cases of Ireland or Poland, or imperial, as in Britain and Russia. At this juncture I suggest something of the variable impact of types of religion on my basic patterns, without going into the immensely complicated issue of the extent to which early Christianity made available a repertoire presupposing a space between the ‘world’ (or the saeculum), in particular the political world, and the community of faith. 2. The Variable Impact of Different Types of Religion Where the religion is Protestant/Evangelical, there are various potential developments. One potential is a radical development of the individualistic deposit in Protestantism. In Europe this individualism easily undermines the sense of active corporate belonging in the body of the

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Church, which is increasingly regarded as a ‘service station’. Maybe individualism, when disseminated in a society where the Church can be viewed as a service station, also assists the rise of modern ‘spirituality’. In the USA, however, churches are not service stations but active voluntary associations filling the space between the citizen and the state. The size of such a space is always an important variable, and in the USA, where the space is maximal, the effect of individualism has been to accentuate the rise of pluralism and a competitive free market, though ‘spirituality’ also emerges, particularly on the west coast. At the same time Protestantism can be partly taken over by the idea of the nation understood as a new Israel, a tendency that has been particularly strong in Anglo-American societies. England donated the idea of the nation as a new Israel to the nascent USA via the Puritan Revolution in 1642. Where the religion in question is Catholic, monopolistic and established, there is a strong tendency to forge an alliance with the ancien régime and to retain a religious monopoly, which in turn stimulates anti-clerical and even anti-religious movements, as in France, Italy and Spain. If Catholicism is part of a duopolistic religious system, as in Germany, Holland and Switzerland it tends to build up its own institutional world, including political parties, parallel to the Protestant institutional world If Catholics are a minority then they may shift politically into the progressive column, as in Australia and the USA. Where Catholicism is the majority faith of a nation oppressed by another nation, religion and nation tend to fuse together, as in Ireland, Lithuania and Poland. The link between Orthodoxy and nationalism is strong and it reaches back to the Byzantine legacy of caesaro-papism, and to the concepts of autocephaly (or autonomous governance) and of a symphonia between Church and state. The link with nationalism persists whether or not the nation is oppressed or a great empire, though it is also true that the link between religion and nation is often strengthened by oppression, or by political circumstances, real or semi-mythical, which lead a nation to regard itself as a collective martyr or Messiah. The consequences for religious vitality of the mythical invocation of national defeat, for example the defeat of the Serbs at Kosovo in 1389, or of victory, for example the Russian victory over Napoleon in 1812, or of sacrificial expenditures of blood and treasure, are too complex and variable to be canvassed here, though their monuments and sites of recollection are scattered all over Europe.

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david martin 3. Some Spatial Translations at the Centre in Capital Cities

These complex and variable relationships constituted a limited set of basic patterns of secularization and of relations between the sacred and secular power which I began to translate in a spatial form some years ago (Martin 2002: part IV). I did so by identifying these patterns and relations in the architectural dispositions at the heart of capital (or central) cities like Washington, London, Paris, Amsterdam, Budapest, Vienna and Berlin. Selecting the contrasting peripheries is a delicate matter, because there are usually several candidates. For various reasons I selected cities like Dallas, Edinburgh (or Dublin), Strasbourg, Debrecen and Munich. I also related my heartland cities to Rome, Athens and Jerusalem, the three ‘cities of perpetual recollection’, though Paris can also be seen as city of perpetual recollection on its own account. Here I look at Washington (including some of the alternatives to it on the North American continent) and at London, Amsterdam and Paris. Washington, London and Amsterdam have had relatively positive relationships between their national myths and religion and between their versions of the Enlightenment and religion. Paris, however, exemplifies mostly negative or at any rate strongly contested relationships. Amsterdam has a special importance because it arguably inaugurated a secular mutation within Protestantism parallel to and following on from the secular mutation of Catholicism in Venice and Florence: the cumulative ascendancy of the commercial over the religious. Taking Washington first, its sacred field is the creation of a specifically American Enlightenment. It embodies classical (and Masonic) ideals of the res publica, and sets the two national cathedrals, Episcopalian and Catholic, (and any number of other denominational buildings) at a distance, symbolizing the wall of separation between Church and state. It also embodies the relation between the national myth and the (non-denominational) text of the Bible in Lincoln’s Second Inaugural as inscribed on the walls of the Lincoln Memorial. However, Washington, was conceived by a French architect, and is an unusually pure case of a unified political vision. America is a continent and can also be represented by other cities, along a spectrum from quasi-establishments to total fragmentation. This spectrum picks up just at the point where Europe (notably England and Holland) leave off and exemplifies the long-term logic of pluralism. New York, which

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was New Amsterdam until 1664, picks up the theme of the cumulative ascendancy of the commercial ethos, with the edifices of the ethnic migrant communities tucked in the interstices, for example St. Patrick’s Cathedral. Other North American cities indicate other major possibilities, some of them referring back to continental Europe, notably Spain and France. Santa Fe is dominated by a cathedral square which affiliates it with Guadalajara in Mexico, and New Orleans has a cathedral square which affiliates it with Montreal, a city where the commanding heights are quite self-consciously dominated by Catholicism. Boston, Savannah and Philadelphia represent a mutation of the British combination of establishment and increasing pluralism. Philadelphia, one of the two epicentres of the revolution, for a long time allowed no building to exceed the statue of one of the founding deists, Benjamin Franklin, in height, and it is perhaps no accident that the nearest ‘religious’ edifice to the government centre is the Scottish rite Masonic temple. Boston, the other epicentre of the revolution, has several churches that stand for rival quasi-establishments, like the historic Congregational Church on the Common, the (now Unitarian) King’s Chapel, the Old North (Episcopal) Church and the Episcopal Church of the Advent on Beacon Hill, but arguably the real sacred site is the city centre itself, ‘set on a hill’, and presided over by a Senate House resembling the Dome of the Rock. If you want explicit European and British genealogies you have to locate them within religious buildings, not in public space, for example the genealogy of British Methodism celebrated in the iconography inside Boston University Chapel. At the same time the boulevards of Boston refer back architecturally to Paris as a (secondary) ‘city of perpetual recollection’. After all, France has adopted the role of godmother to the American Revolution, a claim it symbolized in its gift of the Statue of Liberty for the centenary celebrations of 1876. Stepping westward in the USA the centres increasingly fragment. Though Dallas, Texas, has massive Methodist and Baptist emplacements close to the centre, and an increasing, and mainly Catholic, Hispanic architectural presence, there is at its heart a secular Thanksgiving Square occupied by an edifice resembling the mosque of Samarra. At the end of the westward trail Los Angeles is completely decentred, and so, perhaps, may have been the appropriate city to host the origins of the decentred faith of Pentecostalism. San Francisco is dominated by a secular pyramid structure, while retaining architectural echoes of a more traditional Hispanic format. In San Francisco,

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and in most Californian cities, you encounter the architectural presence of the Far East, for example the Japanese, the Chinese and the (mostly Protestant) Koreans, and the eastern influences that have fed into Californian spirituality. The centre of London exemplifies a pattern of secularization and of the relation between secular and sacred power very different from the centre of Washington. There is no revolutionary wall of separation between Church and state because England has experienced the evolution of an increasing pluralism alongside a continuing but decreasingly dominant establishment. In London the upper end of Victoria Street represented the relation of Church to state in the juxtaposition of the Abbey (with St. Margaret’s) and the Houses of Parliament, while the Methodist Central Hall opposite the Abbey represented the challenge of Protestant voluntarism, and the Catholic Cathedral at the other end of Victoria Street, represented the challenge of the largest ethnic Church. Unlike revolutionary Washington and revolutionary Paris (or enlightened and autocratic Berlin and St. Petersburg) London has no unifying or governing axis, and attempts at creating one have always been successfully resisted. Paris is as different from London as London is from Washington, and the three great cities represent a triangle of fundamental possibilities, all of them exported with variations to the rest of the world—Paris to Santiago, Bucharest and Buenos Aires, Washington to Canberra and London to Budapest. In Paris rival monuments symbolized a prolonged struggle culminating in the separation of Church and state in 1905. On the one hand there were embodiments of the sacred as understood by radical Republicanism and by the myth of the ‘universal’ revolutionary nation, and on the other hand the sacred as understood by the international Catholic Church. This latter is still a live option, indicated by notion mooted by the French President, of positive laicite. The national Pantheon and the revolutionary Place de la Bastille faced off Notre Dame (originally at the centre of a complex spatial symbolism including La Sainte Chapelle), the Madeleine and the Sacré Coeur. An important bifurcated extension of the French model was initiated in Turkey, where a new explicitly secular capital was set up in Ankara by way of contrast to the old Ottoman capital in Istanbul. However, the return of the repressed in the new migrant suburbs has more to do with de-secularization than with anything ‘postsecular’. An analogous bifurcation, this time of the Anglo-American model,

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can be found in Tel Aviv, which stands in relation to Jerusalem as Ankara stands in relation to Istanbul. Tel Aviv is a self-consciously modern city, referring back to modern planning by the British architect Patrick Geddes, and distinguished by fine modern architecture in the Bauhaus style. It is secular and Zionist in its inspiration, and memorializes people who fostered the modern use of the Hebrew language and of an associated national culture, as well as the pioneers, for example those who broke the British blockade or died in the attempt. There is no religious revival evident in Tel Aviv. That is located in the massive emplacements being erected by the largely Sephardic and North African religious movement Shas in the environs of Jerusalem. For some scholars this movement resembles Pentecostalism in its zeal and enthusiasm. Amsterdam is a city where the dispositions of symbolic power seem less obvious that in (say) London, its historic Protestant rival. If one assumes that the Dam is the symbolic centre of Amsterdam, then it can be read as sending out a message about the dominance of money and commerce, just as the architecture of the houses on surrounding canals sends out a message about the dominance of the merchant and banking classes. Amsterdam does not have triumphal avenues or vistas such as one finds in Paris. The ‘New Church’ opposite the Dam is not at all dominating, even though it reminds us of the role of Calvinism in the rise of Amsterdam. It is today given over to profane uses. Amsterdam is, perhaps, the first example of a city where the symbolism of its architectural dispositions speaks loudly of commerce rather than Church, and its numerous successor cities include not only New York but contemporary London, specifically the distinctly secular new financial centre at Canary Wharf rather than the old ‘City’. One might trace a sequence running form the Venetian ghetto to the Jewish communities in Amsterdam, London and New York, and one which included a Huguenot component. The symbiosis of Protestantism and Jewry, and occasionally of sects like the Dutch Mennonites and the Russian Old believers, is closely bound up with the long-term secularizing power of money. Its longer roots go back to the abandonment of the prohibition of usury, a readiness to trade with infidels, and the embrace of naked power in both Venice and in Florence, explicitly articulated for the first time by Machiavelli. An implicit secular practice finally became explicit in Machiavelli and the architecture of the Medicis.

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david martin 4. The Cities of Enlightened Autocracy

One has to recollect, however briefly, another pattern of ‘internal’ secularization inscribed in the cities created by enlightened autocracy. The Enlightenment is far too easily associated with liberty and fraternity when it has just as often been associated with autocracy and/or imperialism and racism, as in France. Vienna and St. Petersburg are two great creations of eighteenth century enlightened autocracy where an interim modernization or internal secularization was achieved by a subordination of the Church as an explicit arm of government. This internal secularization is also present, if more modestly, in London in its enlightened architecture from 1680–1830. Both Vienna and St. Petersburg are conceived in terms of major axes, spaces and vistas conveying a sense of concentrated power, and these look back to a prototype in the architectural projects of Louis XIV, which in turn look back to Rome. In Vienna (with its reminiscences of the Parisian boulevards) there are distinct centres associated with the royal palace and St. Stephen’s Cathedral, providing an echo, however faint, of the church-state distinction and the sense of an independent power base found in Catholicism. In Petersburg the Orthodox tradition of a union of church and state is inscribed in the Peter-Paul fortress, but in the rest of the city the churches are interspersed among other monuments without dominating them, exactly as they are in imperial Berlin, and indeed in Edinburgh’s eighteenth century New Town. In Berlin, (and in Potsdam, its variant of Versailles) the churches are part of an ensemble, and some of the key ones, like the Protestant Cathedral, or the Memorial Church, are royal mausolea or otherwise connected to the monarchy. In all three imperial cities the museums and the emplacements of high art and music, in particular the opera houses, are as important as the churches, Moreover at the point of political breakdown in the wake of the (first) Great War they were in the course of emerging as foci of political radicalism and distinct versions of artistic and philosophical modernity, rivalling those emerging from Paris. As already suggested, Ankara should also be regarded as the creation of an enlightened autocracy, following the ‘shy Enlightenment’ attempted by the late Ottomans, seeking modernization with reference the French model. One finds a somewhat different disposition of power if we look at Munich as a periphery of Berlin, or alternatively as a centre of what

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was once another possible Germany, affiliated to Catholic Austria. Here we have a more emphatic division into two centres, one Catholic focussed on Church and market, and the other classical, overlooked by what is now the Amerikahaus, and providing a space, with monumental Egyptian columns, within which the power of the Nazis could be displayed, just as it was in 1938 in the central spaces of Vienna. 5. Some Spatial Translations in Cities on the Peripheries Munich is an ambiguous example of what is meant by a periphery. Another example might have been Frankfort, where German democracy almost achieved success in the Pauluskirche in 1848. I now offer two rather different examples of the relation between centre and periphery: first within a country, taking Amsterdam as the centre and Groningen as the North-East periphery, and then between countries, where a sometime satellite becomes the new centre of an independent nation. Earlier I characterized Amsterdam as a city representing the power of commerce and in that respect it is the Northwest European Protestant realization of a process begun in Catholic—but anti-papal—Venice, notably the role of credit in the hands of the Jewish ghetto, as well as the role of banking as developed in Florence. In one way Venice is saturated in Catholic religious symbolism, but the Lion of St. Mark’s and its many ancillary symbols represent the triumph of the city, first over neighbouring cities, and then over ecclesiastical power, so that the Cathedral of St. Mark’s is the Doge’s own peculiar as much as Westminster Abbey is the peculiar of the British monarch. Commercial Amsterdam, which also had its important Jewish community, is the Venice of the north, and not only because of its canals. But where can one locate a peripheral city? One candidate is Groningen, the largest city in the Protestant NorthEast, except that in a small country this periphery is more a mirror of the centre than a contrast. Like Amsterdam it was forcibly converted to Protestantism, and the Catholic population mostly expelled, in the war of liberation from the Spanish, alias the Civil War, though Amsterdam looked southward whereas Groningen was a city of the empire. Today it is predominantly a university city which resembles Amsterdam in being a place where those of no declared religion are

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in the majority, though surrounded by a countryside of Protestant villages and small townships which are both Calvinist and Re-Reformed. Its main churches are empty and in civic ownership, like the New Church in Amsterdam. It has a history as a ‘red’ city like Bologna, to which it has related itself quite consciously, and it is the site of the foundation of the Dutch worker’s movement. As Amsterdam is to Venice so Groningen is to Bologna. Up to the 1940s it had a Jewish quarter, housing up to 10% of the population, an area now mainly occupied by Muslims. Helsinki, Edinburgh and Dublin, were once cities on the periphery, closely replicating the style of the centre, and they now symbolize the resurgence of an independent nation. In its original form the (Tsar) Alexander Square of Helsinki combined Church, state, law enforcement and university in a single architectural ensemble expressly echoing the classical style of imperial St. Petersburg. It is literally overlooked by the Orthodox Cathedral on a nearby eminence, whereas the emplacements of the Finnish national vernacular, of the (highly secular) Jugendstyl, and Finnish modernism, are concentrated elsewhere in the city. Today the Square hosts vast gatherings expressing the intensity of Finnish nationalism, incidentally a cause enthusiastically espoused by the Finnish clergy. In the same way the centre of Dublin, with its two Anglican cathedrals, is a largely eighteenth century creation expressing the Anglo-Irish Protestant ascendancy, while in Edinburgh—the self-styled Athens of the north—the eighteenth century New Town expresses the union of 1707. Helsinki, Edinburgh and Dublin have been cities of the periphery, embodying symbols of the power of the centre for a period, prior to nationalist resurgence. Peripheries are important and have to be read architecturally as counterpoints to the centre. We need to envisage them as existing in different degrees of dependence and difference from the centre, both between countries, as in the case of Helsinki in Finland and St. Petersburg in Russia, and within them, as in the case of Paris and Strasbourg. Moscow can be seen as the centre of Slavic spirituality, and St. Petersburg as a rival centre embodying an Enlightened opening to the West. The cathedral of Strasbourg was recovered for Catholicism with the forcible incorporation of Alsace in France in 1681, while a German church was built in Strasbourg after 1870 to symbolize the forcible incorporation of Alsace in the German empire.

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6. Transitional Areas Of course, Strasbourg is also placed at a point of ethnic, linguistic and religious transition, which means it is not simply a city of the French periphery in the way Barcelona, Santiago and Saragossa are cities of the peripheries of Spain—though Barcelona can also be seen, so far as culture an communications are concerned, as a junction or point of transition, since it is as much a periphery of Paris as of Madrid. Strasbourg has to be read alongside other cities that are placed at major junctions between civilizations, such as Timisoara, Sarajevo, Salonika and L’viv. Not only are they countercultural in relation to a national capital but multicultural in relation to the pull of rival centres of power. The different churches and synagogue sites of L’viv are eloquent of its role as a contested meeting point, and of its incorporation in different polities and spheres of religious influence at different times. Only recently the Church of the Transfiguration changed hands after an unhappy struggle and passed back to the Uniates, Orthodox in liturgy but united since 1596 with Rome, and therefore much persecuted and suppressed in Soviet times. As a transitional area the Western Ukraine has been more resistant to Soviet atheism than elsewhere in the former Soviet Union, and is now a religiously plural society with a large Evangelical minority. It is interesting that the three cities, Strasbourg, Brussels and Geneva, lying at, or close to, transitional areas of religio-political and linguistic dispute in Western Europe, were selected to house the key institutions of the EU. The sites of conflict became the sites of reconciliation as well as subject to ethnic, religious or linguistic cleansing. Those Christian Democrats who imagined a reconciled Europe in the late 1940s were very conscious of the meanings attached to the transitional areas, in particular the mythic status attributed to the coronation of Charlemagne at Aachen in AD 800 and role of the Middle Kingdom of Lotharingia. It is one of the oddities of the sociological ‘optic’ that this massive role of religion in post-war European reconstruction, including the creation of the Strasbourg Parliament, was ignored. The importance of religion has only belatedly realized on account of Islam, even though its influence on European voting behaviour has been in continuous decline.

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david martin 7. Religion and Region, Spatial Niches and Geo-Political Boundaries

I hope it is by now possible to envisage how one might map sites of symbolic power on a continental scale, as well as to articulate the varying relations of centre and periphery within nations and between them. However, the relations of centre to periphery just canvassed are not the only ones. There is, for example a massive difference between the religion of the Mediterranean littoral, the Central Alpine hub extending into Bavaria, and the Anglo-Dutch-Germanic north. Arguably there is a Mediterranean kind of religiosity not at all confined to the northern Mediterranean, and it is interesting that the monastery of Montserrat in Catalonia is not only the symbolic mountain focus of Catalonian nationalism but conceives itself in religious geo-political terms which include the south as well as the north of the Mediterranean. The Anglo-Germanic north includes a northern plain dominated by the major capitals of secularity: Birmingham, Amsterdam, Hamburg, Copenhagen, Berlin and Tallinn. Then there are the distinct spiritualities surrounding the (mainly) Lutheran Baltic and the (Celtic) Irish Sea, as well as the spiritualities of the Celtic fringe extending from the Celtic west of the British Isles, including Cornwall, to Brittany and to Spanish Galicia. Starting with Hungary, Croatia and Slovakia and moving east the dominant form of faith has a very strong ethno-religious character. This extends from the troubled Balkans to the equally troubled Caucasus, and both are regions where empires have contended over centuries and religious borders have been coterminous with intense local ethnic identities. The fractures run along the lines between geo-political tectonic plates. There are some other ways in which geography, and in particular geographical niches, affect the distribution of religion, including pilgrimage sites, and by extension, affect patterns of secularization. In Switzerland, for example, Catholicism is more associated with the mountain cantons, and has a major pilgrimage site in the mountains at Ensiedeln, whereas Protestantism is more associated with the lowlying cities as well as more extensively secularized. One might expect Geneva to be a Protestant pilgrimage site, but there seems to be little devotion attached to its major monuments, no doubt in part because Protestantism is an inward faith lacking tangible foci or the sense of sacred place that sustains both Catholicism and Orthodoxy.

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One has to take into account the shape and geographical configuration of a country. Whereas the geography of Switzerland actively shapes its internal religious and linguistic fragmentation, the geography of Denmark shapes its religious and linguistic homogeneity, although history has also played its part, in particular a traumatic defeat inflicted by Prussia, which removed the German-speaking southernmost provinces. Denmark is a peninsula with associated islands and is almost uniformly flat. The Lutheran folk-Church includes the vast majority, but the absence of competition or the presence of a religious or ethnic ‘other’ (until the recent arrival of 150,000 Muslims) results in a lowkey religious identification which has the country of Denmark for its focus as much as Christianity. Denmark, by almost submerging faith in state and nation represents one Protestant mode of secularization while Holland represents another mode through the merging of faith with commerce. The USA combines both modes but with very different consequences for religious vitality. 8. Resistant Niches, Small and Large Copenhagen, strategically placed to command the entrance to the Baltic, ranks with Amsterdam and Berlin as one of the capitals of secularity. Historically the northern tip of Jutland has nurtured a pietist spirituality, and one can locate similar niches in other parts of Scandinavia and in northern Europe generally, such as south-west Norway, central and northern Finland and in Holland the northern Protestant area of Friesland and southern Catholic areas like Limburg. Indeed the northernmost areas of Britain have provided niches able to sustain a distinctive piety, for example the Protestant fishing villages of north-east Scotland and the Protestant and Catholic islands off the Scottish west coast. However, in a world of global communications none of these peripheries is large enough to sustain itself against encroachment from the secular centre or to compensate for losses due to migration from periphery to the centre. There is no equivalent in Europe to the kind of massive pietist periphery you find in the American South. Most peripheries in Europe or North America, or indeed anywhere, are defended by some degree of linguistic difference: a different language as in North Wales, Brittany or the Basque country, or a variant of what claims to be the standard language, as in South-West Norway.

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Some of the largest peripheries in Europe are found in rather ‘square’ countries, like Spain and France, though perhaps one might also include Germany here. Germany has a massive ‘periphery’ in Bavaria, with a distinctive religious and political character, and major pilgrimage sites, such as the Vierzehnheiligen. Spain has four peripheries, Aragon, Catalonia, Galicia and the Basque country, each with major pilgrimage sites, while France has a western periphery, with a pilgrimage site at Mont Saint Michel, an eastern periphery with a pilgrimage site in the Vosges, and southern peripheries with a major pilgrimage site at Lourdes. Taizé is distinctive in being a Protestant pilgrim site. It brings together large numbers of young people, many of them spiritual seekers such as one finds all over Europe. These seekers mingle with more traditional kinds of pilgrim, for example at Santiago. It might well make sense to see remote pilgrimage sites like Lourdes in France and Fatima in southern Portugal as outposts of resistance to the pressure exerted from the centres of those countries by radical secularism. Elongated countries tend to nurture very different kinds of religiosity and may even face serious separatist tendencies. Czechoslovakia was an elongated country created, like Yugoslavia, after the great War, but after the end of communism, it divided into the highly secular Czech Republic (especially secular in Bohemia, the scene of major post-war upheavals and massive expulsions), and a consciously Catholic Slovakia. Italy is also a religiously divided country: the religious and political landscape of the south, beyond Ancona, is quite distinct from the rest of the country, and was traditionally the stronghold of Democracia Cristiana. Milan, the ‘Middle city’ arguably looks north to Central Europe. The Veneto has been a religious region whereas the region of Bologna, situated in what used to be ‘red’ Emilio-Romagna (and originally part of the Papal States), has historically been a stronghold of anticlericalism. The British Isles are also elongated and fragmented in a way that encourages the formation of religious and political niches, particularly in areas like the Scottish highlands. The mountains of North Wales have been a stronghold of religious and linguistic difference as well as nationalist politics, and nowadays they shelter an alternative hippy culture. Ulster east of the river Bann is mainly Protestant and Scots-Irish, whereas west of the Bann is mainly Catholic. It is a general rule that a faith under political and military pressure holds out in mountain areas, as Protestants did in the Cevennes and the mountain areas on the Italian-French border. Religions also shelter in islands protected by the sea. Irish nationalists have regarded the

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island character of the country as mandating both national and religious unity, and the island of Malta is one of the most religious countries in Europe. 9. The Inner Ring and the Processional Ways of the Centre These outposts on the periphery can be contrasted with pilgrimage sites or sacred cities much older and closer to what might be called the political heartlands: Chartres in France, Porvoo in Finland, Uppsala in Sweden, Canterbury in England, or Nijni Novgorod, Vladimir and Zagorsk in Russia. This Russian centre is, of course, contested by an alternative centre and an alternative nationalism in Kiev. Not only is there a symbolic resonance attached to the inner protective ring (the Ile de France, the Home Counties) but also to the processional ways within the capital city, either because they express established power, as in the Champs Elysees, or because they provide venues for revolution and protest, most iconically the storming of the Winter Palace in 1917. Here one recollects the removal of the signs of communist triumph form the city centres of Europe, particularly in Hungary where they have been collected in an amusement park outside Budapest. However, memorials to Russian soldiers have only occasionally been treated in this way and an attempt to displace such a monument in Estonia was officially described in Russia as a ‘desecration’ and as ‘blasphemous’. East Germany is notable for its retention of mementos from the communist period in the naming of its streets and squares, and this includes not only early pioneers of socialism like Rosa Luxemburg but communist dictators like Walter Ulbricht. 10. Ethnic Nationalism and Homogenization The multi-cultural character of much of Western Europe is far from universal in today’s world. On the contrary where nationalism is based on common ethnicity and language, ethno-religious minorities may be threatened with ethnic cleansing, which means that countries become increasingly homogeneous. The exchange of populations between Greece and Turkey in 1922 provides a particularly dramatic example, but the process is ubiquitous and continuous, and includes the evacuation or virtual expulsion of Christians from the Middle East, including Armenia, the expulsion of Muslims from Bulgaria, Crete and parts

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of Russia, and the ethno-religious consolidations following the wars that attended the break-up of Yugoslavia. Russian anti-Semitism, both under the Tsars and the Soviets, as well as the horrors of the holocaust and Nazi plans for the elimination of the Slavs, can all be understood as part of this nationalist frenzy. 11. Empirical Correlations and Functional Differentiation Perhaps I have sketched in sufficient detail the spatial embodiments of the religious and the secular. However, I still need to suggest how one might translate and map in spatial terms certain key components of a general theory of secularization, such as the empirical trends associated with modernization and the process of functional differentiation. There are various empirical correlations between social-geographical milieux and varying kinds of religious belonging or believing, such as the difference between a working class or migrant banlieue and a middle class suburb, or between a rural periphery and the industrial or financial city, or between a mountain hub and the cities of the plain. For example, one could contrast the religiosity of the mountain hub of the Massif Central (or the Protestant Cevennes) with that of the surrounding lowlands and above all with the secularity of the Paris basin. Or, one could contrast the religiosity of the Alpine hub of Europe with the cities of the plain, Vienna to the east, Geneva, Zurich and Bern to the north, and Milan to the south. Functional differentiation is a concept equally central to urban geography and sociology. At its simplest it refers to the process whereby sectors of social life are separated off from ecclesiastical control, beginning with law, commerce and administration and eventually extending to education and welfare. The autonomy of education has included the autonomy of the arts and the sciences. The autonomy of art was initiated in the renaissance with the invention of the art gallery in Florence and the creation of an apostolic succession of artistic genius initiated by Vasari. All the great art galleries which today are custodians of an aesthetic spirituality and provide venues for the celebration of the artist as spiritual hero go back to Florence. At the same time welfare, primary socialization and the family mostly retain some relationship to religion, depending on the type of secularization pattern and the type of religion, given that differentiation is also a theological principle, based on the distinction between God and Caesar, the city of God and the city of Man, and variably interpreted by different

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traditions. If the Art Gallery represents one translation of the role of the medieval cathedral the Hospital represents another, and how far the historic relation to Christianity (commemorated in London by St. Thomas’ Hospital or Barts) is retained depends on particular histories and national traditions. In Germany and in the USA—or, for that matter in Sub-Saharan Africa—the link between the churches and welfare of all kinds is particularly close. In Protestantism there is either a process of assimilation to the state or else an initiation of various forms of voluntary pluralism, while in Catholicism there is an emphasis on the doctrine of the two swords which often issues in Church-state conflict. In Orthodoxy there is a symphonia of Church and state which is often associated with ethnonationalism. Here I simply offer a contrast between the two ends of the spectrum, Protestant and Orthodox, which is also in some degree a contrast between West and East. 12. Some West-East and Protestant-Orthodox Contrasts In Orthodoxy there is minimal space between Church and state, or between religion and politics. The Church of the Divine Wisdom in Constantinople was integrally linked to the imperial palace, and the principle of symphonia is as much a political reality in Russia today as it was an architectural reality in Byzantium. The Kremlins in Nijni Novgorod and Moscow combine religious and political power, as does the Peter-Paul fortress in St. Petersburg. In varying degrees the autocephalous successor churches of Byzantium have declared their independence, as part of the project of national independence, but they have usually reproduced the Byzantine spatial and political proximity of Church and state and of Church and nation in their architectural dispositions, in particular the new cathedral of Saint Sophia in Belgrade and the rebuilt cathedral of Christ the Saviour immediately opposite the Kremlin in Moscow. The Orthodox cathedral in Bucharest is in the immediate vicinity of the Parliament building while the Alexander Nevsky cathedral in Sofia is a reminder of the protective role exercised by Russia towards its Bulgarian ‘younger brother’. So to some extent the functional differentiation of some ecclesiastical and governmental buildings in Catholic Europe has a theological root in the doctrine of the two swords and the two cities, as well as in sociological process. At the same time the pull of collaboration between the elites of Church and state is often as much in evidence as their

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functional differentiation, for example the magnificent clump of allied religio-political power on the Castle Hill in Prague, and for that matter the architectural manifestations of Erastian Protestant folk-churches, for example in the central islands of the Old City of Stockholm. What are the architectural differences introduced by Protestantism? One obvious difference is the relative absence in Protestantism of a tangible sense of presence, including divine presence in sacred space. Protestant churches often have a severe aesthetic, represented in art by paintings of Dutch church interiors, and focussed on the preaching office rather than the altar, and on the aural rather than the visual. Protestant churches do not dominate their surroundings, and have fewer side chapels for specific devotions. Nor do Protestant symbols dominate the city skyline. Instead Protestant cities are more likely to be overlooked by civic or national heroes, for example the statue of Benjamin Franklin in Philadelphia, or at a less commanding level, the historical figures that mark the length of Commonwealth Avenue in Boston and the Victoria Embankment in London. Two interesting cases of what might seem to be Protestant memorials at the heart of cities, the monuments to Kossuth in Budapest and to Hus in Prague, are actually more nationalist than religious, and symbolize the role of Protestantism in the emergent myth of the nation. 13. Exemplary Destructions and Reconstructions Destructions and reconstructions characterize all three traditional forms of Christianity. The Reformation was iconoclastic in two ways, in its destruction of statuary and in its destruction of the monasteries as the abode of religious virtuosi. A parallel destruction followed the political revolutions of 1789 and 1917, and occurred as part of the anti-religious and anti-clerical movements that have characterized Catholic and Orthodox cultures. The fate of the great abbey of Cluny is one of the most dramatic instances of revolutionary destruction, but there were equally violent attacks on churches in Russia under Stalin and in Spain, especially by anarchists, during the Civil War 1937–40. So, whereas Protestant churches succumb to a slow inner secularization, Catholic churches are liable to be attacked or even destroyed in times revolutionary fervour. After the post-war communist takeover in Poland the government punished the resistant city of Cracow by building a vast industrial suburb outside it, without a church. However, the new population drafted into the suburb eventually built

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there one of the largest churches in Poland. The church in Nova Huta, and the memorial to members of Solidarity shot down in protests in the Gdansk shipyard, symbolize the fusion of nation and Church in resistance to alien rule. The history of the Cathedral of Christ the Saviour in Moscow provides an exemplary instance of the severe seesaw between a religious nationalism and revolutionary atheist nationalism. Built in a rather old-fashioned style to celebrate the defeat of Napoleon in 1812, it was demolished by Stalin to make way for what was to be the tallest building in the world, initially to celebrate Lenin but eventually to celebrate Stalin himself, as part of the ubiquitous cult of personality. However, this building was never erected and a people’s swimming pool was erected over the site, until in the 1990s the cathedral was rebuilt and in due course received the body of Yeltsin for the first religious state funeral since 1894. 14. Monuments of Nationalism and Revolution The ideals of revolution and of revolutionary nationalism, sometimes seen as manifested in economic power and progress, have their own architectural embodiments, for example the Eiffel Tower erected in Paris in the 1880s, its miniature version in Guatemala City, and a potential rival installation in St. Petersburg which was never built, designed to flash the message of Communism to the city and the world. Speer had equivalent plans for triumphal architecture celebrating the Nazi revolution. Then there are the churches explicitly built to rebuke revolutionary triumphalism, such as the Sacre Coeur in Paris erected about the same time as the Tour Eiffel, and Gaudi’s still unfinished Church of the Holy Family in Barcelona, with its symbolic references to the sanctity of work and the family. An architectural complex which might equally illustrate functional differentiation, both theological and sociological, as well as the clash of the Church with a revolutionary nationalism, is the Via Della Conciliazione linking the Vatican with Rome as the national capital. It symbolizes the conclusion of several decades of hostility between Church and state, Church and nation. The low points of the papacy were reached in its relationships with Napoleon and the loss of Rome to a newly unified Italy of 1870. However, in the course of the late twentieth century it has steadily gained more in spiritual prestige and salience than it lost earlier in temporal power.

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Another theme needs only cursory mention here. This theme concerns the migrant trails across the continent and across particular countries, as well as localized urban concentrations of migrants. Clearly the most important of these migrations are of Muslims from Africa to southern Europe, of Turks, above all to Germany and Austria, of Indonesians, Turks and Moroccans to Holland and of people from the Indian sub-continent to Britain. Muslim migrations have greatly raised the political and cultural profile of religion in Western Europe. The other major migrations have been of mainly Christian populations from the se-called global south, for example of Caribbeans to England and of Ghanaians in Holland. 16. Religious Niches: An Anglo-American Comparison England (more broadly, the British Isles), is made up of geographical niches likely to foster different versions of the Christian religion. I have already referred to the remote peripheries found in the north-east as north-west of Scotland, as well as the north of Wales and the west of Ireland. These are either more Catholic than the centre or more Protestant. North Wales, as already mentioned, has been different from South Wales both religiously and linguistically, and South Wales today has been extensively secularized and anglicized. The myriad local chapels of a major town like Swansea have given way to a few larger and comparatively successful evangelical churches. One can plausibly divide Britain and the USA alike into religious regions. In the USA there is the pietist Evangelical and predominantly Baptist South (including Texas), the semi-Hispanic South-West, the semi-Lutheran Mid-West, the relatively secular mountain states, the mainly Catholic northern cities—like Chicago, the spiritually experimental Pacific coast, and the mainstream Protestant/Catholic and semi-secular North-East coast. The British regional equivalents fan out from London to the north and to the west, and some of them have historical connections with the regions in America, most notably the connection between Ulster and the Scots-Irish of the American South, and between East Anglia and New England. There are distinctive forms of religion in the West Country and Cornwall, beginning at Bristol, and also in the north of England, in the lowlands and the northern highlands and islands of Scotland. At the Reformation, Catholicism retired

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to the margins, for example north Lancashire, though it remained dominant in Ireland. The growth of Puritan Protestantism, both within the established Church and in an emerging voluntary sector, was relatively strong in the East Midlands, East Anglia and London, and its intellectual capital was Cambridge. It was also strong in lowland Scotland. It is entirely appropriate therefore that the most prestigious universities in America should be Puritan foundations on the north-east coast, at Cambridge MA, at New Haven (Congregational), at Providence (Baptist) and at Princeton (Scottish Presbyterian). The second wave of evangelical Protestantism in Britain, both within the established church and in a rapidly expanding voluntary sector, took root in the industrial West Midlands and the industrial North. This wave was paralleled on the rapidly moving American frontier, and produced a second tier of American universities, beginning with the founding of Boston University (Methodist) in 1838 and followed by institutions like Emory and Duke. The Holy Spirit Empowerment movement, beginning in the northern town of Keswick in 1875, with strong Protestant Irish and Cambridge connections, fed into American holiness movements and eventually—with reinforcements from the Welsh revival of 1904—into the emergence of Pentecostalism in 1906 at the end of the frontier trail in Los Angeles. 17. Holy (Pentecostal) Spirituality in the Developing World; Another Movement in Contrary Motion My final contrast is between architectural dispositions of religious and political power in Europe, and for that matter the USA, with the architectural dispositions of many of the cities of the developing world. The idea for a spatial realization of religious dispositions came to me personally in Jamaica, where the European idea of Establishment mingles with the pluralism of North America and the developing world. At the centre of small Jamaican town the Anglican Church stood next to the Police Station, the traditional voluntary Churches occupied the main street, while Pentecostal Churches thronged the periphery. Whereas in Europe impoverished areas might be sparsely supplied with churches, in the developing world, from Manila to Seoul, and Santiago, Chile, to Accra, they will be honeycombed with small Pentecostal churches or else with mega-churches. Mostly the European relation between established political and religious power will remain in place, though in Seoul the conspicuous architectural link is today

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between the mega-church of Paul Yonggi Cho and what has been the Protestant-dominated legislature of Korea. The impoverished and almost entirely black suburbs at the centre of Johannesburg are honeycombed with small Pentecostal churches, while the immense black suburb of Soweto is dominated by two buildings, the hospital and the Rhema mega-church. As already indicated these churches of the developing world are now flourishing in the migrant suburbs of northern Europe, and are often the liveliest centres of religion in what are the secular capitals of the world. They are also to be found all over the migrant suburbs of North America. 18. Postscript: Some Implicit Genealogies My aim has not been primarily to restate features of the general theory of secularization beyond what is needed for basic understanding, but rather to suggest how it may be inscribed in the space/time of the city, and beyond that to bring out some less obvious genealogies of the secular and of what one has to call the dialectic of sacred and secular. One such dialectic might be successive waves of evangelization and secularization, beginning with the monks in the Roman imperial and medieval periods, continuing with the friars in the cities of the later medieval period, and then bifurcating into a Protestant genealogy running from the Puritan to the Evangelical Revival and the Charismatic or Pentecostal movement, and a Catholic genealogy running from the Counter-Reformation to the revivals of the nineteenth and twentieth century. The Catholic genealogy is usually neglected in sociological historiography. Another less obvious genealogy is only implied by inscription in the space-time of the city because it would involve a prolonged excursion into the history of commerce and of the military. It is the explicit embrace of power politics and the power of money in renaissance Florence and Venice manifest in the Bank and the Arsenal. The Twin Towers in New York (along with other massive emplacements from London and Frankfort to Doha) were the pre-eminent realizations of these closely intertwined powers in the twentieth century. Linked with that epoch-making development in Renaissance Italy was the emergence of the artist as a spiritual hero and of a canonical succession of artist-heroes illustrated in museum and art gallery. Thereafter art and business have been both in conflict and complementary in a

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long succession that came to a climax in twentieth century Paris and (later) in New York. This long succession includes Bohemianism as reinforced by Romanticism, and has today mutated into the postmodern and the art of ephemeral statement or defiant gesture. The prime embodiment of what has to be called the turn to the aesthetic is the modern museum, which from the Guggenheim to MOMA is central to the modern city. As the emergence of bohemianism indicates, the aesthetic not only includes an invocation of the sublime but a celebration of the amoral and hedonistic. An alternative focus to the Museum would be the modern hospital, with its roots in Christian philanthropy and its translation of holiness into holism and health. Heil, hale and health are closely connected, and not just linguistically. Another implicit genealogy is realized in the architecture of the long eighteenth century from about 1680 to 1830, and in the secularization of Nature associated with Newton, later completed for biological nature by Darwin. The long-term realization of that sequence of dramatic change is located in the autonomy of the secular university understood as a translation of the universal Church, above all in the massive emplacements of science. Yet another genealogy can be located in the tradition of Enlightened Autocracy, not just in its imperial manifestations but in modern ‘Enlightened’ Dictatorships. Enlightenment has been far more ambiguous in its historical realizations than it has been given discredit for. Another momentous bifurcation manifests itself here between the more modest Palladian and Grecian strand mostly adopted in Anglo-American culture and the monumental classicism of autocracy practised in Central and Eastern Europe, for example in Berlin and St. Petersburg. Whether there has been a further transition to the postsecular is not easily discerned in the contemporary city or landscape. If the postsecular cannot achieve lasting architectural inscriptions over time it must achieve expression in the uses of space, above in venues for mass festivity or collective mourning. Every city from Paris and London to New York and San Francisco has such spaces, which (like the art scene) combine high secular finance with simply hanging out. The problem is that privatized spirituality as realized in the relationship of client and therapist, needs no external markers. By contrast the simultaneously moral and communal spirituality of the developing world signified by Pentecostalism is massively inscribed in the contemporary city from Manila to Kiev.

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Martin, D. A. (1978) A General Theory of Secularization. Oxford: Blackwell. —— (2002) Christian Language and Its Mutations: Essays in Sociological Understanding. Aldershot: Ashgate.

RELIGION AND THE SALVATION OF URBAN POLITICS: BEYOND COOPTION, COMPETITION AND COMMODIFICATION1 Luke Bretherton Many essays in this volume discuss the nature and definition of the term ‘postsecular’ and its relationship to politics but without giving much attention to what is meant by the term politics. The focus of this essay is the nature of ‘politics’ and how religious groups are crucial to the very possibility of political life in the contemporary context. Whether the vision of politics outlined here is distinctively postsecular or not is another matter. I simply want to argue that the recent resurgence of religion in public life, and in particular in urban life, far from being a threat or even an alternative to politics, represents the ‘salvation’ of politics. This ‘salvation’ is realized most explicitly in forms of inter-faith political alliances as exemplified in the work of London Citizens and other forms of broad-based community organizing. 1. The Eclipse of Politics The American political philosopher Sheldon Wolin (2004) develops an Aristotelian understanding of politics as the process through which to maintain commonality and conciliate conflict with others in pursuit of shared goods.2 And following Aristotle, he notes that politics properly relates to what pertains to the general, comprehensive or public order of a polity. He argues that it is precisely the ability to pursue shared goods amid conflict and difference through a process of deliberating and acting together that has been abandoned in the modern period in favour of either legal procedures, technocratic managerialism or market mechanisms. 1 I am grateful to the UK Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) for funding that has enabled much of the work that informs this article as part of the following research project: ‘Christianity, urban politics and pursuit of the common good through broad-based coalitions: the case of the Citizens Organizing Foundation’. 2 I use the term conciliate to denote both mediation and coming to a position of friendliness with those with whom one disagrees.

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Wolin (2004: 273) gives an account of the centralization of sovereignty in the nation-state and the subsequent attempt to overcome political conflict within liberal nation-states through a combination of rational administration, use of technology and the demarcation of the economy as the sphere of free, uncoerced relations. On Wolin’s account, liberalism identifies freedom with private interest rather than the pursuit of common action and shared advantage. The corollary of this is to grant the economy—the sphere of private interest and uncoerced relations—maximal scope and priority over the requirements of good government or the goods of any institution, whether it is a family, a farm or a factory. Economics becomes the queen of the sciences that can best tell us about how to order our common life (Wolin 2004: 271). As a result social harmony is no longer seen to issue from a prior set of institutional and political arrangements, but is understood to flow from the spontaneous equilibrium of economic forces. Within such a vision the status of the citizen becomes absorbed into that of the producer or consumer (Wolin 2004: 273). For Wolin (1989: 139), the vital task in the contemporary context is the recovery of what he calls ‘politicalness’: the ‘capacity for developing into beings who know and value what it means to participate in and be responsible for the care and improvement of our common and collective life’.—So what has all this got to do with religion? 2. Religion and Political Capital 2.1. Archaic Traditions and Political Renewal The first point is a fairly obvious one. For Wolin, the recovery of politicalness depends in part on local patterns of association and what he calls ‘archaic’ traditions such as Christianity or Islam. These provide the means for the recreation of political experience and extending to a wider circle the benefits of social cooperation and achievements made possible by previous generations.3 In social science this is often framed in terms of discussion about the relationship between religion and social capital, most prominently in the work of Robert Putnam.

3 We might call this the mediation of tradition which enables the trans-generational transmission of beliefs, practices and institutions.

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2.2. Religion, Social Capital and Political Mobilization For Putnam and others, mass membership organizations from trade unions and political parties to scouts and churches socialize members into being more civic-minded and more orientated towards cooperation, trust and reciprocity. At the same time, such organizations help integrate citizens and the state into a common project. Hence, it is argued, a decline in forms of civic and voluntary association affects the health of civil society, the stability of liberal democracies and the ability to address intractable social problems such as urban deprivation (Putnam 2000: 287–90). Religious groups are seen as more resilient parts of civil society and generators of social capital than equivalent groups such as trade unions (Jamoul and Wills 2008). Suffice to say, religious groups, especially in urban settings, are one of the few means of mobilizing common action. We might not like what they do—e.g. proselytism, radicalization etc.—nevertheless, they are one of the few means of mobilization and common action out there. If you are going to have politics you have to be able to mobilize people to act together, and religion, at least in the US and UK urban contexts, is one of the only shows in town. 3. Beyond Economics, Religion 3.1. Religion as a Public, Embodied Vision of the Good Life A more interesting and significant issue is that religion represents the return of politics and the opportunity of a genuinely public life. Why? Because religiously motivated actors re-present to modern liberal polities dominated by economistic and managerial mindsets, the need to negotiate and forge a common life on the basis of something other than economics. What religious groups want—and the more ‘fundamentalist’ the better—cannot be reduced to a question of material benefits, access to consumer products or better technocratic or legal procedures. What they want is their vision of the good life, of what it means to be human, to shape public and social life. 3.2. Religion as Contradiction Religions keeps in play fundamental questions about what human life is for. And religions do this not just at an abstract level of intellectual debate. They do this by creating alternative institutions, forging new

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practices, and sustaining different regimes of life. So for example, in debates about euthanasia and what is a good death, hospices present an alternative vision of what the good death consists of to that embodied by, on the one hand, euthanasia and on the other, technologically driven interventions that refuse to let a patient die. However, the hospice movement, founded by Dame Cicely Saunders on an explicitly Christian basis, was not simply an opposition or protest movement to euthanasia and overly technocratic medicine, nor can it be reduced to a means of social critique. Rather it is best understood as formulating and embodying a contradiction to euthanasia and a particular conception of what good medicine consists of. By contradiction I mean that Dame Saunders’ approach represents a way to show forth a contrary logic of relationship to that existing in the present hegemony. Hospice care simultaneously declared one set of practices to be unjust and presented a possible alternative through which all may flourish. The constructive alternative means that the declaration of a ‘No’ to something was premised on the prior celebration and upholding of a ‘Yes’ to another way, a way to which everyone is invited to participate in.4 We may not like the alternative religious groups present us with, but by presenting liberal polities with contradictions religious groups interrupt the bypassing of public, political deliberation through legal procedures, managerial techniques or leaving it all up to the market to decide. In doing so they open up a space for the political by making a demand for genuine deliberation about what constitutes the common good. 4. Beyond Cooption and Commodification: Faith and Citizenship 4.1. Human Dignity and the Limits of Money and the State Far from faith and citizenship being in conflict, religious traditions, especially in poor urban contexts most acutely affected by processes of commodification (e.g. the selling off of school playing fields) and instrumentalization (e.g. the coopting of civil society groups by the state to deliver welfare services) are the bearers of moral notions of the person that re-present to modern liberal polities questions about

4 For a detailed account of the hospice movement framed in these terms see Bretherton (2006).

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the limits of money, the limits of the state and the importance of community. It is faith communities that give meaning to citizenship through maintaining some notion of the good society that does not collapse into either consumerism or the state. In short, religious traditions and their practices protect and sustain moral ideas of the person and the common good. This point is best drawn out by reference to the work of the philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre. 4.2. MacIntyre, Local Politics and the Renewal of Citizenship Infamously, MacIntyre (1998: 236) sees the politics and practices of the liberal nation-state as intrinsically unjust. He describes the modern state as ‘a large, complex and often ramshackle set of interlocking institutions, combining none too coherently the ethos of a public utility company with the inflated claims to embody ideals of liberty and justice’. He condemns its democratic aspects as a charade (MacIntyre 1999: 131). For MacIntyre (1998: 237), the societies of advanced Western modernity are run by ‘oligarchies disguised as liberal democracies’. The range of what is open to be discussed and changed is severely curtailed, so that no substantive issues about ways of life can be raised. Such debate as occurs is the antithesis of serious intellectual enquiry, prohibiting as it does systematic rational analysis (debates in the recent Presidential election being a case in point). Instead, policies and decisions emerge ‘from a strange mélange of arguments, debating points and the influence of money and other forms of established power’ (MacIntyre 1998: 239). MacIntyre envisages the renewal of contemporary social, economic and political structures as emerging from local reflection and local political structures. This is in accord with the initial emergence of political thought via local traditions of practice and MacIntyre’s substantive theory that all rational thought and conceptions of justice must be rooted in a particular tradition. It makes sense, therefore, to seek to build up a conception of the common good from particular, local, social and political embodiments of such a conception. Furthermore, MacIntyre has little invested in the continuation of the modern nationstate, which can never, by its very nature, constitute the context for shared deliberative rationality about the common good. Indeed, ‘insofar as the rhetoric of the nation-state presents itself as the provider of something that is indeed (. . .) a common good, that rhetoric is a

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purveyor of dangerous fictions’ (MacIntyre 1999: 133). It is only in the context of local communities that a common good can be rationally deliberated upon and embodied. Particular conceptions of the common good can be embodied in anything from a church, to household farms, to schools and businesses. However, to construct such embodiments requires engaging in co-operative enterprises with those whose point of view is very different. Disagreements will be formulated in concrete terms as people make and remake schools, clinics, workplaces and other institutions. MacIntyre (1999: 133) notes: At this level, such disagreements will be local and specific, concerned with the ends and thus the goods of particular types of policy, practice, and institution (. . .). Thus, it is in the actualities and complexities of practice that we shall be able to find opportunities of a kind generally denied to us in the larger arenas of public debate.

Like Wolin, MacIntyre is critical of the liberal nation-state. However, MacIntyre moves beyond Wolin’s description of the possibilities of democracy to give an account of how a local politics that draws on archaic traditions is the only means for deliberation upon and the formation of a common good. What both Wolin and MacIntyre suggest is that local politics is the primary arena of a genuinely democratic politics and as such, local politics constitutes the primary arena for forging contradictions to the dynamics of commodification and instrumentalization at work in the liberal market-state. What MacIntyre’s account of local politics does in particular is clarify why religion is a vital part of renewing democratic politics and the practice of citizenship in the contemporary context. 4.3. Local Politics as Urban Politics In truth, what I am talking about is not local politics per se but urban politics. Democracy from the Paris Commune to the Orange Revolution in Ukraine is an urban event. Manuel Castells (1983) in his analysis of the democratic aspirations of grassroots social movements in urban contexts concludes they cannot overcome the weakness of their structural position since they are too beholden to capital flows and elite political power. But such a view simply accepts the terms and conditions of the prevailing hegemony and can only envisage the state or some other political formation as the proper arena of ‘politicalness’. It is also to ignore how urban localities are the context for what Saskia Sassen (2006) terms counter geographies of globalization.

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As Sassen (2006: 6) notes, locality is a ‘microenvironment with global span’. A city is a proliferation of these microenvironments with multiple and overlapping global circuits which run between them. Urban local politics is always then operating in a number of registers—micro, local (meso) and global (macro)—with global and non-local political dynamics impacting a particular locality and local politics affecting or being imbricated in global or transnational political dynamics. This is especially so in a city like London which is a major generator of cultural production, a crucial node of global capitalism and has myriad diaspora and transnational communities. Within such a global-local dynamic, the local provides a more fertile arena for new and alternative types of political action which are not thereby reduced to localism but because of the symbiosis between local and global can have a much wider impact. As Sassen (2006: 3) argues, urban politics is much more amenable to non-formal political actors (for example, a congregation) than national or international politics because it is not dependent on massive media technologies or sophisticated institutional mediation such as a political party. National politics is like an enclosed park into which there is public access and right of way but minimal involvement. By contrast, local politics is like common land, providing the possibility of building genuinely public spaces of shared responsibility and cooperation. Thus, perhaps the greatest significance of religion for politics is in its contribution to forging political spaces in urban contexts. 5. Case Study: London Citizens An example of this in practice is the work of broad-based community organizing as exemplified in the work of the London Citizens. Now 12 years old, London Citizens is a form of broad-based community organizing (BBCO) that was first developed in the US in the 1940s by Saul Alinsky in Chicago. It brings faith and secular organizations into broad-based alliances to pursue common political interests primarily at a local level. Through training activities and engagement in political campaigns, London Citizens aims to enable politically and economically marginalized people to identify and pursue their own political interests through democratic action. This is the British manifestation of a phenomenon that has transformed US urban politics for the past fifty years. In the US there are 134 organizations equivalent

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to London Citizens active in 34 states, with more than 4000 member institutions and congregations (Warren 2001). Interestingly enough, Barak Obama began his political career as a community organizer in Chicago. Community organizing embodies a concrete example of how religious traditions are helping to re-forge a genuinely political or public life, upholding the possibility of democratic citizenship in deprived urban contexts and acting as a check against the processes of commodification and instrumentalization/cooption. At the same time, as a form of inter-faith political action in pursuit of the common good London Citizens counters the three primary temptations facing religious groups, and the churches in particular, in the contemporary context. From this point on I will focus on the place and role of churches as this where my expertise lies and in the case of London Citizens, it is churches that constitute the great majority of its member institutions. The first of these temptations is to let the church be constructed by the modern bureaucratic state as either just another interest group seeking a share of public money or just another constituency within civil society who can foster social cohesion and make up the deficiencies of state run welfare programmes. The former reduces the church to a client of the state’s patronage and the latter coopts the church in a new form of establishment, one where the state sets the terms and conditions of, and thence controls the relationship. The second temptation is for Christians to construct themselves as part of what Charles Taylor (1992) calls the ‘politics of recognition’. This entails re-framing Christian political witness in terms of either multiculturalism—the church becoming just another minority identity group demanding recognition for its way of life as equally valid in relation to all others—or the rhetoric of rights—the church decomposing itself into a collective of rights bearing individuals pursing freedom of religious expression. The third temptation is to let Christianity be constructed by the market as a product to be consumed or commodity to be bought and sold so that in the religious marketplace Christianity is simply another lifestyle choice, inter-changeable with or equivalent to any other. All these temptations situate the church in a competitive and conflictual relationship with other groups in society—be they from other faiths or no faith. The result is that instead of seeing others as neighbours to be loved, they emerge as enemies who are to be demonized,

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defended from, and ultimately defeated so that Christianity either gains the lions share of the public purse, is the primary partner of the state, the dominant cultural force, shaping ‘our’ way of life, has its rights trump other conflicting rights, or wins the largest market share. Community organizing can be seen as a contradiction to all three of these temptations. To understand why, and to elucidate how organizing provides a conduit for the re-establishment of politicalness we need to identify its component parts. Building on Mark Warren’s (2001) sociological study of contemporary community organizing, my own research has identified seven key component parts to organizing. First, membership of an organization is institutional, rather than individual, whether it is a parish, a school, or a union branch. It is these local institutions that help fund the full time organizer and it is from these institutions that leaders are drawn. This grows out of the insight of Saul Alinsky who saw that people can only act together within traditions that bind them and motivate them to act and that they require institutions within which they can learn to trust and cooperate within particular contexts. Only by working with the grain of the institutions and traditions already in place in a local context can real change be effected. This necessitates both avoiding top down, ideologically driven political programmes and inductively deriving specific policy proposals from the lived experience of the people those policies effect.5 His approach is akin to the kind of conservative radicalism advocated by Wolin (1989) who, as already noted, argues for the intrinsic connection between ‘archaic’ and diverse historic institutions, traditions and patterns of local participation and the ability to ‘tend’ democracy and resist centralizing and technocratic forms of modern power. Its institutional, place based focus distinguishes organizing from social movements, advocacy groups and networks. The institutions that make up the broad-based organization are crucial to its effectiveness. These institutions represent a legal, organizational, financial and physical place to stand. They are places constituted by gathered and mobilized people who do not come together for either commercial or state-directed transactions, but who instead 5

For examples of this in practice see Michael Gecan’s (2002) account of the Nehemiah Homes project and the Living Wage Campaign. Warren (2001: 259–60) notes how this kind of approach has been extended to other health and educational initiatives in the US.

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come together to worship and care for each other. Without such places there are few real places through which to resist the processes of commodification by the market and the processes of instrumenalization by the state. It is a category mistake to conceptualize such coalitions of religious groups as yet another networked social movement. Indeed, in contrast to broad-based community organizing, such networks and social movements are an expression and symptom of the French sociologists Eve Chiapello and Luc Boltanski (2007) call the ‘new spirit of capitalism’. Boltanski and Chiapello argue that capitalism, in order to sustain and legitimize itself, absorbs and adapts to the criticisms that are made of it. Thus, for example, social democracy and the welfare state were adaptations to the critique of Marxism and Socialism. Likewise, the critique of capitalism that emerged in the 1960s and 70s, which focused on the alienation and inauthenticity of the ‘mass society’, and the monolithic, totalitarian conformity and huge size of the bureaucratic organization, have been incorporated into new patterns of management and business. The new spirit of capitalism, exemplified by the ethos and organizational structures of Microsoft and Ben and Jerry’s, emphasizes fuzzy organizational boundaries with flat hierarchies, networks of people working in teams, innovation and creativity as part of a constant process of change, and personal flowering through the flexible world of multiple projects pursued by autonomous individuals. The manager ceases to be a bureaucrat and becomes a ‘network man’ who is to have the qualities of an artist and an intellectual. Much of this sounds suspiciously like the descriptions of new forms of protest movement so favoured by advocates of globalization from below. This is not to say many religious groups do not conform to this networked form. The question is whether such networked groups or social movements constitute a real means of resisting commodification or whether they in fact represent a means of coopting religion to processes of commodification. The genius of Alinsky’s insight and the real potential of community organizing is that it recognizes the importance of institutions to politics, especially in urban spaces where institutions that can organize people and money for effective public action have been decimated. Second, organizing is not issues based but is done via building relationship based on common values and the desire to meets the needs of the wider community. The identification of issues around which diverse institutions are prepared to act together is accomplished

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through conversation and relationship building via what are called ‘one on ones’. MacIntyre’s account of local politics helps clarify why this approach provides such a fruitful means of enacting democratic politics in the contemporary context. On MacIntyre’s account community organizing constitutes a process for discovering and acting upon goods in common, a process that works against the antagonistic logic of identity politics. Third, organizing is not focused on particular groups or sectional interests but works primarily with congregations and other local institutions, building links between these different institutions. It is thus broad based. For example, London Citizens in the UK involves over 100 different faith and secular organizations, including Anglicans, Catholics, Methodists, Pentecostals, Buddhists, Muslims, trade union branches, schools and community centres. This grows out of Alinsky’s analysis, which was not class-based because for Alinsky the interests of the poor were not intrinsically opposed to those of the rich. His concern was the identification and pursuit of a genuinely common good. Hence he was equally critical of the sectarian interest group and identity politics pursued by organized labour and the Black Power movement, both of which denied the possibility of such a good, as he was of the established power holders (Alinsky 1969: 200, 213). Fourth, IAF organizations work to maintain an independent, nonpartisan political strategy, remaining unaligned with any political party (for example, they will never endorse a candidate) or government agency (for example, they will not accept money from state agencies). Organizing thereby tries to avoid a clientelistic politics and cooption by the state. Independence is ritually dramatized in what are called ‘accountability sessions’ which are staged dialogues/arguments with elected or business officials. However, they are also willing to compromise and work with anyone willing to work with them, using both tension and conflict to open up dialogue, plus negotiation to sustain dialogue and achieve results.6 Fifth, Alinsky set out definite ‘rules’—rather akin to a monastic rule—which shape the practice and approach of organizing and give its distinctive feel. These rules act as guidelines for a creative engagement that must be fresh in each instance and particular to each context. A central focus on these rules is how to provoke conflict, such 6 For examples of how the relationship between tension and negotiation works in practice see Wood (2002: 43–9).

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conflict being the precursor to building mutual civic friendships. These tactics, while highly conflictual, are nonviolent and Alinsky was always concerned about remaining within the bounds of the law. Alinsky sees imagination, humour and irony as central. Crucial to all this is working within the experience of your people (rule two) but at the same time, wrong footing one’s opponent by going outside their experience (rule three). All his tactics involve articulating and dramatizing the conflict between the people and their ‘enemies’ or targets. This is notoriously summarized in rule thirteen, which states: ‘Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, and polarize it’. (Alinsky 1989: 130) Each tactic constitutes a form of conscientization, articulating the conflicts of interest at work in a situation and unveiling the existing dramaturgy of power relations. The making explicit and self-conscious engagement with inherent conflicts of interest also serves to foster the solidarity, cohesiveness and identity of the organization and thereby builds the power of the organization by increasing the capacity of its members to act together. Each of these rules assumes the stance of those who do not possess power. Or as Alinsky (1989: 152) puts it, ‘The basic tactic in warfare against the Haves is a mass political jujitsu’. However, the point of these tactics is not conflict per se, but the opening up of a space for new ways of relating or addressing an issue, ways that reconfigure the unjust status quo.7 As Alinsky (1989: 130) puts it in rule twelve: ‘The price of a successful attack is a constructive alternative’. For example, instead of opposing poor pay, London Citizens work for the adoption of a Living Wage. Sixth, against much liberal political theory, organizing has a positive view of power and identifies itself as a ‘power organization’. Within organizing, power is defined as the ‘ability to act’ and the ability to act is understood to come from organized people, organized money or a combination of the two. That the poor do not have much money does not make them powerless. Rather, they are disorganized and so cannot realize the power they do have: relationships. The role of organizing is not ‘empowerment’—i.e. giving power—but following the golden rule of organizing—‘never do for others what they can do themselves’—it

7 It is this that distinguishes Alinsky from the legerdemain politics of Michel de Certeau (1988) for whom trickster politics only ever remains a form of oppositional sub-cultural resistance rather than opening up possibilities of a genuinely shared world of action.

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is to work with the marginalized to act for themselves. Seeking power involves confrontation (bringing people face to face), motivated by anger (from the Norse for ‘grief’, the grief/anger being understood to come from the a sense of the gap between ‘the world as it is and the world as it should be’), but instead of ‘hot rage’, this ‘cold’ or righteous anger is channelled to creating tension with the ‘Have’s’ to bring about change both in circumstances (for the better) and relationship between the ‘Have’s’ and the ‘Have nots’ so that each may recognize their common interests and pursue them together. Lastly, there is a strong trickster element to this whole approach. For example, rule six states: ‘A good tactic is one that your people enjoy’ (Alinsky 1989: 128), rule five advocates ridicule as a potent weapon, rule four deploys the ironic gesture of forcing the enemy to live up to their reputed value system, and rule one advocates deceiving one’s opponent into thinking you have more power than you have. One example illustrates both how these rules both operate in practice and their inherent tricksterism. In 1965 Alinsky began working with the African-American community in Rochester. The main focus of this work was achieving equal employment conditions between blacks and whites at the Eastman Kodak Company. One of his suggestions was to buy one hundred tickets to the opening performance of the Rochester Symphony Orchestra, the nexus of the elite cultural life of that city. The tickets would be given to blacks who would then eat huge amounts of baked beans before the concert and would proceed to fart their way through the event. While highly disturbing of polite society it is within the law and any attempt to act against the group would make a mockery of the authorities. It would be very funny, ridiculing the establishment, while at the same time highlighting the racism of the status quo by physically placing poor blacks in an exclusive environment only frequented by whites. It was completely outside the experience of the establishment while within the experience and abilities of the people. As Alinsky (1989: 141) puts it: ‘The one thing that all oppressed people want to do to their oppressors is shit on them’. Yet at the same time, it recognizes that the alien and formal surroundings of the concert hall would intimidate the blacks, so the measure involves involuntary physical action that overcomes any reticence on the part of the participants. The merit of the action would be in the reaction of the racist ladies-who-lunch berating their executive husbands who worked at Eastman Kodak to do something to stop the fouling up of

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‘their’ concert hall.8 There are numerous examples of such imaginative actions in contemporary organizing. 6. Conclusion I have tried to suggest that before we can begin to think about the normative or on-going relationship between religion and postsecular politics we need to re-create the possibility of a genuine politics. A key, if not the key catalyst for this is institutional religion. This is because religions, particularly those with formal institutional structures, are one of the few means of mobilizing people for common, public action; they present a contradiction to the attempt to over-come, move beyond or avoid politics through either the market or management; they keep alive ultimate questions about what it means to be human and what the good life consists of in such a way as to re-open the need for political deliberation about what we value and why we value it; and finally, religions are the bearers of moral notions of the person and the good society and traditions of practice that enable resistance to process of commodification and instrumentalization. Religious groups thereby uphold the possibility of democratic citizenship which is itself premised on the idea that the state and the market have limits and that persons are not commodities but have an infinite value. The work of London Citizens points to what this can mean in practice and in a way that moves beyond the stereotypes of religious actors as either slavering theocrats or servile service providers making up the deficiencies of the welfare state. References Alinsky, S. (1969) Reveille for Radicals. New York: Vintage Books. —— (1989) Rules for Radicals: A Pragmatic Primer for Realistic Radicals. New York: Vintage Books. Boltanski, L. and Chiapello, E. (2007) The New Spirit of Capitalism. London: Verso. Bretherton, L. (2006) Hospitality as Holiness: Christian Witness amid Moral Diversity. Aldershot: Ashgate. Castells, M. (1983) City and the Grassroots: A Cross-Cultural Theory of Urban Social Movements. London: Edward Arnold. 8 For Alinsky the suggestion outlined here was often repeated, sometimes with the assertion that it had actually taken place. It seemed to function as a kind of paradigm story or parable that encapsulated his ethos.

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Certeau, M. de (1988) The Practice of Everyday Life. Berkeley: University of California Press. Gecan, M. (2002) Going Public: An Organizer’s Guide to Citizen Action. New York: Anchor Books. MacIntyre, A. (1998) ‘Politics, Philosophy and the Common Good’. In Knight, K. (ed.) The MacIntyre Reader. London: Polity Press, pp. 235–52. —— (1999) Dependent Rational Animals: Why Human Beings Need the Virtues. London: Duckworth. Putnam, R. D. (2000) Bowling Alone: the Collapse and Revival of American Community. New York: Simon & Schuster. Sassen, S. (2006) ‘Making Public Interventions in Today’s Massive Cities’. Static 4, 1–8. Taylor, C. (1992) ‘Multiculturalism and the “Politics of Recognition”’. In Gutmann, A. (ed.) Multiculturalism and the “Politics of Recognition”. Princeton NJ: Princeton University Press, pp. 25–73. Warren, M. R. (2001) Dry Bones Rattling: Community Building to Revitalize American Democracy. Princeton NJ: Princeton University Press. Wills, J. and Jamoul, L. (2008) ‘Faith in Politics’. Urban Studies 45, 2035–56. Wolin, S. S. (1989) The Presence of the Past: Essays on the State and the Constitution. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. —— (2004) Politics and Vision: Continuity and Innovation in Western Political Thought. Princeton NJ: Princeton University Press. Wood, R. L. (2002) Faith in Action: Religion, Race, and Democratic Organizing in America. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

THEO-ETHICS AND RADICAL FAITH-BASED PRAXIS IN THE POSTSECULAR CITY Paul Cloke This paper connects ideas of geo-ethics with the emergence of radical faith-based praxis in the context of the postsecular city. In making these connections I want to question some received wisdoms about secularism, identify some facets of the search for a postsecular critique of, and response to, secularization in society (in particular the intellectual search for the ‘invisible’, and the emergence of new forms of ethical praxis), and trace an important but porous distinction between conventional spiritual capital and the more unruly and theo-poetic enactment of counter-ethics that reconcile virtue with difference. I also want to suggest that the latest manifestations of secularism in neoliberal forms of governance have paradoxically created new spaces for postsecular praxis, sometimes incorporating faith-based effort into the market-state’s shaping of how we govern ourselves, but also sometimes offering paths of resistance that inject new forms of care, justice and hope into the turgid landscapes of individualism, consumerism and globalization. The contemporary UK city represents the meeting-place of two currents of thought and action, the collision of which contributes significantly to the swirl of postsecularism in the public arena. First, there is the ebb and flow of secularism itself. There is currently, as Gray (2008) has observed, an atmosphere of moral panic surrounding religion in the UK. Not so long ago, religion was comfortably characterized as a relic of superstition whose role in society was dwindling steadily. Now, however, religion is being demonized (see for example the bestsellers by Dawkins 2006, Dennett 2006 and Hitchens 2007) as the cause of many of the world’s worst evils, in an outburst of evangelical atheism that seems rather out of step with the notion of a hegemonic secularism that is comfortable with itself. If modernity has successfully lodged religion and spirituality in the domain of subjectivity, and denounced it as unreal, fantastic, escapist and reactionary superstition, then why does religion have to be presented as a threat to secular society? Part of the explanation lies in the second current,

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that of a continuing manifestation of faith. Although formal adherence to religion has declined sharply in a number of western countries, the idea of a hegemonic ‘secular’ era was always at least in part illusory. As Davie (1994) has demonstrated, there has not been a wholesale shift in the western world towards a secular society where religious faith has died out. For example, the USA is no more secular than it was 150 years ago (see Berger, Davie and Fokas 2008). Rather, there has in many places been both a suspicion of religious institutions and the institutional framework of truth they represent, and an erosion of interest in ritual participation and regularized commitment to particular faith communities. Moreover, faith-based activity continues to make a significant imprint on social and spatial landscapes in the city; as state-run welfare services have been hollowed out, so faithbased organizations (FBOs) have often been the principal gap-filler, meaning that the people serving the poor and needy in these cities are a likely as not to be faith-motivated. While it is possible to dismiss such people as value-displaying, heart-on-the-sleeve do-gooders of charity (see Allahyari 2000), this faith-motivated praxis can also be interpreted as forging new forms of ethical citizenship (see Cloke, May and Johnsen 2007) through volunteering (for example to provide services for homeless people—see Cloke, May and Johnsen 2008) and campaigning (for example in leading debates about fair trade and ethical consumption—see Cloke et al. forthcoming). The postsecular city is therefore currently being redefined by the powerful movements of going-beyond-secularism in the public arena, and praxis-beyondpost-Christendom in the faith arena. Together, these movements are beginning to give some definition and flavour to the postsecular city, and each is examined in more detail here. 1. Going-beyond-Secularism Blond (1998) has analysed the society of secularism in terms of a number of important characteristics. First, he argues that secularism has allowed religion to fall into the hands of fundamentalists, whose capacity to ostracize and condemn ‘others’ (who are deemed variously as unworthy of moral consideration) has been characterized by Hedges (2006) as a dangerous form of fascism. This accusation of course has more purchase in some places than others, but may be illustrated (see Davie 2007) both in the development of different forms of fundamen-

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talist right-wing Christianities in the US, and in the rise of Islamic fundamentalism in many areas of the world. Secondly, the secular narrative has carried with it a belief that the sorts of advances achieved by science can be reproduced in politics and ethics, including the politics and ethics of welfare. However, as Blond himself points out, if we assert self-reference to be our highest value then we are only ever likely to become more primitive as we develop, and there is a further danger that a secular constructed in scientific politics and assertive political economy will be complicit with an ontology of violence that valorizes selfish individualism and accepts the priority of force and counterforce. As Milbank (2006: 338) puts it: ‘We find ourselves in the midst of a debased democratic politics, frequently tending to tyranny, and at the same time struggling for responses to “non-civic” philosophies which instil an uncompromising relativism.’ Thirdly, secularism has in some ways produced a hopeless vacuity, as endless self-serving acts of negation and denial have become the new weak mysticism of the age. Overarching neoliberal narratives of the governmentalities of the state and the market suggest a society shot through with cynicism and a lack of hope, not least in people’s profound pessimism in terms of their capacity to relate differently to each other, and to the nature-places they inhabit. Despite entreaties to the contrary (see, for example, Harvey 2000), there is a dreary acceptance in some popular quarters that how we live is circumscribed by the market-state’s ability to shape how we govern ourselves, giving the impression that: people don’t believe in anything anymore; people don’t believe that they can change things or make a difference; people have lost the capacity to participate, to be inspired or enchanted (Bennett 2001). Although such overgeneralization is highly questionable, secularism has implied a broad disavowal of any possibility that social melancholia and desperation might be attended to by a form and shape that could transfigure individuals and their world. The secular gaze only discerns what is visible and ignores the possibilities of the invisible in whatever form. What results is what Blond (1998) regards as a sense of contemporary nihilism—an indifference to the extinction both of our own possibility, and that of others. This critique of secularism is given further credence by both philosophical and political developments. First, it is interesting to note how some of the key thinkers of materialist socialism have been drawn towards ideas from religion and faith in their search for a renewal of justice and hope in contemporary society. This is not to suggest that

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left-leaning Marxist atheists are suddenly experiencing a mass conversion to religion, but rather that key philosophers are being drawn towards an implicit horizon of faith and belief, albeit in a rather fragmented and partial manner. As Milbank (2005: 398) argues, material socialism has begun to invoke theology in order to visualize an appropriate ontology: Derrida sustains the openness of signs and the absoluteness of the ethical command by recourse to (. . .) negative theology; Deleuze sustains the possibility of a deterritorialization of matter and meaning in terms of a Spinozistic virtual absolute; Badiou sustains the possibility of a revolutionary event in terms of the one historical event of the arrival of the very logic of the event as such, which is none other than Pauline grace; Žižek sustains the possibility of a revolutionary love beyond desire by reference to the historical emergence of the ultimate sublime object, which reconciles us to the void constituted only through a rift in the void. This sublime object is Christ.

Accordingly we can begin to suggest that these (albeit selective) philosophical attempts to re-form the materialist foundations for a future socialism are drawing not only on idealist visions but also on the theo-ethics of otherness, grace, love and hope, that bring with them an excess beyond material logic and rationale. The appeal to transcendence both sustains a non-reductive materiality, and envisions a going beyond mere liberal celebrations of plurality. In the case of Žižek (2001) and Badiou (2001), for example, there is a marked anxiety that contemporary concern with otherness fails to engage with the exotic other—others are typically kept at a geographical and representational distance, press-ganged into the role of perpetual victims to be observed through societal lens of moral detachment and ethical indifference. In such an arrangement, societal solidarity only occurs in circumstances of weakness rather than in creative celebration and aspiration. Theo-ethics, however, involves a call to love others simply because they personify the image of God, and such a love involves ‘the mutual recognition of our positive realizations and capacities’ (Milbank 2005: 399). Dealing with otherness in theo-ethical terms, then, does not constitute a simple celebration of alterity, but rather an expression of something that can be shared and acclaimed universally, albeit a something that takes particular unique form. Emergent spaces of collaboration between philosophy and theology are therefore beginning to offer prospects for envisaging equality with difference through an ontological lens of faith, hope and charity, but such col-

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laborations themselves pose important questions about how principles of equality are to be applied to different organizational forms of belief and faith. According to Derrida (1996), the appeal of theology is in a postmodern, nomadic form, involving a deconstructive grasp of religiosity that departs radically from the specificities of particular religious movements. For Žižek (2001) and Badiou (2001) on the other hand, Christianity is taken to be the universal religion that alone presents a framework for idealist materialism without collapsing into a triumphant celebration of that ideal. Both of these philosophical traces are evident in the contemporary postsecular city. Secondly, movement beyond-secularism has also been enacted in the political arena. The contemporary age is dominated by the impacts of neoliberalism, which ‘seems to be everywhere’ (Peck and Tickell 2002: 380) and is widely recognized as the dominant political and ideological form of capitalist globalization (Brenner and Theodore 2002). As an ideology, neoliberalism entails a belief in the market as the most desirable mechanism for regulating the economy, and as a policy, neo-liberal governments across the globe have promoted supply-side innovation and competitiveness, privatization and deregulation to transform both the broader economy, and in particular, the provision of public services. However, neoliberalism is far from a unified set of top-down policies, and is rather constituted through a set of day to day ‘techniques’ (Larner 2003)—apparently mundane processes through which neoliberal spaces, states and subjects are created and recreated at a range of different scales. Governmentality, therefore, has taken particular forms under neoliberalism (Dean 1999; Rose 1996) and although these forms are often characterized in terms of a wholesale retreat of the state in favour of a regulated market, it is more accurate to see neoliberalism as a prolongation of government through different means (Lemke 2003). New forms of politics can therefore be witnessed in the contemporary city, through which different technologies of government are being deployed to construct neoliberal subjectivities that are held together not so much by constraints as by different kinds of regulated freedoms. Raco (2005) summarizes these politics as a recasting of individual and collective subjectivities through attempts to shape ‘appropriate’ conduct by individual citizens, and by communities. It is in these technologies of government, and this recasting of appropriate subjectivities that movement-beyond-secularism can be traced in the contemporary city. Most obviously, the age of neoliberal

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governance has opened up a resurgence of faith-based activity in the public sphere—as what were previously state-provided services have become contracted out or excised from the palette of public activity, so opportunities have been created for faith-groups to fill the gap, through both voluntary and increasingly professionalized service organizations. Following the broad framework suggested by Ling (2000), May et al. (2005) have traced three important domains of action in which FBOs have been influential as part of the incorporation of the wider Third Sector by UK governments over the last decade: (i)

Rationale: the New Labour government’s ‘compacts’ with the Third Sector went beyond the previous off-loading of the responsibilities and costs of welfare provision onto volunteer and other groups. Instead, the rationale for partnership involved a recognition of the strengths of Third Sector groups: their local awareness, their creativity, their expertise and so on. (ii) Technologies: these compacts involved control over both the ‘appropriateness’ of the partnering agency, and over how services are delivered. Third Sector agencies therefore became ‘fit’ for a role in governmentality. (iii) Subjectivities: incorporation of Third Sector organizations involved a series of new subjectivities in the relationships between the state, welfare providers and individual citizens. Good citizenship was linked to volunteering, charity and a culture of active community. Within this framework, in which many different kinds of voluntary organizations have flourished, FBOs have begun to play a prominent role in different areas of welfare provision. As Lowndes and Chapman (2005) have noted such groups have motivational linkages to their communities, as normative religious values translate into ethical impulses of love, joy, peace, charity, justice, equality and so on, which can be harnessed in areas of welfare, community cohesion and ethical citizenship. FBOs also represent some of the last islands of social capital as well as spiritual capital in some urban communities (Baker and Skinner 2006), and present potential resources (buildings, volunteers, social leadership and so on) as well as a sense of longstanding local presence and commitment to local areas. As such they are well-suited for incorporation into schemes of governance, to which they can also bring an ability to represent ethical and political views both at national

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levels and as ready-made sources of community representation ready to be plugged into consultation and partnership exercises. It is evident, then, that FBOs have become variously involved in the techniques, technologies and subjectivities of neoliberal governance, and have thus inevitably had some impact on the shaping of ‘appropriate conduct’ in the contemporary city. Clearly this impact should not be overegged. Although FBOs have been dominant partners in certain sectors of welfare (for example serving homeless people— see Cloke, May and Johnsen 2006) a range of other kinds of Third Sector groups—that is non-statutory, usually voluntary, organizations involved in delivering welfare or community-building services—have also influenced conduct and subjectivity over this period. Moreover, the involvement of FBOs in front-line welfare provision may involve partnerships of governance that may dilute, or at least press into the background, the very faith-motivations that originally formed the basis of their existence. The more that FBOs have entered into compact contracts, the more they have found themselves locked into centrally-controlled ways of operating. Although there is not necessarily a divergence between faith concerns with justice, inequality and care and equivalent political concerns expressed by government, the technologies and subjectivities inherent in contracted arrangements necessarily subjugate spiritual capital and accentuate government-inspired social capital. FBOs have therefore tended to bifurcate into ‘insider’ and ‘outsider’ strategies in terms of their relationships with government finance and influence (see May, Cloke and Johnsen 2006). Insider agencies accept government funding, with the strings attached to that funding, and in so doing they can find that their ethos, and their character can change, although faith-motivation remains strong in the ways in which these organizations performatively bring care and welfare into being at the ground level (see Conradson 2003). Outsider organizations are much more likely to work on shoestring budgets and rely on volunteers to provide services outside of the governmental orthodoxy. Such outsider FBOs can often be dismissed as amateur players in the new professionalized world, but their position allows them more easily to escape the technologies and subjectivities of governmentality, and therefore to retain a more explicit faith-basis for action. These philosophical and governmental currents seem to indicate a swirl of going-beyond-secularism in the ideological and political landscapes of the city, as some faith-based and some materialist narratives converge into new spaces of postsecular denouement. New political

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ideas are seeking to bring about an ‘overt metaphysical / religious pluralism’ in public life so as to forge a ‘positive engagement out of the multicultural plurality of contemporary life’ (Connolly 1999: 185). This is not a return to any hegemonic religious values per se—participants generally are required neither to offload their metaphysical baggage nor to adopt wholesale any overarching faith—but rather an acceptance of a deep plurality of religious and metaphysical perspectives in public discourse. What emerges from this, according to de Vries (2006: 3) is not so much a transformation of the secular state, but a shift in the state’s ‘secularist self-understanding’. However, the postsecular denouement has opened up new spaces of possibility for faithgroups to bring their own brands of salt, light, flavour and fragrance back into the heart of the polity, provided that they too are willing to embrace the demands of a postsecular faith-ethics in which virtue is placed in a new and positive relation to difference, meaning that faithmotivated service involves no-strings caritas (see Coles 1997) rather than a thinly-veiled technique of conversion-oriented evangelism. In order to grasp these distinctions, analysis of the postsecular must also, then, trace the movements within religion and faith beyond traditional post-Christendom positions. 2. Praxis beyond Christendom The multicultural nature of the contemporary postsecular city dictates that any discussion of the public positioning of faith should take full account of a range of different religions and the ways in which the fundamentalisms induced during the secular era have been transformed into a wider, more plural theo-ethics of otherness as equality with difference in society. However, in this context I will illustrate this wider theme through the lens of Christian adaptations to and for the postsecular, and in particular I will examine both the importance of radical orthodox theology in responding to questions posed by postmodernism and poststructuralism, and the range of on-the-ground responses to calls for Christians to live as radical exiles in the aftermath of secularist transformation. Frost (2006: 3) has noted that ‘taken as a socio-political reality, Christendom has been in decline for the last 250 years’, and indeed Murray (2004) has defined the current age in the UK as “post-Christendom”. What, then, defines the Christian response to practising faith

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in post-Christendom in such as way as to contribute to the postsecular rapprochement and its critique of fundamentalism? Two attributes stand out. First, Christian faith has spoken into the search for the possibilities of what is invisible rather than visible. In one sense, this entails a faith, spirituality and religion that offer what Caputo (2001: 91) calls the ‘hyper-real’, a reality beyond the visible, making available that which eluded the narrow-minded idea of what was possible within modernity. Caputo argues that this hyper-real is unlikely to be found in what he describes as the all-knowing, God-substituting certainties of fundamentalist religion. Rather, he points to a passionate not-knowing faith that embraces an endless translatability between God and love, beauty, truth and justice, and in which the love of God is integrally interconnected with the transformability of our lives and with the possibility of a transforming future. Faith, then, is an enactment, a leap of love into this hyper-reality. The love of God is witnessed in the contradiction and reversing of human and cultural drives, in the unhinging of our human powers and the drawing on invisible powers, in the being ‘left hanging on a prayer for the impossible’ (Caputo 2001: 136). Of course, many will argue that there is more to religion than hyper-reality, but it is the appeal of the hyper-real as a gateway to invisible powers and seemingly impossible hope that for me helps to explain how and why the critique of secularism has been connected with new interest in spiritual landscapes (Dewsbury and Cloke forthcoming), and in particular a renewed appreciation of the desire for God. The search beyond the rational visible framework of secularism is uncovering a new sense of the sacred within the postsecular, to be found in the ‘anarchic effects produced by re-sacralizing the settled secular order, disturbing and disordering the disenchanted world, producing an anarchic chaosmos of odd brilliant disturbances, of gifts that spring up like magic in the midst of scrambled economies’ (Caputo 2006: 291). It is fascinating that when Caputo illustrates the enactment of uncertain leaps of love into the hyper-real, he turns to the involvement of faith-motivated people in serving the socially excluded and disadvantaged, and in so doing opens out the potential contradictions in the enactment of becoming-faith within postsecular society (Caputo 2001: 92): Religious people, the ‘people of God’, the people of the impossible, impassioned by a love that leaves them restless and unhinged (. . .) are impossible

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paul cloke people. In every sense of the word. If, on any given day, you go into the worst neighbourhoods of the inner cities of most large urban center, the people you will find there serving the poor and needy, expending their lives and considerable talents attending to the least among us, will almost certainly be religious people = evangelicals and Pentacostalists, social workers with deeply held religious convictions, Christian, Jewish, and Islamic, men and women, priests and nuns, black and white. They are the better angels of our nature. They are down in the trenches, out on the streets, serving the widow, the orphan, and the stranger, while the critics of religion are sleeping in on Sunday mornings.

Such passion, however, is not unproblematic, as religious people, as well as their critics, can often present voices and lives that do not add up; where there are discrepancies between the talk and the walk (Caputo 2001: 92): That is because religious people are lovers; they love God, with whom all things are possible. They are hyper-realists, in love with the impossible, and they will not rest until the impossible happens, which is impossible, so they get very little rest. The philosophers, on the other hand, happen to be away at the weekend, staying in a nice hotel, reading unreadable papers on ῾the other’ at each other, which they pass off as their way of saving the wretched earth. Then, after proclaiming the death of God, they jet back to their tenured jobs, unless they happen to be on sabbatical leave and are spending the year in Paris.1

Caputo shows us how religion spawns passionate lovers of the impossible, who will often be led to spill out their passion into situations of social, economic or political need, but in the process they can become impossible people, capable of confusing themselves with God and compromising the freedoms of the people who disagree with them. In this way, religion can become at odds with itself, especially when leaps into the hyper-real are made from very different theological and denominational platforms. If the thirsting after hyper-reality has been one element of the attraction of the spiritual in postsecular society, then the embracing of the centrality of praxis within faith-groups is another. As Oakley (2005) suggests, intrigue with the possibilities of the invisible will often be linked with intrigue with the possibilities of ethical practice that transcends bumper-sticker theology and quick-fix certainty, and many Christian faith-communities are realizing more than ever before that theology is utterly inaccessible without the core horizon of prac1

See also Cloke 2002.

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tices that constitute the church and realize its theology (Hutter 1997). Praxis is fed by many spiritual impulses, but two are significant to the arguments presented here about postsecularism. First, elements of the Christian church are becoming radicalized by intentional forms of discipleship based on being ‘in but not of’ the world. Dissatisfaction with the ease with which faithful people can be sucked into the worldlinesses of individual self-centredness, excess consumerism and uncaring globalization, has led to a sweep of calls for Christian people to rediscover and live out Jesus-values as self-imposed ‘exiles’ in the ‘empire’ of secularized culture. Uncomfortable with old-fashioned church cultures of respectability and conservatism, proponents of new radical discipleship have sought out new agendas for exile faith-praxis (Frost 2006: 10): Exiles are driven back to their most dangerous memories, their recollections of the promises made by Jesus and his daring agenda for human society. Exiles are prepared to practice a set of dangerous promises, promises that point to the kingdom and are caught up with the prevailing values of the empire. Exiles will mock the folly of that empire by offering a dangerous critique of a society wracked by greed, lust, selfishness and inequality. And finally, exiles will sing a repertoire of dangerous songs that speak of an unexpected newness of life.

There is, of course no clear pathway from Biblical foundations to contemporary ethics of praxis. Over-rigid foundationalism can lead to tyrannical and dangerous fundamentalism. Extreme postmodernism can lead to uncompromising relativism. However, the formation of faith-based practice has increasingly leant on a mix of tradition and immanence in the form form of virtue ethics, and has valorized virtuous action both as a goal to aspire to and as a habit to be acquired. In philosophical terms, the contribution of faith-ethics to the postsecular compact is at least in part that ‘the Christian mythos is able to rescue virtue from deconstruction into violent agnostic difference’ (Milbank 2006: 380) In practical terms, virtue has been placed in a new and positive relation to difference in order to validate liberty and equality. Charity can be reproduced as love and friendship, a gratuitous and creative giving of existence practised in relational service rather than with proselytizing in mind (see Coles 1997). As Milbank (2006: 429) concludes: Christian belief belongs to Christian practice and sustains its affirmations about God and creation only by repeating and enacting a metanarrative about how God speaks in the world in order to redeem it. In enacting

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paul cloke this metanarrative, one elaborates a distinctive practice—a counter-ethics embodying a social ontology, an account of duty and virtue.

The ways in which faith-groups have begun to enact these counterethics, enabling virtue to be reconciled with difference, have characterized some of the key practices of the emerging postsecular city. However, faith-motivated virtue ethics are only one part of the contribution of Christian praxis to secularism. Another significant element, strongly linked to the thirst for the invisible discussed above, is the ability of faith-groups to inculcate hope, particularly in the sponsoring of prophetic utterances about, and responses to, the injustices and calamitous orthodoxies of the current order. As detailed elsewhere (Cloke 2009), although much of orthodox religion has tended to separate eschatological and political elements of hope, there has been a growing theological clamour for the conjoining of the eschatological and the political and ethical (see, for example, Wright 2007). The hope vested in the subversive power of spiritual belief is being accessed via three principal manoeuvres of the imagination: (i)

The possibility of the prophetic (see Brueggemann 1986; 2001)— the nurturing, nourishing and evoking a consciousness and perception which is alternative to the consciousness and perception of the dominant culture. While the framework for the prophetic need not be spiritual, it may be that a spiritual combination of anchored belief and unfolding faith provides a potentially significant platform for the prophetic. (ii) The possibility of engaging spiritual interiority (see Wink 1984; 1986; 1992)—diagnosing the problems inherent in the current order in terms of its spiritual as well as materialist core. At the heart of systems and organizations of oppression lies a spiritual interiority, which needs to be addressed alongside more obvious outer material manifestations. (iii) The possibility of alternative discernment (see Myers 2003; Wallis 2005)—discerning the inner spiritual nature of the political, economic and cultural institutions of the day, with an attendant rise in alternative consciousness, perception and emotion, can permit a rupturing of the seemingly hegemonic spaces of the current order, producing new lines of flight and new spaces of hope.

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These imaginative manoeuvres form an important part of the subversive and prophetic capacity of belief not only to illuminate current landscapes, practices and circumstances, but also to help release new politics and poetics of resistance and perhaps even new cartographies of the postsecular city. I want to argue that both the hyper-real of the invisible in faithbeliefs, and the ethical and prophetic praxis of faith-groups represent significant movements beyond more traditional, respectable and comfortable faith-positions in post-Christendom. However, it would be highly erroneous to suggest that the conjoining of these movements has somehow constituted a homogeneous positioning of faith and faith-groups in the urban landscapes of postsecularism. Indeed, there is a wide variety of faith-based practice in the contemporary city, some of which has little to do with the possibilities of hyper-reality, or of ethical and prophetic praxis, let alone the re-sacralizing of the settled order through an anarchic chaosmos of brilliant disturbance. Indeed, in one sense, faith-activity in the postsecular city can represent a remnant of former structures of service. Baker (2007) has shown that both religious capital (the practical contribution of faith-groups) and spiritual capital (that which energizes religious capital) have a longstanding presence in many urban communities and stand as islands of social capital in the ‘Bowling Alone’ (Putnam 2000) culture of shrinking community infrastructure. Such religious and spiritual capital can easily represent the selective outworking of more traditional fundamentalist faith in the emerging postsecular environment, and will therefore be subject to continuing wider critiques of fundamentalism in religion (see Herriot 2008). Some faith-groups, then, will not display the receptive generosity of unconditional service that might otherwise mark them out as formative to new forms of postsecular spirituality. Indeed, such groups may reflect a continuing pursuit of control of, and power over the socially excluded other. This is not to say that such groups are not capable of experiencing renewal involving new forms of ethical and prophetic praxis, but it is to reiterate that not all faith-motivation is directed towards postsecular ways of working. However, there does seem to be another emergent strand of postsecular faith-praxis, that is sometimes separate from traditional faithnetworks, and sometimes interwoven within them. This strand reflects what Smith (1996) has described as a more defiant and unruly kind of faith-action, with its capacity to mobilize, promote and abet social

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movements, and to nourish or resist social change through disruptive or countercultural means. Such action is sometimes very public, as in the case of faith-based peace organizations that (according to Pagnucco 1996) have been significantly more likely than their secular counterparts to use publically unruly non-violent tactics of action. By contrast, faith-action can also involve behind-the-scenes radicalism, as with The Message Trust’s Eden Project in which young adult volunteers choose to uproot themselves and take up residence in some of the most difficult urban areas, sharing the problems of young people growing up in these areas and ministering to their needs. This sacrificial lifestyle choice represents a countercultural form of faith praxis, and stands as a prophetic alternative to the standard processes of neoliberalism that ‘make up’ the subject through individuation and entrepreneurship. Three further examples illustrate how faith-action within a range of very different kinds of organization has been making leaps of love into the hyper-reality of ethical and prophetic practice. First, within the traditional Baptist denomination, there has sprung up in the city of Bristol an initiative entitled ‘re:Source’ (www.resourcebristol. org). The initiative recognizes that Bristol is essentially a divided city, with affluent middle-class suburbs served by large and well-resourced church communities, and inner city and outer ‘sink’ estate areas where churches are much smaller and poorly-resourced. In terms of serving socially excluded people in Bristol, it is these inner city and estatebased churches that have the potential to become centres of service and care, offering pre-school and after-school provision, training for unemployed people or those struggling with health issues, drop-in and visitation facilities for the elderly, and welcome and advice centres for asylum seekers. Yet these are the churches which are least well equipped to resource and staff such services. The re:Source initiative works to establish partnerships between the suburban churches with available people and finance, and the potential outreach centres represented by the smaller churches. Although it may not sound too unruly, re:Source requires of its members a radically generous response in moving their money and their time into areas of need in the city, and there is now large scale faith-based volunteering and financial provision going into these ‘other’ service spaces, and even examples of deliberate residential relocation into these areas. Secondly, a recent study of ‘emergent’ churches in the UK and US—these are fast-growing urban congregations that have been recently formed and do not belong to traditional denominations—by

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Gibbs and Bolger (2006) showed that such faith-groups tend to be dominated by hopeful, vibrant, open-minded and service-orientated young Christians. Emerging churches, according to this account, embody a radically transformative theology of social engagement and are developing a socially engaged praxis in which it is habitual to embrace both the transcendence and the immanence of God. Simon Hall of Revive in the city of Leeds, UK, illustrates this approach (Gibbs and Bolger 2006: 143): Our gospel would be toothless and hypocritical if we were not serving our local community. But I don’t think anyone thinks like that. They just do it. We have a team of people clearing the local park and streets, some guys doing prison visiting, others work with drug addicts and prostitutes. We have a number of youth workers doing sex education in schools, and we put on two big parties a year for the local community.

Here, then, there is an essential interconnection between faith and social service, although there will be within these engagements a range of protocols embracing overt evangelism or more ‘without strings’ postsecular caritas. Thirdly there is increasing evidence of more neo-anarchic local movements that represent more communal ways of living out prophetic and hope-filled faith praxis. Claiborne’s (2006) account of the activities of The Simple Way in Philadelphia tells the story of how a community of radical simplicity grew around faith-inspired acts of kindness and protest in solidarity with socially excluded and politically oppressed groups of people in the city. These activities were smallscale in nature, but embodied a prophetic challenge to the spiritual interiority of systems of oppression. Living alongside a group of homeless people facing eviction from their squat in an abandoned cathedral challenged both religious and secular priorities over the importance of property rights compared with human rights. Sleep-outs and vigils in public parks in the city publicized and contested attitudes to the plight of refugees and victims of war. Working with indigenous communities to ensure access to appropriate water supplies in disadvantaged neighbourhoods demonstrated resistance to social prejudice within urban resource management. Converting into small bills and coins the monetary settlement from a successful lawsuit against police misconduct against homeless people, and then literally throwing the money into the air and onto the street in Wall Street, performatively turned money-cultures on their head in the lair of the beast. Claiborne (2006: 353) concludes:

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paul cloke while many of the traditional main-line denominations and old-school Anabaptists are trying to figure out how to fill empty pews (. . .) there are so many communities and visionaries starting things up that I can hardly keep up with them. We are bursting at the seams at times. Nearly every week, people call wanting help starting a community or a house of hospitality.

Out of these three very different contexts—the traditional, the emerging and the radical neo-anarchic—are emerging new forms of radical faith praxis, that variously reflect the construction of spaces of hope based on prophetic and discerning faith-response to the outward manifestations and spiritual interiorities of oppression, injustice and need in the city. In many cases, these faith responses chime well with the concerns of more secular radical politics, claiming similar ethical ground but from different expressions of motivation. Such faith praxis can, then, form an important part of the wider postsecular rapprochement, in a broader coming together of ethical values and practice that can to some extent blur the boundaries of religion and secularism, as faith praxis moves out into mainstream activities in such a way as to be welcomed into what was previously assumed to be secular territory. 3. Endnote Postsecularism seems to be emerging from the confluence of these two currents; the philosophical and political movement-beyond-secularism, and the expressions of hyper-reality and praxis emergent in how faith-groups discern and perform their role in post-Christendom society. Understanding the exact outworkings of these currents is an ongoing project, but it seems likely that the shaping of the postsecular city will be both societal and local—shaped both by the broader search for philosophical hope and governmental partnership and by more localized configurations of rapprochement variously characterized by the degree to which FBOs and secular organizations are willing to forsake their particular fundamentalisms in the search of caritas and agape without conditions. It can be suggested that such rapprochement might be easier to achieve in ethical and political arenas involving care and justice than in more morally-defined territories, where faith-fundamentalism is less easy to deny. However, such arenas and territories are often interchangeable, meaning that rapprochement is likely to be emergent and perhaps fleeting rather than structural and concrete. The postsecularism of the city may therefore be most evident

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in traces, flows, flavours and affectual tolerances, performed out of a mutual sense of theo-poetics rather than any strict alignment of faith dogmatics with moves beyond the secular. Theo-poetics will point to the power of powerlessness; the possibility of impossibility; the conversion of peace, generosity, forgiveness, mercy, hospitality and so on into everyday realities. Such conversion is less likely in programmes of dogmatic realization and more likely in the flickering becomings of local performances—what Connolly (1999) has termed ‘a politics of becoming’ in which new cultural identities emerge from the energies, suffering and lines of flight available in particular places. It is perhaps in these performative politics of becoming that the role of faith is most likely to be manifest in the postsecular nature of particular cities. References Allahyari, R. (2000) Visions of Charity: Volunteer Workers and Moral Community. Berkeley CA: University of California Press. Badiou, A. (2001) Ethics. London: Verso. Baker, C. (2007) Hybrid Church in the City. Aldershot: Ashgate. —— and Skinner, H. (2006) Faith in Action: The Dynamic Connection between Spiritual Capital and Religious Capital. Manchester: William Temple Foundation. Bennett, J. (2001) The Enchantment of Modern Life. Princeton NJ: Princeton University Press. Berger, P., Davie, G. and Fokas, E. (2008) Religious America. Secular Europe? Aldershot: Ashgate. Blond, P. (1998) ‘Introduction: Theology before Philosophy’. In Blond (ed.) PostSecular Philosophy: Between Philosophy and Theology. London: Routledge, pp. 1–66. Brenner, N. and Theodore, N. (2002) ‘Cities and Geographies of “Actually Existing Neoliberalism” ’. Antipode 34, 349–97. Brueggemann, W. (1986) Hopeful Imagination. Philadelphia PA: Fortress Press. —— (2001) The Prophetic Imagination. Second edition. Minneapolis MA: Fortress Press. Caputo, J. (2001) On Religion. London: Routledge. —— (2006) The Weakness of God: A Theology of the Event. Bloomington IN: Indiana University Press. Claiborne, S. (2006) The Irresistible Revolution. Grand Rapids MN: Zondervan. Cloke, P. (2002) ‘Deliver Us from Evil? Prospects for Living Ethically and Acting Politically in Human Geography’. Progress in Human Geography 26, 587–604. —— (forthcoming) ‘Geography and Invisible Powers: Philosophy, Social Action and Prophetic Potential’. In Brace, C. (ed.) Emerging Geographies of Belief. ——, May, J. and Johnsen, S. (2006) ‘Exploring Ethos? Discourses of “Charity” in the Provision of Emergency Services for Homeless People’. Environment and Planning A 37, 385–402. —— —— —— (2007) ‘Ethical Citizenship? Volunteers and the Ethics of Providing Services for Homeless People’. Geoforum 38, 1089–101. —— —— —— (2008) ‘Performativity and Affect in the Homeless City’. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 26, 241–63.

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——, Barnett, C., Clarke, N. and Malpass, A. (forthcoming) ‘Faith in Ethical Consumption’. In Thomas, L. (ed.) Consumerism and Sustainability: Paradise Lost? Basingstoke: Palgrave MacMillan. Coles, R. (1997) Rethinking Generosity: Critical Theory and the Politics of Caritas. Ithaca NY: Cornell University Press. Connolly, W. (1999) Why I Am Not a Secularist. Minneapolis MN: University of Minnesota Press. Conradson, D. (2003) ‘Doing Organisational Space: Practices of Voluntary Welfare in the City’. Environment and Planning A 35, 1975–92. Davie, G. (1994) Religion on Britain since 1945. Oxford: Blackwell. —— (2007) The Sociology of Religion. London: Sage. Dawkins, R. (2006) The God Delusion. London: Bantam Press. Dean, M. (1999) Governmentality: Power and Rule in Modern Society. London: Sage. Dennett, D. (2006) Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Derrida, J. (1996) The Gift of Death: Religion and Postmodernism. Chicago: Chicago University Press. Dewsbury, J. D. and Cloke, P. (forthcoming) ‘Spiritual Landscapes: Existence, Performance and Immanence’. Frost, M. (2006) Exiles: Living Missionally in a Post-Christian Culture. Peabody MA: Hendrickson. Gibbs, E. and Bolger, R. (2006) Emergent Churches: Creating Christian Community in Postmodern Cultures. London: SPCK. Gray, J. (2008) ‘The Atheist Delusion’. The Guardian, 15th March, Review, 4–6. Harvey, D. (2000) Spaces of Hope. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Hedges, C. (2006) American Fascists. New York: Free Press. Herriot, P. (2008) Religious Fundamentalism. London: Routledge. Hitchens, D. (2007) God Is Not Great. London: Atlantic Books. Hutter, R. (1997) Suffering Divine Things: Theology as Church Practice. Grand Rapids MN: Eerdmans. Larner, W. (2003) ‘Neoliberalism?’ Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 21, 509–12. Lemke, T. (2003) ‘Comment on Nancy Fraser: Rereading Foucault in the Shadow of Globalisation’. Constellations 10, 172–9. Ling, T. (2000) ‘Unpacking Partnership: The Case of Health Care’. In Clarke, D., Gewirtz, S. and McLaughlin, E. (eds) New Managerialism, New Welfare? London: Sage, pp. 82–101. Lowndes, V. and Chapman, R. (2005) Faith, Hope and Clarity: Developing a Model of Faith Group Involvement in Civil Renewal. Civil Renewal Research Programme Report. Leicester: De Montfort University. May, J., Cloke, P. and Johnsen, S. (2005) ‘Re-Phasing Neo-Liberalism: New Labour and Britain’s Crisis of Street Homelessness’. Antipode 37, 703–30. —— —— —— (2006) ‘Shelter at the Margins: New Labour and the Changing State of Emergency Accommodation for Single Homeless People in Britain’. Policy and Politics 34, 711–30. Milbank, J. (2005) ‘Materialism and Transcendence’. In Davis, C., Milbank, J. and Žižek, S. (eds) Theology and the Political: New Debates. Durham NC: Duke University Press, pp. 393–426. —— (2006) Theology and Social Theory. Second edition. Oxford: Blackwell. Murray, B. (2004) Post-Christendom: Church and Mission in a Strange New World. Carlisle: Paternoster. Myers, C. (2003) Binding the Strongman. Maryknoll NY: Orbis. Oakley, M. (2005) ‘Reclaiming Faith’. In Walker, A. (ed.) Spirituality in the City. London: SPCK, pp. 1–14.

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THE END OF THE SECULAR CITY DREAM: THE CASE OF ANKARA Nihan Özdemir Sönmez Modernity has always been one of the most debated terms, especially in the Third World countries, where the term is heavily associated with westernization in social, political and even individual spheres. Turkey is no exception in this regard. In the formation of the new Republic a modernization ideology that looked for inspiration to the West played a major role. In accordance with this ideology secularism became the main component of the conceptualization of west-oriented modernization during the process of nation-state building, and paved the way for the formation of what was called ‘the only democracy among Muslim majority states’. In this context secularism was regarded as an essential feature of universal civilization, and numerous social and political measures were taken to meet its requirements. In spatial terms, the creation of a new, modern and secular capital (Ankara) became crucial and gained a symbolic meaning. In other words, the construction of a new capital was used as a means towards the formation of a secular society. To a certain extent, this aim has been achieved. However, top-down policies imposed by governing elites onto the public and private spheres were not free from problems. In due course, together with increasing popular support, the ‘secular capital Ankara’ started to diverge from what was originally planned and intended. Ironically, during the past fifteen years (and largely parallel to broader societal trends) the metropolitan and most district municipalities of Ankara have come under the control of a pro-Islamic party, the ‘Justice and Development Party’, due to the support of low income groups in the city. In general this change has been interpreted as a historical defeat of the secular establishment and its modernist project, resulting mainly from its failure to integrate the low income groups into the scheme. This chapter aims at discussing the secular legacy of Ankara and its evolution towards a postsecular position against the general background sketched above. First, a brief general discussion on modernization and secularization will be offered as a general framework for the

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study. In the second part the discussion focuses more specifically on the historical context of modernization and secularization processes in Turkey. In the third and last part of the chapter spatial aspects of modernization and secularization processes, together with the efforts to reverse these, will be traced in the case of the capital Ankara. From the performance of the local government of Ankara over the past 15 years I will argue that the processes of constructing a postsecular city have irreversible consequences both in spatial and social terms. 1. The Significance of Modernization and Secularization in the Context of Non-Christian Societies Modernization can be defined as a process of social change from a society largely governed by irrational beliefs towards what is believed to be universal and more rational and advanced. This process involves a complex interrelationship between society, economics and politics. Although the use of the term ‘modern’ dates back to ancient times, our present understanding of the term has been shaped by the Enlightenment. Harvey (1989: 12) describes the evolution of modernization as follows: what Habermas (1983: 9) calls the project of modernity came into focus during the eighteenth century. That project amounted to an extraordinary intellectual effort on the part of Enlightenment thinkers to develop objective science, universal morality and law and autonomous art according to their inner logic. The idea was to use the accumulation of knowledge generated by many individuals working freely and creatively for the pursuit of human emancipation and the enrichment of daily life.

In this context, religion occupied a position of special importance in both the Enlightenment and in the modernization process, since it was considered an obstacle towards achieving a modern society with rational values. Harvey (1989: 12–13) summarizes the relationship between modernization and religion as follows: The development of rational forms of social organization and rational modes of thought promised liberation from the irrationalities of myth, religion, superstition, release from the arbitrary use of power as well as from the dark side of our own human natures. (. . .) It was, above all, a secular movement that sought the demystification and desacralization of knowledge and social organisation in order to liberate human beings from their chains.

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The idea behind these claims is that there is an explicit correlation between modernization and secularization. In other words, it is believed that in due course societies become more secular (i.e. the importance of religious beliefs for social life will decline and religious self-commitments will get weaker). Therefore, there is an implicit assumption that societies which target modernization as the ultimate objective should regard secularization as a pre-condition to reach this end. However, the acknowledgement of the role of secularism in the process of modernization does not necessarily mean that without secularization modernization cannot be achieved, or that modern society should also be a secular one. This rather complicated nature of the relationship between modernization and secularization must also be attributed to the polyvalence of the term ‘secularization’. A rough definition of secularization refers to a decrease in individual beliefs and practices. However, for some social scientists the reason underlying secularization is the decline in ‘religious demand’ on the part of individuals, whereas for others it is the decline in ‘religious authority’ (i.e. the influence of religion itself over individuals) (Gorski and Altinordu 2008). Against the background of the complex sociological and political roles of secularism, Keyman (2007: 219–20) underlines four multi-dimensional functions of secularism: 1) Secularism as rationality, in which it functions as a secular reason, emancipated from tradition and conducive to progress through scientific and technological changes and developments, 2) Secularism as a process of structural differentiation of society, in which it functions as the expression of the institutional separation of the state and religion, that is the removal of religious values and beliefs from legal-rational impersonal rule, 3) Secularism as a boundary producing practice, by which the privatization of religion is achieved, 4) Secularism as a governmentality of self, in which it functions as the practice of controlling religious preferences and claims by confining them to the private sphere and dis-establishing their ties with the public sphere. These functions have become much more problematic in the context of non-Christian societies, although this does not necessarily mean that only non-Christian religions face problems reaching modernity

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and democracy. However, the Eurocentric nature of modernization and secularization should not be underestimated. As Gülalp (2005: 351) points out: Despite the diversity even within the western experience itself, particularly non-western (postcolonial) societies have been held against, or actually forced to conform to, an imaginary standard of secularization. In the modernization theory of development, the history of the Third World is never understood in its own right, but only judged in terms of whether the Third World has succeeded or failed in its efforts to replicate the accomplishments’ of the First World. Just as development theory has begun to be dismantled, the same needs to be done with secularization theory, which is not only based on a false projection about the ‘West’ itself, but often also involves a political imposition on the ‘non-West’.

Consequently, in societies where modernity and democracy still remain targets to be achieved, secularism means something more than a decline in individual beliefs and practices. In other words, the establishment of secularization through the four functions outlined above secures the establishment of modernization and democracy as well. 2. The Turkish Historical Background The Turkish modernization project dates back roughly to the establishment of the Turkish Republic under the leadership of Kemal Ataturk in 1923. However, some early attempts had been made during the late Ottoman era at the end of the 19th century. Even today it can be argued that the Turkish modernization project has not been completed yet. Scholars have examined the Turkish modernization experiences in distinctive stages (Tekeli 1997, Mardin 2007, Keyman, 2007, Kahraman, 2008). Tekeli (1997) includes the late Ottoman era and divides Turkish modernization history into four periods: He calls the piecemeal challenges of the Ottoman period a ‘shy modernization’; the period between establishment of the Republic (1923) and the transition to the multiparty parliamentary democracy (1946) a ‘radical modernization’; the period from 1946 to the military coup in 1980 a ‘populist modernization’, and finally the period after the 1980s a ‘deprivation of modernization’. Following Tekeli’s periodization, I will discuss the ongoing processes, starting from the consolidation of the Republic, in three different periods: (1) the early Republican Era: 1923–1940; (2) the Multi-party Era: 1950–1980; and (3) after the 1980s.

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2.1. The early Republican Period: 1923–1950 The Early Republican period may rightly be considered the most efficient and successful phase in the Turkish history of modernization. It was during this period that the most radical measures towards a modernization of the society were taken by the governing elites. Formation of the nation-state and exclusion of religious affairs from social and political life were two fundamental features of this period. Secularism was considered by the governing elites to be the pre-condition of modernization; the aim was a substantial reduction of religious beliefs, activities and institutions in the shortest possible time. Since there was little support for such changes in society at large, this aim could only be realized by top-down policies. Kemalist and the ruling Republican Populist Party (RPP) did not hesitate to impose the most radical reforms of Turkish history onto what can be identified as a Muslim and conservative society, for the sake of modernization and secularization. Between 1923 and 1938, a series of reforms for the secularization of the society were successfully put into effect and to a certain extent an isolation of religion from politics was achieved. In 1922, a year before the proclamation of the Turkish Republic, the Sultanate1 was abolished. In 1924 the Caliphate2 was brought to an end, religious schools were outlawed and religious courts were banned. In the same year, the Directorate of Religious Affairs was set up as a state institution to control and regulate religious activities and practices (Law no. 429). By this law, the Directorate of Religious Affairs: became authorized to decide matters concerning the beliefs, worship and ethics of Islam, to administer the worshipping locations, and to appoint and dismiss religious officials. The intervention of religion and religious officials of the administration toward the state was prevented. Ultimately, the law assigned religious functionaries to be under the control of the state as public employees.3

In 1925 these reforms were followed by the elimination of religious sects. In 1926 the religious law (Shari’a) was replaced by the Swiss Civil Code. In 1928 the Turkish state was implicitly declared secular with the elimination from the 1924 Constitution of the statement 1

‘Sultanate’ is the old Ottoman government headed by the Sultan. ‘Caliphate’ indicates the political leadership of the Muslims, based on the notion of a continuous chain of succession to the Prophet Muhammad’s political authority. 3 Erdem (2008: 207). 2

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recognizing Islam as the official state religion. In the same year the Arabic alphabet was replaced by the Latin alphabet, the Gregorian calendar was adopted, and Sunday was declared the official weekly holiday. Finally, in 1937 an article was added to the constitution which officially declared Turkey a secular state. These reforms were radical steps, within a fairly short period of time, on the way to the establishment of a non-Islamic Turkish identity for the new nation-state. They: were all realised within the aim of establishing the institutional basis of objective secularization, thereby removing religious beliefs and symbols from the process of modern state building and its consolidation.4

These measures to keep religious affairs under state control made the Turkish modernization and secularization experience a unique case. It could be argued that the separation of religious and state affairs on the one hand, and having religious affairs directed by a state institution on the other, is paradoxical. However, in contrast with the formal definition of the term, the main characteristic of Turkish secularism was its emphasis on intervention in religious affairs. Keyman describes this peculiar condition as a transformation of secularism to laicism. As he puts it, ‘secularism took the form of “laicism”, a concept that indicates not only the “official disestablishment of religion” from the state, but also “constitutional control of religious affairs by the state” ’ (Keyman 2007: 222). This is to say that ‘Turkish secularism operates not as a state-based and laicist control of religious activities but as a democratic and multicultural secular ethos in state-society relations that accepts the need for the institutional separation of politics from religious beliefs and norms’ (Keyman 2007: 229). In the Turkish case, laicism can be defined as the control of religious affairs by the state rather than a total separation of religion from the state. Therefore, the establishment of a Directorate of Religious Affairs together with the constitutional status of the secularism can be seen as reflecting the intention on the part of the state and the ruling RPP to privatize religious activities and at the same time to control their further politicization (Mardin 2007). However, the Directorate of Religious Affairs included neither all sects of Islam, nor other religious beliefs. In fact, as I will discuss below, it has always represented only the Sunni sect of Islam, following here the state ideology. 4

Keyman (2007: 222).

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2.2. The Multiparty Era: 1950–1980 The radical reforms towards modernization and secularization of the new nation failed to take root in the whole country. By the 1940s Turkey still was a ‘rural’ country with more than 75% of its population living in small villages. The vast majority of people did not adopt the changes to their daily lives or were not aware of them at all. It would therefore be reasonable to argue that none of these radical reforms were successful in increasing the level of ‘individual’ secularization, and that, on the contrary, these reforms resulted in the alienation of the masses from the state-oriented enlightenment project, and also led to an increase in religious demands. In due course this uneasiness with top-down reforms took the form of political pressure upon governments. The establishment of a multi-party parliamentary democracy in 1946 created an opportunity for political liberation. In this way the majority for the first time had the chance to express its opinion in the political sphere. People with a strong religious identity could take part in the political decision-making processes after the victory of Democratic Party (DP) in 1950 general elections. The DP did not hesitate to use religious issues in politics by claiming its tolerant attitude towards religion as a part of a democratic ethos. In fact, the DP was successful in responding to the religious demands of the masses and in turn securing their political support: During the DP rule, Islam was manipulated to strengthen the power of the party. As a result, the masses, which supported the DP, demanded the softening of the laic policies. The DP could not resist these demands and the integration of the religion with state bureaucracy continued through the policies of the Directorate of Religious Affairs.5

The activities of the different religious orders and sects (tarikat) and faith-based organizations were tolerated and even protected, despite being against the law. For instance, during the DP government the number of mosque construction associations increased sharply (Tekeli 1997). Compulsory religious courses were included in secondary school curricula. This meant that every student had to attend religious education classes unless their parents requested otherwise. Another symbolic but significant action was the replacement of the Turkish

5

Sarı (2004: 38–9).

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language by Arabic (as the language of Koran) in the call for prayer (ezan). These were all substantial steps towards lessening the impact of the secularization efforts, and undermining the achievements, in the name of a development of democracy and of restoring individual freedom. On the other hand, the Directorate of Religious Affairs played a crucial role in that period. These attempts may by and large be regarded as successful challenges to the state-oriented modernization and secularization projects of the Republican Era. The military coup in 1960 put an end to parliamentary democracy and to the DP rule. A year later a new constitution (the 1961 Constitution) was implemented. For the first time the term secularism was used to define and regulate several social and political issues (Articles 22, 26, 57, 77, 121 and 153). Furthermore, the Directorate of Religious Affairs was confirmed as a constitutional institution (Article 154) in order to keep religious affairs under tough state control and prevent abuse by daily politics. At this juncture it is important to comment on the relationship between the Directorate of Religious Affairs, as a constitutional institution, and the secular state. As mentioned earlier, a simple definition of secularism calls for a total separation of religious affairs from the state. In this context, a religious institution funded directly by the state should be considered a contradiction to the afore-mentioned principle. This feature of secularism, which is almost unique to Turkey, has consolidated its position, and gradually secularism in Turkey has become much more state-oriented. It could, therefore, be argued that secularism in Turkey should always be viewed. in conjunction with state policies. Starting from the establishment of multi-party parliamentary democracy, religion has always been the main ideology of politics, a fact which was pragmatically used by centre-right and right-wing political parties (the Democratic Party [DP] during the 1950s, and the Justice Party [JP], the National Salvation Party [NSP] and the Nationalist Movement Party [NMP] during the 1960s and 1970s). 2.3. After the 1980s The 1980s started with yet another military coup. The military leaders of the coup halted parliamentary democracy by declaring the necessity of reorganizing social order and politics in line with the principles defined in the early Republican Era. Although the military in Turkey has always been regarded as the strongest defender of secularism,

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the 1980 coup in fact turned out to be paving the way for a further strengthening of an anti-secular discourse. Policies implemented by the military regime secured the vital political and social atmosphere needed for the consolidation of the Islamist ideology. In 1982 a new constitution (the 1982 Constitution) was prepared by the military. In the new constitution religious courses were made compulsory for all pupils of primary and secondary schools (Article 24), even though secularism was preserved as the main principle of the Turkish state. These compulsory courses were again based upon Sunni principles of Islam; other sects (i.e. the Alevi), as well as other religions, were totally excluded from the contents and were not discussed at all. During the military regime the Directory of Religious Affairs was given more power. For the first time in Turkish history the duty of the ‘maintenance of national solidarity and integrity’ was constitutionally assigned to the Directory of Religious Affairs (Article 136). In addition to this, the operations of illegal faith-based organizations6 were supported by the state both implicitly and explicitly. For instance, even the salary of imams employed by the state was paid by one of these organizations (called Rabıta) that originated in Saudi Arabia. After the military regime, parliamentary democracy was restored through the 1983 general election. The centre-right Motherland Party (MP) won the elections. The MP declared itself a successful synthesis of modernization ideology on the one hand and religious demands on the other. However, it could not successfully prevent Islamic groups from becoming stronger in the social and political spheres. In 1983, the Welfare Party (WP), with strong Islamic affiliations, was founded. It became the political voice of Islamic criticism of the Kemalist ideology (Aydın 2007). In the 1991 general election the WP gained seats in Parliament and four years later, surprising the Kemalists, it won the 1995 general elections. However, the WP came to power in 1996 only as part of a coalition government. Castells (1997: 19–20) describes this rather unexpected victory as follows: Even in the most Westernized Muslim country, Turkey, Kemal Ataturk’s secular, nationalist heritage came under historical challenge when, in the elections of 1995, Islamists became the country’s first political force,

6 These organisations operate mainly in the form of ‘Qur’an courses’, which are forbidden by law.

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nihan özdemir sönmez relying on the vote of radicalized intellectuals and the urban poor, and formed the government in 1996.

This period of escalating Islamist ideology in Turkey coincided with the global strengthening of radical fundamentalism.7 In Muslim countries a series of social, economic and political events resulted in increasing support for religious ideologies in the political sphere. Castells explains this process by arguing that in the Muslim world state-led modernization policies could not compete with the necessities of the global economy and created deprived masses who lost faith in the nationalist project. As he puts it (Castells 1997: 18): the social roots of radical fundamentalism appear to derive from the combination of successful state-led modernization in the 1950s and 1960s and the failure of economic modernization in most Muslim countries during the 1970s and 1980s, as their economies could not adopt to the new conditions of global competition and technological revolution in the latter period.

The coalition government of the WP ended by a military intervention which would later be called ‘a postmodern coup’ by some scholars and politicians,8 and yet another coalition government led by the MP was formed. The struggle between secular and Islamic groups continued in a very harsh manner. The WP and its successor, the Virtue Party (VP), were outlawed by decisions of the Turkish Constitutional Court. A group of former party members who called themselves ‘reformist’ formed the Justice and Development Party (JDP) in 2001. The JDP won both the 2002 and 2007 general elections and has been ruling the country since then. Under the rule of the JDP the polarization between secular and Islamic groups became much stronger. The most recent development, in 2007, was the JDP changing the constitution to lift the headscarf ban in universities. This action became the reason for the call for yet another political party, the JDP, to close down activities. However, the Turkish Constitutional Court decided against it, despite declaring the party’s focus of activities to be against secularism.

7 ‘Radical fundamentalism’ denotes religious ideologies that advocate a return to the ‘fundamentals’ of Islam which were mentioned in the Qur’an. 8 This term is used to emphasize the different nature of the military intervention of 1998. Rather than by conventional methods [used by the military] it was driven by the the help of the media and non-governmental organisations in order to create unease in society, and it ended with the resignation of the government.

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In more than six years of JDP rule the departure from secular policies became much more pronounced. Several extreme actions were taken by central as well as local governments. In what follows, I will discuss the importance of spatial aspects of modernization and secularization policies in the case of Ankara. I will also examine how and to what extent Islamic ideology can change and redesign what used to be a secular city in postsecular times. 3. Spatial Aspects of Secularism and Postsecularism 3.1. The construction of Ankara as a Symbol of Modernization and Secularization Processes: The Early Republican Period The proclamation of Ankara as the capital of the new Republic can be regarded as the spatial manifestation of the Turkish modernization project. In the early Republican Era and especially during the single party regime the construction of the city as a model of a modern, secular lifestyle was given priority by the Kemalists elites. The period between the declaration of Ankara as the capital in 1923 and transition to the multiparty democratic system in 1946 can be regarded as the consolidation of the modern and secular Turkish society. The relocation of the capital from Istanbul to Ankara was one of the main steps [that were] taken in the Turkish modernization and secularization history, even though there were also hostile reactions from the old establishment (Şengül 1998). The creation of a new capital was considered a prerequisite for the formation of a new modern and secular society. However, the city itself was far from ‘modern’ in any conceivable way. Before the foundation of the Turkish Republic in 1923 and the declaration of Ankara as the new capital at that time, the city was a small agricultural town with a population of around 30,000 (see Table 1). The city, which had previously relied upon agricultural production, was now converted into the new political centre. The reflection of this conversion in space was the construction of the new capital which had to match the new modern, western type of living requirements (Özdemir 1998). In this context, a planned development of the city had always been the main aim of the new elites who gathered around Mustafa Kemal and the ruling RPP. As Danielson and Keleş (1985: 10) put it:

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nihan özdemir sönmez Modernization was the driving force of the Turkish revolution. Ataturk’s overwhelming objective was to remould Turkey into a modern nation, with Western Europe’s political, economic, and social structures providing the model for the new Turkey. (. . .) After the revolution, urbanization was widely equated with the modernization, and cities seen as the economic and social vanguard of a modernized society. Ankara was developed to symbolize the new Turkey, a planned modern city on the model of the great European capitals.

To this end a special local administration was established in 1924. By a special law the municipality was replaced by a central unit under the control of the Ministry of the Interior with an appointed governor rather than an elected mayor. The first development plan of the city was prepared by a German planner, Lorcher, as early as 1925 (Tankut 1990). The construction of the new quarters of the city, which were called the ‘New City’, started immediately. However, these first attempts towards the creation of a planned, modern city were insufficient to cope with the unprecedented population increase faced by the new capital. By 1927, Ankara’s population had risen to around 75,000. The scale of development and the quality of the physical environment of the city were worrying the government. Despite the failure of the first plan, belief in the necessity of a planned development continued to be strong among the Kemalists as well as the population at large. As a result, a modest competition for a new plan was held in 1927. Three planners were invited to Ankara, and after two years the jury, mostly composed of Kemalists, awarded the first prize to the German planner Hermann Jansen. In the first half of the 1930s Ankara underwent a great deal of construction work, both planned and unplanned. Together with the New City some other new quarters had started to emerge. Besides new housing districts, several public buildings were also constructed. These buildings were regarded as the symbols of the new modern state. Among them, an opera house, several museums, university buildings, banks and the town hall can be listed as important symbolic architectural examples. Kemalists gave special importance to the construction of such public buildings and German, Hungarian and Austrian architects were invited to the city to compensate for the absence of Turkish technical staff. Austrian architect Clemens Holzmeister designed the buildings of the High Court and the General Staff, the Residential Palace of the Presidency and the Turkish Grand National Assembly. The building of the Faculty of Language, History

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and Geography was planned by the German architect Bruno Taut; some other high school and college buildings were designed by Ernst Egli. The Turkish architects Mimar Kemalettin, Seyfi Arkan, and Sevki Balmumcu followed their lead and designed many modern public buildings in the city (i.e. university buildings, opera houses, several ministry buildings). These construction processes had created new job opportunities in the city, and these opportunities in turn attracted workers from the rural areas. This influx had already been stimulated by the impact of the Independence War (1919–1923). The housing needs of the numerous migrants could not be met by a controlled development, and the first squatters took up residence near the old city. By the end of the 1930s the new capital of the Turkish Republic had by and large been built according to the development plan, despite several problems. Among them, illegal housing areas were the main concern for the Kemalists. As a measure against this problem a special law was passed (no. 486), which permitted the demolition of illegal buildings. Therefore, I argue that top-down policies for the establishment of a new, modern capital had ignored the demands of the urban poor, and a dual city structure started to emerge as early as the 1930s. This feature of the city had to be accepted even by the Kemalist elite during the 1940s, when the city witnessed another massive influx of rural migrants. 3.2. Efforts to Sustain the Secular Legacy of Ankara: 1946–1980 The establishment of a multi-party parliamentary democracy in 1946 and the victory of the DP over the RPP in the 1950 general election put a stop to the ambitions of the Kemalist elite for a new, modern capital. Parallel to the general policy of the DP towards modernization and secularization Istanbul became the focus of interest rather than Ankara. In Istanbul several new development projects were implemented, but Ankara was neglected. However, Ankara, too, faced a huge influx of migrants that could not be absorbed by planned urban development. Between 1950 and 1960 the population of Ankara increased from 298,147 to 650,067. The average annual population growth rate of the city reached its maximum level of 11.3% during this decade, whereas it had been about 7% between 1927 and 1950 (Keleş and Kano 1987).

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nihan özdemir sönmez Table 1: Number of squatter settlements and population living in squatter areas

Year

Number of squatter dwellings

1950 1960 1966 1970 1975 1978 1980 1990

12,000 70,000 100,000 144,000 202,000 24,000 275,000 350,000

Population living in % of population living squatter areas in squatter areas 62,400 364,000 520,000 748,000 1,156,000 1,300,000 1,450,000 1,750,000

21.8 56.0 57.4 60.6 64.9 68.4 72.4 58.3

Source: Keleş (1993: 384)

In an effort to maintain the city’s planned development yet another international competition was held in 1954 for the preparation of a new development plan, and implemented in 1957 (the Uybadın-Yücel Plan of 1957). This was followed by the establishment of the Ankara Metropolitan Area Planning Bureau in 1969 for the purpose of preparing another new development plan. All these efforts were in line with the modernization and secularization ideology and the special importance given to Ankara, despite the changing political atmosphere of the country in general. During the 1970s, in spite of all these modernization efforts in the spatial sphere, more than 65% of the city’s population were living in squatter settlements (Table 1). Unlike the first generation migrants they supported the centre-left and left wing parties both in general and local elections (Şengül 1998). In central government, largely thanks to the support of these groups, the RPP came into power after the 1973 and 1977 general elections. Similarly, on the level of local government, the RPP won control of the largest cities including Ankara in the 1973 and 1977 local elections. These municipalities implemented a new set of policies and strategies, which was called ‘New Municipalism’. This strategy involved the decentralization of power to the municipalities from the political centre, opening up of the representative channel to the masses, primarily to the squatter dwellers, and the collectivization of the means of collective consumption, that is, prioritizing use value over exchange value including urban land (Şengül 1998: 158).

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The New Municipalism movement guided by the RPP became influential in Ankara and in other large cities. The RPP-controlled municipalities initiated several what were called ‘social projects’ to solve the problems of the urban poor and maintain the city’s modernist position. In Ankara, for instance, mass housing and public transportation projects were implemented, together with a number of educational and social projects from which in particular low and middle income groups benefited. 3.3. The End of the Secular City Dream and the Decline of Secular Aspects of the City: Postsecular Times after the 1980s After the military intervention in 1980 all local governments were dissolved. Until the 1984 local election the municipalities were administered by appointed mayors, most of whom were either ex-military officers or retired governors. Parallel to the general political ideology, local governments tried to integrate municipalities into the new economic system designed by the so-called new-right and liberal ideologies. In this general context there was no space for social policies for the urban poor, such as those once realized through the New Municipalism. ‘In other words, the military intervention of 1980 brought an end to the New Municipalism movement which developed as a response to the needs of and pressures from rapidly urbanising urban poor’ (Şengül 1998: 159). In the 1984 local election the liberal Motherland Party (MP) won in almost all major cities, including Ankara. The MP initiated large-scale investment programmes in the cities in line with new-right policies which promoted investments in urban areas. Legalization of squatter dwellings was one of these programmes. By a series of legislations the MP not only legalized huge tracks of squatter areas but also gave them redevelopment rights. In this way, squat owners became ‘new entrepreneurs’ operating in urban land and housing markets. In a gradual manner, the squatter were first entitled to title deeds by a series of amnesty laws, and then a planning process was initiated for the redevelopment of squatter settlements. In Ankara, between 1984 and 1989 54.7% of the surface of the squatter areas were covered by redevelopment plans which were a prerequisite for the redevelopment process (Özdemir 1998). In 1989 the Social Democrat Populist Party came into power in almost all major cities including Ankara, due to increasing discontent with the liberal policies of the MP (Table 2).

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Table 2: Election results for the Mayor of Ankara Metropolitan Municipality Local Election Year 1989 1994 1999 2004

Liberals

Social Democrats

ProIslamists

Others

Total

20.1 18.7 6.6 0.4

44.1 26.9 32 33.4 (12.6+20.8)9

5.8 27.3 33.8 55.1

30 27.1 27.6 11.1

100.0 100.0 100.0 100.0

Source: Turkish Statistics Institution, Local Election Results

In fact, policies regarding the urban poor did not significantly change from the previous period. The SDPP did not attempt to revitalize the social policies of New Municipalism, and instead implemented rather populist policies towards urban poor. In Ankara, between 1989 and 1991, the surface of squatter areas covered by redevelopment plans reached 78.3% (Özdemir 1998). Apart from the preparation of redevelopment plans nothing significant was done in relation to the problems of urban poor. However, policies based upon the idea of sharing the increasing urban land and house values with the poorer city inhabitants proved insufficient to secure political support. The gap left by the social democrats was filled by pro-Islamists. Their discourse on inequality and social justice, which was in fact borrowed from the social democratic ideology, attracted the poor masses living in the squatter areas of Ankara. In the local elections held in 1994, the Islamist Welfare Party for the first time in Turkish political history took control of the two largest cities (Istanbul and Ankara), together with several middle- and small-size cities, making the 1994 local elections a milestone in Turkish modernization and secularization history. With the 1994 elections, cities became a new battlefield of the Islamist and secular ideologies. This conflict was especially the case in Istanbul and Ankara, where there were several attempts to extract secular space for secular purposes, some of which were successful. Çınar (2005: 102) summarizes these efforts in Istanbul as follows: In its interventions in various sites of the city between 1994 and 1998, the Istanbul city administration run by the Islamist Refah Party formu-

9 In the 2004 local elections social democrat parties (Republican Populist Party and Social Democrat Populist Party) failed to enter a single candidate, which split the social democrat and centre-left votes.

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lated and promoted an alternative nationalist ideology that defined the Turkish nation as an Ottoman-Islamic civilization in contrast to official Turkish-secular national ideology. This Islamist alternative challenged the official ideology, which took West-oriented modernity and secularism as a constitutional basis.

In an extreme attempt to inscribe an Islamist identity on the urban space, the construction of a mosque in Taksim Square was proposed just three months after the party came into office. This square, together with the famous Monument for the Republic built at its centre in 1928, is one of the most important symbols of the Republican Era. In this symbolic square the Islamist city administration wanted to build an equally symbolic and monumental mosque. This attempt evoked an unprecedented reaction from the public in general and from secular circles in particular. Çınar (2005: 117) summarizes the dispute over Taksim Square between secularist and Islamists as follows: What was at stake in this dispute between secularists and Islamists was whether or not Turkish national identity would incorporate and use Islam. The adamant secularist reaction against the project reflected the obstinacy of secularists against granting Islam a visible presence in the Turkish national identity. On the other hand, the aggressive promotion of the project by Islamist circles reflected a desire to insert Islam into national space.

Similar attempts were made in Ankara as well. Symbolic attacks on secular urban space continued during the pro-Islamist rule of the city, starting from 1994. In three successive local elections the Welfare Party, the Virtue Party, and finally the Justice and Development Party came into power in the Ankara Metropolitan Municipality and several district municipalities.10 In the Ankara Metropolitan Municipality and in most of the district municipalities pro-Islamist ideology has been in power for almost fifteen years, much to the surprise of secularist circles (Table 2). More astonishingly, the same mayor (İ. Melih Gokcek) has been elected in these three local elections, and the general performance of the Municipality has become closely associated with his name. During the rule of the pro-Islamist ideology, the city’s modernist and secularist position has been gradually and systematically wiped out. To start with I should mention one of the earliest actions by the mayor 10 As mentioned earlier, these three pro-Islamist parties are one another’s successors, each founded after its predecessor had been closed by the Constitutional Court for being the focal point of anti-secular activities.

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of the Ankara Metropolitan Municipality. In 1994, in his first year in office and on one of his visits to the public open spaces, he verbally abused a sculpture which he declared obscene and had it removed. Later on, several sculptures around the city were removed from public areas on the same reasoning. However, some of these sculptures were ordered by the Court to be replaced. A year later, in 1995, another symbolic attack was undertaken, this time on the Ankara emblem. In 1977 the City Council had selected the ‘Hitit Sun’, which represents the ancient roots of Ankara, to be the city’s emblem or badge. After another City Council decision in 1995 the ‘Hitit Sun’ was replaced by a new emblem, a composition of a mosque and stars. This started a long debate over what image should represent the capital. Only recently, in July 2008, did a court decision put an end to this dispute and stipulate that the City Council’s decision of 1995 to replace the ‘Hitit Sun’ was unlawful. However, so far the Metropolitan Municipality of Ankara has not acted on this decision. In addition to these challenges to the modern and secular symbols of the city, more radical and permanent steps were taken. The construction of mosques all over the city became another battlefield that revealed the power of anti-secular circles. The number of mosques constructed in the city increased rapidly under pro-Islamist rule. In 2006 the total number of mosques in the city reached 1090, taking the population-per-mosque ratio to 2300.11 According to the Turkish planning system the construction of a mosque is only possible on plots designated in the development plan as ‘religious facilities’, which should be allocated to each residential area proportional to its population. Normally, therefore, the first step towards creating a mosque in urban areas should be to find a suitable plot allocated for religious facilities. However, the function attributed to an area in a development plan can easily be changed by plan modifications, if approved by the City Council. In this way, any part of the plan can be converted to ‘religious facilities’. The Ankara Metropolitan Municipality City Council did not hesitate to use this opportunity and made several plan modifications to facilitate construction of mosques. Table 3 lists the number of plan modifications for the purpose of religious facilities under different municipal administrations.

11 To give an idea of the density of mosques country-wide: today the total number of mosques has reached 80,000, whereas schools have remained at only 64,000.

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Table 3: Number of plan modifications under different municipal administrations TYPE OF PLAN MODIFICATION

Transformation of public land to religious facilities Transformation from housing to mosque

1984–1989 1989–1994 1994–1999 1999–2004 2004– TOTAL MP SDPP WP VP JDP OF PRO(ALTINSOY) (KARAYALCIN) (GOKCEK) (GOKCEK) (GOKCEK) ISLAMIST (a) (b) (c) RULE (a+b+c) 17

14

74

12

10

96

10

4

24

3

7

34

Total

27

18

98

15

17

130

Transformation from mosque to commercial

–

2

–

–

–

Source: Derived from Şahin (2007)

As can be seen from the table, in their first period in office the proIslamist city administration and its mayor M. Gokcek made the most plan modifications ever in favour of mosque construction (in total 98 modifications). The great majority of these modifications (74 in the first period and 96 in total) were conversions of public land which was meant to be used for the general public. Similarly, the liberal Motherland Party also made a significant number of plan modifications over 5 years. Again, the majority of these modifications (17 out of 27) were conversions of public land into religious facilities. During the social democrat administration, on the other hand, only 18 plan modifications of this sort were made. When we look at the cumulative total of plan modifications to facilitate mosque construction a pattern emerges. Within fourteen years of the pro-Islamist city administration the total number of plan modifications made for mosque construction reached 130. However, plan modifications to prevent the construction of mosques were only made during the social democrat administration, and the number of such modifications remained two at that. It should be mentioned that, besides its symbolic meaning, a new mosque also means new economic opportunities. ‘Religious facilities’ are allowed to have commercial facilities as well and almost all mosques have a small or large shopping unit which can be either sold or rented out to private businesses. Through the mediation of faithbased organizations the use of these commercial units is allocated to their supporters. Therefore, a mosque represents something more than

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just a religious facility for a religious community. For this reason it would be fair to claim that the increasing number of mosques consolidates in equal measure the pro-Islamic and anti-secular ideology through economic support. Furthermore, it should also be mentioned here that water and electricity used by mosques are free of charge, which means that these costs are borne by the public in general. The construction of a mosque for the apparent intention of granting anti-secularism a visible and persistent presence has always created dispute among the strong supporters of secularism. The first argument began between the Ankara Metropolitan Municipality and Cankaya District Municipality12 over the construction of a mosque facing the Constitutional Court building. The Ankara Metropolitan Municipality Council approved of the plan modification which allowed the construction of a mosque on the plot which had previously been designated as a green area within the Cankaya District. The reason behind the City Council’s decision was something more than the religious needs of the surrounding neighbourhood. The place of the proposed mosque was just opposite the Constitutional Court, which several times had ruled to ban Islamist parties. Therefore, the superiority of the Islamist ideology over the secular circles and their institutions should have been confirmed by building a mosque at such a crucial location in the city. However, Cankaya Municipality took the matter to court and at the end of a long legal battle the project was rejected. Instead, Cankaya Municipality built a public green area named ‘Constitution Park’. Such rather symbolic attempts on the part of the Metropolitan Municipality became part of everyday life in Ankara. Today, the municipal administration is busy with yet another mosque project. This time the significance of the project was revealed to the public by the Directorate of Religious Affairs. In the initial announcement made by the Directorate officials, the necessity of a V.I.P. Mosque in the city was underlined and the plan for a new V.I.P. Mosque with a capacity of 15,000 believers was introduced. However, the project drew reactions from both secularists and some sections of the Islamists. The former claimed there was no need for an additional mosque in the location proposed, as there are hardly any

12 As from the 1989 local elections, social democrat parties have always been in power in the Cankaya District Municipality, which has caused an ongoing tension with the Ankara Metropolitan Municipality.

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residential areas in the neighbourhood. The latter, on the other hand, strongly contested the idea of V.I.P mosque on the grounds that Islam itself regards everybody as equal regardless of socio-economic status. Nevertheless, the Directorate of Religious Affairs gave the go-ahead to the project in spite of these ongoing debates. 4. Concluding Remarks The modernization process involves a complex interaction between society, economics and politics. Secularization occupies a special role in this process as it refers to rationality, the liberation of individual beliefs, and emancipation from tradition. In Turkey, the west-oriented modernization project has long determined the building of a nation-state: secularism was the main pillar of this project. In the early Republican Era the most radical measures were taken towards the secularization and modernization of society. These radical top-down policies, in fact, have never attained control since they failed to take root in society and resulted in, among other things, an increase in non-secular and religious social demands by certain groups. During the Multi-party Era, in line with populist policies, the secularization of society lost its importance. Religion became the main ideology of politics and was pragmatically used by centre-right and right-wing parties. The 1980s witnessed a further strengthening of the anti-secular discourse, which was actually used by the military regime against the rising leftist ideology. As a result, starting from the 1980s, pro-Islamist political parties became stronger in the social and political spheres of the country. It should be noted that like any other societal project, the Kemalist project was itself a highly spatial one. The spatial aspect of the modernization and secularization project of the Republican elites was shaped by the selection of Ankara as the capital of the new Republic. The construction of a new capital was used as a means of creating a secular society. The planned new city with its modern public buildings and spaces was thought to be the home of the new secular society which could then be presented as a model for the rest of the country. An increasing number of urban poor migrated from rural areas to the city and distorted this ideal of the new capital. Later on, measures were taken to reverse this trend. During the 1970s some efforts helped to

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sustain the secular legacy of the city through the social democratic city administration. However, these efforts were not enough to prevent the consolidation of an anti-secular discourse. In Ankara, starting from the 1994 local elections, pro-Islamic parties gained control of the city administration thanks largely to support from the urban poor. The pro-Islamic city administration has in various spheres applied policies which undermine the secular legacy of the city. This chapter was not intended to provide an exhaustive account of these policies and its impacts on the city, but rather to emphasize the symbolic and ideological aspects of these policies. I hope to have shown that most current policies in this area aim at displacing the symbols of the secular project. It is perhaps time to see how different segments of the city population will react to such a change in the years to come. Perhaps the struggle between these two projects is not yet over. References Castells, M. (1997) The Power of Identity. Oxford: Blackwell. Çınar, A. (2005) Modernity, Islam and Secularism in Turkey: Bodies, Places and Time. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Danielson, M. N. and Keleş, R. (1985) The Politics of Rapid Urbanisation: Government and Growth in Modern Turkey. New York: Holmes & Meier. Erdem, G. (2008) ‘Religious Services in Turkey: From the Office of Şeyhülislam to the Diyanet’. The Muslim World 98, 199–215. Ertan, A. (2007) ‘The Tension Between Secularism and Democracy in Turkey: Early Origins, Current Legacy’. European View 6, 11–20. Gorski, P. S. and Altinordu, A. (2008) ‘After Secularisation?’ Annual Review of Sociology 34, 55–85. Gülalp, H. (2005) ‘Enlightenment by Fiat: Secularization and Democracy in Turkey’. Middle Eastern Studies 41, 351–72. Harvey, D. (1998) The Condition of Postmodernity. Oxford: Blackwell. Kahraman, H. B. (2008) Türk Siyasetinin Yapısal Analizi-I (Structural Analysis of Turkish Politics-I). Istanbul: Agora Kitaplığı. Keleş, R. (1993) Kentlesme Politikasi (Politics of Urbanisation). Ankara: Imge Kitapevi. Keleş, R. and Kano, H. (1987) Housing and the Urban Poor in the Middle East. Tokyo: Institute of Developing Economies. Keyman, F. (2007) ‘Modernity, Secularism and Islam: The case of Turkey’. Theory, Culture and Society 24, 215–34. Mardin, S. (2007) Türkiye’de Din ve Siyaset; Makaleler (Religious and Politics in Turkey, Articles). 13th edition. Istanbul: İletişim Yayınları. Özdemir, N. (1998) The Transformation of Squatter Settlements into Authorised Apartment Blocks: A Case Study of Ankara, Turkey. Unpublished Ph.D. Thesis, University of Kent at Canterbury, UK. Şahin, S. Z. (2007) Politics of Urban Planning in Ankara Betwen 1985 and 2005. Unpublished Ph.D. Thesis, Middle East Technical University, Ankara.

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Sarı, O. (2004) The Role of Secularisation During the Turkish Nation-State Building Process. Unpublished MA Thesis, Middle East Technical University, Ankara. Şengül, T. (1998) Hegemony and Urban Space: The Case of Turkish Capital Ankara. Unpublished Ph.D. Thesis, University of Kent at Canterbury, UK. Tahirli, T. (2005) Secularisation in a Strong Religious Society: The Case of Turkey. Linkorpings University Report. Tankut, G. (1990) Bir Baskentin Imari: Ankara 1929–1939 (Construction of a Capital: Ankara 1929–1939). Ankara: ODTU. Tekeli, I. (1997) ‘Türkiye Bağlamında Modernite Projesi ve Islam’ (Modernity Project and Islam in Turkish Context). 1990’ların Bilançosu, Türkiye İşçi Sendikaları Konfederasyonu, TURK-IŞ Araştırma Merkezi Yayınları 2, 412–51. Turam, B. (2004) ‘The Politics of Engagement Between Islam and the Secular State: Ambivalences of “Civil Society” ’. The British Journal of Sociology 55, 259–81.

POSTSECULARISM OR LATE SECULARISM? FAITH CREATING PLACE IN THE US Candice Dias and Justin Beaumont When presented with Habermas’s assertion of the postsecular, one can question the extent to which we have had a secular era, and if so, whether we have indeed passed a secular period to emerge into something beyond the secular. The discussion of the ‘postsecular’ ranges beyond Habermas, of course, yet his framing continues to dominate the discussion, and he has not engaged with others who have offered some, perhaps more nuanced, variations on the theme of an understanding of the secular that is being transformed (cf. Taylor 2007). There are observers of the European scene who view the postsecular as a fait accompli and less as a concept under interrogation as well as others who question the validity of the concept within the European context (see in this volume: Beckford, also D. Martin). In this chapter we critically review the concept of the postsecular in relation to place-making attributes of faiths in the US. We first address various conceptual and theoretical controversies, emanating from the application of postsecular thinking to that of cities, then substantiate our argument via a detailed case study based on fieldwork conducted among congregations in Philadelphia. We will not speak to the utility of the concept of the postsecular as a European concept. Instead we will review its relevance in the U.S. context with reference to research among two faith-based organizations (FBOs) in Philadelphia.1 In addressing the postsecular as a more universal concept, we draw upon Michiel Leezenberg’s critiques of Habermas (in this volume) and like Leezenberg, suggest that, to a considerable extent, ‘the postsecular’ is a highly Eurocentric concept that, as framed by Habermas, has little utility for contemporary U.S. cities. 1 These findings are based on research done by Dias over the course of a year in 2008–2009. Methodological triangulation via interviews, observation and document analysis were used to investigate and understand the role of these congregations in their neighbourhoods and their own conceptions of their role. Informants were congregation members, congregation leaders and neighbourhood residents who were not congregation members.

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In light of the Habermasian position, let us pay a little more attention to Leezenberg’s arguments (in this volume). Leezenberg’s critique of Habermasian postsecularity finds three primary points of weakness: first, that Habermas’s reflections are admittedly and ‘defiantly Eurocentric’ emerging from a perspective that is clearly entrenched in the historical, social and political contexts of Western Europe; second, that Habermas views modernization and secularity as linear processes, and so is bound by the linear temporality of this assumption, entwining modernization and secularity so tightly that normatively, ‘successful modernization is secular or at least non-fundamentalist’; and lastly, Leezenberg notes that the emergence and propagation of the postsecular is itself an ‘ideological representation’ through which speakers can align themselves with particular (progressive) indicators and pass ‘implicit judgements as to which voices are legitimate’. Leezenberg’s examples from the Islamic world particularly illuminate some of these gaps: he notes, for example, that the public-private sphere separation that is necessary for secularization is not part of Islam and that, further, rather than separating religion out from the other social and political functioning, Islamic societies such as Iran have politicized Islam. In other words, disaggregating the spheres of religion, politics and power, for instance, has not been a path to modernity for these nations. Their approaches undermine Habermas’s implicit linear onwards march towards modernity but also challenge the assumptions about the de-privatization of religion that underpin the notion of postsecularism. In the spirit of Leezenberg we extend the critique of Habermas with regards changes and differences over space and time. In his statements on the contemporary role of religion, Habermas temporal stretch is surprisingly recent: he characterizes current religion as often ‘forming the seedbed for the decentralized form of terrorism’ (Habermas 2006: 1). Oddly, too, when he mentions religion in many Muslim countries and Israel as ‘either an alternative or a substitute for secular civil law’ (Habermas 2006: 1), he asserts this as a new development in the role of religion. Habermas aside, in Israel, for example, religious law and religion have in fact had an ongoing entanglement with the secular state since its inception. Similarly, India, the site of vigorous debate about secularism has also—for over 60 years—adapted a secular polity to allow the existence of parallel religious legal entities.

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This temporal short-sightedness also leads Habermas to err in asserting that there is a ‘political revitalization of religion at the heart of the United States’ (Habermas 2006: 1) as though the era of George W. Bush re-introduced religion to Americans and to the American polity (Habermas 2006: 3). In fact, the introduction of religious institutions as government assistants began under Bill Clinton’s Charitable Choice Act in 1996 as part of his transformation of the already limited U.S. welfare system. Further, Habermas seems to ignore the alliances between neoconservatives and the religious right that were cemented by the time of the ‘Contract with America’ era in the early and mid90s—and well before Bush II (Smith 2001). Habermas’s characterizations appear to cast religion in American politics and policy as newly resurgent, which we argue on the basis of ongoing research in Philadelphia as mistaken. Habermas tends to treat the U.S. case as if prior to Bush II and the terrorist attacks of September 11th the U.S. was largely secular. Interestingly, this timeline and historical juncture bears a closer resemblance to events in Europe: Western European nations have tended to view themselves as secular, and following the terrorist attacks in New York, London and Madrid in recent years, the public gaze in media, political and policy circles has undergone a sudden shift towards the assumed changing role of religion in contemporary (European) societies (see Beaumont in this volume).2 The assumption of a secular era that has come and gone also suffers from a certain empirical vagueness. When indeed was the secular era, what constituted it, and what has changed that places us in a postsecular realm? Charles Taylor’s (2007) specification of three types of secularity provides a useful rebuttal of the Habermasian conception of the postsecular. In Taylor’s typology, the first comprises the separation of church and state where the religious is removed from the explicit state; the second type of secularity is one where religious practice and belief decline; and the last type of secularity is one where ‘faith (. . .) is one human possibility among others’. What Taylor describes is a secular that is flexible and responsive. Taylor calls this last mode, ‘Secularity 3’, but in this chapter we prefer the term ‘late secularism’ suggested by Robert Baird (2000). Like Taylor, Baird suggests that simply because 2

The EU 7th Framework FACIT project (Faith-based organizations and exclusion in European cities) explores the changing roles of FBOs in European cities as a departure from the predominance of research on the U.S. and to a lesser but growing extent the U.K. (see http://www.facit.be).

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this manifestation of the secular does not forcefully subjugate religion does not render it any less secular. In this understanding, then, we would suggest that the U.S. remains in a state of late secularism because little has changed in terms of the role of religion in U.S. public life. Of course, the legal separation of church and state remains—and the contestation around this fact remains consistent, fluctuating within a narrow range like the slight movement created around a horizon in a desert mirage—that is, it remains fixed, but there is always a certain amount of static around it. Similarly, religious organizations continue to play a role of filling in state gaps (if we assume, that the state should be a stronger welfare state)—but this situation is not dissimilar to the role of religion in the 19th century. While it seemed possible that religion may have become more legislatively prominent at the national level with the establishment of the Charitable Choice Act and with the early efforts and promises of the second Bush Administration, in the end, the displacement of this agenda by the crises of terrorism and the Iraq war meant that the landscape of religion and politics has changed relatively little. The role of religion in the U.S., then, can be seen as typical of the late secular. To illustrate the late secular in the U.S., we will discuss two churches and their neighbourhoods in Philadelphia. We suggest that the role played by these churches is one that supplements secular state efforts rather than replacing them, in a manner that is typical of American late secularism. In particular, these churches offer alternative routes into the (re)creation of a spatial citizenship. We might even suggest that they allow residents to re-discover neighbourhood, facilitating the renewal of a neighbourhood identity and in so doing, shifting emphasis from the city and the metropolitan/regional towards this emphatically local site of action and identity formation. In this local arena, FBOs and especially congregations can be important actors in the building of social cohesion;3 this is an important activity where the state values social cohesion but does little to 3 Several typologies of FBOs have been suggested (Chaves 2002; DiIulio 2002; Sider and Unruh 2004); all include congregations as a unit whose focus is explicitly on activities of worship, with other activities as secondary. These categories are based on an ideal-type notion that each sphere of activity can be clearly defined—this is not dissimilar to the Habermasian public-private distinction necessary for secularization. The congregations discussed here and Mennonite theology generally question the boundedness of these spheres, suggesting that taking care of one’s neighbours, for example, can be part of an extended act of worship.

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actively promote it. Before we discuss the role of these churches, it would be useful to briefly clarify our understanding of social cohesion and social capital: recent discussions have often confused the two in no small part due to Robert Putnam’s conflation of ‘community’ and social capital (1995; 2000). Scholars who have sought to disentangle these concepts have noted that social cohesion ‘involves patterns of social interaction and values’ (Carpiano 2007: 641) that rest on shared values and connectedness. In contrast, social capital as suggested by Bourdieu is the collective resources or potential resources of a group (Carpiano 2007; Portes 2000; Colclough and Sitaraman 2005). Holding these two definitions in mind it becomes clear that for social capital to be actualized, social cohesion becomes its precursor; however, the two are not rigidly sequential, as some degree of social cohesion must be present for the development of social capital. The congregations from Philadelphia that we discuss revealed a surprisingly acute awareness of these connections, even when they used their own language of fellowship, ministry and community. 2. A People of Reconciliation The two churches discussed in this chapter are both Mennonite churches, each located in a neighbourhood of transition. The first, Roosevelt Mennonite, is located in the Northeast area of Philadelphia, an area that is primarily residential and until 10 years ago, its residents were typically white, working-class and of Irish Catholic extraction; its newer residents are African-Americans, Latinos and immigrants from Russia and Eastern Europe. The second, Cedar Mennonite, sits in West Philadelphia between a zone of recent gentrification and an area that lost its stable working class base with deindustrialization and is now spotted with abandoned buildings and intermittent and illicit street activity. This church too operates in a physical and social moment of neighbourhood transition but between two relatively homogeneous groups: young, well-educated and middle-class white gentrifiers and older, poor and working class African-Americans. It might aid in understanding the role these churches play if we appreciate something of the history and theology of the Mennonites. The Mennonites are an Anabaptist Protestant sect founded in the 16th century and named after the Dutch cleric Menno Simons; most Mennonites of the this period were Swiss and German and, after

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substantial persecution in Europe, many migrated to the U.S. in the 18th and 19th centuries. They created self-contained rural communities, maintaining strong Swiss and German traditions well into the 20th century; as such, the term Mennonite also carries an ethnic component. Theologically, pacifism, peace-making and justice are core Mennonite tenets which were in part responsible for the migration of many young Mennonites to cities in the 1960s and 1970s. As conscientious objectors in a time of compulsory military service, Mennonites fulfilled state obligations through community service in needy urban areas. Many who came to the city remained after their service and became pioneers in creating an urban Mennonite identity and these efforts along with missions to countries of the global South resulted in a minority of African-American and Asian Mennonites. In the late 1940s when Roosevelt church was established in Northeast Philadelphia, the area was not considered a part of the city, viewed instead as a streetcar suburb; the Mennonites could brave a leafy garden suburb but not the city proper. The church was initially comprised of less than 10 members, traditional ethnic Mennonites, who—using the language of the church, felt ‘called to plant’ a church near the godless city.4 Over 30 years later, in the 1980s, Cedar Mennonite emerged from a community of young Mennonites whose contact with the city had come through community service and who felt called to reach out to the urban lost and ‘unchurched’. Fundamental to Mennonite belief is the concept of conciliating opposing positions, of mediating between otherwise opposing groups, ideas and positionalities. At the centre of the Roosevelt Church’s worship space, behind a small altar, is not a cross or reference to Christ, but a banner that says ‘A People of Reconciliation’. At Cedar Mennonite, informants constantly mentioned the importance of Christ as a peace maker and struggled with what they felt as a call to bring peace to the city. In fact, the centrality and purity of peace was so emphasized that Mennonites typically used the Hebrew term shalom and e-mail communications from them were inevitably signed, ‘Shalom’. But peace was drawn not simply as the absence of violence but the absence of conflict and certainly, ideally, the presence of active harmony. One 4 ‘Church planting’ is the process of establishing a new church. Mennonites used the theological language of being ‘called’ to engage in this process: through spiritual discernment (usually prayer), a congregation or individuals would decide that God is calling them to begin a new a church in a particular area. These calls are typically supported by pre-existing contact with or knowledge of the church planting area.

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congregant illustrated this expansive definition by explaining that when, after a long day at work, she went home and reprimanded her children for minor annoyances, she was not acting peacefully and the struggle for appropriate Christian shalom permeated even interactions in the private sphere of family and the home. 3. Reflecting the Neighbourhood In this understanding of what it means to be a practicing Christian, Mennonites might be natural mediators in zones of transition. At Roosevelt Mennonite, its Northeast neighbourhood is in the midst of residential succession: white, working class Irish Catholic ethnics have moved to the suburbs or are aging and are being replaced by poor and working-class African-Americans, Latinos and Eastern European immigrants. In the U.S., churches have become affinity groups, centred as much around shared economic, ethnic and educational commonality as around religious belief—perhaps even more so. As voluntary associations emerging from shared demographic traits, churches are typically organizations that worshippers commute to and concomitantly were increasingly detached from place. The city is the social scale of faith adherence that permits the gathering in sufficient numbers of like-minded, faith-motivated, and action-oriented people. This is true both within faith boundaries, and more radically in interfaith or multi-faith initiatives (e.g. the Interfaith Workers Justice movement in Chicago; cf. Sziarto 2008). Cities, moreover, have always been the focus of, sometimes contradictory developments that are at the heart of the research area. First, poverty has characteristically been seen as a particularly urban problem. This situation has been mirrored by a concern of first private and then public authorities, with helping the poor and later combating (inner-city) poverty—not only out of care for the poor but also as a factor in a strategy of self-preservation. Second, cities always have been diverse, in many respects; diversity relates as much to longstanding Christian communities within cities as it does to ethnically differentiated groups. Third, national level support for urban FBOs, as well as support of national FBOs for the activities of fellow members among excluded groups in cities, make the urban arena important for attention. And fourth, cities exhibit a diversity of ethnic and immigrant groups that mirror both the opportunities and problems of social integration.

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If it were typical, the congregants at Roosevelt Mennonite would be commuting to the church from elsewhere and the church would be only incidentally part of the neighbourhood: that is, its connection to the Northeast would be almost accidental. Instead, the Mennonites there have deliberately decided to engage with their surroundings and be a church not simply in the neighbourhood but of it too. In this respect, Mennonites differ from many other Christian denominations because the role of place is central to their definition of community and ,therefore, congregation. The Mennonite idea of community is rooted in a rural struggle for survival; as farmers, Mennonites created a culture of assisting each other through the vagaries of rural life—but implicit in this was the factor of proximity: one helped one’s neighbours because they were close by and proximity made farmers interdependent. Urbanizing Mennonites took with them the spatial definition of community. In practice, for Roosevelt Mennonite, this meant that a church that was historically Mennonite in ethnic terms— meaning comprised of white farmers and rurally rooted people—was faced with a range of ethnicities many of which were specifically urban-oriented. To achieve conciliation between these contrasting groups, the church changed the face of its leadership and surveyed the neighbourhood as to its needs. The former was a literal change of face. An ethnic Mennonite pastor, white and traditionally bearded, retired and was replaced by a young African-American man. The change was noticed immediately: an African-American woman who eventually became a church member commented: At first, I didn’t know who these Mennonites were (. . .) I thought they were white people from farms. And so, I thought, that’s a white church. But then I saw Pastor Stone, and I thought, ‘Oh, black people go there too.’

The second step in their process of conciliation was a demographic analysis of the neighbourhood and a door-to-door survey of their neighbours. They asked what problems and issues the community faced and, of course, invited people to attend church. As with many Christian groups who believe they have an imperative to proselytize and convert, the Mennonites used their encounters with their neighbours to encourage church attendance: what was striking, however, was that explicit religion—worship—was secondary to their endeavour. One might suggest that the mention of the invitation to church

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attendance automatically de-secularizes these interactions. We would argue, however, for a more nuanced analysis of these exchanges. If uninflected, classical secularism views interactions as either religious or secular, whereas late secularism, clearly recognizes the presence of many layers to an interaction. Through the lens of a flexible secularism, then, we can take into account all factors without permitting the mentioning of a single factor (religion) to eclipse the value and meaning of other elements. In this perspective, we argue that their primary purpose—both within their own perceptions and in their behaviour— was in identifying gaps in the care of the neighbourhood: a secular goal using secular tools of analysis. What they found was a neighbourhood that previously had the luxury of a degree of automatic social cohesion that came with ethnic, class and religious homogeneity and so lacked institutions and independent structures to promote social cohesion because it had so depended on the defaults of sameness. They then made a series of conscious decisions to establish institutions that would promote interactions between neighbourhood residents and improve services for these people. Roosevelt Mennonite created an annual community festival, making a point to advertise the festival by dropping flyers at every residence within a 10 block radius of the church and in particular at the local public housing settlement. The event was funded by the church and staffed by congregants; activities were child-focused and food was free. It might be wondered what the significance of such ‘ordinary’ church activities might have; after all, in some communities, churches arrange festivities frequently. Roosevelt Mennonite’s community festival diverges from these in significant ways: first, the church reaches out with a specific neighbourhood focus—it is a deliberate choice to restrict advertising to a 10 block radius and to saturate that community with advertising; second, the event is not to raise money for the church or to promote the church, but is focused on residents and it removes any monetary bar by offering all activities and, even more importantly, food without cost. The church’s second community effort is the creation of a community development association (CDA). The purpose of the CDA was to establish relationships with existing community institutions to fill gaps that the church saw in its neighbourhood. These efforts included a low cost summer camp in partnership with the residents from the public housing compound and attempts to build bridges with school

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authorities to address youth delinquency and violence in the neighbourhood. Perhaps most significantly, the CDA and church purchased a $3.5 million building in which to house both the church and community outreach programmes. Symbolically, the building was owned and occupied by police and fire-fighter’s associations—groups that were dominated by the Irish Catholic ethnics that used to populate the Northeast. The story of Roosevelt Mennonite Church is tempting to look at through the single lens of success; however, is this story indeed, an unremittingly positive story for the neighbourhood? The need for ‘bringing Christ’ to the ‘unchurched’, while often explicitly secondary, remains an important motivator and implicit goal for the church and its community development association. This situation has the potential to exclude others who view this as religious competition, but perhaps more, it means that those who choose to be ‘unchurched’ have that choice constantly questioned if they want to use these services— and there are few alternatives to the services provided by Roosevelt Mennonite. Further, the fact that the distress of this neighbourhood is not noticed by the city or school district, nor other agencies of secular responsibility, is a reminder that these agencies are not responsive enough and, in fact, often wait for a neighbourhood to enter into crisis before they take action. That is, government does not concern itself with prevention, but often with failed attempts at cure. The degree of activism and initiative that this FBO engages in, then, can also be read as the failure of government and, ultimately, of a secular civil society to meet the needs of local inhabitants and foster socially cohesive relations at the neighbourhood level. 4. Aiding and Abetting Gentrification? At Cedar Mennonite, the struggle for conciliation takes place in a neighbourhood that is being nudged out of distress through processes of gentrification. In West Philadelphia, a classic gentrification process is occurring: low income African-Americans are being pushed out by increases in housing costs and related taxes while being replaced by educated, young middle-class whites. This congregation pre-dates gentrification but demographically resembles the gentrifiers in all but age: that is, it is a highly educated, middle-class and almost entirely white congregation. It was established in the 1980s by young ethnic

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Mennonites who wanted to engage with the city and urban problems: for them, that meant living in a deteriorating, predominantly AfricanAmerican neighbourhood. From the outset, its congregants were determinedly intentional about becoming part of the ‘community’—they emphasized the importance of living within walking distance of the church, of participating in the community and of being ‘of the city’— yet, race and class persisted as a divide between them and the surrounding community. Unlike Roosevelt Mennonite, they did not take visible steps to reflect their neighbours nor did they take the simple step of asking what the community needed. Cedar Mennonite focused on the spiritual development and needs of its own congregants, yet they continued to agonize over how to incorporate the larger community. In the last 10 years, as gentrification gathered pace, the persistent separation of this church community became more apparent: their obvious, visible resemblance to the encroachers was unavoidable and Cedar Mennonite congregants began to worry explicitly about ‘aiding and abetting gentrification’. Their concern was that as a white congregation in a black neighbourhood they had paved the way for new white residents. In early interviews, congregants cast themselves as actively responding by creating a housing rehab project as ‘a bulwark against gentrification’ (interview). The development of this effort, however, was initially intended to provide housing for young congregants purchasing their first homes. After identifying a block of abandoned buildings as their potential site, the group recognized their actions as indistinguishable from gentrifiers in creating conditions that push out current residents. This realization as well the realization that government funding was not available for self-interested projects, shifted their focus from their own needs to creating affordable housing. 5. Concluding Thoughts Through investigating these two congregations, we have had an opportunity to reflect on the discourses of secularism and postsecularism and their empirical application. In this chapter we have critically reviewed both ideas as seen through a Habermasian lens and concluded that in the U.S. context the persistence of religion does not suggest a postsecular moment, but neither does it suggest a Habermasian secularity. Instead, where religious actors supplement secular agencies or act in the absence of the state for a non-sacred goal—a goal that is

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essentially secular—we propose these activities as evidence of a flexible late secularism. In this manner, Cedar Mennonite and Roosevelt Mennonite each offer an understanding of, and approach to, neighbourhood participation and identity that is absent from secular efforts. Both seek to embed themselves in their respective neighbourhoods in a way that is noncommercial, non-consumption and non-market oriented. In cities, commercial and especially retail activity often determines neighbourhood identity and vitality—this is the seductiveness of gentrification in creating ‘new’ neighbourhoods—but these churches suggest that neighbourhoods can be (re)created through non-consumption transactions. They re-vitalize the idea of neighbourhood. However, their efforts are not representative of undifferentiated faith within the concept of FBOs but rather are reflective of a specifically Mennonite approach to community. Mennonites view membership in a congregation as an active choice and commitment to that community; this implies that an individual subscribes to norms of the Mennonite community but also suggests strong individual responsibility and accountability to the community. They attempt through the community festival, the community development association and the housing project to extend this idea of being bound by community to those beyond their congregation. This deliberate and intentional framing of community has brought a spark of social cohesion to neighbourhoods that are fragmented and find themselves with no common site upon which to encounter each other. The efforts of these Mennonite congregations have served to remind residents that they are not merely accidental occupants of a particular space, but can derive meaning from that space and draw upon it to create a viable community. These are efforts towards urban vitality and cohesion that state actors desire but have not brought material focus to. Here the removal of the strict rules of Habermasian secularism— the stripping of any theological signifiers, for example—allow FBOs to effectively step in and offer religiously driven resources towards secular community and secular cohesion. References Baird, R. J. (2000) ‘Late Secularism’. Social Text 18, 123–36. Carpiano, R. M. (2007) ‘Neighborhood Social Capital and Adult Health: An Empirical Test of a Bourdieu-based Model’. Health and Place 13, 639–55.

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Chaves, M. (2002) ‘Religious Organizations: Data Resources and Research Opportunities’. American Behavioral Scientist 45, 1523–49. Colclough, G. and Sitaraman, B. (2005) ‘Community and Social Capital: What is the Difference?’ Sociological Inquiry 75, 474–96. DiIulio Jr, J. J. (2002) ‘The Three Faith Factors’. Public Interest 149, 50–4. Habermas, J. (2006) ‘Religion in the Public Sphere’. European Journal of Philosophy 14, 1–25. Pawar, M. (2006) ‘Social Capital?’ The Social Science Journal 43, 211–26. Portes, A. (2000) ‘The Two Meanings of Social Capital’. Sociological Forum 15, 1–12. Putnam, R. D. (1995) ‘Bowling Alone: America’s Declining Social Capital’. Journal of Democracy 6, 65–78. —— (2000) Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community. New York: Simon & Schuster. Sider, R. J. and Unruh, H. R. (2004) ‘Typology of Religious Characteristics of Social Service and Educational Organizations and Programs’. Nonprofit and Voluntary Sector Quarterly 33, 109–34. Smith, M. C. (2001) ‘Payback or Continuity? GOP Support of the Religious Right in the House of Representatives’. In Kuzenski, J. C., Moreland, L. W. and Steed, R. P. (eds) Eye of the Storm: The South and Congress in an Era of Change. Santa Barbara CA: Praeger Publishers. Sziarto, K. (2008) ‘Placing Legitimacy: Organizing Religious Support in a Health Care Workers’ Contract Campaign’. Tijdschrift voor Economische en Sociale Geografie (Journal of Economic and Social Geography) 99, 406–25. Taylor, C. (2007) A Secular Age. Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press.

VIRTUAL RE-EVANGELIZATION: BRAZILIAN CHURCHES, MEDIA AND THE POSTSECULAR CITY1 Martijn Oosterbaan It is Wednesday morning in Barcelona. The sound of my cell phone indicates that I have received a message. It is from the Brazilian pastor Daniel. The message reads: ‘peace Good People, I am awaiting you td for a great worship and adoration service for our LORD JESUS, C. *** 6 at 18h,***Pr Daniel.’ While reading the message I remember that the pastor had asked all attendants of the church service to write down their cell phone numbers, and I understand that he uses them to send evangelical messages to all the guests and regulars of the church to remind them of the next event. Although it is the first time I witness this evangelization strategy, his digital technique does not come as a complete surprise. Initially I had found the evangelical church through a video of a church service on YouTube put there by pastor Daniel. The email address linked to the YouTube video gave me—and other interested seekers—the chance to visit his church in Barcelona.2 And so I did. During our first face-to-face conversation in the summer of 2008 the pastor explained that he had established the church no more than half a year before. While residing in Brazil, he felt a strong calling to ‘preach the gospel to his people in Barcelona’. He left São Paulo with some funds and with the financial help of an evangelical ministry in London he leased a space in the centre of Barcelona. Having decided to preach specifically to Brazilians in Portuguese, Daniel started a search on the social network site Orkut (powered by Google), and sent 1 This paper forms part of the NWO-funded project: ‘New Media, Public Sphere and Urban Culture’, headed by Prof. Boomkens at the University of Groningen. Basically, this research project aims to create a bridge between normative discussions about emerging transnational public spheres and empirical discussions concerning new media, community formation and city life. I wish to thank NWO for making this research possible and the project members for their valuable insights. Given the precarious position of many undocumented migrants I have changed the names of the churches I discuss here, with the exception of the Congregação Cristã no Brasil, which is only mentioned twice. All the informants have imaginary names to secure their anonymity. 2 YouTube is the popular Internet application that allows users to upload and view videos.

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out invitations to all people who stated they were living in Barcelona and who identified themselves as evangélicos (evangelicals) on their Orkut profile. Not long after that, the first Brazilian migrants started to attend church services and when I first visited the church, a stable group of members and regular visitors had been formed who welcomed me enthusiastically. This essay concerns contemporary flows of people, religion and information in relation to the postsecular European city; in general, it deals with the role of religious institutions and practices in the lives of recent arrivals in Western European cities. Ethnographic research among Brazilian migrants in Amsterdam and Barcelona shows that religious networks provide practical information on how to organize life in the city of arrival, and offer collective practices that enhance a sense of belonging. This paper focuses particularly on the role of evangelical Internet applications and sites. It is argued that the migrants use Brazilian evangelical websites and social network sites to sustain face-to-face encounters in the city, produce and maintain a sense of belonging in a specific place, and reproduce a symbolic space in/on which to project a global Christian community. Lastly, this essay briefly touches upon the political character of religious (virtual) communities in European cities at a time of enhanced polarization between so-called European insiders and outsiders. It is argued that evangelical communities provide a place for the migrants to express and discuss the hardships of undocumented residence and unemployment, and offer them alternative political-religious scripts to counter narratives of national inclusion and exclusion. 1. Brazilians in Western Europe The number of Latin Americans who have come to work and live in Europe has increased significantly over the past decade.3 Popular European destinations among Brazilian migrants are London, Amsterdam, Lisbon, Madrid, Barcelona, Rome and Paris. It is estimated that there are about thirteen thousand registered Brazilians living in the Netherlands.4 A large portion of the Brazilian migrants in the Netherlands live in 3

Migration from Latin America to Europe: Trends and Policy Challenges. International Organization for Migration (2004). 4 http://statline.cbs.nl/StatWeb/Table.asp?STB=T&LA=nl&DM=SLNL&PA=37296n ed&D1=a&D2=0,10,20,30,40,50,(l-1)-l&HDR=G1, accessed 26 February 2008.

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Amsterdam and Rotterdam. Research by the Amsterdam Bureau of Statistics shows that there has been an increase of 67% in the number of migrants from Latin America between 1992 and 2006;5 Brazilians are specifically mentioned as a group that has grown much (23.77%, 1489–1843).6 Meanwhile, the figure for total population of the city has changed very little.7 There were about 9,000 registered Brazilians in Barcelona in the beginning of 2008, compared to 2,000 in 2002. Besides the numerical growth of registered Brazilians the group has also grown in comparison to other groups of migrants. Whereas in 2002 Brazilians comprised 1.7% of all newcomers, in 2008 this was 3.2%.8 In fact, statistics demonstrate that Brazilians were the fastest-growing group of migrants in Barcelona between 2001 and 2008.9 Other fast-growing groups include people from Pakistan, Bolivia and China. According to the International Organization for Migration (IOM), the growth of the Brazilian migrant population in Europe can be related to the increasing restrictions to enter the USA, especially after 9/11, and to the pre-existent communities of Brazilian migrants in the European cities. Existing networks facilitate the migration process as migrants find work and residence via friends, acquaintances and relatives.10 This concurs with my general findings. Many, though certainly not all Brazilians in Amsterdam and in Barcelona initially traveled to a city where relatives or friends had already established a livelihood.11 Likewise, the work of Beatriz Padilla (2006) confirms the importance of social networks in the flow and patterns of contemporary migration from Brazil to Portugal.

5 This does not include Surinamese or Antillean migrants, who are treated as a separate category. 6 Besides these documented Brazilians there are many undocumented Brazilians who work and live in Amsterdam, but exact figures are hard to give. 7 From 722,350 in 1995 to 743,027 in 2006. http://www.os.amsterdam.nl/publicaties/ amsterdamincijfers, accessed 31 March 2009. 8 http://www.bcn.es/estadistica/angles/dades/inf/pobest/pobest08/part1/t326.htm, accessed 25 September 2008. 9 http://www.bcn.es/estadistica/angles/dades/inf/pobest/pobest08/part1/t31.htm, accessed 9 October 2008. 10 Migration from Latin America to Europe: Trends and Policy Challenges. International Organization for Migration (2004). 11 Quite a few people said the strong position of the euro in relation to the US dollar—and the Brazilian real—stimulated them to migrate to Europe rather than the United States.

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To the relative growth of the number of documented Brazilians in Europe should be added the probable growth of undocumented Brazilian migrants. Such an increase is likely if one takes into account the increase of attempted ‘illegal’ entries into the European Union, the discussions in Brazilian and European media and the number of undocumented Brazilians I met in the two cities of my research.12 Brazilian citizens are generally allowed to enter the European Union on a tourist visa, yet more and more European countries require Brazilians to demonstrate upon arrival that they have a return ticket, a place of residence at their destination and enough money to sustain themselves for the period of their stay. Such demands are connected to the concerns of European Union members that too many undocumented people remain within the Schengen-associated countries. The European treaties of Schengen and Amsterdam have increased the mobility of citizens of these nations. The treaties have lead to a reduction or abolishment of border checks within the Schengen territory, accompanied by the intensification of outer border control.13 In February 2007 the pan-European organization Frontex, responsible for the development of an integrated program for border security for European Union member states, commenced operation Amazon II, designed to ‘tackle illegal migration from South America’. According to the Frontex website, 29 experts were deployed at eight European airports: Amsterdam, Barcelona, Frankfurt, Lisbon, Madrid, Milan, Paris and Rome. ‘During the operational phase of Amazon II the [sic] total of 2178 South American nationals were refused entry at the airports involved, the biggest groups being the Bolivians, Brazilians and nationals of Paraguay.’14 While operation Amazon II is called an example of an accomplished mission by Frontex itself, the surveillance of the outer borders of the European Union to control the entrance of non-European citizens has led to conflicts between the Brazilian government and individual European member states.15 In February and March 2008 the govern12 As De Genova (2002: 422) has forcefully argued, ‘ “illegality” (much like citizenship) is a juridical status, that entails a social relation to the state; as such, migrant “illegality” is a preeminently political identity’. 13 http://europa.eu/scadplus/leg/en/lvb/l33020.htm, accessed 10 October 2008. 14 http://www.frontex.europa.eu/examples_of_accomplished_operati/art10.html, accessed 9 October 2008. 15 In the summer of 2008 the government of Great Britain proposed stationing British policemen at a Brazilian airport to control the influx of Brazilian migrants to Great Britain before boarding. The minister of foreign affairs of Brazil, Celso Amorim,

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ments of Spain and Brazil clashed over the treatment of Brazilian tourists entering Spain via the international airport Barajas in Madrid. A Brazilian student traveling to Lisbon was detained at Barajas airport for three days because the authorities doubted her travel motives. The student complained afterwards about the dire treatment during her detention.16 On 4 March, a group of thirty students from Brazil were detained at Barajas for one night for similar reasons, and they also declared they had been treated badly by the authorities.17 The Brazilian government responded by sending back seven Spanish citizens who wanted to enter Brazil at the airport of Salvador de Bahia on 6 March, claiming they could not prove they had enough money to support themselves in Brazil.18 The repatriation was generally considered to be an act of retribution.19 Reprisal or not, the conflict between Spain and Brazil brought to light the increase in the number of Brazilians who were denied entrance into Spain but also the difficulties of separating ‘tourists’ from ‘illegal migrants’, or, in Zygmunt Bauman’s terms, distinguishing ‘tourists’ from ‘vagabonds’ (Bauman 1998: 77–102).20 2. European Cities: Amsterdam and Barcelona The choice of the cities of Amsterdam and Barcelona for my research into the relation between religion and migration in Europe was related to the present growth of the number of Brazilian migrants in both cities, the changes in the European legislation regarding the outer borders and the current transformations of large European cities. On the basis of the number of firms that provide financial and business services (advanced producer services) now settling across the world, Peter declared such a mission unacceptable. http://jbonline.terra.com.br/extra/2008/08/15/ e150829184.html, accessed 9 October 2008. 16 Sources: Brasil Etc 2(21) April 2008; http://g1.globo.com/Noticias/SaoPaulo/ 0,,MUL307027-5605,00-NUNCA+TINHA+ME+SENTIDO+TAO+HUMILHADA+D IZ+ESTUDANTE+BARRADA+NA+EUROPA.html, accessed 9 October 2008. 17 http://www.estadao.com.br/cidades/not_cid135450,0.htm, accessed 9 October 2008. 18 http://www1.folha.uol.com.br/folha/cotidiano/ult95u380216.shtml, accessed 9 October 2008. 19 President Lula da Silva of Brazil stated that many Brazilians were held in detention in February and March because of the Spanish parliamentary elections in March. See: http://www1.folha.uol.com.br/folha/cotidiano/ult95u379842.shtml, accessed 9 October 2008. 20 http://www.bbc.co.uk/portuguese/reporterbbc/story/2007/03/070309_barradosemmadrimb_ac.shtml accessed 9 October 2008.

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Taylor and Ben Derudder argue that Barcelona and Amsterdam are among the nine European cities that form ‘global route arenas’ (Taylor and Derudder 2004). The authors conclude that these nine European cities are significantly more closely linked to other similar cities in the world than to other cities in the region (ibid).21 Such a similarity is important in relation to the discussions regarding the urban transformations in what are called ‘global cities’. The boom in transportation and communication technology, coupled with major shifts in the global organization of finance and business, has drastically changed the social geography of the city and the conditions for the performance of (urban) politics. In relation to European cities specifically, Manuel Castells has argued that there are three inter-related processes at work which characterize the cities as the Informational City, The Global City and the Dual City.22 Much in line which the work of Saskia Sassen (2001), Castells describes the Informational City as the ‘urban expression of the whole matrix of determination of the Informational Society, as the Industrial City was the spatial expression of the Industrial Society’ (Castells 2000: 13). Cities form the quintessential hubs in the global network of people, information and goods and are therefore often described as the focal points of transnationalism (Hannerz 1996; Guarnizo and Smith 1998). Far from arguing that national states will become obsolete transnationalism refers to the present situation, in which many migrants sustain ‘important and durable relationships of a political, economic, social or cultural nature in two or more societies at once’ (Castles and Miller 2009). Transnationalism is closely related to the difficulty of state governments to regulate the economy as they find themselves dependent on the semi-autonomous movement of capital flowing between different ‘global cities’ (Harvey 1990: 164–5; Sassen 2001) and the transformations of hierarchies of governance. Many national governments are tightly connected to and limited by supranational forms of governance—the EU, the World Bank, the UN—but also by global organizations and networks (NGOs, diasporic networks, multinational corporations) that can operate at the local level, yet bypass the nested hierarchies that run from the local to the supra-national (Sassen 2003). 21

The other important (global) European cities are: London, Paris, Frankfurt, Madrid, Zurich, Milan and Brussels (Taylor and Derudder 2004). 22 In Castells’s view the Informational City is also a Global City, given its position as a nodal point in global flows (Castells 2000).

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Lastly, mass media and communication technology enhance plural, decentralized public spheres as cross-border flows of information help to sustain multiple, overlapping networks of publicity within national territories (Benhabib 2002).23 The expansion and thickening of transnational publics is connected to contemporary patterns of migration. With regard to the movements of people and labour, Amsterdam and Barcelona can be compared in terms of distinguishable flows of people who (have) come from other countries to work and take up residence in these cities. The types of migrants range from the relatively well-to-do migrants who work for transnational corporations and organizations, to the relatively underprivileged who come to these cities in search of better prospects for themselves and their families. This essay primarily deals with the latter. Although in the past century the Netherlands has witnessed a much larger influx of foreign labourers—including migrants from Spain— than Spain, Spain itself has become a popular destination since the 1980s (Soysal 1994: 20). Nowadays the largest group of immigrants in Spain consists of people from Morocco, but the number of people from Latin America—Ecuador and Colombia specifically—has also grown substantially.24 Labour migration contributes to the awareness that we can no longer assume a relatively tight fit between political citizenries and borders of national states (Fraser 2007; Habermas 2001; Soysal 1994), so that we have to take into account, as Ulrich Beck aptly states, ‘the realities of life in a world that is becoming increasingly transnational and involves plural attachments that transcend the boundaries of countries and nationalities’ (Beck 2006: 26). According to Castells we are also witnessing the emergence of the Dual City. Manual labour—increasingly carried out by immigrant workers—has been downgraded in relation to labour in the information economy, the result of which is that urban segregation occurs along the lines of informational capabilities of the population. According to Castells this leads to the fundamental urban dualism of our time: the cosmopolitanism of the elite versus the tribalism of local communities. In a similar vein Zygmunt Bauman (1998: 19) has argued that

23

This certainly does not mean that there were no counterpublics (Warner 2002) before, but rather that besides and within such counterpublics we are also witnessing the growth of transnational publics. 24 Courrier International 936, 15 October 2008.

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technological developments in the information economy lead to an increasing polarization between classes: Information now floats independently from its carriers; shifting of bodies and rearrangement of bodies in physical space is less than ever necessary to reorder meanings and relationships. For some people—for the mobile elite, the elite of mobility—this means, literally, the ‘dephysicalization’, the new weightlessness of power. Elites travel in space, and travel faster than ever before, but the spread and density of the power web they weave is not dependent on that travel. Thanks to the new ‘bodylessness’ of power in its mainly financial form, the power-holders become truly exterritorial even if, bodily, they happen to stay ‘in place’.

While other people have presented comparable arguments related to the mobility and travel of the elites (see Creswell 2006), Bauman puts forward another distinctive argument, which correlates the power of the elite with the (re)establishment of frontiers in urban space. Unlike the rest of the population the elites have the ability to isolate themselves by privatizing space in the city, creating walls of separation wherever they see fit. This relieves them from any contact with the ‘locals’ in a shared public space, thus adding to the fragmentation of the city (see Bauman 1998: 19–26). Some things, though, are bound to emerge victorious, whatever strategy is chosen: the new fragmentation of the city space, the shrinkage and disappearance of public space, the falling apart of urban community, separation and segregation—and above all the exterritoriality of the new elite and the forced territoriality of the rest.25

These processes are not necessarily causally linked, however. Castells, for example, is more optimistic about the possible effects of Internet in the restructuring of urban society (Castells 1999: 377–8): Thus while there are powerful trends pushing towards the fragmentation of the city and the individualization of social relationships, people from all social classes, ethnic, groups, and cultures, build up communities, establish networks of interaction, and recreate urban society from the grassroots (. . .) these networks may in fact be expanded and reinforced in the Information Age by the emergence of virtual communities around the Internet. Empirical studies document the fact that some of these virtual communities are relatively stable networks of social interaction, and many of them do relate to face-to-face interaction, thus bridging the virtual city with urban networks based on personal affinity.

25

Bauman (1998: 23).

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In general, such a perspective is welcome given the widespread idea that the development of electronic communication technology would enforce a process of decentralization and fragmentation of the city because it allegedly replaces many of the face-to-face relations and the need for physical proximity (see Meyer et al. 1999). While I am sympathetic to Castells’s view on the role of virtual communities, in general his theory hardly allows for religious virtual communities as the bearers of such qualities. According to Castells, religious fundamentalism is a reaction against globalization, against networking and flexibility. Fundamentalist religious organizations are seen as resistance communes who ‘defend their space, their places, against the placeless logic of the space of flows characterizing the social domination in the Information Age’ (Castells 1999: 358).26 In this essay I wish to explore these descriptions of religious organizations by looking closely at members of two evangelical Brazilian churches that deploy the possibilities of Internet applications to reproduce virtual communities alongside face-to-face interactions in the city.27 According to Danièle Hervieu-Léger there is an in-built tension between the territorialization of religion—its embeddedness in local communities—and its claims to universal significance. However, in recent times this tension underwent a significant shift. The ‘dismantling of traditional bonds of belief and belonging to a local community’, reinforced by the ‘intensive moving around of individuals and the explosion of various means of worldwide communication’, has led to new configurations of the tension between the de-territorialization and re-territorialization of religion (Hervieu-Léger 2002: 103). Recently, Mary Hancock and Smriti Srinivas have picked up this insightful analysis of the nexus of religion, space, and media to discuss the (re)territorialization of several religious movements outside 26 For a useful critique on Castells’s description of religious organizations in a time of globalization and electronic media, see the work of Hent de Vries (2001) and Birgit Meyer (2006). 27 Ayse Çaglar, Thaddeus Guldbrandsen and Nina Glick Schiller (2006) have argued that researchers of migration and religion have often assumed the importance of socalled global cities as pathways for migration and incorporation, without specifying the differences between these and other cities. They suggest (2006: 615) that in relation to migrant networks and low-wage labour it is far more useful to ‘understand all contemporary cities as global but with different scalar positions’. While I agree with their critique, in the light of the arguments about urban segregation in so-called global cities it is useful to focus on cities that are considered nodes in the global network of finance and information, because these cities are often understood as podiums of the present discrepancies between the mobile elite and the immobile poor.

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the European urban context. In their analysis they include the work of scholars who have argued that we should understand religion and media (its mediation) as mutually constitutive instead of antithetical (Meyer 2006; Stolow 2005; Vries 2001). One of their compelling points is that spatiality is part and parcel of the constitution of religion. Such an understanding of religion goes beyond ‘the persistently stubborn assumption of much of recent urban theory (. . .) that religion is external, incidental or peripheral to the discussion of urban modernity or civic futures’ (Hancock and Srinivas 2008: 620). Instead, it urges us to explore ‘the articulations of popular religiosity with the social and material restructuring of urban space’ (Hancock and Srinivas 2008: 621). If we take into account that the constitution of contemporary urban communities relies heavily upon technological mediation, as Ash Amin and Nigel Thrift convincingly argue (2002: 41–8), the questions then become in what ways the emergence of evangelical virtual communities might contribute to the re-territorialization of Christianity and to the restructuring of European cities, and how it affects religious practices. 3. Migration and Communication You only need two important things, Internet and a mobiel (cellular phone) to live here. Internet to stay in touch with Brazil and a mobiel to be able to work. (Fernando, Handyman and member of the Congregação Cristã no Brasil, Amsterdam).

Many of the Brazilian migrants come to Amsterdam with no other prospect than becoming house cleaners or handymen like Fernando. In the course of one year I encountered a variety of Brazilians and talked with them about their life in the Netherlands, their dreams, aspirations and obstacles. Many people arrive without any prospect of receiving a visa and many subsequently remain in the Netherlands or in Spain without documents. Substantial amounts of people come to the Netherlands with the idea of earning enough money to be able to ‘montar algo em Brasil (to set up something in Brazil)’. They want to earn enough money to buy some land, to build their own house or to begin a small enterprise. Their idea is to stay in Europe a couple of years, send sufficient money to support their family in Brazil and save some money as well. Not always do they succeed in saving

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much, nor do all of them necessarily return to Brazil. Most people are working in the informal sector. Some men work as handymen or in small construction but there are also quite a few who clean houses. House cleaning work is often found via satisfied clients but also by distributing leaflets in middle-class neighbourhoods. The housing market in Amsterdam is quite tight and most people are subrenting a room or a house, some of them via other Brazilians. In Barcelona I also met quite some Brazilians who were doing manual labour. Many of them were working as (house) cleaners, but there were also quite a few who were working as waiters and waitresses, much more than in Amsterdam. This disparity is probably related to the correspondences and differences between the languages. The differences between Spanish and Portuguese are much smaller than between Portuguese and Dutch, and it is easier for Brazilians to learn to communicate with Spanish-speaking clients than with the Dutch. More than a few Brazilians explained that they came to Barcelona instead of another city because they thought they could earn well there and because it has a city beach and a nice climate. Furthermore, the culture is generally thought to be relatively similar to that of Brazil. Much more often than in Amsterdam, I met Brazilians who were staying in Barcelona with a student visa. While many said they wanted to return to Brazil after graduation, there are also those who want to stay in Barcelona or somewhere else in Europe. It is thus quite difficult to draw a clear line between international students and migrants in terms of wishes and expectations. Nevertheless, there are differences between students who come to Barcelona with the financial aid of their family and Brazilians who have sold their belongings in Brazil in order to buy a ticket to Barcelona. Older patterns of migration play a big role in the current movements of Brazilian migrants in Europe. A number of Brazilians have parents or grandparents who migrated from Spain to Brazil, and if one of the parents has the Spanish nationality it is relatively easy to obtain a Spanish passport. I have not met many Brazilians who tried to acquire a Dutch passport via this route, probably because fewer Dutch citizens have migrated to Brazil than Spanish citizens. Nevertheless, several migrants I met in Amsterdam tried to obtain or had obtained a passport in one of the Schengen countries, which meant they could live and work legally in the Netherlands. Italy was one of the countries that provided several of my Brazilian contacts with such an opportunity.

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Although various people have to move from one residence to the other, especially when they do not posses the appropriate documents to rent a house themselves, I encountered many people who had a computer with Internet connection. For many of the Brazilians, Internet has become an essential means of communication. Renata, a congregant of the Sociedade Evangélica em Amsterdam (Evangelical Society in Amsterdam), used the Internet to find herself a new apartment in Amsterdam when she was forced out of her current rooms. Dora, a young Brazilian mother who travelled to the Netherlands without her family, used the Internet to view pictures of her kids online as they grew up in Brazil. During fieldwork in Amsterdam and Barcelona I encountered a variety of Brazilian magazines, websites and satellite channels that people read and watched, but Orkut was the one application mentioned most often during my formal and informal interviews. Orkut is an online social network site (SNS), not unlike Facebook, yet powered by Google. It was named after its Turkish creator Orkut Büyükkökten, who was employed by Google when he developed it. Orkut was launched in January 2004 and quickly became particularly popular in Brazil.28 According to its own data, 53.9 percent of its users are from Brazil, followed by India with 17.08 percent. The United States are third in rank with 15.15 percent.29 ComScore, a company that provides information about Internet, has estimated that Brazil has the highest percentage of Internet users in Latin America (19.3 million).30 In October 2006 it was possible to become an Orkut member without invitation. The number of individual users of Orkut in Brazil around the beginning of August 2008 was 16.1 million. According to ComScore it had 15.2 million visitors in April that year. Due to the popularity and to several legal issues Google has decided to hand over the control of Orkut to Google Brasil in 2008 and leave the development of the social network to Google Brasil and Google India.31 Orkut allows all members to add information to their individual profiles and watch profiles of other people. Your profile shows your name, 28 http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/04/technology/04digi.html?_r=1&ref=business &oref=slogin, accessed 21 August 2008. 29 http://www.orkut.com/MembersAll.aspx, accessed 21 August 2008. See also http:// www.comscore.com/press/release.asp?press=1555 accessed 21 August 2008. 30 http://www.comscore.com/press/release.asp?press=2247 accessed 21 August 2008. 31 http://www1.folha.uol.com.br/folha/informatica/ult124u430818.shtml accessed 21 August 2008.

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gender and physical location, for example Barcelona or Amsterdam and it may include photos or videos. You can invite people you find on Orkut to be your ‘friend’ and vice versa. Your profile shows how many friends you have. It is also possible to create communities and invite people to become member. Some communities are open to everyone; others only after the moderators have approved membership. With some communities the content is visible to all Orkut members; others are only visible to members of the community in question. One of the popular features of Orkut is the scrapbook on which people can leave messages. Every member has his/her own scrapbook, which can be made available for reading and or writing to every Orkut member, to all one’s friends or to friends of friends. Orkut communities offer applications that allow members to post messages that will be visible on the community page; it is possible to post upcoming events, initiate a poll or start a topic in the forum. The last application is especially popular in some of the Orkut communities, since the forum allows members to discuss specific topics over a period of time. During the course of my research in the two cities it became clear that many Brazilian migrants use Orkut to keep in touch with relatives and friends in and outside Brazil, and to present themselves to other people in the network. Many migrants indicate their city of residence as their physical location and many people upload photos of their European place of residence onto their Orkut profile. A Brazilian couple that frequented the services of the evangelical church Vida Christã Barcelona (Christian Life Barcelona) created an album on Orkut titled: ‘Leonardo e Suely . . . Espanh . . . Barcelon . . .’, which features a hundred photos of the two nearby prominent tourist locations in Barcelona, accompanied by declarations of their love of God and their admiration of Barcelona. Interestingly, one of the first photos in this album pictures them with a Brazilian flag on the Barcelona beach accompanied by the phrase: ‘There is no better place than our land (Não há lugar melhor do q a nossa Terra)’. This and similar Orkut photo albums by others show that the albums function as private/public logs of the migrants’ life abroad, but at the same time as a stage to re-affirm their Brazilian nationality as an important part of their identity. Many migrants participate in several virtual communities on Orkut. Popular communities of migrants in the cities of my research are Brasileiros na Holanda (Brazilians in Holland) and Brazucas em Barcelona (Brazilians in Barcelona). Not unlike the example of the photo of the Brazilian couple, many of the virtual communities

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affirm and (re-)enforce the national background of the migrants while simultaneously indicating the geographical place of the community in question. In a recent paper, Suely Fragaso discusses the abundant presence of territorial/geographical markers in Orkut’s virtual communities. Criticizing the idea that current technological developments enforce de-territorialization, she demonstrates that ‘geographical place remains an important factor for the construction and sharing of social identity’ (Fragaso 2008). In general Fragaso’s research supports my general findings that borders between online and offline circuits are permeable and that offline and online social relations quite often enforce one another. Many Brazilians in Amsterdam and Barcelona use the relatively open Orkut communities Brazucas em Barcelona and Brasileiros na Holanda as online environments to re-territorialize themselves and to become embedded in the city. The many-to-many mode of communication, so specific for social network sites on Internet, allows for the creation of a network of Brazilian migrants that is woven through the fabric of the city. On the forums of the virtual communities on Orkut people share stories of their arrival and settlement in the city, they give each other advice where to go for services and products, and they indicate housing or employment possibilities.32 Both communities occasionally organize so-called orkontros,33 meetings where participants of the online communities encounter one another in the city. Besides these orkontros, evangelical communities on Orkut belong to the few associations I have encountered that exist as both online and face-to-face communities whose members encounter each other regularly. Especially in the case of Brazilian evangelical communities there is a lively physical and virtual presence. In the following part of

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While much could be said about the social dynamic of the virtual communities, I will not focus on this topic in this paper. What is important is that the communities are governed by moderators who enforce certain rules, for example that all communication should be in Portuguese. The moderators have the privileges to delete topics that are not of concern to the community and to expel people who use fake profiles or are harassing others. 33 Orkontro is a conjunction of the words Orkut and encontro (meeting). I participated in one in Amsterdam. Besides lively conversations about Amsterdam life, there was also gossip about people on Orkut, which made me understand that virtual and face-to-face realities often merge into one another. Later, during my research in Barcelona, I understood that the word ‘Orkontro’ is also commonly used in other communities where people want to meet offline. See also Fragoso (2008).

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this essay I will briefly discuss the emergence of Brazilian evangelical churches in Western Europe, after which I will focus on two large Brazilian evangelical communities that exist both on Orkut and in the cities: The Sociedade Evangélica em Amsterdam and the Vida Cristã Barcelona. 4. Brazilian Evangelism in Western Europe When we left Brazil, we left our families and the brotherhood [the congregants] became a family. It becomes family. That is my case. I left my mother, my brothers and sisters, all of them in Brazil. I have one sister here. She lives here. We left our family. Our brotherhood forms a family. (Paulo, housecleaner and congregant of the Congregação Cristã no Brasil, Amsterdam)

In most large European cities a wide diversity of grass-root migrant churches, temples and mosques can be found, and Barcelona and Amsterdam are no exceptions (Lucassen 2004; Moreras 2006). The fact that that migrants organize their life around religious institutions in the country of destination is in itself not a new phenomenon. As the quote from Paulo indicates, religious institutions can be very important for migrants, generally providing a sense of belonging—a sense of being home, of being surrounded by family.34 Many German and Scandinavian migrants in Amsterdam in the 17th century were members of the Lutheran church, for example (Kuijpers 2004). Yet I do agree with Peggy Levitt that religious transnational (global) networks provide a ‘powerful, under-explored site of transnational belonging’ (Levitt 2004: 14), and these deserve more attention if we want to understand how and why they spring up in a time of increased mobility and accessible media in an unevenly developing world.35

34 In addition, in evangelical circles the image of the family has a specific meaning. In most if not all Brazilian evangelical churches, people who accept Jesus and become part of the church community are referred to as irmão (brother) and irmã (sister). For an insightful discussion on the notions of home and belonging in our postnational condition, see Hedetoft and Hjort (2002). 35 While scholars in the United States began to explore Brazilian migration to the USA in the 1990s (Margolis 1994), Paul Freston has noted that: ‘Religion in the Brazilian diaspora (. . .) is now one of the most glaring gaps in the study of Brazilian emigrants’, even though authors such as Peggy Levit and Maxine Margolis have paid attention to the religious life of Brazilian migrants (Freston 2008: 256).

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As several authors have noted, the spread of evangelical/Pentecostal churches runs parallel to other well-known forms of cultural globalization,36 and evangelical churches increasingly play an important part in the experiences of migrants in different transnational contexts (Çaglar, Glick Schiller and Guldbrandsen 2006; Dijk 2004). Announcements in Brazilian magazines, websites and brochures in Europe indicate that there are many Brazilian evangelical churches in various European countries. A survey of five consecutive issues of the monthly European magazine Brasil etc., which has sections dedicated to different Western European countries, shows at least one advertisement of a Brazilian evangelical church per section.37 If one searches the domain of Orkut communities with the keywords ‘evangélicos’ and ‘Europa’, ‘Espanha’, or any other West-European country, one quickly finds a host of virtual communities dedicated to Brazilian evangelicals in different European countries.38 This does not mean that all Brazilian churches are evangelical. There are also many Brazilian migrants who attend Catholic Churches or other religious institutions. In Amsterdam I encountered Brazilian migrants who frequented a Roman Catholic parish where sermons are held in Portuguese and which used to be attended mostly by Portuguese migrants. In Barcelona I met a group of Brazilians who regularly attended a monthly Roman Catholic Mass in Portuguese, specifically held for Brazilian migrants. Nevertheless, both in Amsterdam and Barcelona Brazilian evangelical churches are much more visible in the public domain than other religious groups, and the number of Brazilian evangelical initiatives and meetings per city is very high. In Amsterdam alone I encountered one congregation of the Congregação Cristã no Brasil (Christian Congregation in Brazil),39 two congregations of the Igreja Universal do Reino de Deus (Universal Church of the Kingdom of God), one congregation of the Sociedade Evangélica, and one independent evangelical church. 36 See for example the work of André Droogers (2001), David Martin (2002); Karla Poewe (1994) and Joel Robbins (2004). 37 See Brasil Etc, issues 20–4. Freely distributed in Great-Britain, Belgium, France, Ireland, Italy, Germany, Spain, The Netherlands. http://www.brasiletc.com, accessed 30 March 2009. 38 For example: Evangélicos en España (1.824 members), Evangelicos Bras. na Alemanha (249), Cristãos na Holanda (121 members), Evangelicos Valencia/Espanha (54 members). 39 The Congregação Cristã no Brasil is the oldest Pentecostal church of Brazil, founded by an Italian named Louis Francescon in São Paulo in 1910.

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A large portion of the evangelical churches in Europe can be categorized as Pentecostal or Charismatic, types of Protestantism that focus on the gifts (charismata) of the Holy Spirit such as faith healing and speaking in tongues ( glossolalia).40 In varying degrees the evangelical congregations acknowledge the daily interference of the Devil, but in general the world is depicted as a place [that is] divided between those who follow God and those who follow the Devil. Therefore, the acceptance of Jesus Christ as one’s saviour is generally portrayed as a fundamental experience and a watershed between the damned and the saved. The historical development of Pentecostal movements in Brazil can be drawn along the lines of three types of Pentecostal churches, which Ricardo Mariano (1999) defines as ‘classic’ Pentecostalism, ‘deutero’ Pentecostalism and ‘neo’ Pentecostalism.41 Classic Pentecostalism consists of the denominations which originated between 1910 and 1950. The Congregação Cristã no Brasil belongs to this group. The largest and best-known denomination of this period is the Assembléia de Deus, founded by two Swedish Baptists who came to Brazil in 1911. The second type, deutero-Pentecostalism, consists of denominations which originated between 1950 and 1975, most of them in the fast-growing urban areas of São Paulo. Denominations of this period had Brazilianborn founders and were the first to use radio and television. Examples are O Brasil Para Cristo and Igreja Quadrangular. The third kind, neoPentecostalism, sprouted near the end of the military dictatorship and is characterized by the wide use of mass media and a style of preaching known as ‘prosperity gospel.’ One of the well-known neo-Pentecostal denominations of this period is the Igreja Universal do Reino de Deus, which has temples in more than 70 countries worldwide, including the Netherlands and Spain.

40 I agree with André Droogers that to a certain degree ‘Pentecostalism’ remains a social-scientific construct (Droogers 2001: 46). In contrast to the Roman Catholic Church there is no overarching organization which links all the different Pentecostal churches in a hierarchical structure. This means that in every country, region, or even city, different types of Pentecostal churches have flourished, each of them exhibiting particular forms, styles and modes of conduct depending on the historical context in which they are embedded. For a comparison between the different trajectories of these movements in Latin America and in Brazil, see for example: Martin (1990) and Boudewijnse, Droogers and Kamsteeg (1998). 41 For a detailed description of the differences between earlier categorizations and their flaws, see Mariano (1999).

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4.1. Sociedade Evangélica em Amsterdam When I started my fieldwork in Amsterdam in 2006 it quickly became clear that the transnational evangelical church Sociedade Evangélica em Amsterdam (SEA) was one of the few places where many Brazilian migrants meet each other face-to-face regularly. The SEA holds its services in Portuguese in a church building. According to the pastor of the SEA, the congregation in Amsterdam has about 150 official members and their services generally draw about 250 people.42 The fact that many Brazilian migrants gather in an evangelical church is most likely related to the popularity of evangelical churches in Brazil and the increasing number of people who have been raised in or have ‘converted’ to one of these churches in their country of origin. Yet, interviews with several migrants revealed that there are also people attending the services who considered themselves Catholics before they travelled to Amsterdam.43 Both its popularity and its attraction of new converts strongly suggest that besides providing spiritual services the SEA also functions as a point of reference for migrants who struggle to find a house or a job.44 Although the SEA attracts many Brazilians it would be wrong to assume that the SEA is exclusively Brazilian or that it speaks for the community of Brazilians as a whole. The SEA does not identify itself exclusively as a church for Brazilians but aims to attract as many people as possible. In practice some people from other Portuguese-speaking countries and some Dutch-speaking people also frequent the church services. This points to the fact that, while identification as ‘Brazilians’ is an important element in the configuration of certain urban Christian communities, one should be careful not to take the national or eth-

42 The services normally start with louvor (worship) performed by an amplified gospel-rock band, after which the pastor preaches for three quarters of an hour. During the whole service, a PowerPoint presentation projected on the wall, shows the lyrics of the songs performed or the Biblical texts the pastor wishes to discuss. Dutch speaking attendants can ask for wireless headphone, via which they receive the simultaneous translation of the sermon into Dutch. 43 Allegedly the recent voyage of Pope Benedict XVI to Brazil was related to the growth of the evangelical churches and the decline of active Catholic membership in Brazil. For a detailed interpretation of the religious transformations in relation to Brazilian society see Birman and Leite (2000). 44 Elsewhere I have argued against reductionist or overly functionalist readings of the popularity of evangelical churches (Oosterbaan 2006). Nevertheless, it is clear that several Christian practices and discourses are extremely attractive for people who live at the margins of society.

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nic group as the sole unit of analysis or reduce the diversity of the church community for the benefit of clarity, as Çaglar, Glick Schiller and Guldbrandsen (2006) have forcefully argued.45 The SEA belongs to a group of six congregations spread over England, the Netherlands and Brazil. It started as a branch of the SEL, the Sociedade Evangélica em Londres (Evangelical Society in London), in 1994. London has a large Brazilian community and after the initial success of the church, which has existed since 1991, the SEL decided to form a Dutch congregation in Amsterdam. After this, the leaders of the church also formed three congregations in different Brazilian cities. In the Netherlands the SEA branched off in Rotterdam. All of the European partners of the transnational conglomeration maintain up-to-date websites on which one can find video recordings of sermons, information about future events, news about Brazil and gospel music. One member of the SEA said that he watched several sermons on the SEA website in Brazil before he came to the Netherlands. Besides having their own website, constructed and maintained by the church, a member of the SEA also created an Orkut community in 2005, which bears the same logo as the church’s website. In the first years after its creation it had relatively few members, but in 2008 the Orkut community grew rapidly and the number of different topics discussed on the forum also increased. On 1 November 2008 the Orkut community had 260 members. Though plenty of individual community members communicate with each other on Orkut, the participation in the Orkut forums is not as high as the participation in the forums of Brasileiros na Holanda, for example. This might be related to the fact that the church website also has its own platform via which to communicate with all visitors: the mural de recados (message wall). Following the hyperlinks in the websites of the SEA and SER (Sociedade Evangélica em Rotterdam), the visitor can navigate to the sites of the other churches in other cities in the world. On the site of the Sociedade Evangélica em Santa Luzia, which lists the virtual and physical addresses of the six churches, it says: ‘We are a group of local churches, denominated “Sociedade Evangélica”. There are 6 churches at different locations connected by the unity of the Spirit and by the ministry (service) that each delivers to the other, like one single family.’

45 Furthermore, there are quite a few Brazilians who profess themselves Catholics and do not feel at home in the evangelical churches that have sprung up in Amsterdam.

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Besides creating the feeling of one family located in different places, Internet allows for the creation of a network of hyperlinks which connects different geographical addresses to each other. This can be seen as new mode of mapping that allows for the representation of transnational Christian communities. The virtual network of church sites offers Brazilian migrants in different European and Brazilian cities the possibility to communicate, and it offers the (aspiring) members the possibility to see themselves as part of a transnational Christian (Brazilian) community, spread over different geographic/municipal locations. The name Sociedade Evangélica can be seen as instrumental in such an imagination. Seen in this light it is not surprising that the SEA website also offers a hyperlink to www.adiasporabrasileira. com, which aims to function as an interdenominational platform for Brazilian evangelical churches outside Brazil. The introduction of this platform on the website reads: The Brazilian Diaspora46 is an expression of those who find themselves in other countries, answering the divine call to expand the Kingdom of God. It has the intention to analyze the performance, incite the continuity and contribute to the growth of the Kingdom of God with those whose nationality, motivations and expression of faith makes them identify with a genuine evangelical Brazilian expression.47

Many Brazilians I have spoken to, including many self-declared nonevangelicals, told me the pastor of the SEA was an important figure for the Brazilian community in the Netherlands, not in the least for undocumented migrants. At the beginning of my interview with him he handed me a copy of a book, recently published by his hand, that contained the story of his first ten years as a pastor in the Netherlands. In this book he presents the Netherlands—Amsterdam in particular— as a place in desperate need of salvation. Taking a missionary perspective, he describes the city of Amsterdam as a contemporary version 46 The use of the term ‘diaspora’ to describe Brazilian evangelical migrants points to the fact that besides an analytic description of a dispersed people, which itself has travelled across many academic disciplines (Brubaker 2005), the term has also come to be used for migrants themselves. It thus makes sense to understand references to ‘the diaspora’ as a discourse by which people understand and explain their location vis-à-vis their ‘home-land’, as suggested by James Clifford (1994: 311): ‘Diaspora discourses reflect the sense of being part of an ongoing transational network that includes the homeland, not as something simply left behind, built as a place of attachment in a contrapuntal modernity.’ 47 www.adiasporabrasileira.com, accessed 26 June, 2007.

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of Sodom and Gomorra, specifically because of the supposed sexual promiscuity and drug abuse. Furthermore, he describes his mission to evangelize the Portuguese-speaking community in Amsterdam in direct relation to the history of Portuguese colonialism, the struggle for independence of the Lusophone countries, the subsequent wars in the African continent, and the unequal distribution of economic opportunity, which drives people to search for a better life in Amsterdam. In the words of the pastor: The context of the battle that we are facing today in Amsterdam was formed, among other factors, by the immigration of people of various parts of the world, in search of a land that promises, but was not promised to them. It was promised to them, but at the same time it was prohibited ( proibida) to them.

The pastor’s conceptualization of the mobility of the gospel and his self-description as a Christian missionary reverses the trajectory of the Christian missionary endeavour linked to colonialism (Hefner 1993; Veer 1996). In a sermon the pastor explained to the attendants that nowadays people are bringing back the gospel to Europe after it was had been taken to Latin America. Likewise, in an interview he explained: Dutch churches have had an important influence in Brazil. The evangelizers of Brazil were Europeans and North Americans. The churches also adopted a certain European and North American cultural identity, until they freed themselves from it and, today, they are returning to these lands. There are many Brazilians in North America and there are many here. Those who know are very grateful, because as a Christian I thank those people who brought the gospel to Brazil. They are our parents. They brought forth children, grandchildren and today the grandchildren are returning to thank them (…) The truth is, we have to be realists, the current image of the church in Holland, in terms of life, participation, involvement, evangelism is provided by the church buildings (templos). The churches are empty. I have an article here that tells of this. [He quotes the header of a newspaper article]. ‘A second life for the empty churches.’ There are enormous churches that are empty. If we had not used this church, it would not have been utilized for its proper function (subutilizado). The other churches are becoming houses, offices, gyms.

The narrative that the pastor presents here, i.e. a community of Brazilians that fills up a vacant Dutch Protestant church, is closely related to the images and websites described above and demonstrates how the virtual representation of the expanding Kingdom of God in

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and via websites is mirrored by the physical occupation of a space in the city of Amsterdam.48 The re-evangelization narrative also has a political aspect. The pastor’s reference to the structural conditions of global migration, in relation to governmental policies aimed to prevent undocumented people from residing in the country, links up well with the work of Peggy Levitt, who has argued for more attention to transnational religious communities in relation to political conditions (Levitt 2004), and with the recent work of Paul Freston who describes the worship practices in these diasporic Pentecostal churches as a ‘rudimentary theology of the undocumented’ (Freston 2008: 265). Barak Kalir has demonstrated that undocumented Latino migrants in Israel experience a strong sense of belonging in evangelical church communities, one of the reasons being that the churches offer them a religious framework to negotiate their ‘otherness’ in relation to a nation that is explicitly defined as Jewish. Many pastors in Tel Aviv preach the teachings of Christian Zionism. They portray themselves as missionaries who are in Israel to defend the Holy Land and to ensure the realization of Biblical prophecies (Kalir 2006). The success story of the SEA pastor reflects the belief more widely shared that Brazilians are re-evangelizing Europe. Nevertheless, the ideology offers shifting perspectives on people’s place of belonging. On the one hand it provides evangelicals with a script that conceptualizes their local residency in the Netherlands as part of a long tradition of Protestant communities based in the country, on the other hand it also projects an image of a supra-national movement with Brazilian origins that is highly successful in spreading the gospel around the world, and thus is not dependent on nor rooted in particular localities. As we shall see, this tension between religious de-territorialization and re-territorialization under current global conditions is also observable in the practices of the Vida Cristã Barcelona.

48 The idea that Amsterdam is in dire need of salvation is also expressed by affiliates of the church via the church website. In October 2008 someone left a message on the mural de recados (message wall) in which he tells of a recurring dream. In his dream he finds himself in a beautiful garden looking at elderly people, dressed in white. While looking, he writes on a sheet of paper: ‘We have to save Amsterdam.’ The person in question explained that he wanted to share this dream with the members to remind them that the church has an important mission to fulfil in the city. Interestingly, the narrative of reevangelization in Amsterdam is closely linked to a widely-held tourist image of Amsterdam as a place of ‘sex, drugs and rock and roll’ (Terhorst, Ven and Deben 2003).

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4.2. Vida Cristã Barcelona According to the Brazilian migrants who frequent the congregation of the Vida Cristã Barcelona (VCB), it is the only evangelical church in Barcelona that holds its services in Portuguese and thus provides an alternative to Spanish-speaking church communities. The church opened its doors in the beginning of 2008 when pastor Daniel joined forces with several other Brazilian migrants and began to hold cultos (services) on Wednesday and Sunday. Several of the congregants I met had been participating in Spanish-speaking evangelical churches before they switched to the VCB. Since the outset the church has operated both virtually and physically. Because Orkut has become enormously popular in Brazil and because many people indicate their geographical location and their religious preferences there, pastor Daniel was able to reach quite a few people who stated they were living in Barcelona and identified themselves as evangelicals. Pastor Daniel created both an Orkut community for the church and a website, developed by a web designer in Brazil. During the period of my fieldwork in Barcelona, from July till September 2008, church attendance grew from 30 to 50 on Wednesdays and from 40 to 60 on Sundays. In the same period the online Orkut community ‘Vida Cristã—Barcelona’ grew from six members at the beginning of July to 127 at the beginning of September. At the end of October this number had risen to 197 and in March 2009 there were 339 members. On numerous occasions the pastor expressed his joy that church membership was expanding rapidly, and confessed that while he specifically came to preach for the Brazilians living in Spain, his dream was to install audio equipment that would allow for simultaneous translation into Spanish and Catalan. Not unlike the SEA, the VCB also sees itself as part of a wider evangelical movement that is spreading globally, aiming to expand the Kingdom of God. The mission statement of the VCB as written on its website states: We understand that as part of the body of Our Lord Jesus Christ our essential mission is to accomplish the church’s growth throughout the world. We understand that the Kingdom of God consists of different churches and denominations that extend and expand this Kingdom. Our objective as local church is to enhance its progress without hindrance.

The church’s self-image is exemplified by the logo that appears on its website, the Orkut community, banners, leaflets and membership cards.

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In an interview pastor Daniel explained that he designed the logo of the church on the basis of the Catalan flag, the fire of the Pentecost, and an empty cross, which symbolizes the living Jesus Christ. Practically, the leaders of the VCB—and pastor Daniel in particular—are carrying out their evangelizing mission with the help of a network of Brazilian pastors. During my fieldwork the pastor travelled to Ireland to preach and was asked to collaborate with Brazilian evangelicals in Dublin to set up a sister church. The VCB is linked to a network of churches in Brazil and Europe, but in fact it is operating quite autonomously and is loosely related to several other autonomous evangelical churches. In practice the pastor uses his network of befriended people to travel and preach in various evangelical churches in Brazil and in Europe, and likewise invites Brazilian preachers from different places to preach in Barcelona. In many of the church services I attended, members referred to their status as underprivileged people who had come to Europe—‘the first world’—in search of a better life. On various occasions the hardships they face were compared to the Biblical story of the life of Job, who remains faithful while he suffers terribly when everything valuable to him is lost. The narrative of the life of Job is interesting in the context of a migrant’s life, because God eventually rewards Job for his perseverance, and such is also the hope, or better, the faith of many migrants. In public testimonies during church services many members thank God, because even when they passed through moments of despair during their life in Barcelona, they eventually did find work, a decent apartment or the necessary documents to reside in the country legally. During one church service, for example, the pastor asked the attendants to pray collectively and repeat the following words: ‘My God. I don’t want to live in humiliation any longer, I will get my documents, I will be legal in this country.’ The plea resonated loudly among the church attendants. Several of the church members had initially migrated to other European countries—Paris, London, Lisbon—but faced with problems concerning housing, money or documentation had decided to come to Barcelona instead. Some said that Barcelona had proved a better location, but occasionally the success stories made way for those of the unfortunate. Once during a service, when the pastor asked the people without work to raise their hands, I estimated that about fifteen people, a third of the people present, were unemployed at the time. A young church member I interviewed was very disappointed with

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his life in Barcelona, and said that he would swiftly return to Brazil the moment he had earned enough money to buy himself a ticket. Nevertheless, many members participate enthusiastically in the church gatherings and several of them undertake other activities together in their spare time. Occasionally, people help each other to find a job or an apartment. 5. Conclusion The examples of the religious virtual communities on Orkut demonstrate that Brazilian evangelical migrants use Internet to organize their journey to, and residence in, Amsterdam and Barcelona. This reterritorialization does not work in the opposite direction to the deterritorializing dynamic of Internet, but is closely related to it. The current virtual and physical activities of Brazilian migrants in the city enforce each other, while the religious/spatial discourse of evangelization allows for a legitimization of the community’s presence and expansion in an unevenly developing world. More than any other medium, Internet provides the possibility to crosslink church leaders and adherents in a relatively flat network of communication, while it also offers a symbolic space on which to project a global Christian community. Internet could easily be perceived as the exemplary medium to exercise and represent global evangelization according to the often-repeated call to ‘preach the Gospel to all nations’ (Matthew 28:19; Mark 16:15).49 In the Bible, global evangelization is portrayed as the last necessary step before the terrestrial community of Christians can and will be transformed into the celestial community of the saved. However, in practice, the religious de-territorialization and re-territorialization enforced by mass media is thoroughly intertwined with the past and present situations regarding state regulation of migrants from and to Brazil and Europe, and with the current economic inequalities that sustain and fuel the labour migration from Brazil to Europe. It is telling that many undocumented migrants use relatively open means of communication such as Orkut to communicate with each other and with their friends and relatives in Brazil, because it indicates 49

See for example the lecture of Pope John Paul II for the 36th World Communications Day: ‘Internet: A New Forum for Proclaiming the Gospel.’ http://www .vatican.va/holy_father/john_paul_ii/messages/communications/documents/hf_jp-ii_ mes_20020122_world-communications-day_en.html, accessed 31 October 2008.

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the community building potentialities of certain Internet applications. Nevertheless, users mostly remain dependent on the private enterprises that have created the architecture of social networks sites such as Orkut. Furthermore, though this social network can be considered a virtual public space that includes people from different classes and ethnic backgrounds, it remains relatively strictly bound by a Brazilian frame of reference. Future developments and research must tell us more about if and how different virtual and face-to-face religious communities intersect with one another, and how that influences urban life at the grass-root level. References Amin, A. and Thrift, N. (2002) Cities: Reimagining the Urban. Cambridge: Polity Press. Bauman, Z. (1998) Globalization: The Human Consequences. Cambridge: Polity Press. Beck, U. (2006) Cosmopolitan Vision. Cambridge: Polity Press. Benhabib, S. (2002) The Claims of Culture: Equality and Diversity in the Global Era. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Birman, P. and Leite, M. P. (2000) ‘Whatever Happened to What Used to be the Largest Catholic Country in the World?’. Daedalus 129(2), 271–91. Boudewijnse, B., Droogers, A. and Kamsteeg, F. (eds) (1998) More than Opium: An Anthropological Approach to Latin American and Caribbean Pentecostal Praxis. Lanham and London: Scarecrow Press. Çaglar, A., Glick Schiller, N. and Gulbrandsen, T. (2006) ‘Beyond the Ethnic Lens: Locality, Globality, and Born-Again Incorporation’. American Ethnologist 33(4): 612–33. Castells, M. (1997) The Power of Identity. Oxford: Blackwell. —— (1999) ‘The Culture of Cities in the Information Age’. In Susser, I. (2002) The Castells Reader on Cities and Social Theory. Oxford: Blackwell, pp. 367–89. —— (2000) ‘European Cities, the Informational Society and the Global Economy’. In Deben, L., Heinemeijer, W. and Vaart, D. van der (eds), Understanding Amsterdam: Essays on Economic Vitality, City Life and Urban Form. Amsterdam: Spinhuis, pp. 1–18. Castles, S. and Miller, M. J. (2009) The Age of Migration: International Population Movements in the Modern World. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Corten, A. and Marshall-Fratani, R. (eds) (2001) Between Babel and Pentecost: Transnational Pentecostalism in Africa and Latin America. London: Hurst&Co. Cresswell, T. (2006) ‘The Right to Mobility: The Production of Mobility in the Courtroom’. Antipode 38(4): 735–54. De Genova, N. P. (2002) ‘Migrant “Illegality” and Deportability in Everyday Life’. Annual Review of Anthropology 31, 419–47. Dijk, R. van (2004) ‘Negotiating Marriage: Questions of Morality and Legitimacy in the Ghanaian Diaspora’. Journal of Religion in Africa 34(4), 438–67. Droogers, A. (2001) ‘Globalisation and Pentecostal Succes’. In Corten, A and MarshallFratani, R. (eds) Between Babel and Pentecost: Transnational Pentecostalism in Africa and Latin America. London: Hurst, pp. 41–61. Fragaso, S. (2008) ‘Geographic Connectedness in Orkut: Exploring Relations Between Territory and Identity in Social Network Sites’. Paper presented at the Conference

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of the Association of Internet Researchers ‘Rethinking Communities, Rethinking Place’ in Copenhagen 15 October 2008. Fraser, N. (2007) ‘Transnationalizing the Public Sphere: On the Legitimacy and Efficacy of Public Opinion in a Post Westphalian World’. In Benhabib, S., Shapiro, I. and Petranovich, D. (eds) Identities, Affiliations, and Allegiances. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 45–66. Freston, P. (1995) ‘Pentecostalism in Brazil: A Brief History’. Religion 25, 119–33. —— (2008) ‘The Religious Field among Brazilians in the United States’. In JouëtPastré C. and Braga, L. J. (eds) Becoming Brazuca. Brazilian Immigration to the United States. Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, pp. 255–70. Guarnizo, L. E. and Smith, M. P. (1998) Transnationalism from Below (Comparative Urban and Community Research). London: Transaction Publishers. Habermas, J. (2001) The Postnational Constellation: Political Essays. Cambridge: Polity Press. Hancock, M. and Srinivas, S. (2008) ‘Spaces of Modernity: Religion and the Urban in Asia and Africa’. International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 32(3), 617–30. Hannerz, U. (1996) Transnational Connections: Culture, People, Places. London: Routledge. Harvey, D. (1990). The Condition of Postmodernity: An Enquiry into the Origins of Cultural Change. Cambridge: Blackwell. Hedetoft, U. and Hjort, M. (2002) The Postnational Self: Belonging and Identity. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Hefner, R. W. (1993) ‘World Building and the Rationality of Conversion’. In Hefner, R.W. (ed.) Conversion to Christianity: Historical and Anthropological Perspectives on a Great Transformation. Berkeley: University of California Press, pp. 3–44. Hervieu-Léger, D. (2002) ‘Space and Religion: New Approaches to Religious Spatiality in Modernity’. International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 26(1), 99–105. Kalir, B. (2006) ‘Christian Aliens in the Jewish State: Undocumented Migrants from Latin America Striving for Practical National Belonging in Israel.’ PhD Thesis. University of Amsterdam. Kuijpers, E. (2004) ‘Een zeventiende-eeuwse migrantenkerk. De lutheranen in Amsterdam’. In L. Lucassen (ed.) (2004), pp. 39–59. Levitt, P. (2004) ‘Redefining the Boundaries of Belonging: The Institutional Character of Transnational Religious Life’. Sociology of Religion 65(1), 1–18. Lucassen, L. (ed.) (2004) Amsterdammer worden. Migranten, hun organisaties en inburgering, 1600–2000. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press. Margolis. M. L. (1994) Little Brazil: An Ethnography of Brazilian Immigrants in New York City. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Mariano, R. (1999) Neopentecostais: Sociologia do novo Pentecostalismo no Brasil. São Paulo: Loyola. Martin, D. (1990) Tongues of Fire. The Explosion of Protestantism in Latin America. Oxford: Blackwell. —— (2002) Pentecostalism: The World Their Parish. Oxford: Blackwell. Meyer, B. (2006) ‘Religious Sensations: Why Media, Aesthetics and Power Matter in the Study of Contemporary Religion’. Inaugural Lecture Cultural Anthropology VU University, Amsterdam: Vrije Universiteit. Meyer, D. de et al. (eds) (1999) The Urban Condition: Space, Community, and Self in the Contemporary Metropolis. Rotterdam: 010 Publishers. Moreras, J. (2006) Migraciones y Pluralismo Religioso: Elementos para el Debate. Barcelona: Cidob. Oosterbaan, M. (2006) ‘Divine Mediations: Pentecostalism, Politics and Mass Media in a Favela in Rio de Janeiro’. PhD Dissertation, University of Amsterdam. Padilla, B. (2006) ‘Brazilian Migration to Portugal: Social Networks and Ethnic Solidarity’. CIES e-Working Paper.

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Poewe, K. (1994) Charismatic Christianity as a Global Culture. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press. Robbins, J. (2004) ‘The Globalization of Pentecostal and Charismatic Christianity’. Annual Review of Anthropology 33, 117–43. Sassen, S. (2001) The Global City: New York, London, Tokyo. Princeton University Press. —— (2003) ‘Globalization or denationalization?’. Review of International Political Economy 10(1), 1–22. Soysal, Y. N. (1994) Limits of Citizenship: Migrants and Postnational Membership in Europe. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Stoll, D. (1990) Is Latin America Turning Protestant: The Politics of Evangelical Growth. Berkeley: University of California Press. Stolow, J. (2005) ‘Religion and/as Media’. Theory, Culture & Society 22(2), 137–63. Taylor, P. J. and Derudder, B. (2004) ‘Porous Europe: European Cities in Global Urban Arenas’. Tijdschrift voor Economische en Sociale Geografie 95(5), 527–38. Terhorst, P. Ven, J. van de and Deben, L. (2003) ‘Amsterdam: It’s All in the Mix’. In Hoffman, L. M., Fainstein, S. S. and Judd, D. R. (eds) Cities and Visitors: Regulating People, Markets and City Space. Oxford: Blackwell, pp. 75–90. Veer, P. van der (1996) ‘Introduction’. In Veer P. van der (ed.) Conversion to Modernities. New York: Routledge, pp. 1–22. Vries, H. de (2001) ‘In Media Res: Global Religion, Public Spheres, and the Task of Contemporary Religious Studies’. In Vries H. de and Weber, S. (eds) Religion and Media: Cultural Memory in the Present. Stanford: Stanford University Press, pp. 3–42.

PART FOUR

PUBLIC USES OF RELIGION

BEYOND THE SECULAR? PUBLIC REASON AND THE SEARCH FOR A CONCEPT OF POSTSECULAR LEGITIMACY Christoph Jedan This paper discusses a perplexity that many scholars interested in the complex relationship between religion and politics will share: while there is much disenchantment with overly secularist accounts of the foundations of our contemporary societies—in fact so much that even Jürgen Habermas felt inclined to comment on the possibility of a postsecular phase of society—there is hardly any clarity about what could replace the secularist accounts and define the outlines of a postsecular public philosophy. The ‘postsecular’ seems to share its predominantly negative focus, and lack of precision concerning a possible alternative, with a lot of other ‘post’ catchwords. It is easy to denounce a cultural or philosophical tendency, but it is far harder to come up with a cogent alternative that retains sufficient public appeal in our complex (post?)modern times. In this paper I focus on one of the problems which a credible public philosophical account of the postsecular would have to address: offering a cogent account of a postsecular legitimacy that would make it possible to have a postsecular public philosophy, separate from a secular one. First, I analyse the reasons why the usual straw man of postsecularist theories, public reason liberalism1 as exemplified by John Rawls and Robert Audi, seems to be deficient. The reason for this is,

1 As far as the role of a public reason is concerned, there is so much resemblance between some liberal theories that one could justifiably identify a single current of ‘public justification liberalism’ or, as I prefer to call it, ‘public reason liberalism’. Although it is possible to highlight the different degrees of moral restraint demanded of citizens, in the context of this paper I focus on the common ground of theories of public reason liberalism, concentrating on the ideas of John Rawls and Robert Audi. The final shape of John Rawls’s theory is presented in the new introduction to Rawls (1996) and in Rawls (1997). (Although Rawls 1997 is also included in Rawls 1999, nothing new has been added as far as my treatment in this paper is concerned. For a recent discussion of public reason in Rawls 1999, see Hayfa 2004.) For Audi’s theory I draw on Audi (2000), which elaborates on his earlier statements, most notably on his contribution to Audi and Wolterstorff (1997). Attempts to defend and further elaborate the concept of public reason include Solum (1994), Sterba (1999), Williams (2000) and Dombrowski (2001). For a general discussion of theories of public justification see D’Agostino (1996).

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I argue, that the account of legitimacy offered in public reason liberalism is fundamentally flawed. Public reason liberalism relies on the view that legitimacy is an all-or-nothing affair, and is moreover governed by general rules which rigidly exclude the religious from public justification. This flawed view of legitimacy is inextricably intertwined with highly contentious interpretations of good citizenship and of an alleged single best form of a democratic regime. However, while it is easy to put one’s finger on the flaws of public reason liberalism, we should not be too happy with its demise. I show this in the second part of my paper by parading with the Radical Orthodoxy movement some of the theorists who have been the most ardent prophets of a ‘postsecular city’. Radical Orthodoxy wilfully denies the need for reflection on a shared notion of legitimacy. In the third and last part I address the question what a plausible account of a postsecular legitimacy could look like. I argue (against Stout) for the sceptical view that a broadly shared, less rigidly secularist conception of legitimacy could in principle be a valuable asset, but cannot be realized in our broader political culture. 1. The Flaws of Public Reason Liberalism The idea that our behaviour in public discussions must be governed by self-imposed moral restrictions is not new. It is a matter of course that one should behave civilly towards others and should, for instance, not resort to slander. In short, we all know that the way we behave in public arguments may have considerable influence on the social climate of a society. Public arguments as well as any other action can strengthen or weaken the bonds between citizens, can improve or deteriorate the social climate, and can thus ultimately affect the stability of a society. The concept of public reason that occupies a pivotal position in some brands of contemporary liberalism gains a lot of mileage out of building on this commonsensical idea. The irreducible plurality of reasonable world views in our contemporary, constitutionally liberal societies necessitates a considerable moral self-constraint on the part of citizens. Since not all citizens can be supposed to share the same world view, arguments deriving from comprehensive doctrines cannot be offered with a reasonable expectation that others, with their own, distinctly different world views, will share them and will thus be convinced of the matter in question. What is at stake here is the

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perceived legitimacy of the legal structure and the political process in general and hence, at least in the long run, the stability of the liberal polity. For the sake of the perceived legitimacy and indeed the stability of the liberal polity, citizens should employ, and perhaps be motivated by, suitable ‘public’ reasons (drawn from the public reason) that are at least accessible to others, and that others can reasonably be expected to share. It is easy to see that the idea of a public reason is quite restrictive. World views are not (at least not as a rule) a trifling matter—they are (usually) fundamental to the identity of those who hold them. The problem is compounded when religion comes into play, since religions often place a high value on ‘witnessing’ and proselytizing. For religious believers it is often crucial to have not only certain implications of their faith realized in the political realm, but also to have the arguments which defend the policies in question adequately reflect their religious convictions. For citizens of faith, in short, the visibility of their religious doctrines, the presence of their convictions in the public realm, is a pivotal issue which places them at loggerheads with demands that one had better refrain from such arguments for the sake of the legitimacy and stability of the liberal democratic society. At the same time, the quality of the public debate stands to lose unless all arguments which motivate citizens are voiced publicly.2 Such concerns have generally been motivated by anxiety about the secular bias of public reason liberalism. In what follows I offer a diagnosis of what is wrong with this form of liberalism, starting with an analysis of John Rawls’s theory of public reason and then turning to Robert Audi’s modification of Rawls’s theory. Rawls (1996) is structured by the question of how the stability of a liberal polity can be preserved, given that free and equal citizens in a liberal polity must be supposed to differ radically as to the philosophical or religious world views they adhere to (‘comprehensive doctrines’). Given the thoroughgoing pluralism of incompatible comprehensive doctrines, Rawls argues, it is of vital importance that at least the ‘constitutional essentials’ are common ground. The structures and procedures outlined by the constitution, and in particular citizens’ basic rights, liberties and opportunities, should be embraced from within all reasonable comprehensive doctrines as a matter of an 2 This concern about public reason liberalism has been voiced by, among others, Waldron (1993), Perry (1997), Quinn (1997) and Wolterstorff (1997).

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‘overlapping consensus’. In order to be the object of an overlapping consensus, public reason cannot establish values in the way a comprehensive doctrine does, whose scope is the whole truth as one sees it. Instead, public reason is a construct, a freestanding conception which can be formulated and embraced from radically different comprehensive doctrines, not as a truth in competition with these doctrines, but as the expression of fair conditions of cooperation in a society whose members differ radically as far as their comprehensive doctrines are concerned. Thus, public reason only conceptualizes certain ‘political’ values for the public-political realm which citizens are free to realize or to disregard in their non-public lives (for instance, within a religious community). Only under this condition is it acceptable to proponents of reasonable comprehensive doctrines that public reason contains a broadly liberal political conception of justice, whose components are among the basic values of liberal democracies, including a certain priority of freedoms and rights such as ‘equal political and civil liberty, equality of opportunity, the values of social equality and economic reciprocity’ (Rawls 1996: 223).3 Besides a system of common liberal values public reason will also contain common ‘guidelines of inquiry’. A summary of these guidelines is that ‘we are to appeal only to presently accepted general beliefs and forms of reasoning found in common sense, and the methods and conclusions of science when these are not controversial’ (Rawls 1996: 224). So far, one might expect Rawls to ask citizens to refrain absolutely from invoking their comprehensive doctrines. Yet, nothing could be farther from the truth; Rawls attempts to formulate moderate moral restrictions on the employment of comprehensive doctrines in public debate. First of all, Rawls does not want to restrict the use of comprehensive doctrines in public debate on all issues. He thinks that the necessity of a common ground is greatest where constitutional essentials are concerned (1996: 227).4 Second, this self-limitation to public reason does not apply to all citizens, regardless of their roles, in the same degree. It will apply to government officials more strictly than to ‘ordinary’ citizens; and more

3

See also Rawls (1997: 773ff.). Rawls is not entirely clear on the matter, but it seems that in ‘well-ordered’ societies such a self-limitation of citizens in their public argument and voting behaviour ought also to extend to issues below the level of constitutional essentials. 4

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strictly still to the judiciary. A constitutional court, finally, is considered by Rawls the ‘exemplar of public reason’ (1996: 231). Third, Rawls acknowledges that there may be circumstances in which the invocation of comprehensive doctrines may be the best strategy: he allows ‘citizens, in certain situations, to present what they regard as the basis of political values rooted in their comprehensive doctrine, provided they do this in ways that strengthen the ideal of public reason itself ’ (1996: 247). Rawls calls this the ‘inclusive view’. This inclusive view is flexible. Whereas citizens in a well-ordered and perfectly just society will not see any reason to invoke comprehensive doctrines, citizens in a nearly just society might assuage doubts about the sincerity of their adherence to the political values by invoking their comprehensive doctrine, and show that their support of the political values in question is sincere and more than ‘a mere modus vivendi’ (1996: 249). In societies characterized by fundamental injustices, finally, citizens will want to invoke their comprehensive doctrines in order to ‘give sufficient strength to the political conception to be subsequently realized’ (1996: 254). Rawls claims that, by its flexibility, the inclusive view ‘best encourages citizens to honour the ideal of public reason and secures its social conditions in the longer run in a well-ordered society’ (1996: 248). In the ‘Introduction’ to the 1996 paperback edition of Political Liberalism and one year later in his article ‘The Idea of Public Reason Revisited’, Rawls argues for what he calls ‘the wide view of public reason’, which relaxes the restrictions on public reason-giving by citizens. He declares (1996: li–lii): I now believe (. . .) that reasonable [comprehensive] doctrines may be introduced in public reason at any time, provided that in due course public reasons, given by a reasonable political conception, are presented sufficient to support whatever the comprehensive doctrines are introduced to support.

Rawls argues that this relaxation of the requirements for introducing comprehensive doctrines into public reason-giving ‘has the further advantage of showing to other citizens the roots in our comprehensive doctrines of our allegiance to the political conception, which strengthens stability in the presence of a reasonable overlapping consensus’ (1996: liii). What the shift between the two views on public reason can tell us is that there is in fact a whole spectrum of solutions to the problem

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of how to strike a balance between the self-expression and free public exchange of arguments necessary in a democracy on the one hand, and the perceived legitimacy of the political process on the other. Rawls does not reflect on his shift, nor does he make it a constructive feature of his public reason theory. He acknowledges the need for some flexibility, but this is a flexibility on the margins only. Flexibility is merely to do with the application of his concept of public reason, with the politically opportune, but Rawls entertains no doubt whatsoever concerning the possibility of outlining in advance a single conception of public reason which is generally adequate.5 Curiously, the same holds for the major reformulation of Rawls’s public reason theory by Robert Audi. In his book Religious Commitment and Secular Reason (2000), Audi develops a theory of public reason which sharpens as well as increases the role that public reason should play in political debate. Like Rawls, Audi is concerned about the legitimacy of the political and legal structure of liberal polities, and phrases this as the concern that the coercion in which legal and political decisions result does not ‘alienate’ and is not ‘resented’ (2000: 67–8). In order to avoid that, reasons of the right sort have to be offered in defence of political initiatives which are to result in coercive law. Reasons must be ‘accessible’, which for Audi means that they cannot have a religious content. Unlike Rawls, Audi does not consider the use of non-religious comprehensive doctrines problematic.6 Audi also extends the scope of public (secular) reason by stating its importance for any discussion of coercive law, where Rawls (at least for the sake of simplicity) was prepared to restrict the applicability of his conception of public reason to fundamental political issues—issues that are relevant at the constitutional level of a liberal democracy. Audi not only attributes a greater role in public debate to public (secular) reason, but also increases the 5 For instance, Rawls expresses his conviction that some basic decision problems (pertaining to constitutional essentials) have no ‘universally best’ solution and that a solution must depend on the historical-political experience of a people. An example is the question of how to protect basic rights of the citizens. Should, for instance, basic rights be entrenched, as the German constitution does, or is a parliamentary supremacy with no Bill of Rights preferable? Rawls sides with Robert Dahl who declared that ‘specific solutions need to be adapted to the historical conditions and experiences, political culture, and concrete political institutions of a particular country’ (Rawls 1996: 235 n. 21). 6 In Audi’s view the ‘neutrality’ with regard to comprehensive doctrines that Rawls’s political liberalism aims at is illusionary; therefore, Audi does not attach any importance to the presence of comprehensive doctrines in general in the public debate.

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burdens that public reason places on individual citizens. Whilst Rawls, through the restatements outlined above, is content with a duty to supplement arguments stemming from comprehensive doctrines with arguments of public reason, for Audi this is not enough. It is insufficient to be willing to offer adequate public (secular) reasons for one’s advocacy or support of coercive law or public policy—the ‘principle of secular rationale’, a close equivalent of Rawls’s proviso (Audi 2000: 86ff.)—, one also has to be sufficiently motivated in one’s advocacy or support by normatively adequate secular reason. Audi calls this ‘the principle of secular motivation’ (Audi 2000: 96): It says that one has a (prima facie) obligation to abstain from advocacy or support of a law or public policy that restricts human conduct, unless in advocating or supporting it one is sufficiently motivated by (normatively) adequate secular reason.

The principle of secular motivation is clearly stronger than anything Rawls had in view. It demands of religious believers a culture of motivational introspection, and if motivation is found insufficient—that is to say, if no sufficient secular motivation is found for the stance one supports—one should abstain from supporting the law or public policy in question and from voting for it. We have seen that a secularist concept of legitimacy is central to accounts of public reason. In turn, this concept of legitimacy is propped up by highly specific and contentious views on what is the best form of a democratic regime, and on the obligations of citizenship within a democratic regime. In the remainder of this section I analyse these views in turn. Public reason theories emphasize the coercive nature of law. Law is an action-regulating system that enforces compliance under threat of sanctions. In a democracy the legal structure is the result of majority decisions—a potential source of tensions. In a democracy citizens count as free and equal, yet they are under the coercive power of a law which is the result of majority vote. The majority have, collectively, a clear coercive power. Normally, the exercise of this coercive power is limited by constitutional safeguards for the rights of individual citizens and minorities. Fundamental rights are entrenched either by making them unalterable by vote, or by demanding a supermajority for any changes regarding such rights. Theories of public reason do not let the matter rest there. Even though in a democracy voting is considered a fair way of dealing with different opinions, an appeal to the sheer fact

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of a majority of like-minded voters is perceived to fall short of the moral demands that liberal democracy imposes (see Rawls 1996: 219). Even if a clear majority of like-minded voters is foreseeable, the majority owes the dissenting voters reasons for their decision. Justifications have to be given in terms of public reasons which in principle every rational citizen can understand and share. Without suitable public reasons being given, there can be no legitimacy of the law or policy voted upon. For public reason liberals the obligation to give suitable public reasons does not rest on groups or parties within society, but is ultimately an obligation of the individual citizen. This is, of course, a very strong view of how the ideal of democratic legitimacy should be interpreted. I shall presently comment on the demands placed on individual citizens, but it is essential to grasp right now how much hinges on the very specific view of democracy assumed by public reason theorists. Public reason theorists demote the aggregative function of democracy (voting), and focus instead on the individual citizen’s duty to offer reasons. With this move public reason liberals shift away from the tenets of the classical liberal concept of democracy. Traditionally, the liberal conception of democracy emphasized constitutional guarantees of individual freedoms and rights, and was closely related to ideas of representative democracy and competitive elites (see Saward 2003: 148–9). It thus stressed the aggregative function of voting; voting was the normal political activity expected of citizens. Public reason liberals, by contrast, crucially draw on a concept of deliberative democracy, which stresses the exchange of arguments at the expense of the aggregative function of voting.7 The concept of deliberative democracy places on individual citizens the demand to give suitable public reasons, at the expense of voting on the basis of personal preferences and of arguing without constraints on the basis of one’s world view. Thus, the concept of deliberative democracy is connected with a specific view of the obligations of citizenship.

7 Rawls (1997: 771–2) uses the term ‘deliberative democracy’ to characterize the ideal of a well-ordered constitutional democracy. Rawls’s political liberalism has regularly been compared to theories of deliberative democracy, see Bohman and Rehg (1997), Gutman and Thompson (2004). But see also Saward’s (2001) critique of a complete identification of Rawls’s liberalism with deliberative democracy.

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These obligations are formulated in terms of an ‘ideal of citizenship’ (Rawls) or ‘civic virtue’ (Audi 2000: ch. 6). In what follows I comment specifically on John Rawls’s formulation. Rawls writes (1996: 217): [S]ince the exercise of political power itself must be legitimate, the ideal of citizenship imposes a moral, not a legal, duty—the duty of civility—to be able to explain to one another on those fundamental questions how the principles and policies they advocate and vote for can be supported by the political values of public reason.

Again, and in line with the ideal of deliberative democracy outlined above, there is a considerable shift of emphasis away from a rightscentred classical liberal conception, in this case towards a conception of citizenship that focuses on a moral duty, i.e. that of civility. The duty of civility describes moral obligations to do with the political participation of citizens. Thus, the focus on political participation shifts the conception of citizenship linked to the ideal of public reason towards what could be described as a ‘neo-Republican conception’ emphasizing political participation. Again, I cannot embark here on a discussion on the relative merits or demerits of a neo-Republican conception of citizenship; all I want to do now is to point out how much is pre-empted by employing such a theory of citizenship in support of the concept of public reason. The links between the concepts of legitimacy, public reason and good citizenship imply that citizens who for their support of a piece of legislation or a public policy have or offer only reasons stemming from their religious beliefs, display a moral defect: they fail as citizens. This is a severe and (at least in my view) highly counterintuitive charge; we ought to think twice before voicing it. Does the fact that citizens cannot or will not offer suitable public (secular) reasons for their political advocacy make them bad citizens? Whatever one may think of citizens’ failure to integrate religious convictions with other, secular, reasons, I do not think that the moral charge of bad citizenship is at all fair. The charge rests wholly on the highly specific conceptions of democracy and citizenship underlying public reason liberalism. As explained above, the classical liberal conception of democracy is normally tied to ideas of competitive elites and representative democracy. Its basic intuition seems to be that it is unrealistic to expect more from people than voting for representatives which are expected to govern competently, and can be exchanged by peaceful electoral means if this should seem advantageous. The voting behaviour assumed in this rather limited view of civic obligation relies

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on the electoral aggregation of individual preferences, and there is no reason to exclude comprehensive (religious) doctrines from the process of preference finding. Moreover, if speaking out at all in political discussions, most citizens will generally rely on the expert knowledge of a representative of a party or institution they implicitly trust. By burdening the individual citizen with the argumentative and introspective demands of public reason, the public reason theorists arguably go far beyond a reasonable, quite limited interpretation of the individual citizen’s obligations. In this context a detailed examination of the pros and cons of the concepts of democracy and citizenship underlying public reason theories is impossible. For our present purposes it is sufficient to have shown that these theories employ highly specific and contentious conceptions of democracy and citizenship, and that these choices steer the public reason theories towards an extreme, secularist interpretation of the concept of legitimacy and the demands of public reason. According to public reason liberalism, legitimacy is a clear-cut concept that requires individual citizens to offer suitable secular public reasons. However, things are not as simple as public reason liberalism makes them appear. The media coverage of, and public response to, recent parliamentary debates and political statements on the basis of comprehensive (religious) doctrines show that the public perception of legitimacy is much broader and more relaxed about the presence of religion in public arguments than public reason theories assume. There seems to be a broadly shared view that some issues inevitably involve (personal) moral and religious views, and that arguments and decisions drawing on such views are perfectly legitimate. The frequent call on political actors in different European countries to lift parliamentary party discipline and allow individual votes on issues such as abortion and stem cell technology supports this interpretation. Instead of restricting or excluding comprehensive (religious) doctrines as a matter of principle, as public reason liberalism suggests, it seems necessary to consider how central to comprehensive (religious) world views a particular issue is, and in how far it is natural, even inescapable, that such views play a role in public arguments and political decisions. The acceptability of comprehensive (religious) views in public political arguments will also depend on other factors. Many of these factors escape a priori analysis and can best be summarized by the term ‘broader political climate’. This broader political climate can, for instance, to a large extent explain the widely different reactions to

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two public political comments of the Archbishop of Canterbury, i.e. his analysis of the inevitability of introducing elements of the shari’a into British law and his comments on the current financial crisis. This suggests that in the public perception legitimacy is far more complex than public reason theories claim. In ordinary political circumstances there seems to be a rather robust assumption of legitimacy; a principled exclusion of comprehensive (religious) doctrines is probably not perceived as a key ingredient of legitimacy. Much of the perception of legitimacy hinges on concrete political circumstances, and can change and develop along with the situation. If, as I have argued, there are good reasons to be disenchanted with the secular bias of public reason liberalism and if, moreover, we can see signs of a ‘robust’ view of legitimacy in the general public, is it then possible to theorize a satisfactory new postsecular account of politics, and of legitimacy in particular? In order to answer that question I propose to turn to a theological movement that has canvassed the need of a postsecular re-orientation of politics and public life as no other has. 2. Radical Orthodoxy and the Postsecular ‘Once, there was no “secular”.’ This is the opening sentence of the seminal text of the Radical Orthodoxy movement, John Milbank’s Theology and Social Theory: Beyond Secular Reason ([1990] 2006: 9). Milbank deplores the emergence of a secular cultural and political space, arguing that the secular is an invention promoted by a mistaken theology. With Duns Scotus’ account of ‘being’ as a univocal concept and with Ockham’s and the nominalist tradition’s voluntarist stress on the absolute, infinite and ultimately unknowable power of God, a theological rationale arose for demarcating a secular space in which humans could think it possible and legitimate to argue and organize their affairs without reference to their divine creator. Milbank and the Radical Orthodoxy theologians deny the legitimacy of the modern ideology of the secular, and attempt to reclaim the secular sphere for theology. Drawing heavily on (neo-)Platonist strands in Christian theology, thinkers affiliated with the Radical Orthodoxy movement frequently turn to the Augustinian metaphor of the City to unfold their socio-political thought. Pars pro toto, I discuss here one publication on the political import of Radical Orthodoxy, William T. Cavanaugh’s ‘The City: Beyond Secular Parodies’ (1999). Cavanaugh

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argues against the widespread acceptance by Christians of the ‘integrating role of the state on the assumption that the state is a “secular” and therefore neutral apparatus for the working out of conflict among disparate interests’ (1999: 198). The modern secular state is founded on a mythos, a story about the salvation of individuals, who are by nature in an interminable conflict about scarce resources, through the central powers of the state. According to Cavanaugh (1999: 187–9), the foundational mythos of the secular state is an alternative soteriology, construed to replace the Christian one. Cavanaugh points to the shortcomings of the secular state, which never fulfilled its promise. Instead of the promised peace, the state ‘has brought violence’; it precludes ‘any truly social process’ and ‘has tried to unify humankind into a body of a perverse sort’ (1999: 192–4). Cavanaugh concludes that ‘state power is the last thing the Church should want’. Christians should ‘participate in a practice which envisions a proper anarchy not in the sense that it proposes chaos, but in that it challenges the false order of the state’ (1999: 194). Although one can take issue with much of Cavanaugh’s history (see Chaplin 2005: 162–8), his polemic against all-too-simplistic historical ‘justifications’ of the liberal secular state and of a secular public sphere certainly hits the mark. Indeed, the claim that the modern secular state and public sphere were inevitable because of the atrocities of early modern wars of religion caused by religious pluralism is hardly credible (Cavanaugh 1999: 188–91).8 Cavanaugh’s argumentative strategy is an exemplar of Radical Orthodox writings on the socio-political realm.9 The modern political condition of secular socio-political argumentations among citizens who differ fundamentally as far as their world views are concerned is radically delegitimized.10 This uncompromising strategy leaves Radical 8 See Judith Shklar’s (1984) description of a ‘liberalism of fear’, mentioned by Rawls (1996: xxiv). I note in passing that is is still possible to retain a link between early modern religious pluralism and a secularization of public political discourse. Hill (1993) has shown how religious diversity and the resulting differences in scriptural exegesis in 17th century England made reliance on the Bible in public arguments highly problematic. In his qualified defence of the reasonableness of a (limited) secularization of public argument (as opposed to an ideology of secularism), Stout (2004: 94–6) explicitly draws on Hill. 9 For an overview on the socio-political thought of Radical Orthodoxy, see Chaplin (2005). 10 Were it not for the very scarce references to Blumenberg (only once in Milbank [1990] 2006), it would be tempting to interpret the Radical Orthodox stance as a an attempt to reverse Blumenberg’s (1986) account of the legitimacy of the modern age.

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Orthodoxy without any possibility of formulating a constructive account of a more limited, political form of legitimacy that can regulate the concrete political dealings between citizens with fundamentally different world views. The political theory of Radical Orthodoxy is directed primarily at the like-minded; it cannot (and will not) reach out to adherents of different world views, other than in a missionary effort. On the basis of this account it seems hard not to feel renewed sympathy for public reason liberalism. Unlike Radical Orthodoxy, public reason liberalism does take our modern condition seriously. It recognizes that citizens live in democratic societies and must decide political questions by argument, while being fundamentally divided as far as their world views are concerned. Radical Orthodoxy makes us aware of the fact that some justifications of the necessity of a secular public reason are overly simplistic. The suggestion that in the absence of a shared public reason modern democratic societies would be torn up by civic discord and perhaps ultimately by wars of religion is too stark to merit belief.11 Yet, much can be said for the need of a shared public argumentative culture of some sorts. The technological possibilites offered by the Internet and digitalized information streams increasingly make the far-reaching separation of argumentative spheres a reality (see Stout 2004: 114, drawing on Sunstein 2001). Citizens can retreat into networks or groups with largely uniform world views, largely reducing the exposure to the arguments of fellow-citizens with fundamentally different world views. I entirely agree with Stout when he bemoans the democracy-undermining tendency of this ‘enclave society’ placed within our reach (2004: 112–17). The question is, can a satisfactory account be given of a postsecular legitimacy that could shape a postsecular society? 3. A Sceptical Conclusion In our search for the possibility of a postsecular concept of legitimacy I propose to begin with a discussion of Stout’s position. So far, my arguments have been largely in agreement with Stout, who criticizes Rawls’s public reason liberalism for reifying the idea of public reason ‘moralistically into a set of fixed rules for public discussion’ instead of treating it, as he ought, ‘as a vague ideal’ (2004: 75). And Stout 11

See also Eberle (2002: ch. 6).

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rejects Radical Orthodoxy because of its probable fragmentizing effect on societies in the contemporary condition of world view pluralism. What has Stout to offer in our search for a postsecular concept of legitimacy? Stout argues that a rigid exclusion of religious views in public justification is unnecessary. Drawing all too freely on one’s own religious convictions for political arguments in the context of an irreducible plurality of world views will not only often be rhetorically counterproductive, it will also be understood as a lack of respect towards those holding different world views. There are, therefore, ‘moral as well as strategic reasons for self-restraint’ (Stout 2004: 65), but Stout thinks that these reasons do not call for a rigid exclusion of the religious from political arguments. As he sees it, democracy is irreducibly dialogical; there is a perfectly legitimate locus of religious reasons for public policies in a ‘Socratic conversation’ (2004: 72): Suppose I tell you honestly why I favor a given policy, citing religious reasons. I then draw you into a Socratic conversation on the matter, take seriously the objections you raise against my premises, and make a concerted attempt to show you how your idiosyncratic premises give you reason to accept my conclusions. All the while, I take care to be sincere and avoid manipulating you.

With his stress on argumentative exchange between individuals, Stout certainly captures an important expressivist strand of political thought, but I fail to be convinced that the idea of a Socratic conversation can be activated under the conditions of a mass democracy. Hannah Arendt (1990: 79), for one, interprets the historic Socrates’ failure to convince his judges as a category mistake, a failure to realize the constraints imposed even by an ancient small-scale democracy: Socrates’ mistake was to address his judges in the form of dialectic, which is why he could not persuade them (. . .) Socrates insisted in talking the matter through with his judges as he used to talk about all kinds of things with single Athenian citizens or with his pupils.

By the same token we may wonder if Stout’s invoking the Socratic dialogue is not working against his own goals. Stout bemoans the fragmentation of the public sphere into streamlined enclaves. It is difficult to see how the bottom-up procedure of the Socratic dialogue can forge large-scale public audiences.12 In order to do just that one would 12 In the words of Callicles, one of Socrates’ adversaries in Plato’s Gorgias, ‘it’s typical that such a man [sc. engaged in dialectical philosophical conversation] (. . .) avoids the

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have to rely on different, non-dialectical forms of exchange, and such exchanges will to a large extent depend on appeals to public reason. In addition, it is hard to see how Stout can give content to a postsecular legitimacy that could render the postsecular distinct from the vilified liberal-secular society. When commenting on the lack of problem-solving power of Rawls’s conception of public reason, Stout writes: ‘I am not addressing the distinctive issues surrounding the roles of judge, juror, attorney, or public official’ (2004: 315 n. 11). This cannot be understood otherwise than as a defence of secular public reason for the arguments used by citizens in an official capacity. With this, however, Stout’s position does not deliver more of an account of the postsecular (and of postsecular legitimacy in particular) than do the much-vilified liberal-secular accounts of the role of religion in democracies. Rawls (1996: 231), for one, explicitly states that the primary concern of his theory is the argumentative behaviour of citizens in an official capacity and he can perceive much more leeway for citizens who are not so positioned. Habermas, whose rather qualified endorsement of the postsecular has often been overestimated, actually theorizes roughly the same status for religion in democracies. Habermas appreciates the importance of religion for opinion-forming processes in civil society, but he counterbalances this by stressing the importance of keeping religious world views outside the debates in ‘official’ legal and political loci, e.g. parliaments and law courts (Habermas 2005 and 2008). Whilst for Habermas perceived democratic legitimacy is contingent upon the discussions conducted within the larger civil society being reflected in ‘official’ debates and decisions (see Habermas 1994: 362–66), he does not seem prepared to acknowledge with this an inroad for religion into ‘official’ political argument, even if the overwhelming majority of the population were to favour religious public justification. Stout’s account does not offer a clear progress in the direction of the postsecular and of a postsecular legitimacy in particular. I would like to suggest that this result is not surprising, since it seems unlikely that a satisfactory concept of postsecular legitimacy could be formulated. The reason for this lies in the volatility of what in the first part of this paper I called our ‘broader political climate’. While we undoubtedly find signs of a robust view of legitimacy among the general public, centers of his city and the marketplaces (. . .) and, instead, lives the rest of his life in hiding, whispering in a corner with three or four boys, never uttering anything well-bred, important, or apt’ (485D–E, trans. Zeyl 1997).

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which is normally not adverse to a symbolic as well as argumentative presence of religion in the public realm, it is important to bear in mind that this is the status quo of an exceedingly complex and precarious balance. Over against manifestations of a robust view that is prepared to accommodate religion, we also find signs of an antagonistic movement: when religions or the religious are perceived to achieve too much and push too far, antireligious reactions are unleashed. The atheistic advertisements on buses in several European cities or the outspoken reactions to a creationist mass mailing in the Netherlands are but two examples of this. In this situation our perplexity remains: while it is easy to point out the deficiencies of public reason liberalism, it is hard to see how a meaningful postsecular alternative could be formulated in the modern circumstance of an irreducible plurality of world views. References Arendt, H. (1990) ‘Philosophy and Politics’. Social Research 57, 73–103. Audi, R. (2000) Religious Commitment and Secular Reason. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. —— and Wolterstorff, N. (1997) Religion in the Public Square: The Place of Religious Convictions in Political Debate. Lanham MD: Rowman & Littlefield. Blumenberg, H. (1986) The Legitimacy of the Modern Age. Trans. by R. M. Wallace. Cambridge, MA. Bohman, J. and Rehg, W. (eds) (1997) Deliberative Democracy: Essays on Reason and Politics. Cambridge MA: MIT Press. Cavanaugh, W. T. (1999) ‘The City: Beyond Secular Parodies’. In Milbank, J., Pickstock, C. and Ward, G. (eds) Radical Orthodoxy: A New Theology. London and New York: Routledge. Chaplin, J. (2005) ‘Suspended Communities or Covenanted Communities? Reformed Reflections on the Social Thought of Radical Orthodoxy’. In Smith, J. K. A. and Olthuis, J. H. (eds) Radical Orthodoxy and the Reformed Tradition: Creation, Covenant, and Participation. Grand Rapids MI: Baker Academic. D’Agostino, F. (1996) Free Public Reason: Making It up As We Go. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Dombrowski, D. A. (2001) Rawls and Religion. Albany NY: State University of New York Press. Eberle, C. J. (2002) Religious Conviction in Liberal Politics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Gutman, A. and Thompson, D. (2004) Why Deliberative Democracy? Princeton: Princeton University Press. Habermas, J. (1994) Faktizität und Geltung: Beiträge zur Diskurstheorie des Rechts und des demokratischen Rechtsstaats. Fourth edition. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp. —— (2005) ‘Religion in the Public Sphere’, Holberg Prize Lecture. Available online at http://www.holbergprisen.no/images/materiell/2005_symposium_habermas.pdf# nameddest=habermas. —— (2008) ‘Die Dialektik der Säkularisierung’. Blätter für deutsche und internationale Politik 4, 33–46.

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Hayfa, T. (2004) ‘The Idea of Public Justification in Rawls’s Law of Peoples’. Res Publica 10, 233–46. Hill, C. (1993) The English Bible and the Seventeenth-Century Revolution. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Milbank, J. ([1990] 2006) Theology and Social Theory: Beyond Secular Reason. Second edition. Malden MA and Oxford: Blackwell. Perry, M. J. (1997) Religion in Politics: Constitutional and Moral Perspectives. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Quinn, P. (1997) ‘Political Liberalisms and Their Exclusions of the Religious’. In Weithman (1997), 138–61. Rawls, J. (1996) Political Liberalism. Extended Paperback edition. New York: Columbia University Press. —— (1997) ‘The Idea of Public Reason Revisited’. University of Chicago Law Review 64, 787–842. —— (1999) The Law of Peoples. Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press. Saward, M. (2001) ‘Rawls and Deliberative Democracy’ in Passerin d’Entreves, M. (ed.) Democracy as Public Deliberation: New Perspectives. Manchester: Manchester University Press, pp. 112–32. —— (2003) Democracy. Cambridge: Polity. Shklar, J. (1984) Ordinary Vices. Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press. Solum, L. B. (1994) ‘Inclusive Public Reason’. Pacific Philosophical Quarterly 75, 217–31. Sterba, J. P. (1999) ‘Reconciling Public Reason and Religious Values’. Social Theory and Practice 25, 1–28. Stout, J. (2004) Democracy and Tradition. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Sunstein, C. R. (2001) Republic.com. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Waldron, J. (1993) ‘Religious Contributions in Public Deliberation’. San Diego Law Review 30, 817–48. Weithman, P. J. (ed.) (1997) Religion and Contemporary Liberalism. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press. Williams, A. (2000) ‘The Alleged Incompleteness of Public Reason’. Res Publica 6, 191–211. Wolterstorff, N. (1997) ‘Why We Should Reject What Liberalism Tells Us about Speaking in Public for Religious Reasons’. In Weithman (1997), 162–81. Zeyl, D. J. (trans.) (1997) ‘Plato: Gorgias’. In Cooper, J. M. (ed.) Plato: Complete Works. Indianapolis: Hackett, pp. 791–869.

RESTRAINTS ON RELIGIOUS REASONING IN THE POLITICAL SQUARE? Andy F. Sanders For a philosopher of religion in the Wittgensteinian tradition, venturing into the relatively unknown territory of political philosophy is an interesting experience. Wherever one goes one is confronted with the towering figure of John Rawls and with philosophers attacking, defending or commenting on his theory of political liberalism. In that context one is also confronted with the news that especially in the United States a number of the most prominent Christian theologians and philosophers ‘have expressed an extremely sour and critical attitude toward liberal democracy’. Referring to Milbank, Hauerwas and MacIntyre, the philosopher of religion Nicolas Wolterstorff even goes so far as to suggest that ‘presumably, the destruction of liberal democracy is the effect these writers desire, since they speak of it as a great evil’ (Wolterstorff 2005: 633). Rawls has developed a very influential theory of political liberalism in the contractarian tradition. In that tradition the central philosophical question is under what general conditions it is possible to have a just and stable democratic society. The aim of political philosophy (or theory) is to specify and justify the reasonableness of those conditions. In view of the radical diversity of world or life views in current society—Rawls calls them ‘comprehensive doctrines’—the potentially destabilizing role of these views, in particular the religious views, in a liberal democratic society becomes a key issue. Habermas, like Rawls a contractarian philosopher, expresses his worry about the possible disintegration of democracy by maintaining that ‘conflict on existential values between communities of faith cannot be solved by compromise’. According to Habermas, such conflicts cannot be contained by a mere modus vivendi but only by ‘losing any political edge against the background of a presupposed consensus on constitutional principles’ (Habermas 2006: 12). In this respect Habermas agrees with Rawls, who developed the concept of public reason partly also to ensure the stability of democracy in societies with a wide diversity of life or world views. Public reason is meant to ensure that citizens can conduct their political discussions on fundamental issues ‘within the

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framework of what each regards as a political conception of justice based on values that the others can reasonably be expected to endorse’ (Rawls 2005: 226). My aim in this paper is twofold. First, I would like to explore Rawls’s so-called proviso (section 1), a requirement that he derives from his idea of public reason as part of the wide view of public political culture (Rawls 2005: 462). This proviso has been strongly criticized by systematic and philosophical theologians for the alleged restraint it puts on the use of religious considerations or reasons in public political discussion and decisions. The restraint is seen as disrespectful and unfair to citizens who are religious. My second aim is to examine the objections of the critics (sections 2 and 3), among whom I have singled out Wolterstorff as a major representative. I conclude my contribution (section 4) with a real-life example of the use of religious considerations in European politics, which shows that the Rawlsian requirements can be, and in fact are, met by politicians who are also religious believers. 1. The Proviso Let me begin by pointing out a central question posed by Rawls in his Political Liberalism (2005: 458, 490): How is it possible for those holding religious doctrines, some based on religious authority, for example, the Church of the Bible, to hold at the same time a reasonable political conception that supports a reasonable constitutional democratic regime?

Some may not care at all whether their fellow citizens are able to keep and to practice their faith in a liberal democracy. Others might detect a whiff of secularism here as the question clearly indicates that religious people in such a democracy might be in serious trouble. The repeated use of the qualifier ‘reasonable’ further suggests that unreasonable religious doctrines may well be incompatible with reasonable political conceptions. The question might also be read as saying that it may well be impossible to advocate religious convictions on the one hand and to act as a political responsible citizen of a liberal democracy on the other. Or is Rawls perhaps suggesting that reasonable and morally responsible citizens should not introduce their religious beliefs in political public discussions? In view of the plurality of differing world-

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views or views of life in current society, it is not only the reasonableness but also the stability of democracy which is at stake: How is it possible that there may exist over time a stable and just society of free and equal citizens who remain profoundly divided by reasonable religious, philosophical and moral doctrines?1

Since he subsumes reasonable religious, philosophical and moral doctrines under the heading of ‘comprehensive doctrines’, Rawls is clearly not advocating secularism. His own rephrasing of the question clearly indicates that he is treating religious and non-religious or secular views of life on equal footing (Rawls 2005: 460): How is it possible—or is it—for those of faith, as well as the nonreligious (secular), to endorse a constitutional regime even when their comprehensive doctrines may not prosper under it, and indeed may decline?

Turning now to the description of some main features of the political culture of a democratic society, Rawls presents us with the following ‘general facts’: – the fact of reasonable pluralism, – the fact of oppression and – the fact that an enduring democratic regime must be willingly supported by a substantial majority of its (politically active) citizens (Rawls 2005: 36).2 These ‘facts’ seem to me incontrovertible and important. The third one is so evident that it warrants little comment. Rawls’s second ‘fact’, that of oppression, rightly insists that under current conditions a single philosophical, moral or religious comprehensive view, a single particular life view tradition to be adopted by all, could only be maintained by the oppressive use of state power (see Rawls 2005: 37).

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Rawls (2005: xxv; see also xxxvii). Rawls calls pluralism ‘reasonable’ because through free institutions a diversity of reasonable comprehensive doctrines has developed: ‘These are the doctrines that reasonable citizens affirm and that political liberalism must address.’ There are a fourth and even an important fifth ‘fact’, namely, ‘that many of our most important judgments are made under conditions where it is not to be expected that conscientious persons with full powers of reason, even after free discussion, will all arrive at the same conclusion’ (2005: 58). 2

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Regarding the ‘fact’ of reasonable pluralism I think Rawls is entirely right in emphasizing that the diversity of reasonable comprehensive doctrines, whether religious or secular, ‘is not a mere historical condition that may soon pass away [but] a permanent feature of the public culture of democracy’ (Rawls 2005: 58). To this I would add that under current postmodern conditions people find themselves confronted with large-scale diversity in virtually all areas of social life. Fragmentization, individualization and disagreement rather than unity and consensus appear to characterize the predicament. Institutionalized religions in Europe have steadily been, and still are, losing members and find themselves at the same time increasingly contested by other views of life, both secular and religious. With the collapse of the ‘Grand Narratives’ of modernity there seems to be no recourse any more to a single unifying standard of the true and the good (if ever there was one). Lacking a single set of universal and ready-made criteria for adjudicating between diverging and opposing claims of different world or life views, one is left with radical heterogeneity. This goes for the various brands of scientism, humanism and secularism as well as for the many living religious traditions, old or new, big or small. The recent discovery that religion is not dead yet, and even in Europe still alive, might perhaps be seen as a development of postmodern culture towards a ‘post-secularity’ that is mainly characterized by the fact of an irreducible life view diversity. In my view, citizens in a liberal democracy have no other alternative than to live amidst, and live with, life view plurality. Their political dealings and conversations with one another can only begin, or be continued, from wherever they stand, that is, from within the view of life they happen to have. In so far as such views are shaped by religious or secular traditions and shared by fellow citizens, the intertraditional conversation between them cannot be conducted on or in the religious or secular terms of only one of them, as there is fundamental disagreement and often a serious lack of mutual understanding. Precisely with an eye to this predicament Rawls developed his famous idea (and ideal) of public reason. There is a vast amount of literature on the precise meanings and implications of this conception but suffice it in this context to emphasize, first, that in Rawls’s view public reason is not the same as secular reason and, second, that public reason should be seen as much more restricted than, and also neutral in regard to, any religious or secular world or life view that is compatible with democratic polity. Just as religious reason is rea-

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soning in terms of, or from within, comprehensive religious doctrines and values, secular reason is reasoning in terms of, or from within, comprehensive non-religious doctrines and values. Examples of the former would be Christianity, Islam and Judaism, examples of secular reason would be, say, humanism, naturalism, scientism or communism. Religious and non-religious doctrines or world views as such are too broad and too controversial to serve the purposes of public reason. This public reason is specifically meant to be employed by ‘equal citizens who, as a collective body, exercise final political and coercive power over one another in enacting laws and in amending their constitution’ (Rawls 2005: 214). Public reason is informed by an ethico-political conception of justice as fairness that is based on values that all or most citizens can reasonably be expected to endorse, and applies only to fundamental political questions, which are exclusively concerned with ‘constitutional essentials and matters of basic justice’ (Rawls 2005: 212ff., 442ff.). There may be political discussions of other fundamental questions, but public reason is, or should be, constitutive of the discourses among members of parliament, government officials, other candidates for public office and judges. In other words, when using public reason one is appealing to principles, ideals and values of certain basic liberal political conceptions when debating fundamental political questions (Rawls 2005: 453).3 What are the implications of public reason for the use of reasonable comprehensive doctrines, religious or secular, in political debate? Though one might expect public reason to rule out the use of religious reason in public political discussion, Rawls’s so-called ‘wide view of public political culture’ does no such thing. It offers only a proviso (Rawls 2005: 462): reasonable comprehensive doctrines, religious or nonreligious, may be introduced in public political discussion at any time, provided that in due course proper political reasons—and not reasons given solely by comprehensive doctrines—are presented that are sufficient to support whatever the comprehensive doctrines introduced are said to support.

3 Note that Rawls’s philosophical and narrowly defined notion of public reason should not be confused with the normal, colloquial notion of giving reasons in public. In addition, the idea of public reason should be distinguished from the ideal of public reason. The latter may be realized by members of parliament, government officials and candidates for public office if and when they act from, and follow, the idea of public reason. As to ordinary citizens, Rawls tells us that ‘ideally citizens are to think of themselves as if they were legislators (. . .)’ (Rawls 2005: 444).

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Questions as to what should count as ‘in due course’, what ‘proper political reasons’ are and by, or to whom they should be presented, cannot be decided in advance. According to Rawls, they ‘must be worked out in practice’. In an interview that appeared in 1998, he put the proviso in a slightly looser way: [A]ny comprehensive doctrine, religious or secular, can be introduced into any political argument at any time, but I argue that people who do this should also present what they believe are public reasons for their argument.4

If ‘proper political reasons’ may be seen as reasons that citizens take to be public reasons, it is not clear why Rawls’s proviso is considered a serious restraint on religious reasoning in the political sphere. Still, this is precisely what many religious writers and theologians have argued. Let us therefore now turn to Wolterstorff for a closer look at his critique of the proviso. 2. Restraints? Central to Wolterstorff ’s account of the role and place of religion in political conversation within a liberal democracy is an ethical conception of the citizen. Taking what he calls a ‘consocial position that fully supports the idea of liberal democracy’, it is abundantly clear that Wolterstorff will have very little to do with Rawls’s (or Locke’s) contractarian approach.5 An exploration and discussion of his objections to that approach cannot be undertaken here, for this would lead us too deep into the land of political philosophy and take us too far away from the current focus, namely the pros and cons of any restraints on religious reasoning in matters of political importance. According to Wolterstorff, there should be no constraints at all on whatever reasons citizens find appropriate to bring up—religious reasons included. Of course, this is not to say that there should be no restraints at all. 4

Prusak (1998: 14). In this respect Wolterstorff ’s (1997: 165) positive reference to Nicolas Rescher (1993) is telling. The latter is an extensive critique of Rawls’s and Habermas’ aprioristic rationalism, which has it that consensus is a communal imperative for a just social order. Rescher argues that consensus had better be viewed as an inherently limited good that one may like to have if it can be secured fairly and at the right price but that, unlike social justice, ‘does not merit unqualified approbation and is no proper object of a generalized imperative for is promotion at any and every opportunity’ (Rescher 1993: 199). 5

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According to Wolterstorff, there are certain ‘virtues of civility’ that belong to the ethic of the citizen and pertain to the manner of public discussion and debate, such as: – listening to the other person with a willingness to learn and to let one’s mind be changed; – conducting debates in accordance with the rules provided by the laws of the land (unless these rules are unfair or unjust); – aiming at political justice in debates, not at only furthering one’s own interests (see Wolterstorff 1997: 112f.). What reasons has Wolterstorff on offer for rejecting Rawls’s proviso? What is wrong with the idea that all sorts of religious (or secular) comprehensive doctrines may be introduced in any political debate on the condition that additional public reasons should be presented ‘in due course’ of the discussion? Wolterstorff ’s first objection (1997: 105; italics original) is that it belongs to the religious convictions of a good many religious people in our society that they ought to base their decisions concerning fundamental issues of justice on their religious convictions. They do not view it as an option whether or not to do so (. . .) Their religion is not, for them, about something other than their social and political existence; it is also about their social and political existence. Accordingly, to require of them that they do not base their decisions and discussions concerning political issues on their religion, is to infringe, inequitably, on the free exercise of their religion.

Wolterstorff ’s second objection is that—at least in current post-secular culture—the proviso leads to ‘a kind of unfairness’. Whereas religious reasons as such can be spotted from a mile away, it is hard to tell whether or not the nationalism of someone who argues on nationalist lines is part of that person’s comprehensive perspective. What to think of these objections? The first objection seems a pretty good one and will certainly appeal to people who feel themselves strongly committed to their religious convictions. As Wolterstorff rightly maintains, religious people in fact do make their decisions on constitutional essentials and matters of basic justice on the basis of, or in terms of, their religious convictions. In a liberal democracy they have a constitutional right to do so. Readers may recall, however, that according to Rawls’s proviso citizens are allowed to introduce religious or secular reasons in support

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of their position in the context of political discussions. The only thing required is that—at some time—they also offer public reasons (in the Rawlsian sense) in support of it. Making decisions on political fundamentals on the basis of one’s faith, however, is something different than giving an account of these decisions in public discussion or debate. Consequently, Wolterstorff ’s objection against the proviso boils down to the charge that it would be unfair or improper to require of religious citizens that they should also offer (Rawlsian) public reasons for their position.6 It seems to me that this charge has some force if religious citizens may not be able to come up with the required public reasons. For example, wondering whether he has a public (or a non-religious) reason for his conviction that people have a right to fair access to means of sustenance, Wolterstorff tells us that he cannot think of one and that he probably came to believe in that rights principle by reflecting on the Biblical prophets and gospels. He also suggests a simple solution to this problem. Religious citizens almost automatically have secular (and possibly public) reasons along with the religious reasons for their political positions. If, say, such citizens were opposed to abortion on the ground that (they believe that) God says that abortion is wrong, they would also be opposed to abortion on the ground that abortion is wrong (Wolterstorff 1997: 162f.). This invokes the distinction, indeed the possible difference, between ‘having a reason’ on the one hand, and ‘giving or presenting a reason’ on the other. The reasons one has need not be the reasons one offers. As far as I can see there need not be any insincerity involved in this. It is remarkable that in spite of his rejection of the proviso Wolterstorff does seem to acknowledge that certain requirements on reasons are in order: he tells us that if persons refer, say, to certain Biblical passages to back up their position on a political issue, and if they also want to persuade those for whom the Bible has no authority, ‘they will have to find and offer other, additional reasons for their position’ (Wolterstorff 1997: 112). Even more outspoken is his summarizing statement of his debate with Robert Audi (Wolterstorff 1997, 164; italics mine): 6 At the time of writing his 1997 article, Wolterstorff may have been unaware of Rawls’s wider view as expounded in ‘The Idea of Public Reason Revisited’, which also appeared in 1997 and was subsequently republished in Rawls (2005). However, Wolterstorff (1997:151) clearly shows that he is aware of this broader view.

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Let religious people use what reasons they wish, and offer them to whomever they wish. Let non-religious people do so as well. Of course, if the religious person wants to persuade the non-religious person, or the person of another religion, of his position, he will have to do more than offer his own idiosyncratic religious reasons.

The first two sentences of this passage state the by now familiar ‘No restraints on reasons!’ in such a general way that it almost seems as if anything goes—something that remains to be seen. Wolterstorff then continues with a requirement that might even be seen as restrictive from the point of view of religious people. For he goes on to repeat that when religious citizens want to persuade their non-religious fellow citizens, they should offer other, that is, non-religious or public reasons. Clearly this is so close to the Rawlsian proviso as to be almost the same. Note, however, that for Wolterstorff the requirement to offer ‘more than religious reasons only’ is merely one of strategy, not one ‘embodied in the ethic of the citizen in a liberal democracy’ (Wolterstorff 1997: 164). I find this suggestion somewhat puzzling. Obviously, there is nothing against making a distinction between offering reasons with an eye to persuade and offering reasons for other purposes. An example of the latter may be, say, offering reasons with an eye to explicate one’s position or informing one’s audience for what reasons one holds a particular position or how one came to hold it. Persuasion is not necessarily implied if the aim is explication or information. However, in political debate among citizens the aim often is persuasion, aimed at agreement or, if this turns out to be impossible, some sort of compromise. As Wolterstorff himself says in so many words, in those cases religious citizens are required also to give at least some non-religious reasons. Before turning to the second objection I would like to consider briefly the question why religious citizens should do so; where the actual context of political discussion is concerned, ‘anything goes’ does not apply. Excluding more or less irenic exchanges of information with an eye to gaining a better understanding of one another’s position, in the context of political discussions aiming at agreement—whether to disagree or to compromise—surely the appropriate speech acts are arguing, explaining, reasoning, suggesting, questioning, criticizing and the like. By virtue of the ‘logic’ of public political discussion even a further proviso may be warranted, because certain speech acts simply do not belong in contexts of political discussion. Performing them in those

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contexts may well terminate the discussion or turn it into something else. Let me give a few examples of those speech acts. According to my Shorter Oxford English Dictionary, proclaiming is ‘to announce publicly’, evangelizing ‘to proclaim as good tidings’, preaching ‘to set forth or teach (anything) in the way of exhortation’, testifying is ‘to proclaim as something that one knows or believes’, witnessing, among other things, ‘to bear witness to (a fact or a statement) or to furnish evidence or proof of’ and prophesying ‘to speak by (or as by) divine inspiration, or in the name of a deity’. Surely, the performance of these speech acts in public political debates in parliaments, ministries, administrations and the like would in a sense be inappropriate. Proclaiming, exhorting or prophesying are speech acts that do not count as offering reasons or as arguing in political discussions in which the participants are committed to different religious or secular views of life. If citizens were called upon to argue their position on a fundamental political issue and then confined themselves to referring to, or quoting extensively from, the Koran, the Bible, the prophets, Socrates, Lenin or the Great Helmsman—to include a few paradigmatic secular life view perspectives—this would surely infringe on the discussion. This would be not merely because focusing on deep differences between the life views of the participants might stir up strong passions, but because speech acts such as proclaiming etc. lack the dialogical character required for discourse aiming at political agreement or compromise. I do not think this implies an infringement on citizens’ constitutional freedom of speech or the free exercise of religion; it only implies that these rights are not absolute. This is not to say, however, that people with religious or secular life views should be reticent or even silent about their convictions in the public sphere. There is a place and perhaps a need in that sphere for intertraditional life view conversation in the dialogical sense. But it would be a mistake to think that that sphere necessarily and completely coincides with the political square within the public sphere. So far, then, the conclusion is inescapable that Wolterstorff’s first objection to the proviso fails. Next, his suggestion to view the requirement that religious citizens should also offer non-religious reasons for their position as merely one of strategy and not one ‘embodied in the ethic of the citizen’ (Wolterstorff 1997: 164), insufficiently takes into account that public political discussion is primarily a matter of reasoning aimed at persuasion. Let us now turn to Wolterstorff’s second objection to Rawls’s proviso.

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3. Unfairness? The reader will recall that the second objection is concerned with a certain inequality between religious and non-religious citizens. Someone using religious reasons will be immediately identified as a religious person, while someone using secular reasons may go undetected as a proponent of some secular comprehensive doctrine. According to Wolterstorff (1997: 105), this implies a certain unfairness in practice. This point of critique seems to be fuelled by the worry that in a liberal democracy religious citizens are worse off than their secular fellow citizens. Wolterstorff does not elaborate his point so we are in the dark as to the precise nature of the unfairness. Our exploration of Rawls’s wide view and the proviso so far has shown that the only requirement is that both religious and secular citizens, when arguing their political positions, may offer any religious or secular reason they like to derive from their comprehensive views, provided that they also offer some public reasons which are sufficiently independent of these views. It is hard to see any unfairness in this, but one possibility is that religious citizens are at a disadvantage because their reasons and beliefs, broadly speaking, transcend the secular. Hence, they will always have a harder job than their secular fellow citizens in explicating and arguing their position as they themselves in their specific way conceive it. Explications will be more difficult to give because at some point they involve the use of religious concepts and idiom, the significance of which cannot reasonably be expected to be familiar to a predominantly secular audience, and possibly even to antagonize it. Arguments will be harder to give because they will include premises or reasons whose truth cannot reasonably be expected to be shared by secular discussion partners. This, it seems to me, is the predicament of citizens belonging to religious minorities in postmodern democratic societies characterized by radical life-view plurality. Perhaps I am now putting this in too neutral a fashion, for consider Habermas’ remark (2006: 15) on the relationship between the religious and the secular in society: [A] secularist attitude does not suffice for the expected cooperation with fellow citizens who are religious (. . .) What is at stake is not some respectful feel for the possible existential significance of religion for some other person. What we must also expect of the secular citizens is moreover a self-reflective transcending of a secularist self-understanding of Modernity.

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What Habermas is requiring here of secular citizens is a huge ‘change in mentality’ that is ‘no less cognitively exacting’ than the adaptation of religion to the challenges ‘of an ever more secularized environment’ in the past. A formidable obstacle to the proposed change consists in a secularism that utterly fails to grasp that its conflict with religious opinions is what Habermas calls ‘a reasonably expected disagreement’. As he rightly points out (Habermas 2006: 15): As long as secular citizens are convinced that religious traditions and religious communities are to a certain extent archaic relics of pre-modern societies that continue to exist in the present, they will understand freedom of religion as the cultural version of the conservation of a species in danger of becoming extinct. From their viewpoint, religion no longer has any intrinsic justification to exist.

Habermas may well be right in suggesting that ‘a change in epistemic attitudes must occur for the religious consciousness to become reflective and the secular consciousness to transcend its limitations’ (Habermas 2006: 18). So far I have not seen much reflecting and transcending in this sense. The plurality and diversity of religious and nonreligious views of life are simply given and may well be too radical and too deep to overcome in the foreseeable future. The epistemic stance of secularists towards religion as ‘archaic’, ‘pre-modern’, ‘unenlightened’ etc. will no doubt have made quite a few religious believers resentful. They may feel silenced and excluded. On the other hand, their very own religious narratives may let them come to see their situation in a different light. In the meantime there is no other way than to go on conversing with each other and discuss the fundamental issues that concern our society from within the life views, religious or secular, we are committed to. 4. An example Let me, by way of conclusion, give an example that shows how political reasoning can be conducted in a manner that may commend itself to both secular and religious people, and may even fall within the confines of public reason because it touches upon a controversial matter of basic justice. The example is not meant to prove anything but only serves to show that reasoning in actual political life can sometimes be quite different from what one would infer from the general musings of political theorists. Wondering whether and how Christian politicians

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might use religious, secular or public reasons, I had a look at the website of a national Christian political party, the so-called ChristenUnie (Christian Union), currently even a party in the coalition government of the Netherlands. Let us consider a piece of reasoning on the public funding of embryonic stem cells research by Hans Blokland, member of the European Parliament and member of the ChristenUnie. In a lecture held in Brussels, Blokland (2004) argued that the European Union should not fund research involving human embryos. Here is a summary of his reasoning (all italics mine): (1) embryonic stem cells research is a punishable offence in many EU Member States—consequently, there can be no EU funding of such research in the countries involved; (2) research should not be at the expense of human life; (3) as Kant already pointed out, human life, at whatever stage of development, should never be used in a merely instrumental manner; (4) somatic (or adult) stem cell research offers a wide range of possibilities for therapies of degenerative diseases and does not involve the use and destruction of human embryos; (5) according to my Christian philosophy, this world with all its plants, animals and human beings’ may be seen as God’s creation, a creation that God imbued with numerous possibilities—consequently, man must search for treatments of diseases; (6) an embryo is a potential human being and contains all the ingredients necessary to become a person and is one of God’s creatures and as such deserving of protection from the very beginning— consequently, therapies and treatments must not involve the use of human embryos; (7) it is a miracle and (. . .) a blessing from God that adult stem cells have been discovered—consequently, let us fund research that develops therapies with the aid of this promising adult stem cell research. Note that (1) and (4) are factual statements, and that (2) and (3) may well be acceptable to humanists and religious believers alike. In (5), (6) and (7) religious reasons turn up: the world is created by God, human embryos are God’s creatures which, as such, deserve protection, and the discovery of adult stem cells may be seen as a divine blessing. Blokland clearly presents something like an integrated argument that would satisfy Rawls’s criteria quite well. After all, both secular

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and religious reasons are presented. Notice also that Blokland could have offered only secular reasons (say, by leaving out the italicized passages) and might have concluded with the last clause of (7) without weakening its point—at least not from the perspective of a non-religious audience. Since participants in a political discussion are under no obligation always to tell each other the whole truth as they see it, I fail to see why religious reasons should always be offered if someone happens to have them. However, in view of the fact that his audience consisted almost entirely of evangelical religious people from all over Europe, why should Blokland confine himself to secular reasons only? For a kindred religious audience he might even have confined himself to the religious reasons (5)–(7) only. He even might have added a few religious reasons to make his case more religiously impressive. That he did not do so, but offered both secular and religious reasons, is precisely what political theorists of the contractarian or consensual kind such as Rawls, Audi and Habermas require of him.7 References Blokland, H. (2004) ‘The New European Union and Ethical Issues’, http://www .christenunie.nl/nl/k/news/view/35980, accessed at 28 March 2009. Habermas, J. (2006) ‘Religion in the Public Sphere’, European Journal of Philosophy 14, 1–25. Prusak, B. G. (1998) ‘Politics, Religion & the Public Good: An interview with philosopher John Rawls’, Commonweal, Sept. 25, 12–16. Rawls, J. (2005) Political Liberalism: Expanded edition, New York: Columbia University Press. Rescher, N. (1993) Pluralism: Against the Demand for Consensus, Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press. Wolterstorff, N. (1997) ‘The Role of Religion in Decision and Discussion of Political Issues’. In Audi, R. and N. Wolterstorff, Religion in the Public Square: The place of religious convictions in political debate, Lanham MD: Rowman & Littlefield, pp. 67–130, 145–165. —— (2005) ‘Jeffrey Stout on Democracy and Its Contemporary Christian Critics’, Journal of Religious Ethics 33, 633–47.

7 It also turns out that in the more than sixty pages of the ChristenUnie’s political programme 2006–2010, written for the elections of 2006, the words ‘God’ and ‘Bible’ are used only 16 and 8 times respectively. If this may be taken as an indication of the distribution of secular and religious reason in the CU programme, Rawls’s proviso has been satisfied quite well.

PUBLIC REASON AND INCLUSIONISM AS PSEUDO-INCLUSIONISM Anke Schuster In the last two decades or so political philosophy has been debating whether religious arguments may legitimately be used in public discourse. The problem arises because in public discourse citizens exercise collective political power, and should do so in terms all citizens can reasonably be expected to accept. In modern societies, marked by a pervasive and deep pluralism of worldviews, religious arguments cannot command widespread assent, but whether it follows that they should be excluded from public discourse is a matter of contention. The idea that public discourse is the place where political power is exercised and that this exercise of power needs to be justified in generally accessible terms, is the core of the concept of public reason. Public reason is a normative notion specifying what kinds of arguments should and should not be used in public discourse. Public reason theories fall into two groups: exclusionism and inclusionism. Exclusionism, most prominently represented by John Rawls1 and Robert Audi, propounds the view that religious arguments should not be used in public discourse. Inclusionists such as Christopher Eberle, Nicholas Wolterstorff or Kent Greenawalt, by contrast, hold that religious arguments may be used in public discourse. Rejecting exclusionism as too restrictive, inclusionists maintain that religious citizens should not be asked to disregard their religious commitments when discussing political issues in public. Both inclusionists and exclusionists, then, embrace the concept of public reason but disagree on whether it admits religious arguments. In the course of the debate a shift has occurred. Whereas the 1990s were dominated by the exclusionist position (Bader 1999: 598), the present century has seen an emerging consensus in political philosophy 1 John Rawls’s idea of public reason, which is part of his conception of political liberalism, could be considered exclusionist at least until the introduction, in 1996, of ‘the wide view of public reason’ (Rawls 1996: li–lii). Unlike the views of many other authors, Rawls’s exclusionism not only concerns religious arguments but all arguments based on what he calls ‘comprehensive doctrines’.

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on the inclusionist view (Boettcher 2005: 497). This shift is due in part to the recent publication of sophisticated defences of inclusionism, most notably by Christopher Eberle (Eberle 2002). Moreover, some exclusionists have come to embrace a more inclusionist perspective. John Rawls, Richard Rorty and Michael Perry have all declared that their positions have changed from exclusionism to more inclusionist perspectives (Rawls 1996: li–lii, Perry 2003: xi–xii, Rorty 2003: 141–4). My claim in this paper is that inclusionism is not as inclusionist as it purports to be. In fact, it is no more than pseudo-inclusionism. It pays lip service to the permissibility of religious arguments in public discourse, but suggests requirements for public discourse which seriously restrict the use of these arguments. I elaborate on two of these conditions: the exclusion of what Kent Greenawalt has called ‘imposition reasons’ and the fallibilism requirement. I argue that both requirements are ill-founded and unduly restrictive. Finally, I ascribe the failure of inclusionism to be properly inclusionist to its conception of a person, arguing that inclusionism only avoids being unduly restrictive for those citizens who conform to that conception. 1. The Exclusion of Imposition Reasons In his theory of religious arguments and public reason, Kent Greenawalt draws a distinction between two kinds of religious reasons: imposition and non-imposition reasons. Greenawalt argues that where the prohibition of human conduct is at issue, only non-imposition reasons should be used in public discourse. As the term indicates, as imposition reasons Greenawalt defines all reasons which seek to impose one’s religious belief on others or to seriously discourage others from holding different religious beliefs (Greenawalt 1995: 59). Among such reasons are those which refer to certain human acts as sins. These are imposition reasons because they are based on notions of harm which are not comprehensible in non-religious terms, but only in religious terms such as eternal damnation, damage to one’s God-given soul, or incurring the wrath of God (Greenawalt 1995: 6). Greenawalt gives several examples of imposition reasons. One is that of a person who supports classroom prayer in state schools because he thinks that this would induce Jewish children to abandon their faith (Greenawalt 1995: 58). A second example is that of an opponent of homosexuality who is convinced that homosexuality is a sin

public reason and inclusionism as pseudo-inclusionism 345 (Greenawalt 1988: 90–1). He also offers an example of a religious reason which is not an imposition reason. It concerns the issue of whether there should be a law to ensure that all animals kept for the production of meat are kept in decent living conditions. Someone who favours such a law on the ground that the Bible calls for concern for animals has a religious reason which is not an imposition reason, as it does not seek to discourage other religious views or practices (Greenawalt 1995: 58–9). Similarly, people who oppose abortion use a legitimate (nonimposition) religious reason if they argue that the embryo deserves the consideration given to any human being—from the moment of conception, as expressed in the Bible (Greenawalt 1995: 6), for the harm of killing a child is comprehensible in non-religious terms. The justification Greenawalt offers for the exclusion of imposition reasons is that they violate the principle of religious liberty. Thus, their exclusion is based on the thought that in public discourse citizens exercise political power and must not use it to infringe on the basic rights and freedoms of citizens. In Greenawalt’s view the political responsibilities of citizens justify only one constraint on their behaviour in politics, namely the duty not to undermine liberal democracy (Greenawalt 1995: 55). Undermining the basic premises of liberal democracy is an instance of this, and in Greenawalt’s eyes necessitates the exclusion of imposition reasons. At the same time, however, Greenawalt says that citizens participate in political life mostly by voting for representatives; they neither represent the population as a whole, as officials of the executive do, nor do they decide on legislation as their representatives in parliament do (Greenawalt 1995: 139, 159). The plausibility of the distinction between religious imposition and non-imposition reasons is disputable. From the examples Greenawalt provides it is not clear what exactly makes the non-imposition reasons religious. Neither of the arguments he names derive their force from the invocation of religious authority. In the case of concern for animals, the argument is the concern due to animals, whereas the fact that the Bible calls for it is no more than an addition, along the lines of ‘and the Bible says so, too’. The sense in which such arguments can properly be considered religious is even more tenuous in the abortion example. The only sense in which such legitimate non-imposition arguments can be considered religious is that religious citizens frequently use them. Apart from that, it is difficult to see what distinguishes them from secular arguments. In fact, saying that abortion is wrong because the embryo should be considered a human being from conception is

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a perfectly non-religious view. Typically, religiously motivated opposition to abortion is religious in that it refers to the sanctity of life. Whether or not one believes that the embryo is a human being from the moment of conception is not a matter of religious belief; rather, the thought that abortion is wrong because God has forbidden the taking of life is based on the prior belief that the foetus constitutes human life. The restrictive effect of the exclusion of imposition reasons depends on how large the group of these reasons is. From Greenawalt’s examples one would have to conclude that any religious argument which refers mainly to the authority of God (including the Bible) is an imposition argument and therefore illegitimate in public discourse. If, for example, the person in the example about keeping animals had referred to the Bible as condemning disregard for animals as a sin (rather than saying that the Bible recommends concern for animals) he would have been using an imposition reason. There is too much vagueness in Greenawalt’s account to allege that he admits only secular reasons in public discourse, clothing them in the guise of non-imposition religious reasons, but even on a more cautious reading of Greenawalt the conclusion suggests itself that the exclusion of religious imposition reasons constitutes a considerable restriction. In contrast to what Greenawalt seems to assume, it is not obvious that using religious imposition reasons in public constitutes an infringement on other citizens’ religious freedom. After all, as Greenawalt himself notes, citizens do not decide on issues, that is, they do not pass laws. Taking part in public discourse, citizens do not have the power to limit their fellow citizens’ religious freedom. Besides, secular conservative citizens often share the religious citizens’ rejection of abortion, same-sex marriage and the like. There is no reason to assume that a religious opponent who refers to the Bible when resisting samesex marriage imposes his belief on others, while a secular conservative referring to the perversity of same-sex relationships does not. Rather, what underlies the distinction between non-imposition and imposition religious reasons is not the imposition of one’s religious belief, but the reference to religious authority. Saying that something is a sin is simply another way of saying that God forbids something. Saying that God forbids the taking of human life, be it in cases of abortion or euthanasia, or that God forbids homosexuality, are ways of referring to religious authority. These arguments may not be persuasive for non-religious citizens, but they express an important way in which

public reason and inclusionism as pseudo-inclusionism 347 religious belief informs political commitments. Banning them from public discourse means preventing (some) religious citizens from publicly relying on the authority of the word of God. 2. The Fallibilism Requirement Another requirement for citizens in public discourse is that they should not propound their arguments without being aware of the possibility that they may be wrong—the so-called fallibilism requirement. It often goes hand in hand with the demand that citizens should be prepared to change their opinions in the course of the discussion. This requirement is more burdensome for religious than for non-believing citizens, and in general certainly more burdensome for citizens with deep convictions. For religious citizens the fallibilism requirement means that they are not supposed to firmly believe in the truth of their positions and should always be conscious of the possibility of being wrong about their religious belief. In order to explore the role of the fallibilism requirement in public reason, let us first consider Christopher Eberle’s theory of public reason. In his book Religious Conviction in Liberal Politics (2002), Eberle has offered an elaborate account of the place of religious convictions in the public sphere, which is based on the ‘ideal of conscientious engagement’. The ideal describes the ways in which citizens ought to support coercive laws. It has two elements: the standard of conscientiousness and the norm of engagement. Eberle’s conception of conscientiousness is primarily directed at seeking to ensure that one’s reasons for supporting a coercive law are morally appropriate. By Eberle’s account, citizens ought to communicate their reasons for a coercive law to their fellow citizens and listen to their objections, with the aim of learning about the moral propriety of the coercive law. Citizens ought to be prepared to learn from others, and to change their opinions. Citizens need to be aware of the possibility of being mistaken (Eberle 2002: 102–6). The fallibilism requirement is a considerable burden for religious citizens, and Eberle acknowledges as much when he says that citizens should not be asked to revise their belief in God, for such a demand would be ‘far too onerous a burden to impose’ (2002: 103). Neither should citizens be required to question the inerrancy of the Bible. Such beliefs, Eberle maintains, are core religious beliefs which define someone’s

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moral identity and should therefore not be subject to the fallibilism requirement. By contrast, less fundamental religious beliefs should be held with a fallibilist attitude. Religious believers should be aware, for example, that their interpretation of the Bible may be mistaken, as well as other theological beliefs they may have (Eberle 2002: 263). It is clear that the distinction between core religious beliefs and less fundamental beliefs is supposed to mitigate the effects of the fallibilism requirement for believers, but it is doubtful whether such a distinction is feasible. There is usually no strict separation between someone’s belief in God and his interpretation of God’s will. Often, core religious beliefs and less fundamental religious beliefs are inextricably intertwined, particularly in those cases with which Eberle is concerned, namely abortion, homosexuality and the like. What is at stake in these cases is fundamental issues about human life and human dignity, and it is difficult to imagine how religious believers would separate their interpretation of God’s view on these from their belief in God. The fallibilism requirement, then, imposes a considerable burden on the citizen. It goes far beyond the duty of diligence in forming one’s political opinion: the fallibilism requirement asks citizens to acknowledge that in spite of their firm belief and conscientious way of forming a political opinion—gathering information, weighing alternatives, acknowledging counter-arguments—, they should still acknowledge that they could be wrong. They should consider being wrong not only as a theoretical possibility (as general human fallibility) which they are free to dismiss after consideration, but they should also keep it in mind as an enduring possibility, the correctness of which may only show during public discourse. This is not only a cognitively demanding stance; it also requires a good deal of meekness. It makes it impossible for religious citizens to express in public discourse that they believe in the truth of their religious beliefs. This means not only that religious citizens may not formulate their religious beliefs in ways that claim the truth of the propositions, but also lessens the force of religious arguments, for they have to be presented as tentative interpretations of God’s will. There are several ways in which the fallibilism requirement could be regarded as having a role in public discourse which is important enough to justify the demands it imposes on citizens. The first option is to argue that the willingness to change one’s mind is a prerequisite to reaching agreement on political issues. Citizens are deeply divided in their views and opinions, and it is one of the benefits of public

public reason and inclusionism as pseudo-inclusionism 349 discourse that it confronts citizens with opposing views and that in having to defend one’s own ideas and learning about arguments for different positions, citizens may come to agree on one common viewpoint. This argument has two shortcomings. First, it portrays a decision on a political issue as a unanimous decision. This need not be the case, and may not be at all feasible in practice. Reasonable citizens disagree about many issues—a disagreement which is legitimate and often cannot be resolved by discourse or by any other procedure. Majority decisions are often the only way of reaching a decision. Second, the consensus argument for the willingness to change one’s mind is based on the presupposition that only a principled agreement is a good outcome of a debate. Again, this need not be the case. Often all that can be attained is a majority agreement on a practical compromise, for example, allowing euthanasia under specific conditions and restrictions. Citizens need not change their opinion on an issue to be able to agree with a practical compromise for pragmatic reasons, such as being willing to come to a result, or for wanting to prevent worse options such as no decision. The second way of according the fallibilism requirement an important role in public discourse is by saying that the willingness to change one’s mind is a sign of showing respect for one’s fellow citizens. An attitude of fallibilism shows that one acknowledges that other citizens’ arguments have force and that one does not see oneself as in the possession of absolute truth. It may also be taken to signal that one does not believe others to be wrong. Yet there is a slippery slope here towards expecting others to actually change their minds. If I owe you respect by adopting a fallibilist attitude towards my political views, you will expect more from me than me saying ‘I am willing to change my mind, but I won’t, because your arguments are just not good enough’. To count as a sign of respect, citizens would expect more from each other than mere lip service to fallibility; on the other hand, citizens could not reasonably expect everyone to change views. Between the two extremes of displaying unwillingness to change one’s mind or only paying lip service to fallibility and actually changing one’s mind, there are some intermediate positions. These do not entail an actual change of mind, so we need proxies for actually changing one’s mind that are tangible enough to render claims about one’s own fallibility credible. Evident candidates are the willingness to let others speak, shown by not interrupting; the willingness to take other arguments

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seriously, for example, by asking clarificatory questions, and not making derogatory remarks about other people’s views; and the willingness to explain one’s own views and arguments as well as possible, shown by answering questions conscientiously and being consistent. It seems uncontroversial to assume that these are all virtues in public discussion, and they are perfectly compatible with believing in the truth of one’s views. If this is already enough to qualify as an attitude of fallibilism, we would not need fallibilism as an explicit extra requirement. The argument from respect can also be used to argue against fallibilism. Respect for one’s fellow citizens as free and reasonable requires citizens to appreciate other citizens’ opinions as they are, as manifestations of their reasoning capacities. Such a conception of respect, which connects with the liberal democratic view of citizens as capable of forming and holding views, is difficult to square with the fallibilism requirement. If a conscientious citizen who has thought long and deeply about an issue, weighing all arguments carefully, finally comes to a conclusion which reflects his best judgement and corresponds to his moral views, there is no reason why he should be required to be willing to change his mind in order to be a good citizen. A third and final option to relate the fallibilism requirement to the purposes of public discourse is to regard it as necessary for the preparedness to discuss one’s views. Someone who thinks of himself as in the possession of truth may regard it as unnecessarily bothersome to explain his views to others. This seems to be the line of argument which Eberle follows when he gives the example of a Christian Right activist who said ‘that a flat tax was biblical policy, and therefore there was no room for discussion’ (Eberle 2002: 263). This is an attitude that some religious citizens may have, but it is not something that is inherent in believing in the truth of one’s position. People thinking that a flat tax was biblical policy can still be prepared to discuss this position. They can be willing to give reasons for this view (where in the Bible is something written that is pertinent to the issue and how is it interpreted to lead to the position on flat tax?) and can be prepared to listen to counter-arguments. That this specific representative of the Christian Right was not prepared to do so is a personal feature, not a function of the firmness with which someone believes in the truth of his own opinion. To conclude, none of the ways to accord the fallibilism requirement an important function in public discourse is convincing. This is not to say that fallibilism should not be seen as a personal ideal, but it does

public reason and inclusionism as pseudo-inclusionism 351 caution against presenting it as a requirement for public discourse and as a moral obligation or virtue of citizenship. There is another aspect to the role of the fallibilism requirement in public reason theories, and Michael Perry’s most recent book Under God? (Perry 2003) illustrates it well. While Perry considers himself an inclusionist, he retains a critical perspective on certain forms of relying on religiously grounded moral belief in politics. Perry calls on believers to exercise self-restraint, for example when disfavouring same-sex marriage on the basis of the biblical injunction of homosexuality. Perry reasons that it is implausible that God has created human nature in such a way that a homosexual relationship can, for some, be a deeply fulfilling relationship, but that such relationships are nevertheless against God’s will. Perry points to the disagreement amongst Christians as to how to interpret what the Bible says on homosexuality. He notes that Christians have for a long time disagreed about the position of the Bible on homosexuality, and he reasons that history has shown that Christians can be radically mistaken in their understanding about what the Bible teaches about morality. Some Christians, for example, used to think that slavery was permissible from a religious perspective. Such disagreement, Perry holds, should be taken by Christians as occasion to subject the traditional belief to careful, critical scrutiny. (Of course, doing so necessitates subjecting the emergent belief that challenges the traditional belief to such scrutiny, too.) Indeed, for Christians faced with such disagreement to fail to subject the traditional belief (that the Bible teaches so and so) to serious re-examination would be, not an act of humble fidelity, but an act of prideful infidelity (Perry 2003: 63).

Perry not only asks opponents of homosexuality to reconsider their interpretation of the Bible, but he also goes to great lengths to show why Christians should accept the view that homosexuality does not contradict a Christian understanding of God’s will. In this way Perry hopes to show that the self-restraint he proposes does not constitute a privileging of the secular (2003: 72). Admittedly, it would not be fair to suggest that Perry’s position privileges the secular. However, it is difficult not to conclude that his stance privileges a modernist (as opposed to a traditionalist) view of religion, one in which believers see it as part of their religious obligation to critically examine their religious beliefs and the pronouncements of religious authorities. The proper way of believing, for Perry, is one in which self-scrutiny, scepticism and fallibilism occupy a central role.

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This is probably a view about which there is much interdenominational and transdenominational disagreement. What Perry fails to explain is why it should be the traditionalists who are mistaken in their view of what religious belief requires. Perry finds the most recent religious views on homosexuality more convincing than the traditional ones, but he cannot convincingly argue why self-critical assessment of one’s faith not merely can lead one to this conclusion, but why it must do so, other outcomes being unreasonable or even unchristian. Clearly, Perry’s chief intention is to persuade believers to adopt the ‘correct’ positions on certain politically contentious issues such as abortion and homosexuality. It is illuminating to compare the fallibilism requirement with the so-called ‘bracketing approach’. This approach is a feature of some exclusionist accounts, such as Rawls’s, and is based on the requirement that citizens ought to bracket their religious and other comprehensive beliefs when debating political issues. Bracketing requires believers to ignore the fact that they are believers, for the purpose of political conduct. This ‘split’ in a citizen’s identity has been criticised as unduly burdensome or impossible (for example, Habermas 2006: 8, Wolterstorff 1997: 105). Yet, the bracketing approach enables citizens to set aside some of their beliefs and protect them from scrutiny (see Boettcher 2005: 511–12), whereas the scrutiny approach expects those religious citizens who adhere to traditional modes of faith to change their beliefs. It is therefore doubtful that the inclusionist scrutinizing approach is less demanding than the exclusionist bracketing approach, both cognitively, i.e. with respect to the cognitive effort required of the believer, and practically, with respect to what can be expected of the religious believer in actual public discourse. 3. The Conception of a Person in Inclusionism It is puzzling that despite its best intentions to avoid the exclusionists’ restrictive stance towards religious arguments inclusionism fails to achieve its aim. In order to expose the source of this failure it is enlightening to recapitulate what theorists of public reason consider the definition of a good citizen. Greenawalt’s good citizen abstains from invoking religious authority and only uses arguments which can be phrased in secular terms. Eberle’s good citizen distinguishes between his core religious beliefs and his less fundamental beliefs and

public reason and inclusionism as pseudo-inclusionism 353 is prepared to revise his opinion about God’s will in the course of public discourse. Perry’s good citizen takes denominational disagreement about moral issues as an opportunity to realise the outmodedness of his interpretation of the Bible. The conception of a person which underlies these accounts of good citizenship is that of someone who is able to step back not only from political commitments, but also from moral and religious views; who is self-reflexive and self-critical and generally wary of his own certainties; who in political discussions eschews presenting his religious views as true and offers his views in order to receive critical feedback. It is not far-fetched to see in this picture, as Stanley Fish has done, the norms of the academy in general and of political science departments in particular, which means that those within the circle will hold their beliefs at arm’s length and relate to them in a style marked by diffidence, aversion to strong assertion (except in a very few cases, like that of racial discrimination), and a pervasive, if mild and unaggressive, skepticism (Fish 1999: 95).

Fish directed this charge at Gutmann’s and Thompson’s book Disagreement in Democracy (1996), but it is also applicable to the theories reviewed above. It is a conception of a person who is liberal not only in his political views, but also in how he believes one should live. Stephen Macedo has expressed this view, which he embraces, most vividly: [B]eing a self-critical reasongiver is the best way of being a liberal and a good way (liberals must suppose) of living a life. The reflective, selfcritical capacities we associate with public justification must, therefore, be regarded as permanent and ever-developing characteristics of liberal citizens at their best. (. . .) Public justification is (. . .) the way liberals should live (Macedo 1990: 288, 292; emphasis in original).

The salient point here is not that one should be a fallibilist about everything, or that philosophers should be aware that their theories may well be wrong. Rather, the point is that public reason theories rest on a specific conception of a person, which functions as unjustified prerequisite for the supposed thrust of inclusionist theories. Only if we presuppose the correctness of the ‘thick’ liberal view of the person can we accept the claim of inclusionists that their theories are indeed inclusionist and do not impose undue cognitive burdens on religious citizens. Citizens who hold their beliefs at arm’s length would probably not perceive the fallibilism demand or the exclusion of imposition

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reasons as unduly burdensome. But public reason does not offer arguments why this conception of a person should be considered correct, or why we should adopt it as our understanding of the good liberal citizen. Without such arguments, these requirements are unduly burdensome for religious believers and all citizens with deep convictions. 4. Conclusion In this paper I have argued that inclusionism is not as inclusionist as it purports to be. In fact, it is no more than pseudo-inclusionism. It pays lip service to the permissibility of religious arguments in public discourse but suggests requirements for public discourse which seriously restrict the use of religious arguments. I have elaborated on two of these requirements: the exclusion of ‘imposition reasons’, banning from public discourse the invocation of religious authority; and the fallibilism requirement, preventing religious believers from presenting their religious belief as true and expecting them to reconsider their conservative political commitments. Moreover, I have argued that neither restraint can be justified by pointing to the needs of liberal democracy or public discourse. Finally, I have ascribed the failure of inclusionism to be properly inclusionist to its conception of a person. In this view good liberal citizens are able to hold their beliefs at arm’s length and to distance themselves from their own commitments and interests. It is only for these ideal liberal citizens that the requirements propounded by inclusionism do not constitute heavy burdens. References Bader, V. (1999) ‘Religious Pluralism: Secularism or Priority for Democracy?’ Political Theory 27(5), 579–633. Boettcher, J. W. (2005) ‘Strong Inclusionist Accounts of the Role of Religion in Political Decision-Making’. Journal of Social Philosophy 36(4), 487–516. Eberle, C. J. (2002) Religious Conviction in Liberal Politics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Fish, S. (1999) ‘Mutual Respect as a Device of Exclusion’. In Macedo, S. (ed.) Deliberative Politics: Essays on Democracy and Disagreement. New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press. Greenawalt, K. (1988) Religious Convictions and Political Choice. New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press. —— (1995) Private Consciences and Public Reasons. New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press. Gutmann, A. and Thompson, D. (1996) Democracy and Disagreement. Cambridge MA: Belknap Press.

public reason and inclusionism as pseudo-inclusionism 355 Habermas, J. (2006) ‘Religion in the Public Sphere’. European Journal of Philosophy 14(1), 1–25. Macedo, S. (1990) ‘The Politics of Justification’. Political Theory 18(2), 280–304. Perry, M. J. (2003) Under God? Religious Faith and Liberal Democracy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Rawls, J. (1996) Political Liberalism. New York: Columbia University Press. Rorty, R. (2003) ‘Religion in the Public Square: A Reconsideration’. Journal of Religious Ethics 31(1), 141–9. Wolterstorff, N. (1997) ‘The Role of Religion in Decision and Discussion of Political Issues’. In Audi, R. and Wolterstorff, N. (1997) Religion in the Public Square: The Place of Religious Convictions in Political Debate. Lanham etc.: Rowman & Littlefield.

NEOLIBERALISM FOR GOD’S SAKE: SECTARIAN JUSTIFICATIONS FOR SECULAR POLICY TRANSFORMATION IN THE UNITED STATES Jason Hackworth Max Weber’s secularization thesis—the idea that modernizing capitalist societies will eventually lose or significantly reduce their need for religion over time—is a canon within the study of religion and society, but it has also drawn its share of criticism over the years. The experience of the United States is one of several angles used to dismiss or complicate the thesis. The US, so the critique goes, accumulated dramatic wealth, and adopted the values of science and bureaucratization, all while maintaining a degree of religiosity not witnessed by other capitalist core countries in the twentieth century. Seldom however, does this critique move beyond the surface of church attendance and more general measures of religiosity to prove the durability of religion in the United States. The enduring political importance of religious discourses on ostensibly secular policy matters in the US is relatively under-researched in general—and almost completely absent from discussions of secularity and post-secularity in particular. This chapter addresses the sectarian ideational supports for neoliberalism in the US during the past 30 years. My argument is that neoliberalism, as an abstract set of ideas, was rarely politically popular enough alone to change policies; rather, it benefited from and was legitimated by other discourses and ideas. In a sense, it needed these ideas—mostly borrowed from other corners of the American rightwing to gain political traction. In the US, various factions of the rightwing forged an uneasy fusion starting in the 1960s (Sager 2006). The coalition was composed of three broad camps: (1) social conservatives who drew much of their inspiration from literal reading of the Bible; (2) economic conservatives, hereafter ‘neoliberals’, who were drawn to the ideas of laissez-faire; and (3) military conservatives devoted to American intervention abroad (Diamond 1995). Many actualized policies fell into, or originated from, more than one of these camps so coalition politics were made possible. For example, policies which increased the tax benefits of donating to religious charities were popular

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with both social conservatives and neoliberals. Wars fought to open markets to American consumers were popular with both neoliberals and military conservatives. But many actualized policies strained the coalition more than this. Strong-handed intervention to, say, limit abortions might be popular to social conservatives but are not necessarily popular to neoliberals. Similarly, anti-terrorist efforts to increase surveillance may be popular with military conservatives, but are generally not popular with neoliberals. In short, many policy ideas tested the broad right-winged coalition that has held significant, but vacillating, sway in American politics for the past 45 years. One ideational realm that challenged right-winged coalition politics involved the role of the state in economy and welfare. Neoliberals were, and remain today (despite recent events), steadfastly opposed to almost all forms of state intervention, particularly as they relate to social welfare. Social conservatives, on the other hand, are a far more complicated group when it comes to this topic. Not only are noted social conservative leaders of past and present open to strong state intervention in welfare, but influential interpretations of the Bible have been used by a variety of scholars and clergy to justify more state intervention. For neoliberals and social conservatives to remain allied on the Right, the rhetoric of one camp (or both) would have to soften so that a bridge could be built. This chapter is about one such ‘bridge’ in recent American history—sectarian voices that have emerged in the last 40 years to promote economic conservatism in taxes, welfare and government spending. Not only do these voices teach us much about the tenuous right-winged coalition that introduced and ushered in neoliberal policies in the US. They also deepen the extant critique of the secularization thesis, by showing not just how secular and sectarian ideas have co-existed, but rather how they were mutually dependent. 1. The Secular, Economic Narrative of Neoliberalism The prevailing narrative of neoliberalism1 has foregrounded the importance of secular economics scholars, concepts and justifications for the 1 I recognize that there is a great deal of controversy in how to define neoliberalism, and I do not wish to make this the focus of this chapter (Hackworth and Moriah 2006). However, for the purposes of creating a reference point, I will define neoliberalism as an ideational and social movement centered around the revival of classical liberal principles, namely the normative importance of property, individual respon-

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rise. The work of economists Friedrich Hayek, Milton Friedman and Ludwig von Mises are particularly central to this narrative (Peck 2008; Hackworth 2007a; Harvey 2005). Though once dismissed as the ‘lunatic fringe’ by a leading historian of liberalism as recently as the 1960s (Girvetz 1963), the ideas of these scholars have become canonical to modern day neoliberalism. All were engaged in the project of selectively highlighting the ideas of classical liberals—Smith, Hume, Acton, Locke and (James) Mill in particular. Hayek, Friedman and von Mises venerated various economic rationalities in the construction of society, in particular the market, property, individual freedom and state deregulation. Along with dozens of other like-minded economists, the three formed the Mont Pelerin society to develop such ideas and advocate their diffusion (Peck 2008; Goonewardena 2003). The ideational influence of scholarly economic thought of this sort to the narrative of neoliberalism is difficult to overstate. The simple fact that many of its proponents happen to be economists is not the only way in which economic thought dominates the narrative of neoliberalism’s rise. A variety of other scholars have highlighted the importance of economic rationalities for this rise. Dumenil and Levy (2004) have, for example, foregrounded the role of tax policy in this narrative. They argue that neoliberalism may have complicated ideational roots, but that its political salience is rooted in a widespread desire amongst elites to reduce their tax burden (Harvey 2005). Other scholars have highlighted the importance of economic logics that are used by various institutions to promulgate neoliberalism. The logic of neoliberalism is shielded by an ostensibly non-political economics, and used to justify ‘necessary’ interventions by global bond-rating agencies like Moody’s (Hackworth 2002), large global institutions like the International Monetary Fund (Peet 2003) and think-tanks like the Cato Institute (Peck 2006). The interventions of these institutions are shrouded in a economistic fatalisms—choose the neoliberal path or else (. . . your economy will fail; . . . your state will fail; . . . your freedoms will be curtailed). In general, the role of secular economics—as a set of ideas, as a discipline, as a justification—is central to the growing scholarly narrative that is tracing the rise of neoliberalism. To be sure there are good sibility, and the market, on the one hand, and the threat posed by the state to all of these principles, on the other. For a much more detailed definition and history of neoliberalism see Hackworth (2007a).

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reasons for such a focus. First and foremost, the revival of classical liberalism in the twentieth century was largely spearheaded by secularminded economists. Hayek, Friedman, von Mises and their infamous Mont Pelerin Society of likeminded economists became incredibly effective activists for their cause. Second, powerful organizations like the IMF and WTO are organized around a secular economic logics. And third, regardless of whether economic thinking can explain the rise of neoliberalism, material changes to the economy in a variety of locations around the world have been successfully used by proponents of neoliberalism. Whether it be the ‘shock therapy’ of mid-1990s Russian economic reconstruction, the stagflation of the 1970s in the UK and US (Harvey 2005), or more immediate ‘crises’ like Hurricane Katrina (Peck 2006) or the war in Iraq (Klein 2007), secular economic ideas have been used to sell, depoliticize and promote the growth of neoliberalism. But while there are certainly valid reasons for using a secular economic lens to understand neoliberalism’s rise as an ideology, such an approach falls considerably short of explaining why the idea has political salience. While we can usefully trace the ideational rise of neoliberalism through economic texts, concepts and institutions, such an approach does not tell us much about why the idea has gained political traction—why it is adopted in many different countries and why it is so appealing during times of crisis when it has such a clear track record of long- and medium-term failure. Some scholars have attempted to deal with this question by widening the scope of ideas beyond those that economists have foregrounded. Goonewardena (2003) and Anderson (2000), for example, highlighted the importance of political theorists like Fukuyama, who, while certainly not averse to economistic logics, rooted his neoliberalism more in the work of Hegel than the work of Adam Smith. Other scholars have chosen to grapple with this question by avoiding the canonical neoliberal economists altogether and focusing on the ideology as an almost-autonomous force. But while these approaches begin the process of understanding the political roots of the neoliberal ideology they both remain ideational (in different ways). Though they encompass more than purely economic rationales, neither approach adequately explains why neoliberalism has gained political traction amongst non-ideologues. The goal of this chapter is to consider the ways in which various radical right Christian philosophical movements support neoliberalism (particularly the destruction of the welfare state) in an ideational

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way, and then to speculate on the actualized influence that these movements have on welfare policy. My argument is as follows. First, if neoliberalism were abstracted as an isolated secular project as laid out by its proponents like Hayek and Friedman, it would not enjoy nearly as much popular political success as it has had in the past thirty years. Its record on ‘solving’ economic problems is a dismal one, and there are no popular movements with neoliberalism as the central objective. Neoliberalism’s ability to morph to, and adapt to, various movements has allowed it to be coupled with ideas that have their own forms of legitimacy, from which neoliberalism can benefit. Three conservative Christian discourses have created an important source of legitimacy. In order to sustain such a thesis, a number of caveats and qualifications are necessary. First, I focus in this chapter on three sectarian discourses within the evangelical fold—Dominionism, Christian libertarianism and Prosperity Theology. Their political importance is more that they provide a rationale for adherents, than a formally proscribed set of theological principles (though they do that too). Thus one need not be a passionate radical Christian Reconstructionist to accept the logic that the Bible should be more influential in government. Similarly, one need not be a formally deemed Christian libertarian to believe that small government and biblically moral government are compatible. It is my argument that these logics have given neoliberalism a form of divine legitimation (amongst Christians) that it would otherwise not have in the abstract. This spiritual legitimacy has been successfully morphed into political legitimacy by those promoting neoliberal policy forms, such as lower taxes and faith-based social welfare. Second, it would be difficult to argue that neoliberalism—in the abstract or in specific forms like tax policy—has been the central plank within the Religious Right, or that there have been no countervailing voices. To begin with, much of the rise of the Religious Right has been consumed with non-economic issues like gay marriage and abortion. Abstract concerns about ‘neoliberalism’ are seldom mentioned, and even concrete ones like tax policies, welfare and deregulation are generally backgrounded by the aforementioned obsession with abortion and gay marriage. Moreover, a number of leading contemporary and historical figures within the evangelical fold advocate policies that could be interpreted as anti-neoliberal. It is certainly the case, in other words, that neoliberalism is challenged by some within the evangelical fold. But these groups have rarely had sustained political success, and have certainly not had sustained success when compared with other

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organizations and ideologues of the Religious Right (Phillips 2007; Wilcox and Larson 2006). Though the latter is composed of hundreds of groups, many at cross-purposes with one another, the emphasis of evangelical conservatives in the past thirty years has been predominately toward less welfare, less taxes, less regulation, and more of an emphasis on markets and property. Identifying several unsuccessful attempts by evangelical leaders to become more politically progressive does not change this fact. Third and related, a number of scholars have attempted to dismiss, refute, or challenge the neoliberal bent of the Religious Right by highlighting more progressive theologies or examples that counter the individualist bent of modern Evangelicalism. In perhaps the most famous recent case of this tack, Willis (2006) challenges many of the theological justifications for various policies put forth by the Religious Right with more progressive interpretations. Other scholars have attempted to illustrate how left-leaning religious movements in general, and progressive faith-based organizations (FBOs) in particular, can be mobilized to enact policies that challenge neoliberalism (Beaumont 2008; Beaumont and Dias 2008; Conradson 2008; Jamoul and Wills 2008), encourage union organizing (Sziarto 2008), or more abstractly serve as a basis on which to build a progressive politics of social justice (Ley 1974; Pacione 1990). Building on longer traditions such as Liberation Theology and the Social Gospel, each of these scholars makes persuasive arguments that religion and FBOs can be mobilized for progressive ends. I fully agree with these scholars that FBOs have the potential to be mobilized toward progressive ends, even as activist critiques of the state. But I depart from the implication that FBOs or any other civil society institution is intrinsically progressive or regressive, or that they can be progressive if only they were inspired by the correct biblical verses. My main argument is that FBOs come with a form of built-in legitimacy that can be mobilized for progressive or regressive ends. It is hard to deny the fact that socially conservative evangelicals have been a key force for supporting national policies toward neoliberalism in the US. It is also hard to deny that intricate biblical justifications have been contrived to naturalize this union. Fourth, even with all of this said, it could be argued that these discourses are nothing more than the ‘fringe’ and do not hold sway in a significant way in serious policy discussions. This is, in fact, the argument that has been made within mainstream policy studies community. Smith and Sosin (2001: 665), to take but one example, dismiss the relevance of Religious Right leader Marvin Olasky’s radical views to

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the debates on faith-based organization. Olasky (1992) has advocated an almost wholesale return to eighteenth and nineteenth centurystyle charity-based welfare, using his faith as a justification. Smith and Sosin (and others) dismiss this perspective as out-of-touch with the perspectives of most faith-based organizations. Many faith-based organizations have been around for decades, some more than a century. Why would the rise of a few radical Christians really affect this? Elements of the Religious Right have influenced such debates with a logic that is rooted to particular theologies. Though certainly extreme, it is difficult to dismiss the importance of biblical logics that affect the world-views of a community that may be as high as 41 percent of the adult population in the US, and whose members have become much more prominent in the political elite (Lindsay 2007). Olasky himself was a chief advisor to Governor Bush in Texas and was the chief architect of the latter’s now-infamous phrase ‘compassionate conservatism’. Moreover, neoliberal evangelicals, like James Dobson and Rod Parsley remain the heads of large powerful organizations—think-tanks, magazines, televised congregations—that reach large numbers of people who share their faith and some of their interpretations of the Bible. Though they may not have convinced every person in America or even every evangelical, they hold a disproportionate sway over the political machinery that determines policies regarding faith and economy in the US. It is also true that, whatever their influence, they have become less marginal within the eyes of many evangelicals and are thus more difficult to dismiss as irrelevant. 2. Neoliberalism for God’s Sake The Religious Right is a highly varied group of people, faiths, congregations and organizations (Wilcox and Larson 2006). The focus here is on those organizations and ideas within the Religious Right that have built-in critiques of the secular interventionist state, welfare, regulation, or taxes. Three ideas stand out in this regard. First, Dominionism—the belief that Christians should take control of government and, in some more extreme forms, impose biblical law—provides ample justification for criticizing the secular interventionist state and its institutions. Second, Christian libertarianism, while small in size, provides the most direct and comprehensive biblical justification for neoliberalism. Third, Prosperity Theology provides a biblical justification for embracing the market and property rights.

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2.1. Dominionism Dominionism, also known as ‘Dominion Theology’, is the largest and most encompassing of the discourses being considered here, but it is also perhaps the one that is most widely held as an assumption by evangelicals in the US. It is also the most internally varied and controversial of the three. As Sara Diamond (1995: 246), a sociologist that many credit with coining the phrase ‘Dominionism’ explains, it is the idea that Christians only are biblically mandated to take-over all secular institutions until the coming of Christ. Derived from controversial reading of Genesis 1:26 and 1:28, Dominionism is a call to unabashedly infuse Christian people and principles into secular government, and in the US context, to ‘return America to its Christian roots’. The term was coined by Sara Diamond (1995), but the belief system itself is often traced to the work of former Dutch prime minister Abraham Kuyper (1837–1920). Kuyper, a Calvinist, felt that all human actions were part of building God’s kingdom—it is ironic that his ideas are now deployed by Dominionists as a way to exclude non-Christians in government given that he is generally considered a pluralist. Many credit him today with the concept of state funding for faith-based agencies and the idea that the mixture of religion and government was not an improper one for a liberal democratic state (Daly 2006).2 In the US context, this perspective was co-opted and radicalized most prolifically by two theologist-ideologues, Francis Schaeffer (1912–1984) and Rousas Rushdoony (1916–2001). Francis Schaeffer whose highly influential book, The Christian Manifesto (1982) called on Christians to lose their ambivalence about infusing their religion with their politics. According to Schaeffer, it was not only permissible for evangelical Christians to aggressively advocate for Christianizing government, it was their responsibility. Rushdoony extended and radicalized this notion further by suggesting that theonomy—biblical law—be imposed on the US. Many consider his work as the beginning of an even more extreme version of Dominionism, called Christian Reconstructionism. In this world view, Old Testament biblical law would be imposed to include ‘capital punishment for homosexuality, adultery and abortion; a ban on

2 The difference of course between Kuyper’s vision and the one that has been promoted by Dominionists, is that the former, while himself a Christian, felt that the same ‘sovereignty’ should be granted to both churches and secular groups alike.

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long-term debt; a return to the gold standard economy; the abolition of income tax; and the destruction of the government welfare system’ (Diamond 1989: 240–1). Certainly the most prolific,3 and arguably the most influential, living Reconstructionist is Gary North. The son-inlaw of the late Rushdoony, North is a Reconstructionist author with a background and focus on economics. North was an active member of secular libertarian groups when he was young but became a strict Christian Reconstructionist later in his life—so strict in fact that he rejected Rushdoony and Schaeffer as ‘moderates’ on various issues. North was formally trained as an economist4 and still retains a strict Austrian School libertarian perspective (Clauson 2006). He founded the Institute for Christian Economics, a think-tank that produces books and material that ridicules secular government, particularly welfare and government redistribution (Diamond 1995). His books are written in a more popular style and are widely available in Christian bookstores in the United States. Reconstructionists like North invoke a sense of eschatological urgency to this agenda by suggesting that it is the duty of Christians to impose such an order before Christ returns to earth. Their belief system is ‘post-millennial’ in that they believe that followers will have to rule the earth for 1,000 years before his return, so it is urgent for Christians to take-over and replace secular government now. This contrasts with pre-millenialists who think that Christ will return before this to usher in the 1,000 years of Christian rule, so it is less urgent to institute political change at this moment. In either case, Reconstructionism is widely viewed by both followers and critics as the most extreme form of Dominion Theology. As a label, Dominionism is highly controversial. Above all else, it was coined by a sociologist who is widely critical of the American conservative movement, Sara Diamond (1989; 1995; 1998) and a religion scholar who has made a career out of criticizing the Religious Right, Frederick Clarkson (1994). As such, some conservative journalists, writers and leaders have dismissed it as ‘conspiratorial nonsense’ by one author (Kurtz 2005), and an attempt ‘to smear the Republican Party as the party of domestic theocracy’ by another (Williams 2005).

3 North was actually somewhat insecure about his level of productivity vis-à-vis his late father-in-law Rushdoony. North once quipped that he struggled to maintain the standard that Rushdoony set: ‘Rushdoony is the Marx of this movement. I’m trying very hard to be the Engels’ (Diamond 1989: 136). 4 He has a Ph.D. in Economics from UC Riverside, awarded in 1967.

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Others who are less defensive, point to the fact that figures like Rushdoony and ideas like Reconstructionism are not shared in a wide doctrinaire way by evangelical Christians. Still others point out that most conservative evangelicals are pre-millenialists in orientation and thus are not predisposed toward having the urgency of post-millennial Reconstructionists. But while they may not be self labels, it is also true that the foundational ideas of Dominionism—or whatever we choose to call it—are foundational to many evangelicals (Rudin 2006). The Religious Right has, for example, made the appointment of sympathetic judges a key agenda item over the past thirty years in part because of Dominionist assumptions. Moreover, the idea that Christians should hold dominion over the earth has been mobilized more recently to motivate more moderate politics, such as a pro-environmental stance by an increasing number of evangelicals (Cizik 2005). Thus as William Martin (1996: 354) and others suggest, the label is more hotly contested than the idea itself. As he pointed out in his book With God on Our Side, Dominionism may not be the label-of-choice by its followers but it encapsulates a belief system that is less disputed than its label. In part because of the discomfort that many followers have over the label, it is difficult to arrive at solid figures on how large the ‘Dominionist community’ is. Rushdoony once estimated the size of Reconstructionists at 20 million (Sugg 2006), but gave little reason for arriving at this figure so it is difficult to tell how accurate it is. More relevant perhaps is the fact that the writings of Dominionists and Reconstructionists are widely available and that many Religious Right figures have expressed public sympathies for the ideas, or used the ideas as a justification for various political interventions (Diamond 1995). The work of North and others was also useful for creating a theological justification for many of the arguments that have emerged in the US over the past 12 years regarding welfare, taxes and the state in general. The ideas have become less radical as more and more adherents express their support. As such, Dominionist ideas have been expressed in recent mainstream discussions on a variety of topics ranging from environmentalism, to economics, to faith-based welfare. So what influence does Dominionist thinking have on the adoption of neoliberalism in the United States? First, Dominionism is a foundational assumption held by many evangelicals. It creates a theological justification for criticizing various forms of government intervention, whether that be through the protest of ‘activist’ judges or the promotion of political figures who will ‘return America to its Christian

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roots’. Second, this theology is rooted to a neo-Calvinist perspective that is both anti-statist (when it comes to welfare) and highly individualist when it comes to poverty. Thus, Dominionism helps deepen and sanctify the critique of secular welfare. Yet by the same token, Dominionist Theology is a shaky foundation upon which to build neoliberal politics, so we should not go too far in emphasizing its influence. In particular, Dominionism, while opening a space for criticizing secular government, envisions a top-down theocratic state that would certainly not appeal to purist secular neoliberals like Hayek. Similar to Hilton’s (1986) description of the alliance that economic liberals and evangelicals had in eighteenth century England and Scotland, modern day neoliberals and Dominionists may share a common enemy, but their endgame is considerably different. In politics though, the antipathy against secular interventionism has been shared enough by Dominionists and neoliberals to consider their alliance—while shaky and headed for different ends—a powerful one of convenience. 2.2. Christian Libertarianism Christian libertarianism is a loosely organized effort to synthesize the often-juxtaposed projects of conservative Christianity and secular libertarianism. It is a hybrid discourse that does not draw on a single line of scholars, theologians or ideologues. But because many of the latter—both contemporary and historical—are powerful people who edit national magazines, write for journals and run think-tanks, it is worth considering the influence of this particular construction. The most frequently cited biblical verse in support of this position is John 8:36, which reads as follows: ‘If the Son therefore shall make you free, ye shall be free indeed.’ Beyond this, Christian libertarians have drawn on three principle sources of inspiration for their movement. First, Christian libertarians draw inspiration from classical liberals who integrated some degree of Christianity in their liberal writings, the two most famous being John Locke and Lord Acton. Acton (1988) was the most outspoken in this regard and now has a think-tank named after him. In one of his more oft-quoted passages, he sets out how his Christianity and his liberalism are synergistic: Liberty is not the power of doing what we like, but the right of being able to do what we ought (. . .) Liberty is the prevention of control by others. This requires self-control and, therefore, religious and spiritual influences (. . .) [In Western countries] Liberty has not subsisted outside of Christianity.

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Second, and related to this synthesis, Rothbard (2006) outlines the three ‘libertarian experiments’ by early American colonists in Albemarle North Carolina, Rhode Island and Pennsylvania. He suggests that the libertarianism of these early colonists was heavily influenced by and infused with Christian principles. Third, a number of others, including Hopfl (1991), have gone back much further to suggest that Martin Luther and the Reformation was based on a form of Christian libertarianism. He argues (1991: xii) that ‘libertarian, egalitarian, communal motifs were part of the texture of his [Luther’s] theology’. Whatever the source however, the basic idea of Christian libertarianism is that society should aim for the maximum feasible freedom within a biblical framework, primarily the Ten Commandments. There is, however, a great deal of controversy about this notion from both secular and sectarian corners. Some ‘libertarian Christians’, who are quick to suggest that they are not the same as ‘Christian libertarians’, quibble with the latter’s interpretation of biblical verses and how law makers should intervene with moral ‘crimes’ that have no obvious victim, such as lust. Christian libertarians believe that such crimes should be punished by the state, while libertarian Christians believe that government should exist only to punish crimes that victimize other people (Olree 2006; Antle 2007). Other theological differences between Christian libertarianism and Libertarian Christianity include the former being more likely to be tied to theonomic or Reconstructionist views, while the latter seems more tied to secular libertarianism and predestination. Overall though, they both draw inspiration from the aforementioned verse (John 8: 36) and are deeply sceptical of the interventionist secular state, particularly as it manifests in the form of taxes and social welfare. Most secular critics, however, either do not make such a nuanced theological distinction, or are focused on a deeper contradiction that they see within Christian libertarianism, namely that libertarianism is an intrinsically secular ideal involving a small state. It is thus incompatible to call oneself a ‘libertarian’ if you consider ‘biblical sins’ like abortion, adultery, or homosexuality, or vices like alcohol, gambling and prostitution to be punishable by the state. Ryan Sager (2006) for example, is deeply sceptical that the alliance between libertarians and radical Christians that undergirds the Republican Party in the US is sustainable. He points out that there has been an effort to ‘fuse’ the two perspectives since the 1960s, but that it has always been a tenuous alliance. Despite these differences he (2006: 21) suggests that the

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two perspectives entered into a marriage of convenience that came to dominate the Republican party by the 1990s. But to Sager, this alliance of convenience, albeit a powerful one, is beginning to break apart the Republican Party (Kirkpatrick 2007). To him, secular libertarianism and Evangelicalism are fundamentally incompatible ideas. Others have expressed scepticism about a tightly-fused alliance, but have nonetheless identified some ground for overlap. Doug Bandow (1994), for example, shares some of Sager’s scepticism but goes much further in trying to build bridges between Christianity and libertarianism. While Bandow (1994: 34–5) is sceptical that the connections are as firm as some argue, he does see ample ground for overlap. The areas that he identifies are revealing for what such an agenda might look like in an actualized political sense. Others have attempted to steer clear of the basic philosophical compatibility between libertarianism and radical Christianity by simply renaming the movement but still accepting its basic premises. Lienesch (1993: 107–8), for example, deems Christian libertarians ‘Christian capitalists’. Still others have tried to turn the debate to a consideration of the aforementioned historical roots of the movement to legitimate it and downplay its internal contradictions. Murray Rothbard (1980; 2006), for example, though not a self-identified ‘Christian libertarian’,5 suggested that an individual’s religion should not preclude their ability to be a libertarian. Rothbard (1980: 11) acknowledged that many present libertarians are atheists, but emphasized the fact that historically many libertarians have been Christian. In short, theological and secular controversies have been raised about the Christian-libertarian alliance, but it would be misleading to say that these have undermined its importance for a fairly powerful set of adherents. Though as Antle (2007) laments, ‘they are (. . .) at a disadvantage without a theological tradition robust enough to compete with the Social Gospel on the left or Christian Reconstructionism on the extreme right’, Christian libertarianism has some very powerful advocates. Arguably the most powerful person currently pushing a hybrid agenda of Christianity and libertarianism, is Marvin Olasky. Olasky is a journalism professor at the University of Texas and editor of the influential World Magazine. As an author of over 200 books and articles, a frequent talk show guest, advisor to President Bush and popular 5 Rothbard is actually an anarcho-libertarian, a group with which many Christian libertarians have a great deal of disagreement.

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journalist, he has chosen to directly weave libertarianism and conservative Christianity into public policy discussions (Grann 1999). Prior to the 1990s, Olasky was a relatively obscure professor, but this changed dramatically both with the publication of his infamous book, The Tragedy of American Compassion and then the rise of governor then president George W. Bush. Tragedy was a harsh critique of the secular welfare state. It venerated the religious charity-based approach of the eighteenth and nineteenth century that was able to separate the ‘deserving’ from the ‘undeserving’ poor and which drew on sectarian community-based resources (not the federal government). Though the book was generally ravaged by academic critics (Hammack 1996; Massing 1992), it was welcomed with open arms by the rising Republican congressional delegation, whose leader Newt Gingrich famously delivered a copy to each freshman congressman in 1994. Though Olasky does not formally declare allegiance to a particular politico-theological movement, his sympathies are made apparent in the preface where he acknowledges both God and Milton Friedman as inspiring the book. His neo-Calvinist ‘tough-love’ approach to poverty softened the political edge of anti-welfarism (and anti-statism) that is intrinsic to libertarianism (and the Republican Party platform at the time) (Grann 1999). It also helped build a platform that would help bring George Bush to power. Olasky was a direct advisor to Bush in Texas during his gubernatorial campaigns and is credited with devising the language of ‘compassionate conservatism’ (Olasky 2000), not to mention the most prominent practical outcome of this idea, the faith-based initiative (Hackworth 2007b). While Olasky has not inspired a theological movement or a literal congregation, his connections to powerful people and his mainstream credentials as a university professor give him and his ideas a legitimacy that extremists like North and Rushdoony have never had. The ideas of Christian libertarianism are also promulgated by the Acton Institute for the Study of Religion and Liberty, named for the aforementioned patriarch of the movement, Lord Acton. The Acton Institute was founded in 1990, is located in Grand Rapids Michigan and is directed by Robert Sirico (Acton Institute 2008). The aforementioned Marvin Olasky and Doug Bandow are board members. Through its journal (Journal of Markets and Morality), its magazine (Religion and Liberty) and its newsletter (Acton Notes), the organization promotes a blend of libertarianism and Christianity. Much like Olasky’s focus, the Acton Institute is not aiming to devise or build a particular

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theological movement, but rather at promoting the hybrid perspective of libertarianism and Christianity in public policy discussions. Though it is not as powerful as some secular libertarian think-tanks like the Cato Institute, it is recognized as influential, certainly the most influential of its perspective. Christian libertarianism and the variants of it are likely the smallest ‘movement’ that is being discussed in this chapter. But by the same token, it is an idea that is promoted by people and institutions that are more powerful than either Dominionists or Prosperity Theologians. Moreover, it is the most direct attempt to weave together neoliberalism (otherwise known as libertarianism) and conservative Christian theologies. It creates a biblically-justified space to critique secular government, particularly taxes and welfare. It tends to be less extreme than Reconstructionism, but for the most part shares the view that the Bible creates bounds that some secular libertarians are unwilling to accept. So, as with Dominionism, Christian libertarianism shares an intellectual enemy with neoliberalism, but has a very different ideal endgame. It creates a theological justification for abhorring socialism, big-government and taxes, and has had a great deal of sway in recent public policy discussions in the United States. 2.3. Prosperity Theology Prosperity Theology—also known as Prosperity Lite, Health and Wealth, Word of Faith—is a controversial movement built around the idea that God wants you to be prosperous and that it is one’s duty to donate heavily to one’s church in order to activate this outcome. It is most often associated with the Charismatic and Pentecostal wings of Christianity. The basic philosophy is preached in three of the four largest churches in the United States: Joel Osteen’s Lakewood Church in Houston, T.D. Jakes’ Potter’s House in Dallas and Creflo Dollar’s World Changers Church near Atlanta. Historians, theologians and critics differ somewhat on its historical origins, but three are most commonly cited. Alcorn (1989: 104) argues that traces of the movement can be found as far back as the ancient Pharisees who ‘lived and breathed Prosperity Theology and relished labelling everyone beneath their social caste as “sinners” ’. Jackson (1989), by contrast, traces modern-day Prosperity Theology to the mid-twentieth century metaphysical cults popularized by Kenneth Hagin and Essex Kenyon. Hagin and Kenyon were popular Pentecostals in Texas and Oklahoma

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who sponsored revivals, radio-shows and newsletters in the 1940s and 1950s. And finally, the most commonly-cited origin (and the one that gives it the most controversy) for modern Prosperity Theology is the 1980s televangelist movements that were led by now-disgraced preachers Jimmy Swaggart and Jim Baker. A variety of different biblical verses are used to justify the position that God wants his followers to be prosperous, but the most often cited ones are Deuteronomy 8:18, Malachi 3:10 and John 10:10. Each is used by prosperity theologians to promote the view that authentic piety toward God will be rewarded with material wealth. It serves, whether by design or default, as a salve for the guilt of wealth that many Christians feel and as biblical justification for minimal or no focus on government-led poverty amelioration, which dominate other theological schools within Christianity, particularly Liberation Theology and its variants. There are, of course, many critics of this interpretation of the Bible and the political and cultural attitude that it is believed to foster. Secularists have repudiated the idea as essentially an offshoot of disgraced 1980s televangelist schemes that demanded heavy financial contributions from parishioners and brought great riches (and eventually public shame) to its leaders. But it is also seen as simply supporting, with biblical legitimacy, immediate-gratification, greed and self-interest that is already rife in American society (Wolfe 2003; Alcorn 1989). Finally, it is seen by some as little more than a form of pandering by religious entrepreneurs aiming to build their congregations by promoting a vision that parishioners will gravitate toward (Lee 2007). In general, there are a variety of secular cultural critics of Prosperity Theology. It seen by some as a view that promotes greed, justifies inequality and at worst leads to fraud cloaked in religion. There are also several theological critiques of Prosperity Theology, but they can be grouped broadly under the argument that its preachers are only loosely based in the Bible and that their views are contradicted more often than they are supported within the Bible. Rick Warren, pastor of the Saddleback Church in California, is a vocal critic of the Prosperity Theology movement (Van Biema and Chu 2006). And Warren, though probably the most famous theological critic, is not alone. Theological scholars have quibbled with the use and interpretation of the aforementioned biblical verses that underlie the movement (see Jackson 1989 for example). Preachers like Warren and scholars like Jackson point to numerous other biblical verses that

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contradict Prosperity’s emphasis on material wealth. Three verses are most commonly cited in this regard are 1 Timothy 6:10, Mark 10:21 and Luke 18:22–25. Theological critics point primarily to these and other verses to reinforce their position that Prosperity is at best loosely supported and at worst blatantly contradicted by the Bible. But while the movement has been harshly criticized by secular and religious scholars, it is hard to escape the fact that it is very influential in some parts of the country—that its promoters reach millions of people per week through televised sermons that construct a biblical justification for wealth accumulation. Like all religious movements, it is very difficult to get firm numbers on the number of adherents to Prosperity Theology, not least because it is both a formal theological movement with members who self-identify as such and a set of assumptions that are likely more widespread. Alcorn (1989) says simply that ‘millions’ adhere to the philosophy in the US, but does not specify further. Time Magazine (Van Biema and Chu 2006) teases us with the estimation that Prosperity Theology, ‘has been percolating in the 10 million-strong Pentecostal wing of Christianity’ and go on to argue that many of its assumptions are even more widespread than this, but get no more specific than this. In the same article, the authors report on a poll commissioned by their magazine which showed that while only 17 percent of Christians selfidentified with the movement, 61 percent felt that ‘God wanted them to be prosperous’ and 31 percent felt that ‘if you give your money to God, God will bless you with more money’. So while the formal adoption of Prosperity is somewhat limited, its central assumptions appear to be widely held by evangelical Christians in the US. But while the numbers of formal adherents are certainly important, the direct and indirect reach of several of its more high-profile proponents suggests that the movement may be broader than simple congregational surveys suggest. The movement is led by many of America’s most influential preachers such as Joel Osteen, and many others who integrate key elements of it into their ministry including Rod Parsley, T. D. Jakes and Kirbyjon Caldwell. Joel Osteen is one of the most controversial of these figures and arguably its most ardent supporter. Osteen pastors the Lakewood Church in Houston Texas. He succeeded the pastorship from his father, John Osteen, in 1999, and has since built the ministry into one of the largest in the United States, with over 40,000 congregants (Van Biema and Chu 2006). He also reaches approximately 2 million people in 150 countries through his weekly

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television broadcasts (Lakewood Church 2008) and is a best-selling author, most notably of Your Best Life Now: 7 steps to living at your full potential, in 2004, and Become a Better You: 7 Keys to improving your life every day, in 2007 (both of which have topped the New York Times Best Seller List; Contemporary Authors Online 2008a). In his books, broadcasts and sermons, Osteen preaches an optimistic self-help message that is, by his own admission, less rooted in Scripture than some other ministries (Van Biema and Chu 2006). Other famous prosperity ministers include TD Jakes and Kirbyjon Caldwell. Jakes is also a prolific best-selling author and a prominent figure in the AfricanAmerican community (Pappu 2006). His ministry preaches much more than just Prosperity Theology, but he is unapologetic about the association, seeing it as an optimistic interpretation of the Bible that can empower his congregants. In addition to weekly sermons at his 30,000-person Potters House Pentecostal Church in Dallas, Jakes is a frequent guest on talk shows and travels widely for speeches, including one in the Georgia Dome in which he reportedly broke the attendance record with over 84,000 people (Contemporary Authors Online 2008b; Winner 1999). Caldwell, though presiding over a ‘mere’ 15,000 parishioners, is more notable for his personal connections as President Bush’s pastor at the United Methodist Church in Houston, Texas. He gave the benediction for the first Bush inauguration and recently presided over the marriage of Jenna Bush. Caldwell preaches a moderated form of Prosperity Theology in his church. Both Caldwell and Jakes were recently identified as informal advisors to President Obama (Goodstein 2009). Prosperity Theology certainly has its critics but it would be difficult to argue that it is a ‘fringe movement’ given the influence of figures like Osteen, Caldwell and Jakes. But Prosperity is more than a formal theological movement. It is also a set of biblically-legitimated assumptions for many people. And these assumptions in turn, reinforce some of secular neoliberalism’s main objectives. First, Prosperity Theology provides divine justification for what many are able to justify only in crass capitalist terms: accumulating wealth. It softens, contradicts and muddies the notion that accumulation is a disreputable pursuit as it is cast by socialists and progressive theologians. Second, it reinforces the Calvinist tenet of individual responsibility for material success and its darker corollary, individual responsibility for one’s failures—a key justification for dissolving the welfare state. Third, Prosperity sanctifies private property as an expression of piety. It not only provides a

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rationale for focusing on your own wealth creation—separate from community or society in general—but also for ignoring the poverty of others. If ‘God wants you to be rich’ as a recent Time Magazine article impishly pondered, then it is not too much of a stretch to assume that being poor is a form of divine punishment. 3. Faith in Neoliberalism The rise of neoliberalism in the past several decades has been traced by a variety of geographers, sociologists and political economists. Though the foci of these accounts vary considerably, a central theme is the importance of both secular economic thought and material conditions in the rise of the ideology. Neoliberalism, in this account, is the brainchild of Hayek, Friedman and von Mises who revived and promoted the works of the classical liberals in their famous Mont Pelerin society and interventions throughout the world. It caught on for material reasons, namely that 1970s stagflation undermined the rationale for Keynesianism, or more cynically, that the wealthy wanted lower taxes. Religion is nowhere to be found in this narrative; neoliberalism is a secular economic rationale carved from classical liberals. I do not wish to dismiss or entirely undermine the basic veracity of this narrative but I do question the efficacy of this script for understanding the political diffusion of the ideal. My argument is that while neoliberalism is primarily a secular economic creation, it has benefited politically from the prominent rise of conservative sectarian discourses in the United States. This is not to say that every corner of the Religious Right is supportive of neoliberalism, but rather that three conservative religious discourses have created intricate faith-based rationales for supporting neoliberalism’s main tenets—the emphasis on individual responsibility, de-regulation, low taxes, and anti-welfarism in particular. All three are deeply, though not exclusively influenced by neo-Calvinism, and as such they share as much as they differ, yet each is aligned with a particular set of institutions, tactics and theologies that are worthy of separate consideration. Though they each have both secular and sectarian critics, all of these movements lend credibility to neoliberalism by reinforcing its agenda. Dominionism invokes divine inspiration for challenging the secular state. Christian libertarianism invokes divine justification for abhorring socialism and the welfare state. Prosperity theology deploys divine absolution for accumulating

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capital. Each draws inspiration from the Bible and, as such, invokes a legitimacy that is rooted in faith. They are influential for different reasons. Though formalized Christian Reconstructionism is most assuredly a fringe movement, the basic assumption of Dominionism utterly saturates the politics of the Religious Right and conservatives in general. Christian libertarianism does not have an intricate theological justification, but it has very well-connected promoters who have influenced recent policy. And Prosperity Theology, though derided by many theologians as an heretical mirage, is the organizing principle for some of the most powerful, widely-heard preachers in the United States. While it is certainly true that none of these discourses has hegemonic status—even within the conservative evangelical community— they have each been morphed and mobilized to support ideologies that do approach the standard of hegemony, such as neoliberalism. Avoiding such ‘fringe’ voices in the study of neoliberalism thus leaves a gaping omission in our comprehension of its political traction over the last 30 years.6 References Acton, J. E. E. D. (1988) ‘Essays in Religion, Politics, and Morality’. In J. R. Fears (ed.) Selected Writings of Lord Acton. Indianapolis: Liberty Classics. Acton Institute (2008) ‘About the Acton Institute’. Acton Institute Website. See http:// www.acton.org/about/index.php, accessed 8 October 2008. Alcorn, R. (1989) Money, Possessions and Eternity. Wheaton IL: Tyndale House Publishers, Inc. Anderson, P. (2000) ‘Renewals’. New Left Review 1, 1–18 Antle, W. J. (2007) ‘Evangelicals and the State: A Law Professor Makes a Case for a Libertarian Christianity’. Reason Magazine (June Issue). See http://www.reason .com/news/show/119726.html, accessed 8 October 2008. Bandow, D. (1994) The Politics of Envy: Statism as Theology. New Brunswick NJ: Transaction Publishers. Beaumont, J. (2008) ‘Faith Action on Urban Social Issues’. Urban Studies, 45(10), 2019–2034. —— and Dias, C. (2008) ‘Faith-Based Organizations and Urban Social Justice in the Netherlands’. Tijdschrift voor Economische en Sociale Geografie 99, 382–392. Cizik, R. (2005) ‘A History of the Public Policy Resolutions of the National Association of Evangelicals’. In Sider, R. and D. Knippers (eds) Toward an Evangelical Public Policy: Political Strategies for the Health of a Nation. Grand Rapids MI: Baker Books.

6 The author would like to thank Paul Grise for his research assistance and the Canadian Social Sciences and Humanities Research Board for their financial assistance.

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Clarkson, F. (1994) ‘Theocratic Dominionism Gains Influence’. Public Eye (May/ June). See http://www.publiceye.org/magazine/v08n1/chrisre1.html, accessed 7 October 2008. Clauson, M. (2006) A History of the Idea of ‘God’s Law’ (Theonomy): Its Origins, Development and Place in Political and Legal Thought. Lewiston NY: The Edwin Mellon Press. Conradson, D. (2008) ‘Expressions of Charity and Action Towards Justice: Faith-Based Welfare Provision in Urban New Zealand’. Urban Studies 45(10): 2117–2141. Contemporary Authors Online, (2008a) ‘Joel Osteen’. Thomson Gale. —— (2008b) ‘TD Jakes’. Thomson Gale. Daly, L. (2006) God and the Welfare State. Boston: MIT Press. Diamond, S. (1989) Spiritual Warfare: The Politics of the Christian Right. Boston MA: South End Press. —— (1995) Roads to Dominion: Right-Winged Movements and Political Power in the United States. New York: Guilford. —— (1998) Not by Politics Alone: The Enduring Influence of the Christian Right. New York: Guilford. Dumenil, G. and Levy, D. (2004) Capital Resurgent: Roots of the Neoliberal Revolution. Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press. Girvetz, H. (1963) The Evolution of Liberalism. New York: Collier. Goodstein, L. (2009) ‘Without a Pastor of His Own, Obama Turns to Five’. New York Times (15 March 2009). See www.nytimes.com, accessed 15 March 2009. Goonewardena, K. (2003) ‘The Future of Planning at the “End of History” ’. Planning Theory, 2: 183–224. Grann, D. (1999) ‘Where W. Got Compassion’, New York Times Magazine. September 12. Hackworth, J. (2002) ‘Local Autonomy, Bond-Rating Agencies and Neoliberal Urbanism in the US’. International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 26, 707–725. —— and Moriah, A. (2006) ‘Neoliberalism, Contingency, and Urban Policy: The Case of Social Housing in Ontario’. International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, 30, 510–527. —— (2007a) The Neoliberal City: Governance, Ideology and Development in American Urbanism. Ithaca NY: Cornell University Press. —— (2007b) Neoliberalism, Social Welfare, and the Politics of Faith in the United States. Centre for Urban and Community Studies Research Report, 210. Hammack, D. (1996) ‘Review of Marvin Olasky (1995 edition), “The Tragedy of American Compassion” ’. Nonprofit and Voluntary Sector Quarterly 25, 259–268. Harvey, D. (2005) A Brief History of Neoliberalism. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Hilton, B. (1986) The Age of Atonement: The Influence of Evangelicalism on Social and Economic Thought, 1785–1865. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Hopfl, H. (ed.) (1991) Luther and Calvin on Secular Authority. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Jackson, R. (1989) ‘Prosperity Theology and the Faith Movement’. Themelios 15(1) 16–24. Jamoul, L, and J. Wills (2008) ‘Faith in Politics’. Urban Studies 45(10), 2035–2056. Kirkpatrick, D. (2007) ‘The Evangelical Crack Up’. New York Times Magazine, October 28. Klein, N. (2007) Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism. Toronto: Random House. Kurtz, S. (2005) ‘Dominionist Domination’. National Review Online (2 May 2005). See http://www.nationalreview.com/kurtz/kurtz200505020944.asp, accessed 7 October 2008. Lakewood Church (2008) ‘About Us’. Lakewood Church Website, See http://www .lakewood.cc/AboutUs/NewToLakewood/Pages/NewToLakewood.aspx, accessed 8 October 2008.

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Lee, S. (2007) ‘Prosperity Theology: T. D. Jakes and the Gospel of the Almighty Dollar’. Cross Currents (Summer). See http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m2096/is_2_57/ ai_n27361438, accessed 8 October 2008. Ley, D. (1974) ‘The City and Good and Evil: Reflections on Christian and Marxist Interpretations’. Antipode 6, 66–74. Lienesch, M. (1993) Redeeming America: Piety and Politics in the New Christian Right. Chapel Hill, NC: The University of North Carolina Press. Lindsay, D. M. (2007) Faith in the Halls of Power: How Evangelicals Joined the American Elite. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Martin, W. (1996) With God on Our Side: The Rise of the Religious Right in America. New York: Broadway Books. Massing, M. (1992) ‘The Tragedy of American Compassion—Book Reviews’. Washington Monthly, 24(9): 59–60. Olasky, M. (1992) Tragedy of American Compassion. Washington: Regnery Gateway. —— (2000) Compassionate Conservatism: What It Is, What It Does, and How It Can Transform America. New York: Free Press. Olree, A. (2006) The Choice Principle: The Biblical Case for Legal Toleration. New York: University Press of America. Osteen, J. (2004) Your Best Life Now: 7 Steps to Living at Your Full Potential. Nashville, TN: FaithWords Publishers. —— (2007) Become a Better You: 7 Keys to Improving Your Life Every Day. New York: Free Press. Pacione, M. (1990) ‘The Ecclesiastical Community of Interest as a Response to Urban Poverty and Deprivation’. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 15(2): 193–204. Pappu, S. (2006) ‘The Preacher’. Atlantic Monthly, 297(2): 92–103 Peet, R. (2003) Unholy Trinity: the IMF, World Bank, and WTO. London: Zed Press. Peck, J. (2006) ‘Liberating the City: Between New York and New Orleans’. Urban Geography, 27(8), 681–713. —— (2008) ‘Remaking Laissez-faire’. Progress in Human Geography, 32(1), 3–43. Phillips, K. (2007) American Theocracy: The Peril and Politics of Radical Religion, Oil, and Borrowed Money in the 21st Century. New York: Penguin. Rothbard, M. (1980) ‘Myth and Truth About Libertarianism’. Modern Age 24, 9–15. —— (2006) ‘The Origins of Individualist Anarchism in the US’. Daily Article, Ludwig von Mises Institute (1 February 2006). See http://www.mises.org/story/2014, accessed 8 October 2008. Rudin, J. (2006) The Baptizing of America: The Religious Right’s Plans for the Rest of Us. New York: Thunder’s Mouth Press. Sager, R. (2006) The Elephant in the Room: Evangelicals, Libertarians, and the Battle to Control the Republican Party. Hoboken NJ: John Wiley and Sons. Schaeffer, F. (1982) A Christian Manifesto. Westchester, Il: Crossway Books. Smith, S. R. and Sosin, M. R. (2001) ‘Varieties of Faith-Related Agencies’. Public Administration Review 6, 651–670. Sugg, J. (2005) ‘A Nation Under God’. Mother Jones (December/January, 2005). See http://www.motherjones.com/news/feature/2005/12/a_nation_under_god.html, accessed 7 October 2008. Sziarto, K. (2008) ‘Placing Legitimacy: Organizing Religious Support in a Hospital Workers’ Contract Campaign’. Tijdschrift voor Economische en Sociale Geografie, 99(4): 406–425. Van Biema, D. and Chu, J. (2006) ‘Does God Want You to Be Rich?’. Time Magazine (18 September 2006). See http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/ 0,9171,1533448,00.html, accessed 8 October 2008. Wilcox, C. and Larson, C. (2006) Onward Christian Soldiers: The Religious Right American Politics. Boulder CO: Westview Press.

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Williams, A. (2005) ‘Dominionist Fantasies’. Frontpage Magazine (4 May 2005). See http://www.frontpagemagazine.com/Articles/Read.aspx?GUID=86BEC0B4-D01C40A0-A060-33D9FB999057, accessed 7 October 2008. Willis, G. (2006) What Jesus Meant. New York: Viking. Winner, L. (1999) ‘84,000 Join Jakes in Georgia’. Christianity Today, February 7, 23. Wolfe, A. (2003) The Transformation of American Religion: How We Actually Live Our Faith. New York: Free Press.

THE USES OF RELIGION IN PUBLIC INSTITUTIONS: THE CASE OF PRISONS James A. Beckford This chapter arises from deep scepticism about the notions of postsecularity and postsecularism. I shall argue that there are good reasons for doubting the usefulness of these notions. My claim will be that they actually conceal some important questions about religion in early twenty-first century Europe. The central point of my argument will be that, from a sociological point of view, developments in religion can be better understood by examining continuity and change in the institutional settings in which religion is defined, practised and regulated. Evidence in support of this argument will come from my studies of religion in the prisons of Britain and France. The conclusion will be that it makes no sense to interpret religion in the prisons of these two countries as evidence of postsecularity. In arriving at this conclusion, I shall make two major criticisms of Jürgen Habermas’s depiction of European secularity and postsecularity. On the one hand, I shall claim that the public sphere in Britain has never been as devoid of religion as it should have been according to Habermas’s model of constitutional democracies in Europe. On the other hand, I shall argue that the public sphere in France remains considerably more secular than Habermas allows for in his model of postsecularity. But before I can tackle some of the arguments about secularity and postsecularity I need to justify my decision to focus on religion in prisons—especially as this has become such a contentious and sensitive issue in relation to the detention of Muslims on charges of terrorism. Two good authorities come to mind for taking the topic of prisons and prisoners seriously: Winston Churchill claimed that the quality of a society can be judged by the way it treats its prisoners; and Dostoyevsky thought that you could measure the quality of a society by the quality of its prisons. It is only to be expected, then, that a sociologist of religion would ask questions about the quality of the opportunities and facilities that prisoners have for practising religions. A more timely reason for research into religion in prisons refers back to the events of 9/11. Since then, journalists and programme

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makers have tended to make a knee-jerk association between prisons and violent extremism among Muslims. There is indeed some evidence—albeit limited—that prisons have been incubators for Islamist ideas and conspiracies to commit acts of violence. The so-called War on Terror therefore demands that the practice of Islam in prisons should be carefully scrutinized and analysed. But I have three broader sociological reasons for wanting to know about the practice of religion in prisons and its consequences for the lives of prisoners before and after their release. First, prisons are clearly part of the public sphere which is under the control of the state, but they are also places where prisoners consider their cells to be private spaces. Prisons therefore provide a relatively rare glimpse of the way in which the privatized practice of religion can be nested in a public institution. Second, minority religions are overrepresented among prisoners and thereby offer a valuable opportunity to study the state’s ways of selectively recognizing and managing religious diversity. Third, prisons are often settings for intense religious introspection, ‘shopping around’ and conversion—as well as indifference and hostility towards religion. As such, they afford opportunities to study these processes in a partial microcosm of the world outside prison. The study of religion in prisons throws an unusual light on relations between religions and the state in Western democracies. It also provides a good opportunity for an empirical investigation of the notion— running through the current volume—that the term postsecular can help to explain why religion seems to enjoy heightened visibility in the public sphere these days. After critically outlining the concept of postsecularity I shall assess its applicability to the practice of religion in the prisons of Britain and France. 1. Postsecularity? This is not the place to consider whether—or how far—a ‘postsecular turn’ has occurred in philosophy, sociology and social theory, although some of the evidence for this view is persuasive (McLennan 2007). But it is certainly the case that a growing number of leading intellectuals now acknowledge that religion calls for more careful consideration and analysis than it tended to receive in the late twentieth century. As Kim Knott’s chapter in this volume shows, a growing number of writers argue that modernity and secularity have been either intensified or

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surpassed by a new era of postmodern postsecularity.1 Another claim, advanced in Paul Cloke’s chapter in this volume, is that even thinkers who previously identified themselves with ‘materialist socialism have been drawn towards ideas from religion and faith in their search for a renewal of justice and hope’. And now that Jürgen Habermas, one of the world’s most respected intellectuals, has injected postsecularity at several points into his diagnosis of current problems in politics, social life and morality, the term can no longer be ignored. What is unclear, however, is the extent to which Habermas and other commentators on postsecularity believe that ‘the return of religion’ or ‘the return to religion’ in the public sphere signifies an increase in religious thought, feeling and action or merely an increase in the salience of questions about religion in the circles politics and the media. The notion of postsecularity has appeared in a number of Englishlanguage writings of Jürgen Habermas’s since 2001,2 but the clearest statement of his thinking about the relation between secularization and postsecularity is his article ‘Notes on a Post-Secular Society’.3 Beginning with doubts about ‘whether the relevance of religion has waned’, Habermas argues that secularization has proved to be a European exception. He supports this claim with evidence that ‘orthodox, or at least conservative, groups within the established religious organizations and churches are on the advance everywhere’, that ‘fundamentalism’ is the fastest-growing religious movement in the world, and that recent years have seen ‘a political unleashing of the potential for violence innate in religion’. None of this is news to students of religion. Nevertheless, while retaining his belief that secularization has occurred, Habermas claims that ‘religious communities can obviously still claim a “seat” in the life of societies that are largely secularized’. This leads him to the view that European societies can be thought of as postsecular because they have to acknowledge that religion remains a political force. European citizens have allegedly come to realize that the further decline of religion is not inevitable and that religious organizations now have major contributions to make towards shaping public

1 See, for example, Derrida and Vattimo (1998), Blond (1998), Gauchet (1998), Debray (2005), Vries and Sullivan (2006), Gray (2007) and Taylor (2007). 2 See Habermas (2002; 2003; 2006; 2008a; 2008b). 3 This is the text of a lecture that he delivered at the Nexus Institute of the University of Tilburg in March 2008. It is available online at http://print.signandsight.com/ features/1714.html. Accessed 6 October 2008.

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opinion on issues of public importance. Habermas adds that the presence of growing numbers of immigrants and settlers from ‘countries with traditional cultural backgrounds’ only heightens the awareness of Europeans that the public sphere must find ways of accommodating a diversity of religions. He sums up his argument as follows (Habermas 2008a): ‘Religion maintains a public influence and relevance, while the secularistic certainty that religion will disappear worldwide in the course of modernization is losing ground.’ Habermas clearly believes that the term postsecularity is warranted by the fact that European societies and states have had to adapt to the higher public profile enjoyed by religion in recent years. In particular, he interprets these changes as challenges to the presumed ‘secularization of the state’, which had been, according to him, an ‘appropriate response to the confessional wars of early modernity’. In turn, this is said to have affected the ‘neutral stand’ that governments had previously adopted towards different religions—as well as ‘the completely secularized powers of the state’. The question that I now want to raise is ‘How well does Habermas’s depiction of secularity and postsecularity fit the very different cases of Britain and France?’. Or, more simply, ‘Can I recognize Britain and France in the picture that Habermas paints of postsecular societies in Europe?’. 2. Britain and France In Britain, the Church of England and the (Presbyterian) Church of Scotland have been ‘established in law’ since the sixteenth century. There is no constitutional separation between religions and the state; and no legal hindrance to officially recognizing the existence of religious and/ or ethnic minorities. Publicly funded chaplaincies operate in prisons, the armed forces and health care institutions in the National Health Service. The state education system includes many schools owned or controlled by religious organizations; Religious Education classes and daily acts of worship are required by law in state schools; some institutions of adult education are involved in the training and certification of leaders of faith communities;4 and there is no obstacle

4 For example, two government departments fund a course in Continuing Professional Development for Faith Leaders. See http://www.niace.org.uk/projects/ leadwithfaith.

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to partnership between local government and faith groups.5 The House of Lords contains the twenty-eight most senior bishops of the Church of England and a growing number of peers from faith communities other than Christianity. Many departments of the British government have protocols for consulting faith communities about the impact of public policies on them. Since the late twentieth-century, successive governments have actively sought partnership between statutory and religious organizations. Despite the lack of a specific constitutional guarantee of religious freedom, the Race Relations Act 1976 (amended 2000), the Human Rights Act 1998 and the Anti-Terrorism, Crime and Security Act 2001 all provide varying degrees of protection for religion. For example, the latter Act amended previous legislation to turn ‘racially aggravated criminal offences’ into ‘racial or religiously aggravated criminal offences’. Hostility that is based on a victim’s membership of a religious group qualifies an offence as religiously aggravated. Moreover, the Employment Equality (Religion or Belief ) Regulations 2003, the Equality Act 2006 and the Racial and Religious Hatred Act 20066 offer further legal protection to religion. Indeed, since 2007, the Equality and Human Rights Commission has enforced the equality legislation not only on age, disability, gender, ‘race’ and sexual orientation but also on ‘religion or belief ’. This can be summed up by saying that religion in England and other parts of the UK is deeply embedded in a dense network of relations between the state and religious organizations and is protected by numerous anti-discrimination statutes—all of which should be interpreted by courts to take account of relevant European law.7 5 For example, Birmingham City Council’s ambitious ‘Corporate Religion and Belief Equality Scheme 2007–2010’ is driven by the conviction that ‘There is a clear moral imperative in working to achieve religion and belief equality’ (p. 6). Online document at: http://www.birmingham.gov.uk/ELibrary?E_LIBRARY_ID=564. 6 Article 29J of this Act offers counter-balancing protection to the freedom of expression as follows: ‘Nothing in this Part shall be read or given effect in a way which prohibits or restricts discussion, criticism or expressions of antipathy, dislike, ridicule, insult or abuse of particular religions or the beliefs or practices of their adherents, or of any other belief system or the beliefs or practices of its adherents, or proselytising or urging adherents of a different religion or belief system to cease practising their religion or belief system.’ 7 For example, Article 9 of The European Convention On Human Rights provides that ‘Everyone has the right to freedom of thought, conscience and religion; this right includes freedom to change his religion or belief and freedom, either alone or in community with others and in public or private, to manifest his religion or belief, in worship, teaching, practice and observance. Freedom to manifest one’s religion or beliefs shall be subject only to such limitations as are prescribed by law and are necessary in

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France, on the other hand, remains a secular republic, most of whose citizens still respect their predominantly Catholic culture. Even the implementation of laïcité—the principle of secular republican morality—displays some characteristics of a dogmatic Catholic theology aimed at unifying an exceptionally centralized and hierarchical type of state.8 But, since 1905, the French Republic has been formally separated from the forces of religion while remaining constitutionally bound to ensure its citizens’ freedom of conscience and religion.9 This does not mean, however, that the French state is completely neutral towards religious questions. Nor does it mean that religion is entirely absent from the public sphere. For example, the Bureau des Cultes is an agency within the Ministry of the Interior responsible for the registration and de-registration of religious organizations as well as—via its regional office in Eastern France—relations with religious organizations in Alsace-Moselle where a pre-1905 concordat is still in force and where the state is still involved in the nomination of bishops and archbishops and religious education in schools. Elsewhere in France the state is responsible for maintaining the buildings of the main Christian churches that were active in France when the Law of 1905 put the separation of church and state into effect; and publicly funded chaplaincies exist in the armed forces, hospitals, schools and prisons. The degree of imbrication between religion and the state is even greater in some of France’s overseas territories. It is misleading, then, to claim that the French framework of secular institutions somehow confines religion to the sphere of its citizens’ private life. This is often the burden of political rhetoric and of the most eye-catching media portrayals of controversies about headscarves and ‘cults’. But the reality is much more complex and nuanced, as John Bowen (2007) and Veit Bader (2007), among others, have argued. In short, Britain is not and has never been a secular society in the terms used by Habermas. France certainly appears to have been the very model of a secular society, at least since the legal separation of the a democratic society in the interests of public safety, for the protection of public order, health or morals, or for the protection of the rights and freedoms of others.’ 8 According to an OpinionWay survey of a representative sample of adults in France, 81 per cent thought that France’s basically Christian roots were compatible with laïcité (Le Figaro Magazine 26 January 2008). 9 Indeed, Article 10 of the 1789 Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen held that ‘No one shall be disquieted on account of his opinions, including his religious views, provided their manifestation does not disturb the public order established by law’.

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state from religions in 1905. But this appearance is deceptive. It conceals a host of adaptations and accommodations to Catholic culture. In general terms, then, both Britain and France are less secular—or less consistently secular in the case of France—than Habermas implies. Does this mean that Britain and France qualify as postsecular? I seriously doubt it. So, this is the time to substantiate my claim that postsecularity is not an appropriate label for relations between the state and religions in Britain and France with empirical evidence from sociological studies of religion in British10 and French prisons (Beckford and Gilliat 1998; Khosrokhavar 2004; Beckford, Joly and Khosrokhavar 2005; 2007). 3. Religion in Prisons The Prison Service of England and Wales is responsible for about 84,000 prisoners who were being held in 140 prison establishments in August 2008.11 Church of England chaplains have been central to the life of prisoners for more than two hundred years. Nearly all establishments have chapels, mosques or other areas designated for religious uses. Indeed, entire units in some establishments have been run on Christian lines since 1997,12 and Christian charitable organizations such as the Kainos Community and the Prison Fellowship England and Wales continue to run therapeutic programmes in numerous prisons (Burnside, Loucks, Adler and Rose 2005; Feasey, Williams and Clarke 2005). Religious and spiritual care is provided partly by chaplains working full-time, of whom about 200 are Christian and about 40 Muslim.13 In addition, the Prison Service Chaplaincy co-ordinates and oversees the work of hundreds of other part-time and ‘sessional’ chaplains and volunteers, of whom about 160 are Muslim. This is done in consultation with a Chaplaincy Council, which represents the major

10 All the evidence in this section of the chapter relates to the Prison Service of England and Wales: not to the separate prison services of Scotland and Northern Ireland. 11 For the latest statistics about the prison population of England and Wales, see the Ministry of Justice’s Offender Management Caseload Statistics at: http://www.justice .gov.uk/publications/populationincustody.htm. 12 See ‘Kainos Programme in Prison’ at: www.homeoffice.gov.uk/rds/pdfs/kainos_ finalrep.pdf. The original programme was closed in all but one unit in 2002 but subsequently reinstated in a different form. 13 See Lords Hansard 3 March 2009 Column WA143.

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faith communities in England and Wales—and with the involvement of individual Faith Advisers who maintain the criteria for assessing the suitability of would-be chaplains. The religious identity of all prisoners in England and Wales is officially recorded by prison staff. This information triggers a wide range of practical consequences for prisoners’ access to, for example, sacred books, chaplains, religious services, diets, clothing, festivals and procedures to be followed in the event of serious illness or death. The Prison Service of England and Wales also provides an extensive manual containing all the information that prison staff are likely to need about prisoners’ religious needs and entitlements as well as about the beliefs and practices associated with the main faith traditions.14 In short, there are relatively few ‘in principle’ limitations on the extent to which the Prison Service ‘recognizes’ religions—and translates this recognition into practice on an everyday basis. This includes not only the provision of religiously appropriate diets and opportunities for collective worship but also, in some establishments, study groups and one-toone consultations with chaplains. Turning to France, the prison population—close to 65,000 at the beginning of 2008—is 25 per cent smaller than in England and Wales and is distributed across 192 establishments.15 Not all establishments have any physical space set aside for collective worship or other religious activities. Moreover, chaplains have never been central to the life of French prisons in modern times. Indeed, the appointment of all chaplains is at the discretion of each prison Director and regional officials. Full-time chaplains in French prisons are relatively few in number. Chaplaincy workers in post in January 2008 numbered 1,110, of whom 30 per cent received payment for full-time or part-time work.16 The remaining 70 per cent served either as voluntary chaplains or as voluntary auxiliaries (who are not allowed to conduct one-to-one meetings with prisoners). Roman Catholic chaplains amounted to 51

14 HM Prison Service. Prison Service Order on Religion: The Religion Manual. PSO 4550. Initially issued 2000. 15 See Ministère de la Justice, L’administration pénitentiaire en chiffres au 1er janvier 2008 at: http://www.justice.gouv.fr/index.php?rubrique=10036&ssrubrique=10041& article=15623. 16 Ministère de la Justice, L’administration pénitentiaire en chiffres au 1er janvier 2008: http://www.justice.gouv.fr/index.php?rubrique=10036&ssrubrique=10041&arti cle=15623.

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per cent of all chaplains; Protestants 26 per cent; Muslims 11 per cent; and Jews 6 per cent. Despite the high percentage of Muslim inmates, the number of Imams working in French prisons is relatively low—about 117 in 2007—and very few of them are employed as chaplains full-time. Moreover, the conditions in which they conduct prayers and meet with individual inmates are often poor. Until the appointment of a Chaplain General for Muslims in 2005 there was no national coordination of Imams who visited prisons, no training, no guidance, no programme of induction and very little funding from the state for their activities. Yet, some observers claim that Muslims amount to as much as 50 per cent17 of the French prison population. In accordance with the prevailing interpretation of laïcité, French prisons are no different from any other institutions of the secular and unitary Republic of France in so far as they do not officially recognize religions. This means that the religious identity of prisoners is not recorded and that provisions for the collective practice of religion are sparse and uneven. Although the criminal law Code (Art. D432) states that prisoners must be able to meet their religious, moral or spiritual obligations, this is interpreted by prison authorities to mean that the private practice of religion must not be obstructed. For example, Art. D436 of the Code specifies that prisoners should be informed, on arrival in prison, of the opportunity to meet a representative of their religion and to attend religious services, but my evidence shows that this does not always happen in practice. Implementation of some of the other Articles of the Code relating to communications between prisoners and chaplains and possession of religious artefacts and books is also patchy. This is because it is often left to prisoners themselves to make their own arrangements for religious practice or to rely on the assistance of volunteers and chaplains who are marginal to the management of French prisons. To sum up, the prisons of England and Wales are much more hospitable towards religion than are their French counterparts. Christianity fares better than Islam in British prisons, but the provision of facilities for Muslim inmates has improved markedly following the implementation after 1999 of an explicitly multi-faith ethos in the Prison Service 17 In the absence of official statistics of prisoners’ religious affiliation, it is impossible to check the veracity or even the plausibility of this estimate. See Khosrokhavar (2004).

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Chaplaincy and various programmes to foster respect for religious and ethnic diversity. Christianity also fares relatively better than Islam in French prisons, but the conditions for practising any form of religion are difficult for French prisoners. Neither multicultural nor multi-faith ideals have penetrated very far into the prison service in France. It seems, then, that neither Britain nor France has moved in the direction of postsecularity as far as the opportunities for the practice of religion in prisons is concerned. The partnership between the state and faith communities has long been—and remains—close in Britain, thereby proving an exception to the claim that European societies are by definition secular. In fact, Britain is far from being alone in this respect: Denmark, Ireland, Greece and Norway present other examples of European states that make no pretence of excluding religion from their public sphere or of being neutral in matters of religion. This is a social, political and cultural reality that is not reflected in Habermas’s confident assertions about the secularity of European regimes. On the other hand, France is clearly a secular republic that—for different reasons—continues to belie the idea that secularity has somehow given way to postsecularity. As recognized earlier in this chapter, the day-today implementation of laïcité may be more flexible and uneven than is ideal in the view of such hard-line secularist organizations as La Ligue de l’Enseignement, Le Comité National d’Action Laïque, Le Comité National d’Action Laïque or Les Comités Laïcité République—and, of course, the Freemasons of the Grand Orient de France. But the fact is that postsecularity, as Habermas defines it, is not evident in France. 4. If not Postsecularity, What? If Habermas’s notion of postsecularity fails to throw light on religion in British and French prisons, do any other conceptual schemes offer greater explanatory promise? I want to argue that both countries are still responding—in their different but predictable ways—to the progressive erosion of religious oligopolies. In a nutshell, one of the features of religious change in the mid-twentieth century was a decline in the capacity of previously powerful faith communities to shape the lives of the people associated with them (Beckford 1989: 170–2). Competition from non-religious sources of influence such as the mass media, commercial advertising, the leisure industry and so on gradually increased. At the same time, competition also increased from

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alternative suppliers of ‘religious goods’. They included new religious movements, new spiritualities and revitalized currents of enthusiasm among Christians and Jews. The result was that the historically dominant religious organizations began to lose their oligopolistic position. Meanwhile, the immigration of large numbers of migrants and settlers from South Asia and North Africa did little to intensify competition for the religious mainstream of Britain and France but certainly added significantly to the religious diversity of both countries. One of the effects of growth in religious competition and diversity has been to create new challenges and opportunities for the state in Britain and France. The British government can no longer assume that questions of religion will be resolved by the mainstream Christian churches. And the French Republic can no longer assume that the legal separation of religions from the state will keep questions of religion out of the public sphere. Neither of these two states is taking a postsecular line, but both are seeking new ways of managing postoligopolistic religion. Let me illustrate the differences between their respective approaches to the management of religion. 5. A New Corporatism? In Britain’s case, there has been not so much a wholesale retreat from multiculturalism (pace Joppke 2004) as an adjustment of priorities and strategies. ‘Security issues’ now take precedence over most other considerations. They are the main driver of a shift of emphasis away from the enthusiasm of the late 1990s for communitarian philosophies and Tony Blair’s vision of the UK as a ‘community of communities’. Instead, the emphasis is now more on measures to promote ‘social cohesion’ as a weapon in the War on Terror. British government policies make increasingly strong links these days between security and social cohesion. The earlier concern with countering discrimination and fostering equal opportunities as a strategy for accommodating ethnic and religious differences has partly given way to a new concern with making difference serve the end of social cohesion (Home Office 2001). The government’s principle is that ‘Integration (. . .) means ensuring that ethnic, religious or cultural differences do not define people’s life chances and that people with different backgrounds work together to build a shared future’ (Home Office 2004: 4). This was subtly captured in the opening sentence of

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a report written by the Commission on Integration and Cohesion: ‘A past built on difference, a future which is shared’.18 Moreover, although debate about national identity and cultural values has been in the background of British politics for generations, it has only recently come to the fore—again in connection with the social cohesion agenda. The government’s position was stated most clearly in a Home Office consultation (2004: 7): Respecting and valuing diversity is an essential part of building a successful, integrated society. But respect for diversity must take place within a framework of rights and responsibilities that are recognized by and apply to all—to abide by the law, to reject extremism and intolerance and make a positive contribution to UK society.

This association between diversity and cohesion eventually led to the introduction of formal tests to determine the suitability of applicants for naturalization as British citizens. They include assessment of competence in the English language and knowledge of ‘life in the UK’.19 Ceremonies to mark the granting of citizenship have also been devised to replace what used to be a private act witnessed by a person with the power to witness oaths. The two developments in public policy since 2001 which have been most clearly intended to influence Muslim communities in Britain relate to the strengthening of the ‘Cohesion and Faith’ division of the Department of Communities and Local Government and the instigation of activities designed to combat ‘radicalization’ and ‘extremism’ by means of the ‘Prevent strategy’ (Home Office 2008). They include funding the Radical Middle Way project—‘a revolutionary grassroots initiative aimed at articulating a relevant mainstream understanding of Islam that is dynamic, proactive and relevant to young British Muslims’,20—helping to set up a group of leading Muslim scholars to foster an understanding of Islam in Britain, creating young Muslims’ forums at national and local level to stimulate discussion around policies against extremism, encouraging a greater interest in Islamic studies and the training of Imams in educational institutions, and increasing the distribution of citizenship education materials in mosques and Islamic schools. 18

http://www.integrationandcohesion.org.uk/Our_final_report.aspx. http://www.bia.homeoffice.gov.uk/britishcitizenship/applying/applicationtypes/ naturalisation/lifeintheuk. 20 http://www.radicalmiddleway.co.uk/index.php. 19

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These initiatives are part of a wider strategy for harnessing the resources of faith communities to the achievement of all government policy objectives. For example, the Faith and Voluntary Sector Alliance was created in 2005 to foster better use of faith-based organizations in the delivery of local government services; the National Offender Management Service plans to integrate faith-based organizations into its strategies for reducing re-offending among adults and young people (NOMS 2007); and, most ambitiously, the Department of Communities and Local Government has published a detailed ‘framework for partnership in our multi faith society’ (DCLG 2008). Delivery of this policy will involve expenditure of nearly £8 million on various schemes to support local and regional activities within the government’s overall strategy for integration and cohesion.21 In short, the shift in British policy since 2001 has been from a multicultural celebration of diversity for its own sake to a determination to harness diversity to the tasks of stemming violent extremism and of cementing social cohesion. This comes close to being a form of state corporatism, that is, a close partnership between state and faith communities by means of which the state tries to co-opt the leaders of religious and ethnic communities in return for enhancing their legitimacy. One of the ironies of these developments is that the British government’s position has moved closer to that of its French neighbours in respect of prioritizing cohesion over diversity and of adopting a dirigiste attitude towards the involvement of faith communities in the public sphere. Religious minorities are accommodated with enthusiasm only to the extent that they sign up to the government’s security and cohesion agenda and are ‘recognized’ by inclusion on the list of the nine mainstream faiths as nominated by the Inter Faith Network for the UK—a voluntary organization.22 The principal criterion for deciding whether such accommodation is reasonable is how far the minorities—or, more importantly—their leading representatives are prepared to co-operate with this agenda. Needless to say, faith communities are internally divided over this question. 21 ‘This Framework is primarily concerned with just one aspect of that relationship between government and faith traditions: how faith communities and government and wider society can work together, at all levels, to encourage and enable greater local activity which brings people with different religions and beliefs together.’ http://www .communities.gov.uk/publications/communities/facetofaceframework (p. 14). 22 They are the Baha’i, Buddhist, Christian, Hindu, Jain, Jewish, Muslim, Sikh and Zoroastrian faiths.

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The changes that have occurred in France are less striking than in Britain but in some practical respects they bring the French and British positions closer together. To begin with, it is important to establish that the distinctiveness of the ‘founding myth’ of laïcité (Gunn 2004) and the robustness of its legal underpinning (Frégosi and Willaime 2001; Messner, Prélot and Woehrling 2003; Delsol, Garay and Tawil 2005; Machelon 2006) are not in doubt. They are confirmed by a huge number of investigations from legal, constitutional and political perspectives. But the application of laïcité on a day-to-day basis in public life is surprisingly flexibile and pragmatic.23 There is a bewildering complexity in the subtle ways in which laïcité actually belies strict notions of excluding not only religion but also the very category of ‘minority’ from the public sphere and public discourse. In fact, Willaime (2005) insists that laïcité masks the social practice of recognizing certain religions as having public utility. He goes further and argues for the idea that laïcité has been ‘laïcized’ in recent decades to the point where France is no longer an exception among European countries in terms of relations between the state and religions. I do not entirely share this interpretation of change, but the evidence of increased flexibility is clear.24 For example, the French state is not supposed to recognize any religion, according to the law of 1905. Nevertheless, the reality is that its Bureau des Cultes—at national and regional levels of administration—is daily involved in a wide range of decisions about the registration of religious groups (associations cultuelles), their forms of organization and the conditions under which they can benefit from various advantages, especially in the field of taxation and the maintenance of the communal religious buildings that existed in France prior to the law of 1905. These decisions can have powerful effects on groups that are denied recognition on the grounds that their activities represent dérives sectaires or cultic aberrations and threats to public order (Beckford 2004). The effect of these decisions on religious orders, congregations and religions other than the recognized religions of Catholicism, Protestantism, Judaism and Islam (in recent years only) is 23

I am heavily indebted to Willaime (2005) and the Machelon report (2006) for much of the information on which this part of my chapter is based. 24 Zoller (2006: 580) refers to this as ‘the benevolent neutrality of the French laïcité’.

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even more profound. For example, prison chaplains who receive payment for their services must come from one of the religions officially recognized by a ministerial circular of 18 December 1997. Jehovah’s Witnesses, among many others, are thereby excluded.25 Religions that are relatively new to France ‘either do not know about or have difficulties obtaining legal privileges that are given to mainstream religions’ (Chélini-Pont 2005: 617). As Elisabeth Zoller (2006: 571) puts it, ‘[I]n French religious law, religions are in the situation akin to the animals on Orwell’s farm: some are more equal than others’. Other examples of the largely hidden involvement of the French state in religion concern public funding and management for chaplaincies in hospitals, prisons (Khosrokhavar 2004; Beckford, Joly and Khosrokhavar 2005), the armed forces (Withol de Wenden and Bertossi 2007) and even some schools (Lossapio 2007). Similarly, the publicly funded television channel France 2 broadcasts programmes on Sunday morning devoted to the ‘main religions practised in France’ in addition to many other programmes featuring religious content—as do the channels France 3 and France 5. This notion of ‘the main religions’ gives more than a hint of public recognition that is far from neutral or even-handed. Further evidence of imbrication between state and selected religions comes from court cases that have legalized the creation of Muslim areas of cemeteries and the recognition of certain religious holidays as days of legitimate absence from school or work. In addition, religious schools under contract to the state are allowed to keep their religious character; diplomas awarded by Catholic Institutes are recognized as the equivalent of diplomas from state universities; the President of the Republic has a meeting to celebrate each New Year with representatives of the main recognized faith communities (including Buddhists for the first time in 2008); the mayors of many communities now hold public discussions with religious leaders; national and local authorities routinely appeal to religious groups for support in strengthening social solidarity and overcoming social exclusion; the French government has used the good offices of religious leaders to intercede in international disputes; and national

25

But for an administrative tribunal decision that called this procedure into question in 2007, see TA Paris, n° 0613450, 06/07/2007, Les Témoins de Jéhovah c/ le ministère de la Justice, full text of the judgement and commentary on the decision are available in: AJDA n° 38, 05/11/2007, pp. 2097–9.

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consultative committees on bioethics and AIDS contain representatives of the main religions and ‘philosophical families’. This is not to deny that debates about laïcité remain heated in France, especially among atheists, secularists, free-thinkers and Freemasons.26 But it is merely to acknowledge that recent years have witnessed moves in the direction of what President Sarkozy calls ‘positive laïcité, which does not consider that religions are a danger but rather an asset’. This phrase implies a liberal interpretation of the law of 1905 and an acknowledgement that France has changed to the point where the Catholic Church no longer presents a threat to the state and where Muslims and possibly other religious minorities deserve some measure of public recognition. When he was Interior Minister Sarkozy managed to force through the establishment of the French National and Regional Councils of the Muslim Religion (CFCM and CRCM) in an attempt to give a collective voice to all shades of Muslim opinion and to have a single agency serving as the intermediary between the state and Muslims. Several of his predecessors had tried but failed to create similar organizations. He also commissioned the Machelon (2006) report to look into the possibility of making some adjustments to the law on laïcité so that it better reflected the current situation of religious diversity. More controversially, President Sarkozy proclaimed in a speech delivered at the Lateran Palace in Rome in December 2007 that ‘the roots of France are essentially Christian’ and that ‘we simply have to see the main currents of religion as testimonies to hope’.27 Sarkozy’s views on laïcité are, not surprisingly, less unequivocal than those of his predecessor, Jacques Chirac (2003), who lauded the principle of laïcité as ‘a pillar of our Constitution’, ‘at the heart of our republican identity’ and ‘cornerstone of the Republic’. The infamous law of 2004, which prohibits students from wearing conspicuous sym26 See http://atunion.free.fr/carnet.hmtl for an extensive list of organizations that share a robust view of laïcité. An IFOP survey published in La Croix, a Catholic newspaper, on 22 March 2008 showed that 71 per cent of respondents wanted to keep the 1905 law on the separation of church and state in force. 27 In an interview with journalists at the Vatican after his speech in Rome, President Sarkozy said: ‘Il ne faut pas avoir peur des religions, personne n’imagine que les religions vont mettre l’État français sous le boisseau, sous tutelle. Il faut simplement voir les grands courants religieux comme des témoignages d’espérance: qu’est-ce qu’un homme qui croit si ce n’est un homme qui espère? Et je ne vois pas au nom de quoi l’espérance serait contraire avec l’idéal républicain. J’ai vu avec plaisir que le Pape prenait le thème de l’espérance comme thème premier. Je m’étais laissé aller à écrire un livre en 2004 appelé: “La République, les religions, l’espérance”.’

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bols of religious identity in schools, owes more to Chirac’s sense of laïcité as primarily a framework for keeping religion in its place than to Sarkozy’s sense of laïcité as a device that enables religious and spiritual resources to benefit the life of individuals and society while keeping fanaticism and communitarianism at bay. In short, the attachment to the 1905 law on the separation of state and religions in France is still extremely strong at most points on the political spectrum and particularly among socialists, free-thinkers, Freemasons and anti-cultists. But there are also definite signs of a more flexible attitude towards religion in liberal circles. In particular, attempts are being made—or, at least, mooted—to address the discrimination that goes with Islam’s minority status (Machelon 2006) and to accept that religions can be useful in the public sphere—all in a political framework that is actually resistant to the very idea of minorities and is uncomfortable with the idea of religion being seen as an active force in the public sphere (Kastoryano 2004). Nevertheless, these tentative proposals for change have been largely instigated and controlled by the state as a way of managing religious diversity and unrest. Sarkozy still insists on having a ‘French Islam’ rather than an ‘Islam in France’—just as Chirac envisaged an ‘Islam with French culture’. 7. Conclusion To what extent do my arguments about the differences between the formal provision of religious and spiritual care in the prisons of Britain and France suggest that these countries are moving beyond secularization? how far does evidence of recent modifications in the management of religion by agencies of the state in both countries support the idea of postsecularity? What we see in Britain does not represent a significant retreat from long-standing public policies with regard to religion. On the contrary, partnership between religions and the state has been a feature of public life in Britain for centuries—most directly in prisons, schools and the military. Nowadays, this relationship has grown closer in certain respects—particularly with regard to policies and programmes aimed at combating violent extremism and social exclusion. But these policies place a predominantly instrumental value on faith communities. They are valued mainly for the contributions that they can make towards

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the achievement of government policy goals. There is no evidence that faith communities have improved their ability to influence the framing of government policies. Admittedly, the rhetoric of official pronouncements on faith communities goes to considerable lengths these days to recognize the public value of religion, but government endorses the practical usefulness of religion rather than its intrinsic truth or worth. This is especially evident in government thinking about the importance of Religious Education in schools as a basis for inculcating mutual respect and understanding between different—and possibly divided— faith communities. In short, the British government makes use of faith communities for predominantly instrumental reasons of expediency. At the same time, Habermas now looks to religion for moral resources with which to combat the excessively instrumental character of modern life (Wolin 2003).28 I find it ironic that Habermas ‘is asking what he as an agnostic secularist can still get from religion’ (Chambers 2007: 220). This is not easily reconciled with his understanding of the position expected of a neutral, secular state—nor with his belief that secular language is the only ‘commonly accessible language’ today (Cooke 2007: 230).29 All the more reason, then, for not using such a problematic term as postsecular for describing Britain’s position. In the case of France, it is true that the ‘war of the two Frances’ (Poulat 1987) has more or less ended or reached a stalemate. But, as Marcel Gauchet (1998) argued, this has created a new challenge for the laïc Republic in the sense that the formerly bitter opposition between religions and the state has left a vacuum. In the absence of its longterm foe, the French Republic has lost a key landmark in its ideological landscape. The reasons for keeping religion at arm’s length have, therefore, weakened at the same time as Catholicism has lost much of its cultural influence in France. The question now facing the Republic is to decide how it should respond to the relatively new expressions of religiosity in, for example, evangelical and Pentecostal forms of Christianity, in controversial new religious movements and in Muslim communities. The problem for public authorities is that some of these expressions refuse to confine themselves to the private sphere of life, 28 Barbarto and Kratochwil (2008: 3) describe Habermas’s aim as the ‘attempt to utilize the semantic potentials of religion for politics in the global sphere’. 29 According to Barbato and Kratochwil (2008: 16), Habermas tries to reconcile these positions by drawing ‘a clear line of separation between the realm of public opinion—in which religious argumentation is desirable—and the sphere of the state with its institutions—which shall remain free of any religious tinge’.

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insisting that authentic faith requires translation into actions at the level of public life. The French state no longer sees itself as facing political competition or a threat from Catholicism, but the apparatus of laïcité that was designed more than a century ago primarily to neutralize the power of Catholicism in politics is struggling to cope with different challenges that are perceived to come from new religious sources. To make matters more politically sensitive, France’s regime for managing religion is now subject to the continuous scrutiny of numerous international authorities, most notably the Council of Europe,30 the UN Special Rapporteur on Freedom of Religion or Belief31 and the US Department of State’s Annual Report on International Freedom of Religion.32 The French Republic is undoubtedly democratic, but it is not yet clear how its particular form of democracy can accommodate public expressions of religion that cut across the old boundary between the public and the private spheres. At present, it shows no sign of abandoning either the idea or the practice of laïcité—even in relatively liberalized forms. In these circumstances, the term postsecularity seems completely inappropriate. In some respects, the recent upsurge of interest in postsecularity among philosophers and theologians is reminiscent of the trajectory taken in the 1980s by the concept of postmodernity. I was sceptical then about the usefulness for sociological purposes of the idea of postmodernity (Beckford 1992; 1996). I remain to be persuaded that postsecularity has sound sociological roots. This is why I doubt whether there is a good sociological reason for describing Britain or France as postsecular societies. Britain has never been secular in the political terms used by Habermas; and France remains secular in its own way. References Bader, V. (2007) ‘The Governance of Islam in Europe: The Perils of Modelling’. Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies 33, 871–86. Barbato, M. and Kratochwil, F. (2008) Habermas’s Notion of a Post-Secular Society: A Perspective from International Relations. Florence: European University Institute, Max Weber Programme. EUI Working Paper 2008/25. 30

http://assembly.coe.int/Main.asp?link=/Documents/AdoptedText/ta02/ERES 1309.htm. 31 http://www2.ohchr.org/english/issues/religion/index.htm. 32 For the 2008 report, see http://www.state.gov/g/drl/rls/irf.

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Beckford, J. A. (1989) Religion and Advanced Industrial Society. London: Routledge. —— (1992) ‘Religion, Modernity and Postmodernity’. In B. R. Wilson (ed.) Religion: Contemporary Issues. London: Bellew. —— (1996) ‘Postmodernity, High Modernity and New Modernity: Three Concepts in Search of Religion’. In Flanagan, K. and Jupp, P. (eds) Postmodernity, Sociology and Religion. London: Macmillan. —— (2004) ‘“Laïcité”, “Dystopia”, and the Reaction to New Religious Movements in France’. In Richardson, J. T. (ed.) Regulating Religion: Case Studies from around the Globe. New York: Kluwer/Plenum. —— and Gilliat, S. (1998) Religion in Prison: Equal Rites in a Multi-Faith Society. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ——, Joly, D. and Khosrokhavar, F. (2005) Muslims in Prison: Challenge and Change in Britain and France. Basingstoke: Palgrave. —— (2007) Les musulmans en prison en Grande Bretagne et en France. Louvain: Presses Universitaires de Louvain. Blond, P. (ed.) (1998) Post-Secular Philosophy: Between Philosophy and Theology. London: Routledge. Bowen, J. (2007) ‘A View From France on the Internal Complexity of National Models’. Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies 33, 1003–16. Burnside, J., Loucks, N., Adler, J. R. and Rose, G. (2005) My Brother’s Keeper: FaithBased Units in Prisons. Cullompton: Willan. Chambers, S. (2007) ‘How Religion Speaks to the Agnostic: Habermas on the Persistent Value of Religion’. Constellations 14, 210–23. Chélini-Pont, B. (2005) ‘Religion in the Public Sphere: Challenges and Opportunities’. Brigham Young University Law Review 3, 611–27. Chirac, J. (2003) ‘Discours prononcé par M. Jacques Chirac, Président de la République, relatif au respect du principe de laïcité dans la République’. Paris, 17 December. Cooke, M. (2007) ‘A Secular State for a Postsecular Society? Postmetaphysical Political Theory and the place of religion’. Constellations 14, 224–38. DCLG (2008) Face to Face and Side by Side: A Framework for Partnership in Our Multi Faith Society. London: Department of Communities and Local Government. Online at: http://www.communities.gov.uk/publications/communities/facetoface framework. Debray, R. (2005) Le feu sacré: Fonctions du religieux. Paris: Gallimard. Delsol, X., Garay, A. and Tawil, E. (2005) Droit des cultes. Lyon: Editions Juris Associations. Derrida, J. and Vattimo, G. (1998) Religion. Cambridge: Polity Press. Feasey, S., Williams, P. and Clarke, R. (2005) ‘An Evaluation of the Prison Fellowship Sycamore Tree Programme’. Sheffield: Sheffield Hallam University. Online at: http://www.prisonfellowship.org.uk/?page=sycamoretree. Frégosi, F. and Willaime, J.-P. (eds) (2001) Le religieux dans la commune: Régulations locales du pluralisme en France. Genève: Labor et Fides. Gauchet, M. (1998) La religion dans la démocratie. Paris: Gallimard. Gray, J. (2007) Black Mass: Apocalyptic Religion and the Death of Utopia. London: Penguin. Gunn, T. J. (2004) ‘Under God But Not the Scarf: The Founding Myths of Religious Freedom in the United States and Laïcité in France’. Journal of Church and State 46: 7–24. Habermas, J. (2002) Religion and Rationality. Edited by Eduardo Mendieta. Cambridge: Polity Press. —— (2003) The Future of Human Nature. Cambridge: Polity Press. —— (2006) ‘Religion in the Public Sphere’. European Journal of Philosophy 14, 1–25. —— (2008a) ‘Notes on a Post-Secular Society’. Retrieved 6 October 2008, from http:// print.signandsight.com/features/1714.html.

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—— (2008b) Between Naturalism and Religion: Philosophical Essays. Cambridge: Polity Press. Home Office (2001) Community Cohesion: A Report of the Independent Review Team. London: Home Office. —— (2004) Strength in Diversity: Towards a Community Cohesion and Race Equality Strategy. Home Office Consultation Paper. London: Home Office Communications Directorate. —— (2008) Preventing Violent Extremism: A Strategy for Delivery. London: Home Office, Ref: 288113. Joppke, C. (2004) ‘The Retreat of Multiculturalism in the Liberal State: Theory and Policy’. British Journal of Sociology 55, 237–57. Kastoryano, R. (2004) ‘Religion and Incorporation: Islam in France and Germany’. International Migration Review 38, 1234–55. Khosrokhavar, F. (2004) L’islam dans les prisons. Paris: Balland. Lossapio, S. (2007) ‘Le respect des pratiques religieuses du croyant’. La lettre du droit des religions 25, 84–107. Machelon, J.-P. (2006) Rapport de la Commission de réflexion juridique sur les relations des cultes avec les pouvoirs publics. Paris. http://www.google.fr/search?hl=fr& q=rapport+machelon&meta=&aq=f&oq=. McLennan, G. (2007) ‘Towards Post-Secular Sociology?’. Sociology 41, 857–70. Messner, F., Prélot, P.-H. and Woehrling, J.-M. (eds) (2003) Traité du droit français des religions. Paris: Litec. NOMS (2007) Believing We Can: Promoting the Contribution of Faith-Based Organisations Can Make to Reducing Adult and Youth Re-Offending. London: National Offender Management Service. Poulat, E. (1987) Liberté, laïcité, la guerre des deux France et le principe de la Modernité. Paris: Le Cerf-Cujas. Taylor, C. (2007) A Secular Age. Cambridge MA: Belknap Press. Vries, H. de and Sullivan, L. (eds) (2006) Political Theologies: Public Religions in a Post-Secular World. New York: Fordham University Press. Withol de Wenden, C. and Bertossi, C. (2007) Les couleurs du drapeau: Les armées françaises face aux discriminations. Paris: Robert Laffont. Willaime, J.-P. (2005) ‘1905 et la pratique d’une laïcité de reconnaissance sociale des religions’. Archives de sciences sociales des religions 29, 67–82. Wolin, R. (2003) ‘Jürgen Habermas and Post-Secular Societies’. Chronicle of Higher Education October 13. Zoller, E. (2006) ‘Laïcité in the United States or the Separation of Church and State in a Pluralist Society’. Indiana Journal of Global Legal Studies 13, 561–93.

INDEX OF NAMES Acton, Lord, 359, 367, 370 Agamben, Giorgio, 46 Alcorn, R., 371, 373 Alinsky, Saul, 213, 215–20 Amin, Ash, 10, 290 Amorim, Celso, 284 Anderson, Benedict, 104 Anderson, P., 360 Antle, W.J., 369 Arendt, Hannah, 324 Aristotle, 207 Arkan, Seyfi, 255 Asad, Talal, 91, 98–100 Ataturk, Mustafa Kemal, 246, 251, 253–4 Audi, Robert, 311, 313, 316–17, 336, 342–3 Augustine of Hippo, 25, 53, 168 Bader, Veit, 386 Badiou, Alain, 47, 226–7 Baird, Robert, 269 Baker, Chris, 3, 8–10, 12, 235 Baker, Jim, 372 Balmumcu, Sevki, 255 Bandow, Doug, 369–70 Barbarto, M., 398 Barth, Karl, 156 Bastian, Jean-Pierre, 67 Bauman, Zygmunt, 285, 287–8 Baumann, Gerd, 131, 141 Bayat, Asef, 105 Beaumont, Justin, x, 8–9, 269 Beck, Ulrich, 154, 287 Beckford, Jim, 42 Benedict XVI, Pope (see also Ratzinger, Joseph), 148, 298 Berger, Peter, 8, 71, 80, 183 Bhatia, S., 140 Birman, P., 298 Blair, Tony, 391 Blokland, Hans, 341–2 Blond, Phillip, 4, 7, 224–5 Blumenberg, Hans, 322 Bohman, J., 318 Bolger, R., 237 Bolivar, Simon, 85 Boltanski, Luc, 216 Bonhoeffer, Dietrich, 156

Bourdieu, Pierre, 271 Bowen, John, 386 Braidotti, Rosi, 48–51 Briggs, Sheila, 180 Brockway, Fenner, 32 Brown, Callum, 71 Bruce, Steve, 55, 71 Bry, Carl Christian, 121 Buruma, Ian, 101 Bush, George W., 269, 363, 370, 374 Bush, Jenna, 374 Butler, Judith, 48, 51–2 Büyükkökten, Orkut, 292 Çaglar, Ayse, 289, 299 Caldwell, Kirbyjon, 373–4 Camus, Albert, 157 Caputo, John, 231–2 Casanova, José, xi, 5, 64, 70–1, 92, 183 Casey, Edward S., 171 Castells, Manuel, 132, 212, 251–2, 286–9 Cavanaugh, William T., 321–2 Certeau, Michel de, 46, 163, 175, 218 Chaplin, J., 322 Chapman, R., 228 Chiapello, Eve, 216 Chirac, Jacques, 396–7 Cho, Paul Yonggi, 204 Churchill, Winston, 381 Çinar, A., 258–9 Claiborne, S., 237 Clarkson, Frederick, 365 Clifford, James, 300 Clinton, Bill, 269 Cloke, Paul, 27, 47, 383 Cochrane, A., 10 Collins, Randall, 41 Connolly, William, 47, 49–51, 239 Cowper, William, 147–8 Cox, Harvey, xi, 6, 27, 156, 158 Cruz, Gemma, 164–5 D’Agostino, Fred, 311 Dahl, Robert, 316 Daly, Mary, 164 Danielson, M.N., 253 Darwin, Charles, 205 Da Silva, Lula, 285

404

index of names

Davey, A., 10 Davie, Grace, 70–1, 224 Davis, Mike, 10 Dawkins, Richard, 41, 223 Dawson, Andrew, 86 De Genova, Nicholas P., 284 Deleuze, Gilles, 226 Dennet, Daniel C., 223 Derrida, Jacques, 4, 47, 226–7 Derudder, Ben, 286 Descartes, René, 53 Diamond, Sara, 364–5 Dias, Candice, 267 Dickens, Charles, 59 Dobson, James, 363 Dollar, Creflo, 371 Dombrowski, D.A., 311 Dostoyevsky, Fyodor, 381 Droogers, André, 297 Dumenil, G., 359 Duns Scotus, John, 321 Eagleton, T., 47 Eberle, Christopher, 343–4, 347, 350, 352 Egli, Ernst, 255 Eisenstadt, Schmuel N., 69, 183 Eliade, Mircea, 177 Enzensberger, Hans Magnus, 101 Erikson, Erik H., 141 Fenster, T., 9 Feuerbach, Ludwig, 55 Fish, Stanley, 353 Fitzgerald, Timothy, 22–3, 27 Foucault, Michel, 24, 91, 97–8, 100, 168, 176 Fragaso, Suely, 294 Franklin, Benjamin, 187, 200 Freston, Paul, 295, 302 Friedman, Milton, 359–61, 370, 375 Friedrich, Caspar David, 118 Frost, M., 230 Fukuyama, Yoshihiro Francis, 360 Gadamer, Hans-Georg, 106 Gal, Susan, 99 Gauchet, Marcel, 4, 398 Gecan, Michael, 215 Geddes, Patrick, 189 Gellner, Ernest, 41, 56–8, 60, 72–3 Georgi, Dieter, 168 Geschiere, Peter, 137 Gibbs, E., 237 Gingrich, Andre, 141 Gingrich, Newt, 370

Glick Schiller, Nina, 289, 299 Gogh, Theo van, 22 Gokcek, I. Melih, 259, 261 Goonewardena, K., 360 Graham, E., 10 Gray, John, 60, 223 Greely, Andrew, 157 Greenawalt, Kent, 343–6, 352 Gülalp, H., 246 Guldbrandsen, Thaddeus, 289, 299 Gutmann, Amy, 318, 353 Habermas, Jürgen, xi, 4–5, 7–8, 28, 42–4, 46, 66–8, 72, 74, 83, 91–6, 98, 100–1, 103, 105, 110–11, 113, 244, 267–9, 311, 325, 329, 334, 339–40, 342, 381–4, 386–7, 390, 398–9 Hackworth, Jason, 8, 359 Hagin, Kenneth, 371 Hahm, C., 106–7 Hancock, Mary, 289 Hanegraaff, W., 21, 32 Harvey, David, 171–2, 244 Hauerwas, S., 329 Hayek, Friedrich, 359–61, 367, 375 Hedetoft, U., 295 Hedges, C., 224 Heelas, Paul, 32 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, 58, 360 Heidegger, Martin, 106, 171 Herder, Johann Gottfried, 117 Hermans, Hubert, 133–7, 139–43 Hervieu-Léger, Danièle, 5, 70, 289 Hill, John Edward Christopher, 322 Hilton, B., 367 Hitchens D., 223 Hjort, M., 295 Hollenweger, Walter, 67 Holzmeister, Clemens, 254 Hopfl, H., 368 Hopkins, Peter, 9 Hume, David, 58, 359 Jackson, R., 371–2 Jakes, T.D., 371, 373–4 Jansen, Hermann, 254 Joas, Hans, 4 John Paul II, Pope, 305 Juchtmans, Goedroen, 178 Kalir, Barak, 302 Kant, Immanuel, 58, 150, 341 Keith, M., 167 Keleş, R., 253 Kemalettin, Mimar, 255

index of names

405

Kennedy, John F., 157 Kenyon, Essex, 371 Keyman F., 245, 248 Kinnvall, Catherina, 141 Klaushofer, Alex, 19, 29–30, 32 Knott, Kim, x, 174, 382 Kong, Lily, 9 Koolhaas, Rem, 159 Kort, Wesley, 173 Kratochwil, F., 398 Kristeva, Julia, 141 Kuhn, Thomas, 60 Kuitert, H.M., 170 Kuyper, Abraham, 364

McLennan, Gregor, 72, 74, 76, 79–80 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, 171 Meyer, Birgit, 83–4, 137, 289 Milbank, John, 5, 26, 225, 233, 321, 329 Mill, James, 359 Mises, Ludwig von, 359–60, 375 Modood, Tariq, 12 Murray, B., 230

Lalive D’Epinay, Christian, 67 Leezenberg, Michiel, 267–8 Lefebvre, Henri, 10, 23–4, 30, 35, 167–8, 171–7, 179 Lehmann, David, 68 Leite, M.P., 298 Lenin, Vladimir, 201, 338 Levey, G.B., 12 Levitt, Peggy, 295 Levy, D., 359 Lewis, Bernard, 101 Lienesch, M., 369 Ling, T., 228 Lipsius, Justus, 53 Locke, John, 73, 359, 367 Loomis, Samuel Lane, 147 Lorcher, Carl Christoph, 254 Louis XIV, 190 Lowndes, V., 228 Luhmann, Niklas, 116 Luther, Martin, 368 Luxemburg, Rosa, 197

Oakley, M., 232 Obama, Barack, ix, 214, 374 Ockham, William, 321 Olasky, Marvin, 155, 362–3, 369–70 Olson, Betsy, 9 O’Neill, Joseph, 131–2, 134, 136 Orsi, Robert, 177–8 Osteen, Joel, 371, 373–4

Macedo, Stephen, 353 Machiavelli, Niccolò, 189 MacIntyre, Alasdair, 211–12, 217, 329 Maffesoli, M., 46 Maier, Christl M., 169 Maitland, Sara, 81, 83 Mann, Thomas, 125 Margalit, Avishai, 101 Margolis, Maxine, 295 Mariano, Ricardo, 297 Marion, Jean-Luc, 4 Martin, Bernice, 42 Martin, David, 64, 70–1 Martin, William, 366 Massey, Doreen, 24, 163, 167, 171–2 Matuštík, Martin, 4 May, J., 227

Napoleon Bonaparte, 185, 201 Newton, Isaac, 205 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 79 North, Gary, 365–6, 370 Nussbaum, Martha Craven, 45, 55

Padilla, Beatriz, 283 Park, Robert E., 157 Parsley, Rod, 363, 373 Perry, Michael, 313, 344, 351–3 Pile, S., 167 Porteous-Wood, Keith, 29 Pratchett, Terry, 81 Pullman, Philip, 81 Putnam, Robert, 208–9, 271 Quinn, Philip, 313 Raco, M., 227 Ram, A., 140 Ratzinger, Joseph (see also Benedict XVI), 66 Rawls, John, 101, 311, 313–19, 322–3, 325, 329–36, 338–9, 341–4, 352 Rehg, W., 318 Rescher, Nicholas, 334 Rich, Adriane, 164 Robertson, R., 137 Rorty, Richard, 46, 344 Rössler, Dietrich, 121 Rothbard, Murray, 368–9 Rushdoony, Rousas, 364–6, 370 Sager, Ryan, 368–9 Sandercock, Leonie, 9 Sarkozy, Nicolas, 396–7 Sassen, Saskia, 167, 212–13, 286

406

index of names

Saunders, Dame Cicely, 210 Saward, Michael, 318 Schachtel, Ernst, 141 Schaeffer, Francis, 364–5 Schleiermacher, Friedrich, 118 Schopenhauer, Arthur, 77 Schlögel, Karl, 170–1 Sennet, Richard, 168, 180 Shari’iati, Ali, 105 Shils, Edward, 183 Shklar, Judith, 322 Simmel, Georg, 122, 133, 149–54, 157–8 Simons, Menno, 271 Sirico, Robert, 370 Smith, Adam, 359–60 Smith, C., 235 Smith, Jonathan Z., 172 Smith, S.R., 362–3 Socrates, 324, 338 Soja, Edward W., 35, 131, 169, 171–7 Solum, L.B., 311 Soroush, Abdolkarim, 105 Sosin, M.R., 362–3 Srinivas, Smriti, 289 Stalin, Joseph, 201 Sterba, J.P., 311 Stout, Jeffrey, 312, 322–3, 325 Strong, Josiah, 147 Swaggart, Jimmy, 372 Tanner, Kathryn, 166–7 Taut, Bruno, 255 Taylor, Charles, x–xi, 5, 41, 52–60, 63–4, 72–83, 86, 156, 214, 269 Taylor, Peter, 286 Tekeli, I., 246 Thompson, D., 318, 353

Thrift, Nigel, 290 Tönnies, Ferdinand, 157 Tuan, Yi-Fu, 171 Ulbricht, Walter, 197 Unger, Roberto, 43–7 Valsiner, J., 140 Vasari, Giorgio, 198 Vattimo, Gianni, 46 Vico, Giovanni Battista (Giambattista), 44 Voas, David, 71 Vries, Hent de, 289 Waldron, Jeremy, 313 Ward, Graham, 10, 26 Warren, Mark, 215 Warren, Rick, 372 Watkins, Gloria Jean, 172 Weber, Max, 75, 357 Williame, J.-P., 394 Williams, A., 311 Williams, Rowan, Archbishop of Canterbury, 11, 321 Willis, G., 362 Wilson, Elizabeth, 172 Winkler, T., 9 Wirth, Louis, 149, 153–4, 157 Wolin, Sheldon, 207–8, 212, 215 Wolterstorff, Nicholas, 311, 313, 329, 334–9, 343 Woodhead, Linda, 32 Žižek, Slavoj, 47, 226–7 Zoller, Elisabeth, 394–5